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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.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/nov/29/spanish-superspy-franciso-paesa
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