MOSCOW -- The arrest of U.S. journalist Nicholas Daniloff parallels the 1963 detention of a Yale professor who was held to try to pry loose a Soviet held in the United States.
Professor Frederick Barghoorn, was arrested Oct. 31, 1963, and held incommunicado for 16 days, prompting strenuous protests from the United States.
President Kennedy intervened seeking Barghoorn's release just as President Reagan did with his letter Friday to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev concerning Daniloff.
Daniloff, 52, who was concluding a 5 -year stint as Moscow bureau chief for U.S. News & World Report, was arrested and charged with espionage nine days ago -- one week after U.S. agents in New York arrested Soviet citizen Gennadi Zakharov, a U.N. employee, on suspicion of espionage.
The U.S. government has ruled out a Zakharov-for-Daniloff swap but said the Soviet citizen caught buying classified information could be released to the Soviet embassy pending trial.
In the Barghoorn affair of 1963, the Soviets sought the release of Igor Ivanov from a charge of espionage. Ivanov was a Soviet driver for the Amcor trading company in New York.
But after holding Barghoorn for 16 days, they freed him and he flew immediately home, although the United States did not respond in kind with Ivanov.
Ivanov remained confined to the Soviet residence at Glen Cove, N.Y., for seven years after his 20-year conviction on an espionage charge.
He was allowed to return to the Soviet Union only in 1971 during the first moves toward detente between the superpowers. Three years later, a New Jersey court dismissed his 20-year prison sentence.
The arrest of Barghoorn also was similar to Daniloff's. An unidentified young man had thrust a roll of newspapers into the professor's hand outside his hotel the day before he was scheduled to leave the Soviet Union.
Daniloff accepted a sealed package from a longtime Soviet aquaintance during a walk in a park in Moscow.
Harold Stoessel, a former undersecretary of state, said Barghoorn had been traveling extensively, 'working on a book and some articles' and, like Daniloff, spoke fluent Russian.
'He got out of his car at the Metropol hotel, somebody came up and shoved a bunch of newspapers into his arms. He took them and six guys came up and arrested him,' Stoessel said.
In 1978, American businessman Francis Jay Crawford was arrested for spying, was tried, convicted but given a five-year suspended sentence for smuggling. He was exchanged for two Soviet U.N. employees arrested three weeks earlier on espionage charges.
