The Press: Jumping Out of the Pool

By RICHARD ZOGLIN.

Carl Nolte, a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, spent his first few days in Saudi Arabia wandering around Dhahran's International Hotel, mostly reading pooled reports from his peers. Then he moved to Riyadh, where he sat in on military briefings. Finally, exasperated, he climbed into his rented Chevrolet Caprice and simply headed north. He got lost several times on the poorly marked roads but eventually hooked up with U.S. troops, who complained to him about everything from inadequate supplies to late paychecks. Nolte duly sent the news home. "If you sit around waiting for the scraps to be fed to you," he says, "you're going to get the kind of things a dog gets: leftovers."

Military officials refer to Nolte and his roving confreres as unilaterals. Reporters prefer to call them free-lancers. More bluntly, they are pool busters: reporters who are circumventing the superintended pool system imposed by the military to limit the number of journalists venturing into the Middle East battlefield. In the grand tradition of buccaneering war correspondents, these reporters are taking risks to give audiences a fuller picture of what is happening in the gulf.

Journalists in Saudi Arabia have been griping about the pool system since before the war started. One fear was that military censors, who screen pool dispatches, would purge any material deemed unfavorable to the military. Despite a few incidents of tampering, that has not happened. But editors and reporters have a more basic objection: the news emerging from the pools is too limited, and often too late, to be of use in the competitive climate.

The battle for Khafji was a case in point. Though pool reporters were stationed with the 1st U.S. Marine Division outside the Saudi city, they were not allowed into the town until 18 hours after fighting started between Iraqi armor and coalition forces. Early accounts of the battle came mostly from reporters operating on their own. One of them, John King of the Associated Press, sneaked into the city on the first night of fighting and watched as Arab troops tried to retake the town. "The pools did not get an accurate view ((of the battle)) because they didn't see it," says King. "They wrote that the Saudi and Qatari liberated the city, but they had no realistic view of how long it took, what happened or how many Iraqis were in there." The best footage of the battle came from two French TV crews and a team from Britain's Visnews, which were in Khafji well before U.S. pool cameramen. (Little of this was seen on American TV.)

Free-lancing reporters have scored many other coups. Some of the first shots of the mammoth Iraqi-instigated oil slick came from a British ITN crew fully two days before pool footage arrived. A group of nonpool journalists driving near the Iraq-Saudi border last week got a scoop when four hungry Iraqi army deserters approached them and surrendered. Complaints about the pool reports have been growing. "Why didn't we get the oil spill? Why wasn't a pool on the ((battleship)) Missouri when it fired its guns?" asks Thomas Giusto of ABC, who is coordinating pool coverage for the four U.S. networks. "The pools have not been granted access to things when they are happening."

Military officials continue to claim that the pool system is the best way to protect allied forces from being overwhelmed by reporters and to safeguard the journalists. The disappearance of CBS correspondent Bob Simon and his three- man crew, whose vehicle was found abandoned near the Kuwaiti border almost three weeks ago, weighs heavily on journalists, but it has not dampened their desire to do more independent reporting. "The last thing Bob Simon would want," says the A.P.'s King, "is for us to stop covering the war because he disappeared."

Though there are no formal penalties for violating the rules, U.S. military officials have reported offenders to the Saudis, who have temporarily revoked some press credentials. For that reason, editors are reluctant to admit that they are encouraging reporters to break the pool restrictions. But it is clear that the practice is at least tacitly condoned. Robert Rosenthal, foreign editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, says he tells his gulf reporters to "use your initiative to do what you can safely."

Though pool busting appears to be on the rise, it is by no means always successful. Two A.P. reporters who showed up uninvited last week at the U.S. 24th Mechanized Infantry Division were detained for three hours and then sent back to Dhahran. A French TV crew that arrived on the outskirts of Khafji during the fighting was greeted by angry shouts from attending pool reporters. According to producer Alain Debos, the crew was forced at gunpoint by Marines to give up videotape it had shot of a wounded U.S. soldier.

- Some correspondents argue that the tight military restrictions add to the dangers they face. To skirt the rules, many are disguising themselves as military personnel, thus increasing the chances of being mistaken for combatants by the Iraqis. But even obeying the regulations can be hazardous. After pool reporter Douglas Jehl of the Los Angeles Times reported 50 U.S. military vehicles were missing, officials complained that his story, which had been cleared by censors, was contrary to the "best interests" of the military. They ordered him to leave the pool. Incidents like that will not make reporters any more eager to play by the steadily fraying rules.

With reporting by Lara Marlowe and Dick Thompson/Dhahran