From the ninth-floor presidential suite of Caracas' Tamanaco Hotel at 1:30 a.m. (E.S.T.) Thursday, New York Times Correspondent Tadeusz Witold Szulc dictated a two-word cable: "Shipment delivered." His message, received by the Times 40 minutes later, was the outside world's first word that Venezuela Strongman Marcos Pérez Jiménez had been overthrown. By the time the dictator's DC-4 took off at 2:10 a.m. for the Dominican Republic —dutifully watched from the hotel's presidential terrace by Reporter Szulc—the Times was making over its first two pages for the big story.
Boilers Out. From Jan. 3, when he arrived in Caracas on a 36-hr, visa (later extended), Rio-based Tad Szulc (pronounced Schultz) filed the most detailed daily newspaper coverage of the off-again-on-again revolution to come out of Venezuela. With help from Caracas news sources cultivated in two years of covering South America for the Times, ex-U.P.man Szulc, 31, not only stayed on top of the story, but used every trick in the newsman's kick to ram his dispatches past the unsuspecting censors. By telephone from Caracas this week, Correspondent Szulc told how he had done it.
Tipped off that Venezuela's censors were responsible only for press messages in English and Spanish, Poland-born Reporter Szulc sent cables in Polish to a business address on Fifth Avenue, where a Polish-speaking friend had agreed in advance to translate and relay his files to the Times. He also smuggled out background stories each day with outbound airline passengers.
Since the censors had the phone numbers and cable addresses of all major U.S. newspapers, magazines and wire services, Szulc updated his files by sending what appeared to be business messages to 229 West 43rd St.—the Times's street address—using a prearranged code ("Regret inform you 24 boilers out of order") to relay casualty totals. When last Monday's school strike in Caracas proved a success, Newsman Szulc succeeded in getting a telephone connection to New York, dictated his entire story in Polish to his businessman-friend. The morning after Pérez Jiménez' ouster, early-rising Tad Szulc had the first press interview with Rear Admiral Wolfgang Larrazabal.
Liquor Out. In the Caracas press corps there were other seasoned censor dodgers, including such photographers as LIFE'S Joe Scherschel and A.P.'s Charles Tasnadi (see cut). Some of A.P. Stringer Morris Rosenberg's early copy went out by phone in Yugoslav. At 2:30 a.m. Thursday, United Press Correspondent Joseph Taylor, 31, sent the first wire-service flash on the government's fall in pidgin French. By the time A.P. filed its first bulletin at 3:08 a.m., Taylor's English-language story had been cleared by censors and was clacking over the teletypes. Though phone calls were monitored, the censors concentrated on the Caracas-New York lines. Thus the New York Herald Tribune's Caracas stringer was able to relay developments to Trib Correspondent Joseph Newman in Buenos Aires.