The United States Obtains Manuel’s Intelligence Report

The United States obtains Manuel Arroyo Benítez’s intelligence report after his covert investigation of Clara Stauffer’s escape network. The report turns suspicions about fugitives, forged Spanish papers, and an Argentine route into material that Meg Williams and Saul Burnstein hope can help expose the Franco regime’s protection of war criminals; its arrival, however, brings no immediate reckoning, only a promise that Rafael Cuesta must wait.

From suspicion to an investigation

In the summer of 1945, Clara Stauffer altered her house at Galileo 14: she converted rooms into an office, installed a telephone line, hired secretaries, and filled new wardrobes with men’s clothes and shoes in every size. The changing visitors gave the operation its human outline. Thin, exhausted men arrived at all hours; Sole Ruiz recognized them as fugitives, including men who had crossed the Pyrenees or been released from Nanclares. They received food and clothing, and their improved appearance suggested that the house offered practical help beyond a meal.

Sole also noticed what did not fit: the men did not speak Spanish, while a Spanish replacement soldier repeatedly delivered sealed envelopes bearing Madrid parish letterheads. When one envelope was left open, Sole found a German baptismal record dated 1907. These details made the operation legible as a system for supplying fugitives with documentation, not simply shelter. A secretary’s mention of Jean-Jules Lecomte gave the investigators a name to pursue.

Meg Williams established that Lecomte was a Nazi fanatic and a member of both the Rex Party and the SS. During the occupation he had served as burgomaster of his home city, Chimay. That identification helped persuade Burnstein, who had been investigating Nazi escape routes for months without finding evidence of a stable organization, that Stauffer’s network might be the proof he needed.

The case for an infiltrator

The political objective was larger than documenting individual fugitives. The investigators reasoned that proof the Franco regime sheltered people responsible for war crimes and the genocide of European Jews could force the Allies to break relations with Madrid and intensify international pressure. But Sole’s testimony alone could not establish the identities of Lecomte and Horst Fuldner, confirm the suspected role of Argentine associates, or demonstrate that Stauffer did more than provide clothing and food.

The Argentine route was the central lead. Manuel had heard rumors in Geneva but had doubted stories about Reich gold transported by submarines. His colleagues dismissed that version as implausible while treating South America as a credible destination for fugitives seeking to evade international tribunals. They suspected that Stauffer’s organization cooperated with the government of Juan Perón: Argentina was sending Spain grain and frozen meat despite the blockade, and the network appeared able to connect fugitives with Spanish birth records and state contacts. Suspicion was not proof. To turn the route into a case, they needed an infiltrator.

Manuel accepted the work by entering the network under successive assumed identities. At Galileo 14 he cultivated the office secretaries, bringing newspapers, sharing coffee, and volunteering for errands. When his holiday shift began on 15 June, he had become useful enough to function almost as another secretary. That access allowed him to observe the organization from inside and write down what he learned.

His intelligence work depended on ordinary objects and small opportunities. With the modest pocket money Ingrid Weiss gave him, he bought a small notebook, pencils, and a sharpener at a stationery shop on Calle Eloy Gonzalo. The secretaries sent him to the parish by the Glorieta de Iglesia to collect a baptismal certificate for José Pacheco Hernández, without telling him that it would help create his own papers. He had not yet written in the notebook when he moved to Calle del Pez; later, at his new workplace, a night porter showed him a wooden-lined meter room and a locker whose lock resembled those at the institute in León, where Manuel had learned to make a makeshift pick from wire. His investigation was built out of such mundane access: errands, office routines, a certificate, and a hidden place to record findings.

What the report might prove

The report’s potential significance extended beyond Stauffer’s assistance to fugitives. Manuel suspected that shipments Guillermo had agreed to supervise contained art looted from museums and Jewish owners in occupied territories, along with jewelry, antiques, and perhaps gold, silver, or foreign currency from the vanished Nazi treasury. He connected this possibility to Stauffer’s earlier attempt, on 18 July 1947, to introduce him to a friend called Bam. If the name ended in an m rather than an n, the visitor could have been Hans Lazar, the former German press attaché known to intimates as Bam.

Lazar’s possible connection suggested a wider chain between the escape operation and the missing contents of the German embassy in Madrid. When Allied representatives entered the embassy in June 1945, they found its rooms stripped of documents, money, gold, antiques, art, and even furniture. The Allies later suspected that Lazar had secretly moved the embassy’s treasures and an unseen archive to a hiding place. His suspected role in the shipments remained a hypothesis, but it widened the stakes of Manuel’s intelligence: the network might have served not only fugitives but also the movement or concealment of Nazi assets.

Delivery and uncertain consequences

On 16 February 1950, Meg met Rafael in a tavern on Cava de San Miguel and told him that she was returning to Washington the following week. The reason was the good news: Burnstein had received Manuel’s report, and it contained more than he had expected. Meg said her colleagues wanted her out of Spain before publication, both to protect her and because they believed the report could have grave consequences for Franco.

Rafael and Meg toasted the possibility, but neither could name a date for action. The report would first need congressional support and a campaign to bring Spain into the newspapers and public debate; even if those efforts succeeded, months could pass. Meg promised to return if the effort worked. The intelligence had crossed the distance from Manuel’s clandestine observations to Burnstein’s desk, but its political effect remained contingent on institutions, public attention, and time.

For Rafael, the handover also marked the end of a shared period of danger and companionship. As Meg’s taxi carried her away, he remembered the Café Lion terrace, the Gran Vía porter's lodge, and the quiet chess games restored to him by his closest friend. He had expected the completion of the work to feel like reaching a goal; instead, the prospect of waiting and the departure left him with a foreboding sense of loss. The report’s receipt thus closes the investigative phase without resolving its larger purpose: evidence is in hand, but the hoped-for consequences have yet to arrive.