Word: frogmen
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...even Phnom-Penh is safe. Last January, the Lucky Star was attacked in the harbor by North Vietnamese frogmen using plastique explosives. A month earlier, the Lucky Star's sister ship, the Bright Star, was holed by plastique and sank. Cambodian soldiers routinely stand lookout duty against frogmen, occasionally lobbing grenades off the piers or spraying the water with machine-gun fire. For the crew of the embattled Lucky Star, however, the guards are simply a nuisance. "I wish they would go away," gripes one of the deck crew. "All they do is keep us awake, smoke our cigarettes...
...waters off The Netherlands, these vessels beam a mixture of pop music, disk-jockey egos and insistent commercials into homes otherwise served only by relatively sedate Dutch broadcasting. Until recently, this profitable operation was shared by Radio Veronica and Radio Northsea, which had agreed to a truce after three frogmen hired by one of Veronica's owners had planted a bomb aboard Northsea (TIME, May 31,1971). Now, though, something new has come between Veronica and Northsea...
Never had there been such extreme security measures to guard Queen Elizabeth in her own capital. Some 6,000 extra police stood duty in the center of London. Police launches and even frogmen guarded the Thames river approaches to Parliament. The building entrance was encircled by wire netting, and police made four separate searches through the underground tunnels in which, exactly 366 years ago, Guy Fawkes' plot to blow up Parliament had been discovered...
...plan almost worked. Shortly before midnight, less than an hour after the frogmen had planted dynamite in the engine room, Disc Jockey West announced: "Flames are approaching the studio, we are abandoning the ship. Goodbye and God bless . . ." Everyone but the captain, the chief engineer and one sailor clambered overboard into lifeboats. But a Dutch tugboat, a firefighting ship from Rotterdam's Europort, a Dutch navy frigate carrying 250 battle-dressed marines, a navy Neptune reconnaissance plane and a helicopter all converged on the scene and put the fire out before it could damage the transmitter...
Radio Northsea was back on the air by 4 a.m. That same morning, Dutch police in Scheveningen rounded up the three frogmen, who had been promised more than $7,000 apiece for the job, and charged them with robbery in international waters. The following day they collared one of the men accused of organizing the plot-Dutch Businessman Norbert Jurgens, 48, a large stockholder and employee of Veronica's. At week's end they also arrested and indicted as an accomplice Hendrik ("Bull") Verwey, one of three Dutch brothers who are the principal owners of Veronica. "We never...