Who bombed the Hilton? Read online

  The Commonwealth Police, New South Wales Special Branch, ASIO and the New South Wales police have been preparing for the event for months. The security threats for each leader have been assessed and complex plans have been made for their protection. While the choice of the Hilton Hotel at the centre of Sydney’s CBD as the venue has been roundly condemned as a security nightmare owing to its dual entrances on two of Sydney’s busiest streets, Pitt and George, it is, at this stage, Australia’s most glamorous hotel. Within the hotel is one of the world’s first X-ray security scanners and explosive-detecting machines imported from the UK. All who enter the hotel are required to go through it. All the VIPs are on the very top floors.14

  Throughout the Asia–Pacific region, the leaders of India, Sri Lanka, Fiji, Singapore, Papua New Guinea, Tonga, Nauru, Bangladesh, Western Samoa, Guyana, Malaysia and New Zealand begin to board international flights.

  ASIO has supplied the threat assessments, and New South Wales Special Branch officers are assigned to the VIPs along with Commonwealth Police and New South Wales police, in addition to the leaders’ own security staffs. The overall operation is coordinated by Superintendent Reg Douglas, the man responsible for the CHOGRM security.

  The security protocol for the conference, ‘Policing the Hilton Hotel’, runs to dozens of pages. Potential threats include direct attacks on persons, assault, stabbing and objects being thrown. Thus each leader is surrounded by security personnel. The second-tier potential threats exist within the hotel itself. The security checks start at the entrance and become progressively tighter as one ascends — the top seven floors where the leaders will stay are virtually impregnable. There is nothing in this document that refers to checking exterior garbage bins for explosives.

  Douglas has an enormous task. Approximately 400 personnel are associated with the conference. The 11 leaders are arriving with their entourages throughout Saturday and Sunday, along with 180 accredited Australian and international journalists. The Hilton also has another 400 to 600 paying guests who must be free to come and go. Security staff constantly search the hotel’s stairwells and lifts and keep a watch over the rooftops of the surrounding buildings. The Hilton is also surrounded by businesses that have a brisk Saturday trade and the public need access to the streets and to be able to move through the CBD.

  Cracks in the system start showing immediately. There are security breaches on Saturday when a young man on the way home from his gun club manages to carry his rifle all the way through the lobby of the Hilton. Orders get misdirected and people turn up at the wrong place.15

  On Saturday five Commonwealth prime ministers arrive and are greeted by Malcolm Fraser at the George Street entrance on a red carpet that leads into the Hilton. All walk past the garbage bin.

  The garbage bin is not emptied that night. Morris states, ‘There was no refuse collection on Saturday evening. This is normal council procedure, as they did not provide this service on ANY Saturday evening.’16

  Sunday 12 February 1978

  Dawn, 5.27 am. It’s going to be a blistering day, 33 degrees Celsius. A Sydney beach day. As first light breaks, yellow crowd-control barriers are stacked ready for use, and the red carpet is rolled out. Police stand in serried ranks outside the George Street entrance of the Hilton Hotel, and police motorbikes roar up and down between the airport and the hotel as the first international flights touch down. Demonstrations have been threatened against the prime ministers of Singapore, Malaysia, India and New Zealand, and the press is due in force.

  At 6 am Leonard John Stevens arrives on the street, broom in hand. ‘I have been employed by the Sydney City Council for the past 21 years as a street sweeper. I have performed that duty in the George Street area for the past 10 years and have worked on Sunday mornings for the past three years.’1 Leonard not only knows the area intimately, he describes his work with a pride and a kind of forensic detail that is almost cinematic in its breadth. Imagine as I do now that there is a bomb in the bottom of the garbage bin directly outside the Hilton.

  Leonard approaches it sweeping from a southerly direction. He sees cars parked on the kerb which ‘go right down to beyond a shop called Harolds which is a ladies wear shop at the northern end of the Hilton Hotel …’, then:

  When I got to the bin which is outside the Hilton entrance and opposite the door to the Angus and Coote shop, I looked into the bin and saw it was half full. The metal insert [this sits inside the fixed concrete exterior] incidentally is about three feet long and is about 18 inches in diameter. I thought to myself that the bin hadn’t been emptied, so I pushed it down to complact [sic] the rubbish with my hand, but it didn’t budge. There was a Sun newspaper on top and whatever was underneath, it didn’t move at all. It was very firm.

  I then went out onto the roadway and picked up a big heap of streamers and put them into a gfound [sic] on the roadway, because if I had put them into the concrete bin, it would have filled it up too much. Further down the street, I saw what appeared to be chicken bones in the gutter between two cars, so I went back to the bin immediately outside the Hilton and put my hand in and pulled out the newspaper and took a couple of sheets off it. When I took the paper out there appeared to be other rubbish in the bin. I dropped the paper back in the bin and then I went down and picked up the bones and dropped them in the ground bin. I kept sweeping down the footpath and got to the bin near Harold’s [sic] and I put my hand in and compressed the rubbish with my hand. This was much softer than the rubbish in the previous bin … It would have been 6.12 am …

  Leonard’s description of the bin outside the entrance to the Hilton being half full and Neville’s statement that 18 hours earlier it had rubbish sticking out the top makes me believe that the bomb was placed during that period. This is pure speculation but I still think it was there — that firm, uncompressible object snug under a copy of The Sun.

  Leonard also notices as he crosses over to sweep the other side of the street around 6.45 am that ‘it looked to me as if there was a demonstration outside the Hilton Hotel and they were standing all over the footpath and naturally in the vicinity of the bin’.

  As Leonard is busy sweeping, Jacques Stoupel, the Hilton commissionaire, emerges out the front at precisely 6.30 am. One can feel confident about this as his statement reads like a man who has been preparing for this — the biggest day of his professional life — for months. Much of his statement exudes professional excellence, except when he veers towards contempt for two things he clearly loathes: litter and unpalatable (presumably long-haired and unwashed) demonstrators.2 So there he is, Jacques, at 6.30 waiting for Prime Minister Fraser. Jacques is immediately informed that Fraser is running late. The first upset to a well-planned day that will lead to catastrophe.

  The PM’s late arrival starts to jam things up a little. Jacques has heads of state and their entourages arriving throughout the day. It’s his job to keep things running smoothly along with the police, the hotel security and the hotel staff. Finally Fraser arrives at 7.15 and enters the hotel. Then at 8 am Sri Lanka’s Prime Minister Jayewardene disembarks from a limousine. Everyone is smiling and shaking hands. Fraser emerges from the hotel entrance to greet him. They walk in together up the red carpet.

  All is going well. Jacques doesn’t mention if he spies a group of demonstrators starting to saunter towards the entrance. His focus is on the imminent arrival of Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore, whose flight SQ85A landed at Kingsford Smith airport at 7.50 am.3 At Sydney airport the federal–state Special Anti-terrorist Unit is on alert.

  A person who does note seeing the demonstrators is Keith Snashall, who is driving the garbage truck up George Street for the next scheduled refuse collection at 8.15 am. He also sees a dozen police, pedestrians and hotel staff and observes that the eastern kerb is ‘completely parked out’ with cars, taxis and buses. Making this journey more precarious are the pedestrians weaving between these vehicles to cross to the other side of the street. As he draws parallel to the bin he notes, ‘I could
see about one dozen demonstrators walking up and down outside the hotel.’ He (unlike Porter the day before) decides to stop to clear the bins with the knowledge that in doing so ‘he will completely block the traffic flow in a southerly direction along George Street … halting the traffic for about three minutes’. However …

  ‘Just as my crew was about to leave the unit to empty the bins I noticed a young uniformed policeman standing outside the hotel on the footpath and he was indicating to me by using his hand that I should move my truck and keep moving.’4

  The Prime Minister of Singapore, whom some demonstrators are expected to harass, is about to arrive. A garbage truck pulls up at the red carpet about to block traffic, a young policeman waves it on.

  According to Superintendent Reginald Douglas’s notes entitled ‘Policing of the Hilton Hotel’, issued on 5 February 1978 to all serving officers, this particular officer would have been in ‘A District’, designating the police stationed at the George Street entrance. Their principal job, according to page nine of the notes, is to report any ‘untoward incident’. They would be informed of imminent arrivals of VIPs and if any demonstrations are to be expected. Any eventuality not specifically mentioned was to be ‘dealt with as it occurs with commonsense’.5

  Waving away a garbage truck to avoid the potential awkwardness of the Prime Minister of Singapore sitting behind its stinking rear while the Australian Prime Minister watches Snashall and his crew empty the bins on a Sunday morning seems like commonsense to me. This is the only instance of a garbage truck being waved on by police.

  The bin, however, is kept busy all day. Jacques Stoupel is vigilant about litter — he finds himself picking up refuse all morning in between assisting the reception of the prime ministers of Malaysia, Sri Lanka and Nauru. Just before lunch he picked up a ‘cardboard milkshake container’ and popped it in the bin ‘without any difficulty’ — noting that while ‘the refuse in the bin was fairly high … there was sufficient room for me to place the container inside’.

  While he has the rubbish under control, he becomes increasingly tetchy about the gathering demonstrators. He has to shoo away a couple who think it’s a good idea to sit down on the footpath blocking the entrance. One of them, Stoupel observes, has hair of a ‘dirty appearance’.

  The most prominent demonstrators are anarchists, New Zealand expatriates and feminists protesting against New Zealand Prime Minister Muldoon’s abortion laws and his locking up of ‘political prisoners’. Other protesters include members of the Campaign for the Abolition of Political Police and a few members of the Indian sect Ananda Marga, who are protesting against the imprisonment of their leader, Baba. The bulk of the Margiis, however, are stationed at the airport awaiting the arrival of India’s Prime Minister Desai. Photographs from the day reveal the demonstrators at the Hilton to be a rather relaxed bunch. They sit and stand in clusters in straw hats, summer dresses or T-shirts and flares, clutching hand-written signs and smiling at the police who hover around them.

  As Reg Douglas’s meticulous (but ultimately flawed) security plans indicate, the demonstrators are expected and, somewhat more surprisingly, are to be treated with civility, though no demonstrators are to be tolerated within the Hilton itself. If any are detected they are to be escorted outside and released.

  Arrests are to be carried out only where no alternative is to be found … It is essential that we prevent any unseemly behaviour such as Police fighting with demonstrators etc. within sight of the Heads of State — every means must be taken to peacefully avoid such an occurrence.6

  Despite the growing irritation of Jacques Stoupel, the atmosphere between police and protesters seems fairly convivial throughout the day. Jacques’s annoyance stems from a number of banner-wielding bearded types blocking the entrance and one flag-waving joker who shoves his placard into one of the upright cylinders through which the rope bordering the red carpet is looped. The police then move the barriers further back from the roped entrance, pushing the demonstrators further away.

  Jacques keeps cleaning up, noting the bin is full by afternoon.

  The bin continues its star turn — Stoupel observes a female protester resting her bum on it, holding a cup above her head. Around 11.30 am, Kevin O’Meara Gleeson, who has taken his kids to town for the day, also sits on the bin to watch the passing dignitaries. He also notices that it’s full.7 Just after midday, Edward Patching, the Foreign Affairs liaison officer to the Western Samoan delegation, comes out to watch the arrival of the prime ministers. He immediately observes that the two bins outside the Hilton ‘near the kerb and between the red carpet and the police barriers, were full of rubbish’. Patching is appalled: ‘I thought that this was unsightly and not in the good interests of the government to have garbage protruding through these cowls, in view of the heads of state’. Taking immediate action, Patching heads over to the middle bin at the side of the red carpet and forces ‘the garbage in through the cowl’. However, owing to the ‘compactness’ of the garbage within, it springs back ‘to just below the lip of the cowl’. He does the same thing to the bin next to it. In this endeavour he is more successful as this one is not ‘as compacted as the other’.8

  Anthony Cuthbertson, a signwriter and amateur photographer, observes that around 2.30 pm the middle bin starts to overflow. He also sees the demonstrators and their placards: ‘Free all political prisoners in NZ’ and ‘Piggy Muldoon’. At one point the protester Carl Maltby stands a sign up in the bin: Politicians are the pus of a suppurating society. Cuthbertson adds that he believes that after the barriers were put up ‘a number of the demonstrators used the garbage tin as an excuse to enter the restricted area’. He then adds, ‘I made particular note of the garbage tin during the afternoon, thinking to myself that the overflowing garbage was an eyesore with visiting dignitaries due to arrive.’9

  Anthony need not have worried unduly. In order to avoid the demonstrators there is a last-minute decision to take New Zealand’s Prime Minister Muldoon (who arrives at approximately 2 pm) and India’s Prime Minister Desai (who arrives around 4.20 pm) in through the Pitt Street entrance. It’s only when Jacques rolls up the red carpet and starts to pack up that the demonstrators realise they have been duped and have missed their targets.

  At Sydney airport, members of the Ananda Marga present Desai with a petition protesting the imprisonment of their leader, Baba. We know this from the grainy surveillance photographs taken before and during the event. In them, one figure is strikingly distinct — a tall willowy man with a thick black beard and a turban. He looms above the other Margiis at the airport.10 His name is Abhiik Kumar. He is the spiritual leader of the Ananda Marga throughout Australasia. In the archive photographs someone has drawn a circle around his head. He is a man Detective Inspector Norm Sheather will come to know very well in the coming months.

  By 5 pm all the leaders (including Desai and Fraser) depart via the George Street entrance for a cocktail party and after that a harbour cruise. The crowds, demonstrators and press depart.

  At 10.30 pm the leaders return to the hotel via the George Street entrance. The conference proper is to begin the next morning.

  It’s a few hours before the bomb will explode. In the days and years to come each minute will be sifted through minutely and contentiously.

  Sunday, 11 pm. Police officers Burmistriw, Griffiths, Hawtin and Withers start their shifts outside George Street.

  Between 11.30 pm and 12.30 am Monday morning the street remains moderately busy; people leaving a rock concert hosted by the radio station 2SM at the Opera House head up George Street, and Hilton guests and staff come and go. All pass by the bin.

  Monday 13 February 1978

  At 12.30 am Bill Ebb drives the Sydney City Council garbage truck north up George Street. Alec Carter is on the back, working the compactor; Bill Favell and John Watson fetch bins and deposit their contents in the back of the truck. Ebb sees that the bins outside the Hilton on the other side of the road are overflowing. He drives on looking
for a safe place to perform a U-turn.1

  12.35 am. A caller to the Sydney Morning Herald asks to speak to an editor. Journalist Tim Vaughan takes the call. A man with a European accent says, ‘You’ll be interested in what the police are going to be doing down at the Hilton soon.’2

  12.35 am to 12.40 am. Criminal Investigation Branch (CIB) switchboard operator Suzanne Jones receives a phone call on the 20966 line, Sydney’s main police line. A man with a European accent asks to be put through to Special Branch. She rings the line and there is no answer. Jones tells the man, ‘They don’t seem to be there.’3 All the Special Branch officers on duty are on the seventh floor of the Hilton — the restaurant and bar level.4

  Ebb turns the truck around. It heads towards the Hilton. Carter and Favell clear the bins. To do so they have to remove the circular metal top and then empty the bin into the truck. The compactor is not on. The truck approaches the Hilton. Police, staff and pedestrians mill about.

  Jones puts the caller through to the CIB duty officer Cec Streatfield. ‘Listen carefully,’ says the caller. ‘There is a bomb in a rubbish bin outside the Hilton Hotel in George Street.’5

  John Watson picks up the bin just before the one at the Hilton. He tosses its contents into the maw of the compactor. Alec Carter compacts it, operating the levers as he stands on the tray. Ebb has his foot on the brake.