FBI releases Stalin's daughter post-defection files

MADISON, Wisconsin (AP) - Newly declassified documents show the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) kept close tabs on Soviet dictator Josef Stalin's only daughter after her high-profile defection to the United States (US) in 1967, gathering details from informants about how her arrival was affecting international relations.

The documents were released on Monday to The Associated Press (AP) under the Freedom of Information Act following Ms Lana Peters' death last year at age 85 in a Wisconsin nursing home. Her defection during the Cold War embarrassed the ruling communists and made her a best-selling author. Her move was also a public relations coup for the US.

When she defected, Ms Peters was known as Ms Svetlana Alliluyeva, but she went by Lana Peters following her 1970 marriage to Mr William Wesley Peters, an apprentice of Frank Lloyd Wright. Peters said her defection was partly motivated by the Soviet authorities' poor treatment of her late husband, Mr Brijesh Singh, a prominent figure in the Indian Communist Party.

Mr George Kennan, a key figure in the Cold War and a former US ambassador to the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, advised the FBI that he and Ms Alliluyeva were concerned Soviet agents would try to contact her, a December 1967 memo reveals. The memo notes that no security arrangements were made for Ms Peters, and no other documents in the file indicate that the KGB ever tracked her down.