Because the production of Frenkel defects occurs most readily along specific crystallographic directions in fee structures, the recovery mechanism by which annihilation occurs should also be related to the same crystallographic orientations. The recovery path of a diffusing interstitial requires the formation of a temporary meta-stable state as a close-pair Frenkel defect prior to annihilation. A theoretical treatment of this scheme for interstitial-vacancy recombination shows that during theIDdiffusion there is an experimentally measurable difference if the recovery forms aIBor aICclose-pair configuration in aluminum. Experimental results are given which show a difference from the theoretical predictions, and it is concluded that the assumed analytical function describing the interstitial-vacancy distribution created by a 0.4 MeV electron irradiation should be modified.