For Senior Writer Ed Magnuson, there are two personal statistics of which he keeps careful track. The first concerns something called DXing, or long-distance communications by amateur radio. Magnuson, call sign W21JB, is an enthusiastic practitioner: in the past seven years, operating his rig from his apartment in New York City's Greenwich Village, he has made at least one contact with 301 of the 315 "countries" from which ham radio broadcasts can originate (a total that includes a single country's widely separated parts, such as Hawaii and Alaska).

The other statistic Magnuson tabulates carefully is the number of cover stories he has written for TIME. With this week's contribution, on the fraudulent Hitler diaries and forgeries through the centuries, the total now stands at 93, more than half again as many as his nearest competitor. His first cover story, on nuclear testing, ran in 1962, a year after he came to TIME from ten years with the Minneapolis Tribune. He later became the Education writer for three years, during which he wrote a favorite cover story, in 1966, on great college teachers. Since 1969, he has written almost exclusively for the Nation section, treating at cover length everything from the My Lai massacre revelations that year to last month's profile of Florida Representative Claude Pepper. In between, there were the Pentagon papers, the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island, the Iran hostage crisis and many thousands of words of political analysis. But Magnuson is chiefly renowned among colleagues as TIME's iron-man chronicler of the Watergate crisis, having written 21 cover stories in 18 months, four in consecutive weeks in May 1973.

That era came to mind last week as he recalled forgeries perpetrated by such Watergate "dirty tricksters" as Howard Hunt, who doctored State Department cables, and Donald Segretti, who used Edmund Muskie's stolen campaign stationery to disseminate malicious falsehoods about other Democratic candidates. "In fact, you could say that Nixon was a sort of forger," muses Magnuson. "In his efforts to defend his beleaguered Administration, he altered the transcripts of his office tapes, a fact that only became clear when the tapes themselves were released." Magnuson's present pace of cover writing is not so frenetic as it was in the Watergate days. But even at the current rate, the editors will likely call on W21JB to produce Cover No. 100 some time next year. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.