Who bombed the Hilton? (18 page)

While it is hard to pinpoint what exactly motivated a police source to make a statement of this nature, it is most probably connected to the fact that three days after the bomb was found in Canberra, an employee of the Indian High Commission, Suresh Kumar, was found hanged.
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What does that mean? Was this chap guilty? Was he a secret agent for the Indian CBI? An Ananda Marga sympathiser? Or just a deeply unhappy man? Why would police, who have been so tight-lipped about their investigations up to this point, make such an assertion? Did Norm Sheather sanction it or did the Commonwealth Police (COMPOL) and ASIO just provide information to the press without consultation? Is this what they really think? Or is it disinformation intended to throw the Ananda Marga off the track? Is the federal government so fearful that they are seeking to defuse the situation by adopting a method of plausible deniability themselves?

I can tell you one thing: the same way a canary must have a first woozy sway before toppling to earth and causing miners to gasp and flee, this event is a precursor to the imminent and catastrophic implosion of relations between ASIO, the Hilton task force and the New South Wales Special Branch, previously united in their pursuit of the Hilton bombers. It's almost as if the Canberra bomb did explode, sending fragments of shrapnel into the investigation, which until now appeared to be going very well.

Keep in mind it's a little over two weeks since Norm got that beautiful intelligence tying those jetsetting senior Ananda Marga figures together and tracking them to India, then Bangkok, Manila and Australia. He must be feeling pretty good about how
things are going. That it is possible that all the violence emanates from a tiny splinter cell within the larger organisation made up of elite long-termers way up the totem pole. Those with a direct line to Baba; those who go regularly to India, visiting him in jail, sitting at his feet in adoration and receiving his counsel. This is exactly what the original task force analysis stated in November 1977, and this is what recent intelligence fleshes out. But making this concrete is not easy. You certainly can't panic or do something reactive.

If a minority elite of the Margiis are playing a mind-bendingly sophisticated game, portraying the sect as oppressed, bullied and conspired against (and attracting huge numbers of new members in the process) while they are actually conducting a highly organised reign of terror in the name of the Universal Proutist Revolutionary Federation, it's going to be almost impossible to compel these individuals to confess.

Sheather has tried. In the days following the arrest of the Bangkok Three, he sends two task force members to Thailand to interview the suspects about their connections to the Australian Margiis and the Hilton. The task force offers them immunity, a free ride home and, who knows, perhaps some of that gigantic reward. Of course none of these inducements are going to fly — they are hardly going to appeal to earnest, highly disciplined young people willing to give up meat, money,
careers, their entire families and, in some cases, their lives. By this stage five members have set themselves on fire in devotion to their cause.

Perhaps the wisest thing to do would be to wait them out — keep the gaze on the horizon. With all this information pouring in from international police, all these similar cases, something's got to give. Norm knows that ASIO has penetrated the sect — perhaps eventually these agents will crack the big time. What's needed is a cool head and a calm mind.

But fear and intense frustration are no allies of patience, and something fractures under the stress. That something is Special Branch.

Shadowlands

For reasons that can only truly be known by the detectives within this now-maligned group of police, whose actions now seem not only inexplicable but kind of insane, on 28 March 1978, six weeks after the Hilton bombing, Special Branch decide, without informing Norm Sheather or ASIO, to recruit and run their own secret agent inside the Margiis. An agent who will penetrate the sect and report exclusively to them. The person they select for the job is Richard Seary.
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It seems so completely mad, doesn't it? Why on earth would they recruit a man whose only contact with the Hilton team was to have wandered in off the street a few days after the bombing to point the finger at the Hare Krishnas? A claim that Sheather is completely unimpressed by. Why do detectives Krawczyk and Helson in particular, and to a lesser degree Watson,
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think that recruiting this slightly odd
young man is a good idea? Why now? And why keep it secret from Sheather, the task force and ASIO?

Here we enter shadowlands.

There is no primary archival evidence about what went on between Special Branch officers Krawczyk, Helson and Watson and Richard Seary on 28 March 1978 between 4.15 pm and 6.45 pm, save that they met at Special Branch headquarters to discuss the possibility of Seary joining the Ananda Marga and attempting to gain inside information and then feed it back to the detectives. In short, to function in much the same way as the two ASIO agents who have been working within the sect since late 1977. This meeting is so clouded by competing recollections it is not even clear how Seary has come to be at Special Branch in the first place. Was he asked? Did he offer?

Even some seven years later, during the extensive inquiry held under Section 475 of the
Crimes Act
into the convictions (based significantly on Seary's evidence) of Timothy Edward Anderson, Paul Shawn Alister and Ross Anthony Dunn, the reasons remain opaque. During the course of that inquiry in 1984–85, all that sharp-eyed Commissioner James Wood can prise out of Krawczyk is that ‘by the time of the meeting he was aware of Seary's earlier contact with the police, but he was unable to recall how it was that the meeting came about'.
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Likewise Detective Helson ‘could not recall the circumstances in which the meeting came about'.
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Detective Watson is completely uninformative, stating that he ‘had not heard of Seary before the meeting'.
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As to Seary's reasons for getting into bed with Special Branch — the Section 475 inquiry lists at least half a dozen contradictory motives. Seary confessed to friends, or in writing, that he was brought on board: one, because he had wasted police time with the Hare Krishna accusations and thus was bullied into infiltrating the Margiis; two, because they thought he was the Hilton bomber; three, because he understood Sanskrit (which he didn't); four, because he was half crazy like the Margiis and could worm his way into the sect — and so on and so forth.
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Yet none of these explanations, or those to come, are backed up by evidence. Furthermore, all of this speculation comes in retrospect, and is tied irrevocably to the miscarriage of justice cases that are yet to occur.

What if we go back to the day in question, forget what is to come and try to slip into their skins?

28 March 1978

It's 43 days since the Hilton bombing.

For the likes of Detective Norm Sheather and the Hilton task force, it can't seem like much time at all for a major case, but this cannot be the feeling of Special Branch Detectives Krawczyk, Helson and Watson, who have doggedly been on the trail of the Ananda Marga for almost a year. They have been at the frontline of the attacks on and threats against Indian nationals since the previous winter and have put in mind- and bum-numbing hours of surveillance. They too have borne the brunt of the failure to protect CHOGRM and are under attack by elements of the press who hold them up to ridicule, or worse, accuse them of blackmail, conspiracy and murder. Then there was the bomb found at the Indian High Commission in Canberra. And what do they have on their prime suspects? Nothing. Nothing but the bland denials
issued by the sect with smooth regularity. Circumstantially it all seems to point to an inner cell within the Ananda Marga, hidden deep within an oblivious rank and file membership. The fact is there is nothing concrete to hang onto despite the hours they have spent watching and listening.

What about the bright young boys and girls over at ASIO? What about the two informants they have had inside the sect since late the year before? Where is their intelligence? Apart from tiny tidbits, they seem to be completely incapable of producing solid leads. I suppose it might occur to Special Branch during that early evening in late March, as Richard Seary faces them across the desk, that Norm and his handsomely resourced Hilton task force don't seem to be faring much better than the cloak and dagger ASIO contingent either. Why wait for them to fuck up? Why not strike out on your own?

Presumably the members of Special Branch believed they could change the course of the investigation and perhaps become the heroes of the day.

It's easy to imagine either Krawczyk, Helson or Watson being intensely frustrated by the lack of traction within the investigation. If I shared their suspicions about the sect I might feel as if I were being mocked. ‘Looky, another bomb. First the Hilton, now Canberra. What are you going to do?' It's fascinating to note how intimate these detectives are with the fresh
terror of this newly discovered bomb, with its potential to rip through walls and flesh, and how mouthwateringly tempting the circumstantial evidence surrounding it is. It is Krawczyk's name on both the original reports relaying details about the components of the High Commission bomb, and on the report:

He must have felt tantalisingly close. Yes, the description is general, yet the gender mix, the age, the brazenness of the actions — casually throwing a bag full of explosives over the back wall of an official compound — do bear a startling similarity to those Margii couples caught in other countries over the last few months.

If it were me, I can imagine feeling that things could be done better — that I could do things better. Remember, the Margiis say they have been infiltrated by ASIO, so it's possible that those operatives are horribly compromised and will never get anywhere. (In almost 20 years' time ASIO will commission and publish a declassified report to address some of these questions. In it they will admit that ‘ASIO ran agents within the Ananda Marga. Most agents
apparently provided only limited coverage of the sect.'
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)

Why not recruit your own agent? It's a good time to start afresh. Why not Seary? He looks like a hippie, smells like a hippie, but behaves like a nark. He was happy enough to point the finger at the Hare Krishnas, who obviously accept him. Why not get him to take his suspicious mind into the Margiis? The more you think about it, it's the randomness and speed of Special Branch's choice that makes Seary kind of perfect. Anyone asking about him knows he's been loosely allied with the Hare Krishnas for years, drifted around, done this or that, done time, had and got over a drug problem, had a tricky childhood. He's bright, the right age — just the sort of person the Margiis might like. What's more, he's clearly up for it. Whether motivated by adventure, a bit of cash or just because going undercover for the police to help solve a big crime sounds like huge amounts of fun — he jumps on board.

And why would you tell too many people about it if you were Special Branch? Why tell ASIO if they never give you any information and treat you like second-rate coppers? Why tell Sheather and his team? They're only likely to be annoyed. Let's face it, on 28 March 1978 who knows what Seary will or will not discover? Why upset the applecart at this stage? Easy does it, wait and see what happens. Why not ‘let him have a run and see how he goes'?
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How bad can the consequences be?