Yet Orwell "had "felt" what socialism could be like" and, according to Bowker, unlike the writer John Dos Passos for example, "who also had a friend killed in custody by the SIM (Servicio de Investigación Militar/Spanish Secret Police) in Spain, and reacted by deserting the Communists and shifting decidedly to the right, Orwell never did abandon his socialism: if anything, his Spanish experience strengthened it." In a letter to Cyril Connolly, written on 8 June 1937, Orwell said, "At last I really believe in Socialism which I never did before". A decade later he wrote: "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, "against" totalitarianism and "for" democratic Socialism, as I understand it."