Ironically, Lyons himself had played a role in concealing the 1932–33 terror famine in Ukraine when he denounced British journalist Gareth Jones as a liar. Jones had written initial reports of the famine and published the first significant reports of the massive famine in the "Manchester Guardian," only to have the veracity of his reporting denounced by Lyons, Duranty, and others in the Moscow press corps. Lyons later self-critically recalled that "throwing down Jones was as unpleasant a chore as fell to any of us in years of juggling facts to please dictatorial regimes — but throw him down we did, unanimously and in almost identical formulas of equivocation. Poor Gareth Jones must have been the most surprised human being alive when the facts he so painstakingly garnered from our mouths were snowed under by our denials."