Lessons for the NSA and CIA from the NKVD: Intelligence Not.

I have a story for you -- I'm reading the Mitrohkin Archives, which is a detailed history of the KGB. One of the stories:

After the Nazis invaded Russia, they took the port city of Odessa. The Odessa NKVD (pre-KGB) detachment retired to a maze of tunnels underneath the city. The city of Odessa was built over centuries with sandstone mined from these tunnels; there are thousands of kilometers of these tunnels, all interconnecting and unmapped, perfect for sabotage warfare.

Moscow assumed that the Odessa NKVD had been liquidated, so they sent a Moscow team out, who slipped into the area and down into the tunnels without being detected by the Nazis. The official KGB history says that the two groups fought the Nazis for several years before being hunted down to the last man. They all got posthumous Hero of the Soviet Socialist Republic medals.

The truth is in the archives, though. The two groups met, and had a big dinner where they all got drunk. A dispute broke out between the two leaders; the two groups polarized, and began hunting each other down in the maze of tunnels. After a year of conflict, during which the Nazis ruled Odessa without a moment's irritation, the Odessa NKVD leader managed to finally assassinate the Moscow NKVD leader. The Odessa group then mercilessly exterminated their fellows, down to the last Muscovite.

One of the Odessa contingent then assassinated the Odessa leader. Slowly, the group killed each other off down in the tunnels, until there were only two left. One night, as one of the two survivors was doing paperwork in the command cave, the other crept up behind and stabbed him in the brain. This last killer then donned civilian clothing, moved into a dacha in Odessa, married, and waited for the Nazis to leave.

When the Nazis left, this last survivor went down into the tunnels to clean up incriminating evidence. While he was there, he picked up a hand grenade that had been left on the floor of one of the tunnels -- it went off in his hand, killing him.

All of these men were the NKVD survivors of the 'Red Terror', the purge of all disagreeable elements from the military and security forces of the USSR by Stalin.

Wait -- didn't this just happen to us?