An Occupational Hazard

The circumstances of Nicholas Daniloff's arrest last week were all too familiar to veterans of Moscow's Western press corps, who routinely endure unsettling if less serious encounters with the KGB. TIME Moscow Bureau Chief James O. Jackson, who has spent 6 1/2 years in the Soviet capital during three tours of duty, describes the difficulties of being an American correspondent in the Soviet Union:

Lyolya was a scruffy little fellow with a ragged beard who talked in conspiratorial whispers, exhaling a fetid odor of garlic, vodka and bad Soviet tobacco. He told Westerners he had been a leader of the Komsomol, the Communist youth group, at a higher-education institute but was expelled from the organization and the school when he spoke out against the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. He was Jewish and had applied to emigrate, he said, but his parents were influential party members who opposed his departure and blocked his exit visa. He always wore a shabby old U.S. Army fatigue jacket. Reporters called him the "urban guerrilla."

Lyolya often telephoned foreign correspondents to ask for meetings, using prearranged codes.

"How's your wife?" he would ask.

"Er, she's, uh, not very well," the correspondent would reply.

"You remember what that means? By the toy store in two hours. See you there."

Those meetings with Lyolya, usually in front of the big Dom Igrushki toy store on Kutuzovsky Prospekt, sometimes seemed more like a TV sitcom than what they were and still are: an essential and sometimes perilous part of a Moscow correspondent's job. Moscow's Lyolyas -- what few are left after years of KGB crackdowns -- carry news of dissidents, refuseniks, political prisoners, religious activists, divided families and the other sad human detritus of a totalitarian state. The news is usually depressing, time consuming to gather, and often of too little import to warrant reporting. But still it must be covered.

Meetings with the Lyolyas are the occasions when correspondents most frequently come into indirect contact with the KGB's Second Main Directorate, the unit in charge of watching -- and sometimes entrapping -- foreigners. The encounters are always a little unnerving. KGB agents often tail known dissidents to watch and photograph those they meet. Or the KGB will suborn the dissidents, compelling them to pass on incriminating material or encourage incriminating activity -- as probably happened in the Daniloff case. Sometimes supposed dissidents are actually KGB agents or paid informers assigned to compromise correspondents.

Until the Daniloff arrest, surveillance of Westerners had often seemed more comical than dangerous. The KGB's imagination is limited to the shabbier vices, and the easy way to avoid being compromised was to steer clear of the usual peccadilloes: sexual misbehavior, currency speculation and smuggling.

Still, the secret police seem never to tire of watching -- and listening -- for a weakness. Foreign reporters assume, usually correctly, that their walls are bugged and their telephones tapped. Listening or homing devices can be hidden in their cars. Westerners are followed on picnics with their families, on walks with their dogs, on trips to the market. Joggers sometimes notice a drab sedan creeping along the curb; KGB agents do not share the American mania for fitness.

If the surveillance is often ludicrously obvious, possibly it is meant to be. Fear can be as effective as blackmail. But intimidation can cut both ways. One memorable January evening a few years ago, four American correspondents attended a farewell party for a refusenik who had at long last received permission to emigrate to Israel. When they left the celebration, the reporters were surrounded by a gang of men -- obvious KGB agents, judging by their suits, overcoats and good fur hats. The agents cursed and shoved the journalists, sending two of them sprawling into the curbside snow. As the shaken reporters picked themselves up, all but one of the gang disappeared down a side street. The straggler, a tall, beefy young man wearing a karakul hat, followed the correspondents as they headed for their car a block away.

Suddenly one of the Westerners mastered his fright and whispered, "Stop, let him pass." The four came to a halt in the middle of the sidewalk. The KGB man, clearly unprepared for the maneuver, walked past them. The hound had become the hare. "Now let's catch up and embarrass him," said the correspondent. The reporters began jogging toward the KGB agent, who looked around, startled, and set off at a dead run. Pedestrians turned to stare at the sight: middle-aged men dressed in suits and overcoats pounding down a snowy sidewalk like bankers after a bus.

After half a block, there was indeed a bus stop. The KGB man leaped aboard a trolley as the door was starting to close. As it pulled away, the journalists caught a glimpse of the agent's face peering through a frost- rimmed window, pop-eyed with terror. He had been as frightened as the reporters.

Old hands like to pass such stories along to newcomers. They complain about Moscow's dilapidated housing, the lack of fresh vegetables, and the sense of isolation. "What can the KGB do to us," they ask, "throw us out?"

But then the Soviets put Nicholas Daniloff in an isolation cell, took away his shoelaces and belt, and told him he might be charged with espionage. The Moscow veterans dusted off their copies of the Soviet criminal code and looked up Article 65. Espionage committed by a foreigner, it says, "shall be punished by deprivation of freedom for a term of seven to 15 years with confiscation of property, with or without additional exile for a term of two to five years, or by death." The situation seems a little less funny than it used to.