Daniloff Affair Shatters Gorbachev’s Image--and More

Underlying the immediate question about what is happening to Nicholas Daniloff, and why, is a more basic query: Whatever happened to that new Soviet leader, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, and his new era?

Despite his shameful behavior at the time of Chernobyl, Gorbachev undeniably was the man of “openness” and action at home, while abroad he was “a man with whom we can do business.”

Now, in a throwback to the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras, a journalist is accused of being a spy, and progress toward arms-control agreements and the chance for a meaningful improvement in American-Soviet relations are put in jeopardy. What is going on, and where are we heading?

Normally, Americans accused of spying in the Soviet Union are sent packing under the protection of diplomatic immunity. We do the same thing to Soviet spies. The difference in this instance is that when we arrested Gennady F. Zakharov in late August we found that he lacked such immunity. Moreover, we did not follow the usual procedure and allow him out of jail or on bail in the custody of the Soviet ambassador to the United States. (On Tuesday Zakharov was indicted by a federal grand jury in New York.)

Coming as it did a month before the scheduled talks between Secretary of State George P. Shultz and Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze, a meeting in which the two are expected to announce the dates of the next Reagan-Gorbachev summit meeting, the Zakharov arrest apparently caught the Soviets off guard. So they decided to arrest Daniloff, who also lacked diplomatic immunity.

Initially some assumed that such eye-for-eye behavior was not the Gorbachev way. Thus it made sense for President Reagan, who had met privately with Gorbachev for several hours last year in Geneva, to write a private letter to the Soviet leader on the reasonable expectation that he would release Daniloff, much as Nikita S. Khrushchev had done after President John F. Kennedy vouched for a Yale professor arrested in Moscow in 1963. What seems to have been overlooked is that in some ways Gorbachev is more of a throwback to Josef Stalin than he is to Khrushchev or to Leonid I. Brezhnev.

At first it seemed perfectly natural that the KGB should try to recover its comrade Zakharov. So after Daniloff’s arrest there did seem to be a chance that the KGB was merely doing its own thing without Gorbachev’s being fully aware of what was happening.

But after the announcement that Daniloff had been formally charged with espionage, there can no longer be any doubt that Gorbachev himself has become involved and indeed was probably involved from the beginning. If anything, this escalation process brings to mind Gorbachev’s behavior after a defector fingered the Soviet espionage network in Great Britain in 1985. The British promptly expelled a few dozen diplomats, whereupon the Soviets announced that they would match them with the expulsion of an equal number of Britons from the Soviet Union. The British responded by expelling another few dozen Soviets, and, to everyone’s shock, Moscow matched the bid again. Finally it was the British who had to let the matter drop. The Soviets still had plenty of people in England, but by matching the British expulsions they had made sure that London had hardly any of its people left in the Soviet Union.

Based on what has happened so far, Gorbachev seems determined to use the same strategy in this case, unfazed by the fact that he has humiliated and insulted Reagan by ignoring the President’s private and now public calls for Daniloff’s release.

Where will all this take us? Initially the Reagan Administration handled this by talking with a big mouth but walking with a small stick. Even that surprised Soviet officials, several of whom expressed shock that such a trivial matter might stand in the way of bilateral arms talks.

All this suggests that while Gorbachev undoubtedly has some new ideas, he still is ill equiped and ill advised when it comes to crisis management with the United States. Whatever advice his old American hand Anatoly F. Dobrynin is giving him, it reflects little about the realities of the United States today.

In all likelihood the Soviet Union and Gorbachev will eventually find some face-saving way to release Daniloff. But the longer the process takes, the more inflamed American passions are likely to become and the less likely Reagan will be able to show the reason and restraint that--despite his rhetoric--he almost always exercises in dealing with the Soviets.

The longer the Soviets and Gorbachev prolong this and the more serious the charges, the more likely it is that the ultimate loser will not be Nick Daniloff or even Gennady Zakharov, but the new Gorbachev and, by extension, a better and more trusting U.S.-Soviet relationship.