Dear Subscriber

Perhaps you read in your newspaper that Harry Zinder, head of the TIME and LIFE Cairo office, was hurt in an airplane crash last week on his way to the Western Desert to cover the great tank battle in Libya.

Here, in word-saving cable-ese is how our London office sent the news:

ZINDERS PLANE CRASHED DESERTWARDING HE DETAINED HOSPITAL BADLY BRUISED SHAKEN BUT EXPECTS OUT DAYER TWO STOP HE COMPLETELY CHEERFUL HOPES GET DESERT SHORTLIEST SENDS SALAAMS EVERYBODY.

Some of TIME's news gatherers move around all over the map, but Zinder is an excellent example of the TIME correspondent who does all his traveling in the one corner of the world that is his special beat and who has to know all about its peoples, customs and problems.

This sort of down to the grass-roots knowledge of far places plays such an important part in TIME's reporting that I thought TIME's readers might like to know a little more about Harry Zinder and his work.

He is a journalism graduate of Northwestern University, got his first newspaper job in the New East in 1935 just after Il Duce's grab at Ethiopia. TIME's Foreign News editor found him there in 1938, when he already had a reputation as one of the best informed newspapermen in the area. Zinder has been working for TIME ever since, digging out the news for us in the deserts of Arabia and the ports of Syria, in Cyprus, Trans-Jordania, Palestine, Turkey, Irak, Iran, Egypt, and now Libya.

He married a girl whose family has lived in Palestine for generations, and now he speaks most of the polyglot dialects of the Near East well enough to make himself understood, from Adrianople to Addis-Ababa--is so fluent in several that he can often wangle his way into news spots that might otherwise be closed to him.

For example, during the worst of the Arab riots in Palestine, he was in constant and dangerous touch with the Arab leaders. He reached and interviewed the Grand Mufti when he was being sought by the British, wandered through the Arab quarters with a nonchalance that frightened his friends. Visiting Correspondent Phelps Adams is quoted as saying, "Zinder knew what the Arabs would do and where they would do it almost as soon as they knew it themselves."

On his last assignment Zinder went up into the hills of Syria to see how the natives would react if the Nazis launch their Drang nach Osten over the seas to the Bible lands. Typical tribal leader was a fat, unpredictable old chieftain of 40,000--who got his job by murdering his employer and annexing his sheep, has 18 wives and is known far and wide as "the man who calls himself God."

Each week the Associated Press gives TIME thousands of words of spot news reports from the uneasy front covered by Zinder--and a large part of Zinder's job is to satisfy the editors' requests for background in formation to make the significance of these bulletins clearer. And other correspondents are frequently in the Cairo office--George Rodger, for example, is there about now on his way home from New Delhi; Hart Preston spent some time in Cairo recently en route to a special job in Ankara.

But Zinder is TIME'S Near East specialist--and when you read about this part of the world in TIME, much of the credit for the authenticity, color and on-the-spot feel of the stories must go to Harry Zinder--who knows what he is talking about.

Cordially,

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