After Germany invaded Poland, Skarbek fled to Britain and proposed a daring plan to enter occupied Poland via Hungary, beginning her service as a secret agent.
Following the German invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939, Krystyna Skarbek fled the country and made her way to Britain, where she approached British intelligence services with an audacious proposal: to travel to neutral Hungary and then ski across the Carpathian Mountains into occupied Poland to gather intelligence and support the nascent resistance movement.
Her plan was accepted, and she began operating as a secret agent for British intelligence even before the Special Operations Executive (SOE) was formally established in July 1940. This made her, according to numerous historians and press retrospectives, Britain's first female special agent of the Second World War.
This appointment marked the beginning of a remarkable espionage career that would span multiple theatres of war, from the snowbound passes of the High Tatras to the deserts of North Africa and the mountains of occupied France. Her early recruitment set a precedent for the use of women in front-line intelligence roles, challenging the era's assumptions about women's capabilities in dangerous covert operations, and paving the way for the many female agents who would later serve in the SOE.