The Big Story That Got Away : Journalism: When reporter Oriana Fallaci went to Saudi Arabia, she wanted ‘to seeee! And to feeel!’ All she saw was the inside of the hotel lobby.

When right minds fail to come to terms and order breaks down and reproduces into chaos, when nations face off across flat plains and opposing citizens march into fields of blood, she is there to record the trauma, a diminutive, graying, wisecracking, chain-smoking raconteur of war.

Oriana Fallaci has complained about Fidel Castro’s body odor and angrily ripped off her veil in the face of an insult from the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini; recorded suffering in Vietnam, Lebanon, Greece, Palestine and Argentina; documented the most intimate thoughts of presidents, revolutionaries, holy men and kings.

But it is perhaps safe to say that none of these things could be expected to prepare her for Saudi Arabia. Or it for her.

On assignment for Italy’s Corriere della Sera, she arrived in the desert kingdom last week--a tiny journalistic cruise missile launched into the middle of what already had become a media war-within-a-war.

There are no happy journalists in Saudi Arabia. Dispatched in swarming hordes in full Banana Republic gear to cover the Persian Gulf War, most have been left smoking and fuming in the coffee shop at the Dhahran International Hotel, foreclosed from the action by Pentagon rules that limit coverage to small troops of combat pools designated to visit the war and send censored dispatches back to their jealous and miserable colleagues.

Nor have many of the unhappy hacks ventured far into Saudi society, an austere, heavily religious, deeply traditional realm where men don’t look at unveiled women, alcohol is forbidden, time passes leisurely and untroubled by deadlines, and a raised voice is the equivalent of a slap in the face.

Enter Fallaci, stage left. Checking into the luxurious Hotel Gulf Meridien in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province, she announced she wanted to go to the front.

At stage right, meet Khalid Myeena, an influential Saudi newspaper editor who announced he would steer her past restrictions that had bedeviled her less estimable colleagues and get her within hailing distance of a tank. As a bonus, the accommodating Myeena offered to throw in an interview with a mid-level Saudi prince.

What happened next had little to do with war, peace, politics or diplomacy and everything to do with two cultures colliding in the lobby of a surf-side hotel. It was a small human drama played out between the U.S. military’s attempt to black out early coverage of the war and the media’s attempts to bring the war home nonetheless.

Myeena ended up in a hospital with heart palpitations. Fallaci wound up pounding her head against a wall and threatening to kill herself to provide news for her newspaper absent any tidings from the front--all while armies from more than 25 nations prepared to fight to the finish a few hundred miles to the north.

“As for me, you can say the poor, wrecked editor of the Arab News suffered high blood pressure and palpitations, honest to God,” Myeena said, trying to set down the tale for history.

Fallaci grimaced at the very idea of retelling the story.

“Please,” she said, “in front of a glass of foamy beer one day I can tell you what they did to me, as a journalist, as a woman. You would throw up at what this man did to me. But we are at the eve of a tragedy.”

It is perhaps outrageous that most of the hundreds of journalists assembled in Dhahran found it unthinkable that Fallaci, shortly after her arrival, demanded to be escorted to Khafji, a small town on the Saudi-Kuwait border that had been the site of the first minor land battle of the war.

A few journalists had braved military checkpoints and deportation threats to sneak into the city, but Fallaci’s request sounded novel nonetheless.

Myeena, captivated by the idea of aiding a journalistic legend, told Fallaci he would use his connections to arrange a military escort. The car, he said, would arrive at 6:30 the following morning, and Myeena and one of his reporters would accompany her.

Off camera, several important realities of the Arab personality were set to come into play. One is that the ever-polite Saudi despises the idea of conflict or public confrontation and rarely will refuse someone face to face, despite the apparently impossible request. Another is that many Saudis, and Myeena in particular, rarely go to bed until an hour or two before dawn; rising at 6:30 is practically unthinkable.

Thus, perhaps Fallaci should have known there was virtually no chance of both Myeena and a car showing up at 6:30, let alone a car headed for the front in defiance of Saudi and Pentagon regulations. But how could she have known?

And so it was that Fallaci was in the lobby of the Meridien at 6:30 one morning last week and Myeena wasn’t.

“She wanted two things,” recalled Saeed Hader, a journalist on Myeena’s staff appointed to help with Project Fallaci. “No. 1, she wanted to be first into Khafji, and No. 2, she wanted to see, and to feel.”

When he says this last, it is with an Italian accent: “To seeee! And to feeel!”

“I asked her, what is it she wanted to see? I think she’s not sure, actually. She was complaining about the complacency here, she had an idea that because she’s Oriana Fallaci, she should be the first to go into Kuwait.

“She wants to see Americans, but she doesn’t want to go on pools. ‘Oriana Fallaci on combat pools? No, no, no, no, no!’ Also, ‘I don’t write small stories, I write big stories! Big! Big!’

“Really,” Hader confessed, “it was a big shock. Because Khalid called me and asked if I know Oriana Fallaci. I said if I don’t know Oriana Fallaci, I don’t have any right to call myself journalist. She interviewed Indira Gandhi, she interviewed Khomeini for six hours. But there’s some basic decency within our society, and she crossed that decency.”

Fallaci declined to talk publicly about the details of her arrangements for the trip, but it was clear her newspaper had reserved an entire page of the next day’s edition for the Khafji saga. Thus it was no surprise that a journalist might be upset when 6:30 rolled around and there was no escort and no Myeena.

An hour later, a police escort apparently showed up and announced that he had orders to take her not to Khafji, but to a relatively uninteresting coastal town much farther south. Fallaci tried calling Myeena’s room, but there was no answer; after dozens of rings, there was still no response.

She tried pounding on his door; still no answer. She got in the car and drove to his office, “to see if we were hiding there,” as he tells it.

She came back to the hotel and pounded on the door again, drawing occupants from every fifth-floor room to the corridor. Only Myeena’s door remained stubbornly closed. She grabbed the hotel housekeeper and ordered him to unlock the door, but when he tried, he found it bolted from the inside.

Furious, Fallaci returned to the lobby, by now hours too late to set out on the trip.

Eventually, Myeena strolled in. Telling it now, he recalls her greeting, approximating an Italian voice raised to fever pitch and holding up his hands dramatically on either side of his head:

“ ‘Khaleeed!’ she said. ‘Khaleeed! I must have a story!’

“She was running around and wailing and ranting, and really, I was scared. I was going to hide behind pillar and post, and she kept screaming, ‘Khaleeed! Khaleeed!’ In fact, everybody was looking at me. Had she been younger, you would have thought that she’s three months pregnant and I’m running away from her, believe me.

“I was sitting very quiet, you know, very sedate. But then, I was really getting upset, and at that time I was feeling embarrassed. I mean, doesn’t she know I’m the editor of five newspapers? I’ve never had a woman treat me like that, anywhere in the world. You can quote this Egyptian person who came up to me and said, ‘Doesn’t she know you’re a VIP?’

“I tell you,” he said sadly, “the myth of Oriana Fallaci is shattered.”

Myeena says he went straight to the hospital. Fallaci had to call her paper in Milan and explain why there was no story.

Later, she rejected the idea of recounting the clash between Italy and Saudi Arabia, between military restrictions and the public right to know, that had been one of the first real battles of the war.

“There is an attack that’s going to take place, thousands of people are going to die, a tragedy is going to occur, and you are spending time on despicable people,” she sniffed.

“I knew when I came that it would be very tough. I knew the conditions under which we all would work, so I was not in a condition to be caught by surprise. And yet when I was here, I was paralyzed by the surprise. It was too much for me.

“I couldn’t believe that journalists would be here to sign, put their name on the stories which had been practically written by the military. I mean, this was against what America has always stood for. I mean, the freedom of thought, the freedom of press and freedom of reporting.”

Fallaci recalled her trip to Hanoi in 1969, when, she said, North Vietnamese officials had restricted her movements, would not allow her to travel to the front, and had carefully selected the soldiers whom she could interview.

“I was horrified by this,” she said. “It was more than censorship, so terrible, it’s like a cancer. Everybody in my family die of cancer. You say cancer, I shiver. You say censorship, I shiver. And that was my deepest experience in censorship and incapability, was North Vietnam. I am living the same experience again, period. I have nothing to add.”

Journalists, she said, are capable of self-censorship, of traveling to restricted areas, interviewing soldiers and avoiding in their reports any material that might threaten military security. Instead, she complained, governments have taken to conducting their wars in private, shielding the public from the painful details of its own worst tragedies.

“In historical terms, this goes back to the Falklands War. It was Thatcher. The Falklands war is a ghost war for me,” she said, referring to former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. “I don’t know what happened. Who are these English soldiers who went with (the ocean liner) Queen Elizabeth and landed there and died there? Who were they? We know nothing about them. We never saw them, never heard their voice, we never reported anything about them. I felt offended, beside myself. See?

“And then they did the same thing with Grenada . . . and Panama. . . . They saw they could do very well without us, and in a major war like this, it’s a crime against history.”

Fallaci checked out of the Meridien two days later and headed for the Saudi capital of Riyadh, where, at least, there were people to interview, briefings to attend, she said; no more being urged to rewrite dispatches from combat pools, no more waiting for the elusive ride north.

Myeena came back from the hospital with blood-pressure medicine, clung a few days to his hotel room, and was seen at dinner a few nights later none the worse for wear.

And somewhere, miles and miles away, hundreds of thousands of allied forces moved north into Kuwait.