NBC, Navy and Information Act

Shortly after the Navy cruiser Vincennes mistakenly shot down an Iranian airliner over the Persian Gulf, NBC News staffers learned that a Navy documentary team had been taping footage aboard the ship at the time.

Ten days after the July 3 accident, in which all 290 persons aboard the plane were killed, NBC filed a request with the Pentagon for a copy of the Navy’s video footage under provisions of the Freedom of Information Act.

The result: “NBC Nightly News” on Friday aired an excerpt from what the network’s Washington bureau chief, Robert McFarland, said was a 34-minute tape of scenes shot aboard the Vincennes. The tape was released earlier that day by the Pentagon.

The excerpts, which an NBC spokesman said made up about 75% of a report that ran just over three minutes, showed dramatic scenes from the Vincennes’ bridge when the ship was under attack by Iranian gunboats and was firing back. It also showed the ship’s launch of two missiles at what Vincennes officials thought--erroneously, as events proved--to be an attacking Iranian F-14 fighter.

The Navy tape did not show the airliner being hit. A Pentagon spokesman said there had been no footage of that.

CBS was the second of the major networks to air excerpts of the tape on Friday, showing them on the second of two “feeds” of the “CBS Evening News” that the network provides to affiliated stations each weeknight.

ABC only aired a brief scene from the tape on its regularly scheduled “News Brief” in prime time Friday, then later provided its affiliates a 3-minute excerpt for late-evening local newscasts, a spokesman said.

NBC got the tape first because “it had its request in about a month ahead of everybody else,” Pentagon spokesman Fred Hoffman said Monday. After NBC had it, he added, “we made it available to all comers.”

NBC’s McFarland was asked if the Pentagon-- which reviewed the tape as part of its investigation into the airliner’s downing--had cut anything from the tape it provided NBC.

“We’re not quite sure because we don’t know what all they had,” he said.

The Pentagon’s Hoffman acknowledged that the tape was edited, but said that the only things cut “were a lot of dead spots”--passages showing nothing of importance--”and if anyone had asked us for the full tape, we would have given it to them.”

Some senior Navy officers were uneasy, he added, about one segment in which a Vincennes crewman, mistakenly thinking that the ship’s missiles had hit an attacking Iranian fighter, exultantly says, “That was a dead on.”

But that was left in, Hoffman said.

NBC’s Freedom of Information Act request for the Vincennes tape wasn’t the first from a broadcast news organization for tape or film made by U. S. military personnel, he said, adding: “This is not a ground-breaker.”

Ken Carter, another Pentagon official, said that all networks had made similar requests during the U. S. invasion of Grenada in October, 1983.

Although military combat cameramen were with U. S. military forces on that operation, civilian reporters were initially barred from accompanying the American troops and loudly protested the press blackout.

Shortly “after it (the invasion) was over, or maybe even while the fighting was still going on,” Carter said, the networks and the American Civil Liberties Union “came in with an FOI (Freedom of Information Act) request to see all the material that had been shot” by military combat cameramen. The request was granted, Carter said.

But there was an occasion in 1986 when a Freedom of Information request by broadcast journalists for military footage was turned down, he said.

The footage, taken after the rebellion in which Corazon Aquino became president of the Philippines, was of ousted president Ferdinand Marcos, his family and his entourage as they were being evacuated from Manila and flown by U. S. military aircraft to Hawaii.

However, in that case, he said, it was the State Department, not the Pentagon, that decided not to make the video material available to the networks.