WASHINGTON — Aline Griffith was a stunning, well-educated fashion model from upstate New York who was sent to Franco’s Spain during World War II 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 shimmering 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 pearl-handled 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 US 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 US 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 intelligence officer told 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.
In 1994, she wrote an admittedly fictional book, ‘‘The Well-Mannered Assassin,’’ based on the Venezuelan-born terrorist Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, better known as Carlos the Jackal. She claimed that she had unwittingly gotten to know him.
‘‘He came to Spain escaping from France because he had killed several policemen,’’ she told the Dallas Morning News after the book was published. ‘‘He got this job in a company of my husband’s and he started coming to the house to deliver papers. . . . I told my husband, finally you’ve got a well-mannered, nice young man in that office. He speaks good English and couldn’t be nicer.’’
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, went to the College of Mount Saint Vincent in Riverdale, N.Y., founded by the Sisters of Charity. Her poise and striking looks attracted modeling agents and, while still living at home, she was hired as a model for the Vienna-born fashion entrepreneur Hattie Carnegie in Manhattan.
