I was not mistreated physically, and even kept notes of the questions and answers to the annoyance of the two KGB interrogators. "This is not a press conference, Mr. Toth!" one exploded angrily, but the level of the vocal abuse got no worse. Trips to the toilet and requests for drinking water were granted, in time and grudgingly, but nonetheless granted.
The initial session dealt with parapsychology and other science-related stories I'd written during three years in Moscow. Then the questioning turned to Shcharansky, who had been arrested four months earlier and charged with anti-Soviet propaganda and espionage, according to Soviet newspapers.
Since all of my relations with Shcharansky were open, I answered all questions openly, and signed an account of the question-and-answer sessions. Besides being told I had no choice--"you do not carry a diplomatic passport," as my interrogators repeated several times--my hope was that the Soviets would recognize that Shcharansky might be guilty of anti-Soviet propaganda but not of espionage, which carried much more severe penalties. Shcharansky's role as spokesman for the Helsinki group and for Jewish refuseniks had made anti-Soviet propaganda an obvious charge against him for at least the previous two years.
But in the end, after 16 months of incarceration before his trial, Shcharansky was convicted on both counts, and got 10 years for spying and three years for propaganda. After his release last February, he said the signed accounts of my interrogation were accurate and had played no significant role in his trial.
But Shcharansky's tragic ordeal in prisons and labor camps was still ahead in mid-June, 1977, while mine was largely over. After three sessions at Lefortovo which lasted a total of 13 hours, our passports were returned by the Soviets, and we were told we were free to leave the Soviet Union, which we promptly did. I was not expelled, and in fact have returned once to Moscow on a reporting assignment.
In retrospect, the most frightening single episode was the careening car ride with the KGB arresting officers. It is standard part of such arrests, I was later told, perhaps deliberately intended to frighten the victim. It did me. All I saw was oncoming trucks and trolley cars as we raced the wrong way down one-way streets and ran red lights at full speed.
Later, when U.S. officials said I might face a jail term of two months to two years, I certainly was anxious about my situation. But it was not the same physical fear as in the car with four large, sweaty KGB agents whose adrenalin had presumably been elevated in anticipation of the arrest.
In retrospect, too, I was furious at the Soviets for arresting me and putting me and my family--our children were 7 through 13 years old then--through the trauma of that final week in Moscow.
The use of such a flimsy pretext as parapsychology to seize me seemed particularly insulting, but at the same time, I was consoled that no one could possibly believe I had been a U.S. spy stealing ESP secrets. No one did, except maybe for the few who believe in parapsychology.
But from the mail I received, and in a few articles, particularly in left-wing publications, the Soviet charge that I had been a spy took brief but disturbing root. And even in more credible publications, the seed planted by the Soviets sprouted and expanded with innuendoes that made me want to sue--until I recognized that it is almost impossible for me as a "public figure" to successfully sue for libel.
I hope that Nick Daniloff's recollections of his final days in Moscow will be as relatively benign as mine are now, and that Americans will accept, when the Soviets produce no proof to the contrary, that the Kremlin needs no kernel of truth to make espionage charges that serve its political ends.
