Dear TIME-Reader:

TO report this week's hair-raising ' cover story on missiles, Los Angeles Correspondent Edwin Rees projected himself along a 15,000-mile course. It zigzagged up and down the U.S. from San Diego to Washington, from New Mexican firing ranges to Seattle plane plants, from SAC air bases to the tropical Bahamas over which missiles are flown. "I baby-sat for a Pentagon colonel to earn a few minutes of his time, and traveled 3,000 miles for a 20-minute interview with one general," he recalls.

At Redstone Arsenal, Huntsville, Ala., Rees ran into an enemy turned friend. He was a wartime scientist at Peenemuende, where Germans developed their V-25. When Rees asked the scientist if he was at Peenemuende on Aug. 28, 1944, he thought a moment, then cried in a deep accent: "Ach, I sure was! The bombers came, and they hit my house and knocked me out of bed and almost killed me." Rees explained that he was there, too, as a radio-operator-gunner in a B17.

A New Yorker by birth and Californian by choice, Ed Rees came to TIME as an office boy at the end of 1941. He was soon off with the Eighth Air Force, dropping bombs on Peenemuende and other targets. He shrugs off his 32 missions over Germany and Occupied France, but the military did not take them so lightly--Rees was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and five Air Medals.

Since the war he has made a specialty of Southern California's aviation industries. But he has reported a wide range of cover stories from Olivia de Havilland (TIME, Dec. 20, 1948) and Olympic Athlete Bob Mathias (TIME, July 21, 1952) to Test Pilot Bill Bridgeman (TIME, April 27, 1953) and Air Surgeon John Paul Stapp (TIME, Sept. 12).

WHILE Correspondent Rees was "'gathering material for the cover story, Science Editor Jonathan Norton Leonard touched base with old friends and acquaintances among the Germans at Redstone and the U.S. technologists who are today's missilemen. To them, he is a writer who speaks their strange tongue and can translate it for laymen. In conformity with established TIME practice, the story was shown to Pentagon authorities to make sure that the printed version would contain no violation of security.

For a reasoned and readable report on the time of day in our missiles movement, see "Missiles Away," beginning on page 52.

Cordially yours,

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