"How is it possible for you to have that in the magazine on Monday morning when it only happened on Saturday night?" The question, raised each time a late-breaking story makes the pages of TIME, arose again last week when 98.5% of our readers came upon "The Rescue: 'We Do the Impossible' " in their copies of the magazine.

For TIME, the story of the daring rescue of 104 Israeli hostages staged at Entebbe Airport in Uganda began at 11 p.m. (Israeli time) Saturday, July 3, when Jerusalem Correspondent David Halevy was suddenly unable to reach Israeli sources by phone. Says Halevy: "I understood that either they were doing something very mysterious, or they were all assembled in one place." At 2:30 a.m., a high-ranking Israeli official telephoned and told him: "The I.D.F. [Israeli Defense Force] operated tonight at Entebbe. All hostages were freed and are on their way back home."

With that, Halevy quickly called Chief of Correspondents Murray Gart, 6,000 miles away in Connecticut, who relayed the message to other editors at their homes. Moments later, Washington Correspondent Bonnie Angelo, tipped off by a State Department source, sent confirming word from the capital. At that point (about 9 p.m. New York time), only a few thousand copies of the cover picture for the July 12 issue had been printed, and TIME's managing editor gave the order to stop the presses and reopen the magazine. Within minutes, the needed staff began assembling on the 25th floor of the Time & Life Building in Rockefeller Center, including Associate Editor Burton Pines, who had written the prerescue version of the hijacking story, Reporter-Researcher Sara Medina and Jerusalem Bureau Chief Donald Neff, who happened to be in New York. Neff maintained phone contact with Halevy, getting details of the story in spite of interruptions from a wary Israeli censor who listened in on the entire conversation. Calling from Nairobi with the latest details from there and from sources in Uganda was Correspondent Eric Robins.

Also on hand were Art Director David Merrill, Picture Researchers Suzanne Richie and Gay Franklin, News Desk Supervisor Al Buist, Copy Chief Anne Davis and four volunteers from Copy Processing, who gave up their holiday plans to process the story, fit it, and transmit it to the printing plant in Chicago. Layout Artist William Spencer hastily designed a dramatic cover illustration in case of a cover switch, but it was decided that such a change would unduly delay distribution of the magazine.

At 4:30 a.m. Sunday (New York time), Pines finished a two-page account of the rescue, napped, then went back to the typewriter to do an expanded three-page version. He finished six hours later as the tall ships sailed up the Hudson in celebration of the Bicentennial. Executive Editor Edward Jamieson stood final watch over the story, and at 3 p.m. Operations Manager Eugene Coyle gave the word to our production people: "O.K. Start printing."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.