Networks Seek Visas to Increase Coverage in Baghdad : Staffing: CNN has the only remaining U.S. correspondent in Iraqi capital. CBS wants to send in search party for four missing journalists.

Cable News Network, whose Peter Arnett is the one remaining U.S. correspondent in Baghdad, Friday was trying to obtain visas for five more staffers to join him. ABC and NBC said they are seeking to get personnel into the Iraqi capital as well.

Rumors that CNN had obtained five visas for re-entry from Iraq’s embassy in Amman, Jordan--and might dispatch people by car to Baghdad as early as this morning--began circulating through newsrooms of its three rival networks early Friday, renewing grumbles of Iraqi favoritism for the international, all-news network.

CNN would neither confirm nor deny the rumors.

“We are making every effort to send people into Baghdad, but we have no information at all except that we are trying,” CNN spokesman Steve Haworth said. “I would recall to your memory the number of times in August or November that people reported that networks were sending people into Baghdad. I wish other networks were paying more attention to their own processes than they were to ours.”

NBC foreign news chief David Miller said that his network also has been attempting to obtain visas for re-entry into Baghdad, but has had no success. “We are discussing sending our people back with them (the Iraqis) every day,” Miller said. “It’s a question of getting permission, and they never say ‘no.’ Instead, they tell us ‘come back tomorrow’ and, the next day, they say ‘come back tomorrow.’ ”

ABC also is attempting to obtain visas for a correspondent and for video and sound crews, spokeswoman Sherrie Rollins said. CBS, meanwhile, has been attempting to obtain permission to send in a search party for correspondent Bob Simon and three other missing staff members.

“They (CNN) have been very supportive and very helpful in helping us deal with our problem,” said CBS spokesman Tom Goodman. He said that if senior CBS News producer Larry Doyle, who is in Amman, obtains a visa, the CNN crew has offered to take him to Baghdad.

Doyle’s only mission, Goodman said, would be to persuade the Iraqi government to help find the four missing staff members and bring them out of the war-torn desert safely.

According to Goodman, CNN’s Arnett has been actively lobbying the Baghdad government in an effort to find the missing CBS crew, which disappeared Monday along the Iraqi-Saudi Arabian border, near Kuwait.