"Modern communications have speeded up the course of world events. Almost every week, you get an indication of the importance of the man on the scene." That dictum, from former Secretary of State Dean Rusk is one of Associate Editor Jordan Bonfante's favorite quotations of the past few months. Rusk was talking about the continuing importance of America's beleaguered diplomatic service, but Bonfante thinks the words might just as easily apply to TIME's own well-traveled corps of foreign correspondents. In trying to describe and assess the increasing number of assaults on diplomatic privilege and protection--not to mention on the diplomats themselves--for this week's cover story, Bonfante found himself under siege, so to speak. He was held captivated in his office by a steady stream of files from TIME correspondents at the scenes of the latest setbacks for U.S. diplomats in Bogota, Tehran, Washington and the United Nations.

A veteran foreign correspondent himself, Bonfante found his empathy for diplomats growing stronger as he wrote the story. The Italian-born son of a distinguished Princeton University linguistics professor, Bonfante briefly considered a diplomatic career before graduating from Columbia College but decided instead to enter Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism. After seven years on foreign assignment for TIME he has become closely acquainted with the symbiotic arrangements that often develop between correspondents and foreign service officers. "They both must report on what is going on, and they invariably turn to each other for help," says Bonfante, whose last foreign assignment before joining the magazine's New York writing staff last year was as Rome bureau chief. "The more distant the outpost, the more intense the relationship."

That relationship is especially intense in Latin America, where it seems Correspondent Bernard Diederich has been spending much of the past few months waving to diplomatic acquaintances imprisoned in one foreign embassy or another. "It has reached an epidemic stage," Diederich cabled from Bogota, Colombia, where he was covering the seizure of the Dominican Republic's embassy. "In El Salvador, I stood vigil outside the French, Venezuelan, Costa Rican, Panamanian and Spanish embassies. I reported on the burning of the Spanish embassy in Guatemala City. Once it was skyjacking. Now it's the seizure of a foreign embassy, that sacrosanct piece of land where a foreign flag casts a shadow and local political strife stops at the door --or used to."

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