Tip Let NBC Track Smuggling Story From Start

An early tip-off enabled NBC News to be all over the story Wednesday when customs officials in England arrested five people as 40 U.S.-made nuclear triggers were about to be smuggled to Iraq on a flight from Heathrow Airport near London.

U.S. and British customs agents for 18 months had been investigating the ring involved in the smuggling effort.

The ring had also been under surveillance by Brian Ross and Ira Silverman--the ace investigative team that NBC insiders have dubbed “Batman and Robin.”

Although no cameras were at Heathrow for the arrests, NBC had exclusive footage on the raiding of a suburban shop, the alleged London front for Iraqi smugglers and of the triggers being loaded aboard a flight at Los Angeles International airport.

Over the past five weeks, Silverman and an NBC cameraman and soundman stationed in London had spent countless hours parked in an unmarked van next to a duck pond in the London suburb of Thames Ditton, observing the suspected Iraqi meeting place.

The NBC van, equipped with one-way windows, was parked to allow a cameramen to observe the front door of a Tudor-style corner shop rented by the Iraqis.

“It was a classic example of extra-strong bladder journalism,” Silverman said Wednesday of the long London stakeout.

The crew photographed the comings and goings of “various Iraqi guys and one woman in various vehicles over the several weeks,” Silverman said. At one point after the arrival of the crate at Heathrow, NBC cameras caught Ali Daghir, the alleged ring leader, leaving the office “looking gleeful, apparently after being notified by a telex or a fax that the crate had made it from the U.S.”

According to Silverman, Ross and an NBC crew in Los Angeles had previously made a videotape of the crate of detonators going up the loading belt as they were being put aboard TWA Flight 260 last week at LAX.

According to Silverman, “the Iraqis were slow in picking up the shipment” until this Wednesday, when the arrests were made by British authorities.

Silverman declined to tell how he and Ross were tipped off about the international investigation initiated by U.S. Customs officials.