Who bombed the Hilton? (7 page)

E. Three blank invitation cards to attend the PM's CHOGRM banquet were found in a hotel room occupied by a person ‘identified as Helen M Bell (née Gundry)'. Neither she nor her husband are known to ASIO.
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A bunch of foreign students, a militant trade union, a religious sect missing a leader, some pissed off rail workers and a woman who may or may not pilfer stationery. The immediate threats seem ridiculously benign, but Sheather decides to pursue them nonetheless. They are also the forerunners of a trove of less recent ASIO intelligence that will burst to the forefront of Sheather's investigation in the next 24 hours.

Wednesday 15 February 1978

By the second day of the investigation, a pattern of events — a mixture of breaks, good policing, fatal mistakes, misinformation and disinformation — is established that will characterise and haunt the investigation for the next four months, until it becomes completely derailed on 15 June.

The problem with misinformation is that it's sometimes hard to distinguish from information. If you're in Sheather's task force you have to make a decision whether Mr Sutton, an explosives engineer employed in Adelaide, is correct in believing that ‘from details he has heard in news broadcasts' the explosives used are the same as those stolen recently from his employer's warehouse in South Australia 1500 kilometres
away and that this is a useful lead that should be pursued.
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Similarly, is one to rely on the tip-off volunteered by Mr Robert Trotter (a draftsman and cab driver for Legion) who swears he saw Tim Anderson (PR spokesperson for the Ananda Marga and fellow cab driver) loitering in his cab outside the Hilton with a passenger yet with the lights turned off at 1 am on Sunday the 12th?
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While the latter seems like powerful circumstantial evidence, one needs to remember that at a press conference the day before, India's Prime Minister Desai had cheerfully aired his belief that he was the target of the bombing and that the Ananda Marga were to blame. At the same time, a lean, bespectacled and bearded 26-year-old Tim Anderson, in his role as spokesperson and secretary of that religious sect, has had his own well-attended and well-publicised press conference stating that Ananda Marga members were greatly shocked by the bombing and extended sympathy to the families of the dead men. Maybe Trotter has simply married this well-known identity to the man he thinks he saw in the cab. Is it evidence?

At the Ananda Marga press conference Anderson also informs journalists that the Margiis suspect they have been infiltrated by ASIO and Commonwealth Police agents (which is absolutely true in the case of ASIO) and that they welcome this. They have nothing to hide. To have Ananda Marga connected with the
Hilton bombing is unthinkable. He adds that they are aware there are elements attempting to destroy Ananda Marga and that these elements were responsible for terrorism around the world. This refers to an alliance of the Russian KGB and the Indian Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). He ends by saying, ‘The fact that Australia, which is the little brother of the United States, in Russia's eyes, is hosting the conference, is all the more reason for an attempt to undermine the aim of the conference.'
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The disinformation is easier to identify but equally time-consuming to address. For the most part this takes the form of a swathe of bomb hoaxes that begin to be called in; there are three on 15 February and within six weeks Sheather's team will have logged over 500 of them. It also takes the form of a steady stream of mentally disturbed individuals who confess enthusiastically to being the bomber.

Accelerating the rising tide of intelligence, both good and bad, is the sudden announcement of a $100 000 reward to be given jointly by the state and federal governments for information leading to an arrest. This is simply an astonishing sum of money for Australians in 1978. To put it in context, it is exactly the same amount of reward money that would be offered today, almost four decades on, for Australia's most serious crimes. Not only is it a wad of money that promises to attract crazies, it is guaranteed to be ineffective
in producing informants who may be implicated in the crime but wish to name associates in exchange for immunity, as Premier Wran has warned there would be no ‘immunity for people responsible for the bomb blast. There will be no compromise for a terrorist. There will be no mercy for people who plant bombs.'
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One imagines Fraser and Wran felt they needed to make a gesture of this size commensurate with the catastrophic explosion — but it is simply a fatal mistake. It will turn Sheather's tide of intelligence into a tsunami.

Making the day worse are the initial reports from the ballistics team — the Scientific Branch — stating that while they do not believe the bomb was a land mine or plastic explosive, they do believe the explosion was of such force to have blown things such as a timer to pieces. The violence of the explosion makes it difficult to find many traces of the actual bomb. Their best guess is that it was ‘plas-gel', a malleable form of gelignite or sticks of gelignite — the latter procurable at that point from almost any large hardware store — weighing around 4.5 kilograms.

Despite an exhaustive fingertip search of the barricaded site the night of the bombing by the Scientific team and a large number of police, the operation is ‘hampered due to the presence of refuse' from within the garbage truck. The items of interest that are discovered ‘that might assist in establishing the means of detonation' are sent for further examination to the
school of metallurgy at the University of New South Wales and to a Mr West at the Analytical Laboratories. Among the items are: ‘sections of white and yellow insulated wire', fragments of ‘black plastic insulating tape', ‘a small unidentifiable spring', parts of batteries, bits of an electric hobby motor, watch batteries, samples and swabs from the garbage truck, pieces of metal, a man's gold wristwatch and a single leather glove.
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And then comes the break: news arrives from Bangkok. Three members of the Ananda Marga have been arrested in the Thai capital in possession of ‘enough high explosive to blow up a ten-storey building'.
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Two of the three are Australian: Timothy Thomas Hilton Jones, 25, and Caroline Lee Spark, 24. Also arrested is US citizen Sarah Child, 29.
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All three were about to leave Bangkok for Australia but had been unable to get on a flight.

As this news breaks, Sheather receives a barrage of reports about the Margiis. On 7 February in Manila, Americans Stephen Dyer and Victoria Shepherd (both members of Ananda Marga) were caught in the act of stabbing an Indian Embassy employee.
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On 8 February in West Germany, two Ananda Marga members, Helmut Klein Schmidt and Erica Rupert, set themselves on fire and burn to death.
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It seems they are protesting the arrest in London on 1 November the previous year of three Margiis — Anthony Niall Kidd, Brian Shaw and Susan Waring, all British — on
bombing charges and for conspiracy to murder a member of the Indian High Commission.
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It is thought that this spate of violent acts in Manila, West Germany and Thailand in less than two weeks is linked to the fact that the imprisoned Ananda Marga leader Sarkar (Baba), a god to sect members, had his appeal denied in India on 2 February.
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Sheather must be staring at this information as one might stare at an unexpected visitor from a parallel dimension. Who are these people? What is going on? He must also be staring hard at those dates. Sarkar's appeal is denied in India on 2 February; on 7 February two Margiis are arrested for stabbing an Indian official in Manila; on 8 February two Margiis self-immolate in West Germany; on 15 February three Margiis are arrested in Thailand with high explosives. The bombing of the Hilton on 13 February sits neatly within these dates. The Indian PM was inside the hotel. Is there a link?

Coming across this material in the archive I actually feel a rush of adrenalin, as if I were one of Sheather's team making this discovery. If not exactly concrete evidence, it surely suggests a motive. It's provocative. Ten members of the Ananda Marga have been caught either planning or committing acts of extreme violence in four completely different countries — England, the Philippines, Thailand and West Germany. The latter three seem clearly motivated by
the denial of Sarkar's appeal. Surely the Hilton must be part of a wave of Margii violence protesting against Sarkar's continued incarceration?

Needless to say, Norm will investigate this path — indeed, how can he avoid it? The Ananda Marga have thrust themselves forward as prime suspects. To be willing to touch a naked flame to your own petrolsoaked skin takes a certain kind of terrifying belief. What could explain it? To save a child? A lover? A country? To free your god? These acts are extreme. They cannot be ignored.

Norm will not, however, close off other inquiries nor completely discount the idea that the Hilton is simply a coincidence.

He contacts ASIO. Do they have someone working undercover within the organisation? Yes, they do. Had they received any information about these attacks in other countries? Anything about actions protesting the denial of Sarkar's appeal?

I imagine the ASIO officer takes a moment to consider how he will answer these queries. This is going to take some time. He needs to takes Norm back to when Ananda Marga first appeared in Australia. If the members of this religious sect are suspects, Norm needs to know more about them. And if he wants to know who within the sect could be responsible, if indeed they are, and how he might catch them, he's going to need the patience of Job.

Enter the Ananda Marga

The Ananda Marga, comes onto the radar of Australian authorities in May 1976. A report entitled ‘A Note on Anand Marg [sic]' is sent from the Indian Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to ASIO via Interpol.
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The unnamed author is clearly hostile to the sect but nonetheless provides a detailed report of the religion's origins. Literally meaning ‘Path of Bliss', Ananda Marga is founded in 1955 in Jamalpur in the state of Bihar by 31-year-old PR Sarkar, then a clerk at a local railway workshop. The sect is founded on a complex and detailed philosophy that eschews both communism and capitalism for a third path known as universalism. Like other Indian religious practices, its adherents practise yoga, meditation and vegetarianism and it has a hierarchised structure of followers with
different cadres of disciples — in the Margiis case with the avadhuts and the acharyas at the top. Avadhut is a Sanskrit word for a mystic or saint, and acharya, also Sanskrit, means a teacher, a highly learned person or a leader of a sect. Both appellations and roles were common to a range of Indian religions.

The sect and Sarkar hold a great attraction for young Indians attending college and over the years the membership grows. Along with the Ananda Marga, Sarkar founds a philosophy called Prout (Progressive Utilisation Theory), ‘a comprehensive socio-economic political philosophy [which] envisages a Proutist government that would take society towards “universalism”'.
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Prout is also established as an organisation. Although the Ananda Marga and Prout share similar tenets, they can and do have separate memberships and indeed different aims.

To define them crudely, the former might be regarded as the practitioners of spiritual philosophy and the latter as those who undertake practical and proactive steps towards social reform.
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Up until the mid to late 1960s the sect is mainly confined to India, but then starts to send out disciples to an increasing number of countries — the USA, Germany, the UK, Italy, Sweden, Thailand, the Philippines, New Zealand and Australia. These disciples are for the most part white, Western and well educated, having joined the Path of Bliss after visiting Sarkar in India. The disciples
scatter to the four corners of the globe and establish yoga societies, schools, meditation centres and relief centres in disaster-hit areas. These sites in turn collect funds and followers. The religion grows.