Story was just not believable. Writing style poor.
Doña María Aline Griffith Dexter, Countess of Romanones, Grandee of Spain (born New York, 1923 is a Spanish-American aristocrat, socialite, and writer who started at the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS) as a cipher clerk during World War II. She has been a member of the International Best Dressed List since 1962.
Miss Griffith (as she then was) was working as a model when she was recruited to the OSS and sent to Spain, where she later met and married her late husband. Reporting on the gossip she had overheard after a night of partying, often with Spanish aristocracy."[2] She married Luis Figueroa y Perez de Guzmán el Bueno, Count of Quintanilla, in 1947[ they had three children
The couple later became the Count and Countess of Romanones, at the death of her husband's grandfather, Alvaro Figueroa, former prime minister of Spain.
Romanones wrote six books, The Spy Wore Red,[1] The Spy Went Dancing, The Spy Wore Silk, all sold as non fiction, about her involvement in espionage and intelligence, and The Well-Mannered Assassin, her first fiction, based in part on Carlos The Jackal. In 2009, she appeared in "Garbo: The Spy"[6], a documentary about Juan Pujol, a Spanish double agent who supported Britain during World War II.
There is some controversy over the accuracy of Romanones' depiction of her work for OSS and the CIA in her memoirs. 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..In 1991 Women's Wear Daily reported that it had retrieved her OSS file from the National Archives and found that Romanones had "embroidered her exploits as an American spy". 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. Romanones responded to the allegations in a March 1991 Los Angeles Times interview: "My stories are all based on truth. It's impossible that whatever details of any mission I did would be in a file." Women's Wear Daily had also quoted an anonymous former intelligence officer's complaint that Romanones' later memoir gives the misleading impression that she and the Duchess of Windsor alone found a CIA mole when "it took the whole CIA two years and about 200 people to do it." Romanones replied "I did not pretend to do it single-handedly. I explained clearly that they only came to us when they couldn't find him." The CIA has declined comment on Romanones.
In Spain, instead of birthdays, everyone celebrates his or her name saint's day.
In Spain, embalming is not customary but according to law buriel must take place within 24 hours of death.