FOR several months now," cabled TIME'S Saigon Bureau Chief Jonathan Larsen, "relations between the press corps and the military command in Saigon have grown chillier and chillier. With little combat reporting to be done, journalists have begun scrounging around base camps and rear areas, asking questions about drugs, fragging, phony decorations and morale. The Army has retaliated by refusing interviews, bird-dogging correspondents in the field, and generally administering the news with an eyedropper."

For Larsen and his colleagues--both in Indochina and Washington --even an eyedropper's worth of information would have been greeted with heartfelt cheers during much of last week. Seeking to report a cover story on General Creighton Abrams and the biggest allied operation since the thrust into Cambodia, TIME'S correspondents ran up against a news blackout so complete that it seemed almost laughable. As Dewey Canyon II got under way, Saigon newsmen were briefed (in the truest sense of the word), told that all news was embargoed and then informed that even word of the embargo was embargoed. Still, by picking up a stray fact here, a veiled hint there and by sifting through previous information Larsen & Co. had arrived at a sketchy idea of what was going on.

Meanwhile in Washington, the most dramatic blackout since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis saw, in the words of Diplomatic Correspondent William Mader, the same "intense expenditure of shoe leather, seemingly endless knocking on doors, convoluted probing and painstaking mosaic work." Over at the Pentagon, the messages were even fewer and farther between. "People were not talking because they just didn't know," reported Correspondent John Mulliken. "At one point a three-star Army general said rather plaintively, 'I was left out of Son Tay [the U.S. raid on the North Vietnamese prison camp], and I am embarrassed to say I seem to have been left out of this one, too.' "

Nevertheless, by the time the embargo was finally lifted midweek, considerable detail was already flowing into New York, where Timothy James, who wrote the main narrative, was able to draw on his own knowledge from a previous trip to South Viet Nam. On-the-scene reportage came from James Willwerth, who hitched a plane ride from Saigon to I Corps, where he viewed the situation at Khe Sanh and Lang Vei, a point about three miles from the Laotian border. By now the final elements were falling into place as cables arrived from Stanley Cloud, who had flown from Bangkok to Vientiane for the story from inside Laos. "Vientiane is a kind of convention center for those who wage war and intrigue in Southeast Asia," Cloud reported, "and Russians. Chinese and North Vietnamese diplomats are as busy as Americans, Indians and British in the furious race for information and, if one is lucky, facts."

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