The Princess Spy

by Larry Loftis

  After The History of Pascualete and The Spy Wore Red, Aline continued to write, publishing four more books: The Spy Went Dancing (1990), The Spy Wore Silk (1991), The Well-Mannered Assassin (1994), and The End of an Epoch (2015). The History of Pascualete and The End of an Epoch were nonfiction books, while The Well-Mannered Assassin was a novel. Her three memoirs about her espionage career—The Spy Wore Red, The Spy Went Dancing, and The Spy Wore Silk—were published as nonfiction, but all were highly fictionalized.II

  Like Edmundo Lassalle, Aline was a unique and remarkable character. While she was not a war heroine (impossible while operating in a neutral country), she nonetheless gave her country valuable service in Spain, work that was sometimes dangerous. Her employment with Ryan after the war remains mysterious, as does World Commerce Corporation itself.

  That she had a storybook romance and marriage with Luis is unquestionable, and she appears to have been a splendid mother. Why she felt the need to embellish her exploits as a spy in the books she passed off as memoirs is puzzling, but she always had a flair for the dramatic. Interestingly, in a 1992 article she contributed to The Secrets War: The Office of Strategic Services in World War II—a book published by the National Archives and Records Administration and likely read by most living OSS agents—Aline was forthright, excluding from her essay the murders and wild events she had imagined in her books.

  Perhaps she simply couldn’t see that her true story needed no embellishment. She’d lived an extraordinarily multifaceted life as a small-town girl, a model, a spy, a wife, a mother, a socialite, a fashion icon, and a celebrity. She’d left the safety of home and put herself in danger in order to help defeat the Nazi threat, then found the love of her life in a fairytale romance. Aline was smart, resourceful, determined, and fearless. Perhaps most remarkably, she also had a spirit that allowed her to adapt to almost any situation in which she found herself.

  Like Hemingway’s bullfighters—some of whom became her lifelong friends—she lived her life “all the way up.”

  * * *

  Aline, Countess of Romanones, died on December 11, 2017, at the age of ninety-four. She was survived by three children, thirteen grandchildren, and twelve great grandchildren. Her eldest son, Álvaro, is the current Count of Romanones and upon his death his oldest child, Cristina, will become the Countess of Romanones.

  I. Aline preserved their secret by keeping the words confidential.

  II. Discrepancies regarding Aline’s activities while with the OSS (imagined murders, for example) are detailed in the endnotes accompanying the dates of events.

  EPILOGUE THE REST OF THE STORY

  JUANITO BELMONTE

  Like his famous father, Juanito was not killed in the bullring. He retired as a wealthy matador in the mid-1950s, but he had been deeply affected by the death of his matador friend, Manolete, in 1947. Not long after that, Juanito married a beautiful Spanish girl with whom he had three children. He died of a sudden heart attack before his fiftieth birthday.

  “It was a sad shock for me,” Aline recalled after hearing the news on the radio. “Juanito had been one of my first real friends in Spain and had introduced me to many of the country’s pleasures. He had not only been extremely brave in the ring—but he was also kind to everyone and generous. With his sense of honor and dignity he represented those characteristics I admire in Spaniards.”

  BARNABY CONRAD

  Barnaby Conrad lived the life Ernest Hemingway had fantasized. He was a boxer (captain of the freshman team at the University of North Carolina), diplomat, bullfighter, bon vivant, novelist, nonfiction writer, pianist, portrait painter, teacher, and nightclub owner. After the war he left the diplomatic corps and moved to Lima, Peru, where he worked as a cocktail pianist, portrait painter, and bullfighter.

  Two years later he returned to the United States and began a writing career. He published his first novel, The Innocent Villa, in 1948, and then multiple books about bullfighting: La Fiesta Brava: The Art of the Bull Ring (1950), Matador (1952), My Life as a Matador: The Autobiography of Carlos Arruza (1956), The Death of Manolete (1958), and Barnaby Conrad’s Encyclopedia of Bullfighting (1961). American media were spellbound.

  “It’s rather difficult to tell the reader right off about Barnaby Conrad,” Harvey Breit wrote in his July 6, 1952, New York Times article. “For a young chap—he’s just turned 30—he’s done, and is doing, too much. Of course, he is a novelist, having with his second novel (‘Matador’) hit the jackpot.” As Breit noted, Conrad at thirty had already accomplished more than most do in a lifetime.

  Matador went on to sell more than three million copies. No less an authority than John Steinbeck said it was his favorite novel of the year, and William Faulkner sent a copy to his niece, writing, “I’m sending you a wonderful book called Matador…”

  But Conrad was only just beginning. In 1953 he opened a San Francisco nightclub, El Matador, but couldn’t let go of the exhilaration found only in la fiesta brava. He returned to Spain and continued to fight bulls. In 1958, however, the odds caught up with him.

  In a fight in El Escorial, Conrad was badly gored. The bull’s horn plunged nine inches into his left leg and he was rushed to the hospital. After surgery he remained in critical condition. News of the incident traveled fast, and New York cafés buzzed with talk about the famous author-matador’s plight.

  At Sardi’s restaurant, actress Eva Gabor saw British playwright Noël Coward and blurted, “Noël dahling, have you heard the news about poor Bahnaby? He vass terribly gored in Spain!”

  “He was what?”

  “He vass gored!”

  Noël sighed. “Thank heavens—I thought you said bored.”

  When the exchange (recorded by columnist Leonard Lyons) made its way to Spain, Conrad thought it would make a splendid epitaph: “Gored but never bored.”

  He eventually recovered, retired from bullfighting, and returned to the US, where he resumed drawing, painting, and writing. In 1969 he published a memoir, Fun While It Lasted, about his adventures bullfighting in Mexico, Peru, and Spain. He then founded the Santa Barbara Writers Conference and began teaching creative writing, and in 1990 he published The Complete Guide to Writing Fiction. Four years after that he published a book with stories he had collected from running his nightclub, El Matador, titled Name Dropping: Tales from My Barbary Coast Saloon. He would eventually write eleven nonfiction books and seven novels.

  His artwork was equally compelling. Two of Conrad’s charcoal drawings, of Truman Capote and James Michener, hang in the National Portrait Gallery (part of the Smithsonian Institution) in Washington, DC.

  On February 12, 2013, Conrad died at his home in Carpinteria, California. He was ninety years old.

  ROBERT DUNEV

  Robert Dunev, Aline’s colleague in the Madrid code room, went on from the OSS to the CIA. As the sole CIA agent in Manila, he established an office and information network from scratch.

  In the fall of 1949 the CIA sent a senior officer—a major—to Manila to study the plan and assist in the new agency’s creation. Soon thereafter, however, Washington notified Dunev that an associate of the major’s had been identified as a double agent, thus compromising not only the major but Robert as well. The CIA recalled both to Washington and Dunev’s employment with the agency was terminated.

  Robert, his wife, Louise Marie (who went by the nickname “Ninus”), and their newborn son, Peter, moved back to Madrid in March 1950, where Robert took a job working for his father-in-law. The couple had another son, Michael, in 1952, and a daughter, Christine, the following year.

  Robert moved on to posts with the Haute Couture Cooperative of Spain, Revlon, and Hilton, before becoming the marketing director for Sterling Drug, an international pharmaceutical company, in 1964. At this time the CIA Madrid office asked him to perform some jobs “on the side,” which he did, and then continued on with small tasks while posted with Sterling in Lima, Peru, and then in Buenos Aires, Argentina. It was there in 1971 that he asked for
full termination from the CIA so as not to jeopardize his career in marketing, and continued on with Sterling, taking up posts in São Paulo, Brazil; Kingston, Jamaica; and San Juan, Puerto Rico. Louise Marie died in 1981 and Robert retired. He married Ofelia González Tolezano the following year, and they relocated to Miami.

  Robert Dunev died in 2006. His sons, Michael and Peter, kindly provided invaluable assistance about their father for this work, including access to their father’s unpublished memoir, A Spy Reminisces.

  GLORIA VON FÜRSTENBERG

  Gloria’s post-war activities really began when she disappeared from Madrid in 1944 and stayed at the Estoril Palacio Hotel, just west of Lisbon. Though she had told Portuguese officials she was “penniless,” she managed to stay at the most luxurious hotel in Portugal for more than three months, from August 9 to November 20. The answer to how she could afford to stay in this hotel with her two children lies with the arrival of another guest, Egyptian Prince Ahmed Fakhry, grandson of King Faud I, who checked in to the hotel on August 28 and remained until September 1.

  After the war, there was never any evidence that she had been a German spy or informant.

  In 1946 Gloria married Prince Fakhry, her third husband, but the marriage would end in divorce in 1949. Two years later, on April 7, 1951, Gloria married Captain Thomas Loel Guinness, a British member of Parliament and heir to the Guinness beer fortune. Loel’s wealth, which came largely from banking and real estate, was almost beyond measure, and the couple had residences in Paris, Normandy, New York City, Acapulco, and Manalapan, Florida. The Florida home, called the Gemini and located at 2000 Ocean Boulevard on a 15-acre compound on Palm Beach’s peninsula, is a 62,000-square-foot mansion with thirty-three bedrooms, forty-seven bathrooms, a pool, spa, tennis court, botanical gardens, and a PGA-style four-bunker golf hole. With over 1,200 feet of shoreline on the Atlantic and Intracoastal Waterway, it is one of the most impressive homes in the United States. In 2016 the Gemini was put on the market for $195 million. It remains for sale as of this writing and is listed by Sotheby’s with a price tag of $115 million.

  From 1963 to 1971, Gloria was a contributing editor to Harper’s Bazaar. Considered to be one of the most elegant women of all time, she was dressed by Balenciaga, Christian Dior, Chanel, Yves Saint Laurent, Givenchy, and Halston, and appeared in Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and Women’s Wear Daily. She appeared on Eleanor Lambert’s International Best-Dressed list from 1959 through 1963 and was inducted into its Hall of Fame in 1964.

  Gloria died of a heart attack in 1980 at the Guinness estate in Epalinges, Switzerland, just north of Lausanne. She was sixty-seven.

  PRINCE MAX VON HOHENLOHE

  In The Spy Wore Red and The Spy Went Dancing, Aline disguises Prince Max von Hohenlohe’s identity, calling him “Prince Niki Lilienthal.” In The Spy Went Dancing, she has him being murdered on a hunting trip in Toledo in 1945. In reality, Prince Max died of natural causes in 1968 in Marbella, the resort town developed by his son, Alfonso. As Prince Max had feared, the Hohenlohe-Langenburg family lost much, if not most, of its wealth in Germany and Czechoslovakia after the war. Alfonso restored much of it in 1955 by marrying the Austrian-Italian princess Ira zu Fürstenberg, a Fiat heiress, but they divorced five years later, in 1960. After that, Alfonso dated one of Aline’s Hollywood friends, Ava Gardner, and then another star, Kim Novak, before marrying Austrian actress Jocelyn Lane in 1973.

  Marbella’s success, unfortunately, attracted unseemly residents—members of the Russian mafia and Arab arms dealers. Alfonso sold his shares in the Marbella Club in the 1990s and moved to Ronda, Spain, to commence a wine business, which became successful.

  The family’s palatial finca, El Quexigal, caught fire in 1956, and the house and many priceless paintings were destroyed. In 1979 the Hohenlohe family hired Sotheby’s to sell the remaining paintings, with the proviso that the artwork remain in Spain. To assure that this request was honored, Spain’s Ministry of Culture designated El Quexigal a historical-artistic monument. The collection was valued at over 100 million pesetas.

  The family would later sell the Quexigal estate to Grupo Eulen, a Madrid-based company with operations around the world.

  EDMUNDO LASSALLE

  In The Spy Went Dancing, Aline has Edmundo dying in London in 1966. In a death made to appear as a suicide, she has him working for the CIA and being bumped off by the KGB. The real story is less dramatic and more disheartening. Edmundo did die in London, but on August 1, 1974, rather than in 1966. He never worked for the CIA, and did, in fact, commit suicide.

  His was a life filled with promise, but with devastating ends. Edmundo had been chasing windmills of royalty and high society during the war, and he finally seemed to have arrived after marrying Princess Maria Agatha. Sadly, his dreams never materialized.

  As noted in the text, he divorced his first wife, Emilie, in order to marry Maria Agatha, notwithstanding that he and Emilie had a young daughter, Pepita. Soon after his second marriage, he had a professional disappointment. He had traveled from Madrid to New York in the spring of 1947 to discuss his future with the Walt Disney Company, a two-week stay that was paid for by the company. But while Roy Disney had encouraging words, the company—apparently experiencing financial difficulties—decided not to continue his employment. So he and Agatha moved to Mexico City, but the marriage soured and they divorced four years later, in 1951.

  Three years after that Edmundo would try again, this time marrying Nancy Norman, an heiress of Sears, Roebuck & Co. They lived on Fifth Avenue, overlooking Central Park, and Nancy and Edmundo had three children. But that marriage failed, too, and they divorced in 1966. He married again promptly thereafter, to Patricia Rinehart, who had two children of her own. Edmundo adopted them, and they had a child together as well. At this point Edmundo had seven children (including the two adopted) by three of his four wives.

  Though he had a good job working for the International Fund for Monuments, it required constant travel. In 1971 his health, as well as his fourth marriage, began to unravel. He had a heart condition, he wrote to his daughter Pepita from Rabat, Morocco, adding that “doctors say my condition is serious and I have but a few years to live.” He and Patricia divorced the following year, with a settlement that offered Edmundo a trust allowance valued at over $1 million, provided that he lived in London.

  And so in 1974, in failing health and with a string of broken relationships, Edmundo took his own life at age fifty-nine.

  WILLIAM LARIMER “LARRY” MELLON, JR.

  As an heir to the Mellon banking and oil fortune, Larry Mellon did not need to work—but he did, and hard. After the war he owned and operated a cattle ranch near Rimrock, Arizona, but in 1947 he had a life-changing experience. He read about the life and work of Dr. Albert Schweitzer, the Alsatian medical missionary who had founded a hospital in Gabon, Africa, and decided to do the same. He wrote to Dr. Schweitzer and asked how he might go about it and Schweitzer responded with details about the medical training needed and how to set up a clinic.

  At the age of thirty-seven, Mellon enrolled at Tulane University to pursue a medical degree, and his wife, Gwen, enrolled to become a laboratory technician. Seven years later, in 1954, Mellon received his degree. Now age forty-four, he decided to build and operate a mission in the Artibonite Valley of Haiti, a poor and disease-ridden area with a population of 150,000. The Albert Schweitzer Hospital opened two years later, in 1956. Mellon personally financed the building and equipment, which cost $2 million at the time.

  While he worked on the medical staff, he also spearheaded community efforts to install wells, water systems, and roads. For the next thirty years, ministering to the people of Haiti became his life’s work. In 1951 Mellon sent Aline more than ten million units of penicillin to distribute to the poor of Madrid.

  On August 3, 1989, Larry Mellon died of cancer and Parkinson’s disease at his home in Deschapelles, Haiti. He was seventy-nine.

  PIERRE

  The identity of Pierre rem
ains a mystery. In The Spy Wore Red, Aline indicates that his real name was François Ferronière, code-named PIERRE, OSS agent number 333. But OSS records show no agent by that name, code name, or number, and only include names of The Farm trainees from two classes, neither of which was Aline’s.

  In her Author’s Note at the beginning of the book, Aline admits she changed the names of some in her story, but the true identities of most of the players are easily identifiable through the OSS files at the National Archives and Records Administration. Aline’s character John Derby, for example, code-named JUPITER, was in fact Frank T. Ryan, code-named ROYAL. Similarly, her character Jeff Walters was Robert Dunev, code-named WILLIAMS, and Prince Niki Lilienthal was Prince Max von Hohenlohe. She did not disguise Edmundo Lassalle’s name, however, perhaps because by the time of her writing he had already died (although she changed his code name from PELOTA to TOP HAT).

  But Aline’s PIERRE was not assigned to the Madrid station, so without a cross-reference to his real name or code name, it’s impossible to identify him among the OSS’s more than fourteen hundred employees.

  Aline writes in the note: “The man I call ‘Pierre’ has been disguised, I hope, as has been the man code-named Mozart. But there was a Pierre, and there was a Mozart.”

  The latter is readily identifiable. Mozart, whom Aline calls Phillip Harris, was really Madrid’s station chief, Gregory Thomas, code-named ARGUS.