IN reporting this week's cover story, TIME'S correspondents drew on long experience in the Middle East. Marlin Levin, who has been TIME'S man in Jerusalem for eleven years, toured the frontiers to speak with Israeli border troops. Along with Rome Correspondent John Shaw, who was making his 20th visit to Israel in the past two years, Levin talked with nine of the 13 generals on the Israeli general staff. On the other side of the Arab-Israeli lines, Beirut Bureau Chief Gavin Scott, who was interviewing officials in Egypt, began his week by breakfasting on the Nile and wound up reporting the melee at Amman Airport as American evacuees boarded rescue planes. He was aided by Rome Bureau Chief Jim Bell, also a veteran Middle East hand. In New York, the cover story was written by Spencer Davidson, edited by Ronald Kriss, and researched by Ursula Nadasdy.

The Soviet Union last week expelled Correspondent Stanley Cloud, a member of TIME'S Moscow Bureau for nearly a year. Despite repeated inquiries by Time Inc. in both Washington and Moscow, Soviet officials have given no explanation for the ouster, which they accomplished simply by refusing to renew Cloud's visa and accreditation.

"Mr. Cloud's expulsion," said Murray Gart, Chief of Correspondents, "is an arbitrary and highly irregular act that violates both the spirit and protocol of normal journalistic relations." Cloud served in the San Francisco bureau before going to Moscow, where he ably reported a wide variety of stories on subjects ranging from Soviet space shots to the policymakers in the Kremlin.

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