Back From the Cold War : Reporter Nick Daniloff Says His KGB Arrest Probably Wouldn’t Happen Under <i> Glasnost</i>

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. —  So, Nicholas Daniloff, were you a spy?

It is the question his publisher concedes most people want to ask the former Moscow correspondent for U.S. News & World Report; the question Daniloff said he has confronted “1,001 times” in the two years since his release from Soviet detention.

“No,” Daniloff said.

No, and no, and no and no.

“It simply ain’t so,” he said, lapsing into a use of the colloquial so rare as to seem uncomfortable in a man ordinarily so stiff and reserved. Daniloff is 52, slender and gray-haired, prone to reading 20th-Century Russian novels, in Russian, for recreation. He is protected at all times in his apartment here by Zeus, a lap-sized terrier whose ferocious bark would suggest no one has informed him he weighs less than a good-sized bunch of bananas.

Daniloff’s life might have been very different if, as he had planned, he had taken Zeus for a walk in the park on Aug. 30, 1986. Instead, he went alone to his meeting with Misha, a longtime source. Daniloff was preparing to leave the Soviet Union and had brought Misha, a man Daniloff said exuded “boyish naivete,” the seven Stephen King novels he had asked for. Misha brought Daniloff an envelope containing, he said, articles from regional newspapers and photographs he said might be useful to Daniloff.

Forced Into a Van

Five minutes after leaving Misha, Daniloff was overpowered by four men and forced into a van. It took him but a moment to realize he had been arrested by the KGB.

“What happened was that the KGB was baiting a trap for the CIA station, and I walked into it,” Daniloff said.

In the United States, Daniloff’s 13-day confinement in Moscow’s Lefortovo prison made front-page after front-page. Coming on the heels of the arrest outside a New York subway station of Gennady F. Zakharov, a Soviet physicist and United Nations employee charged with spying, the apparent retaliatory incarceration of Daniloff cast a pall over plans for the impending U.S.-Soviet summit talks in Iceland.

“An outrage” was how President Reagan, Secretary of State George Schulz and Mort Zuckerman, Daniloff’s boss at U.S. News & World Report, each characterized the Soviet action.

Daniloff said the situation became clear to him almost immediately upon his arrest. “Once Zakharov had been arrested, they were going to take a hostage,” he said.

Lacking diplomatic immunity, Daniloff was subject to Soviet law. In what has been termed the toughest action taken against a U.S. journalist since the Stalin era, he was treated accordingly. He was formally charged with spying, a crime that in the Soviet Union can carry the death penalty.

“It wasn’t exactly a pleasant experience, and I wouldn’t recommend it, not even in jest,” Daniloff said on the eve of his nationwide tour for the book in which he chronicles his experience, “Two Lives, One Russia,” (Houghton Mifflin; published, not coincidentally, on the second anniversary of Daniloff’s imprisonment).

Each night he was relieved of his eyeglasses. His wristwatch and shoelaces were taken. A light bulb burned constantly in his 8-by-10 foot cell. His cellmate remained a cipher; to this day Daniloff is unsure whether “Stas” was a legitimate prisoner, a KGB plant--or both.

Daniloff was not permitted to wear his belt and lost so much weight on the prison diet that soon his pants were “falling off.” As he writes in some detail in his book, he felt particularly stripped of dignity when forced to perform body functions in full view of others.

‘Designed to Humiliate You’

“It was a set of circumstances designed to humiliate you and to make you feel totally in the power of your inquisitor,” Daniloff said.

“In the Soviet Union,” he added, “duress has traditionally been a very accepted method of dealing with people.”

Though not abused in a physical sense, “I would describe it as mild torture,” Daniloff said, of the nearly two-week term before he was released to the custody of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow.

“What happens to you mentally is also torture,” he said, his voice grim.

By Sept. 29, one month after what he still describes as his kidnaping, Daniloff was released from house arrest and flown to West Germany. The same deal also freed Zakharov in the United States.

In the bright light of glasnost, Mikhail Gorbachev’s avowed policy of openness, the Daniloff story now sounds like the outline for a spy thriller--the kind of book Daniloff’s wife Ruth is working on now.

It’s hard to speculate on whether the same set of circumstances might transpire today, but, Daniloff said, “I can tell you that one Soviet official has passed on the word and it has finally reached me that if this incident had occurred two months later, the whole ‘matter with Daniloff’ would have been very different.”

But even in the spirit of glasnost, “it could happen again,” he said, “because in the Soviet Union, the police and the courts can be manipulated by the executive power.”

But would it happen?

“Here I can say that the amount of publicity that the Soviet Union got in my case was enormous, and not good,” Daniloff said. “So I would say, they wouldn’t take a journalist” as a hostage.

The notion of glasnost as introduced by Gorbachev, Daniloff said, “is a radical policy which is an incredible departure from what had gone before. You’re now getting stories reported in the Soviet press that you would never have gotten before, and there has been a significant lessening of censorship.”

‘They Do Become Extreme’

The seemingly sudden expansion of this openness comes as little surprise, Daniloff said.

“That is fairly typical of the Soviets,” he said. “They do become very extreme.”

Easing the restrictions on reporting in the Soviet Union has proved a mixed blessing for journalists, Daniloff said.

“In one sense, it’s harder because there’s so much more to do,” he said. “But it’s easier because you have much better access.”

For Daniloff, the bleakness and uncertainty that accompanied his detention have brought new empathy for the plight of political hostages elsewhere in the world. He said he speaks out regularly on behalf of Terry Anderson, the chief Middle East correspondent for Associated Press who was taken hostage in Lebanon more than three years ago in March 1985, and is in frequent contact with Anderson’s sister, Peggy Say.

“This sort of problem goes with the territory,” Daniloff said. “You don’t think about it all the time,” he said of the dangers of working and living in a totalitarian regime, “but I can remember thinking, ‘What would happen if I ever were to be arrested?’ ”

A Constant, Quiet Worry

It is a constant worry, albeit a quiet one, Daniloff said, “a thought that is occupying space somewhere in the back of your brain.”

Daniloff’s brain was already fairly crowded during his stay in the Soviet Union. He extended his tour of duty twice, as much out of personal curiosity as professional allegiance. He was determined to unravel the story of his great-great-grandfather, Alexander Frolov, a member of a group of anti-czarist revolutionaries known as the Decembrists in 19th-Century Russia.

Forged of Iron

His main link was a ring, forged of iron but lined with gold, passed on to him by his father. While living in Moscow, Daniloff had the ring authenticated and was eventually able to trace the grave of his great-great-grandfather. The “Two Lives” story weaves through Daniloff’s book, and a sketch of the ring graces its cover.

Daniloff said his soul soared the day he laid eyes on Frolov’s final resting site. Here was the connection he had searched a lifetime for. Later, while in prison, he felt a chilling resurgence of that feeling of kinship.

“Large and with a bump,” he read of his own nose in a listing of his physiognomy. It was exactly the description he had read in an historical text of his great-great-grandfather’s proboscis.

“I just about fell off my chair,” he said. “It was as if there were some kind of uncanny force working across the centuries.”

Eager to Write

Daniloff is eager to get on with more book writing; after all those years of undergoing editing as a news journalist, he was still stunned at the amount he had to leave out. Living both in Cambridge, where he is a fellow at the Kennedy School of Government’s Joan Shorenstein Barone Center on Press, Politics and Public Policy, and in Vermont, where he and his wife have built a house, Daniloff said he is also eager “to promote the study of Russian language and culture.”

His term in a Soviet prison is an experience he would neither like to repeat nor recommend to others, Daniloff said.

“But it doesn’t really change my views about the Soviet Union,” he said. “I guess I knew the Soviet Union too well. I knew that the Soviet Union had a powerful police apparatus and that they used it, and now I have experienced it first-hand.”