In the early hours of 15 June 1952, Christine Granville returned to the hotel she called home in London’s Kensington, after her flight to Belgium had been cancelled due to engine failure. As she reached her usual room upstairs, a man in the lobby shouted her name and demanded the return of some letters. Granville went downstairs to find her former lover, who suddenly thrust a commando knife into her chest, fatally wounding her. It was a bitter irony that Granville, Britain’s longest-serving World War Two spy, who had survived many perilous situations across Europe, should lose her life in the apparent safety of a London hotel.
Born in May 1908 as Maria Krystyna Janina Skarbek, Granville was the daughter of a Polish count and, through her mother, an heir to a Jewish banking family. In September 1939, she had been travelling in southern Africa with her second husband, a Polish diplomat, when they heard their homeland had been invaded by Nazi Germany. The couple headed straight to Britain to join the war effort. While her husband went to join the Allied forces in France, Granville approached MI6 and submitted a plan to ski across the Carpathian Mountains into Nazi-occupied Poland, to take in Allied propaganda material and funds and bring back intelligence about the occupation. As they had limited information about what was happening in Eastern Europe, it was a plan Britain
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