Raghida Dergham had just one small request, quite a reasonable request under the circumstances. "If you have a message to deliver" Dergham said, "write an Editorial. please, be our guest. Your message will be heard, I promise you. But no more mail bombs, okay?

Dergham is the United Nations correspondent for Al-Hayat, the Arab-language paper that is all of a sudden getting bombs in the mail. A total of 13 letter bombs have shown up this month at the paper's offices in Washington, London and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Four were discovered at the United Nations on Monday, addressed to Al-Hayat.
Talk about rattling the nerves of a UN bureau chief: Dergham wasn't pretending yesterday. "Only a fool wouldn't take this seriously," she said, looking up from her cluttered desk as she filed her story for today. "I trust - hopefully - this is the end of it."

Many people who work in the news business live lives of theoretical danger. We cover wars. We go to bad neighborhoods. We write stories about vicious gangsters and thugs, and nothing bad ever happens to any of us as a result. Almost never anyway. Then we block out of our minds the bad things that do occur.

We block them out because we have to. Otherwise, the next time a kid is shot at a bodega in South Jamaica, I'm staying back at the office instead of getting on the train. But there is a difference, a big difference, between this theoretical kind of danger that all of us learn to repress - and the bomb-in-the-mail reality that Raghida Dergham is living with this week.

She is no neophyte. She's been covering the United Nations for 20 years now - since 1989 as the correspondent for Al-Hayat. She was just elected president of the UN Correspondents Association. And her paper is no ideological rag. It is, instead, known for being the captive to no nation or group - fair-minded, balanced and professionally prepared. But yesterday, as UN security officers were triple-checking every package and letter by hand, Dergham was still in her office, going about her day, doing what she could to separate herself mentally from the threat. "You have to promise me," she said. "You will not write about my personal life. This is not about me personally. The letters weren't even addressed to me. This is about Al-Hayat." Fair enough.

But still, all day people kept asking, friends on the phone from overseas, colleagues dropping by her desk: Who on Earth might want you maimed or killed? "We have no suspicions - beyond what we read like everyone else," Dergham said. "We have no information that this has anything to do with any particular group."

Choosing her words with obvious care, she brushed aside what was fast becoming the conventional wisdom of the day: That supporters of Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman were Al-Hayat's anonymous pen pals. "Yes, we covered the World Trade Center case," she said when asked about this. "Of course we did. But we at Al-Hayat do not have any reason to suspect those spoken of as terrorists in that case or convicted in that trial. We have no reason to point a finger at them. If the authorities know something like that, they have not told us." In truth, it wasn't the authorities who saved Dergham's life. She pretty much did that herself.

Almost two weeks after the first bombs reached the other Al-Hayat offices, no one, it seems, was paying much attention to the paper's mail in New York. Not the UN security people. Not the post office. Not the city police. It was only Monday, after one bomb blew in London, that Dergham made a heads-up call to UN security - and the four bombs were discovered in her mail. Several of Dergham's UN colleagues sounded quite irate about this yesterday.
"Can you believe that?" one of them said after a special security briefing for the in-house press. "All this time since the bombs arrived in Washington - and they don't even check New York until she makes a call?"

It was an understandable sentiment, one that UN security supervisors never quite answered yesterday. But it was not a complaint Dergham was willing to echo. "I have confidence in the security here," she said simply. What she did grow animated about was the question of why anyone would start sending bombs to Al-Hayat. "Al-Hayat has been a rare and unique forum," she said. "So many different points of view. Who is this, and what is the message? What is the point of sending a bomb and not explaining why?"

That answer, of course, could be a while in coming.

In the meantime, the UN bureau chief said, she's counting herself lucky to be alive. Counting herself lucky - and giving credit where credit is due. "God did this," she said. "Seriously. I'm very convinced of that. I am not a religious woman. But I am spiritual enough to know that God did this. I was alert enough to make the call before those letters reached my hands or the hands of anyone else.

For this, I say, "Thank God, and I really mean that - literally."