Dear TIME-Reader:

THE tension and threat of violence hanging over the Arab world last week got much too personal for two of our reporters. Paris Correspondent William McHale, covering the unrest in North Africa (see FOREIGN NEWS), was caught out after curfew one night near Algiers. Stopped by Senegalese troops with fixed bayonets, McHale was prodded off to the commissariat by a young French machine gunner with an itchy finger. When the correspondent showed his press pass, the nervous Frenchman snapped:"That doesn't mean a thing--this is war!" At the commissariat, luckily, cooler heads prevailed: McHale was released after a 15-minute grilling.

In Jordan, Beirut Bureau Chief John Mecklin found himself circling over Amman in a plane piloted by King Hussein (see COVER) and preparing for a crash landing. With the nosewheel jammed, the young King flew round and round for 20 minutes, fiddling with the controls before he made a rough landing.

THE spectacular arrival in England last week of General Ivan Serov, boss of Russia's dread secret police (see FOREIGN NEWS), was in sharp contrast to his discreet entry into India and Burma last December--when TIME first turned a journalistic spotlight on him. During the early part of that tour with Khrushchev and Bulganin, Serov managed to remain always close at hand but as unobtrusive as a plainclothesman. At state functions and banquets he was billed on programs and place cards simply as I. Serov. This meaningful name on the list of the Khrushchev-Bulganin entourage sent TIME'S Russian desk in New York digging into its files on General Serov and the MVD. The record was full of gaps, for little was known about him outside the Soviet Union. And anyone in Moscow who knew more was not talking.

Our correspondents in Washington tapped diplomatic sources, while New Delhi Bureau Chief Alexander Campbell tried the direct approach with Serov in Burma. Serov fixed him with his cold, pale eyes and said: "I am not interested in your career -- why should you be interested in mine?"

In Munich, our special correspondent, Robert Ball, joined the search for information. He went from inconspicuous downtown buildings to an antenna-studded former Luftwaffe base in the suburbs and back to a house hidden among the trees in the Englischer Garten to check with the agencies that monitor Communist-country radio broadcasts and interview refugees from behind the curtain. From these and other private sources, Ball was able to help us flesh out the file for our story, "The Third Man" (TIME, Dec. 19), the first hard look U.S. readers have had at General of the Army Ivan Alexandrovich Serov.

Cordially yours, James A. Linen

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