The Princess Spy: The True Story of World War II Spy Aline Griffiths, Countess of Romanones, by Larry Loftis (2021)
Aline Griffith (1923 ~ 2017) was born Pearl River, New York, a sleepy little town in outside of New York City, to a middle-class family. She had big dreams and longed to make a name for herself. After graduating from college, she landed a job as a model with New York fashion designer Hattie Carnegie. While it wasn’t her dream job, she did learn poise and a fashion sense.
A chance meeting at a dinner party one night in the early 1940s with an Office of Strategic Services (OSS) operative changed the course of her life. She was given mysterious instructions and told to show up at a building in Washington, D.C., and give a false name. That led to her training to become an operative with the OSS. After completing the training course, she was sent to Madrid, Spain in the midst of World War II. There she was to search for Nazi supporters in the supposedly neutral Spain. She rubbed elbows with the rich and famous and dated many glamorous men.
After the War, she married Luis Figeuroa y Pérez de Guzmán el Bueno, Count of Quintanilla, making her an instant countess. Her husband’s grandfather was Álvaro de Figeuroa, who had served as Prime Minister of Spain in the early 1910s. She mostly retired from the spy business after her marriage, but in the 1950s she occasionally took on secret information-gathering missions for the CIA.
Her actual involvement in espionage was not well enumerated. The author describes one event when Aline takes in some female operatives into her home, and one woman was sleeping in her bed. Later, Aline discovers that the woman had been shot and killed while sleeping. Aline called her handler and they quietly removed the body before morning. The author, however, acknowledges that it is difficult to determine what is real and what is not because Aline, herself, provided very contradictory versions of various events.
Most of the book describes the life of high society in Spain during. The author describes the sport of bullfighting in detail and introduces the reader to some of the most famous bullfighters of that era. Aline traveled in circles where she met and became friends with many of the bullfighters. From reading this book, one gathers that most of her time as a spy was attending cocktail parties and bullfights.
During the War, Aline seems to be nervous about having too much contact with Nazis. After the
War, however, she considers the Duchess of Windsor, a known Nazi sympathizer, as one of her closest friends.
The book was mildly interesting. I expected to learn more about a female spy during World War II, and not the antics of a high-society partier.
Read: April 26, 2023
3 Stars
