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December 1, 2008

Of spies and spokesman

By LUCAS BLAISE

PLATTSBURGH — The son of a refugee from the Russian Revolution in 1917, Nicholas Daniloff long desired to be involved in foreign affairs.

Little did he know that a few chance occurrences would place him at the center of an international incident as a pawn of Soviet Russia during the Cold War.

REJECTED BY MILITARY
All of it is chronicled in his new memoir, "Of Spies and Spokesman: My Life as a Cold War Correspondent."

At the invitation of a former student, Plattsburgh State Professor of Journalism Shawn Murphy, Daniloff came to Plattsburgh recently to talk about his career.

Daniloff didn't set out to be a journalist.

"When I was a student, I had this misguided idea that what was important was to get good grades and to get an honors degree. I thought that would be helpful" in getting involved in foreign military service.

He tried the foreign-service exam but failed. In 1955, he applied to the Navy, the Coast Guard, the Army and even the CIA junior officers.

Each rejected him on physical grounds.

"I had actually gone to Washington (in October 1956) to get a waiver to get into the Navy. They rejected me," Daniloff recounted before the audience of about 70 people.

HIRED BY POST
Desperate, he saw a sign for the Washington Post and Times Herald.

A Harvard graduate, he strolled in and asked for a job as foreign correspondent.

"They looked me up and down and sent me up to human resources," Daniloff said.

One typing test later, he was hired.

"Because I could spell Eisenhower correctly, I was sent to the crusty city editor, and with a lot of hemming and hawing, I was hired as copy boy for the Washington Post."

Five years later, Daniloff was moved to Russia as correspondent for United Press International.

As the most junior of three correspondents in a highly competitive atmosphere, he had to be a one-man show — writing stories, taking and developing his own photographs, doing video and audio recordings.

Daniloff was expected to be a "double-threat man" and get a leg up on the competition: the Associated Press and other news networks with Moscow offices.

He later returned to the United States to cover the State Department and eventually was invited by the magazine U.S. News and World Report to head its Moscow office in 1980.

BIG STORIES
Throughout his career, Daniloff saw the Cuban missile crisis from the Russian perspective, felt the effects of an authoritarian nation, reported on the Chernobyl nuclear explosion and covered a slew of other international stories.

All are covered in his memoirs, but for his recent audience, he highlighted incidents that spoke about journalism as a profession.

"As you know, the great public today has very little regard for journalists," said Daniloff, who now teaches at Northeastern University in Boston. "Frequently, (the public) feels that they are unethical."

ACCUSED AS SPY
One event led Daniloff to become front-page news himself.

In 1986, just toward the end of his assignment with U.S. News and World Report, he was charged with espionage by the Soviet government.

Daniloff received from one of his sources an envelope that he was told contained newspaper clippings.

"As I was walking home on a public street in Moscow, a white van drove up beside me. Six guys jumped out. They were all over me.

"They put my arms behind my back, they put handcuffs on me, and without a word they threw me in the van."

Over the next six hours, he was interrogated before witnesses and photographers.

It turns out the envelope contained pictures of Russian military installations in Afghanistan.

Around the same time, the FBI had arrested 39-year-old Russian physicist Gennadii Zakharov for espionage in New York. He was to be sentenced to at least 30 years in jail.

"(Secret Police) decided — and this was based on some precedents that had occurred earlier — that they would arrest an American citizen and then create a big international scandal," said Daniloff.

"They would trade Mr. A for Mr. B."

This happened just months away from the Iceland summit conference between President Ronald Reagan and Communist leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

"It was clear to me that I was being set up as a spy. So, I decided to do something that might frustrate their desire; namely, (during the interrogation) I put both my hands on the photographs that were lying on the table, but I put them with a famous American gesture," he told the audience, showing a middle finger on each hand.

"The pictures (of the interrogation) were never published."

But his arrest was.

Getting headlines across the world and White House attention, Daniloff became a bartering piece that threatened the Russian and American talks.

After 13 days in Lefortovo Prison, he was traded for Zakharov and returned home to the United States.

RUSSIA TODAY
He talked to the Plattsburgh State audience about today's Russia, culled from his lifetime association with the country of his heritage.

"The good things are that Russia is a much more open place than it used to be. The Internet now is penetrating. It has gotten through the political class. It has gotten to the universities. It has gotten to the up-and-coming generation.

"Russia, in that sense, is less isolated than it was before.

"The bad things are that Russia has not become democratic. It has slipped backward into a more authoritarian style of government. It is a country that continues to be fearful of the outside world."

Yet, all isn't lost, he said, especially with terrorism and nuclear weapons still front-page news.

"We (the countries) have a lot of common business that has to be worked through."

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