THE AGITATOR.(Oriana Fallaci)(Interview)

"Yesterday, I was hysterical," the Italian journalist and novelist Oriana Fallaci said. She was telling me a story about a local dog owner and the liberties he'd allowed his animal to take in front of Fallaci's town house, on the Upper East Side. Big mistake. "I no longer have the energy to get really angry, like I used to," she added. It called to mind what the journalist Robert Scheer said about Fallaci after interviewing her for Playboy, in 1981: "For the first time in my life, I found myself feeling sorry for the likes of Khomeini, Qaddafi, the Shah of Iran, and Kissinger--all of whom had been the objects of her wrath--the people she described as interviewing 'with a thousand feelings of rage.' "

For two decades, from the midnineteen-sixties to the mid-nineteen-eighties, Fallaci was one of the sharpest political interviewers in the world. Her subjects were among the world's most powerful figures: Yasir Arafat, Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi, Haile Selassie, Deng Xiaoping. Henry Kissinger, who later wrote that his 1972 interview with her was "the single most disastrous conversation I have ever had with any member of the press," said that he had been flattered into granting it by the company he'd be keeping as part of Fallaci's "journalistic pantheon." It was more like a collection of pelts: Fallaci never left her subjects unskinned.

Fallaci's manner of interviewing was deliberately unsettling: she approached each encounter with studied aggressiveness, made frequent nods to European existentialism (she often disarmed her subjects with bald questions about death, God, and pity), and displayed a sinuous, crafty intelligence. It didn't hurt that she was petite and beautiful, with straight, smooth hair that she wore parted in the middle or in pigtails; melancholy blue-gray eyes, set off by eyeliner; a cigarette-cured voice; and an adorable Italian accent. During the Vietnam War, she was sometimes photographed in fatigues and a helmet; her rucksack bore handwritten instructions to return her body to the Italian Ambassador "if K.I.A." In these images she looked as slight and vulnerable as a child. When she was shot, in 1968, while reporting on the student demonstrations in Mexico City, and then confined by the police with the wounded and the dying on one floor of an apartment building, the first impulse of the students around her was to protect her; one boy gave her his sweater, in order to cover her face from the drip of a sewage pipe. Her essential toughness never stopped taking people--men, especially--by surprise.

Fallaci's journalism, at first conducted for the Italian magazine L'Europeo and later published in translation throughout the world, was infused with a "mythic sense of political evil," as the writer Vivian Gornick once put it--an almost adolescent aversion to power, which suited the temperament of the times. As Fallaci explained in her preface to "Interview with History," a 1976 collection of Q. & A.s, "Whether it comes from a despotic sovereign or an elected president, from a murderous general or a beloved leader, I see power as an inhuman and hateful phenomenon. . . . I have always looked on disobedience toward the oppressive as the only way to use the miracle of having been born." In Fallaci's interview with Kissinger, she told him that he had become known as "Nixon's mental wet nurse," and lured him into boasting that Americans admired him because he "always acted alone"--like "the cowboy who leads the wagon train by riding ahead alone on his horse, the cowboy who rides all alone into the town." Political cartoonists mercilessly lampooned this remark, and, according to Kissinger's memoirs, the quote soured his relations with Nixon. (Kissinger claimed that she had taken his words out of context.) But the most remarkable moment in the interview came when Fallaci bluntly asked him, about Vietnam, "Don't you find, Dr. Kissinger, that it's been a useless war?," and Kissinger began his reply with the words "On this, I can agree."

Fallaci's interview with Khomeini, which appeared in the Times on October 7, 1979, soon after the Iranian revolution, was the most exhilarating example of her pugilistic approach. Fallaci had travelled to Qum to try to secure an interview with Khomeini, and she waited ten days before he received her. She had followed instructions from the new Islamist regime, and arrived at the Ayatollah's home barefoot and wrapped in a chador. Almost immediately, she unleashed a barrage of questions about the closing of opposition newspapers, the treatment of Iran's Kurdish minority, and the summary executions performed by the new regime. When Khomeini defended these practices, noting that some of the people killed had been brutal servants of the Shah, Fallaci demanded, "Is it right to shoot the poor prostitute or a woman who is unfaithful to her husband, or a man who loves another man?" The Ayatollah answered with a pair of remorseless metaphors. "If your finger suffers from gangrene, what do you do? Do you let the whole hand, and then the body, become filled with gangrene, or do you cut the finger off? What brings corruption to an entire country and its people must be pulled up like the weeds that infest a field of wheat."

Fallaci continued posing indignant questions about the treatment of women in the new Islamic state. Why, she asked, did Khomeini compel women to "hide themselves, all bundled up," when they had proved their equal stature by helping to bring about the Islamic revolution? Khomeini replied that the women who "contributed to the revolution were, and are, women with the Islamic dress"; they weren't women like Fallaci, who "go around all uncovered, dragging behind them a tail of men." A few minutes later, Fallaci asked a more insolent question: "How do you swim in a chador?" Khomeini snapped, "Our customs are none of your business. If you do not like Islamic dress you are not obliged to wear it. Because Islamic dress is for good and proper young women." Fallaci saw an opening, and charged in. "That's very kind of you, Imam. And since you said so, I'm going to take off this stupid, medieval rag right now." She yanked off her chador.

In a recent e-mail, Fallaci said of Khomeini, "At that point, it was he who acted offended. He got up like a cat, as agile as a cat, an agility I would never expect in a man as old as he was, and he left me. In fact, I had to wait for twenty-four hours (or forty-eight?) to see him again and conclude the interview." When Khomeini let her return, his son Ahmed gave Fallaci some advice: his father was still very angry, so she'd better not even mention the word "chador." Fallaci turned the tape recorder back on and immediately revisited the subject. "First he ...