Who bombed the Hilton? Read online

  Thursday 16 February 1978

  Meanwhile, Norm and the Hilton task force, buffeted by the sea of government, public and media reactions, also respond to different internal tides and unexpected waves. Three days in and Norm is taking the long view. Different lines of investigation begin to solidify into three broad areas. First, those detectives pursuing rigorously what can best be called the usual suspects. Second, those detectives responding to evidence gathered from the blast, including the evidence contained in hundreds of witness statements and information from the public, and third, the detectives getting to the bottom of the cluster of international violent acts surrounding the Hilton bombing allegedly carried out by the Ananda Marga.

  While Norm is briefed on the course of all three, it is the latter that he steers most directly.

  For those who have long believed that the Ananda Marga were singularly targeted, hounded, persecuted and stitched up, it may be surprising how thoroughly the police pursued other lines of inquiry. While there is a potent and compelling sense in the media that the Hilton bombing is a defining historical moment in which Australia is thrust into the horrors of international terrorism, it is also true that there was a fairly long-ish and diverse list of individuals and groups who could have been responsible. A wonderfully subtitled article ‘Cowardly killer that knows no innocents: Australia in Bomb Club’, published the weekend after the bombing, states brightly, ‘Security police say there are several hundred people in Sydney alone who could have conceivably been involved in bombing incidents.’1 This includes ‘Certain members of our fledgling and crackpot National Socialist (Nazi) movements’ or ‘the anarchro-syndacalists [sic] and others on the far Left’. There were also the Yugoslav and Croat communities in Australia who ‘brought their native animosities here’ and have been attempting to blow each other up for years. A number of these community members were interrogated and checked for alibis. Slavko Fuskic is investigated because of his vocal attacks on Fraser and the Liberal government, and because he is an electrical fitter by trade.2

  Another course of inquiry followed with vigour is a theory that the Malaysian Liberation Front operating in Australia was targeting Singapore’s prime minister at CHOGRM. In response to an inquiry about a Singaporean student who arrived in Australia on 30 January 1978, the Singaporean intelligence service sent back an urgent telex warning that Ng Hiok Ngee was a member of a Marxist group plotting with Euro-communists to exert pressure on the Singaporean government ‘to release hardcore communist detainees to rebuild the Communist United Front in Singapore’.3 He is also accused of sending money to the Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA) ‘who are Communist Terrorists operating in the Malaysian jungle, engaged in insurgency to overthrow the elected governments of Malaysia and Singapore’. The tone of the telex from Singapore strongly suggests that Ngee is good for the Hilton bombing and should be locked up, although the most he is accused of is being a member of an illegal political party. Two days later he is hauled in and interrogated by the task force. His defence, that he is in Australia purely to visit his sister, is backed up by strong corroboration from the sister and her husband.4

  Lebanese-born Baha Bayeh presents as a strong suspect in so far as he has convictions for assault and related offences and, exactly one year and one month before the Hilton bombing, ‘was arrested at Waverley on the 13.1.77 by Detective Sergeant Hetherington for the offence of maliciously plac[ing a] bombing device to destroy a building’.5 After investigation, he too is eliminated from the list.

  What the Hilton task force is looking for is those who would have the most to gain from an act of terrorism. As Mr William Clifford of the Australian Institute of Criminology points out, ‘The sad thing about terrorism is that it works … Bombings are usually not at all personal. They are used to attract attention to particular causes or to destabilise the political climate.’6 The Herald, quoting Clifford, expands on this, arguing that the ‘callousness of bomb attacks by movements which seek mass support is difficult to explain, except on the theory that governments are finally blamed for the failure to create safe, stable societies’.

  Clifford’s take on where the blame lies differs from every other publicly reported opinion:

  This week … there was room for improvement in the national coordination between Australia’s police and security forces … But the real need, the Criminology Institute Director believes, is not for more police and more Special Branch surveillance — a topic quickly taken up by conservatives in the wake of the bomb attack. ‘What is really needed in Australia,’ Mr Clifford is reported as saying, ‘is greater cooperation between the public and the police. People should be much more security-conscious and aware of the dangers in their cities … Disregarding the police performance, a number of aspects of the Hilton bombing indicated that people generally were just not alert to the risk.’

  If Clifford is correct, the ‘people’ are certainly attempting to make up for their failings in the days following the bombing. The task force is besieged by information from the public and it is the responsibility of a section of detectives to pursue this information, whatever it may be. In the files is a long and detailed statement about a man behaving suspiciously around the Atomic Energy Commission,7 another relates the sighting of an old noisy car crossing the Harbour Bridge with three male occupants and Western Australian licence plates.8 It’s all too easy in hindsight to regard these as petty and inconsequential, but big crimes are often solved with exactly these kinds of random sources of information. The Yorkshire Ripper was caught through a vehicle registration check. The Hilton task force has to receive information with open arms. They set up a desk inside the Hilton lobby manned by Special Branch officers for the sole purpose of providing an easy portal for the public to pour forth their tips, sightings and theories.

  So when Richard Seary walks through the smashed exterior of the Hilton Hotel on the afternoon of Thursday 16 February and comes up to the desk with a story to tell, Special Branch Detective Sergeant Ireland listens and transcribes it.

  Did the Hare Krishnas do it?

  What Seary discloses to Detective Sergeant Ireland has enough merit to start moving him up the chain of command. He is asked to repeat his allegations on 22 February 1978 — this time to two other Special Branch officers, Detective Senior Constables Inkster and Hardy.

  Richard Seary will become one of the most notorious witnesses in Australian criminal history thanks to his involvement in various court cases and inquiries surrounding the Hilton bombing, including the official inquest in 1982. Because of this, it is fascinating to observe his entrance onto the stage; to see not how he was viewed in retrospect, once the spotlight glared down on him, but how he sat among all the other hubbub going on at the time.

  In the future much will be made of the fact that immediately before he fronts the police desk three days after the blast, Seary had been to see the first Star Wars at the Hoyts cinema complex further down George Street. The implication being, I suppose, that he was all hopped up on Goodies and Baddies and living in a complete fantasy world. In reality there can’t have been that many people in Sydney who hadn’t seen Star Wars at this point.

  More pertinent is the potential connection between the timing of his statement to the police and the announcement of the astronomical reward that same morning. I would imagine that anyone who believed they had even a snippet of information about the Hilton bombing would have been lured out when this bait was dangled.

  Yet another accusation to be made against Seary is that the allegations he makes to the police that day are full of bizarre and colourful oddities. However, reading over it now, Seary’s statement comes across as rather boring and long-winded, as if from an overearnest but upstanding member of the public.

  He introduces himself thus: ‘I am a drug counsellor at the Wayside Chapel at Kings Cross and I have been engaged in this work for the past 14 months.’1 He goes on to relate a visit he made to a Hare Krishna gathering at Belmore Park in Sydney on 3 February
1978. The Hare Krishnas are a religious sect popular among Westerners, founded in 1966 by an Indian swami based in New York City. Seary told the police he had been invited to the gathering of four or five thousand people because he was a former member of the sect, and he was interested in what was going on. There he sees an old friend called David. They chat and then David leaves. After this, a stranger, a Krishna called Bala Deva, approaches him. Deva knows Seary’s former sect name, ‘Pandu’, and strikes up a conversation. He knows that Seary had been an opal miner at Lightning Ridge and wants to know all the ins and outs of what kinds of explosives he used, how you obtained them, and whether they were safe to handle. Seary reports all this with the monotony of a head prefect dobbing on a wayward student.

  He said, ‘You’re mining, aren’t you.’ I said, ‘Not any more. I haven’t mined for about a year.’ He said, ‘What sort of mining?’ I said, ‘Opal mining.’ He said, ‘Do you use explosives?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘What sort?’ I said, ‘Nitropril or gelignite.’ He said, ‘What’s nitropril?’ I said, ‘It’s a nitre [sic] glycerine solution suspended in a neutral base which gives it the appearance of small gray pebbles.’ He said, ‘How does it work?’2

  And so on and so on. The Krishna Deva does not say he is intending to buy or use explosives of any kind. He does not say he is intending to blow anything up — let alone CHOGRM or the Hilton. This is the worst that Seary says of Deva: ‘I would recognise him again if I saw him. I would say that this person I was talking to was very interested in explosives and mining but he obviously didn’t know anything about it.’

  What piques the interest of the Special Branch officers is how Seary contextualises this conversation with Deva. He tells the police that when he had been a member of the Hare Krishnas he had ‘heard talk of a radical member of the sect’ advocating a plot to bomb the Homebush Bay meatworks. There was mention of a similar plan in New Zealand in which two members had died while building a bomb to be planted in a meat-packing factory. He says that he had eventually left the sect in Brisbane after becoming disenchanted with the leadership. This leadership tended towards violence, directed at the more peaceful members, particularly on the part of some of the ‘more radical’ members, mainly the Americans, many of whom were Vietnam veterans …

  Seary rounds all this off by stating that he believes that some members of the Hare Krishnas were capable of the Hilton bombing. He offers to provide information to Special Branch if they want some insights into the organisation. Furthermore, he claims that some senior members of the sect who had been at Belmore Park had come from overseas and were in Sydney several days before the Hilton bombing and left two or three days after it … The only possible motive he can provide for Hare Krishna involvement in the bombing is that it would have been directed against the Prime Minister of Singapore, ‘as a number of sect members had been imprisoned in that country’.3

  As vague, if overly detailed, as Seary’s statement is in its allegations, it does have enough references to explosives and suggestions that this Deva could be a potential member of the new ‘Bomb Club’ to warrant attention.

  Seary’s assertions are typed up in the running sheets. Next they are considered by long-suffering Hilton task force member Detective Sergeant Bruce Jackson, whose job it is to sift through the mountain of information received and identify ‘which matters … called for further investigation’. Such information could include rants from a certain Mrs A, who thinks her ‘Euro-Indian neighbours’ whom ‘I do not know [and] do not wish to’4 are putting ‘shocking’ literature in her letterbox, to the delusional confessions of the mentally ill. Jackson selects Seary’s statement for review and it is sent to Norm Sheather for consideration.

  As will be said in one of the many official inquiries years later, ‘It is evident that the members of the Hilton bomb squad were unimpressed with the information.’5 Norm’s immediate reaction is to dismiss the tale outright. There has never been a whiff of violence, alleged or otherwise, associated with the Hare Krishnas in Australia, which for Sheather makes them unlikely suspects.

  As an exhaustive inquiry seven years later put it:

  Detective Inspector Sheather was satisfied that the description given by Seary of Bala Deva as a man ‘25 to 26 years old, 170 centimetres tall, slim to medium build, large nose, pimply face, looks slightly Jewish, mousy brown hair which possibly was a wig’ was too uncertain, and that there was no suggestion in the police files, or within police experience, of any involvement of the Hare Krishna in terrorist activity. As a consequence the allegations were not pursued.6

  And that is that. I imagine Norm simply put Richard Seary from his mind and did not expect he would ever encounter him again. If someone had told Norm that in less than four weeks this man would actually be working for the police force on the Hilton bombing investigation without his knowledge or approval, he may have simply retired early or demanded a transfer — anything to avoid the horrors he will be plunged into once he and his task force go over the falls with Seary.

  But right now, the investigation is still fresh and Norm is otherwise absorbed. He is drawn away from the chaotic rapids of the intelligence coming in from crazies and eager beavers and moves towards the steady, heady stream of compelling intelligence pulling him back towards certain members of the Ananda Marga.

  The Bangkok Three

  I imagine that there will be a certain point in the future when the past can no longer be researched physically. That time when things are simply collated in digital formats and live in the ether like fairies. When everything is stored somewhere, undeciphered and unedited, in vast underground storehouses in Utah or the like. There won’t be things that sit in boxes for years unattended and unloved waiting to be discovered. Historians or researchers of the future perhaps won’t be able to feel the rush of undoing the linen ties that enclose a stack of primary sources that suddenly spring open yielding pages that you can leaf through with your lint-free gloves. Part of the whole experience is the time it takes to discriminate and decide which page is significant, which you will take notes on, which will be set aside.

  It’s much the same way Norm has to function each time the indefatigable detectives on his task force present the daily intelligence on the Hilton bombing to their boss. He is understandably alert to any mention of the Ananda Marga, given what he has learnt about their alleged violence in 1977 and given the coalescence of violent acts internationally surrounding the 13 February bombing in Sydney. So when a neat hand-written letter from a Ms or Mr AB pointing to a member of the sect as being good for the bombing is sent up the line to Norm, he does not downplay it as he did the Hare Krishna scenario sketched out by Richard Seary.

  The letter is written entirely in capital letters.1

  DEAR SIR,

  AS YOU WILL APPRECIATE I HAVE NO WISH TO BECOME INVOLVED BUT FIGURE YOU OUGHT TO KNOW

  THE PERSON YOU ARE LOOKING FOR WHO MADE THE BOMB AND KNOWS WHY IT WAS PLANTED AT THE HILTON HOTEL IN SYDNEY IS A GUY ANSWERING THE NAME JACK–MELEE–BEERE. I DO NOT KNOW IF HE TOOK IT DOWN TO SYDNEY. HE IS A SILENT MEMBER OF THE ANANDA MARGA SECT AND HAS A NUMBER OF MISSIONS TO ACCOMPLISH BEFORE RETURNING.

  The helpful AB states that ‘I HAVE SEEN HIM MAKING EXPERIMENTAL BOMBS FOR PARTICULAR MISSIONS’, that ‘JACK IS AN ELECTRICIAN BY TRADE’ and that if they need more information about plans for further attacks ‘MAYBE HIS WIFE CAN HELP AS I KNOW SHE LIVES IN FEAR’.

  AB signs off with:

  I WISH YOU LUCK IN STAMPING OUT THE PROPOSED ATTACKS, DEPORT HIM, FOR THEY WILL SEND SOMEONE ELSE AND WE WILL HAVE MORE INFORMATION AS WE ARE NOW CLOSER TO THE TOP.

  PERSONAL COLUMN FOR FURTHER INFORMATION IF YOU REQUIRE IT AND WE WILL REPLY. GOOD LUCK.

  I really feel for policemen involved in major criminal investigations when I read things like this. Why the cloak and dagger? If you know something, why not just front up with the evidence? Make a statement? Be prepared to stand up in court? Their hearts must sink. Is it credible? What text should they plac
e in the personal columns? ‘Seeking AB who blew my mind on 16 Feb. I’d love to find out more about you and your interesting friends. Can we meet? CIBXXX …’

  Still, coy as this letter is, it is a tip-off that cannot be ignored given the unnerving alarm bells it sounds. No other tip-off, anonymous or otherwise, has made reference to potential future attacks. Sheather assigns detectives to investigate.2

  At the same time he steps up the focus on the alleged violent acts by the Ananda Marga reported in Manila, West Germany and Bangkok immediately before and after the Sydney bombing. The two US-born Margiis arrested in the Manila knife attack on 7 February, and the three Margiis arrested in Thailand on 15 February (two Australians, and one American), are loudly proclaiming that they have been framed by the police forces in those countries.3

  Not claiming foul play are Lakesh and Didi Uma, aka Helmut Klein Schmidt and Erica Rupert, who on 8 February, six days after Sarkar’s appeal is denied, ‘sacrificed themselves by fire in protest against continued incarceration of Baba, world hunger and as a reprisal for the arrest of sect members in London’.4 These London sect members — Anthony Niall Kidd, Susan Waring and Brian Shaw, caught and arrested on 1 November at the tail end of the 1977 wave of violence against Indian nationals — are about to stand trial in the UK.

  Sheather’s list of confirmed members of the Ananda Marga caught red-handed in acts of extreme violence (which includes the Australian Margii John William Duff, accused of attempted abduction and stabbing the military attaché at the Indian High Commission in Canberra) is growing and he and the team turn their gaze outside Australia to see if they can begin to connect these scattered sect members. There are broad similarities between them. They are all Western. They are all under 32 years of age. Each separate group always has a mix of genders. Never just all women or all men. Why? Does it make them less noticeable? Just hippie couples, hippie friends wandering around. Perhaps that makes it hard to assume that such a group is about to stab someone, blow something up or indeed set themselves on fire. If the Ananda Marga is responsible for the Hilton, was a similar modus operandi used? Are they looking for male and female suspects?