María Aline Griffith (y) Dexter, Countess of Romanones (22 May 1923 – 11 December 2017) was an American-born Spanish aristocrat, socialite, and writer who worked in the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II and later for the CIA as a spy.
The spouse of Luis Figueroa y Pérez de Guzmán el Bueno, a Spanish grandee, she was a close friend to world leaders and celebrities including Nancy Reagan, Jacqueline Kennedy, and Audrey Hepburn.
[11] Aline Griffith moved between her homes in Madrid, New York, and Pascualete, her country estate in the rural Spanish province of Caceres, which belonged to her husband's family and which she painstakingly restored.
[13] In 2009, Griffith helped craft Garbo: The Spy[13] a documentary about Juan Pujol, a Spanish double agent who supported Britain during World War II.
[13] Several people were interviewed for the project, among them were Aline Griffith, Nigel West (a pseudonym used by intelligence expert Rupert Allason), historian Mark Seaman, investigative journalist Xavier Vinader, and psychiatrist Stan Vranckx.
There is no doubt that she served as a cipher clerk for the OSS in Madrid during World War II, but historian Rupert Allason, writing under the pen name "Nigel West", contends that her "supposedly factual accounts [of her espionage work] were completely fictional.
According to the paper, she started out as a code clerk and then moved into a low-level intelligence job that involved reporting on gossip circulating in Spanish high society; there was no mention of her shooting a man or assisting in the exposure of a double agent, as her first book, The Spy Wore Red, alleges.