Reporting from the U.N. for this week's cover story on U.S.-Israeli relations was a new experience for TIME Bureau Chief Wilton Wynn, who normally operates out of Cairo. His past assignments have included interviewing the late King Faisal of Saudi Arabia for TIME'S 1975 Man of the Year cover, and six months later joining Egyptian President Anwar Sadat aboard the first ship to pass through the reopened Suez Canal.

But Wynn quickly felt at home in Manhattan. Just before Jimmy Carter's speech to the U.N. General Assembly, Wynn spotted two old friends from Saudi Arabia. Both are now ambassadors, but Wynn had not seen them since they were students of his at the American University of Cairo, where he taught journalism in 1945-47. "We started talking about college days," he says, "but I soon shifted the conversation to the political situation in the Middle East. They proved excellent sources."

Also new to the U.N. was Correspondent Lee Griggs, who has worked abroad for 17 years and served as Beirut bureau chief during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. He did a great deal of his reporting last week on the run, buttonholing delegates as they rushed from one meeting to another "to find out what they really thought, as opposed to what they were saying on the record."

Much of last week's story took place in Washington and was reported by Diplomatic Correspondent Strobe Talbott and State Department Correspondent Christopher Ogden. Discovered Ogden: "This week there finally is palpable excitement in the Administration that the Geneva conference could become a reality." To round out our reporting, Jerusalem Bureau Chief Donald Neff and TIME'S David Halevy assessed the mood in Israel, while TIME'S Dean Brelis and Abu Said Abu Rish interviewed Palestinian leaders in Beirut.

From these reports, Associate Editor Spencer Davidson, who has visited Israel five times and has worked out of our Cairo and Beirut bureaus, wrote the story, assisted by Reporter-Researchers Ursula Nadasdy de Gallo and Susan Reed. It was his 15th Middle East cover story; his first was in 1969 and was on Golda Meir. Most of them, he notes, "have been late-starting, because things have a way of happening suddenly over there." Sums up Davidson: "When you've spent so much time writing about the Middle East, you feel compassion for all the people involved. I hope some day to write the peacetime stories."

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