Closing night on a weekly magazine is always somewhat stressful, since events have a way of refusing to recognize deadlines. On Friday evening, as TIME prepared to close, two startling incidents occurred almost simultaneously. No sooner had word of James Earl Ray's escape reached our offices than some half a dozen correspondents were sent into action, and the editors in New York began preparations to put Ray on the cover. In Atlanta, Larry Woods immediately chartered a plane to get to the remote Brushy Mountain state prison, while Joe Kane and Jef McAllister of our Washington bureau drove all night to reach the scene. As they covered the story on the ground, a TIME photographer was airborne in a helicopter to shoot pictures of the search. Houston Bureau Chief George Taber went to Atlanta to talk with black leaders and with Ray's past and present lawyers. With files from other correspondents who interviewed sources in Boston, Chicago, Washington and Atlanta, Associate Editor James Atwater on Saturday wrote our account of how America's No. 1 prisoner escaped, and Senior Writer Ed Magnuson described the conspiracy theory that surrounds the assassination of Ray's victim, Martin Luther King Jr. Our Nation staff pieced together the Ray saga, as our World and International staffs began work on another late-breaking story, the Dutch marine attack on the South Moluccan kidnapers; their story on the raid includes an eye-witness account by TIME'S Peter Kronenberg.

This week we also take an unprecedented look at a normally hidden world--the Central Intelligence Agency, which until recently kept its doors tightly shut to journalists and news photographers. It tried to be almost as invisible in Washington as overseas. Says Diplomatic Correspondent Strobe Talbott, who reported part of our story and who has also worked in Eastern Europe and Moscow: "Even inside the embassies, it was taboo to mention the CIA."

Today, under its new director, Admiral Stansfield Turner, the CIA is expanding its press relations. But the new openness will take some getting used to at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., says Washington Correspondent Bruce Nelan. Last week when Photographer Stanley Tretick visited to take exclusive color pictures for our story, the halls were festooned with warnings to agents operating under cover: TIME FILMING TODAY IN BLDG.

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