Who bombed the Hilton? (21 page)

Two days later, on 18 May, Sydney is hit by another bomb blast. At 7.40 pm ‘a bomb blast shattered a plate glass window at the New South Wales Police Headquarters in College St'.
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The bomb, while not large and resulting in no injuries, is alarming — the devices seem to be turning up with disturbing regularity. The police investigators take the debris to be examined and compared to the bomb fragments from the Hilton and the bomb from the Indian High Commission.

What does Norm Sheather make of this devilry? Not much — he's on leave, as will be nastily reported in the paper in a few days' time. Not only has he been kept out of the loop by the clandestine actions of his colleagues in Special Branch, he is also being mocked and derided in public.

At the very moment Richard Seary heads off to his first Volunteer Social Services camp (and alleged arms
training) in Ashton Park, Mosman (around the back of Taronga Zoo, where the new car park is), Sheather is being hectored like an errant schoolboy. In response to the bombing at police headquarters, the
Sun-Herald
adopts the tone of an aggrieved headmaster:

It's Norm who is pushed forward as the author of this sad state of affairs. Not only is he, ‘the officer in charge', on leave that week, it seems his second in command, Detective Sergeant Bruce Jackson, is also ‘off for four days'. The
Sun-Herald
spent
two days
(their italics) making phone calls that fail to discover who is heading the investigation in their absence. What a far cry it is, the Sunday tabloid declaims, from the mighty hundredfold of detectives (actually 58) who began the team. A number that dropped to 70 after a fortnight, then to 37 by mid-March and now only constitutes a mere handful. The article pits the monumental, but in its view pointless, effort of interviewing ‘1500 people ranging from religious groups to political activists and plain cranks … to produce only three strong leads'.
The reporter, Roger Franklin, then sets out the tragic narrative arcs of rising and falling action, the hopes of promising leads — like the Mr Whippy ice-cream van, and box-carrying, Piggy Muldoon–hating Penny from New Zealand — which are irrevocably dashed. As is the latest sliver of hope that came in the form of a strip of super-8 film sent anonymously to the police. Unlike Zapruder's history-defining piece of celluloid, this is simply a dead end. On examination it reveals a man carrying a brown box towards the bin outside the Hilton — a man who turns out to be a local shopkeeper getting rid of some rubbish.
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It's amazing how little this reporter is able to glean about what is really going on in the investigation, and how closely the reduced task force is holding its cards to its chest. The ‘leads' the article refers to are so far down the priorities list for Norm and his investigative team they appear laughable. Still, it must grate that things do suddenly appear to be going a wee bit pear-shaped. Having Abhiik Kumar throw on another pantomime mask and slip out of Australia as Michael Brandon must stick in the craw a bit, as must all those bloody bombs. If Norm's mood is bleak, it is hard to imagine what it's going to be like when he finds out a few weeks later that Seary has been recruited as an operative to gather information about his case.

‘A full-scale terrorist war'

Seary has his fourth tape-recorded debrief with Krawczyk and Helson on 24 May, immediately after his attendance at the VSS and related Margii camps. It's a doozy. Given that he's been immersed with Margiis on camp sites for days on end, it isn't surprising that he's chummed up with a few of them and picked up some chatter. In brief, Seary claims he has heard that if Baba is not released during the current appeal process, there will be ‘a full-scale terrorist war coming about the middle of June'. This attack will be coordinated by the head of the Volunteer Social Services, who is coming to Australia from Manila. Seary relates the information that Abhiik has gone to India to await the outcome of the trial and to confer with Baba. He then details the unarmed combat training he received
at the VSS camp and the war games he saw; conversations with Margiis about the existence of caches of weapons; the existence of a VSS uniform; and the existence of the Universal Proutist Revolutionary Federation. Heady stuff indeed, to be lambasted in years to come as far-fetched nonsense.
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And yet, and yet … there is corroboration for much of this. Not only is Seary's account of the postering and of Kapil's arrest of 30 April supported by independent local area command ‘police observations',
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we know that the camps were held and that Seary attended them. ASIO was undertaking its own surveillance. We know that Abhiik has indeed left the country. There is independent corroboration of Seary's acharya in Manila, the head of the VSS, who is allegedly to lead the violent uprising of Margiis should Sarkar not be released.

A telex to the Hilton task force from COMPOL or Interpol with information supplied by Hong Kong's Special Branch states ‘we can confirm Acharya Japananda is global secretary of volunteers social service, whose headquarters is in Manila'. Like Kumar, he is a man of many names and dangerous (or unlucky) friends:

Like Abhiik Kumar, Acharya or Avadhut Japananda has been travelling in the company of long-term Ananda Marga members immediately prior to their arrests in Bangkok and Manila. It must be concerning to Special Branch and the Hilton task force to imagine such a man entering Australia.

Even with corroboration, it is true that Seary's list of Margii activities is, as James Wood will come to describe it, ‘startling'.
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However, when one looks at the lengthy transcript itself, these ‘facts' emerge fairly vaguely and are issued with all manner of qualifications. To be honest it reads to me like someone struggling to fathom the nature of the people around him and unsure of what to make of what he has heard, rather than just spouting allegations in order to stitch them up. On 24 May Seary comes across as particularly circumspect. When asked by Krawczyk (referred to phonetically as C in the transcript) whether he
thinks the Margiis are held together by the imprisonment of Baba or by something else, Seary replies:

Krawczyk asks him what these feelings are.

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.'
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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.'
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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 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.
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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'.
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A ‘document' is presented and a meeting ‘to discuss possible threats to Indian personnel and establishments in Australia'
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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'.
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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]'.
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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.'
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