Strange Cargo

A curious trove of Soviet arms

Halfway through a routine nine-day crossing of the Atlantic, below a scalding sun on a lazy late afternoon, a deck hand aboard the Venezuelan cargo ship Maracaibo suddenly spotted a ship drifting aimlessly in the hazy distance. Captain Humberto Leon Dorante steamed toward the mysterious vessel and tried to establish radio contact with it. When he received no response, he slowly circled the ship three times to look for signs of life or danger. Then he dispatched an armed three-man expedition to board it. Shortly thereafter, Leon radioed Venezuelan navigation headquarters with his findings: "We have found the steamship Cloud, without flag, without crew. Its cargo: weapons. We wait for instructions."

Several Maracaibo crew members who boarded the 2,383-ton, Cyprus-registered Cloud concluded that it had been abandoned in haste, as if the difference between life and death lay in a few seconds. Shoes, apparently thrown off as the crew jumped into lifeboats, littered the deck. In the mess, food that had been left during an evening meal lay rotting on the tables. The ship's radio was still tuned to the emergency band. Moving deeper into the engine room, the explorers from the Maracaibo got their first clue as to why the Cloud had been abandoned. A short circuit had started a fire and caused serious damage to the electrical and fire-prevention systems. But the fire, which eventually burned itself out, had caused only limited damage. There had to be another reason for the crew's panic.

The key to the mystery lay above the engine room in the Cloud's cargo hold, where 5,000 wooden boxes labeled TNT were stored. Each box contained two 122-mm shells, a caliber used exclusively in Soviet-manufactured field guns and howitzers. The Venezuelans determined that the crew had probably thought it could not control the fire, and that the ammunition was about to blow the ship to pieces. Said Captain Leon: "They were on a floating bomb."

As the Maracaibo began to tow the Cloud to Turiamo Naval Base, nine Venezuelan infantes, or marines, parachuted onto the deck of the mystery ship. They learned from the engine-room log that the Cloud had picked up its hot cargo in Yugoslavia in March. The last stop, probably only a few hours before the fire, had been Las Palmas in the Canary Islands, 155 miles off the northwest coast of Africa. Venezuelan Defense Ministry officials believe that the Cloud's three British and nine Ghanaian sailors were picked up by a Panamanian liner and taken to Senegal. The Cloud then drifted for 62 days, during which it traveled some 1,800 miles before crossing paths with the Maracaibo.

According to the Cloud's documents, the ship was on a perfectly legal mission, heading for Nigeria to unload its cargo. Although the Venezuelans initially thought the weapons could have been destined for Cuba or Nicaragua, the Nigerian embassy in Caracas and the ship's Greek owners confirmed the destination. That did not answer the question of why, for 62 days, no one bothered to search for the Cloud or claim its explosive cargo. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.