From the Publisher

By Robert L. Miller

"Look, planes!" Fortunately for the TIME staffer accompanying Yasser Arafat on his flight across the Middle East last week, they were not Israeli aircraft, which Arafat charges have recently been trying to ambush him. They were Turkish jet fighters, 16 of them, and they rose in waves to provide a protective escort as Arafat's plane flew over the Iraqi border and into Turkey. The U.S.-made F-16s hugged Arafat's wing tips, and their pilots saluted the Palestinian leader. "They were so close, I could see their eyes," recalls Murray Gart, the TIME senior correspondent on board Arafat's plane.

The encounter came midway through an extraordinary airborne conversation with Arafat that appears in this week's Interview section. Tracking down the P.L.O. leader took months of careful plotting. Gart finally caught up with Arafat at his heavily guarded compound four miles from the center of Baghdad. While he had interviewed Arafat on nine previous occasions, none had prepared Gart for the three-day, eight-hour talkathon that followed. Nor was he ready for the late-night meal at Arafat's table that featured five different preparations of lamb or the motorcade that careered through Baghdad at 80 m.p.h. Says Gart: "That was about as close to the Indy 500 as anything I've been in."

In Turkey, Gart and Arafat were joined by assistant managing editor Karsten Prager, who also had interviewed Arafat repeatedly while serving as TIME's Middle East bureau chief in the mid-1970s. "Arafat hasn't changed much," says Prager, "despite some bitter years since then. He has an amazing ability to bounce back from defeat and make himself essential to the Palestinian cause." Still eager to talk, Arafat later bumped an aide and a bodyguard from the return flight to Baghdad -- again with the Turkish air force escorting -- to make room for Prager, Gart and photographer Thomas Hartwell. For Gart, the extended interview provided "one of the more memorable experiences" in 40 years of journalism. "It was like being on a magic carpet," he says, "but I wouldn't have wanted to be there too much longer."