Yesterday - Christine Granville

[boleslaw3]

The segment of the serial Yesterday, the Secret War: Çhristine Granville, is I'm
afraid replete with errors. I have been researching Christine's life story here (London)
and in Poland, and have recently completed a biography of her. There are too many
errors to be listed here so I shall just mention a few:

Christine never had a confrontation with the Gestapo and there is nothing in her Personal File or
in the SOE archive at Kew that confirms this. She was first arrested in Budapest
in 1940 by Hungarian secret police. Her lover and colleague Andrew Kennedy, is apparently
the source for the rumour that Gestapo agents were present in the room where she was to
be interrogated. Hungary was a neutral nation in 1940 and the Germans were trying not alienate
the government by openly interfering in Hungary's affairs.
It has been rumoured, probably correctly, that the Gestapo had infiltrated
the Hungarian Ministry of the Interior by early 1940.
On the same subject, Çhristine was never intercepted by Gestapo agents while attempting to
enter occupied Poland. She and a colleague were apprehended by Slovak border guards in June
1940 but escaped before they could be turned over to the Germans. Christine was also challenged at
a checkpoint on the French-Italian border in the summer of 1944 but she was not taken into custody.
There are several accounts of what happened on that border. One account has it that she was
challenged by a German sentry and threatened to detonate a grenade, and was then allowed to pass.
Marcus Binney wrote that she was challenged by an Italian patrol (or sentry) and pulled TWO grenades
from inside her tunic, and was allowed to pass. There were no eyewitnesses to this incident and no
official account in SOE files.

There is no truth - no witness, no official account that proves Churchill ever uttered that immortal
phrase, She's my favourite spy. He allegedly made this comment after receiving information that the
Germans were about to invade the USSR. As a matter of fact, Christine was not even in Poland at the
time but in Andrew Kennedy's Opel being driven across southern Europe, headed toward Palestine. A
non-government resistance group in Poland calling themselves the Musketeers noticed the movement
of German troops and materiel towards the Polish-Russian border. They passed this information to
Christine in Sofia and she in turn shared it with the British air attache. It was this man who sent it on
to London. Most important: Christine was not in Poland when the Germans began preparations for
Operation Barbarossa, so there's no way she could have observed this. A simple look at Christine's
chronology for the spring of 1941 will prove that she was nowhere near Poland at that time.
There is no established truth to the rumour of a Fleming - Granville affair. What is true is that this
rumour had only one source and that was a man who had already been exposed as a hoaxer, having
written a book about Jack the Ripper using sources that had already been discredited.
Without going into any more detail [unless asked to] comments on Yesterday about Christine's father
are far off the mark. Christine was suspected by the British only after being alerted by a Polish intelligence
agent who put about the rumour that she was a double agent working for the Germans.
Christine was not generally known as Vesperale. The best source for the name Vesper re Fleming is
A Lycett's well researched biography of Fleming (1995).
Genealogical tables (Polish) refute any notion that Christine was a countess. On her father's death the
title of count would have been passed to her older brother Andrzej. If she was called countess it was only
as a matter of respect for her and her family.

[ayrshireman]

Shame, as it was imo a gripping and tragic episode of a gripping series.