• Ship Hijackers Held at Cambodia Base

Ship Hijackers Held at Cambodia Base

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia, Aug. 19 – Charles Manson is their hero. Violent revolution is their cause.

But Clyde McKay and Alvin Glatowski, the two Americans who hijacked a U.S. munitions ship, to Cambodia five months ago, stand little chance of meeting Manson or joining the battle to “overthrow the pigs” they say control the United States.

They are prisoners of the Cambodian government. During the last three months McKay and Glatowski have been confined to a rusting World War II landing ship moored in the Mekong River beside the Chrui Changwar naval base two miles east of Phnom Penh.

American and Cambodian officials have not talked to them in an official capacity once they diverted the U.S. merchant ship Columbia Eagle to Cambodia. It was carrying war materials to U.S. bases in Thailand. Silence has answered their requests for political asylum. Written pleas to Premier Lon Nol for permission to visit diplomatic missions in Phnom Penh to arrange asylum in “a country that does not have an extradition treaty with the United States” have not been acknowledged.

McKay, 26, of San Diego, Calif., and Glatowski, 20, of Long Beach, Calif., admitted in an interview that they picked the wrong time to hijack the ship. The day after they sailed the vessel into Kompong Som (Sihanoukville), the 15-year-old regime of Prince Noordom Sihanouk was overthrown and war broke out with the Vietnamese communists.

But the two Merchant Marine seamen, described by the ship’s skipper as “pot-smoking, pill-popping hippies,” said they have no regrets over their actions as part of a plan to set up a center here for American military deserters from Vietnam.

Wearing Van Dyke style beards, the soft-spoken hijackers smoked cigarettes and drank coffee during an interview under the shade of a tree close by the ship, on which they said they were well-treated and well-fed.

McKay was dressed in fawncolored Levis and an orange shirt in stark contrast to the blue slave that covered most of his arms and around his eyes as treatment for rashes and sores.

Glatowski, who said his wife has written to him telling that their divorce will be final next February, wore off-white jeans, a bright green T-shirt and rubber tire sole sandals.

They said they still had some of the $2,000 they brought with them, although their guards changed it for Cambodian riels at 50 riels to one U.S. dollar, 4.5 riels below the official rate and close to 50 riels under the black market rate.

Their guards, they said, bring them whatever they can pay for, including marijuana, which is in plentiful supply. “We get marijuana in our ducks’ egg soup. Great flavor,” Glatowski said.

They said U.S. Air Force F4 phantom jets “go out of their way to buzz” the prison ship. “They love to harass us. We go out on deck and give them the peace sign.”

On the prison ship with them, they said, are about 12 Cambodian political prisoners and a third American whom they identified as Cpl. Larry Humphrey. They said Humphrey deserted from the U.S. army in Thailand seven months ago.He now has yellow jaundice, but Cambodian officers refuse to allow newsmen aboard to see him, they said.

By KENNETH J. BRADDICK

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