Reporting from the Frontline - in pictures

Colin Peck's pictures of Blowpipe missiles were the first clear evidence that they had been supplied by Britain to Afghan guerrillas in the 1980s, despite denials from the Thatcher government. Peck's Frontline colleague Peter Jouvenal was arrested with the pictures at a restaurant in Covent Garden after being overheard talking to another journalist over lunch about Blowpipe missiles, heroin stashes, and Kalashnikovs
Photograph: Colin Peck

During the 1991 Gulf war, Vaughan Smith disguised himself as a soldier to report on the US-led advance into Iraq. Smith talked his way into a Bradley fighting vehicle at the spearhead of the US advance. At one point Vaughan suggested a formation to the lieutenant alongside, who accepted the idea, being junior in rank. Vaughan's position was absurd: at the front end of the American army a tactical decision was being made by a freelance British cameraman
Photograph: Vaughan Smith

A wad of Deutschmarks, a packet of cigarettes and a mobile phone wrapped up in a green handkerchief took the main impact of a round fired at Vaughan Smith in 1998 by a sniper in Kosovo. If he hadn't been wearing the bumbag which held these items, the bullet would have gone straight into his side. The pictures he had just taken of a new Serbian offensive allowed the Dutch army to identify the armoured vehicles used by the Serbs. They were taken by Serbian killers in 1995, at the Srebrenica massacre
Photograph: Vaughan Smith

The fate of Afghanistan was sealed in a few weeks in the spring of 1992, when rival mujahideen forces fought among themselves as they could not agree on a new leader after the ousting of the Soviet-backed government. Rory Peck was in the thick of the fighting. By then he had made more than 40 trips into Afghanistan, often travelling for several weeks with mujahideen fighters. Two years after the civil war broke out the Taliban emerged in a reaction to the chaos
Photograph: Robert Nickelsberg

Until very recently Afghan street photographers used homemade pinhole cameras for pictures such as this 1993 portrait of Rory Peck and Tony Davis. Rory wrote a little story on the back of the print, about 'an isolated post in Turkestan commanded by Tony (Beau) Davis which was attacked by hordes of Turkomen. In the finest PC Wren tradition Davis props his dead men up as dummies, and the relief force arrived too late. I was the ace reporter from the Chicago Daily Star whose record of the defence was the basis of the legend. There were no survivors'
Photograph: Anonymous

The cameramen who worked for Frontline retained an independent spirit, even when commissioned to work for broadcasters. The BBC correspondent Mark Urban compared them to masters of cuisine: 'They would appear in the edit suite with the manner of a great chef as the client tastes the food in a restaurant. Once they had detected the ripple of satisfaction at the material they had brought in, they would retreat very quickly.' Here Rory Peck (left) and Peter Jouvenal hitch a lift on a Russian helicopter in Afghanistan in 1991
Photograph: Tim Deagle

Rory Peck bought this BMW in Bosnia, from an escaping Croat refugee, in the condition seen here. He called it 'the ultimate war wagon', using it to report from Sarajevo in 1992. Speed, rather than protective armour, was his strategy for dealing with Sniper Alley
Photograph: Anthony Massey

Peter Jouvenal, seen here relaxing with Liberian guerillas in 1991 and the stills photographer Patrick Robert, who was later seriously wounded in fighting there, saw witnessing atrocities as his duty, even if some of the images were too gruesome to broadcast. 'I do it all the time – like dogs eating people's faces in Liberia. If you don't do it then when you send the pictures back as cut stories to people in London, they start to think that war is not so bad. It is a message to these editors to wake up. This is a real war'
Photograph: Patrick Robert

Before becoming a freelance cameraman, Nicholas della Casa fought on the losing side in the war for independence in Zimbabwe, then called Rhodesia. His regiment, the Grey's Scouts, were the last mounted cavalry in the world. The horses were trained not to flinch while bullets were fired over their heads at a gallop. Nicholas was killed in 1991, along with his wife Rosanna and brother-in-law Charlie, while trying to cross from Turkey into Iraq to report on Saddam Hussein's repression of the Kurds
Photograph: Nicholas della Casa

The tank barrel marks the northernmost point of the Taliban advance into the Panjshir Valley in Afghanistan in the late 1990s. Smith (right, filming me) often dressed in local clothing to blend in. The shalwar kameez was made in a local market, and the hat is a distinctive pakhool, worn by Afghans in this region. But by the turn of the century the writing was on the wall for the freelance buccaneers drawn to Frontline. The market was changing as the internet drove down the rates they could charge for pictures. In their time they had changed the way that news pictures were shot Photograph: David Loyn