Expects to Be Tried on Spy Charges, Daniloff Tells His Wife

Jailed American correspondent Nicholas Daniloff told his wife Saturday that he expects to be tried on espionage charges but received a vague hint from his interrogators that he might be freed as part of a Soviet-American exchange.

Daniloff made an unexpected telephone call to his wife, Ruth, on his eighth day in custody at a KGB prison on the east side of Moscow.

She told reporters afterward that she reassured the veteran correspondent for U.S. News & World Report that top-level U.S. officials were pressing the Soviet Union for his release.

KGB Monitors Call

“I probably sound worried--I am worried,” she quoted him as saying during the 15-minute telephone conversation that was monitored by his KGB jailers.

In recounting their conversation, Ruth Daniloff said:

“The main line that seemed to be coming across, or the impression that they (the KGB) are trying to give, is that they are proceeding with the investigation, that there will be a trial, there will be a sentence, and whether he serves that sentence here or in the United States is undecided. They don’t say this, obviously, but this is what he picks up between the lines.”

As for being freed in a possible exchange involving a Soviet citizen imprisoned in the United States, Ruth Daniloff noted:

“He said he had a very fuzzy hint of this. . . . He didn’t seem to make much of it.”

There has been speculation that the Soviets set up Daniloff, who was arrested Aug. 30 on a Moscow street immediately after he received a packet from a Soviet acquaintance, so as to have a person to trade for Soviet physicist Gennady F. Zakharov, arrested on espionage charges in New York a week earlier.

Won’t Consider Swap

The package included material labeled “Top Secret,” Daniloff discovered when it was opened in his presence by the KGB agents who were waiting nearby to arrest him. He has said that the acquaintance, identified only as Misha, told him the package contained only newspaper clippings.

Ruth Daniloff said she told her husband of Secretary of State George P. Shultz’s declaration Friday that the United States would not consider a swap for Daniloff on grounds that he was an innocent hostage rather than a real suspect.

She said Daniloff told her that he has not been physically abused in the prison but that his diet is sparse. He has kasha, a cereal, for breakfast, soup for a midday meal, and his Friday night dinner was mashed potatoes and a single herring, he told her.

Although he suffers from high blood pressure that he usually relieves by jogging for an hour or more each day, his condition is normal so far, his wife said. In the Lefortovo Prison, he is allowed to spend one hour each day in an exercise cage on the roof. Otherwise, he is confined to an 8-by-10-foot cell with another man except during his daily interrogations.

Questioned on Story

Daniloff told his wife that he was often asked: “What spy school did you graduate from?”

“It’s ludicrous,” he commented.

The KGB investigator on his case, Valery D. Sergodeyev, also asked him about a story about the KGB that Daniloff wrote for his magazine about two years ago, he told his wife. In addition, the investigators focused on his three-year acquaintance with Misha, who handed him the package. Misha is a schoolteacher from Frunze, the capital of Kirghiza. His whereabouts are unknown, and there has been no indication that he has been arrested, suggesting that he may have been working with the KGB.

Ruth Daniloff said she appreciated the telephone call, which she said appeared to be an attempt on the part of the KGB to show that it was treating her husband well.

“It’s sort of ironic that they kidnap and hold Nick hostage and at the same time are trying to get brownie points for being nice,” she told reporters.