Who bombed the Hilton?
Page 15
S. It appears to be — it appears to be the cause to which they’re cohering around.
C. So, with the release of Baba.
S. No, there’s nothing I could truthfully — I mean I have my own feelings but there is nothing I could truthfully say that I’ve heard in specific reference to it.5
Krawczyk asks him what these feelings are.
S. Well my feelings are that they are an extremely dedicated, very very dangerous, fanatical religious group. They believe their leader is God and so anything they do in defence of him is justifiable. They believe they’re the new saviours of mankind … they believe in the wholesale destruction of our present day society and replace it with Prout.
This is pretty strong beer but also pretty true — Margiis do believe Baba is a god and they do believe that Prout should replace both capitalism and communism as the third force. But it is also immediately tempered by the answer Seary gives when Krawczyk asks, ‘Do you feel they could be capable of carrying out some of their ideologies?’
Seary replies, ‘Well, they are a very strange, very mixed breed.’6 He tells his handler how a lot of the Margii ideas are very good, such as their social service activities (disaster relief, soup kitchens and such). It’s their rigidity and extremism that he thinks will prevent them from gaining popular support. Having to believe that the leader is a god (as opposed to a guru) and members burning themselves to death to protest Baba’s imprisonment are not exactly the ideology of peace and love that attracts most Westerners to Eastern religions. Even if Seary’s testimony is a pack of lies, he surely makes a good point when he observes that self-immolation reveals ‘the mentality of the people you’re dealing with. You know, if a person is prepared to burn himself to death you know than [sic] to die in a gunfight is nothing.’7 Despite this assertion he seems reluctant to paint them all with one brush.
As to whether his compatriots at the VSS camp were of that persuasion, Seary talks at length about a ‘very nice chap’, a school principal and single father he met there who didn’t strike him as the type to blindly follow orders. But he believes followers are kept in the dark about the inner workings of the sect. Seary guesstimates that maybe two-thirds might carry out such acts — ‘especially the women whom I’ve found to be more fanatical than the men’ — and a third probably wouldn’t. All through the debrief he repeats general suspicions but punctuates his answers about what he has heard with the phrase ‘no specific mention’ and provides no concrete evidence pointing to violent tendencies in any particular sect member. Asked again if he’s yet met the ‘two radicals’:
Seary. No, I haven’t and whether they are operating as Universal Proutist Revolutionaries Front which is a separate deal with all the Margiis but it is controlled by Baba but they are the very extremist wing.
J.8 Very extremist?
Seary. Yes and the only thing that I’ve heard was that they do exist in this country.
J. How many do you know?
Seary. I don’t know. I’ve got no idea how many.9
Seary likewise has nothing specific to say about Narada (aka Alister aka O’Callaghan, who was convicted of throwing the pig’s head in 1977 and who will be arrested on 15 June), who heads the VSS in Australia, but doesn’t seem to care for him much. He delights in telling Special Branch how the ‘nice chap’ he met at the camp tells Narada to shove something up his arse when disagreeing with a command he has issued. Of his original Margii contact, Kapil, he has nothing much to say.10
Special Branch, despite their issues with ASIO, do make an effort to immediately pass some of this concerning information on to other investigative departments, although it is done rather informally and on a somewhat ad hoc basis. Under oath, years later, Special Branch officers will reiterate their uncertainty about what Seary was saying into a tape recorder in those small rooms. They must have wondered whether it was all nonsense. But what if it is true and they react too soon and lose the critical piece of intelligence that blows the case open? What if ASIO marches in and just takes over Seary themselves? They want to keep their source close — deep down, the intelligence they are getting from him does seem pretty authentic. However, some time after the 24 May revelations, ‘some material [is] communicated informally between desk officers, and also between senior officers of Special Branch, ASIO and COMPOL’.11 A ‘document’ is presented and a meeting ‘to discuss possible threats to Indian personnel and establishments in Australia’12 is convened. At all times Seary is referred to only as an informant, not as connected to Special Branch.
The only thing that Seary seems to be absolutely certain of in the entire 26 pages of the 24 May transcript is that Abhiik Kumar is the man in charge of everything, the ‘all over commander, the commandant …[who] would know everything that’s going on’.13 He does add, though, that the man in Manila who runs VSS worldwide does have seniority in some things. If the man in Manila decreed that the VSS had to take action, Abhiik would have to comply.
‘Abique [sic] would be definitely told what was going on but the VSS is worked as a separate unit and the guy who is in charge of the VSS is an ‘avid hoot [sic] which is higher up than simply a acharia [sic] like Abique [sic]’.14 Variant spellings aside, this information reflects exactly the complex layers of hierarchy in the sect — an acharya (a teacher, learned person or sect leader) is not as powerful as an avadhut (a mystic or saint).
Five days later, in Seary’s fifth tape-recorded debrief on 29 May, we learn that Seary has suddenly reconnected with Kapil Arn. After apparent weeks of limited contact and Kapil’s busy schedule, suddenly they are bosom chums. Like a pining schoolgirl, Seary finds himself miraculously waiting for a taxi with this intriguing man, who doesn’t ignore him but instead lavishes attention on him. They start with small talk about firecrackers and the Queen’s birthday, and Kapil begins wittering on about how much he likes firecrackers and rockets and rocketry. He’d designed and built a two-stage rocket. He and his friends had tried to blow up a bridge. ‘They used plastic tubing which they filled with black powder and they had fuses and they lit it and there was a God almighty bang and nothing happened.’ Seary seems to become giddy with this sudden rush of intimacy and when Kapil quips in reaction to his failed explosion, ‘Next time I should use amatol,’ Seary gushes to Krawczyk, ‘I would think that anyone who knows of amatol would know about explosives because amatol is an explosive and quite a powerful one and it wouldn’t be sort of common knowledge.’15
Standing side by side on a cold late-May day, Seary says Kapil holds out his hand and points at some ‘little burn-like scars’. Seary asks him how he got them, adding, ‘Not blowing up the bridge?’
‘Oh no, this is much more recent,’ says Kapil, ‘I was very lucky … I could have blown my hand off.’ Then he adds, ‘I had an accident with a detonator.’16
Krawczyk seems to become quite giddy himself. He’s all over this. He asks Seary, ‘Now, in your opinion, you’ve dealt with detonators and that before — would that be similar — the injuries he had on his hand?’
Instantly Seary reverts to the head prefect mode he’d adopted when apprising Detective Ireland of his suspicions about the Hare Krishnas in February:
It would depend on the size of the det. If it was a small priming detonator, it would have left those marks, if it had been an electric det. standard charge size, it would have blown his whole hand off, unless it had gone off when he wasn’t in actual contact with it. If he was holding it and it was a normal det. it would have blown his hand off.
Seary then starts speculating. He’d seen similar wounds in Lightning Ridge, and if Kapil knows rocketry then he must know bomb making … In all this excitement Seary does seem to glean that something is afoot.17
Seary: [Kapil] seems rather interested at this stage to tell me of his exploits and wants me to come around and do things with me … it would appear that it involves explosives … I definitely get the feeling that he’s priming me for something.
Krawczyk: He’s planning you for
something?
Seary: Yes, he’s priming me.
Krawczyk: Priming you for something?
Seary: He wants to see how eager I am to support him, that’s my feeling.
Krawczyk: That’s my feeling, seriously?
Seary: Seriously, that’s my feeling. You know he knows my background as far as explosives are concerned, he knows my background and I’ve told you about my police involvements and things like that and arrests, and I think he’s impressed. I think he would probably like me to join his cliché [sic].18
Seary intuits that:
… my feeling is that Kapila [sic] could be involved with a group that the average Margii doesn’t know about who is [in] collusion with or being told what to do by Abhiik, who’s in direct contact with Baba in India, and as such, their terrorist wing goes through that sort of function from Baba to Abhiik to Kapila to Kapila’s friends … I would say if this United Revolutionary Proutist Front exists, then he is most definitely a member.
Seary detects complicated divisions in the sect and doesn’t believe that Alister and the Volunteer Social Service know about it. ‘No, they might act under a different set of circumstances. You know they could be doing their own little terrorist trips.’ Kapil worked with Abhiik, Alister with the man in the Philippines.19
The Margii leader in the Philippines must be feeling the pressure. That week US-born sect members Victoria Shepherd and Stephen Dyer are sentenced to 17 years in a Manila prison for the stabbing and attempted murder of the Indian diplomat on 7 February.20
It’s about here, at the close of 29 May 1978, that I slam into a wall. After this everything seems to become unstable, incoherent, illogical. Here we have been, over the course of months and months, pursuing the threads that have drawn us through the labyrinth. Through the eyes of Norm and the team after the Hilton bombing, our monster has never really changed, has he? That tall turbaned man at the airport: Abhiik Kumar, aka, aka, etc., etc. — now waiting for his god to be released or not from prison in India. He’s the one we’ve been sniffing around. He’s the one we think may be good for it, him and his inner sanctum of like-minded souls ensconced in Prout or a cell within that cell. Just as Seary describes it. But wait — we don’t have any evidence quite yet, do we? But golly it feels like you can taste it.
Then, just like that, everything goes dark. It’s like a tanker splits in two, flooding the ocean with dark viscous waves of impenetrable oil, coating everything in their path, killing everything. What to make of what comes next in the historical record? It’s as if Tom Stoppard starts writing the narrative, doing his cute and clever things with familiar Shakespearean storylines — what if Rosencrantz and Guildenstern take centre stage? What if Shakespeare falls in love? Let’s turn the box upside down and shake hard. Think of how funny it will be. How disconcerting. Innovative. Brilliant.
What else to make of the fact that bit players like Anderson, Alister and Dunn suddenly hijack the plot? Within two weeks — and for decades to come — they are the Margiis you know. The sect members you defend or hunt down; the stars of the show.
I mean it’s kind of odd, don’t you think, that Richard Seary, who has been buddying up to Abhiik and Kapil and the ‘nice chap’ he met at the VSS camp all through April and May, is suddenly exclusively in the company of Anderson, Dunn and Alister and intimately embroiled in their intrigues. He appears only to have properly met the first two in June — in Anderson’s case possibly on 13 June — and although he had met Alister earlier, he still barely knew him and reportedly disliked him.
Also odd is the fact that the targets completely change. In June we do a complete shift from a universe in which Margiis allegedly attack and threaten Indian nationals (shopkeepers, flight attendants, children, high commissioners) in India, Thailand, Manila, Sweden, the USA, the UK, Denmark, Germany, Australia and so on, to Margiis attacking … Nazis.
June 1978
The events of June 1978 get so completely chaotic and impossible to corroborate that one has to proceed with care. Let’s dip our feet in and wade through the muck for a moment and see what we can feel squelching between our toes.
For the first ten days in June there is no contact between Richard Seary and his Special Branch handlers. It is possible they are attempting to gain some independent corroboration for Seary’s unnerving allegations of a potential ‘all-out terrorist war’ should Baba fail to win his appeal. Despite their reluctance to share unsubstantiated claims, the 24 May debriefing has stirred the pot. The information moves from one desk to another and, despite the rivalry, ends up at ASIO on 8 June. It is more than likely that Sheather and the Hilton task force are apprised of the intelligence, as it is clear that a 26-page ‘debrief of a “usually reliable” New South Wales police informant who had penetrated Ananda Marga’ is passed from the New South Wales police to the Commonwealth Police and thence to ASIO.1 They are sufficiently alarmed to rapidly convene a meeting of the Protective Services Coordination Centre the next day, and the names of the Manila-based global secretary for the VSS, Acharya Japananda aka Japananda Avadhut aka Nimay Chandra, are placed on international airport watchlists. Someone — or a few someones — in these organisations decides next to bring the pot to the boil and make these suspicions public. Why not go to the press and see if they can shake someone from the tree?
Meanwhile, when Seary and Krawczyk sit down on 10 June for their sixth tape-recorded debrief, Seary introduces him to our new Nazi villain — the rightwing white supremacist Robert Cameron, the head of the Australian faction of the National Alliance. For reasons that are not entirely coherent, the Ananda Marga have decided to target this organisation with demonstrations, poster campaigns and letters to newspapers. Causing some kind of a fracas outside the organisation’s headquarters will bring the police out to protect the National Alliance, thus publicly demonstrating that the police are siding with racists:
… sort of protecting them and so they hope to get political gain out of that. Also, they said if there was any bombings or things of the National Alliance, then they could use that as political things again, saying that it was being used by the police and people like the National Alliance to frame the Margiis.2
It seems monumentally convoluted, and Special Branch doesn’t appear to be much impressed. It accompanies bluster that Seary claims to have heard in relation to the Bangkok Three. The Margiis believe that the Commonwealth Police sent to interview the three, Inspectors Hull and Sharp, in fact set them up, and ‘they are going to do something about’ it. This is not profoundly different from what is explicitly stated in the Ananda Marga newsletter for May. More bravado allegedly comes from Alister when he describes to Seary what the VSS will do if Baba is not released. He apparently details a ‘grand plan’ that entails breaking Baba out of jail in India and then spiriting him into Australia via its poorly protected northern coastline. After that there’s more talk of the all-out war that will erupt here, there and everywhere against all who continue to support the incarceration of Baba the god — this includes the Commonwealth Police, the Indian CBI, ASIO and Special Branch.3
It pays to remember that these are groups of very young men and women, not much more than teenagers, who are alleged to be spouting the rhetoric above. A bunch of social revolutionaries who feel aggrieved that the one they worship has been locked up. If you add this to Seary’s own tendency to embroider and embellish, who’s to say these conversations didn’t take place? But the subject matter is completely new. Why the focus on Cameron and his skinhead mates? Note also this startling new indiscretion. Alister is apparently running off at the mouth.
Krawczyk is not so impressed with all this big generalised talk and doesn’t pass the information on.
What do I make of this seismic shift in tone and content from Seary? There are many theories. James Wood speculates in the Section 475 inquiry that perhaps by late May Seary wanted out. He had applied for and been accepted into Sydney University to study psychology and anthropology (non-degree courses) in early Ju
ne.4 Things were heating up and he had other (safer) options for expanding the mind and thus may have been exaggerating certain things.5 Yes, it is absolutely true that nasty Robert Cameron and his racist organisation abruptly become the focus of Margii ire in June; letters are written, demonstrations are held. But why? Whose directive was this? Kapil’s? Instructions Kumar left? Or is the organisation going rogue? Are people veering off on their own paths while the leader is away? Is the lack of discretion reported by Seary stuff he is making up? Or is it because someone like Kapil is on to him and directing others to trip him up?
There is one possible insight Seary supplies in the 10 June debrief. He is asked:
In relation to the Hilton, there was a demonstration at the airport and then the bombing at the Hilton, now do you feel that they would do, all in the same category, go to that extent with this National Alliance?
Seary replies:
I think so, ah, if it does happen it will certainly be the modus operandi for the group, the demonstration for their political purposes then their follow up using the follow up to say that it was done to frame them, which they kill two birds with one stone they get more political mileage out of it plus their objective done. Ah, it is a political exercise this thing and I think, yes, they are quite capable of [it] and I think it’s quite feasible that they will do a follow up, and even to the extent of psyching up of some of their lesser members perhaps a bit of violence which would take the blame off those in authority and they could say it wasn’t really one of their members at all.6