Hitler's Reich spawned a welter of organizations that conducted espionage and counterespionage. As was often the case in the Nazi bureaucracy, these secret services rarely cooperated with one another and frequently worked at cross-purposes. The leaders of these clandestine organizations were complex, ambitious men who vied for power, scarcely hesitating to discredit a rival in the Machiavellian struggle for supremacy in the German shadow world.