Who bombed the Hilton?

by Rachel Landers

  Something else is going on.

  Looking at the Hilton records, it seems that immediately after Yagoona on 15 June Norm et al push themselves back from their desks with a sigh à la Babe that says ‘That’ll do’, but this is not what happens at all. It is true that both Norm Sheather and the Hilton task force begin to wind up, however it also marks the launch of an extraordinary last stand of the investigation, the ramifications of which resonate powerfully in modern Australia. We just have to look elsewhere for our information.

  The principal sources I gleaned to piece together what occurred over the next six months are twofold: the super-public, being the daily newspapers, and the super-secret, being the federal Cabinet papers that began to be released under the 30-year rule in 2008. Peppered throughout are other primary archives I located from a range of sources that appeared over the last few decades — declassified ASIO reports and detritus from the ongoing trials. This is the story they relate.

  Let’s return to the article that appeared in the Sun-Herald on 11 June, just before the Yagoona arrests on 15 June. This is the article that seemed intentionally planted, that stated the investigators knew the identity of the bombers — a young woman and a young man, both sect members, the latter currently in India, which is where Abhiik Kumar is. What becomes clear in a matter of weeks is that the article is not the only act of official provocation around this time. On 13 June Kumar’s latest passport, in the name of Michael Brandon, is cancelled by the federal government,7 meaning that the police are in a position to detain him for questioning when he gets off that flight from Thailand on the morning of 16 June.

  Except he’s not on that flight. He does not return to Australia. Instead, they have Anderson, Alister and Dunn in custody because the day before Kumar is due, Seary has launched a massive police operation based on the sudden and totally unexpected news that three sect members are heading off that very night to blow up a Nazi. Pretty weird timing. You couldn’t imagine a better orchestrated bait and switch, could you? Amazing coincidence.

  Anyway …

  Baba is released and after celebrations in India, the no doubt relieved and euphoric Kumar, using his Brandon passport, finally boards a flight to Sydney, which touches down on 9 August 1978. He is immediately detained. We know about this from the Ananda Marga themselves.

  The spiritual leader of the Ananda Marga sect in Australia was detained by Commonwealth Police at Sydney Airport last night on his return from India, an official from the sect said. Commonwealth Police refused to comment on whether 28 year old Mr Jason Alexander, known as Acarya [sic] Abhiik Kumar in the sect, had been detained. However, the president of the sect in Australia, Mr Mark Dimellow [sic], said he had seen Mr Alexander led away from the Customs area by two plainclothes detectives. Mr Dimellow said he had spoken to Mr Alexander briefly. Mr Alexander had said he had been arrested and his passport confiscated. Mr Alexander left Australia 10 weeks ago to work on a book in India and meet the sect’s leader, Baba, who was recently released from an Indian jail.8

  The cancellation of Kumar’s Brandon passport on 13 June comes on orders from high up within the federal government. A top secret report on the Ananda Marga is in the process of being compiled, in consultation with the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, the Department of Foreign Affairs, the Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs, and the departments of Attorney-General’s, Education, Administrative Services and Treasury, as well as ASIO and the Commonwealth Police. When the report is finally presented to Cabinet later in the year, it is startlingly clear that none of these parties believe that the Yagoona Three are anything but foot soldiers like John William Duff, presently before the courts on assault and attempted kidnapping charges, and that they intend to pursue Abhiik Kumar with everything they can collectively throw at him.9

  The process of cancelling the Michael Brandon passport — no small legal feat — is set in motion in the wake of the Hilton bombing and the international acts of violence associated with the Margiis (Bangkok, London, Manila). Andrew Peacock, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, convened a Passports Working Group whose task was to consider all applications for passports by Australian Ananda Marga members. Norm Sheather and the ever-present Detective Sergeant Bruce Jackson are invited to Canberra to participate in the group. By June the members of this collective believe they have sufficient grounds to provide a legal basis for the minister to cancel Brandon’s passport. The Passports Working Group ‘took into consideration criminal evidence supplied by COMPOL which indicated while in Bangkok, he was engaged in conspiratorial conduct in relation to arranging the illegal purchase of explosives and that he also sought to obtain false Canadian or British passports’.10

  In brief, the Working Group feel they have compelling evidence linking Abhiik Kumar to the explosives found on the Bangkok Three just after the Hilton, and this is enough to revoke his passport.

  There is a certain degree of practical genius as well as symbolic power in stopping the globetrotting spiritual leader in his tracks and forcing him to stay put in Sydney under the watchful eye of the authorities. Much is made of the fact that while Brandon is a naturalised Australian citizen, this is very recent (he only became a citizen in early 1977, probably because of the impending travel ban on foreign Margiis) and he is US born and raised. It is clear that part of the intention behind the cancellation of the passport is to sway the hearts and minds of the public. As part of this orchestrated attack on the sect’s elite, the Department of Foreign Affairs issues a statement to the press the day after Kumar’s detention which makes clear that this man is an undesirable Australian — indeed they question whether he deserves the right to be a citizen:

  A spokesman for the Foreign Affairs Department said last night that the Federal government was no longer willing to require of a foreign government the protection and assistance for Mr Brandon normally afforded an Australian citizen.11

  This all makes sense and it’s a good PR move to characterise him as an unsavoury type yet offer up no details about what he’s actually done, instead leaving it to the public to imagine his evil deeds. In the same vein, and on virtually the same day, the Thai Government suddenly announces that they are to release the three Ananda Marga members imprisoned in Bangkok — the Australians Jones and Spark and the American Sarah Child. This decision is clearly made in consultation with the Australian Government. The news appears in an article attached to the one about Kumar’s loss of his passport and rights as an Australian citizen: Thailand to Free Ananda Marga Trio. No Passport for Sect Leader. The Thais have no problem being utterly clear about their motives for freeing the trio: ‘Thailand decided today to release [the three members of the Ananda Marga sect] because the government feared terrorist reprisals if a court sentenced them to long jail terms.’12

  In order to ameliorate the process and presumably save face, the Thai authorities offer Jones, Spark and Child a Faustian pact of sorts — they can go free but only if they change their pleas of not guilty to ‘Having possessed 1.25 kg of plastic explosives, to guilty, in exchange for light sentences.’13 So light, in fact, that they will be out the following Tuesday, having served six months. After that they are to be deported back to their countries of origin — Jones and Spark to Australia, where they haven’t set foot for almost five years, and Child to an ‘unspecified destination’. Selling a small part of their souls in order to take the deal doesn’t faze them a bit. On the contrary, they argue that if they didn’t switch their pleas as requested, their lawyers said they could be liable for sentences of up to 20 years. They also claim that, ‘We pleaded guilty after the offer was made to us, as we saw we had no chance of a fair trial in Thailand,’14 which seems a bit rich given the Thais have just given them a golden ticket and released them.

  Overall, Spark and Jones are remarkably untouched — possibly even emboldened — by the entire experience. In addition to maintaining their innocence, despite their guilty pleas, they declare to journalists, ‘Outside prison we can act. We know p
eople in Australia are hostile to Ananda Marga but that’s only because they don’t know the truth. We aim to change that.’15 For Timothy Jones, the whole thing has given him an opportunity to renew his vows, announcing that ‘he would dedicate the rest of his life to Ananda Marga’. For Caroline Spark, 25, of Canberra, it was all a bit like a holiday or spiritual spa: ‘I leave prison with some reluctance. Where else could I spend nine hours a day in meditation as I have been doing?’16

  One element of this abrupt offer of liberty that jars is the statement from the Australian embassy officials, who ‘assured the two Australians that there were no plans for charges to be brought against them in Australia relating to the events in Thailand’.17 Why are they being so nice? Is it another attempt to try and get them to turn against Abhiik Kumar or each other? The threats haven’t worked so maybe their thinking is ‘let’s give them something to be grateful for and see if that works’.

  I thought this might be the case at first but then realised this was not the raison d’etre. Given the soaring bleats of devotion issuing from the mouths of Spark and Jones post release, and their distinct lack of gratitude to either the Thai or Australian authorities, it’s impossible to imagine the cops, who’d made various attempts to get them to cooperate throughout their incarceration, thinking these two would ever be good for turning. The secret Cabinet paper makes clear that what they want, as in the case of Kumar, is to keep them close and to keep them in one place. As soon as the ardent pair are deported to Australia, their passports are also cancelled.

  What the Australian authorities want is to curtail the freewheeling gallivanting that these particular Margiis have engaged in for years. They want Kumar, Jones and Spark, who they suspect of dark and criminal deeds, to stand still so that they can watch them. They want to assert their control and make it clear to these cult members who has the power. The days of flitting in and out of countries and slipping on new names and identities are over. You will stay where we put you.

  If some of this seems a tad familiar in contemporary Australia — the cancellation of passports, the aggressive assertion of federal government authority over individuals who are regarded as suspicious but not actually charged with anything — that’s because it’s possible that what we are witnessing is not so much the birth of Fortress Australia as its conception. Scholars and sceptics alike have claimed that the Hilton bombing brought in widespread and sweeping changes to the security agencies in Australia. By the end of 1978, the Marks inquiry (instigated by Fraser immediately after the bombing) will lead to the formation of the Australian Federal Police; the following year increased powers of surveillance are given to ASIO, and paramilitary SWAT-style units are created in state police services, as is the domestic Special Air Service (SAS) in the Australian Defence Force. Crisis Policy centres are established with the authority to take control of parts of the country in times of emergency.18

  There is no question that after the bombing Australia implemented a much more rigid and systemised process of determining who was to be kept within our borders and who was to be kept out.

  That said, the situation is a lot more complicated than first meets the eye. It is very easy, as we have seen, to simply caricature a government as a bunch of civil liberty stomping fascists intent on eroding individual rights simply because they’re fascists and that’s what fascists do. Usually things are more nuanced and human. The bringing to heel of Abhiik Kumar in August 1978 is born as much out of exasperation as out of genuine fear.

  Evidence in years to come will bear out that none of these entities — ASIO, COMPOL, the federal government, the police — have any doubt that this man is responsible for the Hilton bombing and other atrocities here and abroad. They are frightened of him and want to convict him. Yet despite their collective might, all their authority and money and organisational clout, they have severely underestimated their target.

  I’m sure if I was a physicist I could name the tendency or principle associated with bringing a highly volatile and mobile element to stasis which in turn causes it to erupt catastrophically. When it is revealed on 9 August that Michael Brandon’s passport has been cancelled, the outrage from the membership of the Australian Ananda Marga on behalf of their spiritual leader is immediate, vocal and deeply disturbing. The actions it unleashes completely outweigh reactions to the arrests of Anderson, Alister and Dunn eight weeks earlier.

  Exactly what the Australian authorities think is going to happen next is impossible to know. It could be a wait-and-see scenario. Perhaps the embedded ASIO agents were hoping that the free Baba euphoria would loosen lips, although one imagines Seary’s exposure as an informant would make this less likely.

  What they aren’t expecting is an assault on federal parliament.

  A hardline policy

  On Wednesday afternoon, 16 August 1978, about 24 hours after the annual budget speech, the cut and thrust of Question Time in the House of Representatives is just concluding. The House is jam-packed with politicians bickering, joking and flirting. As things start to wind up, Prime Minister Fraser pulls his lanky length upward and starts to lead his entourage across the chamber towards the exit. At that moment a young man in the public gallery leaps to his feet screaming ‘Free Michael Brandon’,1 and hurls something at the members below. The pollies jerk their heads up in fright as they are showered in reams of paper. It seems a little comical now, to have been so frightened by a rain of Ananda Marga leaflets, but one of the things Malcolm Fraser told me (when he’d done chastising me for looking into the bombing at all) was that this protester could have been throwing hand grenades.

  ‘Really?’ you say. ‘Really?’ Yes. Back in those innocent times no one is searched or questioned or prevented from entering the public gallery of Parliament. There are no walk-through metal detectors or wands or wary security guards on alert. What is even more extraordinary is that when the screaming protester, Margii Roger Thompson of Newtown,2 is hauled away by the attendant, there isn’t even a law to charge him under. In 1978 the parliamentary privilege that allows Australian politicians to say and, to some extent do, whatever they bloody well want within that chamber also extends to members of the public in the gallery. Strictly speaking the attendant who hauls away the ranting Thompson doesn’t even have the right to remove him. Under the laws of the day, he is able to scream and shout and throw things to his heart’s content. He is simply representing the sect and acting on his right to legitimately protest against the police persecution of the Australian Ananda Marga leader.

  Three weeks later, parliament goes into another panic when an aide sees a shoe box left in a toilet off King’s Hall. The aide prises off the lid, spies Ananda Marga leaflets inside and decides that it’s probably a bomb. The building is evacuated.

  This incident, according to the papers, ‘spotlights the lack of security surrounding all federal parliamentarians, from the Prime Minister down’.3

  Then it happens again:

  For the second time in six weeks, the Chamber of the House of Representatives was showered yesterday with leaflets from the Ananda Marga. Just after question time a woman stood up in the gallery, shouted ‘return Michael Brandon’s passport’ and threw hundreds of leaflets into the chamber.

  This time the Commonwealth Police haul the woman away and question her for two hours. But as before, there is no law to charge her under, so she is released. The papers report that this second incident is once again motivated by the sect’s anger at ‘Michael Brandon, head of the Ananda Marga in Australia [having] his passport confiscated on August 9 after his return to Australia from a visit to India.’ The difference this time, however, is that the shouting and leaflet-throwing woman ‘hardly raised a ripple in the House’, with Speaker Sir Billy Snedden choosing simply to ignore her, while several members are reported as letting out a collective groan.4 While this could be evidence of how quickly Aussie politicians toughen up in the face of danger, it’s possible that many of them have inside information that’s girding their loins …
Something secret.

  At the very moment the impassioned sect member is demanding the return of her beloved leader’s passport, a group of men are sitting in a room in the very same building finalising Submission No. 2520. This submission is the final Cabinet Minutes of the Intelligence and Security Committee, who have formulated Australia’s very first Policy and Organisation in Relation to Counter Terrorism. These blokes aren’t mucking about, and missy up in the gallery is lucky she wasn’t lobbing grenades, given that the Committee has just agreed that:

  (a) Australia adopt a ‘hardline’ policy in dealing with terrorist incidents, that is: —

  (i) the police and, where it is appropriate to authorise their employment, elements of the Defence Force, be instructed to take firm action against the terrorists and obtain their surrender;