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Just before heading back to Britain, Jones secured an interview with Maxim Litvinov, Foreign Commissar of the Soviet Union, who agreed to the meeting because of Jones’ ties to Lloyd George, Britain's former prime minister.  Litvinov greatly admired the prime minister for what he explained to Jones was the man's "boldness." In the interview, Jones acted not as a journalist but as a representative of Lloyd George. In fact, he didn't publish any of the conversation, preserving his notes only in a confidential letter he mailed to Lloyd George from Berlin. In secret, Litvonov told Jones that the Ambassador Ovey's tough talk was actually making the situation worse for the engineers who'd been arrested. Ovey had been "too tactless and too bullying," Litvinov told Jones. "He is seeking a quarrel and the breaking off of diplomatic relations. … The greater the pressure the less chance there is of my helping because we can't give way to pressure." Litvinov told Jones that the engineers would not be shot and that there would be a trial.

The arrest of the engineers wasn't the only territory Jones covered in the interview. Jones the journalist weaved his way into the conversation, following up easy questions with hard ones. For example, after querying about additional freedoms being granted to Soviet playwrights, Jones abruptly asked, "Would you describe famine in the villages?" After first denying the famine, Litvinov elaborated. "You must take a longer view," he told Jones. "The present hunger is temporary. … It would be difficult to describe it as hunger."

After the interview, Jones walked the streets of Moscow. Looking across the Moscow River at the golden domes rising above the red brick fortress around the Kremlin, Jones was filled with anger, not only about the famine but about the arrests, as well. "Within that citadel, the Kremlin, lives Stalin. There the whole policy has been framed which has changed the life of every man, woman and child in Russia over the last five years," he later recounted in a newspaper piece.  The engineers were arrested, he later wrote, to divert the world's attention from the disaster in the countryside.

Later that night, Jones boarded a train for Germany, never to return to Moscow. The news he carried, of the starvation in the countryside, was too urgent to wait for his return to Britain. As soon as he arrived in Berlin, he described in detail what he saw to H.R. Knickerbocker, a Pulitzer-prize winning correspondent for the New York Evening Post. Knickerbocker wrote a piece similar to the articles Jones soon would pen himself. A day later, Jones arrived in London, safe from his travels and ready to write.

He had done what few correspondents could even have imagined accomplishing. He'd gone to Moscow, taken a secret trip into the countryside where he was one of few Westerners to witness the horrors of the famine. When he returned to Moscow, he'd done what Eugene Lyons failed to do in 1930 when he interviewed Stalin. Jones had pushed a Soviet official to discuss the human costs for the fast pace of industrialization. Although he stuck to his word and didn't write about his interview with Litvinov, the conversation informed his convictions. Litvinov's opinion – that a view of the starving masses required a longer view in terms of progress – did nothing other than convince him that it was essential to expose the suffering. In the month after his return, he published at least twenty stories about his findings. None, however, appeared in The London Times, where Jones had long hoped to work, perhaps because the story of the arrested engineers dominated the Britain press.   Still, convinced he wanted to work as a journalist, he finally did what the news veteran at the Times suggested years earlier. He started work at a paper in Wales, The Western Mail, in Cardiff. Little did he know that his toughest battles were still ahead.

 Jones wasn't ready for the reaction to his pieces. He wasn't the first to write about what he saw in Russia outside of Moscow. Barnes' pieces, as well as three unsigned articles in the Manchester Guardian by Malcolm Muggeridge, who for a short time freelanced from the USSR, depicted very similar scenes. But Jones' work, probably because of its graphic and descriptive nature, was now causing a stir. Kremlin officials were scrambling to discredit his claims. Meanwhile, editors in America and Britain were curious why their correspondents didn't chase a story that Jones, in their eyes an inexperienced freelancer, seemed to have gotten so quickly and easily. The correspondents, under pressure from home to make up for or at least justify their lack of famine coverage, and the Soviets, desperate to blur the truth, formed a convenient alliance.

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