Suddenly the war in Viet Nam was a big story again. TIME Saigon Bureau Chief Peter Range was hardly back from covering the desperate situation in Cambodia when the South Vietnamese government decided to abandon a large portion of the country in a strategic withdrawal. After a hectic scramble for transportation, Range managed to cadge a seat on a flight to Danang, terminus for streams of refugees from the northern provinces. His eyewitness report accompanies this week's cover story.

Meanwhile, heavy reinforcements of journalists from round the world were deployed to Saigon to help cover Viet Nam's darkening struggle, as noted in this week's Press section. Among them were TIME'S newly appointed Tokyo bureau chief William Stewart, who spent 1966-70 "in country" with the State Department, and London correspondent William McWhirter, who reported the American buildup in Viet Nam for TIME from 1965 to 1967. Both got in touch with political and military sources to try to find out what the massive retreat would mean to President Thieu and his long-suffering country. Dispatches from all three correspondents formed the basis of the analysis of Viet Nam's crisis written by Richard Bernstein with the assistance of Reporter-Researcher Betty Suyker.

Over in Cambodia. Hong Kong Bureau Chief Roy Rowan, who covered the collapse of Chiang Kai-shek's army for LIFE in 1949, reported that table talk among journalists in Phnom-Penh has turned abruptly and urgently to plans for escape.

As if to underline the threat, a Khmer Rouge 105-mm. rocket last week blasted out windows in the Ministry of Education building where Rowan was conducting an interview. Rowan inspected one jagged shard of shrapnel still hot from the explosion.

A different sort of explosion shook the American press when it was revealed that the Central Intelligence Agency had salvaged part of a Soviet submarine sunk three miles deep in the mid-Pacific.

The salvage operation, it is now known, was contracted out to a corporation controlled by Hermit-Billionaire Howard Hughes. TIME correspondents in Washington, Los Angeles and other cities probed confidential sources for details of the bizarre operation. The story was made to order for Associate Editor David Tinnin, author of Just About Everybody v. Howard Hughes (Doubleday, 1973), a study of Hughes' victorious ten-year legal war against the nation's financial establishment. Tinnin is working on a second book -- on an assassination campaign by an intelligence agency. He views the Hughes- CIA link caustically as "a wedding of our most secret agency and our most secretive citizen."

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