Polish-born wartime 007 died 65 yrs ago TODAY
June 15 marks the 65th death anniversary of Warsaw-born Krystyna Skarbek, a star British intelligence agent during World War II and the first woman to work for the service during the war.
Maria Krystyna Janina Skarbek, OBE, GM, Croix de guerre (May 1 1908 - June 15 1952), also known as Christine Granville, was a Polish agent working for Britain's Special Operations Executive (SOE) during World War II. She became best-known for her daring missions in Nazi-occupied Poland and France (see: NOTE).
She joined the British intelligence shortly before the SOE was founded in July 1940 and was among the longest-serving of all wartime female agents in Britain. In 1941 she switched to her nom de guerre Christine Granville, a name she legalised upon receiving British citizenship in 1946.
During a brief 1940 visit in occupied Warsaw Skarbek unsuccessfuly tried to convince her mother Stefania Skarbek to flee the country. Stefania remained in Warsaw and perished in its Jewish ghetto.
In 1944 Skarbek parachuted into Nazi-occupied France, where she masterminded the buyout of several resistance members arrested by the Gestapo. According to accounts Skarbek said the local Gestapo head that she was the niece of British general Bernard Montgomery, and claimed that freeing of the prisoners would ensure his life after the Allies entered France. The German supposedly fell for the story and even provided Skarbek with a pistol and a car to take them to the Allied side of the front.
After the war Skarbek had to struggle for her subsistence, working alternately as as a hotel maid, telephone operator, Harrods shop assistant and a ship stewardess.
At about that time she struck up a romantic relationship with Ian Fleming, later to win fame as author of the James Bond novels which inspired the known film series. Skarbek is said to have been the prototype of Fleming's character Vesper Lund from first James Bond novel Casino Royale, with some claiming she also inspired the creation of 007 himself.
While working as a ship stewardess Skarbek met her later killer Dennis Muldowney, who stabbed with a knife on June 14, 1952 after she rejected his marriage proposal. Skarbek died in hospital, Muldowney was apprehended and sentenced to death.
Skaberk's espionage exploits were described by Clare Mulley in her her book The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville. (PAP)
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NOTE: According to various experts, intelligence agents linked, among others, to Poland’s wartime Home Army (AK) (see: NOTE 2) played a key role in providing the Allies with information about German Nazi actions in occupied Europe.
Polish intelligence operated in every European country and ran one of the largest intelligence networks in Nazi Germany. Many Polish also served in other Allied intelligence services, including the much-lauded Krystyna Skarbek ("Christine Granville") in the United Kingdom's Special Operations Executive.
More than 40 percent of all reports received by the British secret services from continental Europe in 1939-1945 came from Polish sources.
Until 1942 most of Britain's intelligence from Germany came from Polish Home Army reports; until war’s end, the AK would remain Britain's main source of intelligence from Central and Eastern Europe.
V-1 and V-2:
Polish Home Army intelligence provided the Allies with information not only on the V-1 flying bomb and the V-2 rocket, but also on German concentration camps. As early as 1940, Polish agents (including "the bravest of the brave", volunteer to Auschwitz Witold Pilecki) penetrated German concentration camps, including Auschwitz, and informed the world about Nazi atrocities.
Polish Home Army intelligence was vital to locating and destroying (18 August 1943) the German rocket facility at Peenemünde and to gathering information about Germany's V-1 flying bomb and V-2 rocket, which towards the end of the war terrified London and other British cities with hundreds of hits, resulting in major infrastructure destruction and a high death toll among the civilians.
The Home Army delivered to the United Kingdom key V-2 parts after a rocket, fired on 30 May 1944, crashed near a German test facility at Sarnaki on the Bug River and was recovered by the Home Army with the help of local residents.
On the night of 25-26 July 1944, in an operation codenamed Most III (Bridge III) the crucial parts of the widely-feared weapon were flown from occupied Poland to the United Kingdom in an RAF plane, along with detailed drawings of parts too large to fit in the plane. Analysis of the German rocket became vital to improving Allied anti-V-2 defenses.
Another AK operation, codenamed Synteza (synthesis), enabled the location of a German fuel factory in Police (Germ. Hydrierwerke Pölitz), which manufactured synthetic fuel for the V-1 and V-2 rockets (as well as U-boats - PAP), and the depots in which it was stored. In effect the Allies successfully bombed the installations. Working with the French resistance movement, AK teams also helped locate 162 V-1 launching installation in France.
Enigma REAL codebreakers:
During a period of over six and a half years, from late December 1932 to the outbreak of World War II, three mathematician-cryptologists (Marian Rejewski, Henryk Zygalski and Jerzy Rozycki) at the Polish General Staff's Cipher Bureau in Warsaw had developed a number of techniques and devices to facilitate decryption of messages produced on the German "Enigma" cipher machine.
Just five weeks before the outbreak of World War II, on July 25, 1939, near Pyry in the Kabaty Woods south of Warsaw, Poland disclosed in an unprecedented act of military co-operation almost a decade-worth of top secret technical data to France and the United Kingdom, which had, up to that time, failed in all their own efforts to crack the German military Enigma cipher.
Had Poland not shared its Enigma-decryption results achieved at Pyry, the United Kingdom would have been unable to read Enigma ciphers. In the event, intelligence gained from this source undoubtedly altered the course of the war.
Agency Africa:
In July 1941, Mieczyslaw Slowikowski (using the codename "Rygor"—Polish for "Rigor") set up Agency Africa, one of World War II's most successful intelligence organizations. His Polish allies in these endeavors included Lt. Col. Gwido Langer and Major Maksymilian Ciężki. The information gathered by the Agency was used by the Americans and British in planning the amphibious November 1942 Operation Torch landings in North Africa. These were the first large-scale Allied landings of the war, and their success in turn paved the way for the Allies' Italian campaign.
NOTE 2 Founded in 1942, the Home Army (AK) was the largest underground resistance force in German-occupied Europe, with up to half a million soldiers fighting in its ranks. In his book 'God's Playground. A History of Poland', historian Norman Davies said that "the Home Army could fairly claim to be the largest of European resistance [organisations]".
Along with various combat activities, the AK was also widely involved in rescuing fellow citizens of Jewish descent, among others through the famous 1942-founded Council to Aid Jews (Rada Pomocy Zydom) codenamed 'Zegota' - the only organisation in Europe and the world established to defend and provide help to Jewish people in ghettos and outside.
After the war many Home Army soldiers refused to lay down their arms and continued fighting against Poland's Soviet-imposed communist regime, winning the name "Enduring Soldiers". They are also sometimes called the "Cursed Soldiers" for being treated as outlaws and forced into oblivion by the communist state. (PAP)
