Moscow Takes a Hostage

It was the waking nightmare that haunts every American reporter in Moscow. Nicholas Daniloff, 52, a respected correspondent for U.S. News & World Report, had been receiving persistent phone invitations to meet with a Soviet acquaintance named Misha. Daniloff, who was busy packing to leave Moscow after a 5 1/2-year stint, kept putting Misha off. Finally they arranged to meet in a park in the Lenin Hills near Daniloff’s apartment. As they walked, Misha edgily pressed into Daniloff’s hands an envelope he said contained newspaper clippings. Daniloff gave Misha a goodbye gift: two books of horror stories by Stephen King. That was when Daniloff’s own horror tale began.

As Misha was hurrying off, eight KGB agents surrounded Daniloff, grabbed the package he had been given and hauled him away in handcuffs. They drove him to Lefortovo, Moscow’s infamous maximum-security prison, where they opened the envelope and announced that it contained photographs and maps marked TOP SECRET. After an interrogation in which the KGB agents demanded to know whom he was “really” working for, Daniloff was stripped of his belt and shoelaces and placed in an 8-ft. by 10-ft. “isolator” cell. Though American reporters in Moscow have been harassed, arrested and expelled in the past, not since Joseph Stalin’s time has a correspondent spent a night in a Soviet prison.*

The ruse was such a ham-handed throwback, so lacking in the artful subtlety that the new Kremlin leadership is supposed to prize so highly, that analysts were stunned. One week earlier the FBI in New York City had arrested Gennadi Zakharov, a Soviet citizen employed at the U.N., after he had bought an envelope filled with U.S. military secrets. Since Zakharov did not have diplomatic immunity, a federal judge ordered him held without bail. The subsequent arrest and jailing of Daniloff offered the Soviets both a bargaining chip and a choreographed symmetry. Or at least so it seemed to them until the sloppy pawn-for-pawn gambit escalated.

The problem with the pretense of symmetry was that to most Americans, the pretense so obviously overwhelmed any symmetry. Zakharov, after all, was almost assuredly a spy, nabbed as he took delivery of material that he had specifically requested. Daniloff, according to all reliable reports, was most assuredly not. Declared U.S. News Chairman Mortimer Zuckerman, who immediately flew to Moscow: “Daniloff is no more a spy than Gidget.” Added Daniloff’s angry wife Ruth, after visiting him in prison: “The whole thing is an outrage and a complete and absolute frame-up. Nick is, basically, a hostage.”

The ticklish drama could hardly have come at a more sensitive time for Soviet-American relations. Even as the controversy unfolded, Soviet officials were in Washington for talks that could pave the way for a second summit meeting between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev later this year. Those discussions went ahead as scheduled, and plans are still under way for a meeting in Washington next week between Secretary of State George Shultz and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze. But U.S. officials hinted last week that the Daniloff affair, if not resolved, could endanger the possibility of a summit.

The arrest of Zakharov had been the climax of three years of surveillance by the FBI. The Government charged that as its operatives watched, Zakharov went to a Queens subway station to meet a man he thought was a trusted accomplice. In return for $1,000 in cash, the Soviet was handed an envelope containing classified documents on U.S. Air Force jet engines. When FBI agents moved in, he tried to flee and then fought but was wrestled to the platform and snapped into handcuffs. His contact was a student from Guyana whom the Soviet spy had carefully cultivated for three years, shepherding him through school and then into a job with a defense subcontractor. What Zakharov did not know was that the whole time the Guyanese student, identified in court documents only as “C.S.,” was working for the FBI.

The KGB, miffed that it was unable to get Zakharov out of jail through regular channels and afraid he would break under FBI and CIA interrogation, needed something to bargain with — and Daniloff was apparently it. A naturalized American citizen, born in France of Russian parents — his father was a czarist general who fled Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution — and reared in New Hampshire, Daniloff is fluent in Russian and French as well as English. A former U.P.I. correspondent in Moscow in the 1960s, he had returned for U.S. News in 1981 and was about to take a year’s leave of absence when he was arrested. He planned to research a book on his great-great-grandfather, Alexander Frolov, who was sentenced to 30 years in a Siberian prison for taking part in the Decembrist rebellion of 1825 in which officers and soldiers tried to overthrow Czar Nicholas I.

Daniloff’s intense interest in the land of his ancestors did him no good with the Soviet government, which vilifies journalists with emigre origins as particularly anti-Soviet. In fact, Daniloff had been targeted for a frame-up once before. In 1984 a Jewish friend was asked by the KGB to pass him incriminating material, and had his visa to Israel taken away when he turned them down.

Daniloff was careful about his Soviet contacts, often refusing to meet with people he did not know who claimed to be dissidents. Clearly he was not careful enough in the case of Misha, a 27-year-old teacher whom Daniloff met in Frunze, capital of the central Asian republic of Kirghizia. Misha lured Daniloff to the Lenin Hills with the promise that he would give him a packet of newspapers from Frunze. Hours after Daniloff left for the meeting, his concerned wife got a call from a man who refused to identify himself. He said Daniloff would be home late. “I was very, very shaken by the call,” she said. Four and a half hours later Daniloff called, calmly relating that he was in the hands of the KGB.

Neither the Zakharov nor the Daniloff arrest seemed to make sense in terms of delicate summit planning, but in the arcane world of East-West spying the events had their own logic. Both sides say they acted because the other side broke unwritten rules of espionage. Zakharov was an irritant to U.S. counterintelligence agents because current spying etiquette decrees that operatives who are not accredited as diplomats can perform “spotting” and “assessment” functions for the spy masters but only those with diplomatic status can handle informants. “We couldn’t let the KGB get away with this,” said an intelligence official. The timing of the collar was not a mistake by overeager agents. Said FBI Assistant Director William Baker: “The final decision on an arrest was fully cleared in interagency channels right up to the top.”

The Soviets countered, according to intelligence sources, that the U.S. broke the rules by setting its trap for a nondiplomat like Zakharov, and then by putting him in jail. Normally agents who are arrested are expelled or released to the Soviet Ambassador. “The Soviets don’t like to have their spies put in jail,” says former CIA Director Stansfield Turner. “Things won’t get quiet until he’s out.”

Moreover, some analysts say, the Soviets wanted to display their displeasure with what they feel is recalcitrance by the Reagan Administration on arms control and other issues. They also wanted to punish and intimidate the Western press in Moscow, which they feel has not taken their peace initiatives seriously enough. The arrest of Daniloff, says Washington Kremlinologist Dimitri Simes, was a “considered judgment and decison by an irritated Soviet leadership.” Whether Gorbachev fully concurred is a much debated question. He, Foreign Policy Adviser Anatoli Dobrynin and Shevardnadze were all on vacation at the time, raising the possibility that the KGB staged the Lenin Hills charade without consulting the top political leadership. Most U.S. analysts were incredulous that such an important arrest could have been made without Gorbachev’s knowledge. Says former CIA Director William Colby: “The most interesting thing about this is how it shows the power of the KGB. You have Gorbachev angling for a summit, and the KGB fakes this deal.” A clear sign that the Soviets had misgivings after the event was the sparse coverage of the Daniloff arrest in the Soviet press. Pravda, the Communist Party daily, never mentioned it. Also, the authorities were unusually accommodating toward Daniloff’s family and colleagues. Ruth Daniloff was allowed to visit her husband twice within a few days, though family visits are generally limited to one a month. Zuckerman, who was able to travel to Moscow without the usual delays in obtaining a visa, said his correspondent was being treated well but conditions at Lefortovo were harsh. “He was thrilled when I walked in,” said Zuckerman. “He literally fell into my arms and was close to tears.”

Negotiations to obtain Daniloff’s release were hampered from the beginning by indecision from the summer White House on the West Coast. Early in the week, with President Reagan up in the hills at his ranch, White House Spokesman Larry Speakes told reporters in Santa Barbara, Calif., that any official who claimed that no swap or deal would be considered was “a fool.” In Washington, State Department Spokesman Charles Redman said that while the department was “very concerned” over Daniloff’s fate, the scheduled U.S.-Soviet meetings would go ahead as planned. After indicating a readiness to negotiate, the U.S. quickly came up with a plan under which Daniloff and Zakharov would be released into the custody of their respective ambassadors. The face-saving deal, as outlined by U.S. officials, would have Daniloff expelled from the Soviet Union without any charges being brought. Zakharov would face trial, but the understanding would be that if he were convicted, he would be part of a future swap for a dissident or Western spy.

The proposed arrangement closely resembled a similar one in 1978, when two other Soviet U.N. employees without diplomatic immunity were caught in an espionage operation and held for trial. A month later, after U.S. Businessman Jay Crawford was arrested in the Soviet Union on smuggling charges, the two Soviets were released into the custody of the Soviet Ambassador. Crawford was released from jail and later convicted and deported. The two Soviets, convicted and sentenced to long prison terms, served less than a year before being freed in exchange for five Soviet dissidents.

The question of a swap provoked sharp dispute within the Administration. While the State Department initially was all for it, a Justice Department spokesman announced that his agency would not go along with any deal that involved dropping charges against Zakharov. “There will be no disposition of this case in an atmosphere of coercion and intimidation,” said he. Growled a National Security Council official: “There were two crimes committed — by Zakharov and by the KGB in arresting Daniloff — and these can’t be righted by a dumb-headed deal.” One White House aide explained, “Basically, State doesn’t see why one Soviet spy should be allowed to derail all the progress we’re painfully making toward a summit. (FBI Director William) Webster and (Attorney General Edwin) Meese went into orbit when news of a deal was floated. They had a lot of work invested in Zakharov.”

The idea of making a deal stirred wide public criticism on the ground that it would amount to craven capitulation to hostage taking and blackmail. Wrote John Hughes of the Christian Science Monitor: “If the Soviets can seize a United States citizen for trade every time one of their spies is caught in the U.S., the dialogue to produce trust in the handling of, say, nuclear weapons cannot proceed very far.” Saying that “even Mr. Carter would have responded with more backbone,” New York Times Columnist William Safire wrote: “At issue is the degree of our willingness to tolerate Mr. Gorbachev’s contempt for the freedom of one American, which means all Americans.” Daniloff himself sent word through Zuckerman that he wanted no part of a swap that implied he was a spy.

By week’s end the Administration’s public position perceptibly hardened. Speakes reversed himself, now suggesting that a swap might not be worth considering after all. So did the State Department, but only after its boss spoke up. “Let there be no talk of a trade for Daniloff,” Secretary of State Shultz declared in his speech during Harvard’s 350th-anniversary celebrations on Friday. “We, and Nick himself, have ruled that out.” Calling the arrest of the magazine correspondent an “outrage,” Shultz said it “showed the dark – side of a society prepared to resort to hostage taking as an instrument of policy.”

Yet officials tried to mute the matter, hoping that a cooling of rhetoric would allow a quiet solution. “The object is to save face for everyone,” said a White House spokesman. “We’re trying to find a way through the maze.” Despite reports that the Administration was ready to retaliate, President Reagan postponed making a public statement on the issue until at least Monday. Instead, Reagan sent a private letter to Gorbachev in which, according to a spokesman, he “gently but firmly” asserted Daniloff’s innocence and demanded his release. Word was passed to the Soviets that they should resubmit their request to the judge in the Zakharov case to have the accused spy transferred to the custody of the Soviet Ambassador.

Although the Soviets were taking their time in responding to the diplomatic feelers, there was a perception that the case could be resolved by this week — if both sides felt that progress on arms control and a potential summit was worth it.

FOOTNOTE: *The last to be so treated was Anna Louise Strong, a freelance writer who was accused of espionage in 1949 and held five days before being expelled.