Human beings are gossips by nature. There has always been someone who listens behind doors, peeks behind the curtains or secretly pokes through the neighbor’s mailbox. If they also pay for that, honey over the top. Espionage can be a fun and better-paying profession, although, as the Mata-Hari of this world know well, it can also be very dangerous.
Under its façade of a placid Mediterranean city, Barcelona was once a true nest of spies. The writer Roser Messa is an expert on the subject. She wrote Espies de Barcelona (Comanegra, 2021), a book that covers the life and work of many of the confidants who swarmed the Catalan capital in the first third of the 20th century.
Now, Messa shows the places where these spies acted live in an itinerary organized by Libraries of Barcelona within the framework of the BCNegra that runs through Poble Sec and Raval. The tour starts at 17 Margarit Street, where Francesc Boix was born. He was the son of a tailor who was passionate about photography and since he was a child he learned from his father to take images and develop them.
During the Civil War he joined the forces of the Republic and when the conflict ended, he went into exile in Paris. The Nazis captured him in 1940 and interned him in Mauthausen. There Boix became a spy. He didn’t do it for money. He just wanted to make the world aware of the horror of the concentration camp.
Thanks to his knowledge, the young Boix was assigned to the Mauthausen photographic laboratory. Terrible images of torture and atrocities were circulating there. Boix managed to steal some negatives, take them out of the countryside and hide them in the houses of the town’s residents. At the end of World War II, he recovered them and published them in the magazine Regards. Boix’s photos and testimony served as evidence in the Nuremberg trials to condemn the Nazi leadership.
Next stop. The Pes de la Palla square, scene of violent clashes during the years of gunfights. Manuel Bravo Portillo led the sinister Black Band. He was also a spy for the Germans, who paid him a fixed salary. He ended up murdered and was replaced at the head of that bloody Black Gang by Baron de König, a false aristocrat known in casinos around the world, who spied for the French and managed to reveal the secrets of the Enigma cipher machine that the Nazis jealously guarded. But he later changed sides. The false baron was a spy from a novel.
Now we also spy, but in a much more prosaic way. The fault is new technologies. La Vanguardia journalist Gemma Saura is one of the people who knows the most about the matter because she has studied espionage in depth with Pegasus, an Israeli software that enters mobile phones and “leaves no trace.”
On Wednesday afternoon at the Jaume Fuster Library in Barcelona, ??BCNegra meets Saura with Roger Torrent, former president of the Parliament, whose phone was spied on with Pegasus. “My cell phone battery ran out very quickly, but beyond that I didn’t notice anything strange. Later, when I found out that I had been spied on, because it was certified by a Canadian laboratory, I couldn’t help but review everything I had said or done, which generated a certain paranoia in me,” Torrent explained.
The talk, moderated by the editor Pere Sureda, is joined by the police agent Miquel Àngel García Alvira, who reveals a lot of secrets about the very modern espionage tactics to conclude that “those who have something to hide have returned to the techniques of all life, carrier pigeons and invisible ink.” Mobile phones and computers are no longer safe, it is more practical to peek behind the curtain.
