Nicholas Daniloff, an American journalist whose arrest in Moscow in 1986 on fabricated espionage charges threatened to derail Cold War détente amid crisis talks that led to a prisoner swap for his freedom, died Oct. 17 in Cambridge, Mass. He was 89.

The death, at an assisted-living facility, was confirmed by his daughter, Miranda Daniloff Mancusi, but no cause was noted.

The showdown over Daniloff, a correspondent for U.S. News & World Report, came at a delicate moment. Preparations were underway for an October summit, just weeks away, between Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and President Ronald Reagan that was intended to chart a new path, including opening arms control negotiations.

Neither side wanted disruptions. Yet Reagan publicly rebuked the Kremlin after the arrest of Daniloff, calling him a “hostage” whose wrongful detention jeopardized “the future of Soviet-American relations.” For a time, Gorbachev did not budge as Daniloff endured KGB interrogation at Moscow’s notorious Lefortovo Prison.

With ancestral roots in Russia and fluent in the language, Daniloff had a stint in Moscow in the 1960s with United Press International and returned in 1981 with U.S. News & World Report. He and his wife were packing up to head back to the States when he received a call on Aug. 30, 1986, from a contact named Misha, who had given Daniloff tips over the years, Daniloff wrote in a 2008 memoir, “Of Spies and Spokesmen: My Life as a Cold War Correspondent.”

They met in a park in the Lenin Hills near Daniloff’s apartment. Daniloff gave Misha two Stephen King novels, he recounted. From Misha (later identified as a former hotel worker, Mikhail Anatolevich Luzin), he received a sealed envelope that he was told contained newspaper clippings and photographs for future stories.

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Minutes later, Daniloff was hauled into a van. The material handed over by Misha included photos and maps of military sites in Russia and Afghanistan stamped “top secret.” Daniloff recounted that he immediately recognized the classic KGB entrapment technique of planting incriminating documents.

He also soon guessed the Soviet endgame: using him as a bargaining chip in attempts to free a KGB-linked prisoner in the West. A week earlier, a member of the Soviet delegation at the United Nations, Gennadi Zakharov, was arrested by FBI agents after paying an informant $1,000 for classified documents on U.S. warplanes.

“I was a pawn in a superpower game of strategy and will,” Daniloff later wrote in an article.

For two weeks, Daniloff faced relentless grilling and threats of being shipped off to a Siberian labor camp, he said. He denounced the spy claims as a frame-up but had no idea at first how much others were working on his behalf.

“Without friend or legal counsel, I felt increasingly vulnerable,” he wrote in an account of the ordeal in U.S. News & World Report. “I felt I was digging my own grave each time I opened my mouth.”

Mortimer Zuckerman, a real estate mogul and chairman of the magazine, traveled to Moscow to meet with Soviet officials and then briefed CIA director William Casey. “Daniloff is no more a spy than Gidget,” Zuckerman said.

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Media outlets and rights groups called for Daniloff’s release. Eventually, Daniloff’s wife, Ruth, was allowed to visit him at Lefortovo.

Secretary of State George P. Shultz and the Soviet foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, hammered out a release deal less than a month before the summit in Reykjavik, Iceland. Daniloff and Zakharov were handed to their respective embassies on Sept. 13. Also released as part of the swap was Yuri Orlov, a human rights activist who was imprisoned by Soviet authorities in 1978 and sent to a Siberian camp. “They blinked,” Reagan said of the Soviets.

When Daniloff landed in Frankfurt in what was then West Germany on Sept. 30, on the first leg of his journey to Washington, he called his detention a crude attempt by Moscow to gain political leverage after the spy Zakharov was nabbed in New York. “The KGB did not punish me,” Daniloff told reporters. “The KGB punished itself.”

Before meeting with the president and first lady Nancy Reagan at the White House, Daniloff had a message for leaders on both sides. “Cool it,” he appealed.

He said the Iceland summit and bids for better U.S.-Soviet ties were “far more important than the details of my case.” The summit set in motion talks that led to a 1987 treaty on intermediate-range nuclear missiles – which lasted until 2019 when President Donald Trump withdrew from the provisions.

In the past 18 months, Daniloff’s case was often reexamined for parallels with that of Wall Street Journal correspondent Evan Gershkovich, who was arrested by Russian authorities in March 2023 and later convicted of espionage – charges that he and the Journal strongly denied and that were denounced by President Joe Biden. Gershkovich was released this August in a multinational exchange involving 24 people.

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“What I sensed was that history is repeating itself,” Daniloff said after Gershkovich’s arrest. “And that is a rather sad, sorry state of affairs.”

‘JOURNALIST BY CHANCE’

Nicholas Daniloff was born in Paris on Dec. 30, 1934. His father, the son of a general in czarist Russia, was an executive for Packard cars – a job that moved the family to the United States, then to Argentina and back to Paris. His mother, an American, tended to the home.

Daniloff graduated from Harvard University with a bachelor’s degree in political science in 1956. He sought to join the U.S. diplomatic corps or an intelligence agency. “As luck would have it, the US Foreign Service, the CIA, USIA, all found my mind lacking. The military services found my body lacking and unfit for service,” he wrote in a Harvard alumni journal.

“I became a journalist by chance,” he added.

He worked a year at The Washington Post in an entry-level role that was then called a copy boy, and left to study at the University of Oxford, receiving a master’s degree in political science in 1959.

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He joined UPI in London and was named bureau chief in Geneva in 1960. A year later, he was sent to UPI’s Moscow bureau, where he reported on Soviet affairs until 1965. His first book, “The Kremlin and the Cosmos” (1972), chronicled the Soviet space program.

After returning from Moscow, Daniloff covered diplomacy and the White House for UPI. In 1980, he joined U.S. News & World Report and was appointed Moscow bureau chief the following year. He shifted to academia in 1989, becoming a journalism professor at Northeastern University in Boston. He retired in 2014.

His books include “Two Lives, One Russia” (1988), which threaded the story of his detention in Moscow with the life of his great-great-grandfather, Aleksandr Frolov, who was exiled to Siberia for taking part in a 19th-century uprising against Czar Nicholas I.

In 1961, he married journalist Ruth Dunn. She died last year. Survivors include daughter Miranda Daniloff Mancusi; son Caleb; five grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

More than two decades after he was freed, Daniloff looked back at his predictions for democratic reforms in what became Russia. He said the authoritarian grip of President Vladimir Putin upended even his most cautious forecasts.

“When I left Moscow in 1986 after a five-year assignment, I warned not to expect democracy to take hold in Russia for two generations or 40 years,” he said in an interview with Northeastern in 2009. “I guess I was too optimistic.”

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