A Letter From the Publisher: Aug. 17, 1987

For TIME correspondents, reporting some cover stories involves weeks, even months, of legwork, grueling sojourns to far-flung places and often tense encounters with figures in the news. So it was with this week's report on the Ayatullah Khomeini's revolutionary Iran and the mounting tensions in the Persian Gulf that Iran has precipitated. TIME's reporting team fanned out to the far corners of the Middle East and the major capitals of Europe and to Washington to talk with various government officials, diplomats and academic experts about the ominous confrontation between Iran and the U.S. -- and indeed the world.

Since this spring, Cairo-Based Correspondent David S. Jackson has logged thousands of miles crisscrossing the gulf region from Saudi Arabia to Bahrain, Kuwait, Dubai and Abu Dhabi. His real preparation for this week's assignment, however, began nearly nine years ago, when he started covering Khomeini's fundamentalist Islamic revolution. That brought him eyeball to eyeball with the Ayatullah, whom Jackson interviewed in a Paris suburb in 1979. "Back then," recalls Jackson, "none of us expected Khomeini would still be as domineering, provocative and full of vitality as his revolution. The passions that I saw sweeping the country then have not diminished."

Information on Iran, to which Western journalists have limited access, had to be culled from disparate places. From Cairo, Reporter Scott MacLeod canvassed sources throughout the Middle East for an assessment of Iran. Jerusalem Bureau Chief Johanna McGeary and Reporter Ron Ben-Yishai got a vivid picture of internal politics in Tehran by interviewing Iranians in Israel. In Paris, Adam Zagorin talked to Iranian expatriates, while in London, Frank Melville spoke with defense sources and in New York City, Reporter-Researcher Sally B. Donnelly interviewed academic experts on Iran.

Reporting on the U.S. perspective in Washington were Correspondents Michael Duffy, a pool reporter on the cruiser U.S.S. Fox in the gulf only weeks before; David Aikman; Bruce van Voorst; and Barrett Seaman. Seaman traveled from TIME's bureau to the sweltering heat of the West Wing driveway to buttonhole congressional visitors, then to the air-conditioned White House back offices. "It was hardly as dangerous as the gulf," said Seaman, "but it did bring the threat of a good old-fashioned summer cold."