Nicholas Daniloff, 89, Dies; Reporter’s Arrest in Moscow Ignited a Firestorm

Nicholas Daniloff, an American news correspondent whose 1986 arrest in Moscow on trumped-up espionage charges ignited a political firestorm in the United States and an international crisis in the latter stages of the Cold War, died on Thursday at an assisted living facility in Cambridge, Mass. He was 89.

His daughter, Miranda Daniloff Mancusi, confirmed the death.

With intrigues fit for a John le Carré spy novel, the contretemps in Moscow landed Mr. Daniloff in a notorious prison there, set up his exchange for a K.G.B. agent snared in New York City, led to the expulsion of scores of Soviet and American diplomats and suspected spies, and nearly wrecked a summit meeting between President Ronald Reagan and the Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

Mr. Daniloff, who later became a university professor and director of a journalism school in Boston, wrote several books on Soviet and Russian life, including one that twinned his own ordeal and that of a forebear who was arrested and exiled to Siberia for joining the failed plot of the so-called Decembrists to overthrow Czar Nicholas I of Russia in 1825 — a deed revered and romanticized in Soviet histories.

Mr. Daniloff was a veteran correspondent whose knowledge of Russian language and culture led to assignments in Moscow with United Press International in the 1960s and with U.S. News & World Report in the 1980s. He was five days short of completing that five-and-a-half-year second tour when the K.G.B. trap — a betrayal by an old friend — was sprung.

After taking a call at his Moscow apartment on Aug. 30, 1986, Mr. Daniloff met a trusted Russian friend and news contact, Misha, in a park for a farewell exchange. He gave Misha several Stephen King novels, and Misha gave him a sealed packet that supposedly contained news clippings from a Soviet republic and some photographs that he said might be useful.

After they parted, a van pulled up alongside Mr. Daniloff. Several men leapt out, handcuffed him, dragged him into the vehicle and took him to the infamous K.G.B. torture center, Lefortovo Prison. Misha's packet turned out to contain photographs and maps of military installations, all marked "secret." The fix was in — a heavy-handed throwback to Stalinist tactics.

In Room 215, a chamber that reeked of interrogations, Mr. Daniloff was met by a tall, imposing man in a dark gray suit. "He walked toward me, pinning me with his dark eyes," Mr. Daniloff wrote in his book "Two Lives, One Russia" (1988). "This senior K.G.B. officer said solemnly in Russian, 'You have been arrested on suspicion of espionage. I am the person who ordered your arrest.'"

For the bewildered Mr. Daniloff, that moment set off 14 days of grueling interrogations, confinement in a tiny underground cell and the anguish of being cut off from the world, facing what his captors called years in a Siberian labor camp or a death sentence. His claims of innocence hardly mattered; as he guessed, he had been arrested as a bargaining chip in a larger game.

A week before Mr. Daniloff's detainment, Gennadi F. Zakharov, a Soviet spy working at the United Nations in New York, had been arrested in a subway station after he paid an F.B.I. informant $1,000 for classified documents on American military jets. F.B.I. agents swooped in and seized Mr. Zakharov, who quickly admitted his espionage and named three other high Soviet spies in America.

The two cases made worldwide headlines for months. But Mr. Daniloff's arrest, clearly a retaliation for Mr. Zakharov's, drew wide international condemnation. Mr. Daniloff's wife, Ruth Daniloff, a British journalist, kept up the public pressure. Protests were lodged by American and European news organizations, human rights and civil liberties groups, American and allied embassies, legislators on Capitol Hill, and the White House.

"I think the K.G.B. suspected that I was a C.I.A. agent," Mr. Daniloff said in a 2017 interview for this obituary. "I was not a C.I.A. agent! And that was well recognized by the Reagan administration, which honestly tried hard to extricate me from that situation. My wife, too, put up a very energetic defense."

President Reagan personally assured Gorbachev that Mr. Daniloff was not a spy, and warned that his arrest was "an act that held hostage not only an innocent American journalist but the future of Soviet-American relations." But Gorbachev, in a rebuff to Reagan, called Mr. Daniloff "a spy caught red-handed."

After intensive talks between the governments, Secretary of State George P. Shultz and the reformist Soviet foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, agreed to swap the prisoners, and they were released on Sept. 13 to their embassies. As part of the deal, the imprisoned Soviet human rights activist Yuri Orlov was also released to the West.

But the affair continued to roil Soviet-American relations. About 100 Soviet officials, including 80 suspected spies, were eventually expelled by the United States. Moscow expelled 10 American diplomats and withdrew 260 Russian employees from the American Embassy in Moscow.

Tensions seemingly undermined the Reagan-Gorbachev summit meeting in October 1986. Despite the strains, however, the two leaders met in Reykjavik, Iceland. The talks produced no nuclear arms accord but laid the groundwork for a treaty on intermediate-range nuclear missiles in 1987.

Returning home from Moscow, Mr. Daniloff was met at Dulles International Airport outside Washington by hundreds of jubilant reporters, photographers and friends in a nationally televised reception, the kind of news coverage normally accorded a president.

Later, Mr. Daniloff and his wife and two children met the president and first lady at the White House. "It was a very complex situation," Mr. Daniloff told reporters. "If it hadn't been for Mr. Reagan taking such a deep and personal interest in my case, it would probably be years before I could stand here in front of you and thank the president."

Nicholas Daniloff was born in Paris on Dec. 30, 1934, one of two children of Serge and Ellen (Burke) Daniloff. His mother was an American, and his father was the émigré son of the Czarist general Yuri Danilov, chief of operations in the Russian Imperial Army's general headquarters during World War I.

Nicholas began learning Russian from his grandmother. He and his older sister, Ellen, grew up in a household where French, English and Russian were spoken. Their father, an executive with the Hudson Motor Car Company, moved the family to the United States, to Argentina and back to Paris before Nicholas attended Harvard, where he earned a bachelor's degree in 1956.

After a year as a copy boy at The Washington Post and Times-Herald, he studied at Oxford University in England for two years, then joined U.P.I. in London in 1959 and was named Geneva bureau chief in 1960.

Mr. Daniloff married Ruth Dunn in 1961. In addition to his daughter, Miranda, the executive director of a globally focused program at Wellesley College, he is survived by a son, Caleb , a writer and author; five grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. His wife died in January at 88.

As a U.P.I. correspondent in Moscow from 1961 to 1965, Mr. Daniloff covered the Cuban missile crisis, the Soviet space program and the fall of the Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev. Back in Washington, he covered diplomacy and wrote his first book, "The Kremlin and the Cosmos" (1972), on the Russian space program. He was a Nieman fellow at Harvard in the 1973-74 academic year and then became a U.P.I. White House correspondent, covering the fall of President Richard M. Nixon in 1974 after the Watergate scandal.

He joined U.S. News in 1980 and became its Moscow bureau chief the next year.

After ending his active journalism career, Mr. Daniloff settled in Cambridge and joined Northeastern University in 1989 as a professor of journalism. From 1992 to 1999, he also directed the school's journalism program, and he taught courses there until his retirement in 2014.

In his memoir, "Of Spies and Spokesmen: My Life as a Cold War Correspondent" (2008), he recalled his reporting career. "Two Lives, One Russia" wove the narratives of his own ordeal in Moscow and that of his great-great-grandfather Aleksandr Frolov, who was exiled to Siberia for 30 years for his part in the 19th-century uprising against the czar in St. Petersburg.

On his last day in Moscow in 1986, Mr. Daniloff placed flowers on his ancestor's grave. "I had the K.G.B. to thank for allowing me to appreciate Frolov's life fully," he wrote. "After being in prison, I understood his struggles in ways I had never dreamed of. And I saw ever more clearly the links that chained his life to mine."

Ama Sarpomaa contributed reporting.