In a Feb. 28 expose headlined THE SPY STRIPPED NAKED, the paper claims that the countess’s books “may be more fiction than fact.” The most important piece of evidence: a recently declassified file in the National Archives in Washington. The paper says it was written by the countess in 1945 when she was Aline Griffith (formerly of Pearl River, N.Y.) and working as a code clerk in Madrid for the OSS, the precursor of the CIA. The countess’s first book, “The Spy Wore Red,” published in 1987, is a detailed account of those years, full of dead bodies and double agents.
Women’s Wear reporter Susan Watters was able to track down the file because the countess had told John Taylor, military specialist at the archives, that her real code name was not Tiger, as the book states, but Butch. The file contains 80 pages of routine reports from Butch on social life in Madrid and rumors about German agents. There’s no mention of the exploits in her books: for example, the time she blasted a would-be assassin with her Beretta.
Watters’s story, reprinted in an expanded version in the current issue of W, the sister magazine of Women’s Wear, has the countess fuming. “I have always considered myself an honorable woman,” she says. “Naturally, I want to preserve my reputation.” She has never denied that Butch was one of her code names, she says, but so were Tiger and Sugarlump and “some others I can’t remember.” Sam Vaughan, who edited her first book, recalls that the countess’s original title was “Code Name: Butch.” It was changed, he says, to boost sales. Watters quotes her as saying that her first publisher, Random House, made the change because Butch “had other implications.”
As for the humdrum files, the countess, who has not yet read them, maintains that they prove nothing. Even if they are hers, she says that she would never have written down everything she did for her country: “You have to keep many things secret.” Taylor, the archivist, points out that there are 33 boxes of unfiled documents in the same series and it’s possible that other reports might back up de Romanones.
The countess admits her original manuscript was turned down by half a dozen publishers as “too documentary.” So, she says, she went back to the typewriter and re-created dialogue, telescoped some events to simplify the story line and made some characters composites - while keeping the “core” of the tale. All this she acknowledges in author’s notes at the beginning of each book. With those changes, says Vaughan, “I decided that she had invented a new genre: romantic nonfiction.”
Some of the countess’s friends in the loose-knit fraternity of ex-spies smell a conspiracy. They think the countess is the victim of jealous gossip by other former agents whose own books were rejected by publishers as too dull. “In my opinion, the Watters story is one notch above the National Inquirer,” says Geoffrey Jones, president of the Veterans of the OSS. It’s not hard to understand why other ex-agents might be jealous. Besides the books, there are plans for a TV movie and a Broadway musical based on “The Spy Wore Red.” The countess, whose husband died in 1987, is also in demand as a speaker on politics (“Her lectures place her somewhere to the right of Attila the Hairdresser,” says Vaughan). But Watters and her editor, Patrick McCarthy, stand by their story. “Some of her books are quite amusing,” says McCarthy, “but no one thinks they are true.”
Indeed, even the countess’s fans concede that readers should not take every word of her books literally. “What she really tried to do is make the OSS look good,” says Ray Cline, a former deputy CIA director who now teaches at Georgetown University. “Espionage is mostly boredom. Once in a while, about 2 percent of the time, it’s very exciting. But 98 percent is drudgery. In order to get her books published, she decided to glamorize.” In that, she is not unique, says Elizabeth Bancroft, director of the National Intelligence Book Center in Washington, who publishes a respected list of current books on espionage. “Every defector’s account makes it sound like the whole KGB depended on this guy,” says Bancroft, who adds that the truth is slippery in the cloak-and-dagger world. “That’s why they call it the ‘wilderness of mirrors’.”
