By his own admission, it was somewhat by chance that Orwell joined the POUM, rather than the far larger Comintern-run International Brigades. Orwell had been told that he would not be permitted to enter Spain without some supporting documents from a British left-wing organisation, and he had first sought the assistance of the British Communist Party and put his request directly to its leader, Harry Pollitt. Pollitt "seems to have taken an immediate dislike to him ... and soon concluded that his visitor was 'politically unreliable.'" Orwell then telephoned the headquarters of the ILP, and its officials agreed to help him. The party was willing to accredit him as a correspondent for the "New Leader", the ILP's weekly paper with which he was familiar, and thus provided the means for him to go legitimately to Spain. The ILP issued him a letter of introduction to their representative in Barcelona and was affiliated with the POUM. Orwell's experiences, culminating in his and his wife Eileen O'Shaughnessy's narrow escape from the communist purges in Barcelona in June 1937, greatly increased his sympathy for the POUM and, while not affecting his moral and political commitment to socialism, made him a lifelong anti-Stalinist.