Manuel Arroyo Infiltrates the Stauffer Network Under an Assumed Identity

Manuel Arroyo Benítez’s infiltration of Clara Stauffer’s network turns impersonation into both a physical ordeal and an intelligence operation: posing as wanted Nazi fugitive Adrián Gallardo Ortega, he enters the very refuge whose crimes he intends to expose. His cover is built from a fabricated escape story, a carefully altered body, and the help of people who believe they are saving him; once accepted, the assumed identity gives him access to Stauffer’s arrangements and a means to record what he learns.

Identity and Mission

The operation grows out of the evidence gathered by Sole Ruiz, who had seen Stauffer’s Madrid home at Galileo 14 change into a refuge and apparent staging point. In the summer of 1945, Stauffer renovated rooms for an office, installed a new telephone line, hired secretaries, and filled new wardrobes with men’s clothes and shoes in many sizes. Thin, exhausted visitors appeared at all hours. Sole recognized them as fugitives who had escaped European prisons or been released from Nanclares; they were fed and given clothes, and seemed to return to the office after receiving further help. Their inability to speak Spanish heightened her suspicions.

A further clue came through a Spanish conscript who regularly delivered sealed envelopes, often bearing the letterhead of Madrid parishes. When one envelope had been left open, Sole found a German baptismal record dated 1907. She later overheard a secretary identify a visitor as Jean-Jules Lecomte. Meg Williams established that Lecomte was a committed Nazi, a member of both the Rex Party and the SS, and the wartime burgomaster of Chimay. Sole’s observations offered a compelling lead, but the investigators needed confirmation of identities, the network’s methods, and the destination of the people it sheltered.

Manuel Arroyo accepted the role of infiltrator because the information could reveal more than a route used by individual fugitives. Meg Williams persuaded Congressman Sal Burnstein that Stauffer’s operation appeared to be a stable organization, but the evidence was not yet sufficient to present to the United Nations or to pressure the United States government. The investigators hoped to establish that Franco’s regime sheltered war criminals implicated in the genocide of the Jews; in their assessment, such proof could force the Allies to break relations with Madrid and make intervention harder to avoid. They also needed to substantiate the suspected connection to Argentina and identify the people moving through it. Manuel recognized what the plan required: an infiltrator accepted inside the network.

Constructing the Imposture

Manuel prepared not merely to claim Adrián’s name but to make the claim legible in his voice and body. He deliberately made his German sound like the faulty, heavily accented German of a Spaniard who had learned it without formal study. He also reshaped his appearance through a severe three-month diet of small amounts of rice and black bread, avoiding fruit, vegetables, and fresh food. He lost nearly twenty kilograms, his skin took on a dry, dull appearance associated with camp inmates, and long daily walks in the sun completed the impression of physical decline. The deterioration became so marked that he gave up the comfortable hospitality of María Aránzazu rather than invite questions he could not answer.

The physical disguise depended on close comparison with the available descriptions of Adrián. Accounts in the proceedings against Kleiber contradicted one another about Adrián’s hair, and their general descriptions did little to establish an exact likeness. Meg instead supplied sports reports giving his height and weight, along with photographs in which his face was often indistinct beneath boxing gear. Adrián was two centimetres taller than Manuel, so Meg gave him shoes with a concealed lift. He wore them on his daily walks and left them uncleaned, allowing dust and mud to disguise their age and quality. His nose posed the harder problem: as Guillermo put it, a boxer with an unbroken septum would be implausible.

Guillermo performed a local-anesthetic procedure that left Manuel in pain for days and made the nasal septum heal crookedly. By the time Guillermo presented him to Amparo Priego Martínez, the swelling had disappeared and the nose looked as though it had been broken years earlier. The medical work did more than alter a feature: it connected the assumed identity to the history of a boxer and made the cover withstand the scrutiny of someone who had known Manuel under another name. Amparo, who had believed that Guillermo’s wartime identity, Felipe Ballesteros Sánchez, concealed a Fifth Column agent inside Republican intelligence, was not expected to recoil from the deception. Guillermo told Manuel that Amparo knew he was Adrián; her response was the one remaining uncertainty that worried him.

Entering Stauffer’s Circle

In early March, Manuel moved into a tiny attic room on Mira el Río Alta, borrowed through Guillermo’s communist friends on the condition that he share it with another clandestine operative if necessary. He had only a pajama, the clothes he wore, his oldest suit, and a white shirt that he would wear daily, bleaching it until its collar began to fray. Alone in the room, without even visits from Meg, he gradually inhabited the role of a man he hoped never to meet.

The investigators’ approach to Stauffer had been prepared with care. Three weeks before the visit, the Allied Control Council issued a notice warning that Adrián Gallardo was in Spain. Meg Williams had written it using information from Republican exile circles in New York. She expected that, once the notice reached the ministry, someone would alert Stauffer. After waiting two weeks, she arranged for Rafael Cuesta Sánchez to secure an appointment, believing the delay would make the meeting seem less conspicuously tied to the alert.

When Manuel arrived with Amparo, Ingrid Weiss greeted the fugitive in German as a friend of Fräulein Stauffer. Manuel answered in conspicuously poor German, matching the linguistic performance he had rehearsed. Stauffer then welcomed him warmly as Adrián. The act placed him inside Galileo 14 not as a visitor investigating the organization, but as a fugitive whom its members believed they had reason to protect.

Rafael helped make that entrance credible. Five days before the meeting, Manuel had moved from the attic to a shabby pension on Espoz y Mina, where Rafael paid a week in advance. Manuel had not seen Meg since leaving the attic, but met Guillermo each afternoon to rehearse the story intended for Stauffer. Rafael, taking advantage of their hostess’s gratitude, began narrating the account himself rather than leaving it to the false Adrián. That story drew on accounts from fugitives who had crossed the Pyrenees: Adrián was said to have escaped with a German from Cologne, been sheltered in Bavaria by a priest named Strauss, and travelled with his companion toward Switzerland in the boot of a farmer’s van. After the two men separated in France, Adrián supposedly crossed the Pyrenees in April 1947 with a guide arranged by a priest near Perpignan, then spent more than a month reaching Madrid. The improvised-looking route was designed to be credible within a postwar landscape in which churches offered fugitives shelter, food, and transport.

The Cover Becomes a Channel of Access

Stauffer’s welcome quickly became practical protection. She gave Manuel a copy of the Allied notice seeking him and asked whether he had known about it. Manuel pretended surprise and presented himself as a soldier who had not expected to matter to the authorities. He spoke of his role in Estonia without denying that he had understood what he was doing. He framed his crimes as service to a European order, rejected the idea of asking forgiveness, and repeated the language of a Europe made clean and peaceful for Europeans. The confession was an act within the cover: it offered Stauffer the ideological assurance she wanted from a fugitive whose supposed past implicated him in atrocity.

The notice had a larger significance than the performance allowed. Manuel had been beside Meg when she wrote it, yet Stauffer possessed the original document, complete with seal and signature. Its presence in her hands indicated collusion between the Galileo 14 network and the Francoist state, or at least senior officials within it. Stauffer presented the notice as proof that Manuel could trust her, and promised to direct his next steps. The document thus worked in two directions: as a threat to the invented fugitive and as evidence for the infiltrator that the network’s connections reached beyond private assistance.

Stauffer planned to place him with Ingrid Weiss, find him new papers and work, and eventually let him decide whether to remain in Spain or emigrate. Her immediate instructions were to rest, sleep, eat well, recover, and shave. Soon afterward, Manuel was placed in an interior room at Ingrid’s home. He grew genuinely fond of her, learning about the misfortunes that had shaped her life and recognizing in her grief for her lost son an echo of his own longing for maternal love. The affection did not make him forget the purpose of his mission. When Stauffer later needed Ingrid’s room for another fugitive, Manuel was relieved to leave, even though the attachment had become real.

Work, Records, and the Network’s Reach

On 1 July 1947, under the name José Pacheco Hernández, Manuel began working as a night porter in a building on Gran Vía. He signed the contract in the office where Stauffer directed his life; a German-named comrade had delegated the paperwork to her, and Manuel never met him. His work gave the false identity a routine beyond the network’s headquarters. The evening porter and the morning porter called him José, while everyone at Galileo 14 continued to call him Adrián. Even the policeman who took his fingerprints and signature greeted him by the assumed name with a knowing air before handing over his identity document.

Stauffer helped him rent a small but comfortable interior flat on Calle del Pez, waiving the deposit and giving him the first month’s rent. The move also ended Manuel’s stay with Ingrid. His most important gain from the porter’s job, however, was not the new address or the public plausibility of employment: it gave him nights in which he could write down what he had discovered. He had befriended the office secretaries by bringing them the newspaper, sharing coffee, and running errands. When their holiday period began on 15 June, his help became so useful that he was effectively acting as another secretary.

Manuel saved part of the small weekly allowance Ingrid gave him for tobacco and a couple of vermouths, and bought a pocket-sized notebook, pencils, and a sharpener at a stationery shop on Calle Eloy Gonzalo. The secretaries sent him to the sacristy of the parish at the Glorieta de Iglesia with money for two metro rides, to collect a baptismal certificate for José Pacheco Hernández. They did not tell him that the certificate would be used to make his identity papers. That errand revealed how ordinary administrative and clerical documents could become instruments of the escape system—and supplied Manuel with a paper identity made through the same channels he was investigating.

The night porter’s booth offered a different kind of concealment. The retiring porter showed Manuel the meter room and his locker, whose wooden lining and lock recalled the lockers at the institute in León where he had learned to make a simple lock-pick from a piece of wire. The memory proved useful again: on his first night, he used that skill to open the locker. During the following eight nights he filled his notebook with what Adrián had supposedly learned from his first conversation with Stauffer through her later account of the network’s effectiveness. The record included Jean-Jules Lecomte’s route to Argentina under a Spanish passport bearing a version of the name Jan Degraf, De Graf, De Graaf, or Degraaf. Manuel could not confirm the spelling, but knew the second surname began with Ver, enough to search passenger lists for a transatlantic voyage.

The notebook also recorded the importance of Argentina to the operation. Manuel had not met Carlos Fuldner, who had returned to Buenos Aires in February, but devoted several pages to him. Eva Perón’s visit had generated rumours and reports within Galileo 14, and its aftermath intensified the network’s contacts with the Argentine embassy and the correspondence Fuldner maintained from Argentina. These details gave shape to the investigators’ earlier suspicion that the fugitives Stauffer received were being prepared for onward passage, rather than merely hidden in Spain.

The wider evidence placed the infiltration within an international system of suspected protection and movement. The investigators believed the network supplied Spanish documentation through baptismal records provided by friendly parish priests and contacts in the state administration, and that Argentina was the fugitives’ final destination. They understood the route as a concrete lead, not a fully proven case. Later, Manuel suspected that Guillermo’s shipments might include art, jewelry, antiquities, and perhaps gold or foreign currency looted from occupied territories. He also connected Stauffer’s reference to a visitor called Ban or Bam with Josef Hans Lazar, known to intimates as Bam, who was associated with the missing treasures and records of Hitler’s embassy in Madrid. Those suspicions broadened the stakes of Manuel’s work from identifying individual escapees to tracing the people, documents, and valuables moving through the network.

Significance

Manuel’s disguise depends on a contradiction he cannot resolve by acting alone: the more convincingly the network accepts him as Adrián, the more access he gains, but the more fully he must inhabit a person whose crimes he is pretending to confess and justify. His cover is assembled through collaboration—Meg’s research, Guillermo’s medical skill, Rafael’s performance, Sole’s observations, and the routines of Stauffer’s office—while its credibility also rests on the complicity of officials, clerics, and institutions that supply papers and protection.

The infiltration’s decisive product is not a dramatic exposure in the scenes described here, but a portable written record. A parish certificate helps manufacture Manuel’s next identity; a locker opened with a remembered wire trick shelters the notebook that documents the network. The two forms of paper mirror each other: one enables a fugitive’s passage, while the other is meant to make that passage legible to those trying to prove how the system works. By the time Manuel has become Adrián to Galileo 14, José to the porters, and a secretary’s useful helper to the office, the imposture has become the mechanism through which the escape network can be observed from within.