Lithuanian TV Patched Back Together : Baltics: Engineers put in long hours to jury-rig equipment. Broadcasts resume less than five days after Soviet paratroopers stopped the operation.

Thanks to a jury-rigged transmitter and fast-thinking employees, Lithuanian television is now back on the air in a triumph of journalistic dedication over brute force.

Sunday morning’s Soviet army attacks that killed 14 people were specifically aimed at seizing the studios of state-run television and radio here, as well as their transmitters and 1,076-foot-high broadcast tower. The purpose of the tank-led operation was ostensibly to halt the “anti-Soviet” and “anti-communist” hysteria of Lithuanian TV and radio. The evident goal was to deprive the pro-independence government of President Vytautas Landsbergis of a voice capable of reaching the people.

However, whoever ordered or planned the early morning assault failed to reckon with Raimondas Rainys, 30, Lithuanian TV’s chief engineer, and many others like him.

Laboring 15-hour days and longer, Rainys and the others did nothing less than reinvent their TV station, using the scanty equipment that had been left in the Supreme Council Parliament, two mobile transmission units, amateur video cameras and an antenna positioned on the Parliament’s roof.

“The most important thing we can do is show the people we are still alive and working for them,” said Irmina Medelsite, a director.

At 7 p.m. Thursday, less than five days after the Soviet paratroopers’ attacks, Lietuvis Televizija (Lithuanian Television) resumed broadcasting in Vilnius, at least in downtown districts reached by the low-power transmitter that engineers put together.

After a stirring patriotic hymn (“We Have Been Born Lithuanians and Lithuanians We Will Remain”), viewers saw a rough cut version of a popular news show “Panorama” that used footage of the day’s Persian Gulf events snatched from the British satellite channel, Sky News.

The highlight of the show was a badly lit videotape of a news conference that Soviet army officers and Lithuanian Communist Party officials gave earlier that day to explain their recent actions.

It may have been awful photography, but the content was riveting. The officers and Communists bumbled their way through explanations of why the Vilnius garrison commander attacked the broadcast facilities at the request of the National Salvation Committee, a shadowy organization that has not divulged the names of any of its members.

Lithuanians watching the broadcast on Channel 10 saw the officials’ discomfort and awkward pauses as they tried, largely without success, to dodge questions. They heard the correspondents, Soviet and foreign alike, break into laughter at some of the implausible replies. By most accounts it was a fiasco.

Predictably, none of this made it on to Soviet television’s main news show “Vremya,” whose reporting on the Lithuania crisis has been so blatantly distorted that the Russian Orthodox prelate in Lithuania has complained that it is spreading disinformation.

On Thursday night, “Vremya” was broadcast here as the conquered TV tower now under pro-Soviet management also went back into operation for the first time since Sunday. The Soviet TV news show used only one bit of tape from the Vilnius news conference--an unverified complaint by an aide to the Soviet prosecutor general that the Lithuanian prosecutor was not cooperating in an investigation of the Sunday bloodshed.

Since most of the on-air talent and production staff refused to work for what they consider “collaborationist” television, the pro-Soviet channel’s local news boasted a new anchorman: Edmundas Kasperavicius, said by residents here to be a Soviet army colonel who fought in Afghanistan.

After witnessing soldiers’ readiness to use their weapons to capture the Vilnius press house and broadcast facilities, Lithuanian TV workers know there is a risk in what they are doing and some are worried.

“We are afraid every minute, because they may come for us. It’s terrible to work in such conditions,” said producer Dalia Stakeliunaite.

In a second-floor room near Vilnius University, videotape editing and dubbing was being carried out Friday afternoon by a woman using two VCRs donated by private citizens. Although the Parliament has been fortified, the building used for the editing has not. And after receiving a false alarm, the production staff was able to clear the building of TV equipment in five minutes.

Copies of videotapes are also taken by car or train to the city of Kaunas, whose radio and television stations have remained on the air. Kaunas radio, which earlier had been incorrectly reported to have been captured by soldiers, has become the major source of information for Lithuanians since the paratrooper seizures in Vilnius.

According to the TV employees, Kaunas colleagues outsmarted the Soviet soldiers who arrived to occupy their studios by immediately yielding and then rushing off to ring the transmitters with buses and supporters. Paratroopers wrongly thought that they had knocked Kaunas radio and TV off the air but the essential transmission facilities remain in Lithuanian hands.

The radio, which can be heard throughout Lithuania and even abroad, also is worried about its future. It signed off a few days ago, saying: “We will be back on the air tomorrow. That is, we hope to be.”