For a newsman in a foreign country, the biggest problem usually is finding a way to send his story home. Thus, the first thing a correspondent learns wherever he goes is the location of the nearest cable office. But for Buenos Aires Bureau Chief Charles Eisendrath, a TIME correspondent since 1968, this classic rule was impossible to follow last week. Less than 24 hours after arriving in Santiago, Chile, for a long-awaited interview with President Salvador Allende Gossens, Eisendrath found a government collapsing and Allende dead -literally across the street from his lodgings in the Carrera-Sheraton Hotel. More than 48 hours passed before he could get a message out, and when he did it was brief: "I can't go anywhere. They're still shooting outside."

Tanks, in fact, were advancing past his window -just across Constitution Square from the beleaguered Moneda, the Presidential Palace -and raking the hotel's fac,ade with gunfire; Chilean army fighter-bombers were streaking overhead. For a while, guests were ordered into the basement for safety; when Eisendrath returned to his room, he found machine gun bullets lodged in his ceiling.

As one of the few foreign journalists in Santiago, Eisendrath had a unique story to tell but almost no way to tell it. Rio Bureau Chief Rudolph Rauch, having hurried from Brazil to Buenos Aires to be closer to events, tried to phone Eisendrath for two days with no luck. "My principal worry," Rauch said, "was that the extraordinarily tight control imposed on communications by the military junta might keep TIME'S exclusive too exclusive." Adding to that worry were the controls imposed on telephone conversations: "Calls have been limited to three minutes, and are a particularly exquisite form of torture: the three minutes begin as soon as the connection is made. Invariably the person you are calling comes on just in time to shout 'Who's this?' before the operator interrupts to tell you, 'Your three minutes are up. You may say goodbye.'"

Eisendrath got his story out by combining his newsman's instinct with a piece of luck. While traveling, he had taken the phone number of someone living in Mendoza, Argentina (where at least 60 foreign journalists were waiting at week's end to cross the Andes into Chile). Eisendrath gave the number a try. The phone lines were open -and unlimited. Eight pages of dictation later, the Mendoza contact ran to a local cable office and sent the story to Rauch in Buenos Aires. Rauch forwarded it to New York City, where Associate Editor Spencer Davidson wrote the story along with Reporter-Researcher Genevieve Wilson. Chile's military censors later asked Eisendrath for a copy of his report -which he promptly submitted. But by Friday the tension -and the shooting -had vanished, and Eisendrath emerged from the Carrera to walk through the relieved city.

Having been in Chile in the month of August, Rauch provided extensive background material on the present crisis. In one of his files, Rauch reported: "The only thing amusing about Eisendrath's predicament is what some other newsmen made of it. One of them asked Perdn's rival, Ricardo Balbin, whether he felt the U.S. was responsible for the coup. 'After all, a special correspondent for TIME went to Santiago just hours before Allende's downfall,' the journalist explained, 'and doesn't that prove it?'"

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.