From the outset, the daily news conferences giving updates on the recovery and investigation of the crash of Trans World Airlines Flight 800 were unfailingly confident and practiced. There was a sense of control in the measured answers, the technical knowledge of the safety experts, even in the top F.B.I. man's tough talk about ''collaring the cowards who did this.'' Always, caution was urged.
But the televised appearances were deceiving, for the convincing performances in restraint masked a much more complex and frantic scramble to action going on behind the scenes, at least in the first stages of the investigation. There, lines of authority were unclear, levels of experience varied, and people fought through sleeplessness for coherence and progress.
A reconstruction of the investigation shows that at least in its early weeks, it was what one investigator called ''a shotgun marriage'' -- the imperfectly matched cultures of transportation safety experts, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other agencies. The coming together produced its share of fractures. Indeed, the varying agendas and differing personal styles produced suspicions about everything from news leaks to professional competence.
The most senior officials with the National Transportation Safety Board wound up furious with their own personnel at the scene, convinced that the agency had ceded control of the inquiry to the F.B.I.; the prospect that ''friendly fire'' might have destroyed the Boeing 747 lingered ominously for investigators for days as the Department of Defense slowly eliminated all conceivable possibilities; distrust was so deep at times that workers with the Medical Examiner's office and agents with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms thought their telephone calls were being monitored by the F.B.I.
But the reconstruction of the investigation into the July 17 crash shows that in the rush for the kind of answers turned up in an F.B.I. laboratory in Washington, people pushed themselves to their limits. Divers operating far beyond their experience partnered dozens of victims up through the sea's basement of black. Pathologists, operating in a kind of hypnotic trance, had to be physically pried from the autopsy tables and sent for sleep.
There have been secret, sober subplots, as well. The inquiry forced investigators to confront daily decisions about how much information to make public. Concerned about causing widespread alarm, they muted their statements on how seriously they were taking the notion that a missile had brought down the aircraft.
Faced with the problem of preserving evidence and extricating victims from tangles of wreckage, investigators finally ordered that no one speak of any bodies found underwater, but only those officially counted and brought to shore. The aim was to keep the expectations of family members realistic.
The investigation has been played out in part on television, in part on a distant expanse of the ocean, and in part behind armed guards at an old airplane hangar where agents and experts, each hoarding his own information, rebuild the aircraft and try to reconstruct the catastrophe.
But it was in the environment of the forensics laboratory in Washington that the investigation's greatest breakthrough occurred. The discovery, kept under wraps for roughly two weeks, could in time alter the nature of the investigation. The F.B.I. could soon declare the crash a crime and expand its investigation to pursue suspects.
''A lot died with screams across their faces,'' a senior investigator said of the 230 victims. ''You want to try and answer those screams.''
An Initial Chaos
Struggle for Order During First Days
In trying to find these answers, the first response of investigators and rescuers was less than smooth. The outfit of agents with guns and badges, aviators and engineers, giant ships and underwater robots, began its work in fits and starts in what was a scene of raw ruination, a hailstorm of humans and aluminum that showered the sea nine miles off shore.
Looking back, those involved in the recovery talk of a frenzy not quite captured in the accounts of the catastrophe's early moments. In a stifling heat, investigators worked in protective ''biosuits'' the first several days, unsure of what they were dealing with in the recovery, and afraid of its hazards. At one point, after reports of H.I.V.-infected blood on the flight circulated, a brief panic erupted on the Coast Guard station dock. A glass container broke and something that might or might not have been blood splashed everywhere. A madcap cleanup with bleach and brushes followed.
Coast Guard ships, thinking they were protecting the quadrant of sea that was, in truth, an enormous, shifting accident scene, briefly kept out boats officially assigned to help in the recovery. An impostor in the uniform of an Army officer showed up at the command center and helped direct helicopter traffic around the guarded zone the first night and into the next day. He was eventually found out, escorted from the scene but was not arrested. The authorities said he had done a fine job.
