in 1949 with a large group of intellectuals and artists that included Alfonso López Michelsen, Ignacio Gómez Jaramillo and Baldomero Sanín Cano among others, the Colombo-Soviet Cultural Institute with the aim of improving friendship and cultural relations with the Soviet Socialist Republic. That same year on November 21 de Greiff was arrested along with Diego Montaña Cuéllar, Alejandro Vallejo, and Jorge Zalamea for “political reasons” that were never explained. De Greiff had been victim of the political and violent turmoil that had been engulfing the country known as La Violencia and his left-leaning tendencies and relations made him a target of the newly elected conservative Government. He was released on December 6; shortly after, he presented his letters of resignation to the Ministry, and steps down as Director of Cultural Promotion and Fine Arts and as Professor at the National University on March and May 1950 respectively. Feeling betrayed and persecuted by the government, he chooses to best serve the nation as a check on the government, this time as a tax auditor for the independent government agency of the Office of the Comptroller General of Colombia on June 1, 1950 until February 25, 1957. He would return to work at the Office of the Comptroller for a short time in 1959 from January 20 to May 25. Diplomat By 1959, de Greiff had grown in popularity and international recognition and had the opportunity to return to the land of his ancestors for the first time when he was invited to the Congress of Nations for Disarmament and International Cooperation held by the World Peace Council from the 16th to the 22nd of July in 1958 in Stockholm. De Greiff who had not been an open communist was nevertheless of leftist tendencies and fit right in with the crowd, and after the summit he traveled to, at the invitation of the respective governments, the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China, East Germany, Austria, the SFR Yugoslavia, and France. The trip lasted a total of 115 days and it would mark him politically and personally as a friend and ally of the communists. In 1958, upon his return to Colombia and after pressure from Juan Lozano y Lozano, President Alberto Lleras Camargo appointed de Greiff as First Secretary to the Colombian Embassy in Sweden, a post he held from June 16, 1959 to September 30, 1963. Lozano y Lozano had