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Rayle looked again at the demure, attractive woman with copper hair and pale blue eyes who stared back at him. She did not fit his image of Stalin’s daughter, though what that image was, he could not have said. She handed him her Soviet passport. At a quick glance, he saw the name: Citizeness Svetlana Iosifovna Alliluyeva. He went through the possibilities. She could be a Soviet plant; she could be a counter-agent; she could be crazy. But Iosifovna was the patronymic, meaning “daughter of Joseph.” George Huey asked, nonplussed: “So you say your father was Stalin? The Stalin?”

As the officer in charge of walk-ins from the Soviet bloc, Rayle was responsible for confirming her authenticity. After a brief interview, he excused himself and went to the embassy communications centre, where he cabled headquarters in Washington, demanding all files on Svetlana Iosifovna Alliluyeva. The answer came back one hour later: “No traces.” Headquarters knew nothing at all about her — there were no CIA files, no FBI files, no State Department files. The U.S. government didn’t even know Stalin had a daughter.

While he waited for a response from Washington, Rayle interrogated Svetlana. How had she come to be in India? She claimed that she had left the U.S.S.R. on Dec. 19 on a ceremonial mission. The Soviet government had given her special permission to travel to India to scatter the ashes of her “husband,” Brajesh Singh, on the river Ganges in his small village of Kalakankar, Uttar Pradesh — as Hindu tradition dictated. She added bitterly that because Singh was a foreigner, Alexei Kosygin, Chairman of the Council of Ministers, had personally refused her request to marry him, but after Singh’s death, she was permitted to carry his ashes to India. In the three months she’d spent here, she’d fallen in love with the country and wanted to stay on. Her request was denied. “The Kremlin considers me state property,” she said with disgust. She told Rayle that, under Soviet pressure, the Indian government had refused to extend her visa. She was fed up with being treated like a “national relic.” She looked firmly at Rayle and said that she had come to the American Embassy to ask the U.S. government for political asylum.