DearTIME-Reader:

ONE morning last week a group of West German journalists visiting TIME were surprised to meet in the corridors a file of men, like bearers for an African safari, carrying large canvas-covered crates. As the journalists watched, the men opened the crates, hauled out floodlights and began to unreel rolls of heavy cable. When the Germans came to my office, I could not receive them there; the place was a jungle of light standards, camera tripods and booms for microphones.

We had to explain to our visitors that even for TIME this was an unusual morning. A camera crew had come to film television sequences for the British Broadcasting Corp. According to the script, TIME'S Foreign News Editor Thomas Griffith and a few members of his writing staff were to re-enact one of the frequent story conferences that are an important part of TIME'S editorial work. BBC plans to show the film later this month on its popular TV program, London Town, to give Britons an insight into TIME'S editorial operations.

The German journalists had come to see these operations for themselves. Since the end of World War II, when TIME'S international editions succeeded the special wartime editions for the armed forces abroad, our editorial offices have become a magnet for foreign journalists. They have come to us from, among other places, Helsinki and Karachi, Turin and Cali.

IN 1952, the United States Information Agency made a visit to TIME a part of its three-month orientation tour of the U.S. for the foreign editors and writers employed by the agency as cultural and information specialists in cities all over the world. The 13 Germans, five women and eight men, were the third USIA group to visit us since the first of this year.

For four hours, as these visitors from West Germany's major cities toured the editorial floors, paused in the wire room to read snatches of reports coming in over the teletypes from our domestic and foreign bureaus and inspected the morgue and the teletype-setting section, they laid down a barrage of questions about TIME.

Their interest was more than passing. TIME, to them, is one of their principal weapons for dealing with the flood of Communist propaganda that sweeps into their home areas from Eastern Germany -- and points farther east. In the North Rhine-Westphalia area alone, reported Hans Joachim Oertel of Dueseldorf, 256 Communist journals are distributed. TIME, he found, was his best rebuttal to their propaganda.

Said Oertel : "TIME is believed in -- that is its great asset in Germany. Editors use it as an archive and as a guide to the meaning and the significance of news from other parts of the world."

As a wartime organizer of the Office of War Information, one of the USIA's parent bodies, I have continued a lively interest in the cultural and information activities of this agency abroad. To me its influence in the cold war on men's minds is as essential as it was in the hot war against their lives. It has been indeed gratifying to note the intellectual range and the vivacity of these foreign colleagues who interpret U.S. democracy -- its ideals and aspirations -- for their fellow countrymen in so many lands.

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