"Only the Beginning"

When a Senate subcommittee last week began to investigate charges that the Isbrandtsen Steamship Co. Inc.'s Flying Cloud had run "contraband" into Communist China, it quickly struck rich paydirt. But it was not the pay dirt that the committee had expected.

First on the witness stand was Calvin Frederick Bonawitz, the Flying Cloud seaman who had made the charges in a letter three weeks ago (TIME, Oct. 9). Since he had written the letter, said Bonawitz, he had learned that he was mistaken on some major points. It was not armor plate but thin steel plate that the Flying Cloud had carried, and instead of gasoline, the drums in the ship's hold contained motor oil and toluene, a raw material used in making dyes and TNT. Actually, added Bonawitz, most of the oil was unloaded from the ship soon after he wrote the letter, and before the Flying Cloud left Japan for China. But, implied Bonawitz, that was only because crew members had complained about the cargo to U.S. Army officials in Japan. Even so, the Flying Cloud had carried such things as steel, wire, pumps and radio tubes to Red China.

Captain Fred Harry Rylander, the Flying Cloud's skipper, did not deny delivering those products. But, he added, a number of other shipping companies, notably U.S. Lines, American Mail Line, Pacific Far East Line, Pacific Transport Lines and American President Lines, were taking substantially the same cargoes into Red China. This would still have to be proved.

Much of the testimony was off the record and not released for reasons of military security. But at week's end, Maryland Democrat Herbert R. O'Conor, acting chairman of the subcommittee, summed up: the Government's ban last March on shipments of many strategic materials, including oil products, from the U.S. to Red China had not cut off the supply. Reason: at that time there was nothing to prohibit U.S. shippers from bringing oil to China from other parts of the world. Not until October 13 were such shipments banned. In the meantime, said O'Conor, about 500,000 gallons of lubricating and engine oil had slipped into Red China since the start of the Korean war.

To find out who was to blame for the loophole, the subcommittee planned to send extensive questionnaires to oil companies and shipping lines on the China run. Said O'Conor: "This is only the beginning of our investigation."

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