In 1947, the US Immigration authorities deported Tsafendas to Greece, which was in the throes of a civil war. Joining the Democratic Army, the military wing of the Greek Communist Party, Tsafendas fought with them against the royalists. Shortly before the war ended in defeat for the Communists, Tsafendas made his way to Portugal. Upon his arrival to the country, he was arrested and interrogated by the police about his political activities in Mozambique in 1938. He was imprisoned for nine months in the two most notorious Portuguese prisons for political offenders, the Barca d’Alva and the Aljuba Prison. In October 1951, Tsafendas travelled by sea to Lourenço Marques, but was refused entry because of his past political activities and for being a known Communist, and was deported back to Portugal. Banned from entering South Africa, where his family had gone to live in the late 1930s, and Mozambique, Tsafendas was forced to spend the next 12 years of his life in exile. Over these years he would apply at least once a year for permission to enter Mozambique or South Africa, but all his applications were refused because of his Communist status and his political activities in Mozambique in the 1930s. Constantly harassed in Portugal by PIDE and the Portuguese police, Tsafendas roamed across Europe and the Middle East, working and visiting places which interested him. Sometimes, when he was down and out, he would claim to be mentally ill so as to secure food and shelter. During his wanderings, he picked up 8 languages. While in Turkey in 1961, he worked for some six months as a teacher of English at the Limasollu Naci College, a prestigious private language institute in Istanbul, and upon eventually securing his return to South Africa, he worked for a time as a translator at Durban Court. In 1962, during a visit to Crete to see his father's and ancestors' birthplace, he met Greek partisans from the Second World War who had participated in the kidnapping of the Nazi General Heinrich Kreipe and they trained him in bomb-making.