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At the time of Jones' return to the West, the arrest of the engineers was filling column inches from London to New York. Mostly because of the pending trial, but in part because of Jones' news of the famine, people in high places in the West, including Britain's government and even in the U.S. Department of State, were questioning the Soviet experiment. The Kremlin, wrote Jones, was in a panic. But, as Jones' former boss Ivy Lee had learned, every crisis in public relations presents an opportunity. And the upcoming trial of the Brits gave the Soviets a chance to save themselves. It's unclear exactly how the message was conveyed. Lyons, the young United Press correspondent who'd interviewed Stalin, wrote in his memoir, "Assignment in Utopia," that the chief Soviet press officer called the correspondents to a meeting at a hotel to make a bargain.

Discredit Jones, the Soviet told the men, and they would be allowed to cover the trial of the engineers. Those who refused to do so would be barred from the courtroom. The deal gave the correspondents a chance to cover themselves for missing a story a far less experienced reporter had gotten. More importantly, the agreement would mean they wouldn't have to explain to their editors why they had been shutout of one of the world's highest profile trials. Failure to cover the trial, wrote Lyons, would have been career suicide. The correspondents, Lyons wrote, unanimously toasted the agreement with the press officer over vodka and appetizers. Lyons didn't name names in his memoir, and nearly forty years later, when historian James Crowl asked him in a letter about the incident, Lyons answered that he could remember little about the meeting other than what was written in the book. He told Crowl in a letter that the Soviet press officer merely hinted at what needed to be done.  

Regardless of how it happened, The New York Times' man in Moscow, Walter Duranty, denounced Jones' findings more forcefully than anyone else. Among those on the Stalin beat, it was often Duranty who stood out. He had a bald head, a wooden leg and a way with women. Dubbed the dean of the Moscow correspondents, Duranty was the Times' only regular reporter in Moscow from 1921 to 1934. He also was the center of a social circle including Western engineers, businessmen and most of the twelve or so British and American Moscow correspondents, many of whom ignored the story Jones was trying to tell. During most of his time in the Soviet Union, Duranty had a wife on the French Riviera and a young mistress in Moscow. One female admirer recalled that an "evening with him was like an evening with no one else."

He sometimes played as fast and loose with the facts as he did with women. Yet he was widely seen in the U.S. as an expert on the USSR. In fact, Franklin Delano Roosevelt privately sought advice from Duranty about granting diplomatic recognition to the nascent empire. Widely seen as a pundit of sorts, Duranty received little if any editing from his superiors. After all, if leaders such as FDR were taking Duranty's advice, who were the Times' editors to question the reporter?

In a prominent Times story, Duranty called Jones's articles nothing but "scare stories," based on "hasty and inadequate" investigations of the countryside. Duranty, who had not traveled where Jones had been, called the food shortage serious, but wrote that nobody was starving. "There is no actual starvation or deaths from starvation but there is widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition."

Lyons, in his memoir, called Duranty's words, "verbal finessing" and "philological sophistries." Duranty, however, justified the suffering about which he wrote. In Duranty's piece, he compared the deaths to casualties incurred in a crucial battle in a war. The deaths in both cases, Duranty wrote, were regrettable but necessary. He concluded chillingly, echoing a phrase he used earlier in his ode to Red Square, "You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs."

Duranty's article, headlined "Russians hungry but not starving," quickly reached Jones, who now was working full-time at the provincial paper in Wales. On May 13, 1933 – two months after he returned to Britain from Russia – the New York Times published Jones' letter to the editor in which he stood by his statements. Censorship, wrote Jones, had forced the regular correspondents into "masters of euphemism and understatement." Jones then went on to congratulate the Soviet Foreign Office for its "skill in concealing the true situation in the USSR." Moscow, he wrote, "is not Russia at all, and the sight of well-fed people there tends to hide the real Russia."

Despite Jones' efforts to preserve his integrity, the damage had been done. Once facts are called into question in a paper with the credibility of the New York Times, a reasonable doubt is raised, allowing readers to evade inconvenient truths. While even Duranty later reported suffering and death, no correspondent was ever given credit for definitively explaining the famine. By blurring the truth, the Soviets managed to disguise millions of deaths for generations. Later in 1933, as harvests came, and the Soviets backed off the amount of grain they took from the peasants, officials slowly opened up the countryside, granting Duranty access a few weeks sooner than any of the other reporters.

As summer gave way to fall, Duranty, with a driver, set off on a 300-mile auto tour. Conveniently, the Soviets approved Duranty's trip to coincide with a season of harvest.  In a piece he wrote datelined Rostov, in southwestern Russia, near Ukraine, and published on Sept. 14, 1933, Duranty described mile after mile of fields flush with wheat. In contrast to the glassy-eyes and distended bellies about which Jones wrote six months earlier, Duranty said he found "plump babies" and "fat calves" tended by healthy children. "Husky girls and women are hoisting wheat to the threshing machines," he wrote.

"A child can see that this is not famine, but abundance," Duranty wrote. Reports of suffering and starvation, he wrote, were nothing but exaggeration. In fact, Duranty concluded, the good peasants of the Soviet Union had suffered nothing but a "hardish" winter.

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