Who bombed the Hilton?

by Rachel Landers

  Is this evidence that the Margiis have something to hide? Like a plot to blow up the Hilton as the Indian Prime Minister arrives on the eve of CHOGRM? Or does it mean absolutely nothing — just a bunch of young believers fed up with police harassment and asserting their civil rights?

  What about document No. 17? ‘A receipt from Wormald International Electronics, dated 11.1.78 payable to DAMBIEC, of 14 Binning Street Erskineville 2043, in the amount of $80.00 payable by cheque No. 13956’.8 Parts for a timer for a bomb? Or a sophisticated baby monitor?

  Like so many bits of the information they collect, most of it is irritatingly ambiguous, like a Necker cube — one second a solid object, the next it flips and presents itself just as convincingly in reverse. Norm notes the names on the bottom of the dossier of documents collated over the duration of the Crosslands camp — Special Branch detectives Krawczyk and Henderson. He remembers their names from their work in tracking the wave of violence directed at Indian nationals for the task force. One can sense how deeply committed to the case they are, how vigilant, and how they must long for that hard clear unequivocal piece of evidence to provide a reason to storm the gates and catch the Margiis in the act. The incredulous denials from the Margii spokespersons around the globe must have them fed up to the back teeth. Norm has to remind himself that all this intense focus, all the resources expended over the last few months, predates the bombing at the Hilton. Yet as he looks through these pages of notes he finds nothing.

  The problem with all this material acquired through technical coverage is that it lacks a ‘human source’, as ASIO puts it, to interpret it.9

  ASIO starts to gather informants in late November, around the time the 1977 wave of violence is peaking. They are deliberately vague on the details they give to Norm and the Hilton task force. Yes, they have agents inside the Ananda Marga. No, the police can’t know their names.

  These agents are off limits to Norm. They have only been active for a few months and their coverage has been limited. None of them had any forewarning about the Hilton bombing. It’s critical at this stage that they don’t do anything to jeopardise their cover that might yield rich intelligence in the future.

  The existence of these shadowy agents, sex unknown, some of whom, Norm realises, may already have been interviewed by his task force in the roundup of suspects after the bombing, must unnerve even the most unflappable of policemen. Even ASIO admits in its training manual that it ‘faces obvious difficulties in using human sources to monitor violent organisations’. Obvious difficulties — such as where an undercover agent draws the line when acts of physical violence are being planned.

  On the one hand, an ASIO source operating within a violent organisation has to maintain cover, and this will involve at least some commitment by word or deed to the objectives of the target organisation. Also, there is the possibility that, if the agent refuses to become involved in planning or executing acts of violence, others will be approached, and ASIO will lose both vital intelligence and the opportunity to exert some influence over events. On the other hand ASIO must not allow its agents to become agents provocateurs.10

  Of course it’s only a difficult line if it is certain that the source is infiltrating a violent organisation, but the hard evidence for this is currently beyond ASIO’s grasp. As yet these newly minted covert Margiis have only orbited on the margins of the sect. Those at the core of power — Kumar certainly, Kapil maybe, Anderson who knows? — have been members for years. Who exactly is a member of Ananda Marga or Prout or both is complicated. The religion is complicated and there is much to get one’s head around.

  The other problem, and this surely gives Norm disquiet, is that the day after the Hilton bombing Tim Anderson clearly and publicly states that the sect knows it has been infiltrated by ASIO agents. This hardly provides much confidence in the intelligence these ASIO operatives would be able to gather at this stage. The danger too is that often the information agents collect is hearsay, and police know how useless this is in attempting to obtain a conviction. This is where the volume of technical surveillance provided by Special Branch could prove invaluable should it uncover concrete evidence to be used by some future prosecutor.

  In theory the human sources and technical sources should complement each other in any clandestine operation. So too should the work of the police and the secret service — the flow of information should be harmonious, organic and productive.

  And so it seemed it was — right up until the moment the bomb ripped Alec Carter and William Favell apart on 13 February 1978.

  As Norm is taken through the months of surveillance work, what is clear is that they all failed. Despite the task force, the top secret Cabinet reports, the covert agents, the extra protection, the vast security protocols surrounding the CHOGRM — the sheer manpower focused on preventing a terrorist act at the conference had been for nought.

  Someone missed something. Someone put a bomb in the bin. While in the days directly after the bombing the shock keeps the blame-game to a minimum, the shame all the agencies feel must be palpable. Were they looking at the wrong targets? The wrong group? What do our friends Detectives Krawczyk, Helson and Henderson of New South Wales Special Branch feel that morning in the aftermath of the carnage, knowing that there was a warning call to their office minutes before the blast? True it came too late for anyone to have been saved, but the fact that the diligent Suzanne Jones put the caller through to Special Branch between 12.35 and 12.40 am and the phone rang and rang in that empty office must cut pretty close to the bone.

  It’s easy to make cartoon baddies or Inspector Plods of these men. But, like Norm, I have read their reports and seen the months and months they put in building an incredibly detailed portrait of the sect’s operations in Australia. It’s hard to view these Special Branch officers as anything but earnest, diligent and committed to the job. Possibly over-focused on detail, but the job of grasping the overview, the global perspective, is the role of those higher up the food chain — ASIO, the Department of Foreign Affairs, the Commonwealth Police. Does Special Branch blame them? Norm Sheather may or may not detect this whiff of bile early in his investigation, but it will seep out in days to come and like acid eat away at any semblance of agency cooperation, eventually destroying any chance to try the case. But this is still to come.

  What Norm notes straightaway is what they all missed. Not so much the elephant in the room but the absence of it. Where in all this covert surveillance is Abhiik Kumar? Where is the man who is clearly regarded by all the agencies involved in the government task force in 1977 as the one, of all the sect members, to watch? Where is the man who made all those worrisome allusions to violence — the man of many names and many passports, the man who is the absolute spiritual leader of the Australasian Margiis, the one with the direct line to the imprisoned Sarkar, in whose cause all this violence is carried out?

  It seems that for the last eight months or so no one is exactly sure, beyond ‘travelling internationally’. He is not present in any of the Special Branch surveillance targeting Margii headquarters in Sydney, nor does he feature in any of the debriefings of ASIO’s Margii operatives. Through December and January he is not in the country.

  Then on Sunday 12 February he spectacularly reappears centre stage, in full kit with dark beard and turban. ASIO wire-taps a hissy fit he has with Tim Anderson, who tells him that the Ananda Marga protest against the Indian Prime Minister should take place at the Hilton Hotel’s George Street entrance. Kumar shouts him down, he’s joining the sect at the airport where they will present Desai with a petition advocating Sarkar’s release. Tim ignores him and heads to the Hilton.11 That day there are photographs of Kumar and fellow sect members taken by Special Branch which consist of a series of long-lensed snaps of Kumar, his tall willowy turban-topped frame bobbing above a group of Margiis milling at Kingsford Smith airport.12

  While Kumar’s reappearance is unexpected and flamboyant, it is also less than 12 hours before the bomb goes off.
This would seem — if indeed the Ananda Marga is innocent of the crime — to be a spectacularly bad time to resume the reins of the sect. Of course if they (or Proutists) did plant the bomb, the timing is just about perfect. If you are orchestrating an international reign of terror against Indian nationals in order to free your god, it’s not something that you’re likely to miss.

  And before that? Where was Kumar exactly? It astonishes Norm that no one has been tracking his movements. It is something he addresses immediately.

  He tempers this with the knowledge that despite all the forensic surveillance of this sect over months and months, there is not a sliver of evidence to tie the Margiis to the bombing. Except for the possible sighting by a fellow taxi driver of Anderson parked in his taxi near the Hilton the Saturday night before the bomb went off.13 He remains convinced that he needs to keep the minds of his task force investigators open to other possibilities until something sways him one way or the other.

  This is not a pathway that will be adopted by those most professionally battered by the blast. Within days Special Branch officers will embark on a dizzyingly maverick and misguided quest. It will be the undoing of Sheather, his team, and the case.

  ‘The blast that shook Australia’

  On the third day of the Hilton task force’s existence, Norm must feel close to success, or at the very least confident in his captaincy and the direction he has set with his crew. However, at sea nothing is certain.

  In the case of the Hilton bombing, Norm Sheather’s sea is the unruly and emotional reactions that the blast has set off in the pentagram of institutions and organisations that surround the investigation. These five are the government, the press, ASIO, Special Branch, and the Hilton task force itself with its 58 detectives. A fatal bombing at an international political gathering has set forces in motion that, in turn, set off others; all manner of old wounds and agendas flare up. People can respond very badly or foolishly when they are terrorised.

  For a moment let’s leave Norm Sheather and the Hilton detectives hunting down the movements of Abhiik Kumar over the last eight or so months, interrogating suspects and waiting for Interpol requests for terrorists’ MOs to come in. Let’s see what’s going on in the public arena. Let’s test the public mood.

  To be frank, three days post-bombing the mood is far from good. For the first 36 hours the Australian people reel in shock. The Sydney Morning Herald’s editorial sums up the public horror:

  Australia is not entirely a stranger to isolated acts of terrorism but there was an ugly new dimension to the Sydney bomb outrage. This kind of reckless political violence, careless of what innocent victims suffer, is a pattern familiar to many countries but from which Australia had hitherto been almost free.1

  Throughout the country the bombing is regarded as a game changer — a moment the nation is thrust violently into the global arena of terrorism. Within days the government is copping criticism for its failure to protect its citizens. First, of course, there is a chorus of attacks about the inadequacy of the security for CHOGRM and the hotel. Then, attacked with equal vehemence, is Fraser’s decision to call in the Army to provide security for the international guests in the following days. Everything the federal and state governments do in the days following the blast is regarded as misguided, kneejerk or corrupt by someone in the media. The conservative elements in the Australian press accuse the South Australian and New South Wales premiers of undermining the power of Special Branch in South Australia and ASIO in New South Wales because they have been investigating allegations that both agencies were keeping ‘dirt files’ on private individuals.2 When New South Wales Premier Neville Wran drops the inquiry into ASIO in the immediate wake of the bombing, the more liberal elements of the press are critical. This inquiry, about events in the early 1970s concerning ASIO and a Liberal party politician, Peter Coleman, has nothing to do with New South Wales Special Branch and is not an attempt to shut ASIO down. Nevertheless, from this point onward arguments will be made that dropping the inquiry is proof that ASIO and New South Wales Special Branch planted the bombs themselves.3

  There are a few things to remember about the late 1970s in Australia. The first is that people on the left hated Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser with a passion that I doubt has been matched before or since. I mean hated him like spurned lovers, or like betrayed and vengeful Shakespearean characters. Think Medea. Think Macbeth. Big hate. Fraser was regarded as the illegitimate ruler who had snatched power from the forward-thinking Labor leader Gough Whitlam in 1975 in the most unsportsmanlike, underhanded and dastardly manner. The Dismissal sat fresh, raw and oozing in the minds of the left. My mother was one of the true believers who was so enraged that night of 11 November 1975 that she left my elder brother and me without a babysitter so she could attend a hastily organised protest at the Royal Motor Yacht Club in Newport where Fraser’s equally loathed henchman, Governor-General John Kerr, was heading for dinner.

  Even a little over two years later, in February 1978, these true believers were having no difficulty maintaining their rage.

  The other thing to remember is that papers such as Nation Review and the National Times were made up of bright, intelligent new voices. They weren’t just a bunch of scruffy ratbags — they were well-educated, thoughtful and credible. Emerging in the early 1970s these journalists instigated dozens of explosive investigations revealing corruption in big business, among politicians and within the police. The ‘first comprehensive account of the Hilton Hotel bombing’ in the now legendary National Times was written by Paul Kelly, David Leitch, Anne Summers, Andrew Clark, David Hickie and Evan Whitton.4 The special report titled ‘The Blast that Shook Australia’ is convincing and disturbing:

  A threat psychology, provoked by a tragic bomb attack still totally unexplained, is abroad again in Australia. For the first time in our peacetime history military forces were deployed last week to support the civil authorities. This was the real precedent and lasting legacy of Malcolm Fraser’s initiative in calling together Commonwealth region leaders (CHOGRM) at Sydney’s Hilton Hotel and at Bowral.5

  For this new breed of journalist it is not the loss of innocence that is of concern but ‘[t]he psychological effect of the bombing’ on the government and the population; the response to the crisis ‘has transformed the meaning of security protection for VIPs in Australia’.

  For the journalists this has generated two troublesome tendencies since the Monday blast:

  1. The way the bomb blast transformed the political climate in favour of strong security measures advocated by the Prime Minister and against the softer ‘civil liberties’ line espoused by Labor premiers Wran and Dunstan; and

  2. How swiftly the legal and constitutional processes were effected to make the entire military apparatus available to the government to quell domestic disturbance.

  The report is full of detail and analysis that on a minute level seems very well considered, but on another level, through a headline like ‘Bombing a Boost for ASIO’,6 it helps create the crucible that will forge the conspiracy that the secret and not-so-secret services — ASIO, Special Branch, the military and potentially Fraser himself — colluded and planted the bomb so they could maintain and extend their power.

  The other aspect of this report is that the authorities are characterised as buffoons, which undermines the idea that ‘they’ hatched a sleek, sophisticated and malevolent plan to place the bomb themselves. The authors assert there was:

  This uncertainty, arising from the total lack of clues to who placed the Hilton bomb, combined with official confusion and military inexperience, gave the week-long security measures a continuing note of farce. Just as it was possible for unauthorised visitors to walk into the Hilton’s security areas, so it would have been equally possible for a determined assassin to do his job at Bowral despite the army.7

  Not that the mainstream press is much kinder to Fraser — they also see the Army call-out as absurd and misjudged: ‘In the over-reactions at Bowral we look
ed faintly ridiculous — babes in the woods.’8 Overlaying this disapproval are the unambiguous images of three little girls — Christine and Susan Carter, aged seven and nine, and Cassandra Favell, seven9 — at their respective fathers’ funerals on 17 February, and the stark headlines, five days later, reporting that young Constable Paul Burmistriw had died from the injuries he received in the blast.

  In a state of shock and collective pain in the days after the bombing, the public demands swift action, which is counter to the slow gathering of evidence by investigating police. The frustration is palpable in the papers, which complain loudly and regularly with headlines such as ‘“Ring us” plea to bomb warning man’10 and ‘Police frustrated in bomb investigations’11 and accompanying articles that depict the Hilton task force as being at the mercy of the public, who either fail to give them leads or waste valuable police time by making bomb hoax calls.

  Fraser does what anyone else in his position would do when harassed from all quarters — he decides to hold an inquiry. The inquiry, announced 12 days after the bombing, is to be expensive and extensive and helmed by the best expert one can get. In the timehonoured Aussie tradition of getting someone from overseas — preferably white and male and from the UK — to come over and sort us out, Fraser appoints Sir Robert Marks, former head of Scotland Yard, to come and take names and find someone to blame.12 At the very least, it takes the heat off the government.