On the day after we met I received a long letter — densely typed and with many hand-written insertions and underlinings. "Thank you for your hospitality. Your house is very pleasant (to my taste) and the salad was very good indeed....On my way home and this morning I feel that I missed a few important points in our conversation." She had not sufficiently emphasised, she wrote, the urgent need for co-operation, not just by top politicians but by everyone: "All our attitudes, ideas, comparisons (political and historical, plus propaganda) are OBSOLETE...Kremlin is not the centre of the world: the human soul is...what I have learnt...in the last 17 years is that we must all now turn to LOVE and reject all and everybody who is still calling us to HATRED...PLEASE do not think that I had some personal bad experiences in USA and THEREFORE I talk now about how they are both alike...I had, and I will have my bad experiences everywhere — this is my lot and luckily I do know that...I think I missed all this yesterday...in talking I am rather monotonous and do not like overstatements...of course it is all different from [what I say in] my book; but so it ought to be! NO ONE in the world should remain where he stood 17 years ago! That would be lunacy indeed."

She wrote me several more long letters before the publication of the interview. One of them continued for seven tightly spaced typed pages (with a handwritten postscript: "Enough now, or I'm going to have a heart attack"). In all of them she is very anxious to explain how, having arrived in the West "blind with admiration for the FREE WORLD", she had come to believe that the US and the USSR were morally equivalent. She had been convinced that "in the FREE WORLD people are superhuman, wise, enlightened...What a terrible blow it is to find out that...there are just the same idiots, incompetent fools, frightened bureaucrats, confused bosses, paranoid fears of deception and surveillance...this loss of idealism is what happens to defectors only too often. BECAUSE we all relied too much on propaganda."  

She rails against many things: the CIA and the State Department who treated her as a "personal, even much-liked, pet"; the law firm into whose hands she was placed and who were deputed to "control her every step"; the publisher of her two (excellent) books who exploited her "celeb" [sic] status, selling serialisation rights without consulting her and appointing an "outrageously poor" translator whose work later had to be revised; the Sovietologists who idiotically thought that her father had shared his innermost thoughts with her and were greatly disappointed that she couldn't pass on any secret revelations; the Kremlinologist Louis Fischer who, she alleges, read her second book (Only One Year) in manuscript form and "took the most interesting piece from it and placed it in his own book, The Road to Yalta [which came out before hers], NOT even mentioning the source". 

She had agreed to everything and signed every document put before her "harmless as a dove", not realising that she was moving "from one cage to another". When she finally complained some years later "to my Grand Patron, George F. Kennan, former Ambassador to the USSR etc etc", about having no rights whatsoever over her own work, "he told me in a mood of tired annoyance: ‘You should not dwell on the past'. I was NOT supposed ever to complain." Whenever she did, people would say "She has been through a great deal. She is confused." It is, she says, exactly what the USSR told the world when she defected in 1967.