Whittaker Chambers had some experience of this practice in America. At the time he worked for Soviet intelligence, he did not know to what specific organization he belonged. Later he wrote: "The Washington apparatus to which I was assigned was only one wing of a larger apparatus ... There were no doubt other apparatuses of the GPU (OGPL) and and the Fourth Departments in Washington, of which I knew nothing ... A variety of self-contained underground apparatuses, ignorant of each other's existence, operate side by side for more or less the same purpose.

Thus the OGPU (NKVD after 1933) and the Fourth Department (GRU after the war), as we have seen, rarely worked in concert and more often worked apart, in fierce competition. They envied each other's successes and tried to surpass them. They tried to steal each other's stolen information (when they knew about it), to trip up each other's agents in the field (when they recognized them), to make the other look bad in the eyes of the Party (where they had a chance). More than that, they engaged in mutual purges. In 1935 a branch of the general staff, led bv Berzin, liquidated NKVD illegals in the Far East, then repeated the exercise the next year in Spain. Payback came the following year when the Red Army generals and their staffs, including intelligence men, fell in the purges carried out by the NKVD. Naturally each agency received its instructions to purge from the Party, which remained dominant, despite its own depletions in the purges, since the overall slaughter was being directed by the Party man at the top, running a rigged and terrorized Politburo.

The Communist campaign denouncing Krivitsky as an impostor succeeded in creating around him a suspect aura that partially explains the cautious manner in which some historians even many years later treated his evidence ... Krivitskv was, in fact, the first person to reveal the presence in Spain of General Yan K. Berzin, the principal Soviet military adviser; of Alexander Orlov, the chief NKVD (secret police) operative; of Artur Stashevsky, the adviser to Juan Negrin, the minister of finance; and to reveal the true name of General Emilio Kleber, the charismatic leader of the International Brigades... In the light of what is now known of the unchecked power of the NKVD and of Krivitskys extraordinary knowledge of the Soviet secret police, his disclosures ... have unassailable credibility today.

The Spanish Government possess all the possibilities for waging a victorious war: they have modern weapons, an excellent air force, tanks, a navy and great human resources. They hold a sizeable territory with a war industry base which is more than adequate for supporting such a "small" war (Hispano Suiza's plants and others). Adequate provision base and so on. The number of Government troops outnumbers the enemy considerably. But this whole machine and all these resources are corroded by:

1. Inter-party conflicts in which the energy of most people is devoted to winning authority and power in the country for their own party and discrediting others rather than to the struggle against Fascism.

2. The corrupt composition of the Government, part of which has got nothing in common with the Revolution and which reacts to events passively and whose only consideration is preparing a timely escape in the event of a collapse.

3. The Government's failure to appreciate the real danger of the situation as a result of anxieties and excessive panics. The true threat to the fortunes of the Republican Government of Spain is now perceived by them as a normal state of alarm.

4. Irresponsibility and sabotage by Government bodies and staff in supplying the army and directing its operations.

5. Failure to mobilize hundreds of thousands of healthy men living in cities (Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia and a number of others) for civil works and erecting fortifications.

6. The absence of an experienced Soviet staff with clear authority and the absence of a really prominent adviser on our part. Gorev (the Soviet military attache) has no military experience. In war affairs he is a child. Grishin (the alias of General Berzin, the former GRU chief) is a good Party member, but he's not an expert - and this is the pinnacle of our military command. With such a lack of leadership the abilities of a number of our specialists subordinated to them are brought to nought. (Only the air force and tanks and their heroic personnel are good, but they cannot stand in for an army.)

General Alexander Orlov's efforts to build up a secret police force under NKVD control to effect a Stalinization of Spain did not go unnoticed, or unchallenged, by ministers of the Republican administration. In his memoirs the Communist Education Minister, Jose Hernandez, bitterly and specifically attacked the NKVD chief for his sinister role in establishing and directing the SIM, the acronym for the feared Servicio de Investigacion Militar, which he believed was intended to become the mechanism for enforcing a totalitarian state in Spain. In March 1937 General Berzin had sent a confidential report to War Commissar Vorishilov reporting resentment and protests he had received about the NKVD's repressive operations from high Republican officials. It stated that the NKVD agents were compromising Soviet authority by their excessive interference and espionage in Government quarters. They were treating Spain like a colony. The ranking Red Army General concluded his report with a demand that Orlov be recalled from Spain at once.

"Berzin is absolutely right," Slutsky allegedly told another NKVD officer, Walter Krivitsky, who happened to be in Moscow when the General's report arrived. The head of the Foreign Department, he said, went on to assert that "our men were behaving in Spain as if they were in a colony, treating even Spanish leaders as colonists handle natives". When Krivitsky asked what action he was going to take, Slutsky told him it was "up to Yezhov", the NKVD chief.

When in exile in the postwar United States, Orlov repeatedly denounced the assertions ofhis former comrade Krivitsky as unfounded. He would vehemently deny any personal involvement in repressive secret police operations, nor would he concede that the NKVD in Spain was involved in the brutal suppression of anti-Communist opposition elements in, or outside of, the Republican Government. Orlov sought to portray himself in his books, to the Fst and before the Senate Committees, as a professional adviser to the Spanish Government on counter-intelligence and guerilla warfare. He charged that those who accused him of sinister activities on behalf of Stalin were motivated by Trotskyist sympathies and that he was the innocent victim of lying propaganda.