Who bombed the Hilton?

by Rachel Landers

  A lot has been said about New South Wales police officers over the years — some of it by me in a documentary called The Inquisition — about the endemic corruption, the blue walls of silence and the like, but on an operation like this one cannot fault their courage. In short, they are instructed to set off for Yagoona after Seary has collected the Margiis in Newtown, and to apprehend them in the act — or immediately prior to the act. To enter a scene without hesitation in which all six of them could be blown sky high.

  Simultaneously Perrin mobilises the Observation Squad to cover the Margii headquarters in Queen Street, Newtown, which is just around the corner from Carillon Avenue, the site of the intended pick-up. A mix of Special Branch detectives, including Krawczyk and Observation Squad police, seven in total, are dispatched to Newtown to observe the rendezvous.

  It is among all this frenzy that Seary leaves police headquarters, around 9 pm, via the basement.14 He walks out into the cold, wet night of a Sydney winter and all is lost.

  Yagoona

  Between 9 pm and 11 pm all Seary needs to do is borrow a friend’s car. Perhaps that’s why the police don’t accompany him — how hard can that be? Perrin, on the other hand, has to ensure the smooth coordination of almost 20 police officers at separate locations: Newtown, Yagoona and CIB headquarters. Perhaps it is no surprise that Seary is left utterly unsupervised over the next few hours.

  Things start to go wrong immediately. Seary can’t find anyone who’ll lend him a car. After wandering around for 90 minutes he finally decides to nick one from Foveaux Street, Surry Hills. He hotwires an HT Holden and drives towards Sydney Uni.

  By the time Dunn, in the back, Alister, up front, and Seary, driving, set off for 16 Gregory Street, there is a large blue denim bag in the car containing all the components to make a good size bomb. In it sit ten sticks of gelignite, batteries, a timer and a detonator. Seary and seven policemen will swear under oath that Dunn arrives at the car in Carillon Avenue with the bag — or carrying something that looks ‘bag-like’. The trio of Margiis will counter that Seary pulls up to collect them with the bag containing the bomb already in the back seat. Dunn and Alister will swear that they had no idea the bag contained a bomb until Seary tells them about it just before their arrival at Yagoona. Anderson will assert he had absolutely no idea about a bomb until the police turn up to arrest him later that night.

  Let these differences lie for now. Next there is a kind of comedic aside when Seary realises he has managed to steal a car with an empty tank — there is a little physical farce as the men locate a back lane and struggle to break open the petrol cap, then locate a service station and fill up in order to make the getaway car functional. After this, alone in the dark, zooming towards their destination, a bomb nestled on the back seat and followed discreetly by the Observation Squad, there are versions of what is or is not said. Supposed confessions and accusations. Misunderstandings and conflict. None of it is recorded. All of it is hearsay.

  Down Parramatta Road then sweeping up the mighty Hume Highway and then we’re at Yagoona. Seary misses the turn-off to Gregory Street and takes the next left at Horton Street that runs alongside Bass Hill Public School. The Special Weapons and Operations Squad swoop in behind the Margiis’ car. Detective Summerfield, driving the lead car, forces the Holden off the road into the front yard of a modest weatherboard on Horton Street.1

  At that moment these two worlds that have orbited each other uneasily for so many months smash together in a collision of noise and light. Three slight, bearded young men are dragged from a car and across the road, handcuffed and made to lie down on the pavement in front of the school.

  Then the Army bomb disposal unit arrives, with a Captain Stevenson2 in full uniform warning the detectives to stay away as the bomb might be set. The Army officers invade the car and dismantle the unprimed bomb. This, too, with all its gleaming components, is spread out in front of the school.

  The Margiis on one side, the police on the other, are incomprehensible to each other. Nothing captures this better than the police photographs taken that night. There are three action shots of each of the sect members being escorted away from the scene by separate sets of policemen. The police are all huge. Tall, handsome men in suits and matching dark raincoats, three with those glossy Tom Selleck moustaches so popular in the ’70s. Their expressions are a mix of triumph and relief. In their tatty street clothes, Alister and Dunn look tiny beside them, their hands behind their backs. In these frozen tableaux, Alister looks stunned and Dunn, childlike and bereft. Even Seary, who is likewise shackled and aware of what is to occur, wears an expression of intense anxiety.3 One of the things that strikes me is how effortlessly Seary looks like he’s one of them, a Margii through and through, a true believer.

  Everyone would have been so scared, though, wouldn’t they? While the bomb they retrieve from the back seat is unarmed, ‘each of the components was operational and there was a continuity of the electrical circuit’. All one had to do to get it up and running would be to ‘place the leg wires and the detonator on the positive and negative terminals of the batteries’. If approximately 12 to 15 sticks of gelignite can obliterate the back of a steel garbage truck, eviscerate two men and shatter glass 16 storeys high, 10 sticks would have destroyed the car, its occupants and anyone within 15 feet of it. This would have included the occupants of the house six or so feet from where the car came to rest. Whoever brought the bomb was playing an extraordinarily high stakes game.4

  Making things even more surreal is that neither Robert Cameron, nor his dog, wife or kiddies actually live at 16 Gregory Street, Yagoona. He’d moved out of the area a year earlier. Seary had plucked the address from an old telephone directory. Had either scheme succeeded, the residents of 16 Gregory Street might have woken on Friday morning to find their home daubed with inexplicable slogans like ‘Prout hates racists’ — or they mightn’t have woken up at all.

  Not long after the drama at Yagoona, the Observation Squad, padded out with additional detectives, pours into the Ananda Marga’s Newtown HQ, ascending to the office and hoovering up — or, as the Margiis claim, planting — evidence.

  Here the plot both thickens and twists. We have a new bit player who will dominate the show for years to come. In 1978 I doubt anyone would make much of the inclusion of Detective Roger Rogerson in the crack team assembled for the raid on the Margiis that night. At the time he’s a lauded and decorated officer, known to bring cases in. Of course by 1986 his reputation is such that you may as well have hired Attila the Hun or Vlad the Impaler if you were going to put question marks over the integrity of the operation that night. His presence at the Margii residence becomes one of those immovable obstacles that blocks out the light. In view of his various alleged and proven transgressions in the coming decades — murder, green-lighting criminals, fabricating evidence — it’s difficult to be certain about anything he’s involved with. If you’re guilty of some things are you guilty of everything? Does it automatically follow that all he touches is infected with the same dark traits?

  It’s not as if he’s the only one running the show.

  Krawczyk and Helson, who had been at the Horton Street scene, are directed by Inspector Perrin to return to the Newtown police station and meet up with Rogerson. After a conference, the three of them, along with another three detectives, head to Queen Street and find a Margii guard outside. The police force the front door open. They ask for Anderson and locate him on the top floor, lying on his back, his eyes open.5 He is arrested and taken to CIB headquarters.

  Here’s the problem: according to the police, the arrested sect members are refreshingly forthcoming both at Yagoona and at Queen Street and then at CIB headquarters. They don’t seem to be able to shut up, not only about their involvement in the crime, but also their lack of remorse. Immediately after being cautioned, Anderson supposedly tells Rogerson, in front of Detectives Howard, Krawczyk and Helson:

  ‘I don’t intend to say a lot. I will say this. It will no
t stop here. What was going to happen tonight was the only justice that Cameron and his kind deserve. You will suffer the consequence for this.’6

  The problem is that no one has thought to turn on a tape recorder. It is possible that in fact they have decided deliberately not to turn on a tape recorder. Thus all the ‘conversations’ are dutifully recorded in police notebooks. Hence these kinds of confessions were called ‘verbals’. In short they could be incriminating, unverifiable statements fabricated by corrupt police.

  It’s a spectacularly stupid decision. Even if Anderson, Alister and Dunn did utter every word they were accused of saying that night, it can’t ever be proved, can it? Think what you like about Rogerson, but I’ve spent a great deal of time with Detective Krawczyk’s meticulous records and reading transcripts of his interviews with Seary. He does things transparently and without equivocation. While some of the Seary debrief tapes are mislabelled, which fuels a variety of attacks from the Margiis, Krawczyk did think to record them. I find it hard to believe he would have thought that simply jotting notes down during interrogations was a good idea.

  What these verbals do is create doubt. Enough doubt, along with other doubtful circumstances such as the lack of surveillance when Seary collected the Margiis in Carillon Avenue, and questions over Seary’s credibility, to free these three men in seven years’ time.

  While there are disturbing problems in the ‘evidence’ (as there will be for Anderson’s trial in 1989), after reading everything available I also stand by what James Wood says in the conclusion to the 1984–85 Section 475 inquiry:

  In these circumstances, I have no alternative other than to express the conclusion that, while strong suspicion attached to the petitioners [Anderson, Alister and Dunn] in relation to the counts on which they stood indicted and were convicted, a doubt remains as to their guilt.7

  Did Seary bring a bomb of devastating power to a suburban street, all in order to frame the sect members, escape his relationship with Special Branch and be free to go to university? If this was Seary’s intention it utterly failed. In his own way he will be shackled to this act for the rest of his life. In August 1991 he goes so far as to make a serious complaint about ASIO failing to bring forward their agents inside the sect, who he alleges could have corroborated his claims about Margii violence.8

  As recently as 1999, Seary unsuccessfully sues Tom Molomby, a staunch supporter of Anderson, Alister and Dunn, for defamation9 over his book Spies, Bombs and the Path of Bliss published 13 years earlier.10 In the book Molomby alleges that Seary is a liar and a perjurer and that it is possible he is the Hilton bomber himself. So if Seary invented all his allegations about the Ananda Marga and brought the bomb to Yagoona just to get away from the sect and Special Branch, it didn’t work out very well.

  There is a third possible interpretation of what happened the night of the arrests at Yagoona, an interpretation beyond the versions presented by Richard Seary and the police on the one hand and the Margiis and their supporters on the other. An interpretation I toy with in idle hours, which can’t be proved: that Anderson, Dunn and Alister are set up by Abhiik Kumar. That the Australasian leader of the sect is so rattled by the allegations against him in the Sun-Herald on 11 June that he sends Seary, of whom he is suspicious, and the others, two of whom he dislikes (Alister, who Seary alleges in his Special Branch tapes Abhiik can’t bear, and Anderson, whom Abhiik has had a documented spat with the day before the Hilton bombing), so they can get caught and thus divert police attention away from himself and other higher-up Margiis like Kapil Arn who are suspected of the Hilton bombing and other acts of international violence.

  While it’s just a theory based on pure speculation, it’s not without merit. For example, by 16 June all the attention on Kumar seems to cease. I can find nothing in the police archives as to whether or not he arrives, as expected, on the 8.35 am flight from Thailand. He doesn’t. The fact is, after these extraordinary arrests in Yagoona and Newtown, it seems that the entire gaze of the New South Wales police — Special Branch included — is upon these three Margiis and no others. If one asks the age-old question ‘Who benefits?’ with regard to the Yagoona arrests, the answer is Abhiik Kumar.

  For example, one of the items collected the night of the 15 June arrests is a tape recording entitled ‘Fight Against the Demon’, narrated by ‘Abhiik Kumara [sic]’.11 This recording was located at the VSS headquarters in Burwood, raided simultaneously with the Margii headquarters in Newtown. While the subsequent police transcription of the tape is littered with spelling mistakes, its message is clear: sect members are not supposed to sit idly by while the ‘demons’ deny the human and legal rights of their leader, Baba. They are expected to vigorously oppose those who oppress the sect. It is not enough to fight darkness with ‘light’ nor to imagine that simple good works will realign the balance. A member must actively fight and struggle with the demons, ‘avoidance of that struggle is pure hypocrisy … it is a useless life. You might as well be dead’:

  It’s clear Baba does not believe that humanity is fighting sufficiently, that’s why he is telling us to be vigorously active. So life is conflict … Baba said that even the apposles [sic] of peace were not allowed to work peacefully. Consider … Jesus how he was crucified or how many times they tried to kill Baba consider Baba’s condition now, in jail. Are we to be at the mercy of these demons that would kill him if they could? Are we to sit idle, relying on fate, consider if it is possible for this true devity [sic] not to fight the demons, for the true spiritualists, not to be also social revolutionary.

  Kumar goes on to reiterate how the charges that have been brought by the Indian Government against Baba are outrageous and unsubstantiated. They are a violation of his human rights. Something has to be done.

  I have said before that the meek shall inherit the earth. They’ll do that, but they’ll only inherit the earth when they are ready to fight for it, to live for it, to fight for it, to die for it and they will have to fight against these demons, against those self seeking opportunists who are presently controlling this entire planet and the destiny of the entire human race.

  He then recounts an instance of one of Baba’s miracles, and concludes his long impassioned speech with:

  You may be many things, but first and foremost you are a spiritualist, and on the social plane that means you are a revolutionary … Those of you who have eyes to see, then see his [Baba’s] physical condition now, those of you who have ears and can hear, then hear this varney [phonetic from the tape]. Hear this message and hear it right, hear it correctly and then do something, do something …12

  It’s hard to interpret this as anything other than a call to physical activism against the enemies of the sect. While perhaps not explicitly inciting violence by sect members, it certainly could be argued that certain individuals listening to such a speech could take it to mean exactly that. It does seem to indicate that Kumar, rather than his foot soldiers, should be the one to watch. If violence, or the threat of violence, is thought to be committed by sect members, it makes complete sense that it is Kumar who would have authorised it.

  Despite this, the police, under Inspector Perrin of Special Branch, seem completely uninterested in looking at suspects higher up in the Margii hierarchy, and appear content with the trio they have captured. Again it’s worth remembering that Seary only met Dunn and Anderson a few days immediately before 15 June, and that the Hilton task force never seemed to regard them as major players. It was Kumar they were watching.

  Not any more.

  To make matters worse, Richard Seary seems to be intent on shredding his remaining credibility.

  By the time morning dawns on 16 June, the members of Ananda Marga must be aware not only of the arrests of Paul Alister, the head of Volunteer Social Services, Ross Dunn, possibly a leader of Prout, and Tim Anderson, the Ananda Marga public relations officer, but also that Richard Seary is a police informant. He has nothing to lose now. He has no reason to feel he can’t unburden himself co
mpletely to the police. But he does not.

  Despite Special Branch mentioning the possibility that Alister and Dunn have knowledge of the Hilton bombing in their 15 June debrief to police prior to the Yagoona arrests, Seary hasn’t contributed anything concrete to support this. In his eight taped debriefings with Special Branch up to the morning of the 15th, he makes the odd veiled allusion, but nothing he says is even vaguely conclusive. Nor does Seary make any mention of the Hilton bombing in his official interview on 16 June after the trio’s arrest. He diligently relates all the information regarding the alleged plot to blow up Mr Cameron and his family, and that’s it.

  Then abruptly Norm Sheather steps back into view in the archive. The last time he captured our attention he was being lambasted in the papers for being the absent leader of a doomed investigation. Now he thrusts himself forward, propelled perhaps by the rush of emotions he must feel in reaction to the arrest of the three Margiis.

  Is Norm appalled, enraged or uplifted by the news of the arrests? Of the involvement of one Richard Seary, who is working as a Special Branch agent? It’s difficult to know precisely when this information is made known to the head of the Hilton task force. It’s possible Norm is brought into the loop at the time of the 24 May revelations about an ‘all-out war’, but it’s hard to say. He’s clearly been sidelined and nowhere does his name appear in the heady, frantic preparations for the 15 June Yagoona and Newtown operations. It’s rather a pity that Roger Rogerson and not Norm Sheather met with Krawczyk and Helson at Newtown police station before bouncing off to arrest Anderson. Perhaps Sheather would have remembered to push the button on the tape recorder. A pity, too, that Norm wasn’t involved in the briefings of the Observation and Special Weapons squads — he may have been more apt to point out the need to be meticulous in collecting corroborating evidence when dealing with a complex, secretive sect highly skilled at plausible deniability.