The Spy Who Loved: the secrets and lives of one of Britain's bravest wartime heroines

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They were checked by a German patrol and thus were in danger of being arrested, but Krystyna without a second thought showed false documents. On 3 May 2016 BBC Radio 4 broadcast an episode of Great Lives in which Krystyna Skarbek's life was proposed by Lt General Sir Graeme Lamb, with Clare Mulley as the expert witness. Her desired career of working in the diplomatic service was not to be: after applying to work for the British United Nations mission in Geneva, she was turned down for not being English.

With a mix of charm, money, threats and the story she was the niece of General Montgomery, she successfully persuaded the Gestapo chief to release them – whatever the odds she got the job done. While issuing new documents, she decided to rejuvenate herself by 7 years and had the date 1915, not 1908 written in her birth certificate. Krystyna Skarbek showed that, with courage, determination and creativity one person can have a disproportionate impact on events.With the two invasions in Normandy and southern France in summer 1944, these distinctions became irrelevant, and almost all the SOE Sections in France were united with the Maquis into the Forces Francaises de l'Interieur ( FFI). Their year-long affair is most likely a fabrication, as is the theory that Skarbek served as the basis for Vesper Lynd, a character from Fleming’s first James Bond book, Casino Royale. In January 1941, when Britain's ambassador to Budapest, Sir Owen O'Malley, produced passports in false names for Skarbek and her partner Andrzej Kowerski, the two Poles chose the names "Christine Granville" and "Andrew Kennedy". After her father died in 1930 the family moved to Warsaw, where at one point Krystyna took a job in a salesroom above a garage.

Meanwhile, abandoning all hope of security, she embarked on a life of uncertain travel, as though anxious to reproduce in peace time the hazards she had known during the war. The SOE officer who recruited her, Patrick Howarth, later said jokingly that "the most useful thing I did in World War II was to reinstate Christine Granville". Krystyna however was able to arrange a meeting with George Taylor of MI6 and convince him of her usefulness before divulging a plan which she had concocted to travel to Hungary. She helped Polish prisoners escape Hungary, smuggled numerous radio stations to Poland and collected intelligence, as well as working together with the Musketeers, a Polish underground organisation. Upon seeing her bags packed, Muldowney confronted her and when she explained he proceeded to stab her in the chest, killing her in the hallway.Meanwhile, the threat of war loomed large in the heartlands of Europe and not long afterwards, whilst the young couple were still in Ethiopia, Germany invaded Poland. A week after the dismissal of Skarbek and Kowerski, on 22 June 1941 Germany began its Operation Barbarossa invasion of the Soviet Union, predicted by the intelligence the couple had passed along to the British from the Musketeers. Skarbek's "impressive line of ribbons, enough to flatter a general", led to resentment among the crew and accusations of lying.