Since Andrei Gromyko first appeared on the world scene as Soviet Ambassador to the U.S. during World War II, three generations of TIME correspondents have dogged the footsteps of this taciturn, publicity-shy diplomat. In Washington, at the United Nations and during almost every East-West crisis, reporters have waited, usually in vain, for the impenetrable Gromyko mask to slip.

TIME'S current practitioners of the art of Kremlin watching are as persistent, and sometimes as frustrated, as their predecessors. Diplomatic Correspondent Strobe Talbott, whose behind-the-scenes narrative of the Reagan Administration's conduct of the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks is a large part of this week's cover package, is a Sovietologist who began his TIME career as a summer trainee in the magazine's Moscow bureau in 1969. Last week Talbott, on his twelfth visit to the Soviet Union, filed his observations of the Soviet foreign policy process. He confesses to once having employed a small ruse in an effort to interview the close-mouthed Gromyko. During a 1978 Moscow meeting between the Soviet Foreign Minister and then Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, Talbott borrowed a camera and joined the photographers' pool. "When Gromyko came near," Talbott recalls, "I stepped forward, introduced myself and asked him a couple of questions. Gromyko's answer: 'Nice to meet you, but this is not a press conference.' "

To help report this week's story on the new hard line in U.S.-Soviet relations, Moscow Bureau Chief Erik Amfitheatrof studied the record of the past and consulted dozens of Soviet and Western sources. He also drew on his on-the-scene experience of watching Gromyko at numerous Kremlin functions, including the receptions for foreign statesmen that followed the funerals of Leonid Brezhnev and Yuri Andropov. On those occasions, he reports, Gromyko lingered longer with East bloc allies and exchanged only perfunctory greetings with Western leaders. "The exception," Amfitheatrof notes, "was Britain's Margaret Thatcher, who seemed able to charm the grim-faced Foreign Minister."

Amfitheatrof's files, along with those of Washington Correspondent William Stewart, who interviewed State Department officials, retired Ambassadors to Moscow and Kremlinologists, went to Associate Editor John Kohan, who wrote the main story. Says Kohan, who speaks fluent Russian and has visited the Soviet Union six times: "It's hard to remember, from my days in Leningrad as a student during detente, that the Russians once spoke confidently about good relations with the U.S."