The Princess Spy

by Larry Loftis

  “Aline, I have attended many weddings in my life. I have seen many people of different stations joined in matrimony, but I want you to know that today I was very proud of you. You walked down the aisle… like a queen.”

  Aline fought back tears, as did Luis.

  The wedding was announced the following day in the New York Times.

  At 36 Wall Street, Frank Ryan set down the paper and smiled.

  Aline’s wedding announced in the New York Times, June 27, 1947. Note that the Times erred not only with Aline’s first name, writing that it was Mary rather than Marie, but also with the honeymoon destination, declaring that they were off to Lisbon, rather than the correct city, Rome.

  Aline in her wedding dress, posing with Luis’s nieces and nephews.

  On the flight to Rome, Aline and Luis recognized another passenger in the first-class Iberian cabin: Eva Perón, wife of the Argentine president, Juan Perón. She was hard to miss as she was wearing a pink straw hat, with feathers, and a veil covering her eyes. Despite the late June weather, a mink stole rested over the arm of her seat.

  Eva had sent them a priceless Ming vase as a wedding gift, and Aline had had mixed feelings about thanking her. While it was rude not to thank someone for a wedding gift, especially someone married to a head of state, Juan and Eva were universally considered Nazi collaborators.

  Not long after takeoff Luis went to the rear of the first-class compartment to talk to some men—apparently Eva’s bodyguards—and Eva came over and took Luis’s seat. In her hand she carried a copy of ABC, Madrid’s newspaper, which had a photo of the wedding on the front page.

  Eva asked who had made the dress, and Aline told her it was a Balenciaga. Eva carried on for some time about the difference between Balenciaga’s Madrid store and the salons in Rome. It was important for her, she said—as the president’s wife and as a state figure—to pay attention to such matters because she was expected to create a sensation each time she appeared in public.

  Aline nodded, thanked her for the vase, and then asked Eva about the Nazi money which had been sent to Argentina.

  Eva glared at her. “Querida, take my advice. If you want to live long enough to enjoy your honeymoon and the life of a grandee countess, do not ever talk about such things. It can be very dangerous. Comprendes?”

  With that, Eva returned to her seat.

  * * *

  When they arrived in Rome, Aline learned that Luis had made reservations to stay an entire week because of a series of receptions set up by El Abuelo and Luis’s father. First was the formal dinner in their honor hosted by the Spanish ambassador to Italy, Señor Sangroniz. Aline had met him in Paris during her stint with World Commerce and was delighted when the ambassador provided her with a new Spanish passport reflecting her new name: the Countess of Quintanilla.

  The next day the Prince and Princess of Torlonia (sister of Spain’s exiled King Juan) hosted a dinner for them, followed by another at the French embassy the next night. Luis was surprised by the ambassador’s greeting: “What a pleasure to have my beautiful friend Aline in this embassy,” the Frenchman said.

  Unbeknownst to Luis, Aline had met him in Madrid when the ambassador was head of the Free French intelligence service.

  Luis didn’t probe, though, and Aline had no desire to bring up her wartime work as a spy, which had been the source of such amusement for him in the past.

  From Rome they took the train to Naples, and from there the ferry to Capri. Their mutual friend Italian prince Raimundo Lanza—the very man Aline had abandoned at lunch during the drama with Luis over his marriage intentions—had rented for them the entire second floor of a palazzo overlooking the beach. Below them lived Princess Caraciollo, a Spaniard whom Luis knew from Madrid, and Princess Manona Pignatelli.

  At night Luis and Aline would take a horse-drawn carriage—cars were not allowed in Capri—into town for drinks and dinner. To Aline’s pleasant surprise, it was customary to shop in the quaint stores before and after supper.

  Each morning they would head down to the rocky beach where a boat—or boats—with friends and acquaintances would arrive to take them to swim in clear water. Aline was amazed at the number of dignitaries whom Luis knew. One of the boat guests was Eva Mussolini, daughter of the ill-fated Il Duce. Aline knew that Eva had married Count Ciano, but she didn’t know that Mussolini had had Ciano executed for objecting to Italy’s alignment with Hitler. Also in the group was Pamela Churchill, the British prime minister’s daughter-in-law, and Gianni Agnelli, who would soon become the president of Fiat.

  One day the boat party decided to lunch at a restaurant on the other side of the island. When they were close to the shore, everyone dove into the water to swim ashore. Aline began swimming and a few dozen yards past the boat she looked back for Luis. She stopped, treading water.

  Luis was floundering, going under and then bobbing up, gasping for air.

  He was drowning.

  Aline swam back and assisted him to shore.

  When they caught their breath, she asked how it was that such a great athlete couldn’t swim.

  Luis shrugged. “When we were children during our summers in Biarritz our governesses never allowed us in the water for more than a few moments and even then just far enough to get our legs wet. I never had the chance to learn how to swim.”

  Aline was stunned. Luis knew he couldn’t swim, yet rather than lose face by admitting it to the others, his Spanish pride compelled him to plunge in, drowning be damned. There was much, she realized, she still had to learn about her husband.

  While Luis had received a privileged, protected upbringing—governesses, butlers, tutors, and tailors—she had always sensed that he was extremely brave and the swimming incident confirmed it. She inquired about his arm, the one that had been injured during the civil war and had a large chunk of muscle missing. Before their marriage, Luis had always shrugged it off as a souvenir of the fighting.

  But fighting for whom? Where? How?

  She pressed Luis to tell her, once and for all, about his arm, about the war, about what had happened to him and his family.

  Luis gathered his thoughts, as if remembering a nightmare, and started from the top.

  “The day the war began, July 17, 1936, I was playing golf in Puerto de Hierro. My sister, Isabel, had played golf earlier and was waiting for me to finish my game so we could go home together. For some time there had been demonstrations in the streets by communists, people in the club referred to them as rojos. I was seventeen and didn’t know much about politics. But I knew that a week before the police had difficulty preventing a mob from burning a church. But despite the lack of safety, my family had remained in the city because my stepmother’s father was seriously ill in the hospital.

  “When I came in the clubhouse, Isabel was very upset. ‘Papa has telephoned,’ she said. ‘Blanca’s father’s operation is over but papa says we must not go home. The house is being watched by a group of dangerous-looking people. He insists we meet him at the hospital instead. There is too much unrest in the streets.’ ”

  Luis paused, reacting to the memory, and then said that when he arrived at the hospital, two nurses were struggling to remove a large body from a stretcher to an emergency table.

  “I stepped closer to help. The sight was horrible. A man’s bloodied body covered with black scorched flesh, his face was almost unrecognizable, his hair was singed, he was delirious and groaning with pain. As I helped to move the body, one of the nurses told me that the rojos had hung the bodies of three monks by the feet over the altar and set them on fire. ‘This one is still alive,’ she said.”

  Luis went on, explaining that his father arrived at the hospital and one of the doctors he knew said it wasn’t safe for any of them to go home. “There are dozens of gangs of rojos attacking homes, arresting the owners, and beating up anyone who appears privileged.”

  Luis’s paternal grandparents were in Biarritz at the time, Luis explained, but his maternal grandparents, the
Ariases, were in Madrid. He called their home, and the butler told them that his grandfather had gone for a walk that morning on the Castellana but never returned. Panicked, his grandmother, Torre, had fled to the Palace Hotel.

  That evening Luis went to the Palace to see Torre. Around midnight the concierge told them that he had just heard what had happened to Arias. He had been shot and killed, the concierge said, by a group of reds shooting randomly at people who appeared well-dressed. Luis’s grandfather was one of the first.

  “My grandmother of course was desperate and determined to go out herself to look for his body and give him a proper burial. But the concierge told us they would kill her too.”

  The bodies had been dumped in the city’s public cemetery, the concierge added.

  Luis slouched in his seat and lit a cigarette, reluctant to continue the story. “The place was horrible,” he finally said. “Stinking bodies all around. It must have been about two o’clock in the morning and I had to use a flashlight. Finally I found him, my poor grandfather, just thrown in a heap, blood all over his face and clothes.”

  Luis paused again, remembering. “I loved my grandfather, who was gentle and kind to us, and to everyone. That night was an experience I’ll never forget.”

  Aline could see it was painful for Luis to relive the scene, so she waited until later to ask again about his arm. He agreed to continue his story, albeit only briefly. He was seventeen, he said, but had joined to fight with the Nationalists, whom his entire family supported. His injury had happened during fighting in Victoria: “I was left for dead among others in the field. It must have been late at night or early in the morning when a doctor and two nurses were looking through the bodies scattered all over the battlefield. By a miracle a good friend of my sister, Isabel, was among the nurses and she recognized me. I was unconscious. I was taken into the operating room and that doctor was able to remove entirely the gangrenous part of my arm.”

  She shook her head, stunned, not knowing what to say.

  Luis was stoic, frozen in the past. “Exactly nineteen of the boys and men in my family were killed in that war. I was the only male left of that generation in our family.

  “We were too young to know anything about politics,” he went on. “However, I can tell you there were plenty of foreigners in our war; most favored the other side. At the very beginning, masses of Russians piled into Madrid. They draped a three-story picture of Lenin over the façade of the great post office building in the Plaza de Cibeles. They also created torture centers called chekas. The Russians did much to incite the civil war and to divide us Spaniards.”

  Aline took his hand, absorbing Luis’s pain and memories. The more she learned about her husband, the more she loved and admired him.

  * * *

  Meanwhile in Spain, on August 28, Manolete was fighting in the nearly forgotten town of Linares. Small venues like this were not really worth his while, and the ring administrators certainly couldn’t afford the fee for Spain’s greatest matador, but when a bullfighter was on tour, the small towns were convenient layovers on their travels between Málaga, Seville, Cordoba, Valencia, Madrid, and Barcelona, and the parties found ways to make it work.

  It was important for Manolete to be spectacular this day because Linares was close to his hometown of Cordoba, and because Luis Miguel Dominguín—his closest rival—was also on the card. Only twenty years of age, Dominguín was heir apparent to Manolete’s throne as Numero Uno. When the trumpet blew, both fighters were determined to give their best.

  Manolete killed the first bull with a workmanlike effort but the crowd was unimpressed; he was the top bullfighter to enter a ring in decades and they demanded perfection. Dominguín followed and he was remarkable. The crowd cheered as if they had witnessed history’s greatest performance.

  Manolete was now even more resolute. His second bull—Islero—like the one that had killed the incomparable Joselito a generation earlier, was a Miura. Manolete’s manager, Camará, watched the bull coming down the tunnel and shivered. “Malo—bad, bad,” he said to Manolete. “It hooks terribly to the right. Stay away from this one, chico!”

  But Manolete could do no such thing. He had to give the performance of his life. He had to show the crowd that he was still the best.

  Immediately he began working Islero close, ignoring Camará’s shouts to stay away from him. As the fight progressed, Manolete brought the bull closer and closer, executing the Pass of Death, his own highly dangerous manoletina, and fifteen suicidal “natural” passes. It was the show of a lifetime.

  Camará knew that the time to kill was drawing near and remained nervous, notwithstanding Manolete’s flawless performance. “Stay away from him, man!” he shouted. “Off to the side and get away quick!”

  Manolete, though, was determined. He would kill the most dangerous bull in the most dangerous position: from the front. As the animal charged, he lunged over the right horn and plunged the sword deep into the withers. Islero, at the same time, wrenched his head up, goring Manolete in the groin. Manolete flew through the air and slammed hard in a heap. Islero spiked at him twice and then keeled over.

  British critic John Marks once wrote: “The bullfight is sometimes condemned as the particularly depraved combination of a spectator-sport and a blood-sport, in which the gloating witness runs no personal risk. The accusation is unjust. The bullfight audience takes neither part nor pleasure in causing pain to the victims of the fiesta, whose sacrifice is not contrived as an end in itself, to provide selfish amusement, but solely as a means to conjure up visions of movement and color, and to excite the sublime tragic emotion which Aristotle defined as pity mixed with fear.”

  As Barnaby Conrad put it, bullfight fans go for one reason: to see the near death of the matadors. Thus, the fighters who most gracefully maximize their chance of death within the aesthetic ritual are recognized as the best.

  On this day, the best bullfighter in the world gave the audience what it wanted. And more. He gave them everything.

  Manolete was dead.

  * * *

  When Aline and Luis heard the news at their next stop, Venice, they were heartbroken. Their Italian hosts, not understanding, were surprised at their grief. But Manolete was not just a national treasure and international star; he was their friend. It was only yesterday, it seemed, that he had offered to help Aline at the tienta. Now he was gone.

  * * *

  In Venice the parties and receptions for Luis and Aline continued, and at one event they met Elsa Maxwell, the American gossip columnist and radio personality. What she was best known for, though, was hosting elaborate parties for royalty.

  During the evening, Luis heard Elsa ranting about the Spanish Civil War, and he couldn’t help himself. “What you are saying is absolutely incorrect,” he told her. “You had better ask me since I was in that war.”

  Aline grimaced, thinking the two might quarrel. She left them at it and circled back a half hour later to find that Luis and Elsa were bosom buddies. A week later they saw Elsa again, just before she was to leave for New York. When Luis mentioned that he and Aline would be arriving in New York on November 11, she said: “I will make a reservation in the hotel Carlyle for you. Luis, you can’t stay anyplace else, and you will have a party in your honor the next day.” She gave Luis her card and said to call.

  In early September Aline and Luis returned to Madrid for a short rest and then began preparing for the third leg of their honeymoon. Luis wanted to spend October in Paris and London, and then all of November in the US, starting in New York and then perhaps driving cross-country to California.

  Meanwhile, two of Aline’s former colleagues, Robert Dunev and Frank Ryan, were busy picking up where the OSS had left off. On September 18, Congress passed the National Security Act of 1947. The act established the Air Force Department and merged the War and Navy departments into the National Military Establishment. It also created a new espionage organization—one that would employ Dunev.

  The Cent
ral Intelligence Agency.

  Six days later, on September 24, the New York Times quietly introduced a company on page 35 of the financial section: the World Commerce Corporation, formerly known as the British American Canadian Corporation.

  The World Commerce Corporation goes public in the New York Times, September 24, 1947.

  Frank Ryan, World Commerce’s president, was interviewed for the article and explained that the company was an international trade group with “world-wide coverage, being presently represented in forty-seven countries of the globe and through six partially owned subsidiaries in Canada, Brazil, Mexico, Egypt, Panama, and the Philippines, the latter in course of organization.”

  Coincidentally, Robert Dunev had just landed in the Philippines.

  He was to be the CIA’s first representative in Manila.

  I. After the wedding Aline heard details about the Benito Llambí incident. “When they spoke to him,” she recalled later, “he told them he was not going to allow Luis to marry me, that he was the man Aline should marry.”

  CHAPTER 25 LIVING THE DREAM

  Few would have noticed the fine print of the New York Times article, but the list of the board of directors for World Commerce included the top echelons of Allied intelligence during the war: OSS chief General William Donovan; British Security Coordination chief Sir William Stephenson; MI6 agent and Stephenson aide John Pepper; OSS director of Europe Russell Forgan; and OSS Iberian peninsula head Frank Ryan. In the “others financially interested” section of the article, even fewer would have connected the dots between Hambros Bank of London and Sir Charles Hambro, head of Special Operations Executive, or between “the Mellon interests of Pittsburgh” and OSS’s Larry Mellon.

  This, apparently, was by design. And former OSS agents brought in to open WCC offices would be completely under the radar. Yet the question remains: Did WCC conduct any type of espionage, or was it merely facilitating trade, as it had announced? Did Ryan recruit former OSS agents because they were seasoned spies or simply because he knew them, knew of their skills, and knew that they were reliable? Was it a coincidence that WCC had an office in the Philippines that was in the “course of development” at the same time that Robert Dunev had started work there for the CIA?