Military Intelligence Service

The Military Intelligence Service is the Republican wartime intelligence apparatus through which the novel stages a crisis of sovereignty: the institution expected to protect the Republic may itself be compromised by Soviet direction, clandestine repression, and the factional struggles of the besieged government. For Manuel Arroyo Benítez, sent to investigate Madrid’s political underworld, the Service is not merely a source of intelligence but one of the central questions his mission must answer: who commands it, whose interests it serves, and whether it remains Spanish in any meaningful sense.

Institutional Context

The Service operates amid the fractures exposed by the Barcelona fighting of May 1937 and the disappearance of Andreu Nin. When Juan Negrín explains the assignment to Manuel, he describes a government intelligence environment beset by rivalries: Soviet advisers exert influence, Communists look the other way, Negrín’s fellow Socialists impede one another, and anarchists and Trotskyists continue their own revolution. The result is not a settled chain of command but a landscape in which political factions and security bodies overlap and compete.

The danger is not confined to open political conflict. Negrín tells Manuel that the Madrid Defense Council had closed the checas in the previous year, yet illegal detention centers continued to operate without oversight: when one was shut, another appeared. Against that background, the Service’s authority is inherently suspect. The state may claim to have ended abuses while coercive activity persists in new, unofficial forms, beyond the control of the bodies supposedly responsible for security.

The Mission to Investigate

Negrín asks Manuel to return to Madrid under a false identity and join the Public Order Department of the city’s Defense Council. The appointment as government representative to the Council provides cover, but the real assignment is to report on what is happening behind the official structures. Manuel is to find out how many uncontrolled brigades remain active, who is conducting a purge in the Republican rear on their own authority, how far the Service has ceased to be a Spanish intelligence agency and become an extension of the Soviet secret police, and whether Madrid could experience a crisis like Barcelona’s.

The work is explicitly presented as more dangerous than fighting at the front. Negrín warns Manuel that he is being asked to risk his life for the Republic, while urging him to flee at the first sign of danger. Manuel accepts the assignment, and on 1 July 1937 Rafael Cuesta Sánchez takes up an office in the Council’s Public Order Department. The distinction between the cover identity and the operative’s actual purpose mirrors the larger institutional uncertainty: official positions provide access, but the information that matters must be gathered beyond the assurances of office.

Contacts and Divided Loyalties

Manuel’s contacts reveal how difficult it is to distinguish cooperation from surveillance or infiltration. The police commissioner Basilio Rodríguez welcomes him and offers help without asking questions. Rodríguez is a Communist, having joined the party in November 1936 because he believed its members were the only people capable of restoring order. His presence connects the local police to the partisan politics surrounding the security apparatus, without establishing that he is himself an agent of Soviet control.

A second contact is Jesús Romero, a career military officer and Socialist Party member who serves as a liaison between General Rojo and the Military Intelligence Service. Negrín describes Romero as well regarded but refuses to guarantee his reliability. Manuel, for his part, distrusts the captain from their first meeting and suspects that he may work for the Fifth Column, though Romero never makes an identifiable misstep. His apparently cordial relations with Soviet military advisers do not settle Manuel’s doubts. The uncertainty is consequential: the mission depends on contacts within the very networks it is trying to assess, and appearances cannot reliably disclose allegiance.

Negrín insists that Manuel is free to act independently and that he alone is the mission’s chief. The assurance offers a clear personal line of authority even as the Service’s institutional loyalties remain in question. Manuel’s reports, sent to Valencia, help the government rule out a possible uprising in Madrid and apply pressure to party leaderships, the Ministry of the Interior, the Defense Council’s Public Order Department, and the Soviet delegation. The pressure works well enough to make it clear that someone in Madrid is working for Negrín. Intelligence thus becomes an instrument of political intervention as well as observation.

A Contested Instrument of Republican Authority

The Service’s significance lies in the gap between the Republican government’s need for Soviet military assistance and its distrust of Soviet influence over domestic security. Negrín argues that expelling Soviet advisers would mean giving up the only substantial outside aid available to the Republic—aircraft, tanks, and heavy weapons—and that breaking with the Soviet Union would risk handing Spain to Franco. Yet accepting Soviet assistance also makes it harder to establish that intelligence and coercion remain under Spanish control. The dilemma makes institutional independence inseparable from military survival.

The novel does not present the Service as a unified body with a single, transparent purpose. Its representative is a liaison whose loyalties Manuel doubts; its surrounding political environment includes illegal detention and factional retaliation; and its work is scrutinized by a government that needs its information while fearing what may be directing it. In the account of Jesús Romero, the Service is named as his destination, but the evidence does not describe its internal organization or establish a final resolution of the suspicions surrounding it. Its narrative force instead comes from that unresolved contest: intelligence is necessary to preserve the Republic, yet the machinery meant to secure it may have become another arena in which the Republic’s authority is at stake.