Veteran CBS Reporter, Crew of 3 Are Missing

Four CBS newsmen, including veteran combat correspondent Bob Simon, have been missing for more than three days in the no-man’s-land between the massed armies of Iraq and the U.S.-led coalition forces, the network confirmed late Thursday.

Their car was found abandoned in an area where the borders of Kuwait, Iraq and Saudi Arabia meet.

Simon and his crew are the first media personnel reported lost, apparently while trying to break free of the Pentagon’s rule that reporters and other media types travel only with military escorts.

The network said the four men were last heard from Monday near the Saudi border town of Hafar al Batin. Their vehicle was found later by a Saudi military patrol farther up the road, near a deserted village shown on some maps as Al Roqui. CBS staffers said the key was in the ignition and the gas tank was empty.

CBS News reported Thursday night that the Saudi patrol followed the tracks of four people in the sand as far as the Kuwaiti border. Saudi sources said the car contained a passport, television equipment, a wristwatch with Saddam Hussein’s image on the face, Iraqi money and $6,000 in U.S. currency.

“It is not unusual to be out of touch for a period of time, although when it got past Tuesday midday, our concerns heightened a little, and we started informing authorities,” said CBS spokesman Tom Goodman in New York. “But our anxiety level heightened a lot more when we found out that their vehicle was found on a road.”

American military patrols apparently had several contacts Monday with the CBS crew. Simon also was in touch with his headquarters here earlier that day. Some at CBS express the hope that the journalists may be in the custody of an American military commander angry about their unauthorized wanderings.

Missing with Simon are producer Peter Bluff, cameraman Roberto Alvarez and soundman Juan Caldera. The team is experienced in working amid turbulence and conflict: Simon is one of a handful of journalists in the Persian Gulf theater who also covered the war in Vietnam; he also has reported on fighting in Beirut and Northern Ireland. Alvarez and Caldera, a Nicaraguan, had experience covering insurgencies in Latin America. Bluff, the network’s London bureau chief, had served in Lebanon.

Simon and the crew had been to the border last week and had found a story about how combat had already started. Colleagues said they had decided to go back to do more reporting.

“One day soon, next week perhaps, maybe tomorrow, this desolate road is destined to become a main battleground in the war, which is already raging, not very far from here,” Simon said in concluding a report last Friday.

CBS colleagues said Simon and his crew had chafed under the heavy hand of U.S. military restrictions on press coverage in the Persian Gulf War. The four are among the most adventurous but by no means the only journalists of 710 credentialed here to try to ignore military warnings against unescorted travel.

Times staff writer Thomas B. Rosenstiel in Washington contributed to this report.