New Players, Old Game

Among the more notable traits of the Soviet secret police--the KGB--are its lack of subtlety in domestic operations and its institutional loyalty to those of its employees who are unfortunate enough to be caught spying overseas. With its arrest on espionage charges of Nicholas Daniloff, the Moscow correspondent for U.S. News & World Report, both traits are once more being demonstrated.

Daniloff was pounced on by eight KGB agents just after he was handed a package by a Russian acquaintance on a Moscow street. Daniloff understood that he was being given clippings from Soviet provincial newspapers. Authorities claim that he actually received several maps labeled “Top Secret.” Daniloff has spent more than a decade reporting from the Soviet Union and avoiding trouble there. Colleagues say that it is preposterous to think that he would ever engage in any illegal activity. The manner of his arrest, its timing and clumsy official vagueness in explaining what happened to the Soviet citizen who met with Daniloff clearly suggest that he was the fall guy in a set-up that was crude even by KGB standards.

That view is powerfully supported by the overt linkage that the Russians have now made between Daniloff and Gennady F. Zakharov, a Soviet employee of the United Nations who was arrested by the FBI on Aug. 23 on spying charges. The KGB prides itself on getting its captured agents back by swapping for them or, as in the notorious George Blake case in Britain, by breaking them out of prison. The KGB may well regard Daniloff as trading material.

The question then is whether Daniloff’s arrest was first approved by higher authority and, if so, why now, just a few weeks before U.S. and Soviet foreign ministers are scheduled to meet to talk about a possible summit conference later in the year. Nick Daniloff has been made the victim of an organization whose enormous power has brought pain and anguish to so many. That is a certainty. Far less certain is whether the Soviets fully appreciate the potential political consequences that they invite by pursuing this cynical game.