Journalist Was Captured by KGB

Nicholas Daniloff ’56 says Harvard did not prepare him for the challenges he would face in his professional life. Perhaps that’s because his long career as a journalist would take him away from the ivory tower and into the dungeon of a jail.

“Harvard fell down for me in that it was not very good at preparing students for anything other than further education,” Daniloff says.

But what undergraduate education prepares a student for enemy capture?

In 1986 while working as a correspondent for U.S. News and World Report, Daniloff was arrested by KGB agents and held in a Moscow jail on charges of espionage.

In late August, Daniloff went to meet a friend, promising his wife, Ruth Daniloff, that he would be back in time for lunch. “1:30, 2:30, 3 p.m., and no sign of him,” Ruth says. “This was strange because usually he would call.” At around 3 p.m. a colleague called the Daniloffs’ house and informed Ruth that an American correspondent had been arrested.

The friend, it turned out, was actually a KGB informant.

Daniloff’s capture and subsequent release followed the tit-for-tat logic of the Cold War. He was arrested the week after a Soviet physicist working at the United Nations was charged with spying against the United States. And Daniloff was only freed after a complex series of negotiations resulted in the release of Daniloff, the Soviet agent, and several other Soviet dissidents.

But not before spending two weeks in the 18th century jail. In his tiny cell, Daniloff was given meals of spaghetti and sugar, herring, and kasha. “My Russian grandmother used to feed that to me, so that was tolerable,” Daniloff says.

A GENEALOGICAL JOURNEY

Daniloff credits his grandmother with “infecting me with a desire to see Russia and understand the Soviet-American relationship.” And so like many regionalists before him, Daniloff, whose father was a refugee of the 1917 Russian Revolution, journeyed eastward to understand his heritage.

“My father was burdened by his Russian past, and in some respects saw the world through Russian eyes,” Daniloff says. “He gave me bad advice.”

During his Harvard career, Daniloff says, his father saw his son’s prospects for advancement through those eyes.

“When I applied for a Rhodes scholarship, he said to me ‘you’ll never get a Rhodes unless you bribe the judges,’” Daniloff recalls.

Daniloff neither bribed the judges, nor received the scholarship. But he did fulfill his father’s wish that he get into a final club.

“My father, being an immigrant and refugee, was anxious for me to develop strong American roots,” Daniloff says. “With this mentality that everything gets done through bribes and personal contacts, he thought that I should get into a final club if at all possible.”

While he was admitted to the Spee Club, Daniloff says he benefitted neither from contacts made at the club, nor contacts made at Harvard in his professional life.

“The very thing my father thought Harvard was going to give me, I never found.”

But through rowing, Daniloff found a community. A teammate on the lightweight crew team and roommate, Reginald E. Greene ’56 remembers Daniloff as serious, cordial, and courtly.

“He is like Ashley in ‘Gone With the Wind.’ He looks a little like him. He behaves like him,” Greene says.

Unlike Margaret Mitchell’s characters, Daniloff describes himself as particularly un-romantic. “I am not a nostalgic.”

“Harvard is a part of my life. I contribute to Harvard, but I give directed contributions,” Daniloff says.

He will not be attending his class reunion. But on the suggestion of longtime friend, teammate and freshman roommate, George B. “Barry” Bingham Jr. ’56, Daniloff will return to campus for a boat-race the morning of June 5th. Though Bingham died earlier this spring, Greene and Daniloff organized the event as a reunion for the lightweight crew team.

‘ACCIDENTAL JOURNALIST’

Still Daniloff has been a frequent presence on campus. He served as a fellow at the Barone Center, which is now known as the Shorenstein Center for Press, Politics, and Public Policy, and as a fellow at the Neiman Foundation. Though his excellence in journalism was further recognized when he served as the director of Northeastern University’s School of Journalism, Daniloff stumbled upon his profession.

After graduation, Daniloff had hoped to go into government service, but a series of rejections set his plans askew. He first tried joining the Navy to fulfill the draft requirement, but he was rejected because of unstable blood pressure.

Then he tried joining the Foreign Service, but he failed the entrance exam—an event he partially attributes to the shoddy education in American history he received as a government concentrator at Harvard.

Daniloff’s final attempt to join the government was thwarted when he tried to join the CIA.

“When I left Harvard, I very much wanted to go abroad essentially as a diplomat,” Daniloff says. “I also applied to the CIA. And guess what? I was rejected.”

Though the Soviets claimed that the CIA routinely used Western journalists in covert activities, Daniloff stresses that his early desire to join the intelligence agency was unrelated to his work as a reporter.

Except that it was Daniloff’s interest in government service that took him on a fateful trip down a street in Washington. He saw a sign for The Washington Post, went inside, took a typing test, and was hired as a copy boy.

But despite a distinguished career in which he served at the foreign affairs desk and the Moscow bureau of United Press International, some were still unconvinced of Danlioff’s innocence, Ruth says.

“Ronald Reagan didn’t have that great of credibility, so when the U.S. government says someone isn’t a spy, people tend to think he was a spy,” she says. “That was the most painful thing.”

Perhaps some of the pain was eased when Daniloff was received as a celebrity at home.

“I had speaking invitations all over the country all the time,” Daniloff remembers. And he says he was paid anywhere from $4,000 to $10,000 for the hour-long engagements.

The story of his capture was eventually published in a 1989 book called “Two Lives, One Russia.” The book, which was intended as an “inside the Cold War” story, yielded only mediocre sales because by the time it hit bookstands, the Soviet Union had begun to crumble.

When he isn’t teaching classes on ethics and journalism at Northeastern, Daniloff is working on another project: authoring his memoirs. The book chronicles “how I got into journalism and where it lead me,” Daniloff says. The working title? “Accidental Journalist.”

—Staff writer Sarah E.F. Milov can be reached at milov@fas.harvard.edu.