Die at 94 Aline Griffith, aristocrat and spy

USPA NEWS - The life of the New Yorker Aline Griffith was so romantic that Hollywood tried on several occasions to take it to the movies, without success. And is that the widowed countess of Romanones, who died on Monday in Madrid at 94, lived an intense, interesting, adventurous and luxurious life, all of which she reflected in seven books about her experience as a spy at the service of the OSS in the Second World War and the CIA until 1986.

Born in New York, daughter of a businessman related to the press, she graduated in Literature, History and Journalism and flirted with the world of fashion, soon, American intelligence noticed her and hired her “for three more than I was paid as a journalist,“ she said in a interview with a Spanish newspaper. As a spy in the service of the CIA, knowing as 'Tiger', Aline Griffith was sent to Europe to locate and arrest the Nazi hierarch Heinrich Himmler. She arrived in Spain in 1964 and, from the first moment, she entered the circles of international intelligence but also of the aristocracy. That is how she meet her husband, the then future Count of Romanones, Luis Figueroa y Perez de Guzman, with whom she married and had three children. Elegant, educated, familiar and, above all, brave and cultured, the countess widow of Romanones kept her halo of mystery until the end. Possessing a great fortune, she captured her adventures in seven books and rejected the offers of Hollywood to take them to the cinema because they demanded licenses to her character “that did not suit my image,“ as she explained.

With her death, the countess widowed of Romanones closes an era, that of the romantic, idealistic, daring and adventurous spies on which movie characters like James Bond 007 were based. Aline Griffith was representative of a time in which the secrets of State circulated in cafes, parties and meetings, and when spies pursued war criminals to bring them before the courts. The countess widowed of Romanones was the object of a Nazi conspiracy to kill her and avoided an attack against the Spanish Head of State Francisco Franco. A life of a novel that, nevertheless, was real and ended on Monday, December 11.