After Three Weeks, Three Countries and One Broken Chain of Command, the IB Atlantic IV Is No Longer Liberia's Alone to Find

MONROVIA, Aug. 10 -- For the better part of three weeks, the IB Atlantic IV existed mostly as a rumor with coordinates attached. It was a ship the government said it was watching, a ship whose engine trouble nobody could quite verify, a ship that drifted at 0.3 knots toward a port it wasn't supposed to be near, flying a flag that asks almost nothing of the vessels that fly it. Liberians read about it in fragments - an anonymous government source here, a rejected letter there, a pursuit off Rivercess that didn't end so much as move somewhere else.

By Rodney D. Sieh, [e-mail]

That fragment collecting is over. The IB Atlantic IV has been arrested in Ivory Coast, and for the first time since this saga began, the...