As TIME'S State Department correspondent for the past three years, Christopher Ogden became accustomed to constant foreign travel at the drop of an olive branch. In the past two years alone, Ogden logged 200,000 miles with Cyrus Vance, including six trips to the Middle East. So it was with unpacked bags and undisguised relief that he began his new assignment last week as TIME White House correspondent. His first scheduled trip late this month with the President: to Elk City, Okla., a place that Carter promised to revisit if he were elected. Only hours later, however, the President announced his peace mission to Egypt and Israel, and off went Ogden to the Middle East once again. Ogden welcomed the Carter journey as easier to cover than the Camp David summit meeting last September. "At least now," he reported from Cairo, "the principals and their aides are not locked up in seclusion behind electrified barbed wire in the Catoctin Mountains."

Correspondents usually stationed in the Middle East also found their travel plans disrupted. Cairo Bureau Chief Dean

Brelis, on a two-week assignment in Saudi Arabia, left after five days to return to Egypt. Jerusalem Bureau Chief Dean Fischer, who only a week earlier had flown from Israel to Washington with Premier Begin on his sudden trip, quickly hopped a plane back to Jerusalem in order to cover Begin's return. Fischer thus lost a traveling companion, Photographer David Rubinger. Besides shooting the trip for TIME, Rubinger, an Israeli citizen, had been chosen by Begin to be his official photographer during the U.S. visit, so it behooved him to remain with the Premier.

Correspondent David Halevy, an eleven-year veteran of TIME'S Jerusalem bureau, was also in Washington, and he too flew back to his old beat. Since the visit of President Sadat to Jerusalem 16 months ago, the native Israeli has reported on negotiations not only in his country, but in Cairo and Ismailia as well.

Says Halevy: "If this trip leads to the signing of a peace treaty, it will probably guarantee the future of my generation and that of my children's generation. We have become so used to wars that peace is something we have only dreamed about."

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