Kremlin’s Hard Line: Costs and Benefits : Gorbachev Image Could Suffer; Experts See Possible Soviet Gains

The Soviet Union’s arrest of American correspondent Nicholas Daniloff on what Administration officials called “trumped-up” spy charges represents a risky strategy that may torpedo Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s campaign to charm the West.

But U.S. experts in Kremlin behavior believe that the Soviets consider the benefits to be worth the costs.

Those benefits, the U.S. experts said Tuesday, include seizing an American whom the Soviets feel they can trade for a Soviet U.N. official accused as a spy and the intimidation of the U.S. press corps in Moscow. Those are the two possible motives cited by President Reagan in his first public comment on the case Monday.

And the non-governmental experts said that the Kremlin’s motivation may go even deeper.

George A. Carver, a former deputy director of the CIA, said the case of Daniloff, a U.S. News & World Report correspondent, has presented the Reagan Administration with a dilemma as it decides whether to go ahead with plans for another summit meeting between Reagan and Gorbachev.

‘We Look Pretty Wimpish’

“If they hold onto Daniloff and we go through with the summit, we look pretty wimpish,” said Carver, now a senior fellow of Georgetown University’s Center for Strategic and International Studies. “But, if we get starchy and call off the summit, Reagan will be blamed for escalating superpower tensions.

“They achieve a number of things and lose relatively little,” he said.

Although some analysts have suggested that the KGB secret police moved against Daniloff without authorization, most specialists in Soviet policy consider that explanation to be far-fetched, especially after the Soviet government’s announcement that it has filed formal espionage charges against Daniloff, which required high-level political clearance.

“It is always tempting to speculate that this is a case of the KGB going off on its own,” said Thomas Thornton, professor of Soviet studies at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. “But that just does not happen.”

Nevertheless, it seems certain that the KGB was angered by the Aug. 23 arrest in New York of Gennady F. Zakharov, who was accused of trying to hire a U.S. citizen to obtain classified information. Intelligence agencies traditionally go to great lengths to obtain release of their agents, primarily because failure to do so would make recruiting more difficult.

Soviet Foreign Ministry spokesman Gennady I. Gerasimov said Tuesday that a “mutual solution” to the crisis is possible, implying a Daniloff-Zakharov swap. But Reagan already had ruled out such a deal on the grounds that the espionage charges against Zakharov are substantial while Daniloff is the victim of a frame-up.

“The FBI and other agencies have been a lot more effective in their counterintelligence efforts lately, and there are a lot of Soviet spies at work,” Carver said. “They (the Soviets) want to send us a message: ‘Lay off our spies because, when you get one, we will pull someone off the street.’ ”

Arnold L. Horelick, director of the Rand/UCLA center for the Study of Soviet International Behavior, said that the Soviets apparently had been building a case against Daniloff for months, possibly with the intention of trying to embarrass him at the end of his 5 1/2-year tour of duty in Moscow.

‘A Savvy Guy’

“They don’t like him because he is a very knowledgeable and savvy guy who knows how to get around in the country,” Horelick said. “It may very well be that they were preparing to take a parting shot at him that also would serve as an object lesson to other American reporters.

“Then came the Zakharov arrest, and the KGB certainly wanted to find a way to spring their guy. At that point, whatever else they were planning to do to Daniloff, they converted it into an effort to arrange for some kind of trade.”

By seizing Daniloff, the Soviets increased Washington-Moscow tension and raised serious new questions about the summit.

Horelick said the Soviet leadership “had been feeling ambivalent about the summit--they did not want to torpedo it but they didn’t see any brilliant prospects for it either.”

He said some Soviet officials have suggested recently that Gorbachev went too far in extending Moscow’s unilateral nuclear test moratorium. Therefore, Horelick said, Gorbachev might have welcomed an opportunity to take a fresh hard-line position.

Helmut Sonnenfeldt, a former State Department and National Security Council expert on the Soviet Union who is now a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said that Gorbachev might have wanted to disabuse Washington of the idea that he is so concerned about domestic economic reform that he is set to make concessions at the summit.

In a recent press conference, Reagan said the chances for an arms control accord are good because economic factors would prevent Moscow from engaging in a costly arms race. Although this may be so, Sonnenfeldt said, the Soviets don’t want to admit it--to themselves or to the world.

“Objectively speaking, the Soviets have more need for a summit than the United States does,” Sonnenfeldt said. “The Soviets are courting the Europeans, the Chinese and the Japanese because they need a quiet international environment to do what they want to do at home. But they want to mask this so as not to appear to be the supplicant.”