Espionage This article is more than 12 years old

Spanish superspy Francisco Paesa, 75, gets out of yet another scrape

This article is more than 12 years oldSierra Leone escapade follows a lifetime of intrigue including years on Interpol's 'most wanted' list

Francisco Paesa bamboozled terrorists, laundered money, entrapped crooked police chiefs, became mixed up in a dirty war fought on French soil, fooled Interpol and placed a death notice in a Spanish newspaper asking monks to pray for his soul.

Now the freelance Spanish superspy has resurfaced at the age of 75, cheekily calling on diplomats from his home country to rescue him from a tight situation involving a private jet, Sierra Leone border guards and a mysterious cargo of gold masks.

Diplomatic sources said that, after landing at Sierra Leone's Lungi airport in October, Paesa was locked up for three days – but used his influence with the Spanish authorities to be flown out to safety in France.

For years Paesa featured on Interpol's most wanted list after a Spanish court accused him of laundering millions of pounds stolen by a corrupt senior socialist government official.

Paesa had previously been involved in a sting operation against the Basque terrorist group Eta in 1986, in which he sold them missiles fitted with radio transmitters so that they could be tracked by the police.

His name was also mentioned in the mid-1990s as a middleman between the socialist government of prime minister Felipe González and the so-called Anti Terrorist Liberation Group (GAL), set up by Spain's interior ministry to carry out attacks in south-west France on suspected Eta members.

The group hired mercenaries from Portugal, Italy and elsewhere to carry out attacks that killed 26 people – a third of whom turned out to have nothing to do with Eta.

Paesa's contacts were said to be several bag men who worked in González's office when he was prime minister between 1982 and 1996 – though courts found insufficient evidence to convict him of any GAL-related charges.

His close contacts with senior Spanish police officials meant that civil guard boss Luis Roldán decided to turn to him when courts found he had been demanding commission for handing out contracts to build new police barracks around Spain.

Paesa was believed to have laundered the estimated £8m that Roldán had amassed, and to have then helped him flee to Laos in 1994.

He then persuaded Roldán to travel to Bangkok, Thailand, where he was picked up by Spanish police in 1995. Newspaper reports at the time claimed the Spanish government paid Paesa up to £1m for luring his former friend to Bangkok.

In 1998 Paesa's sister published a death notice in a Spanish newspaper. It claimed her brother had died of a heart attack and been cremated in Thailand. His family asked the Dominican monks at San Pedro de Cardeña, near Burgos, to pray for his soul.

But when none of his family turned up to hear the monks say mass for him, suspicions were raised about whether he was really dead.

About £4m had disappeared from his bank account in Madrid a few months earlier.

It was not until 2004, however, that rumours surfaced that Paesa was alive and well and living under a false name in Luxembourg.

Smudgy photographs taken by private detectives working for clients who claimed that Paesa, now known as Francisco Pando, had ripped them off were published by El Mundo newspaper.

By then Paesa was reportedly claiming to be Argentine and had a young, blonde girlfriend and a passport that took 14 years off his real age of 68.

When a judge ruled that the money-laundering charges he faced in connection with the Roldán case had timed out, he was able to live openly again.

Rather than enjoying a quiet and opulent retirement in Luxembourg, however, he appears to have returned to a life of high-risk adventure and strange cross-frontier transactions.

Paesa travelled to Sierra Leone "representing a French lawyer to verify a cargo of antiques, including old perfume bottles and Chinese golden masks", according to the Cadena Ser radio network. He got into trouble with border guards, who detained him, then turned for help to Spanish officials. He was flown out of Sierra Leone with the aid of the Spanish foreign ministry to France where he was released without charges.

Spanish diplomatic sources said they believed he was really involved in a major gold transaction.

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