‘We are being stiffed by Eden Pastora.’

Nicaraguan rebel leader Eden Pastora was scheduled to visit KGIL radio in San Fernando for a live interview last week, and I decided to drop by to see the famed Commander Zero and find out what message he had for the audience of “Valley Radio.”

As it turned out, though, I was late by 24 hours, and Pastora didn’t show up at all.

My excuse is easy to explain. In the cool world of print journalism, to find out what’s going on I type a few keystrokes on my computer keyboard and the City News Service budget of coming events comes on the screen before my eyes. That’s what I did last Thursday when I thought the Friday budget should have been out. Either it wasn’t out yet or I simply leafed past it in the electronic filing cabinet without noticing. The item on Commander Zero which I thought was in Friday’s budget was actually in Thursday’s.

So on Friday, just before 9 a.m., I walked into KGIL’s beige block building on Lassen Street, just west of the San Diego Freeway.

I was led through a corridor where the red “On The Air” sign was lighted. Through a window of the broadcaster’s booth, a stout man with a graying beard glanced away from his microphone to look me over.

Around a corner was the newsroom, a tight rectangular space cluttered with newspapers, large electronic equipment, racks of recording cassettes and tangled nodes of wire along the baseboards.

At the back, news editor Ed Ziel, wearing a red Windbreaker, jeans and cowboy boots, was cutting sheets of wire-service copy and arranging the pieces in neat stacks of international, national, regional and local stories.

A young, harried woman stood beside a typewriter, talking on the phone.

“Would it be possible to speak with the senator this morning?” she asked. Her tone deftly combined a polite manner with an almost hysterical sense of urgency.

A strong voice produced a rhythmic background. It was Stan Bohrman, the man in the isolation chamber nearby, live on the radio.

Bohrman is the host of an unusual news program.

Each morning he and the young woman, Lisa Fredlender, arrive about 4 o’clock and read through the day’s newspapers. About 5, she begins calling the people in the news to line up interviews. At 6, Bohrman goes on the air, talking on the phone to whomever Fredlender can produce.

He asks tough, combative questions in a voice that is as hard as steel. But, of course, everything depends on Fredlender, who works in the background.

At the moment there was no one on the phone and Bohrman was ad-libbing on the space shuttle explosion.

The voice was calm, but during a commercial a frantic version of it boomed over an intercom:

“We working on somebody? Pretty soon now, huh?” he asked.

Fredlender was trying to reach Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner to talk about the dismissal of charges against Rep. Bobbi Fiedler (R-Northridge).

“Suddenly he’s unable to come to the phone,” she said in frustration.

Ziel looked up from his typewriter, grinned and depressed the switch on the intercom:

“They said he’s talking to Michael Jackson,” he said, breaking out in laughter.

State Sen. Ed Davis (R-Valencia) wasn’t available either. Fredlender told Bohrman she had Alexander Pope and James Hahn coming up a little later.

“We need something now,” Bohrman bellowed.

She got on the phone.

“Tell him that Senator Watson is coming to the phone,” she said.

“We will be speaking to Senator Diane Watson in a few minutes,” Bohrman said on the air.

“You want to bring me what we’re talking to the senator about?” he pleaded into the intercom. “Don’t leave me hanging anymore.”

During a break, I stepped into Bohrman’s chamber to ask him about Pastora.

Bohrman wore blue jeans and an old white polo shirt that bulged around the middle. He leaned back in his chair with a self-satisfied expression.

He said Pastora, who heads the main force of the contras , would have been one of his most important interviews. And he was ready.

He said he prepared by interviewing a Central American expert in Washington who accused the contras of committing more atrocities than the Sandinista government.

Bohrman invited me to listen to the tape of what happened.

The first whiff of trouble came just before 9 a.m., when Bohrman told his audience: “We are being stiffed by Eden Pastora.”

At 9:27, he burst out: “I’m getting a little hot. I’m trying to control my anger and my temper. I’m not going to get angry on the air.”

Then, about 9:35, Bohrman broke in on the traffic news.

“You wanna hear the latest?” he said. “We just got off the phone with the Pastora people. They haven’t left Costa Mesa. . . . I wouldn’t give one nickel of my tax money to aid the contras of Nicaragua if you came in with the FBI.”

Pastora’s people phoned in while Bohrman was on the phone with City Councilman Ernani Bernardi. Bohrman put the commander on hold.

He got back to him about 10 minutes later and asked an interpreter to first tell the commander: “To honor a commitment is something we consider to be sacrosanct.”

Then, for about 10 minutes, Bohrman grilled Pastora’s interpreter with statements from the contra’s critics. Each was followed by an exchange in Spanish and then a polite denial. Finally, Bohrman hung up to take a call from Supervisor Deane Dana.

Obviously, Commander Zero paid more dearly for his error than I did.