Those of you who read Correspondent Robert Benjamin's account of the treatment of political prisoners and the low state of democracy in totalitarian Paraguay in TIME'S Aug. 30 issue may have wondered how he happened to get the story. Here is his version of it:

"On the first day of my arrival in Asuncion for the inauguration of Paraguay's new President I looked up an old friend of mine to see whether he could brief me on the anti-government side of Paraguay's political situation. We talked for a while and, to prove his points, he promised to put me in touch with the underground.

"After three days of no word I had about given him up, figuring that either he was being watched too closely to risk doing anything or that he felt I was being shadowed. The four of us on hand to cover the inauguration (A.P.'s Joe McAvoy, U.P.'s Thomas R. Curran, New York Times's Milton Bracker) knew that at least one of us was being carefully checked on.

"Then, as I was getting into my dress clothes to attend one of the numerous receptions at the Club Centenario, a messenger showed up and gave me a small slip of paper with instructions to be at a corner of the Calle Estigarribia in the heart of downtown Asuncion at 10 o'clock the next morning. There was no mention of whom I would meet there or how.

"I had waited only a few minutes at the designated corner when a most attractive Paraguayan girl came up and greeted me as an old friend. As we walked toward a backstreet cafe owned by some friends of hers she said she had been given a good description of me and had been instructed to tell me about the opposition movement and the current political situation of terror in Paraguay. Someone in the crowd at the cafe moved her to grab my arm and hustle me out of the place into a taxi, which we left a block from her home so the destination slip, which taxi drivers have to turn in to the Paraguayan police, would not show her address.

"As one of the active members of the Paraguayan underground, the girl had assembled all the documents, lists of political prisoners, etc. that I needed for my story. Then, she said that if I were willing to go to Asuncion jail and see for myself, she would arrange it for me and advise some of the prisoners that I could be trusted.

"The next day the girl introduced me to an old man who was going to the jail to see his son. I was unshaven, dressed in rags, and I guess I managed to pass for a lower, class Paraguayan --although I narrowly missed becoming a permanent guest of the house when the guard asked me a question in Guarani, the language of the Paraguayan pueblo. The old man spoke up for me and the guard, satisfied, admitted us into the unpaved courtyard crammed with prisoners. There was a big parade going on in another part of town, and I suppose the guards figured that no correspondent would pass up a good parade to look at a jail.

"That evening a driver called for me at the hotel to take me to meet the leader of the underground, a man well-known to the police, who have yet to catch him. After doubling around the city three or four times we drew up to an old ramshackle house on the edge of town.

The driver tapped out a signal on the back door and an old lady let me into a room that looked like a set for a Hitchcock murder mystery -- complete even to a single, weak, bare light bulb suspended from the ceiling and throwing weird shadows on the cracked walls.

"After the interview I couldn't wait to get out of town. I returned to my hotel and, inasmuch as it was my birthday, ate some birthday cake. The (next morning, with my three colleagues, I boarded the Buenos Aires plane and sat there, feeling most uncomfortable, with a big, fat manila envelope full of opposition documents among my possessions. Neither the police nor the customs officials molested me, however, and when the big seaplane took off from the Parana river it was too late for anyone to do anything about it."

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