Who bombed the Hilton? (22 page)

Standing side by side on a cold late-May day, Seary says Kapil holds out his hand and points at some ‘little burn-like scars'. Seary asks him how he got them, adding, ‘Not blowing up the bridge?'

‘Oh no, this is much more recent,' says Kapil, ‘I was very lucky … I could have blown my hand off.' Then he adds, ‘I had an accident with a detonator.'
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Krawczyk seems to become quite giddy himself. He's all over this. He asks Seary, ‘Now, in your opinion, you've dealt with detonators and that before — would that be similar — the injuries he had on his hand?'

Instantly Seary reverts to the head prefect mode he'd adopted when apprising Detective Ireland of his suspicions about the Hare Krishnas in February:

Seary then starts speculating. He'd seen similar wounds in Lightning Ridge, and if Kapil knows rocketry then he must know bomb making … In all this excitement Seary does seem to glean that something is afoot.
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Seary intuits that:

Seary detects complicated divisions in the sect and doesn't believe that Alister and the Volunteer Social Service know about it. ‘No, they might act under a different set of circumstances. You know they could be doing their own little terrorist trips.' Kapil worked with Abhiik, Alister with the man in the Philippines.
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The Margii leader in the Philippines must be feeling the pressure. That week US-born sect members
Victoria Shepherd and Stephen Dyer are sentenced to 17 years in a Manila prison for the stabbing and attempted murder of the Indian diplomat on 7 February.
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It's about here, at the close of 29 May 1978, that I slam into a wall. After this everything seems to become unstable, incoherent, illogical. Here we have been, over the course of months and months, pursuing the threads that have drawn us through the labyrinth. Through the eyes of Norm and the team after the Hilton bombing, our monster has never really changed, has he? That tall turbaned man at the airport: Abhiik Kumar, aka, aka, etc., etc. — now waiting for his god to be released or not from prison in India. He's the one we've been sniffing around. He's the one we think may be good for it, him and his inner sanctum of like-minded souls ensconced in Prout or a cell within that cell. Just as Seary describes it. But wait — we don't have any evidence quite yet, do we? But golly it feels like you can taste it.

Then, just like that, everything goes dark. It's like a tanker splits in two, flooding the ocean with dark viscous waves of impenetrable oil, coating everything in their path, killing everything. What to make of what comes next in the historical record? It's as if Tom Stoppard starts writing the narrative, doing his cute and clever things with familiar Shakespearean storylines — what if Rosencrantz and Guildenstern take
centre stage? What if Shakespeare falls in love? Let's turn the box upside down and shake hard. Think of how funny it will be. How disconcerting. Innovative. Brilliant.

What else to make of the fact that bit players like Anderson, Alister and Dunn suddenly hijack the plot? Within two weeks — and for decades to come — they are the Margiis you know. The sect members you defend or hunt down; the stars of the show.

I mean it's kind of odd, don't you think, that Richard Seary, who has been buddying up to Abhiik and Kapil and the ‘nice chap' he met at the VSS camp all through April and May, is suddenly exclusively in the company of Anderson, Dunn and Alister and intimately embroiled in their intrigues. He appears only to have properly met the first two in June — in Anderson's case possibly on 13 June — and although he had met Alister earlier, he still barely knew him and reportedly disliked him.

Also odd is the fact that the targets completely change. In June we do a complete shift from a universe in which Margiis allegedly attack and threaten Indian nationals (shopkeepers, flight attendants, children, high commissioners) in India, Thailand, Manila, Sweden, the USA, the UK, Denmark, Germany, Australia and so on, to Margiis attacking … Nazis.

June 1978

The events of June 1978 get so completely chaotic and impossible to corroborate that one has to proceed with care. Let's dip our feet in and wade through the muck for a moment and see what we can feel squelching between our toes.

For the first ten days in June there is no contact between Richard Seary and his Special Branch handlers. It is possible they are attempting to gain some independent corroboration for Seary's unnerving allegations of a potential ‘all-out terrorist war' should Baba fail to win his appeal. Despite their reluctance to share unsubstantiated claims, the 24 May debriefing has stirred the pot. The information moves from one desk to another and, despite the rivalry, ends up at ASIO on 8 June. It is more than likely that Sheather and the Hilton task force are apprised of the intelligence, as it is clear that a 26-page ‘debrief of a “usually reliable”
New South Wales police informant who had penetrated Ananda Marga' is passed from the New South Wales police to the Commonwealth Police and thence to ASIO.
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They are sufficiently alarmed to rapidly convene a meeting of the Protective Services Coordination Centre the next day, and the names of the Manila-based global secretary for the VSS, Acharya Japananda aka Japananda Avadhut aka Nimay Chandra, are placed on international airport watchlists. Someone — or a few someones — in these organisations decides next to bring the pot to the boil and make these suspicions public. Why not go to the press and see if they can shake someone from the tree?

Meanwhile, when Seary and Krawczyk sit down on 10 June for their sixth tape-recorded debrief, Seary introduces him to our new Nazi villain — the rightwing white supremacist Robert Cameron, the head of the Australian faction of the National Alliance. For reasons that are not entirely coherent, the Ananda Marga have decided to target this organisation with demonstrations, poster campaigns and letters to newspapers. Causing some kind of a fracas outside the organisation's headquarters will bring the police out to protect the National Alliance, thus publicly demonstrating that the police are siding with racists:

It seems monumentally convoluted, and Special Branch doesn't appear to be much impressed. It accompanies bluster that Seary claims to have heard in relation to the Bangkok Three. The Margiis believe that the Commonwealth Police sent to interview the three, Inspectors Hull and Sharp, in fact set them up, and ‘they are going to do something about' it. This is not profoundly different from what is explicitly stated in the Ananda Marga newsletter for May. More bravado allegedly comes from Alister when he describes to Seary what the VSS will do if Baba is not released. He apparently details a ‘grand plan' that entails breaking Baba out of jail in India and then spiriting him into Australia via its poorly protected northern coastline. After that there's more talk of the all-out war that will erupt here, there and everywhere against all who continue to support the incarceration of Baba the god — this includes the Commonwealth Police, the Indian CBI, ASIO and Special Branch.
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It pays to remember that these are groups of very young men and women, not much more than teenagers, who are alleged to be spouting the rhetoric above.
A bunch of social revolutionaries who feel aggrieved that the one they worship has been locked up. If you add this to Seary's own tendency to embroider and embellish, who's to say these conversations didn't take place? But the subject matter is completely new. Why the focus on Cameron and his skinhead mates? Note also this startling new indiscretion. Alister is apparently running off at the mouth.

Krawczyk is not so impressed with all this big generalised talk and doesn't pass the information on.

What do I make of this seismic shift in tone and content from Seary? There are many theories. James Wood speculates in the Section 475 inquiry that perhaps by late May Seary wanted out. He had applied for and been accepted into Sydney University to study psychology and anthropology (non-degree courses) in early June.
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Things were heating up and he had other (safer) options for expanding the mind and thus may have been exaggerating certain things.
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Yes, it is absolutely true that nasty Robert Cameron and his racist organisation abruptly become the focus of Margii ire in June; letters are written, demonstrations are held. But why? Whose directive was this? Kapil's? Instructions Kumar left? Or is the organisation going rogue? Are people veering off on their own paths while the leader is away? Is the lack of discretion reported by Seary stuff he is making up? Or is it because someone like Kapil is on to him and directing others to trip him up?

There is one possible insight Seary supplies in the 10 June debrief. He is asked:

Seary replies:

Seary adds, a minute later, that while he's not exactly sure if Kapil Arn would be in a position to authorise
a violent action, he is absolutely positive that the Acharya (Abhiik) Kumar, despite being overseas, would be the one to green-light it. ‘Any violence, activities done in the name of Ananda Marga anywhere in the world, he has to sanction. So any activities which they have done anywhere in the world, he is privy to it.'
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I wonder sometimes whether the rising fractiousness within the Australian Margiis begins to mirror exactly that going on between the various investigative agencies. If so, what is about to occur over the next five days is an epic and unavoidable collision in which everyone shares the blame.

There is no more direct evidence of how utterly at cross-purposes the separate investigative organisations have become by early to mid-June than the calculated leak (fuelled by Seary's 24 May revelations) to the newspapers on 11 June. It is clear that ASIO and possibly Sheather's team are responsible for the information that appears in the
Sun-Herald.
The headline shrieks:

With a refreshing lack of equivocation it seems the ‘security chiefs' know the bombers to be a young man
and a young woman, both members of the religious sect Ananda Marga. The young woman is currently in Australia but the man is overseas. It seems obvious that anyone within the sect would imagine they are referring to Abhiik Kumar. The ‘security experts' quoted go on to declare that while they ‘have no doubt who the bombers are', they have ‘no real evidence against them'. These two bombers are radical members of the sect who also follow the Proutist movement and do not represent the majority of sect members.
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