saniloff ad zakharov; Hostages to Understanding

Nicholas S. Daniloff’s innocence made outrage easy. Americans angry about his imprisonment in Moscow for espionage denounced the arrest as a cynical Soviet gambit to spring their own agent indicted in New York. Before an accommodation was reached late last week turning both prisoners back to their respective ambassadors, anger had obscured the one thing each case had in common--the two arrests were stage-managed from start to finish.

The Daniloff case is an example of how quickly things can go wrong when intelligence agencies try to get tough with each other. The FBI knew it was breaking an unwritten rule of the game when it arranged the arrest of a Russian without diplomatic immunity, but the bureau wanted to issue an unmistakable warning. Daniloff’s prompt arrest in retaliation was the Soviet way of saying their agents aren’t expendable. The only unusual thing in this episode is the fact it involved leaders of both countries.

It could hardly have been otherwise, given the Soviet’s ghastly blunder in choice of victim. Daniloff is the least likely of spies, a well-respected veteran journalist, fluent in Russian, who spent three years in Moscow during the 1960s for UPI and then returned in 1981 for U.S. News & World Report. In between he worked out of Washington, where his many friends in government and the press corps became infuriated at his arrest by the KGB on Aug. 30, moments after accepting a sealed envelope from a Russian friend during a stroll in a Moscow park. Daniloff said he thought the envelope contained newspaper clippings; the Soviets charged that it held photographs and diagrams of military facilities.

But Daniloff’s character and personal history made the espionage charge impossible to accept, insisted his friends and family. One old friend, also fluent in Russian, described Daniloff as poryadochny --a Russian word meaning a stickler for correctness, going through channels, hewing to the letter of regulations. This is a quality much admired in the Soviet Union, and it helps explain why Daniloff had so many trusted Russian friends.

Russia is the great passion of his life. His grandfather was a Czarist general; a great-great-grandfather, Aleksandr Frolov, was sentenced to 30 years in Siberia for his role in an attempt on the czar’s life in 1825 by the Decembrists, a group of Russian revolutionaries treated as heroes in official Soviet histories. Friends say Daniloff’s years in the Soviet Union were an attempt to understand his own past; he was arrested shortly before he planned to leave both the Soviet Union and U.S. News to write a biography of Frolov in Vermont, where he and his wife, Ruth, had already rented a house.

If none of this added up to a career as a spy, then why did the Soviets risk an international incident in choosing Daniloff for arrest? U.S. officials blamed it on a typical Soviet mix of cynicism and clumsy brutality and had threatened a wide range of punitive sanctions in response, including indefinite delay in the summit. In his letter to Mikhail S. Gorbachev on Sept. 5, Ronald Reagan offered his personal word that Daniloff was no spy. Two days later, with Daniloff still in jail, the President denounced the charges against him as an “outrage” and insisted the Daniloff case had nothing in common with the case of “one of their spies that we have caught red-handed.”

That was, for several days, the nub of the problem: Daniloff was innocent and their man was “caught red-handed.” That was exactly what the Soviets refused to accept. They could argue that their man was also set up.

Like Daniloff, Gennady Fyodorovich Zakharov was arrested moments after he’d been given a sealed envelope by a friend. The FBI claimed that similarities between the two cases ended there. They said that Zakharov’s regular job as an official of the U.N. Center for Science and Technology for Development was a front; his real work was collecting technical information for the Soviet Union--he was probably a professional intelligence officer for the KGB. Not much is known about the case against Zakharov, but the announcement of his arrest and court papers gave the following outline of what happened:

The 39-year-old Zakharov, who has a doctorate in physics and mathematics, arrived in New York in December, 1982, and joined nearly 500 other Soviet citizens who work for the U.N. Secretariat. Two months later he found an apartment in a pleasant neighborhood in the Bronx, where he lived quietly with his wife and daughter. (Both were in the Soviet Union on vacation at the time of his arrest and have remained there.) In April, 1983, Zakharov approached a student at Queens College who immediately reported the contact to the FBI. The student has been identified only as a computer specialist in his 20s who comes from Guyana in South America.

During the next three years the two met often. According to the FBI, Zakharov paid the student thousands of dollars for technical information stored on microfiche cards that he stole from libraries, offered to help pay for graduate school if the student chose to go, advised him to remain single and urged him to join a small technical company in New York working for two larger firms doing business for the Pentagon--Bendix Corp. and General Electric.

Last May, the FBI says, Zakharov drew up a formal contract with the student, promising to pay him for information over a period of 10 years. When Zakharov was arrested by FBI agents on a Queens subway platform on Aug. 23, the student had just handed him an envelope containing three classified documents about jet engines designed for the military. Last week, as the diplomats argued, Zakharov was formally indicted on three counts of espionage. Since he is protected by diplomatic immunity only from charges related to his official U.N. duties, a Zakharov conviction--if he is not returned to the Soviet Union--could bring a sentence of life in prison.

But the Zakharov case is not quite as simple as it appears. The FBI was in complete control from the beginning and ran it as a classic double agent operation. The student carried secret recording equipment during all his meetings with Zakharov, and all the technical information he delivered was chosen and provided by the FBI. Zakharov’s crime--the payment of $1,000 for three classified documents--was arranged by the FBI, and the documents to be handed over were selected by the bureau. For more than three years the FBI had ample opportunity to follow Zakharov wherever he went, but no suggestion has been made that he committed any other act of espionage during the entire period. The subtle point of just who proposed the exchange--Zakharov himself, or the student at the FBI’s suggestion--may not be answered unless and until Zakharov is brought to trial.

But one thing remains clear: Zakharov’s fate was entirely in FBI hands. The bureau chose the moment of his arrest--only a few months before he was scheduled to return to the Soviet Union--and even decided the nature and substance of his crime. All this is standard operating procedure in the intelligence business; set-ups are a hazard of the trade, a way of burning the other side to make them cautious. If Zakharov had been an accredited diplomat he would have been immediately expelled, the Soviets would have expelled a U.S. diplomat in retaliation--and that would have been that. The Soviets play the game by the same rules. The threat of prison in the Zakharov case made all the difference.

The FBI clearly had more on its mind in deciding to arrest Zakharov than reeling in one low-level Soviet agent who thought he knew what he was doing, but didn’t. The bureau, like the rest of the U.S. intelligence community, has been under pressure to do something about Soviet espionage in the wake of recent spy scandals. Last March, in an attempt to cut back the pool of Soviets in this country available for intelligence work, Reagan ordered a one-third reduction in the staff of the Soviet Union’s U.N. mission, from 275 to 170, by April, 1988. The first 32 are scheduled to depart this month. Zakharov’s arrest, approved in advance at high levels of the U.S. government, was clearly intended as a warning to the rest. “In recent years,” an Administration official told a reporter recently, “those without diplomatic immunity, particularly Soviets working for the U.N., have been doing a lot of industrial and technological spying, and our arresting Zakharov was our way of saying to them that this has gone too far.”

Trying to stop the flood of technical information from the United States to the Soviet Union has had a high priority in the Reagan Administration. The flow is not illegal for the most part, but we don’t like it, just as the Soviets don’t like American journalists talking to dissidents. Collecting such information was apparently Zakharov’s real job in the United States, but he did nothing illegal until the moment he accepted an envelope containing planted secrets. We may think that act differs radically from Daniloff’s, but clearly the Soviets didn’t, and they were not about to abandon one of their own.

Daniloff’s sudden celebrity and the enigma of Zakharov made the dispute a difficult one to negotiate in the glare of publicity. But some sort of trade was inevitable, and Reagan might have helped make one possible--perhaps unintentionally--when he publicly charged that Zakharov had been “caught red-handed.” After all, how could Zakharov expect a fair trial if the President of the United States had already found him guilty?