Beyond the Pools: Riveting Scenes : Media: Unsupervised crews toting satellite gear buck Pentagon rules, show surrender and liberation.

The scene Tuesday was precisely what the Pentagon had spent years trying to avoid--ever since the invasion of Grenada in 1983.

As allied forces stormed into Iraq and Kuwait, routing retreating Iraqi forces, Americans saw dramatic moments of surrender and liberation televised live by American news correspondents who had violated Pentagon rules and taken to the battlefield unsupervised, carrying portable satellite “uplinks.”

“We didn’t arrive all that far on the tail of the Iraqi soldiers who left,” said CBS correspondent Bob McKeown. In fact, the CBS crew sped ahead of the Saudi unit it had hitched up with and drove its rented jeep into Kuwait city unescorted.

CBS cameraman David Green, touring a network of Iraqi bunkers, found an Iraqi soldier’s candle inside still burning.

By evening, McKeown and a handful of advance U.S. Marines were waiting for more liberation troops to arrive. With them were a variety of other American news crews.

Military briefers in Saudi Arabia and in Washington could not keep up with what the public was already learning, they acknowledged.

Yet there was little sign of the reports breaching military security.

“They’re not creating problems,” Assistant Secretary of Defense Pete Williams acknowledged in an interview.

Rather than try to chastise the lone-ranging reporters, called “unilaterals,” the military instead invited them Tuesday to join a Marine amphibious unit off the Kuwaiti coast. One of the reasons for the invitation: Most of the reporters who had signed up for that supervised pool had left it to go back to Dhahran and strike out on their own. If they elected to cover the Marines, the military said, reporters would not even have to share what they saw according to the usual pool rules.

Traveling unsupervised is how American reporters have covered all other wars, although until Vietnam their reports were cleared by military censors. But the rules established since the Grenada invasion required reporters to submit to supervised pool arrangements which governed their access to events, required them to share all information and film and imposed military censorship.

As a result, most experts had dismissed the prospect of the media carrying satellite gear into the field for live broadcasts during the Gulf War. But as frustration with the Pentagon rules mounted, journalists began preparing for this eventuality.

“You get out with a pool and you can be stuck way back of the action, stuck in the mess tent,” said CNN Executive Vice President Ed Turner. “Then the stuff comes back sporadically and gets dumped into the barrel for everyone to use.”

Since the ground war began, however, the most riveting and timely material generally has come from the handful of reporters traveling on their own, not from the more than 200 traveling in the organized Pentagon pools.

CBS had prepared to go out on its own from the beginning, and one crew staying secretly in Khafji was nearly trapped there when the Iraqis launched an attack on the coastal city earlier in the month. Another team, led by correspondent Bob Simon, was taken prisoner and is still believed to be held hostage in Baghdad.

Many other news organizations had reporters detained by U.S. forces, in some cases at gunpoint, for going out on their own.

When the ground war began early Sunday in the Gulf and the Pentagon announced its news blackout, the system virtually collapsed in Dhahran, with hundreds of reporters trying to head out on their own.

Pools continued working with units that had crossed into Kuwait and Iraq, but there was a relative paucity of reports from those pools compared to the information coming from free-ranging reporters.

Still, Pentagon officials concede that there have been few problems with news reports breeching military security.

The only real trouble since the ground war began, according to a senior Pentagon official, came when an NBC reporter in an organized pool broke away--in violation of the rules--to do a live phone hookup with New York. As it happened, the NBC editor in New York recognized that the reporter might be commiting a security violation about the location of U.S. troops and deleted the material, the Pentagon official said.

Today, CBS has two crews on their own, internally dubbed “desert rats,” each with its own portable satellite dish. ABC also has two, both with dishes, NBC has one and CNN has more than three.

Among the major newspapers, the New York Times now has at least one reporter on his own. The Associated Press has a “unilateral” reporter and a photographer. A Los Angeles Times reporter went out on her own during the battle for Khafji, but since then the paper has stuck to the pool system.

The most dramatic footage Tuesday came from McKeown’s CBS crew, which drove into the city on its own and was mobbed by jubilant Kuwaitis after hearing rumors that the Iraqis had fled the night before.

CBS’ Richard Threlkeld’s team also traveled on its own, at times, like McKeown, braving artillery and sniper fire. Its report Tuesday showed an Egyptian colonel leaning over a terrified Iraqi soldier who had been wounded in the head: “It is OK, soldier,” the officer told his prisoner, stroking him and then taking his hand. “You are safe now. I, too, am an Arab. I am your brother.”

ABC’s Forrest Sawyer had done perhaps the most extraordinary unilateral work until the liberation of Kuwait. Before the ground war began, Sawyer was the only American reporter to shoot pictures during a bombing run, when he rode in the second seat in a Saudi F-15 escorting Saudi Tornado bombers.

Meanwhile, back in Dhahran, where the military pool operation is based, the tight restrictions and organized pools were leading to chaos. On Tuesday, a group of 12 newspapers appealed to the military to set up a pool to enter Kuwait city with escorts, many hours after the renegade reporters had safely reported from the liberated capital. The military counteroffered, saying it would take three reporters. Finally, they settled on six.

But when the group leaves, “the rest of this hotel is going to show up and try to follow the caravan,” predicted Ed Chen, a Los Angeles Times reporter in Dhahran.