Seeking a Way Out

He had a three-day growth of beard and was still wearing the rumpled tan trousers he had on when arrested 13 days earlier. But Nicholas Daniloff was < ebullient, witty and still possessed of his reporter's instinct for summarizing a story. As the Cadillac carrying him from Moscow's Lefortovo Prison on Friday night stopped before cheering reporters gathered nearby, Daniloff, 51, popped out, threw his arms into the air and whooped with joy. Nonetheless he quickly observed, "I am not a free man today." Later, as he and his wife Ruth took up temporary residence at the U.S. embassy, Daniloff explained that he must stay in the Moscow area as long as espionage charges against him are pending. Said the U.S. News & World Report correspondent: "I have exchanged one hotel for another, much better hotel."

Just as Daniloff was getting sprung from Lefortovo, U.S. marshals in New York City, where it was early afternoon, escorted Gennadi Zakharov from the Metropolitan Correctional Center to a Brooklyn federal courtroom for a hearing that took all of three minutes. The Soviet U.N. employee stood ramrod- straight and stone-faced as Judge Joseph McLaughlin read the espionage charges against him. Zakharov said only, "Not guilty." The judge then told him that "contingent on the prior or simultaneous release of Nicholas S. Daniloff," he too was being let go in the custody of his ambassador. Other conditions also were nearly identical to those imposed on Daniloff: Zakharov must not travel more than 25 miles from U.N. headquarters in New York, and he must check in by phone with a federal marshal every day. Soviet Ambassador Yuri Dubinin promised in writing to produce Zakharov in court when required; the U.S. similarly guaranteed that Daniloff will show up in a Soviet court if ordered.

The parallel procedures looked like the first steps toward exactly what the Reagan Administration had repeatedly vowed not to arrange: a straight swap of Zakharov for Daniloff. Washington appeared to be conceding that the cases should be treated as equivalent, despite its repeated thunders that Zakharov is a real spy arrested in the act of trying to buy classified documents while Daniloff is the innocent victim of a crude KGB frame-up that began when a Soviet acquaintance thrust a package of documents into his hands in Moscow on Aug. 30.

Some Administration officials were privately bitter that the U.S. seemed to have caved in to Kremlin bullying. But they were overruled by none other than Ronald Reagan, whose compassion in this instance overpowered his visceral anti-Sovietism. Reagan personally approved the arrangement Thursday afternoon (it took nearly 24 hours to nail down) for the simplest of reasons: he had been touched by the plight of Daniloff, and just wanted to get the reporter sprung. Said the President: "We are so relieved and happy that Mr. Daniloff is out of his 8-by-10-ft. cell, which he was sharing with someone we believe was an informant, and that he won't be subjected to four hours of interrogation each day."