Who bombed the Hilton? (24 page)

Perrin is trapped. He can only go forward and act, no matter how unconvinced he may feel. Harder to explain is the series of procedural oversights that follow this decision. Seary is sent off unaccompanied to borrow a friend's car. He is not fitted with a listening device. They don't procure a car for him and fit it with a listening device. Allegedly all they say is something along the lines of, ‘We will have you under surveillance once you arrive to pick up the men in Carillon Avenue.'
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Maybe Inspector Perrin is reluctant to go all out until he can actually have the police eyeball the suspects together at 11 pm. Maybe it's the lateness of the hour, the lack of time to scramble expert teams to handle a threat such as this, that leads to mistakes. There is so much to do. As soon as Richard Seary completes his tale of imminent terror, Perrin has to assemble three sets of police to cover the operation. Naturally in the spirit of ‘delegating up', Perrin first informs his bosses, Police Commissioner Wood and Superintendent Black.
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Next he has to locate some cops. Thursday evening on a frigid night in Sydney 1978 — senior expert police such as the Special Weapons and Operations Squad aren't exactly standing in a room downstairs ready to vault into action. Some are at home, some are at the pub. Miraculously, they are rounded up swiftly, brought in and briefed.

The briefing prepared by Special Branch at CIB underlines the belief that this operation is critically linked to the ongoing investigation into the Hilton bombing: ‘All the persons [who are to be picked up by Seary] are members of the Ananda Marga sect and at this stage it is suspected that two of them, namely, O'Callaghan [Alister] and Dunn, would have vital information concerning the Hilton bomb inquiry.'
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Independently of Seary, Special Branch have their suspicions about these two individuals. Alister has been arrested in the past for attacks against Indian nationals and he is associated with VSS. Dunn is believed to be part of Prout, and while they can't yet prove it, they believe Prout members to be involved in the bombing.

It is pointed out that the sect members are constantly involved in physical, possibly military, training, they are known to carry daggers, and at least one member has a degree in Mining Engineering and is an expert in explosives. The final point in the Special Branch briefing that night literally drops from the sky and reunites us with our old comrade Abhiik Kumar, who once again has an unerring capacity to arrive in or depart countries immediately before or after bombings or attempted bombings.

In 11 hours' time.

Imagine how on edge you'd be if you were a member of either police squad. You'd be thinking about the Hilton. Thinking about zealots and the potential horror of the whole thing going badly. After all, this is a likely scenario from what Seary is suggesting — that if the Margiis think the cops are going to stop the car, Alister will set the bomb off. Perrin and Helson of Special Branch bring the squad up to speed on what they know of the sect. It can hardly instil confidence in the Weapons Squad to discover that Margiis believe their god is on trial, that they occasionally set themselves on fire, or that almost ten of them have been arrested around the globe for terrorist acts. Add to this that the whole enterprise is going to take place in Yagoona, a graveyard-quiet suburb of fibro houses on quarter-acre blocks, and that the target is the leader of the Australian wing of the National Alliance, and this must make the whole operation seem even more peculiar and disturbing.

A lot has been said about New South Wales police officers over the years — some of it by me in a documentary called
The Inquisition
— about the endemic
corruption, the blue walls of silence and the like, but on an operation like this one cannot fault their courage. In short, they are instructed to set off for Yagoona after Seary has collected the Margiis in Newtown, and to apprehend them in the act — or immediately prior to the act. To enter a scene without hesitation in which all six of them could be blown sky high.

Simultaneously Perrin mobilises the Observation Squad to cover the Margii headquarters in Queen Street, Newtown, which is just around the corner from Carillon Avenue, the site of the intended pick-up. A mix of Special Branch detectives, including Krawczyk and Observation Squad police, seven in total, are dispatched to Newtown to observe the rendezvous.

It is among all this frenzy that Seary leaves police headquarters, around 9 pm, via the basement.
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He walks out into the cold, wet night of a Sydney winter and all is lost.

Yagoona

Between 9 pm and 11 pm all Seary needs to do is borrow a friend's car. Perhaps that's why the police don't accompany him — how hard can that be? Perrin, on the other hand, has to ensure the smooth coordination of almost 20 police officers at separate locations: Newtown, Yagoona and CIB headquarters. Perhaps it is no surprise that Seary is left utterly unsupervised over the next few hours.

Things start to go wrong immediately. Seary can't find anyone who'll lend him a car. After wandering around for 90 minutes he finally decides to nick one from Foveaux Street, Surry Hills. He hotwires an HT Holden and drives towards Sydney Uni.

By the time Dunn, in the back, Alister, up front, and Seary, driving, set off for 16 Gregory Street, there is a large blue denim bag in the car containing all the components to make a good size bomb. In it sit ten
sticks of gelignite, batteries, a timer and a detonator. Seary and seven policemen will swear under oath that Dunn arrives at the car in Carillon Avenue with the bag — or carrying something that looks ‘bag-like'. The trio of Margiis will counter that Seary pulls up to collect them with the bag containing the bomb already in the back seat. Dunn and Alister will swear that they had no idea the bag contained a bomb until Seary tells them about it just before their arrival at Yagoona. Anderson will assert he had absolutely no idea about a bomb until the police turn up to arrest him later that night.

Let these differences lie for now. Next there is a kind of comedic aside when Seary realises he has managed to steal a car with an empty tank — there is a little physical farce as the men locate a back lane and struggle to break open the petrol cap, then locate a service station and fill up in order to make the getaway car functional. After this, alone in the dark, zooming towards their destination, a bomb nestled on the back seat and followed discreetly by the Observation Squad, there are versions of what is or is not said. Supposed confessions and accusations. Misunderstandings and conflict. None of it is recorded. All of it is hearsay.

Down Parramatta Road then sweeping up the mighty Hume Highway and then we're at Yagoona. Seary misses the turn-off to Gregory Street and takes the next left at Horton Street that runs alongside
Bass Hill Public School. The Special Weapons and Operations Squad swoop in behind the Margiis' car. Detective Summerfield, driving the lead car, forces the Holden off the road into the front yard of a modest weatherboard on Horton Street.
¹

At that moment these two worlds that have orbited each other uneasily for so many months smash together in a collision of noise and light. Three slight, bearded young men are dragged from a car and across the road, handcuffed and made to lie down on the pavement in front of the school.

Then the Army bomb disposal unit arrives, with a Captain Stevenson
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in full uniform warning the detectives to stay away as the bomb might be set. The Army officers invade the car and dismantle the unprimed bomb. This, too, with all its gleaming components, is spread out in front of the school.

The Margiis on one side, the police on the other, are incomprehensible to each other. Nothing captures this better than the police photographs taken that night. There are three action shots of each of the sect members being escorted away from the scene by separate sets of policemen. The police are all huge. Tall, handsome men in suits and matching dark raincoats, three with those glossy Tom Selleck moustaches so popular in the '70s. Their expressions are a mix of triumph and relief. In their tatty street clothes, Alister and Dunn look tiny beside them, their hands behind
their backs. In these frozen tableaux, Alister looks stunned and Dunn, childlike and bereft. Even Seary, who is likewise shackled and aware of what is to occur, wears an expression of intense anxiety.
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One of the things that strikes me is how effortlessly Seary looks like he's one of them, a Margii through and through, a true believer.

Everyone would have been so scared, though, wouldn't they? While the bomb they retrieve from the back seat is unarmed, ‘each of the components was operational and there was a continuity of the electrical circuit'. All one had to do to get it up and running would be to ‘place the leg wires and the detonator on the positive and negative terminals of the batteries'. If approximately 12 to 15 sticks of gelignite can obliterate the back of a steel garbage truck, eviscerate two men and shatter glass 16 storeys high, 10 sticks would have destroyed the car, its occupants and anyone within 15 feet of it. This would have included the occupants of the house six or so feet from where the car came to rest. Whoever brought the bomb was playing an extraordinarily high stakes game.
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Making things even more surreal is that neither Robert Cameron, nor his dog, wife or kiddies actually live at 16 Gregory Street, Yagoona. He'd moved out of the area a year earlier. Seary had plucked the address from an old telephone directory. Had either scheme succeeded, the residents of 16 Gregory Street might
have woken on Friday morning to find their home daubed with inexplicable slogans like ‘Prout hates racists' — or they mightn't have woken up at all.

Not long after the drama at Yagoona, the Observation Squad, padded out with additional detectives, pours into the Ananda Marga's Newtown HQ, ascending to the office and hoovering up — or, as the Margiis claim, planting — evidence.

Here the plot both thickens and twists. We have a new bit player who will dominate the show for years to come. In 1978 I doubt anyone would make much of the inclusion of Detective Roger Rogerson in the crack team assembled for the raid on the Margiis that night. At the time he's a lauded and decorated officer, known to bring cases in. Of course by 1986 his reputation is such that you may as well have hired Attila the Hun or Vlad the Impaler if you were going to put question marks over the integrity of the operation that night. His presence at the Margii residence becomes one of those immovable obstacles that blocks out the light. In view of his various alleged and proven transgressions in the coming decades — murder, green-lighting criminals, fabricating evidence — it's difficult to be certain about anything he's involved with. If you're guilty of some things are you guilty of everything? Does it automatically follow that all he touches is infected with the same dark traits?

It's not as if he's the only one running the show.

Krawczyk and Helson, who had been at the Horton Street scene, are directed by Inspector Perrin to return to the Newtown police station and meet up with Rogerson. After a conference, the three of them, along with another three detectives, head to Queen Street and find a Margii guard outside. The police force the front door open. They ask for Anderson and locate him on the top floor, lying on his back, his eyes open.
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He is arrested and taken to CIB headquarters.

Here's the problem: according to the police, the arrested sect members are refreshingly forthcoming both at Yagoona and at Queen Street and then at CIB headquarters. They don't seem to be able to shut up, not only about their involvement in the crime, but also their lack of remorse. Immediately after being cautioned, Anderson supposedly tells Rogerson, in front of Detectives Howard, Krawczyk and Helson:

‘I don't intend to say a lot. I will say this. It will not stop here. What was going to happen tonight was the only justice that Cameron and his kind deserve. You will suffer the consequence for this.'
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The problem is that no one has thought to turn on a tape recorder. It is possible that in fact they have decided deliberately
not
to turn on a tape recorder. Thus all the ‘conversations' are dutifully recorded in police notebooks. Hence these kinds of confessions were called ‘verbals'. In short they could be incriminating, unverifiable statements fabricated by corrupt police.

It's a spectacularly stupid decision. Even if Anderson, Alister and Dunn did utter every word they were accused of saying that night, it can't ever be proved, can it? Think what you like about Rogerson, but I've spent a great deal of time with Detective Krawczyk's meticulous records and reading transcripts of his interviews with Seary. He does things transparently and without equivocation. While some of the Seary debrief tapes are mislabelled, which fuels a variety of attacks from the Margiis, Krawczyk did think to record them. I find it hard to believe he would have thought that simply jotting notes down during interrogations was a good idea.