Who bombed the Hilton? (36 page)

Both scholars, having conducted exhaustive research with Margiis themselves, argue that any action attempting to liberate their leader, no matter how extreme in the eyes of outsiders, was not necessarily regarded as violence per se and thus could be denied publicly without contradiction. Further, this was always accepted by the inner sanctum of the sect, the elite at the top of the hierarchy.

All of this ceases to matter when the mortal embodiment of Baba — Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar — comes to an end on 21 October 1990. The Ananda Marga appears to successfully dissociate itself from allegations of violence thereafter. The sect continues its good works in supporting disaster relief, setting up schools and running yoga retreats and meditation centres. By the mid-1990s the University of Maryland Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism classes the group as ‘inactive'.

Tim Anderson left the sect well before any of this and is now a lecturer at the University of Sydney. Ross Dunn appears to have retreated into the mists but Paul Alister is still a member — recently embroiled in a federal court case over who has control of the estimated $20 million of assets belonging to the Australian wing of the sect. Evan Pederick has opted for the spiritual
life and is an Anglican minister in Western Australia. Richard Seary has made various complaints and undertaken litigation over the years in a quest to legitimise his claims about the sect and defend his character. In 2012 he published an ebook about the bombing on Amazon called
Smoke and Mirrors: How the Australian Public were Screwed.

And Abhiik Kumar? Well, his last foray in front of the Australian public occurs in 2003, on the eve of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the bombing.
The Australian
newspaper publishes a series of long investigative articles that review all that has occurred (including interviews with Seary and Pederick) in the decades since the bombing.

One story, titled ‘Is this man the Hilton bomber?', plainly states that ‘Abhiik Kumar was the mastermind of the Hilton Hotel bombing.'
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While this is pretty much what all the official agencies involved in the investigation of the bombing believe, what is new is that reporters Janet Fife-Yeomans and Natalie O'Brien secure an ‘exclusive interview' with Kumar, ‘who has broken his silence to declare his innocence'. The interview (presumably conducted over the telephone) isn't as exciting as one might hope. Much of it consists of lengthy asides recounting the case and the players involved. There is a longish section in which Kumar recounts his outrage at having his passport confiscated in 1978, but other than that there's not much to sink
your teeth into. It's all rather sunny. Of the Margiis he has this to say:

Of his alleged involvement with the Bangkok Three and the purchase of explosives in Thailand, he says simply, ‘If such a person … actually existed, it wasn't me.' Of the Hilton, he flat out ‘denies that he or the
Ananda Marga had anything to do with the bombing and says he has never been interrogated about the incident'.
⁹

What is interesting is that the journalists have managed to track him down. He now has yet another new name — this one quite a mouthful. He is now known as Abhidevanda, and is a senior monk in the Ananda Marga, living in — of all places — Israel. Jon Hoffman, who first arrived in Australia in 1973, was not only an American citizen by birth but also possibly Jewish, and perhaps able to claim citizenship under Israel's Law of Return.

He's still there. Anyone can locate him with the most cursory of internet searches. I certainly have.

Epilogue: ‘My heart has been broken'

My friend Anna, an intrepid and fearless filmmaker, says I should jump on a plane and confront Kumar. Perhaps storm into some serene meditation centre in Jerusalem and wave bits of paper and demand an explanation. Personally I can't see the point of this. I'm not a detective or an investigative reporter. When I made the decision to explore the Hilton bombing archive I also made a vow not to trust the living, so why start now?

For a long time I considered seeking out the daughters of William Favell and Alec Carter, to see how they had fared in the years since the bombing. The little girls Christine, Susan and Cassandra were between seven and nine, about the age my son is now,
when their fathers were killed. Yet the longer I thought about it, the more I felt it would be a crass attempt to remind people of how much was damaged that night almost 40 years ago. Like going up to relatives after a plane crash and asking them how they feel.

Then an email arrives in my inbox.

Since beginning this book I have wanted to look only at the historical record and see what could be gleaned from it, so it's a shock to get such a stark reminder of the horrific consequences of the explosion from someone who was standing in front of it. What is more disconcerting is that Terry Griffiths is also the chief advocate of the conspiracy allegations involving ASIO,
Special Branch and so on. I know these allegations well and have found nothing in any archive that supports them.

I don't know what to do plus I'm sick with the flu and can't bring my aching fingers to stretch to the keyboard to hit reply …

Finally I run out of excuses, send an apology and give him my number.

We speak. It's not a happy conversation. I feel I need to let him know as soon as possible that I don't share his views and that I can't see any evidence to give them credence. This makes him angry and he tells me that I am an idiot and like the rest of the idiots who believe the pack of lies that have been fed to them. A pack of lies that include most, if not all, of the 400 plus boxes of material contained in the Hilton bombing records deposited in state archives in 1995 that have been put there deliberately (and incompletely) to mislead stupid and naïve people like myself.

I spend the first half hour on the phone being a self-righteous cow trying to impress him with how much I know and how thorough I have been in my research, which has stretched far beyond just the contents of the Hilton archives in New South Wales State Records. I suddenly hear myself and think how prissy and irritating this must sound to someone who has spent his life fighting for the justice he believes has been withheld. I stop talking. He tells me about how close
he has been in each decade to instigating a bipartisan inquiry or royal commission into the bombing only to see these monumental efforts collapse time after time. He explains how they made a guard stand beside him when he went to look at the Hilton bombing archive after it had first been deposited. How he knows that critical documents had been excised or eradicated. He tells me what a good detective he was and is. About the emotional and physical pain he has endured, that he has had two broken marriages and lives alone. That he wakes up every single night thinking about the bombing and the lies that were told and are still being told.

‘Imagine you are me,' he says. ‘My heart has been broken.'

Then I think maybe he's right, maybe the conspiracy is true — maybe everything I read in the Hilton bombing archive and beyond is fabricated, maybe every word I've written is not true. I mean it's possible. Maybe Terry Griffiths is right and I am absolutely wrong.

About an hour into the conversation we start to get on — and for a man with a lot to be bitter about, he's very charming. At one juncture I tell him that when I first started researching the bombing I used to remind myself that I could only be sure of one thing and that was that I didn't put the bomb in the bin. Terry laughs and tells me that he didn't do it either. We muse about the fact that we probably want the same
thing — a transparent inquiry to lay some ghosts to rest. An inquiry I doubt will ever come.

In the end we say goodbye and arrange to continue talking and to maybe meet up some time.

‘We can agree to disagree,' he says.

I agree. We can.

Note on sources

I have cross-checked the Hilton bombing material contained within New South Wales State Records against extensive archival material held in the New South Wales State Library, Trove, the National Library and the Australian Archives among others. This other material includes the transcripts and findings of the various court cases and inquiries over the years, newspaper reports extending over almost four decades and, most importantly, key documents that have been declassified by ASIO or the federal government years after the bombing and not contained in the New South Wales State Records Hilton archive. It is clear that the New South Wales State Records on the Hilton bombing are not infallible. They contain mistakes, inconsistencies and possibly omissions. The documents they
contain are written by hundreds (possibly thousands) of different and diverse individuals representing a myriad of state, federal and international agencies — Interpol, ASIO, the New South Wales police, Special Branch, federal Cabinet and dozens of international police forces (New York, Washington, Hong Kong, Thailand, Manila, London and so on). If I have been unable to locate multiple (and transparently verifiable) archival sources for a discovery or development in the investigation I have been clear that there is ambiguity or conflicting versions surrounding that event. I do not, however, believe (as some indeed do) that the contents of the voluminous and chaotically compiled Hilton archive is fabricated. For that to be true all the other archival holdings not just across Australia, but also from numerous international sources would be similarly artfully deceptive. In my view this seems unlikely.

Beyond these primary sources there are a number of secondary sources — memoirs, documentaries, including accounts by those involved. But while I have read these accounts, I have tried to avoid using them as references as they are drenched in their own particular agendas. My purpose here has been not to evaluate the various conspiracy theories, but to sift the original primary documents in the various archives and to show how the investigations into the bombing unfolded.