On the afternoon of February, 1, Jon Alpert and Maryann DeLeo put on their coats and started out of their New York City office, on their way to Iraq. They were carrying two new Hi8 cameras, financed with part of a $ 7,000 check from NBC, and by the next day they hoped to be using them to shoot stories for Nightly News about just what was happening in Baghdad and Basra under all those bombs.

But the phone rang and there was a hitch. Steve Friedman, executive producer of Nightly News, had authorized the trip; now, NBC News executive vice-president Donald Browne was pulling the plug. Iraqi officials in Jordan were apparently claiming that because Alpert already had a visa lined up in Amman, Jordan, they could not give one to NBC correspondent Tom Aspell, and NBC was having trouble explaining that Alpert, although he had a twelve-year relationship with NBC, was a free-lancer and not the person the network wanted as its main eyes and ears inside Iraq. Also, Browne did not want the network associated with former U.S. attorney general Ramsey Clark, who can generally be counted on to oppose the use of American military force, and who had arranged for Alpert's and DeLeo's visas in the first place. Clark was waiting for them at his Greenwich Village apartment.

This made for a moment of truth. They agonized a bit, made some calls, and finally told Browne they wanted to go as independent journalists. Would NBC want to take a look at the coverage they came back with? Browne again made it clear that they must not represent themselves as NBC. If they chose to go into Iraq as free-lancers, he added, they would be treated when they returned "like any other free-lancer" offering video to the network.

Which, as it turns out, was not the case. And in some ways it couldn't be, since Alpert had a unique history at NBC and was known as somebody who worked along the edge of many of journalism's rules and conventions.

His news segments, independently produced and edited, usually along with DeLeo, had brought a share of glory to the network, including six Emmy awards and an Alfred I. duPont/Columbia University Silver Baton. His Today show role was that of a sort of footloose cousin who stopped in from time to time with interesting stories. Alpert's personality suffused the stories. This was partly a matter of his insistent and occasionally leading questions. It was also his I'm-just-a-regular-guy manner. And Alpert hung around with his subjects long enough for them to let something human shine through the camera lens.

Occasionally his Today show pieces were funny, but mostly they were serious pieces about ordinary people who in one way or another were getting the short end of the stick. Sometimes they were stories from places that other reporters had not been able to get into.

Like Cuba and Vietnam. Like Iraq. As the air war unfolded in late January with almost no real coverage of what was happening down on the ground, Alpert and DeLeo asked Freidman to let them try to get in. They hired an Iraqi-American to fly to Jordan and try to get visas, but Ramsey Clark's offer came first. Clark, who had pushed Iraq's U.N. ambassador for visas, planned to visit Iraq as he had visited Libya after the U.S. bombing of Tripoli, and he wanted someone to document the journey. Alpert says he viewed the former attorney general strictly as the fastest way to a visa. So did Nightly News's Friedman. "I wasn't doing a story on Ramsey Clark," Friedman says. "I saw him as a door. Other people didn't."

The door opened in any event, and on February 2 they drove in Iraq. The tapes Alpert and DeLeo brought back show an eerily empty highway to Baghdad, with the occasional bombed-out truck floating past the car window. The somewhat surreal images on the tape include a four-star hotel operating by candlelight, a mosque filled with caskets, an unidentified building surrounded by burning tires to give the impression to airborne pilots that it had already been hit.

And in the Alpert-DeLeo style, the tapes present lots of ordinary Iraqis. In Baghdad, Alpert interviews a man standing in front of the smoking ruins of what was once a market.

"My brother's place," the man says. "Bring from the river and sold fish here."

"What are you going to do now?"

The man shrugs.

In Basra, Alpert questions a grieving woman in front of her father's home.

Alpert: "What happened to your father?"

"His leg broken and his hand and his, all face -- no face. His lips, and now, and everything. His eyes." Alpert finds the father in the hospital, and we briefly meet a man with all of his facial features burned away.

"We talked very directly to the Iraqi people," Alpert says. "They came across as the ultimate victims caught in the pincers between their own stupid leader and the American military machine, and they were getting the daylights squeezed out of them." He wanted to document that, Alpert says, because the air war seemed to be coming across on U.S. television as a war without bloodshed. "It was being romanticized," he says. "It cried out for reportorial presence."

One thing the Iraq tapes have in common with much of Alpert's work is that people argue about their merit. Alpert has supporters inside NBC and no shortage of critics. Mention his name and you get strong reactions, many of them from sources who don't want to be identified:

From a veteran producer: "He does verite that isn't verite. He sacrifices reality to a political point of view. He's basically not watched; he's a free-lancer, and there it is."

From a former veteran correspondent: "There was a certain resentment. 'Who is this guy?' Everybody is working their ass off to get on the air and this guy, because he's offbeat, gets his stuff on the air."

From another veteran producer: "People either loved him or hated him. I though he was fine. I think people may not like his politics. But it wasn't disguised. He was different. So what?"

One of the hotter debates about Alpert's work centered on a segment in a 1986 series called The Philippines: Life, Death, and Revolution. After he and DeLeo made contact with the New People's Army, Alpert traveled with an NPA raiding party as they ambushed a government convoy. Much of this guerrilla operation, in which fourteen Philippine army soldiers were killed, was captured on a riveting tape that would later appear on Nightly News.

Too riveting, some though. Alpert's critics wondered whether the ambush had been carried out for the benefit of the camera or whether, at the least, Alpert had an obligation to warn the government troops. Others, including veteran correspondent George Lewis, singled out a moment in which a nervous Alpert shouts out that the "enemy" is approaching. "It sounded as if he was warning them," Lewis says. "It appeared to a lot of us that he indeed crossed over the line to become more of a participant."

Alpert says that from where he was in the Philippine jungle, there was no way to warn the government troops about the raid, which he says would have taken place whether or not a camera was there to record it. And warning either side, he says, is not the journalist's job. In the wake of the furor over the report, NBC asked two executives with combat experience to screen the tape and the outtakes. "The use of the word 'enemy' you could quarrel with. But Alpert didn't warn them; the soldiers were already seen," says one of those executives, Tom Wolzien, a former Nightly News producer who is now a senior vice-president in NBC's cable division. "Did he cause the ambush to come about? Nah. Nobody does an ambush like that just to accommodate a camera. I though this was some of the best cinema verite material I'd ever seen in combat, and one of the gutsiest pieces of film I'd ever seen.

"I think he's an honest point-of-view journalist," Wolzien adds. "He makes no bones about it. It's almost commentary, what he does, and he brings you things that you don't get anywhere else. Other people's biases are more mainstream, so they don't think what they do is commentary too."

But in January 1989, only five months after Michael Gartner took over as president of NBC News, Alpert provided his critics with what they saw as a smoking gun in their case against him. London bureau chief Frieda Morris noticed that the tape other networks had fed via satellite from Kabul -- images of the final lowering of the flag at the U.S. embassy there -- looked different from what Alpert was sending to NBC. Morris asked assistant bureau chief Dina Modianot to query Alpert via the satellite channel, and, Modianot recalls, "He replied that he had arrived late and he had asked them to re-do the ceremony." The footage aired on NBC News at Sunrise before the editors could kill it.

To Alpert as well, the flag incident was a terrible error in judgment. "We met with Gartner," he says. "We said we had no excuses, that we would take whatever punishment they thought appropriate. They basically said, Rehabilitate yourself with good deeds. We took that real seriously."

Alpert pads around his Chinatown office in sandals and shorts as if he were at home, which he is. He and hiswife, Keiko Tsuno, also a video filmmaker, and their thirteen-year-old daughter Tami, a karate expert like her father, live in the building, a magnificent if slightly dilapidated former firehouse that they wrested from the city to house Downtown Community Television, or DCTV, the community video center they founded in 1972.

Alpert, now forty-two, was a cab driver/community activist at the time and Tsuno was an artist/waitress/community activist whose filmmaker friends told her about the wonders of video. She sent money to her mother in Japan, who sent back a Sony camera. Alpert was soon using it in a union reform campaign he had gotten involved in, getting fellow cab drivers to tell their tales of unsafe equipment and gouging by the fleet owners. "When this tape was shown at one of our meetings, it was the first time we had an effective meeting," he says. "We all saw that television had a power that you could actually harness."

The idea behind DCTV was to teach community groups to harness that power, and it has taken off, financed mostly by a combination of public and private grants and the sale of work to places like NBC. In a fundraising tape, Tom Brokaw, the NBC anchor and a DCTV board member, tells us that "Each year, more than 6,000 students, mostly minorities, enroll for its free classes. Over 400 community organizations and hundreds of community producers use DCTV's equipment free of charge."

Through the 1970s Alpert and his DCTV colleagues turned out a series of documentaries that ran on PBS. Maryann DeLeo, while in college, had been impressed by one about health care and volunteered to work at DCTV. She soon found herself on a mission to find a young male prostitute willing to talk about his life on camera. "Ricky" became one of the six lives depicted in the 1980 documentary Third Avenue, about people who live and work along that New York City street.

It was in Third Avenue that Alpert's particular style emerged. For the first time he did hit own camera work, and, instead of providing commentary, got people to tell their own stories, sometimes right into the camera. It seemed to work. "There is more drama, more life, more love and passion in this short hour than in a week's worth of prime time potboiling," Tom Shales wrote in The Washington Post. "Third Avenue is a triumph of its kind and a guidepost to a new age of television." Among the viewers was Steve Friedman, who was then running the Today show at NBC.

"I thought, this is the kind of stuff that we can't get, because we can't spend that kind of time with people. So I decided, let's present Jon as a [Today show] character and bring him on when he has stuff." Freidman exploited a loophole in union rules that let him buy essentially finished products from stringers, a loophole that also gave Alpert a great deal of editorial control.

"I never asked Jon to be a reporter," Friedman adds. "A reporter in the classic sense is somebody who does a story and gets one side of it and then goes to the other side and then presents it down the middle. Well, we never asked Jon to do that. We asked him to take a slice of life -- whether it be hard-metals disease, whether it be in Vietnam, whether it be all the great stuff that he did -- just present that stuff."

There is a moment in the series Alpert did for NBC about deteriorating conditions in Veterans Administration hospitals during the Reagan years that points up what some journalists see as the flaws that undermine his work. "They've really hurt you, haven't they, Rocky?" he asks a weeping man in his hospital room. But from what we see on tape it is not clear that Rocky is crying about the physical abuse he says has been inflicted on him and others by hospital personnel -- charges raised but not substantiated in the piece -- or even about conditions in the hospital. He seems to be crying about the fact that he cannot live again in the world outside his window.

Hard Metals Disease, another series Alpert did for the network, on the other hand, demonstrates why some journalists admire him. We watch a former GTE Valeron plant manager and plant foreman explain how they had advance warning of OSHA inspections and cleaned up hazardous metal dust just before the inspectors arrived. We go inside a plant -- the door stealthily opened by a young employee -- and see that a single floor fan is the only ventilation the company provides in the area where the dust is produced. Most memorably, we meet a freckle-faced young woman named Cathy, who says that she acquired hard metals disease after taking over a job from another woman. No one told her until it was too late that the other woman had come down with the disease. Later in the series we meet her again. Two years have passed; her face is swollen from steroid treatments and, her doctor says, she will soon need regular oxygen for her deteriorating lungs.

One story idea that NBC chose not to go with was a controversial one about the bleak, self-destructive lives of three small-time Newark hoods. They were shoplifters, who obligingly performed their work in front of a hidden camera, once again raising questions in some critics' minds about the line between observer ad citizen. Alpert and DeLeo took a tape of that material to Home Box Office, where Sheila Nevins, the vice-president in charge of documentaries, was intrigued enough to ask for more, and stunned by what she eventually saw. "It was very said, it was very true, it was very different, and I thought it was very important," she says. "Jon's films are from the inside out, not from the outside in. It was as if we were in their house looking at the world, rather than the other way around."

Nevins has little patience for Alpert's critics. "Jon's politics are less important to me than his compassion," she says. "I don't even know his politics."

In wartime, of course, compassion can get political.

"So far, we've had just two ways to get a look at the damage done to Iraq -- pictures taken from Allied warplanes, or footage of death and destruction shot by Iraqi television," Tom Brokaw said on the January 31 Nightly News. When they returned to New York, Alpert and DeLeo had what they thought was solid material to fill that vacuum, and Friedman and Tom Brokaw and Tom Capra of Today seemed to agree. The editing instructions, Alpert says, were to keep Ramsey Clark out of the story, to report only what Alpert and DeLeo had confirmed with their own eyes, and to hurry up and get it ready to air. Friedman confirms that a Nightly News piece was to run on Tuesday, February 12; Captra says two or three segments were to follow on Today.

But on the afternoon of the twelfth, Alpert and DeLeo instead found themselves in a meeting with Michael Gartner. "He said he hadn't seen the footage. He said he didn't want to see it," says DeLeo. "He said he didn't want to use anything that we ever did again. He said something like 'Every time you go to the third world there are problems.' He mentioned Afghanistan." A decade with NBC was quietly blown away.

Why? Now that the dust has settled, the players have assembled their reasons. Gartner won't talk about this; for Browne, Ramsey Clark looms large.

"Ramsey Clark got in because of his point of view, and the reason that Jon got access to things was Ramsey Clark's contacts," he says. "He did it as a free-lancer and that's fine. But that doesn't mean we have to use it." Browne says that "one of Clark's aides held a press conference in Washington announcing that Alpert was going to be running a piece on NBC," further linking the network to the peace activist. And Alpert, Browne adds, was "not exactly riding high" at NBC News. "That thing in Afghanistan confirmed that Jon uses techniques that we don't use."

Alpert notes that, following the Kabul incident, he covered a number of other stories -- including China during the Tiananmen Square massacre -- for NBC. And he notes that Browne came out of NBC's Miami bureau, on whose territory -- Cuba, Nicaragua, El Salvador -- Alpert thinks he may have trod once too often. His analysis of what brought about the severing of his relationship with the network is that, while the Clark connection and his own poor judgment in Kabul were undoubtedly major factors, a more important reason was that Gartner feared taking heat for reporting an unpopular story -- a story on the effect of the war on Iraqi civilians.

"I think [Gartner] thought it was an intelligent choice," Alpert says. "Keep the team happy, don't get the public riled up at NBC, don't get the government riled up, and once and for all get rid of this ornery whippersnapper who seems to do things in a different way."

Steve Friedman, a lively man who tosses a baseball into a mitt during interviews, thinks NBC ought to be commended, not criticized, for "giving Jon Alpert ten years when no one else would. Everything has its run.

"The business has changed," Friedman says. "These places are undergoing a restructuring, which doesn't really permit rogue free-lance guys working under their own frame of reference. I think Michael and Don talked and I think one of them was concerned about Ramsey Clark. I think they decided right then and there for many reasons it was time to say goodbye.

"I agreed with them," Friedman continues. "In my position, I'd have run the piece. But I only run the show. The way the business is going, you have to control what you put on the air from start to finish. I think that they said that since they had no control over Jon, that he's a free-lancer, that he's part of an era gone by. The fact of the matter is, he complicated our life during a very complicated time, so the feeling was, That's it. See ya.

"Jon is a dinosaur of the eighties," Friedman concludes. "He has to reinvent himself in the nineties if he wants to be in mainstream television."

But Alpert doesn't seem to be good at re-inventing himself to suit the institutions he works with. When he has broken into mainstream TV it has been because insiders like Friedman saw value in the very fact that he can't or won't conform. And just who are the dinosaurs and who are the mammals in the TV jungle these days is hard to discern.

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