COMMERCE SECRETARY FEARED DEADIN CRASH : JET CARRYING BROWN, U.S EXECUTIVES HITS MOUNTAIN IN CROATIA.

Byline: R.W. Apple Jr. The New York Times

A military plane carrying Commerce Secretary Ron Brown and a delegation of American corporate executives slammed into a mountainside Wednesday as it approached the airport at Dubrovnik, on the Adriatic coast of Croatia. Chances that Brown had survived were ``next to zero,'' a White House official said after more than 12 hours of rescue efforts.

Clambering over rocky, rugged terrain, working by flashlight in pelting rain, Croatian search parties found nine bodies and one survivor, described by a Dubrovnik doctor at the scene as ``a woman who was bleeding profusely.'' She died later, reports said.

But there was no definitive word on the fate of Brown, 54, a political insider who helped spark President Clinton's 1992 campaign. Glyn Davies, a State Department spokesman, said Wednesday night that all 33 people aboard the plane were presumed dead but later retracted his comment, saying they were considered missing. Croatian television said all had perished.

Searchers at the scene and officials in Washington said they held out almost no hope that survivors would be found. A U.S. military official in Germany said there was no indication that the plane had been downed by hostile action.

One of those missing in the crash was Nathaniel C. Nash, 44, the Frankfurt bureau chief of The New York Times, who was accompanying Brown on a trip to Balkan nations for an article on reconstruction efforts following the Bosnian civil war. Commerce Department staff members were on board as well, including Charles Meissner, assistant secretary for international economic policy.

Names of the corporate executives aboard were not made public by the government, but some companies issued statements confirming that their executives had been on board. Among them was Robert A. Whittaker of Foster Wheeler Energy International of Clifton, N.J.

Several prominent businessmen who had at one point planned to make the trip did not do so. One was Alfred A. Checchi, co-chairman of Northwest Airlines, who elected instead to attend a White House state dinner Tuesday night.

A senior American official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the pilot of Brown's plane had flown up a valley parallel to the one he should have followed before turning for his final approach. When he turned, he hit the mountain, the official said on the basis of reports from the scene.

Clinton went to Brown's Washington home to comfort the commerce secretary's wife, Alma, and then to the Commerce Department, where he spoke feelingly of the missing Cabinet member as ``a magnificent life force.''

Clinton said Brown, who ranged across the globe like none of his predecessors in an effort to develop markets for American business, had made the department ``what it was meant to be - an instrument for realizing the potential of every American.''

Brown's fund-raising and coalition-building skills, honed in campaigns past and in years as a lobbyist, proved invaluable to Clinton four years ago, when Brown was serving as the first African-American chairman of a major party. Because Brown was under investigation by an independent counsel for purported financial irregularities, Clinton decided months ago not to name him, as previously planned, as chairman of his re-election campaign, but Brown remained a trusted presidential counselor.

In a tribute to Nash, who had represented The New York Times in Washington, South America and Europe, the newspaper's publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., called him ``a colleague known as much for his gentleness of spirit as for his keen journalistic abilities.'' If Nash perished in the crash, he would be the first Times reporter to be killed working on an article since World War II.

The plane, reportedly carrying 27 passengers and six crew members, took off at lunchtime from Tuzla in Bosnia for what should have been a routine flight. Brown had visited there with American troops attached to the NATO-led peacekeeping effort.

The plane vanished from radar screens at 2:52 p.m. local time (4:52 a.m. PST) as it neared the Cilipi airport, about 15 miles southeast of Dubrovnik, a medieval walled city squeezed between mountains and the sea.

According to Col. Robert Mirelson, a spokesman for the U.S. European Command in Stuttgart, Germany, the weather was harsh - fog, rain and high winds from the south - but it was well within the limits for Brown's plane, a military version of the Boeing 737 known as a T-34.

For reasons still unknown, perhaps pilot error or instrument failure, the plane came in too far north, missing the runway and striking the mountain - actually more a large hill called Sveti Ivan or St. John. It came to rest on the hilltop.

``I can't tell you why they were where they were,'' said Lt. Gen. Howell Estes, operations director for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at a Pentagon briefing Wednesday afternoon. He said he doubted that the pilots had erred but later backed away from that statement and said he could not speculate.

Although Peter Galbraith, the U.S. ambassador to Croatia, was at the airport awaiting Brown's arrival, both the State Department and the military had trouble all day verifying what had in fact happened. Officials were unable to supply a list of those on board, admirals and generals contradicted each other and, in some cases, issued erroneous information.

For example, a senior Air Force colonel told reporters four hours after the wreckage was located well inland, near the hamlet of Velji Do, a mile or so from the airport, that the aircraft had come down in the Adriatic.

There were also conflicting reports as to whether the plane carried a cockpit voice recorder or a flight data recorder. Wednesday night top Pentagon officers said it did not, which will make it harder to learn exactly what went wrong. But it did carry a proximity warning system, which warns pilots when they are flying too close to the ground, the officers reported.

EXECUTIVES ON THE BROWN FLIGHT Here is a list of corporate executives who were on the plane with Commerce Secretary Ron Brown on a trip to Bosnia and Croatia. The names were supplied by the Commerce Department and the executives' companies:

Walter Murphy, senior vice president, AT&T Submarine Systems Inc., Morristown, N.J.

Robert A. Whittaker, chairman and chief executive officer, Foster Wheeler Energy International, Clinton, N.J.

John A. Scoville, chairman Harza Engineering Co., Chicago, Ill.

Paul Cushman III, chairman and chief executive officer Riggs International Banking Corp., Washington.

Leonard Pieroni, chairman and chief executive officer, Parsons Corp., Pasadena, Calif.

Claudio Elia, chairman and chief executive officer of Air & Water Technologies Corp., Somerville, N.J.

CAPTION(S):

3 Photos, map, box

PHOTO (1 -- color) Commerce Secretary Ron Brow n, center, visited a power plant Wednesday before flight

Associated Press 

(2 -- color) The Clintons leave Ron Brown's home in Washington, D.C.

Associated Press

(3) Cabinet members bow their heads in a tribute to Ron Brown at the Commerce Department. Front row, from left, are: Health Secretary Donna Shalala, Housing Secretary Henry Cisneros, Attorney General Janet Reno and Education Secretary Richard Riley.

Associated Press

BOX: Executives on the Brown flight (see text)

Map: Route of Brown's plane