He Keeps Israel Tuned In to the World : Broadcasting: Gulf War shines a spotlight on the nation’s king of electronic information, ruling by satellite dish and shortwave antenna.

When war broke out in the Persian Gulf, the American public heard the news from CNN, the British public from the BBC and the Israeli public from a kindly, balding man in corduroy slippers reporting from his modest home in the heart of Tel Aviv.

Mickey Gurdus, dubbed “the Eyes and Ears of Israel” by the local press, rules by satellite dish and shortwave antenna over an electronic empire that stretches across the globe.

Ensconced in a black swivel chair and surrounded by an array of equipment as complex as a jet’s cockpit, he twirls dials and punches remote-control buttons that can take him from Baghdad Radio to Chinese television to the airwaves of Lithuania or the U.S. Air Force in the gulf.

Far more than a glorified ham radio hack, Gurdus, 46, describes himself as a special breed of reporter.

“I’m an electronic journalist,” he said. “A political correspondent has his sources in the State Department and the White House; a military correspondent would have his sources in the Pentagon, and my sources are in the electronics.”

Listening in on these electronic sources, Gurdus knew hours before the United States launched its attack on Iraq that it was about to begin, he said, and told his Voice of Israel listeners that “the climax is approaching.”

When the attack actually began, he did a masterful job of mixing sound bites of explosions and nervous reports from CNN correspondents with his own instant translations from American, European and Arab broadcasts.

“He was at his peak,” said his wife, Bilhah Gurdus. “Everyone was stammering and didn’t know what to do, and Mickey announced that it had started and went on from there.”

The gulf attack was far from his first scoop.

Gurdus picked up exclusive information on the coup in Cyprus in 1974, on the failed American attempt to rescue the hostages in Iran and on a whole series of hijackings.

Once, he recalled with a grimace, his skill at homing in on aviation channels brought him an unwanted exclusive: Terrorists were torturing hostages in the cockpit of the plane they had hijacked, and he could hear their screams.

On Monday, Gurdus caught a British Broadcasting Co. report on one of his five television sets showing American and British pilots who had been taken prisoner by the Iraqis reciting their apparently forced speeches of contrition on Iraqi Television.

He grabbed the phone.

“Hi, this is Mickey. Have we had the tapes yet of the pilots taken prisoner?”

Within minutes, he was on the air, reeling off a summary of what the pilots had said from quickly scribbled notes and slipping in a recording of their droning, unnatural voices.

He spoke with his lips kissing the microphone, his mellow voice breaking slightly after almost a week of nearly round-the-clock broadcasts, and without bothering to turn down the babble coming from the televisions and some of his 10 shortwave and VHF radios.

Gurdus is so deeply caught up in the constant barrage of information that he last left the house in early December, Bilhah Gurdus said. He takes no vacations and generally eats in the broadcast room as well. But she and his two daughters, Keren and Tali, can visit him in the room whenever they want, she said.

“Our life is different from most people,” Bilhah acknowledged. But she is so proud of her husband, she added, that it is small sacrifice to receive a stream of visitors at home rather than going out.

“I always knew he was a special person,” she said, “but this crisis, he has really reached a new high. He has become an international institution; he’s not just for Israel.”

Gurdus is under contract to the Israeli Broadcasting Authority, but he also works for NBC as a monitor and for an American oil and metals trading firm that needs to keep an eye on the Arab world.

And he is bombarded by phone calls from around the world. When Iraqi missiles hit Tel Aviv last week, he ended up describing the city’s situation through the mouthpiece of his gas mask to callers from America and Australia.

Although Gurdus has been immersed nonstop in current events for more than 20 years, he has none of the jaded alienation of some old news hounds.

When footage of American Patriot missiles shooting down Iraqi Scuds came on the BBC, he exclaimed with glee, “Oh! What a picture!” And when a report showed that night’s attack by Soviet soldiers on the Latvian Interior Ministry, he clucked his tongue four times in disapproval.

“What a world,” he said.

He is outspoken, too, about the Gulf War.

“I would throw an atom bomb on Iraq, I swear to God,” he said. “Why should one American soldier die for this son of a bitch? The Americans should wipe it out with every possible weapon. Did you see those poor pilots? All Iraq is not worth one American life.”

In many ways, Gurdus--who speaks English, Hebrew, Arabic, French, Russian and Polish--does alone what the BBC Monitoring Service outside London does with hundreds of people, and then some. He twiddles his way through the radio traffic of Aeroflot, the Soviet airline, to Israeli police radio--”I always tune to them when there’s a bombing”--to an amateur broadcasting from inside the Lithuanian Parliament.

“I’ve developed the skill of gathering information from a maximum of sources,” he said.

The son of a reporter for the Agence France-Presse news agency in Israel, Gurdus began fiddling with radios as a child, and studied political science with an eye to becoming a journalist like his father.

He still lives in the Tel Aviv building where he was born. According to Bilhah, he does not own a suit or a tie and, to her horror, has appeared on foreign television in his bathrobe.

He refuses to be filmed or photographed by the Israeli press, choosing to preserve his anonymity. When Israeli Television airs his reports, it uses only the disembodied audio from “our monitor, Michael Gurdus.”

It appears inevitable that Gurdus will be snapped up by a Western network but, for now, he is needed by his Israeli listeners.

“During the bombing,” he said, “lots of people called and said, ‘Listen, Mickey, please tell us something. We’re scared.’ ”