Keeping ’60 Minutes’ Ticking : Television: Journalist-detectives such as Lowell Bergman are the foundation of network newsmagazines.

On the screen was Mike Wallace of “60 Minutes,” the biggest of the big stars on the biggest, most profitable CBS series of them all.

There he was in his protective vest one Sunday last September, inside maximum-security Pelican Bay, California’s controversial high-tech dungeon that houses the worst of the state’s bad apples, asking tough questions about alleged inhumane treatment.

There he was last November, on a story about the CIA’s reported involvement in the smuggling of cocaine into this nation as part of an undercover operation it undertook without the knowledge of any U.S. law enforcement agency.

There he was again last month, a laser of aggression in dangerous south Beirut, mincing no words with those blamed by the U.S. government for some of the worst anti-American terrorism in recent history. There he was, in the heart of Hezbollah country, telling Sheik Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah:

“Americans believe that you--as an Islamic fundamentalist--that you are a leader that contributed to the bombing of the U.S. embassy, the killing of the 241 Marines, the plane hijackings and the taking of the hostages.”

There he was, arguably the most recognizable reporter in the United States, affixing his big, looping journalistic signature to some of the best and highest-profile investigative stories “60 Minutes” had to offer.

Great work . . . Lowell.

Lowell ?

That’s right, for the man behind those stories and many others that Wallace does is Lowell Bergman, 48. Unsung, unheard, unseen Lowell Bergman. Well, nearly unseen.

“I’m sort of like Alfred Hitchcock,” Bergman said recently, citing the legendary director who liked to make fleeting appearances as an extra in his films. “If you looked closely in the Beirut piece, there I am among the faithful--probably the first and last Jew to do this--being frisked on the way into a mosque.”

Instead of being a director, though, Bergman is a field producer, a sort of “60 Minutes” West as he operates mainly from his Bay Area home in Berkeley Hills. As co-founder of the highly regarded Center for Investigative Reporting in San Francisco, he’s one of TV’s top journalist-detectives. He’s a shrewd, talented blue chipper among the blue-collar reporters who for years have anonymously underpinned television newscasts and magazine programs, doing much of the work while remaining faceless as others bask in the glow of the stories that go on the air.

In his autobiography, Wallace himself lauds some of those who have labored off-camera for “60 Minutes.” For the most part, though, it’s television’s dirty little secret that the people in news who toil the hardest are generally the ones who are least known and least paid.

In fact, some equate the relationship between correspondent and producer as that of a dog and a fire hydrant.

“The public,” “60 Minutes” producer Joe DeCola once said, “thinks the correspondent has done all the running around, interviewed all the people, read all the government reports, spent hours on the phone. Wrong. It’s the producer who’s done all that.”

Not only on the network level. “I probably do 80 to 90% of everything,” says a field producer who’s done investigative series at several local stations. “Most reporters don’t get involved until it gets on the air. You basically have a news reader who delivers what you researched.”

As vividly affirmed by Diane Sawyer’s new ABC contract, estimated to pay $5 million to $6 million a year, the business nourishes--and is nourished by--a star system. Although she’s smart and has had posh assignments at ABC and CBS, where she once co-starred on “60 Minutes,” Sawyer is infinitely less valuable as a journalist than as a charismatic personality and human trademark.

Although no box-office slouch himself, interviewer deluxe Wallace is a different case. Bergman is awed by the 75-year-old Wallace’s drive and says he’s the most actively involved of the correspondents he’s worked with in 11 years at “60 Minutes” or at ABC’s “20/20,” where Bergman began on TV after working for alternative newspapers.

As Wallace himself acknowledged recently, though, “most of the reporting on a given piece is done by the producer and the researchers. How the dickens could you possibly turn out 25 to 30 stories a year by yourself? We, the correspondents, are like co-producers.”

Bergman is “one of the best reporters I’ve ever come across, plain and simple,” Wallace said.

“Few reporters have better contacts in certain areas like police, crime and terrorism,” added “60 Minutes” creator and executive producer Don Hewitt. “He’s plugged into elements of our society that other reporters just guess at.”

Yet it was Hewitt who titled that recent terrorism story “Three Days in Beirut,” Bergman said, because “Mike was there three days.” Bergman was there seven days.

Its enduring popularity proves that no program is more influential or tells and sells a story better than “60 Minutes.” Like TV news most everywhere in the United States, however, the largest names on its marquee are its own celebrity journalists, who themselves are the chief storytellers. “It’s become part of the grammar in which Americans watch television, and apparently it works,” Bergman says.

*

Regardless of their varying journalistic skills, Wallace, Morley Safer, Ed Bradley, Lesley Stahl and Steve Kroft attract an audience largely through their personas--carefully crafted personas as solo flyers.

“It’s terrible,” bristled veteran “60 Minutes” senior producer Phil Scheffler. “The system around here is to perpetuate the myth that the people you see on the air on ’60 Minutes’ are the people who do the work. They do the work, but they don’t do all the work.” Their many collaborators “are not given the public credit they deserve,” Scheffler said.

Hewitt said he takes “no issue” with that. “It’s the nature of the beast, and I wish there was a way to change it. We have five correspondents and 22 producers. Thus we have 27 reporters. Five of them get to broadcast because they talk better than the others.”

To its credit, “60 Minutes” was the first network news program to regularly list the names of field producers with stories. Yet few viewers are aware of the critical roles these producers play. And that information gap wasn’t narrowed when they were virtually excluded from a recent two-hour CBS program celebrating the 25th birthday of “60 Minutes” and, correspondingly, the roles of Hewitt, his big-name correspondents and Andy Rooney.

Bergman’s own career as a field producer has not been without frustration. He mentions no names, but. . . .

“It’s bad when you’re working with someone who can’t interview on camera. I’ve even gotten on my hands and knees and crawled across the floor behind the correspondent--so that the person being questioned maintains eye contact in the direction of the interviewer--and asked questions we needed answers to. Otherwise we wouldn’t have had a story.”

Bergman is almost euphoric, though, about the “incredible collaborative effort” behind the Beirut story, from Wallace’s reporting and interviewing to Debbie DeLuca’s associate producing to Tony Baldo’s editing to Ray Briebiesca’s camera work.

Bergman: “Jim Hougan, an old friend of mine who’s writing a book about Beirut in the 1980s and the intelligence wars, said he could set it up for us to interview these people from Hezbollah, the party of God. I asked Mike if he was interested, and he said, ‘Oh, sure.’ The government told Mike we shouldn’t go because we’d all be taken hostages, but we went in.”

After getting Hewitt’s approval, of course, he and members of the crew moved 35 cases of equipment from New York to Beirut, where they rendezvoused with two Arabic-speaking free-lance TV crewmen from Athens. “I’ve worked with them before in Jordan and on the Iraqi border,” Bergman said. “They do things that save your life.”

Although granted armed escorts by local authorities, the crew’s timing was critical because the story would implicate Syrian President Hafez Assad in acts of terrorism. “There was some risk to our lives,” Bergman said. “We knew that the Syrians control Lebanon, and that the Hezbollah can only exist with the assent of Assad, and that he was going to meet Clinton in Geneva on Jan. 16. So we felt we were safe until the 16th because the Syrians wouldn’t want to screw up their summit.”

Wallace arrived in Beirut Jan. 9, completed his interviews in two days, then flew with Bergman to London, and the next morning both flew on to New York. On Jan. 16, “Three Days in Beirut” led “60 Minutes.”

Does Bergman ever yearn for more recognition? “Oh, sure,” he said. “As I grow older, the desire to get more credit has grown. Part of it has to do with being more honest about the process. But as Hewitt says, ‘Do you know a better way to do it?’ ”

So, on the screen is Mike Wallace. . . .