 In his autobiographical accounts, Louis claimed that the report was based solely on his analysis of circumstantial evidence such as the disappearance of a big portrait of Khrushchev in the centre of Moscow and Khrushchev's name being expunged from Soviet media news reports, even though he admitted that the initial hint had been given to him by his "friend" who worked at the USSR Broadcasting Committee ().According to his own account, Louis had a series of personal meetings with the KGB chairman Yuri Andropov from the late 1960s till the mid-1970s.Louis claimed that Andropov personally gave him the go-ahead when, having overheard Andropov's telephone conversation with Leonid Brezhnev, he volunteered to go to Chile in the wake of the military junta's in the autumn of 1973 to ascertain that Luis Corvalán, the general secretary of the Communist Party of Chile, was alive.