Arnaud de Borchgrave looked over the mezzanine-level brass railing to the newsroom below, saying: ”I see myself as the captain of the ship, and it`s my job to stay on the bridge.”

The veteran foreign correspondent, who covered 17 wars in 30 years, is fighting a war of his own, a battle against what he views as the communist menace and the ”terminal naivete” of the American press.

”It`s a never-ending battle, a war of words, a war of ideas,” he says.

His vessel, though, is more a dinghy than a destroyer.

In March, De Borchgrave, 58, who co-authored a best-selling novel called

”The Spike,” which portrayed the Western media as dupes of Soviet propaganda, became editor-in-chief of the Washington Times.

The paper was set up in 1982 by New World communications to be a

”conservative alternative” to the Washington Post. The company is an affiliate of the Unification Church, founded by Rev. Sun Myung Moon, serving a prison term for federal income tax evasion.

De Borchgrave, who spent 25 years roaming the world for Newsweek magazine, calls his and the goal of the paper`s founders a ”coincidence of mission.”

His sense of mission may explain why he is virtually living in the office, sometimes running out of his office-bedroom to remake the paper after midnight.

But it does not explain how a man who sometimes does not leave the building for days still manages to have what is referred to as ”the tan.”

The dapper, balding, Belgian-by-birth has been permanently and mysteriously golden brown for decades, according to long-time observers.

But the tan is just one of the many legends that surround De Borchgrave, whose stature and hereditary title, which he renounced when he became an American citizen, led to his nickname as the ”Short Count.”

In his three-month tenure as editor, De Borchgrave has shown the same ability to attract attention that he did as a foreign correspondent, when his escapades were a favorite topic of conversation among fellow journalists gathered at the end of the day in hotel bars of various world hot spots.

Shortly after taking the editor`s job De Borchgrave announced the newspaper would add $1 million to the bounty for information leading to the whereabouts of Nazi war criminal Joseph Mengele.

And in April when the U.S. House of Representatives denied aid to the rebel fighters trying to overthrow the Nicaraguan government, De Borchgrave, who champions the contras` cause, called for a worldwide fundraising effort. The Unification Church agreed to contribute $100,000 to kick off the fund.

De Borchgrave pursues communism, ”liberal” bias in the media and exclusives for the Washington Times with the same single-mindedness he brought to his pursuit of world leaders in 25 years with Newsweek.

He sleeps at the newspaper–he says just four hours a night–on a sofa-bed and showers and shaves in a private bath off his office. He does his morning exercises while watching the early morning television news in his office.

One office wall has been turned into a personal picture gallery: De Borchgrave in some of the combat fatigues resembling those of a dozen nations that he kept hanging in an apartment in Geneva, from which he could dash to the airport and race toward the latest shooting war; De Borchgrave frolicking with an inflatable toy at poolside with King Hussein of Jordan; at the Khyber Pass with rifle-toting Afghan tribesmen; the wounded war correspondent (a shrapnel nick) ”awaiting evacuation by chopper,” according to the hand-written caption, at battle for Hill 400 between U.S. marines and North Vietnamese army troops near the DMZ in 1966.

Throughout his career, De Borchgrave was as famous for his style and self-promotion as for his scoops. De Borchgrave dismisses the concentration on his persona rather than his performance as ”jealousy.”

”People were always talking about `the tan` and the way I went to the best parties. But black tie, white tie or combat fatigues, I was working,” he said. ”I`d come up with an excuse to go to the bathroom every 30 minutes at a party to make notes on what I`d been told.”

”Sure, there were pictures in fancy magazines with the Aga Khan on his yacht off Sardinia. But, my god, I was working!”

”It`s very easy to make sport of him,” says Nicholas Proffitt, former Saigon and Beirut bureau chief for Newsweek. ”But there were few publications that wouldn`t have liked to have had him or someone like him.

”Nobody ever had a correspondent who worked harder than Arnaud. He worked incredible hours. He had a single-mindedness of purpose getting to a source for an interview.”

And it paid off countless times over the years for De Borchgrave and Newsweek as he pioneered back-to-back interviews between Egyptian and Israeli leaders long before Walter Cronkite and Barbara Walters.

Critics said he was too liberal letting sources set the ground rules for interviews. His intelligence sources and his CIA sources were so good, according to the critics, because he accepted as gospel everything they told him.

”I would find (Central Intelligence Agency director) Bill Casey far more interesting for an hour off the record than on the record. I was brought up on the sacred code that if you were told something off the record it never saw the light of day,” says De Borchgrave.

Then what good was the information?

”It was background for the next story,” he says.

For De Borchgrave access and contacts are sacred.

”I spent a lifetime building up contacts,” he says. ”Knowing their birthdays, their children`s names.”

Ideological and editorial differences led to his departure from Newsweek in 1980 when he went over the editor`s head to complain about the handling of stories on the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

De Borchgrave spent the intervening years promoting ”The Spike,”

publishing a monthly intelligence newsletter, ”Early Warning,” and serving as a senior associate of a Washington conservative think tank.

But he admitted in an interview in 1984 that he missed the impact of his stories in a major publication.

The Times gives him an outlet, if not many readers.

The Monday through Friday paper, despite an annual operating subsidy of some $25 million, a figure comfirmed by a Times spokesman, had a circulation in March of just over 75,000 in Washington, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulation. Approximately 8,600 more copies are distributed around the nation.

By contrast, the Washington Post has a daily circulation of over 770,000 and more than 1 million on Sunday.

Still the Times has carved out a niche in the nation`s capital. It is watched for information about the state of conservative thought and leaks from like-minded administration officials. And it is prominently displayed in the offices of high-level Reagan officials.

”It`s got stories you don`t find anywhere else or you find there first,” says Patrick Buchanan, the White House director of communications, who finds the paper ideologically compatible.

Buchanan insists that it is not just for show that the conservative newspaper is one of a handful included in the President`s daily news summaries or that some of the paper`s news ”beats” are the result of authorized leaks from the administration.

”Not all the leaks are friendly or supportive,” says Buchanan, noting someone leaked a plan to have the President address a huge rally at the Orange Bowl to pressure Congress to provide aid to the anti-Nicaraguan government guerrillas.

”The leak killed it,” said Buchanan.

Still, even De Borchgrave acknowledges the paper is ”facing an uphill battle.”

But, he insists, the paper`s owners are committed to keeping it going despite the red ink and still relatively minuscule circulation.

”I guess some people find it hard to understand because they just can`t believe someone believes in something,” said De Borchgrave.

While De Borchgrave believes in the conservative cause, he also loves the competition.

When a recent interviewer asked him about printed reports that he has startled the staff by running out onto the mezzanine wearing blue silk pajamas during a late-breaking story, De Borchgrave insisted, ”I don`t know how this kind of thing happens. They`re cotton and a good reporter would have checked. ”Thirty-five percent cotton. The rest is polyester,” said the interviewer, as De Borchgrave emerged from the bathroom, pajama top in hand.

Not to be outdone, De Borchgrave immediately shot back. ”But you didn`t notice they were Christian Dior knockoffs.”

And his competition with the Post often takes on a personal tone.

He asks if an interviewer has seen a local magazine article in which handwriting experts analyze his and rival Washington Post editor Benjamin Bradlee`s signatures. He goes off in search of the magazine, but can`t find it. Asked what the analysis showed, De Borchgrave sniffed, ”typically they found a lot of nasty qualities in mine.”

It was Bradlee who in 1954 succeeded De Borchgrave as Newsweek`s Paris bureau chief.

And De Borchgrave can quote from memory a note of congratulations he says he received from Bradlee when he became the Times` editor.

”Congratulations, and I really mean it. But if I were you I`d worry about your owners. Who would have ever thought you and I would have wound up this way, in this city, in this time?” he recalls the note said.

After a pause, De Borchgrave, ever the competitor, said, ”So, I wrote back, `I thank you for your concern about my owners. I wonder if you shouldn`t worry about yours. You forget you are five years older than I.”