Skarbek and Kowerski "had driven fairly blithely across hundreds of miles of Nazi-sympathizing territory, often carrying incriminating letters and sometimes microfilm and just weeks or at times days ahead of the Nazi advance. The Allied invasion of southern France had occurred on 15 August, and Allied soldiers were 60 kilometres (37 mi) distant and advancing rapidly toward Digne, a fact that was apparent to the Germans and their French collaborators. She received compensation from her employer's insurance company and took her physicians' advice to lead as much of an open-air life as she could. He pleaded for the sentence to be carried out as quickly as possible, so that he could ‘rejoin his beloved in the afterlife.

Indeed, Krystyna's love life was equally adventurous with a string of passionate affairs, including one with one-legged Polish war hero Andrzej Kowerski who used the nom de guerre Anthony Kennedy. Determined to help defend their country, they immediately left for London, where Krystyna engineered a meeting with George Taylor of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). Though most of the women in France answered to F Section in London, Skarbek's mission was launched from Algiers, the base of AMF Section. She could not count on the support of her second husband, whom she had divorced in mid-1946, and her relationship with Kowerski was also on the rocks. When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939 instead of fleeing Krystyna found an MI6 agent and joined the Secret Intelligence Service.This blog looks at the carefully-thought-out methods used by Special Operations Executive (SOE) agents to pass as members of the local population in Nazi-held territory. She turned down offers of office work and continued to be sidelined from the kind of dangerous and difficult work she desired. The British authorities showed little interest but were eventually convinced by her acquaintances, including journalist Frederick Augustus Voigt, who introduced her to the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). Marrying Stefania in late December 1899, Jerzy Skarbek used his wife's dowry (her father was a banker) to pay his debts and continue his lavish lifestyle. Though shot at, chased, captured and escaped she succeeded in creating an escape line across the mountains through which she aided the passage of several hundred Polish pilots who would later go on to play a decisive role in the Battle of Britain.

However, it never saw wartime service with the Allies, as the designs and specifications had deliberately been destroyed upon the outbreak of war and there was no time for reverse engineering.

This section was only set up in the wake of Operation Torch, the Allied landings in North Africa, partly with staff from London (F Section) and partly with staff from Cairo (MO. When Skarbek's husband, Jerzy Giżycki, was informed that Skarbek and Kowerski's services were being dispensed with, he took umbrage and abruptly bowed out of his own career as a British intelligence agent. Having fled to Britain on the outbreak of war, she was recruited by the intelligence services and took on mission after mission.

To do so, she met with the commander of the local Gestapo unit, whom she was able to convince with the help of her personal charm and a bribe of two million francs. Whilst their passionate affair would last, they would never marry and her dedication to her undercover work never faltered. Skarbek addressed the Poles with a megaphone and secured their agreement to join the Allied forces, provided that they shed their German uniforms. Krystyna was incredibly charming and intelligent, but also fraught with strange insecurities; she had both her noble eccentricities and bouts of snobbish pouting.

Through each character, their motivations and their secrets, I found I was able to build a history that felt ‘real’ to the reader, and provided the ‘truth’ and veracity that one seeks within such a genre. Many times she managed to outsmart Gestapo officers, she stole the plans of the German invasion on USRR, and was able to take not only herself but others off the hook. Bombs, dropping out of planes, breaking resistance leaders out of Nazi jails, skiing into german occupied poland through hungary - the woman was a force to be reckoned with. Upon their arrival, the British would remain suspicious of the pair until an investigation ruled out the possibility of them being double agents.