How did the authorities know of Dvoracek's presence and that he'd be coming to Kolonka? According to Iva Militka, on the day she ran into her old friend and offered to put him up for the night, she had lunch with her friend Dlask. She told him of her strange encounter (he was already aware that Dvoracek and Juppa had fled the country) and asked that he not come and visit her that evening. Dlask, she says, then told Kundera about the spy's return.

The cause of the international furore, then, is the following piece of evidence, a local police report unearthed by Hradilek, a researcher at the Prague-based Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, who uncovered it as part of his investigation of the Dvoracek case: "Today at around 1600 hours a student, Milan Kundera, born 1.4.1929 in Brno, resident at the student hall of residence on George VI Avenue in Prague VII, presented himself at this department and reported that a student, Iva Militka, resident at that residence, had told a student by the name of Dlask, also of that residence, that she had met a certain acquaintance of hers, Miroslav Dvoracek, at Klarov in Prague the same day. The said Dvoracek apparently left one case in her care, saying he would come to fetch it in the afternoon...Dvoracek had apparently deserted from military service and since the spring of the previous year had possibly been in Germany, where he had gone illegally."

It deserves emphasis that Hradilek happened upon this document accidentally, and not - as has been intimated among some of Kundera's defenders - in the manner of a witch-hunter. Yet the personal cannot quite be divorced from the political. Hradilek is related to Militka, and he was contacted about her story by his cousin Matej because Hradilek had for years been collecting testimonies from ordinary Czechs about the communist era for the Post Bellum civic association. He assumed his present commission at the institute with "slight trepidation at the thought of the tragic destinies I would once again encounter". For decades, Militka has lived with the guilt of feeling responsible for Dvoracek's imprisonment. "I still feel guilty about talking about him," she told Hradilek. "I was too naïve. I went to Kostelec to see my parents and told them I had caused Miroslav's arrest. My father then paid a visit to his parents and told them. The feeling I had to live with afterwards was dreadful." Dvoracek, who has lived in Sweden since the mid-1970s, always believed that it was Militka who informed on him. Dvoracek would not be interviewed by Hradilek. He has since suffered a stroke.