Word: diplomat
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Since Andrei Gromyko first appeared on the world scene as Soviet Ambassador to the U.S. during World War II, three generations of TIME correspondents have dogged the footsteps of this taciturn, publicity-shy diplomat. In Washington, at the United Nations and during almost every East-West crisis, reporters have waited, usually in vain, for the impenetrable Gromyko mask to slip...
...Saudis have been trying to contain tensions in the area, hoping that reason will somehow prevail. They are desperately seeking to prevent the conflict, as well as Khomeini's brand of Islamic fundamentalism, from spreading. Says a senior Western diplomat in Jidda: "They are timid balancers. Their power is in their pocketbooks, not their guns." The Saudis can avoid a clash as long as the Iranians limit their attacks to tankers at sea. If they hit ships in the vicinity of the Saudi port of Ras Tanura or the Kuwaiti port of Mena al Ahmadi, a Saudi or Kuwaiti...
...portable transmitters. In response to a specific request from Massoud, the CIA also arranged to send hundreds of land mines by plane, ship, truck, camel and pony across three continents and through several intermediaries, so that they got into rebel hands just before Goodbye Massoud began. Says a Western diplomat: "Nothing would make the Soviets happier than breaking the back of the CIA pipeline in Afghanistan...
Meanwhile, the majority of the Afghan recruits went to Pakistan, where the CIA has for three decades run a topnotch network of agents and safe houses. "The CIA archives on Pakistan are perhaps the best in the world," a Western diplomat notes. "When the CIA pipeline first moved in, there wasn't a path into or out of Afghanistan that they didn't have mapped down to every physical detail." Better yet, nearly half of the almost 5,000 ships that unloaded goods in the Pakistani port of Karachi last year were carrying cargo from the Persian Gulf...
...carefully packed each mine in a mixture of camel dung, mud and straw-the mate rials that local peasants use to build walls. Finally, more than two weeks later, ponies piled high with the booty arrived at Massoud's base in the Panjshir Valley. Says a senior Western diplomat in the region: "Considering that we are living in the age of computers and the Concorde, the means of getting help to the mujahedin are extremely primitive...