Moscow’s Muscle Men Make a Point : Grabbing Daniloff Was to Show Impatience With Gorbachev

Ever since Mikhail S. Gorbachev became Soviet leader in 1985, a new detente with the United States, including an agreement to stop the nuclear arms race, has been the primary objective of his foreign policy.

Why, then, was the American correspondent Nicholas Daniloff arrested in Moscow on Aug. 30--an extraordinary action that gravely jeopardized not only Gorbachev’s plan for a second summit with President Reagan but his entire policy?

The two explanations favored by American commentators are implausible. One is that by arresting a Soviet physicist at the United Nations, Gennady Zakharov, on spy charges a week earlier, the FBI witlessly triggered a knee-jerk retaliation against Daniloff by Soviet authorities who did not foresee the furor it would cause. The problem with this Keystone Kops scenario is that Daniloff’s arrest was unprecedented. If the Soviet motive was routine retaliation, Daniloff was not an appropriate target. Nor is such a blunder characteristic of the new Soviet leadership, whose international “public relations” skills have been widely noted. Far more likely, the jailing of an American journalist was calculated to provoke a major political scandal.

The other implausible explanation is that Gorbachev contrived Daniloff’s arrest as an excuse to cancel the Washington summit planned at his Geneva meeting with Reagan. Yet why would the Soviet leader sabotage his own pro-detente foreign policy, which is an integral part of his campaign for internal reform and on which he has built much of his prestige?

We may never know the full Zakharov-Daniloff story. But we can begin by placing the decision to arrest Daniloff in the context of ongoing Soviet politics, which is the scene of intense conflict. As I have found in several visits to Moscow, the most recent in September, Gorbachev’s reformist proposals in domestic policy, from economics to culture, continue to arouse strong opposition. He still lacks the power to impose his policies or to disregard oppositionist opinion.

The same is true in foreign policy, where Gorbachev’s “bold new approaches” in strategic areas, from Japan and China to Israel and nuclear weapons, have collided with Soviet vested interests and dogmas. Having failed to produce any important achievements, his conciliatory policy toward the United States is particularly vulnerable. Indeed, if we view the period from the prelude to the Geneva summit in 1985 to Zakharov’s arrest through Soviet eyes, as we must, it has been a year of major Soviet overtures and concessions met by a succession of American “rebuffs and provocations.”

In August, 1985, for example, Gorbachev announced a unilateral Soviet moratorium on nuclear testing and on deployment of European missiles. Washington responded by accelerating its nuclear testing and by inflating a minor “spy dust” incident into a threat to the November summit. Gorbachev then dropped his demand that “Star Wars” be on the summit agenda, but as the two leaders arrived in Geneva, someone made public Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger’s letter protesting virtually any arms-control agreement.

The pattern continued after Geneva, amidst expectations of another summit.

Between January and July, Gorbachev extended his moratorium on testing; made major concessions on European and Asian missiles; abandoned Soviet opposition to on-site treaty verification and to “Star Wars” research; offered to reduce offensive nuclear weapons unilaterally in return for a U.S. extension of the 1972 ABM treaty, and announced a small but symbolic reduction in Soviet forces in Afghanistan.

During those same months, the Administration ordered a large reduction in the Soviet U.N. Mission; sailed U.S. warships into Soviet waters; linked American military actions against Nicaragua and Libya to Soviet “support” for those countries; decided to give advanced anti-aircraft missiles to the Afghan rebels; repudiated the SALT II provisions; threatened to jettison the ABM treaty, and continued to test nuclear devices for “Star Wars.” Nonetheless, on Aug. 18, Gorbachev again extended the Soviet moratorium on testing.

Imagine the charges in the United States against a pro-detente President who persisted in making concessions to the Soviet Union in the face of such “provocations.” No clamorous accusations have been leveled publicly against Gorbachev, but by mid-summer, high-level objections to his policy were increasingly evident in the Soviet media. In particular, military officials hinted ominously that his “dangerous illusions” about the United States were seriously threatening Soviet national security. Several officials publicly referred to “different opinions” about Gorbachev’s continuation of the moratorium, a sure sign of sharp protest behind the scenes.

Then came Zakharov’s jailing by U.S. authorities. There are two possible explanations of what followed. Either an opposition group seized the opportunity to arrest Daniloff in order to force an end to Gorbachev’s policy of conciliation. Or confronted with the demand that he finally reciprocate in a tough manner, Gorbachev had to authorize the action.

That Daniloff may have been arrested without Gorbachev’s knowledge cannot be ruled out. Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze’s remark that Gorbachev saw the Daniloff dossier only after the arrest suggests that possibility. So did Gorbachev’s effort to find a way out of the crisis by releasing Daniloff and proposing the a meeting with Reagan in Iceland.

Whatever the full story, one lesson is clear. Given the existence of powerful opposition to better U.S.-Soviet relations in Washington and in Moscow, only two equally determined leaders will ever find a political way out of the nuclear arms race. For too long, that kind of leadership has been present only in Moscow.