Book Review: The Princess Spy, by Larry Loftis
A Fake Princess Spins Fake Stories about Fake Espionage
This book is a re-telling of Aline Griffiths’ fanciful tales she spun in books marketed as memoirs, which she claimed were true. It appears that the Countess (she married a Spanish nobleman, a pitiful sort of clutching at Cinderella dreams), was quite successful passing off bloody and thrilling tales of espionage derring-do, and gun-play as the truth of her WW2 Office of Strategic Services (OSS) work. Griffiths, calling herself Aline, Countess of Romanones, published a series of books purporting to be true tales of her cloak and dagger work in Spain.
Her non-fiction books have been called out as fanciful daydreams by espionage experts.
Nigel West, observed in his book Counterfeit Spies that the Princess seemed remarkably unembarrassed to be exposed as a fraud and in his Historical Dictionary of Sexspionage he commented: Although Aline had served as a cipher clerk in Madrid … her supposedly factual accounts were completely fictional.
It appears that Loftis’s book is pretty much a regurgitation of the “Countess’s” own fanciful nonsense.
Aline Griffith was a small town girl, 22 years old in the early days of WW2. Her only "real world" experience was working a couple months as a fashion model.
An older man, at a dinner party, comes on to her with "I could get you a job," pick-up line.
This approach is almost an exact template for Harvey Weinstein's schtick 50 years later. Turns out that Weinstein’s girl-collection technique was not new. An observer described Harvey W.’s girl-collection in 2010:
Every few years, Harvey picks a new girl as his pet. He puts her in a picture or two, takes her to an event, and not unlike Cher Horowitz, makes her a project, an attempted creation.
The Harvey Girls are easily spotted. They are all very pretty, often in a rather generic sense. Their instant fame and the push behind them comes seemingly out of nowhere and without any justification in terms of resume or skill set. Most obviously, at least as of 2007, they are clothed exclusively in Marchesa on the red carpet (the fashion line of Weinstein’s wife, Georgina Chapman). So if you were wondering why Harvey Weinstein seems only interested in actresses who dress like fairy princesses from Planet Sugarplum, it’s his wife’s fault. But the most telling sign, if you’re looking, is the Want. These girls, each of them, has the look of desperation, of need. They WILL be famous. They WILL be stars.
This technique was not new in 2010. It wasn’t even new in 1943. Howard Hughes used the same template to build a stable of wannabe starlets, pretty young girls who’d caught his fancy, in the 1920s and ‘30s.
Whenever he saw a picture of a pretty teenage actress, he sought to get her under contract — and under his full control — right away, installing them in his apartments, scheduling every moment of their lives and hiring each a personal driver who was also his spy.
Young Griffiths had exactly nothing to qualify her for work in intelligence, except she's hot.
Note: if the pick-up line seems far-fetched, you may want brush up on the founder of the OSS, "Wild Bill" Donovan. He used the OSS as his personal dating service. He, and his staff, as we see with The Princess Spy, hired hot women, and salted them around the world. Whenever Donovan arrived in an OSS location, and he traveled constantly around the world, the local OSS office knew to provide a woman for the portly 60-something skirt-chaser.
Word soon spread among OSS officers abroad that Donovan also liked a female for the night during his foreign stops. You knew to have women at the receptions Donovan attended,” recalled Rolfe Kingsley, one of his Middle East operatives. He’d take care of the rest of it. (Wild Bill Donovan, Waller, p. 200)
Once you know that, you should see this Princess for what she was. She wasn't a Princess, by the way.
After being picked up by the OSS guy in charge of Spain, and brought to DC to meet him, our Princess is sent to the Farm for training. Although the Farm is mentioned over and over in this book, the fact is, as actually reported in the book, that the fashion model had exactly 20 days of training at the Farm.
In case you're wondering, no, 20 days is NOT enough time for anyone to learn to be an intelligence operator, but especially not a country girl fashion model.
Be that as it may, the author, who appears to base his story on the Princess's own fake books about her husband-seeking time in Spain, insists that the model during her 20 day stint at the Farm achieved the following skills and knowledge: cypher expert; Morse code expertise [Note: Radio experts suggest that, with practice every day, a beginner can learn Morse code in 1-2 months!] ; how to handle almost any weapon [Note: Current CIA training to qualify to be issued a pistol is a one-week intensive, 8-10 hours a day, course. Another week to qualify on a carbine rifle.] ; the fundamentals of Spanish history, economics, and language, which she picked up by browsing books at the Farm library, but she was careful to avoid letting her fellow trainees guess where she was going, by mixing books on Spain with other books [Note: Loftis’s book details another OSS employee sent at the same time as the Princess. He was an actual expert on Spain—a native Spanish speaker, he also had multiple graduate degrees in related subjects—which took him a decade or more to earn] [Note: But the Princess does mention that she realizes she’ll need to brush up later to be fluent.]; and is transformed into a valuable intelligence officer. Evidently, not many readers, nor the publisher or editors, have a working bullshit detector. For those claims are ridiculous.
Griffith’s exploits in Spain, as detailed by Loftis--which, to summarize, revolve around various men chasing her, showering her with gifts, money, travel, and more, and scurrying from one fashionable party to the next, weekends on fincas, etc.--were useless for real intelligence purposes.
This book is ludicrous and should embarrass both the author and the Princess.
Drop the pretenses and look at Griffith’s exploits through clear lenses. What the Princess described, and what the author repeats, is the Donovan model for grooming women for his stables. Grooming is what it's called. His operation selected cute girls, trained them in intelligence and then seeded them around the world. He expected, and got, female companionship, drawn from OSS staffers, wherever in the world he traveled. And he traveled pretty much non-stop during WW2.
And the Princess was clearly pursuing her graduate degree, what she missed during undergrad, the Mrs. qualification.
She was successful—she bagged a Spanish Grandee, and her life was set after that. Unfortunately, she had a penchant for fabrication and confabulation. Instead of using that skill to write fiction, she wrote fiction and called it auto-biography. Then Loftis picked up her fraudulent stories, called it research and put them in this non-fiction.
If you want the real scoop on what it was like to be a clerk in the OSS, you may want to try The Covert Affair, by Jennet Conant, about a 6 ft. 2 inch California woman, Julia McWilliams. A clerk, just like the Princess, although not quite as beautiful, Child earned her Mrs, too, marrying a State Dept. officer during her tour abroad. The account of her short stint overseas as an OSS clerk is honest, (mostly--Conant does justify Child’s involvement with a friend who was a communist penetration of the OSS) and realistic. Child went on to write honestly about her actual life in France, without pretending she was 007. Child picked up culinary skills and honestly shared her love of French cooking with America.
The current PC-Progressive need to attribute extraordinary accomplishments to ordinary women de-legitimizes both the ordinary and the truly extraordinary accomplishments of others. This book and this Princess are exemplary specimens of this regrettable fad. We can only hope that the fad passes, and that reality replaces it soon. A true story about Griffith’s manipulation of men, which allowed her to achieve her title of Countess would be intellectually honest, and more interesting.