SPY, JET-SET COUNTESS, ‘ADVENTURE JUNKIE’
Aline Griffith was a stunning, well- educated fashion model from upstate New York who was sent to Franco’s Spain during the Second World War as a spy code- named “Tiger” for the Office of Strategic Services, a CIA forerunner, to gather information on Nazi sympathizers, including the Spanish dictator himself, in what was officially “neutral” Spain.
Her overall aim was to aid the success of the Allied invasions of Europe in 1944. But she fell in love with a Spanish count and, in the decades after the war, became one of that country’s most- photographed members of what Spaniards call “la Jet” ( the jet set) or “los beautiful” ( the beautiful people).
In her diamonds, rubies and emeralds, the Countess of Romanones, as she was known, was seen in the company of sultans and movie stars, of first ladies and fashion tastemakers. Her Rolodex included Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Ivana Trump, publisher Malcolm Forbes and Imelda Marcos. She once attended a costume ball at a French palace at which Audrey Hepburn wore a bird cage over her head, while she and Wallis Simpson, the American-born Duchess of Windsor, hunted down a suspected Soviet mole working for NATO.
A self- confessed “adventure junkie,” the countess said she packed a pearlhandled pistol in her handbag for many years and confessed to her husband only on the night before their wedding in 1947 that she had been an agent of the U.S. government. He persuaded her to give up spying for good — for her own good and for the good of Spain — but she later said she continued periodically to engage in clandestine work for the CIA.
“Espionage becomes like a drug,” she told People magazine in 1990. “It makes life very exciting. You know things other people don’t know — you’re always going under the surface.” In another interview, she said: “My training in the U. S. was very harsh. I was taught how to shoot, parachute and silently kill with a knife or even a newspaper.” She did not reveal how you kill someone with a newspaper. She also learned, she said, to unlock safes and pick pockets.
She died in Madrid on Dec. 11 of undisclosed causes at the age of 94, according to her three sons, having spent most of her married life in an urban chalet in the Spanish capital and with getaway homes in Marbella and a pied-à-terre off Park Avenue in New York.
She documented her espionage career in three nonfiction books: The Spy Wore Red ( 1987), The Spy Went Dancing (1990) and The Spy Wore Silk ( 1991), but they drew criticism for embellishing, even fictionalizing some of her exploits. In 1991, Women’s Wear Daily said it had checked her work with the OSS and other archives and believed she had “embroidered” her spying escapades.
The fashion newspaper said that from 1943 she was a code clerk who had worked her way into a low- level intelligence job, passing on gossip within Spanish society. It said there was no evidence of her shooting a man who tried to kill her or of her helping the OSS uncover a double agent, as she had recounted in The Spy Wore Red.
An anonymous former i ntelligence officer t old Women’s Wear Daily that the countess’s tale of successfully tracking down the Soviet mole with the help of the Duchess of Windsor — they invited suspects to sumptuous dinners and charmed vital information out of them — was misleading at best. “It took the whole CIA two years and about 200 people to do it,” the officer said.
In a 1991 interview with the Los Angeles Times, the countess insisted: “My stories are all based on truth. It’s impossible that whatever details of any mission I did would be in a file.” She said she had changed the names of many of those mentioned because they were still alive and might be embarrassed. The CIA has never commented on her role.
Mary Aline Griffith was born May 23, 1923, in Pearl River, N.Y., a town with a large Irish-origin population near the New Jersey border. She was one of six children of a father who worked in his own father’s printing- press factory as well as selling real estate and insurance. Her mother claimed to be a descendant of the Mayflower pilgrims.
Aline, as she was always known, was sent to the College of Mount Saint Vincent in Riverdale, N.Y., founded by the Sisters of Charity. Her poise and striking looks attracted modelling agents and, while still living at home, she was hired as a model for the Vienna- born fashion entrepreneur Hattie Carnegie in Manhattan.
After the United States entered the Second World War, she said she went on a date with a young man with connections to the OSS who helped smooth her entry into the clandestine group. For three months on a private estate near Langley, Va.,, close to where the CIA was later based, she and one other woman trained with 30 men, learning to parachute, fire .25- calibre Beretta pistols and automatic rifles and prepare for potential suicide by swallowing a poison “L- Pill” if caught by the enemy.
The OSS sent her to Spain with the cover of a rich American socialite working for the American oil mission, which sold petroleum to Spain, in the hope she could infiltrate Spanish high society.
On arrival, she booked into the Ritz Hotel in Madrid, the place to see and be seen among Spanish and international royalty, celebrities and artists. She started by recruiting Spanish women — from cleaning ladies and hotel clerks to hairdressers — who might pick up stray information on Nazi sympathizers.
It was in Madrid that she met Count Luis de Figueroa y Pérez de Guzmán el Bueno, Count of Quintanilla and later of Romanones, who descended from early Spanish nobility. He died in 1987. They had three sons, Alvaro, Luis and Miguel, who survive along with more than a dozen grandchildren.
In The Spy Who Wore Red, she wrote of leaving a ball at the Puerta de Hierro, a posh Madrid country club, in 1944 when “double agents” abducted her and tried to kill her.
She recounted to the Morning News that the driver "pulled the car to the side of the road, and I jumped out, and he started running after me and he grabbed me. I had high-heeled shoes on.
“That’s when I had that gun in my bag and I shot him,” she continued. “He fell on top of me, and I didn’t know whether I killed him or not. I suppose I did. The next day ( my bosses) told me, first that I’d killed him, and then they told me I had not. I had to leave him there, and naturally I didn’t wait to take his pulse.”
WOMEN’S WEAR DAILY SAID IT BELIEVED SHE ‘EMBROIDERED’ HER SPYING ESCAPADES.