TIME correspondents covered Czechoslovakia last week from ev ery available vantage point. In Prague itself, Peter Forbath, who has been reporting on the crisis from the beginning, was joined by Friedel Ungeheuer, who hardly had time to unpack after his previous assignment: the Nigerian civil war. London Bureau Chief Jim Bell, an old Eastern Europe hand, toured the tight Austrian-Czech frontier to interview scores of refugees, and Stringers Bob Kroon, Eva Stichova and Christian Schwinner all pitched in at the Vienna bureau. As tension mounted in nearby Rumania, Correspondent Bob Ball reported from Bucharest.

In Moscow, TIME'S Bureau Chief Jerrold Schecter had an unexpected opportunity to test his new knowledge of Russian. Fresh from a four-year tour in Tokyo, Schecter was winding up a crash course in a language school in Monterey, Calif., when the news sent him hurrying to his latest assignment.

Even when Soviet troops in Prague cut off telephone and Teletype communications, TIME'S files got through. Office drivers turned couriers raced to convenient border points to pick up copy from correspondents. In New York, those files were combined with voluminous re ports coming in from TIME'S Washington Bureau for the cover story and other articles written by Howard Muson and David Tinnin, and edited by Jason McManus.

Just about everyone who worked on the stories in New York brought to them a personal understanding. As a university student in West Germany shortly after World War II, Tinnin watched the growing isolation of the citizens of East Germany. Muson studied Marxism at Harvard. Re searcher Mary McConachie, considered something of a Czechoslovakia specialist for THE WORLD section, polished her command of the Czech lan guage while working as press secretary in Prague for the British Foreign Service from 1957 to 1959. She remembers the sadness of a gracious people afraid to be caught talking to a Westerner. "They thought I was a spy," Mary says, "simply because I had taken the trouble to learn their language."

Ursula Nadasdy, the other cover researcher, was born in Budapest. She was only 13 when the Russians invaded Hungary in 1956 and her family tried to escape. The first time, they were caught only 500 yards from the Austrian border and jailed for three days. As soon as they were freed, the Nadasdys tried again. They slithered across a heavily patrolled highway on their bellies and managed to join friends and relatives in Vienna in time for Christmas. "When the revolution began," Ursula remembers, "Hungarians stopped complaining about the hardships of daily life. There really was a taste of freedom in the air." She is still hopeful that "the Czechoslovakians can do what the Hungarians didn't."

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