World Scoop Spotlights Arab Network : Media: The first report of Kuwait invasion also brings fear of death threats to broadcaster.

Radio newsman Atef Gawad says he felt his heart “bouncing” when, while broadcasting his evening show on Aug. 1, he received a telephone tip that Iraqi troops had just crossed the border heading south.

For 15 minutes, Gawad, the Egyptian-born program director of the Arab Network of America, which has its headquarters here in Maryland, simply sat on the information, trying frantically to get confirmation while teasing his listeners with promises of “a very important announcement” to come soon.

Then he earned a footnote in the chronicles of the Persian Gulf crisis: He scooped the world on the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.

Gawad’s brush with history has brought new fame, to him and to the year-old Arab Network of America, which beams daytime broadcasts to the thousands of Arab-Americans in the Washington metropolitan area from its studios 40 miles from the capital.

It also has left him with a lingering fear--he has received death threats from three Arab-American callers who say that his coverage was biased against Iraq.

“It wasn’t bias,” he said with a shrug. “I was reporting the invasion of a small country.”

Gawad said he did not take the first phone threat too seriously, but the two that followed made him nervous enough to call the FBI. Since then, he has changed his phone number and swapped cars with friends. He varies his route to and from work.

When he awoke one recent morning to find his car missing from the street, he immediately called the police and reported that it probably had been stolen by disgruntled Arab-Americans. He was told it had been towed away because it was illegally parked.

“See what it has done to me?” he said, laughing. “I have become paranoid. I suspect everyone.”

Not many people have heard of the Arab Network, although it recently expanded to provide programming for radio stations in Detroit and Chicago, where there also are large Arab-American communities.

“We are in the boondocks,” Mohammed Bedrawi, the network’s Saudi-born founder and owner, said as he gave directions to a visitor at the network’s small studio in the upper story of a two-story house. “You have to take the mule path.”

The tiny network rents air time. The station here is so inconspicuous that even the staff at the physician’s office below is not sure where it is.

Gawad said he is not sure why he suddenly decided to go ahead with the report, even before receiving the confirmation for which he had been waiting.

“It just seemed the time had come,” he said. “I didn’t know I was the first person in the world to broadcast news of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, but I knew the gravity of the situation. My heart was bouncing.”

Gawad, who holds a doctorate in international relations from the London School of Economics, insists that he anticipated the Iraqi invasion--a claim that few Western officials can credibly make--by carefully monitoring events in the Middle East by means of short-wave radio.

He said that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, in a bellicose speech on July 17, the anniversary of his coup in Iraq, hinted broadly at the coming conflict.

“I looked at the language Saddam Hussein used, and I thought how extremely unusual it was, and I thought to myself it was going to lead to something serious,” Gawad said.

He said that immediately after broadcasting news of the invasion, he called the editor of a Kuwaiti newspaper for comment. It was about 12:30 a.m. Kuwait time, and the editor was skeptical--until he looked out the window and saw Iraqi tanks surrounding his home.

“I woke the poor guy up to war,” Gawad said.

For Gawad, who spent eight years as a broadcast reporter, first at Radio Cairo and then with the British Broadcasting Corp., the thrill of getting a world scoop is still fresh.

“We take great pride in the fact that we broke the news three hours before President Bush was informed--and five hours before CNN reported the story,” he said.