Rarely has a new year begun with such a fast-developing and important story. Even before the holiday season ended last week, it was clear that the flow of Soviet troops into Afghanistan would deeply affect the course of Soviet-American relations, and thus call for TIME'S first breaking news cover of 1980.

New Year's Day had hardly ended when Senior Editor Otto Friedrich met with the Nation section staff to plan this issue's 17-page series of stories, the main narrative of which was written by Associate Editor Burton Pines. Says Friedrich: "We simply hit the ground running this year." TIME correspondents on three continents were already pursuing various aspects of the story.

The Hong Kong bureau's David DeVoss last visited Afghanistan in September to report on its rocky transition to socialism. But this time, when he tried to drive in from Pakistan, he found the border closed tight. Nonetheless, he was able to get a perspective on developments inside Afghanistan by talking to Afghan rebel warriors near Peshawar and at Dara Adam Khail, a wide-open frontier town that, says DeVoss, "supplies the sine qua non of many an Afghan's wardrobe --guns." New Delhi Bureau Chief Marcia Gauger, whose experience with Muslim militance includes being besieged with 90 others at the burning U.S. embassy in Pakistan in November, managed to reach Kabul aboard a regular flight. Yet her stay was brief: at the airport, which she found to be "a veritable garrison," she and other arriving journalists were held for seven hours before being deported on another flight. But Hubert Van Es, a Dutch photographer on assignment for TIME, managed to prolong his stay. Though he was placed under guard, he was still able to slip away and sneak a few fast photographs after simply refusing to leave the country on a departing plane. His pictures and impressions of the occupied capital appear in the cover section.

In Washington, Correspondents Christopher Ogden and Gregory Wierzynski interviewed Zbigniew Brzezinski and other top officials, while Diplomatic Correspondent Strobe Talbott contributed an assessment of the future of SALT. From Moscow, Bureau Chief Bruce Nelan reported on the state of detente as seen from the Soviet vantage. One index of Soviet-American relations, he finds, is the degree of difficulty that journalists in Moscow have in reaching sources. Reports Nelan: "Officials are still willing to open their doors to U.S. newsmen, but if relations really freeze over, we could be out in the cold." But so far, Moscow has been a hot beat in 1980.

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