When Correspondent Jim Bell went to Iran four months ago, he landed in a wave of good will toward TIME. Main reason: Many Iranians considered our February 5th story "Iran: Land of Insecurity" the soundest piece of reporting about their country ever printed in the foreign press. As you may remember, that story traced the political intrigue and confusion in oil-laden, strategic Iran, reported the dangerous bungling by the British and the eleventh-hour vacillation by the U.S. State Department.

At the time, I reported to you the editors' reasoning behind such a story. "It is news," they said, "in the sense that what the U.S. is or is not doing in the Middle East will affect the future course of events just as much as the stuff in the headlines." Since that time, two assassinations and the law nationalizing the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company have made plenty of black headlines. And Secretary Dean Acheson finally admitted a fortnight ago that conditions there "might easily deteriorate into a situation out of which war could grow."

To regular TIME-readers this view of Iran's importance was no surprise. Back in 1929 when trouble in nearby Afghanistan created a stir in the U.S., the editors pointed out that little-noticed Iran was far more vital to the West. The spur-jangling Reza Shah Pahlavi of Iran (father of the present Shah of Shahs) was the subject of three TIME cover stories between 1934 and 1941, was described as "emancipator of his country from British domination." In conditions remarkably similar to those of today, a 1941 story centered around a map titled "Iran--New Focus in Middle East." In 1945 TIME stories reported that Washington's air of hopeless resignation had already become the dangerous pattern for U.S. relations with Iran, left Russia with chances galore to bring trouble. Since 1946 the editors have continued to report on the ineptitude of both British and American policies right through to the time when the present crisis began to take shape last spring.

To cover this tough assignment, the editors picked Jim Bell, who was back in the U.S. to mend an arm injury that he got in Korea. You may remember some of Bell's stories since he joined our Chicago staff in 1942. His account of the 1947 Centralia Mine disaster is still the model for young correspondents on Mid-West assignments. Among the cover stories for which he supplied background: Harold Stassen (1947), FBI Chief J. Edgar Hoover (1949), Frank Costello (1949), and Charles E. Wilson (1951). In his work as a war correspondent, Bell's "Battle of No Name Ridge" was one of the most gripping stories to come out of Korea.

In Teheran Bell found people so hospitable that it was hard to get work done. In cablese he reported, "eye got coffee running out one ear, tea outa other . . . learned love caviar teheran where tis but six bits for all you can eat. budget going to take hell of beating when eye get home, learned like vodka, only approximation dry martini teheran."

Bell found less comfort when he headed for the line where the worst trouble could begin -- the Russo-Iranian frontier between the Caspian Sea and Mt. Ararat. Nervous officers showed him their defense preparations and tried to keep him hidden from watchful Russian binoculars across the line. In the whole area he found panic-ridden faces, men afraid to talk for fear of the police or of ever-present Communist agents.

Back in Teheran again, he started work on the Mohammed Mossadeq cover story (TIME, June 4). One of his jobs was to check on doubtful stories that get back to the U.S. Among them: the false rumor that mysterious U.S. oil millionaires were dickering for spots in Iran's oil industry, if & when it were nationalized.

While covering a meeting of the anti-British Fadayan Islam, Bell ran into a strange sort of trouble. He and three other correspondents jeeped up to the Shah's Mosque, where a Fadayan fanatic had assassinated Prime Minister Ali Razmara. The crowd of Fadayans suddenly became a shouting, angry mob, surrounded the correspondents' jeep, beat on the window curtains and bounced the little car around. After three false starts down dead-end streets, the correspondents escaped. The cause of all the row: the rioters had thought that Bell was Winston Churchill.

Cordially yours,

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