U.S. reporter’s arrest a set-up—wife

Press, 1 September 1986, Page 10

U.S. reporter’s arrest a set-up —wife

NZPA-Reuter Moscow An American journalist Nicholas Daniloff was seized by K.G.B. security police in Moscow on Saturday and his wife said it was in retaliation for the arrest of a Soviet United Nations employee on spy charges in New York.

Ruth Daniloff said that any suggestion her husband was spying was "totally preposterous.” “This was a typical set-up, a tit-for-tat sort of thing,” she said.

Daniloff, aged 52, in Moscow for the last 5y 2 years as correspondent for the weekly "U.S. News and World Report,” was detained about midday yesterday after meeting a Soviet friend, he told his wife in a call from a police station.

Her husband had said K.G.B. officers had told

him they found maps marked “top secret” in a packet the friend had given him, she said.

The detention of Daniloff, a respected veteran of the Moscow foreign press corps who also served in the Soviet capital in the early 19605, sparked an immediate protest from the United States Embassy to the Soviet Foreign Ministry. “We are protesting what is obviously a rather crude provocation,” an embassy spokesman said. Consular access had been requested to Daniloff, whose assignment was due to end this week, he said.

In Washington, a State Department spokesman said embassy personnel had been denied permission to see Daniloff and had been told he was

being detained for accepting classified materials.

“Based on the information we have, however, it is clear that the grounds on which he has been detained are contrived,” he said.

“We have thus lodged strong protests at high levels here and in Moscow in which we have rejected any suggestion that Daniloff may have been engaged in activities incompatible with his status as a journalist and have demanded his immediate release.” The Russian held in New York is Gennady Zakharov, a 39 year-old physicist working for the United Nations. He has been charged with espionage and denied bail after being seized by Federal Bureau of Investigation agents on a subway

platform. American officials said he had obtained classified documents about jet engine design from a student who was working for the F. 8.1. Zakharov had been under surveillance for three years. Mrs Daniloff, aged 51, said she was convinced her husband, a descendant of an anti-Isarist Russian revolutionary of the early nineteenth century, had been seized because of the Zakharov affair. “Like Zakharov, Nick does not have diplomatic immunity,” she said. “I think they will try to get into some kind of negotiations or swap.”

There was no immediate comment from Soviet officials on the Daniloffs’ detention and no word on whether he was being

formally charged. In the phone call, he had told his wife his interrogators kept asking him: "Who are you working for? Who are your masters?”

Mrs Daniloff said the friend her husband had gone out to meet was a 27-year-old teacher from Frunze, capital of the Soviet Central Asian republic of Kirghizia, whom he first met while on a trip there four years ago. "Since then, Nick had seen him five or six times. He certainly trusted him.” Her husband had not said whether the man had also been detained. Daniloff had told her he had given the friend paperback books by the American horror novel writer Stephen King as a farewell present. The man had given him a package he said contained cuttings

from Frunze newspapers.

“Nick said when he was walking away after they said goodbye he was grabbed by half a dozen men in plain clothes and taken to a police station. He said they were polite but insistent in their questioning." The affair was strongly reminiscent of the detention in 1977 of a “Los Angeles Times” correspondent, Robert Toth, who was also seized by the K.G.B. after receiving a package from a Soviet friend just before he had been due to leave Moscow.

Toth, who had a close friendship with the Jewish dissident, Anatoly Shcharansky, was freed after three hours of questioning but then summoned to more K.G.B. interrogations for five

days in a row before being told he could leave. Subsequently, Mr Shcharansky was put on trial and convicted of espionage. He was freed in a prisoner exchange in February this year and went to live in Israel. Daniloff and his wife had been due to set off next week on a monthlong journey following the tracks of his revolutionary ancestor, Alexander Frolov, a young noble who was involved in the socalled Decembrist uprising against the Tsar in 1825. Daniloff had spent some time researching the history of Frolov, his great-great-grandfather, and had presented family papers to Soviet historical archives, his wife said. “He has a great affection for this country.”