Who bombed the Hilton? (25 page)

What these verbals do is create doubt. Enough doubt, along with other doubtful circumstances such as the lack of surveillance when Seary collected the Margiis in Carillon Avenue, and questions over Seary's credibility, to free these three men in seven years' time.

While there are disturbing problems in the ‘evidence' (as there will be for Anderson's trial in 1989), after reading everything available I also stand by what James Wood says in the conclusion to the 1984–85 Section 475 inquiry:

Did Seary bring a bomb of devastating power to a suburban street, all in order to frame the sect members, escape his relationship with Special Branch and be free to go to university? If this was Seary's intention it utterly failed. In his own way he will be shackled to this act for the rest of his life. In August 1991 he goes so far as to make a serious complaint about ASIO failing to bring forward their agents inside the sect, who he alleges could have corroborated his claims about Margii violence.
⁸

As recently as 1999, Seary unsuccessfully sues Tom Molomby, a staunch supporter of Anderson, Alister and Dunn, for defamation
⁹
over his book
Spies, Bombs and the Path of Bliss
published 13 years earlier.
¹⁰
In the book Molomby alleges that Seary is a liar and a perjurer and that it is possible he is the Hilton bomber himself. So if Seary invented all his allegations about the Ananda Marga and brought the bomb to Yagoona just to get away from the sect and Special Branch, it didn't work out very well.

There is a third possible interpretation of what happened the night of the arrests at Yagoona, an interpretation beyond the versions presented by Richard Seary and the police on the one hand and the Margiis and their supporters on the other. An interpretation
I toy with in idle hours, which can't be proved: that Anderson, Dunn and Alister are set up by Abhiik Kumar. That the Australasian leader of the sect is so rattled by the allegations against him in the
Sun-Herald
on 11 June that he sends Seary, of whom he is suspicious, and the others, two of whom he dislikes (Alister, who Seary alleges in his Special Branch tapes Abhiik can't bear, and Anderson, whom Abhiik has had a documented spat with the day before the Hilton bombing), so they can get caught and thus divert police attention away from himself and other higher-up Margiis like Kapil Arn who are suspected of the Hilton bombing and other acts of international violence.

While it's just a theory based on pure speculation, it's not without merit. For example, by 16 June all the attention on Kumar seems to cease. I can find nothing in the police archives as to whether or not he arrives, as expected, on the 8.35 am flight from Thailand. He doesn't. The fact is, after these extraordinary arrests in Yagoona and Newtown, it seems that the entire gaze of the New South Wales police — Special Branch included — is upon these three Margiis and no others. If one asks the age-old question ‘Who benefits?' with regard to the Yagoona arrests, the answer is Abhiik Kumar.

For example, one of the items collected the night of the 15 June arrests is a tape recording entitled ‘Fight Against the Demon', narrated by ‘Abhiik
Kumara [sic]'.
¹¹
This recording was located at the VSS headquarters in Burwood, raided simultaneously with the Margii headquarters in Newtown. While the subsequent police transcription of the tape is littered with spelling mistakes, its message is clear: sect members are not supposed to sit idly by while the ‘demons' deny the human and legal rights of their leader, Baba. They are expected to vigorously oppose those who oppress the sect. It is not enough to fight darkness with ‘light' nor to imagine that simple good works will realign the balance. A member must actively fight and struggle with the demons, ‘avoidance of that struggle is pure hypocrisy … it is a useless life. You might as well be dead':

Kumar goes on to reiterate how the charges that have been brought by the Indian Government against Baba are outrageous and unsubstantiated. They are a violation of his human rights. Something has to be done.

He then recounts an instance of one of Baba's miracles, and concludes his long impassioned speech with:

It's hard to interpret this as anything other than a call to physical activism against the enemies of the sect. While perhaps not explicitly inciting violence by sect members, it certainly could be argued that certain individuals listening to such a speech could take it to mean exactly that. It does seem to indicate that Kumar, rather than his foot soldiers, should be the one to watch. If violence, or the threat of violence, is thought to be committed by sect members, it makes complete sense that it is Kumar who would have authorised it.

Despite this, the police, under Inspector Perrin of Special Branch, seem completely uninterested in looking at suspects higher up in the Margii hierarchy, and appear content with the trio they have captured. Again it's worth remembering that Seary only met Dunn and Anderson a few days immediately before 15 June, and that the Hilton task force never seemed to regard them as major players. It was Kumar they were watching.

Not any more.

To make matters worse, Richard Seary seems to be intent on shredding his remaining credibility.

By the time morning dawns on 16 June, the members of Ananda Marga must be aware not only of the arrests of Paul Alister, the head of Volunteer Social Services, Ross Dunn, possibly a leader of Prout, and Tim Anderson, the Ananda Marga public relations officer, but also that Richard Seary is a police informant. He has nothing to lose now. He has no reason to feel he
can't unburden himself completely to the police. But he does not.

Despite Special Branch mentioning the possibility that Alister and Dunn have knowledge of the Hilton bombing in their 15 June debrief to police prior to the Yagoona arrests, Seary hasn't contributed anything concrete to support this. In his eight taped debriefings with Special Branch up to the morning of the 15th, he makes the odd veiled allusion, but nothing he says is even vaguely conclusive. Nor does Seary make any mention of the Hilton bombing in his official interview on 16 June after the trio's arrest. He diligently relates all the information regarding the alleged plot to blow up Mr Cameron and his family, and that's it.

Then abruptly Norm Sheather steps back into view in the archive. The last time he captured our attention he was being lambasted in the papers for being the absent leader of a doomed investigation. Now he thrusts himself forward, propelled perhaps by the rush of emotions he must feel in reaction to the arrest of the three Margiis.

Is Norm appalled, enraged or uplifted by the news of the arrests? Of the involvement of one Richard Seary, who is working as a Special Branch agent? It's difficult to know precisely when this information is made known to the head of the Hilton task force. It's possible Norm is brought into the loop at the time of the 24 May revelations about an ‘all-out
war', but it's hard to say. He's clearly been sidelined and nowhere does his name appear in the heady, frantic preparations for the 15 June Yagoona and Newtown operations. It's rather a pity that Roger Rogerson and not Norm Sheather met with Krawczyk and Helson at Newtown police station before bouncing off to arrest Anderson. Perhaps Sheather would have remembered to push the button on the tape recorder. A pity, too, that Norm wasn't involved in the briefings of the Observation and Special Weapons squads — he may have been more apt to point out the need to be meticulous in collecting corroborating evidence when dealing with a complex, secretive sect highly skilled at plausible deniability.

At any rate, Inspector Perrin doesn't seem to have called him. Maybe he thought that Detective Inspector Sheather was too important to haul away from dinner at the family home. Maybe Perrin decided that the recruitment of Seary was his call and that he would take all the blame or all the glory.

The result is that Norm Sheather does not reappear in the archive until 22 June. It is, however, clear that he has taken the initiative to place himself back in the fray. In 1985, Sheather tells James Wood, ‘Well, I believed that in view of [Seary's involvement] with the three gentlemen presently before this inquiry that you would expect something to be known about the Hilton Hotel bombing and I interviewed him
to see what information he could convey to me that would assist me in the inquiry.'
¹³

On 22 June Seary participates in a three and a half hour interview with Detective Inspector Sheather, the faithful Detective Sergeant Jackson and Inspector Perrin, who, after all, is the one who initially approved Seary's recruitment. At the outset of the interview it is made clear to Seary that inquiries are being made about the Hilton bombing in relation to the Yagoona ‘incident'. He is then given his record of interview from the night of 16 June, asked to read over it and whether he has anything to add.

He does.

Seven long days after Yagoona, Seary, startlingly, produces the mother lode.

‘Have you ever seen what this stuff can do?'

It turns out Seary hasn't just omitted a few bits and pieces. He has omitted the extraordinary revelation that on the way to bomb Cameron, Alister and Dunn made it pretty bloody clear — basically confessing to him — that they had also bombed the Hilton. Apparently they blurted all this out with little prompting:

In response to this astonishing pronouncement, Sheather and Perrin seem thunderstruck and reduced to the most banal kind of police-speak.

Years later it is revealed in court that Seary felt that Norm Sheather particularly disliked him. Personally, I'm surprised Norm is able to contain himself and doesn't reach across the table and throttle him then and
there. First the procedural problems on the night of the arrests and now this cataclysmic admission, made — preposterously — six days after the first exhaustive interview.

Then there's more …

Towards the end of the interview on 22 June (around 11.50 pm), Seary says he's tired and asks if he can finish the interview at a later date. Sheather agrees and picks up the trail on 26 June 1978, ten days after the first interview regarding the Yagoona incident.