Last Tuesday morning, TIME Correspondent Wilton Wynn was walking to his office in Rome when he recalled that exactly eight years ago to the day, he had been urgently summoned to Egypt to cover a war; Anwar Sadat's Egyptian army had crossed the Suez. Only hours later, Wynn was again summoned to Cairo, this time to cover carnage of a different kind: the assassination of Sadat. It was a haunting journey for a man who had spent eleven years as a correspondent in Egypt and dozens of hours in intimate talk with its slain leader. It was one of many dramatic experiences of TIME staffers around the world who helped report this week's cover package on the tragic events in Cairo.

Earlier that day Photographer Barry Iverson was watching a parade of Egyptian weaponry through his telephoto lens. He heard gunfire. In moments, he was staring at Sadat's fallen presidential photographer, who had "blood streaming from his face." Later, via telephone with NBC's Tom Brokaw in New York, Iverson was one of the first eyewitnesses to describe the scene to an anxious U.S. TV audience. Meanwhile, Wynn and Cairo Bureau Chief Robert C. Wurmstedt lined up an interview with Egypt's new leader, Hosni Mubarak, and Correspondents Roland Flamini and Jack White arrived from Bonn and Nairobi to profile the assassins and follow the funeral preparations.

When the news broke, Jerusalem Bureau Chief David Aikman was lunching with some influential Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and could only watch in silence as they raised their glasses to toast Sadat's assailants. Diplomatic Correspondent Strobe Talbott experienced an ominous sense of dej`a vu. He was with Libyan Strongman Muammar Gaddafi in 1979, when the signing of the Camp David accords was shown on television.

Says Talbott: "I remember the concentrated, determined hatred that his eyes were beaming at the image of Sadat." A team of experienced Middle East hands worked on the cover package in New York, including Associate Editor William E. Smith, who has specialized in Middle East stories since 1973, and Staff Writer William Drozdiak, Cairo bureau chief until last summer. Supervising the entire Sadat section was International Editor Karsten Prager, onetime Middle East bureau chief, who recalls his own invigorating colloquies with Sadat: "Sooner than any other Arab leader, he recognized the value of putting his case to the Western world. His openness was one of his best qualities."

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