An intimidating assignment. Cut Henry Kissinger's thickly woven, elaborately detailed memoir, White House Years, down from 750,000 words to some 30,000, maintain its sense of narrative and still retain the breadth, texture and philosophical shadings of the original. If that was not challenge enough for Assistant Managing Editor Ronald Kriss, he also had to guard his work on the project -- the three-part serialization of Kissinger's book that begins this week -- as if it were a state secret. "We did not want stories to appear in advance of TIME'S own first excerpt," explains Editorial Director Ralph Graves, "nor would Kissinger have wanted any unauthorized excerpts to be published."

Security measures were tight. Kissinger's corrected galleys were hand-carried to New York from the publisher, Little, Brown, in Boston, and stored in a vault at the Chase Manhattan Bank. They were brought by courier to Kriss, who had a 24-in. safe installed in his office for the occasion. Later, he regretted having turned down an 84-in. model when the excerpt drafts and numerous revisions began to bury the office furniture. Photocopying the work, a project that overheated several office machines, had to be done on weekends, when witnesses were scarce. "At home," Kriss adds, "the only one who saw it was the cat."

Betty Satterwhite Sutter, head reporter-researcher in TIME'S Nation section, was one of the few staff members with her own copy of the opus--kept, of course, in a locked drawer in a locked room. With assistance from 14 TIME research librarians, she attempted to verify every fact and figure included in the excerpts. Inevitably, some niggling little problems arose. Should the traditional Chinese phrase for "Bottoms up," for example, be transliterated as gam-bei, the dialect version, as it appears in the book? Or should it be ganbei, the Mandarin version? We settled on the latter.

"As always," says Kriss, "the toughest question was what to leave out. Each theme introduced in the book is intricately threaded and developed throughout the whole. " In refining and condensing the excerpts, Kriss readily accepted some constructive suggestions from an authoritative source who proved to be a fast, able and understanding editorial aide: Henry Kissinger himself.

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