Krystyna Skarbek

Who was Krystyna Skarbek?

Maria Krystyna Janina Skarbek, GM, OBE, Croix de guerre was a Polish Special Operations Executive agent. She became celebrated especially for her daring exploits in intelligence and irregular-warfare missions in Nazi-occupied Poland and France.

She became a British agent months before the SOE was founded in July 1940 and was one of the longest-serving of all Britain's wartime women agents. Her resourcefulness and success have been credited with influencing the organization's policy of recruiting increasing numbers of women.

In 1941, she began using the nom de guerre Christine Granville, which she legally adopted on naturalisation as a British citizen in December 1946.

Journalist Donald McCormick has claimed that Skarbek had a postwar affair with Ian Fleming, and that she was an inspiration for Fleming's characters Tatiana Romanova and Vesper Lynd. One Skarbek biographer, Clare Mulley, notes that Fleming "never claimed to have met her, even in passing.... [T]he only known source for the much-quoted story of Christine's affair with Fleming is McCormick, who claims to have seen [a] letter from Fleming praising Christine, and his supporting witness, an Olga Bialoguski, who testified to McCormick that she was the sole person Christine confided in, and who is... untraceable. Edward Howe, a Kelmsley Newspapers journalist, received a letter from Fleming about a meeting with Christine in a London restaurant. McCormick had already written a history of the British Secret Service, and a 'Spyclopaedia', both of which mention Christine without reference to Fleming. It seems that the opportunity to bring them together finally proved irresistible."