HOW ELITE UNIT SAVED U.S. PILOT.

Byline: Eric Schmitt The New York Times

Shortly after 8:45 p.m. Saturday in the Balkans, a secretive search-and-rescue team based with U.S. forces in Bosnia received an urgent phone call: An F-117 stealth fighter, the premier attack plane in America's arsenal, was down in Yugoslavia. The fate of the Air Force pilot was unknown.

Within minutes, a nighttime recovery mission was under way tapping the talents of an elite special operations team that stands poised to pluck downed and injured pilots from stormy seas or from behind enemy lines.

Nearly 5,000 miles away in Washington, the national security adviser, Sandy Berger, broke the news to President Clinton at the White House. ``Keep me informed,'' Clinton responded grimly, according to a White House aide.

For the next seven hours, Berger, Defense Secretary William Cohen and Gen. Henry Shelton, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, waited anxiously and fielded dozens of phone calls from Gen. Wesley Clark, NATO's military commander in Brussels, updating them on the situation.

There were emotional highs and lows. At one point, Pentagon aides cheered with joy when it was reported the pilot had been saved, only to learn it was a false report. At about 7:30 p.m. Eastern time, or 1:30 a.m. in Yugoslavia, tension rose as CNN reported that Belgrade had launched a massive manhunt for the downed pilot.

Finally, at 9:35 p.m. Eastern time, three specially equipped Air Force MH-60G Pave Hawk and MH-53J Pave Low helicopters, skimming over treetops at more than 150 mph, swooped in to snatch the pilot from his hiding place. He had suffered bruises and a battered kneecap in the ejection but otherwise was well.

The pilot, a field grade officer, parachuted to earth more than 10 miles west of where his $43 million radar-evading plane had crashed, 35 miles northwest of Belgrade. The Pentagon has not said what caused the plane to go down.

Although the area around the rescue site was teeming with heavily armed Yugoslav troops, the rescue mission took no enemy fire. Seventeen minutes later, with the might of the allied air operation covering its flight home, the rescue team crossed back into Bosnian airspace.

Back in Washington, Berger alerted Clinton, who expressed relief. At the Pentagon, spokesman Kenneth Bacon confirmed the pilot's safe return, but he declined to disclose any details, cautioning that NATO may need to rescue other pilots and did not want to give away its extraction trade secrets to Yugoslavia.

The pilot, whom Shelton described Sunday as a ``very experienced'' aviator, belongs to the 8th Fighter Squadron at Holloman Air Force Base, N.M. Air Force officials said the pilot, who declined all interviews Sunday and asked his superiors to withhold his name, wants to return to duty as soon as possible.

The outlines of the most perilous pilot rescue since Capt. Scott F. O'Grady was snared by Marines six days after a Serbian missile felled his F-16 fighter jet over Bosnia in June 1995, emerged Sunday in interviews with more than a dozen military officials in Washington and in Europe.

``I've been on rescue combat air patrols in Vietnam where we stayed for a long time,'' Gen. Michael Ryan, the Air Force chief of staff, said in an interview. ``The process is very calculated. You have to take it step by step. I can tell you this last operation was done very well.''

While Saturday's rescue was largely an Air Force affair, members of other branches of the services and officers from other NATO nations helped out, from flying air cover to providing intelligence on the ground.

``They train as hard as anyone in the world - harder, in fact - and that's the reason they were able to get into a hostile environment and pull him out back to safety,'' Cohen said of the rescuers Sunday on NBC's ``Meet the Press.''

Even as the rescue preparations unfolded in the Balkans, Pentagon and White House aides waited helplessly. At about 5 o'clock, a senior Pentagon aide said he recalled asking Shelton, ``How long is it going to be?'' Shelton replied, ``We just have no way of knowing.''

Indeed, O'Grady evaded capture for six days, scrounging for water (even wringing a few drops of rainwater from his wool socks) and digging for ants to eat.

But the F-117 pilot was more fortunate. A few hours after Shelton's remarks, the downed aviator had dashed to a waiting helicopter and its hovering escorts.