ANYONE who becomes a Moscow correspondent knows that life will not be all caviar, though sometimes he may be hard put to think of any other advantages to the job. Top Soviet leaders are usually inaccessible, uncommunicative, or both. And even when there are Western sources available too--as for this week's cover story--they sometimes fall into a diplomatic silence. Averell Harriman amiably reminded Moscow newsmen last week that the last diplomat to report to the people before he reported to his President was Jimmy Byrnes, and "he was fired."

Still, TIME'S Moscow correspondent, Israel Shenker, set to work. One night at dinner he played host to Harriman and the U.S. press colony --which takes some doing in Moscow, where Mrs. Shenker usually cooks on a double hot plate on the hotel room windowsill, and has the refrigerator in the bathroom.

Shenker enlisted the help of LIFE Photographer Howard Sochurek. who arrived bearing a silver plate on which sat a tremendous pike. Behind came two assistants, one bearing bowls of shrimp, another carrying a roast suckling pig. All of this, Shenker casually informed Harriman, had been prepared in the Kremlin kitchens.

Shenker finds his two children have adjusted more quickly to the Moscow life than he. Early this month Daughter Susan, 12, and Son Mark, 9, flew off to Copenhagen and summer camp. When they found out they were to fly by Soviet Aeroflot jet, they asked their mother to fix peanut-butter sandwiches. Explained Susan: "You can't expect us to eat caviar all the way to Copenhagen."

Despite all the handouts, the importuning telephone calls of press-agents, and the impressive amount of statistics around, business, too, can be an area of secrecy. Howard Hughes is indisputably the most elusive and invisible U.S. businessman, but two men in this week's business news are not far behind.

Daniel K. Ludwig is an American shipowner whose tanker fleets outrival the golden Greeks'. Six weeks ago, Correspondent Dudley Doust got interested in Ludwig's oil refinery and orange groves in Panama, then our man in Miami picked up Ludwig's trail, and last week Ludwig invested $100.5 million in Union Oil. Everywhere TIME asked, Ludwig was reported somewhere else. But by simultaneously interviewing business acquaintances and assistants and others in Wall Street, London, Washington, Miami and places west, we are able to tell more about one of the world's most powerful businessmen than anyone has since Ludwig gave a rare interview to FORTUNE back in 1957.

Our other elusive subject is Morris Markin, who learned how to keep his mouth shut during the taxi wars in Chicago in the lurid 1920s. For 31 weeks, Chicago Correspondent Miriam Rumwell got the run-around when she tried to reach him. Finally she turned up at his Checker cab factory in Kalamazoo, was told by David Markin that he didn't know his father's whereabouts. But after a two-hour conversation, in which she apparently passed some kind of test, David asked, "Would you like to see my father?" Reports Miss Rumwell: "We went into a room next door. He'd been there all the time."

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