THE sudden sealing off of the East Berlin border, and the decision of TIME'S editors in New York to put East Germany's Ulbricht on the cover, descended in one-two fashion on TIME'S Bonn bureau. But if surprised, Correspondents Robert Ball and William Rademaekers were not unprepared. They have been living with the story a long time.

As he set about interviewing West German and American sources on Ulbricht's past and present. Correspondent Ball could draw on eleven years of entries in his notebooks since he did his first story on Ulbricht and the East German Communists. That was back in June 1950, covering the famed East Berlin rally of "free German youth" for his home-town paper, the Owosso (Mich.) Argus-Press. In the process, he was arrested and held for several hours by the Volkspolizei.

Ball was also on hand for the memorable June 17 uprising in 1953. He has visited East Berlin "countless times" and crossed East Germany on dozens of occasions, by rail and highway, has interviewed hundreds of East Germans over the years. He has often been close to his cover subject at rallies and press conferences: "I have even attached myself to Communist May Day parades and marched past his reviewing stand in Marx-Engels-Platz."

Rademaekers, who has been working on Iron Curtain affairs since 1955 and was in Hungary during the 1956 revolt, dipped into East Berlin twelve times last week--crossing the border at dawn, dusk and midnight--walking, driving, and once taking a ghostly ride through East Berlin's heavily guarded U-bahn (subway) stations. He also scouted the length of the East-West Berlin border from Teltow Canal in the south to Tegeler Forst in the north, scrambling over rubble and through potato patches, often attracting the nervous attention of the armed border guards. At week's end, Washington Correspondent Loye Miller flew to Bonn and Berlin with Vice President Johnson to augment TIME'S own "presence" in Berlin.

In New York, Contributing Editor Edward Hughes, working with the correspondents' on-the-scene reports and drawing on his own store of information--he was chief of TIME'S German and Iron Curtain bureau from 1956 to 1959--wrote the cover story.

THE news from Berlin inevitably renewed interest in the state of U.S. missile readiness, and in a story called "Underground Fortresses" (see THE NATION), TIME this week rounds up, as no publication has before, the current state of the biggest military construction program in peacetime U.S. history. To gather material for it, Chicago Correspondent William Shelton hopped about by air last week from Chicago to Los Angeles to Seattle to Great Falls to Denver to Salina and back to Chicago, visiting underground launching sites. The missiles that will be poised in these underground silos are an old story to Shelton. In his days as TIME correspondent in Miami he has seen 44 missile launchings, is the author of a book called Countdown: The Story of Cape Canaveral. Before joining TIME'S staff he was a professor at Rollins College, and spent two nights a week teaching English classes at Cape Canaveral, where among his students were German scientists working on Redstone and Jupiter.

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