Gorbachev answers Reagan about writer

Press, 12 September 1986, Page 10

Gorbachev answers Reagan about writer

NZPA-Reuter Washington The President of the United States, Mr Ronald Reagan, said yesterday that the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, had responded to Mr Reagan’s request for the release of the American reporter, Nicholas Daniloff, but would give no details. Mr Reagan made the comment to a small group of reporters allowed to attend a state banquet for the Brazilian President, Mr Jose Sarney. “I don’t want to rock

the boat,” Mr Reagan said when asked about Mr Gorbachev’s reply. “It isn’t safe to comment on it. We are doing all we can.” The Reagan Administration has been withholding retaliation against the Soviet Union over Daniloff’s jailing in Moscow as it struggles to find a diplomatic way out of the dispute. Soviet officials have insisted that a solution is possible. But intense discussions in Washington

and in Moscow have failed to find a formula to meet the American refusal to trade Daniloff for a Soviet citizen accused of spying in New York. As the Administration lowered its rhetoric in the case, the State Department signalled yesterday that negotiation rather than retaliation was still the policy. “The objective is to obtain the release of Nick Daniloff rather than engage in retaliatory action,” said a spokesman

Bernard Kalb. The Secretary of State, Mr George Shultz, had another meeting on the affair with the Soviet Ambassadsor, Mr Yuri Dubinin. The crisis threatened to cancel a week-long privately sponsored public conference on United States-Soviet issues in Riga, Latvia. Other United StatesSoviet contacts linked to an expected summit meeting later this year have continued as scheduled since Daniloff was seized

by K.G.B. security men on August 30 and accused of spying. Word that the contacts were being expanded emerged yesterday when Mr Kalb disclosed plans for previously unannounced talks at the State Department this week on conventional armed forces in Europe. Pre-summit conference meetings between Mr Shultz and the Soviet Foreign Minister, Mr Eduard Shevardnadze, are set for September 19-20.

Officials have said that the Daniloff case, if unresolved, would be a centerpiece of the talks. In Moscow, Daniloff’s, wife, Ruth, said her husband had proposed that he and the Soviet citizen charged in New York be placed in ambassadorial custody to ease superpower tensions. She said Daniloff made the suggestion in an aside to her and not to his investigators when she visited him at Moscow’s Lefortovo prison.

“Nick would not see this as a spy-swap but as a possible face-saving compromise for both sides, which would not torpedo United States-Soviet relations,” Mrs Daniloff said. More calls for a tougher line against Moscow emerged in Congress yesterday. The House of Representatives, by a 394 to 0 vote, condemned the Daniloff arrest and said that Moscow’s failure to free him could sabotage summit conference prospects and arms control talks.