Who bombed the Hilton? (12 page)

What Norm notes straightaway is what they all missed. Not so much the elephant in the room but the absence of it. Where in all this covert surveillance is Abhiik Kumar? Where is the man who is clearly regarded by all the agencies involved in the government task force in 1977 as the one, of all the sect members, to watch? Where is the man who made all those worrisome allusions to violence — the man of many names and many passports, the man who is the absolute spiritual leader of the Australasian Margiis, the one with the direct line to the imprisoned Sarkar, in whose cause all this violence is carried out?

It seems that for the last eight months or so no one is exactly sure, beyond ‘travelling internationally'. He is not present in any of the Special Branch surveillance targeting Margii headquarters in Sydney, nor
does he feature in any of the debriefings of ASIO's Margii operatives. Through December and January he is not in the country.

Then on Sunday 12 February he spectacularly reappears centre stage, in full kit with dark beard and turban. ASIO wire-taps a hissy fit he has with Tim Anderson, who tells him that the Ananda Marga protest against the Indian Prime Minister should take place at the Hilton Hotel's George Street entrance. Kumar shouts him down, he's joining the sect at the airport where they will present Desai with a petition advocating Sarkar's release. Tim ignores him and heads to the Hilton.
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That day there are photographs of Kumar and fellow sect members taken by Special Branch which consist of a series of long-lensed snaps of Kumar, his tall willowy turban-topped frame bobbing above a group of Margiis milling at Kingsford Smith airport.
¹²

While Kumar's reappearance is unexpected and flamboyant, it is also less than 12 hours before the bomb goes off. This would seem — if indeed the Ananda Marga is innocent of the crime — to be a spectacularly bad time to resume the reins of the sect. Of course if they (or Proutists) did plant the bomb, the timing is just about perfect. If you are orchestrating an international reign of terror against Indian nationals in order to free your god, it's not something that you're likely to miss.

And before that? Where was Kumar exactly? It astonishes Norm that no one has been tracking his movements. It is something he addresses immediately.

He tempers this with the knowledge that despite all the forensic surveillance of this sect over months and months, there is not a sliver of evidence to tie the Margiis to the bombing. Except for the possible sighting by a fellow taxi driver of Anderson parked in his taxi near the Hilton the Saturday night before the bomb went off.
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He remains convinced that he needs to keep the minds of his task force investigators open to other possibilities until something sways him one way or the other.

This is not a pathway that will be adopted by those most professionally battered by the blast. Within days Special Branch officers will embark on a dizzyingly maverick and misguided quest. It will be the undoing of Sheather, his team, and the case.

‘The blast that shook Australia'

On the third day of the Hilton task force's existence, Norm must feel close to success, or at the very least confident in his captaincy and the direction he has set with his crew. However, at sea nothing is certain.

In the case of the Hilton bombing, Norm Sheather's sea is the unruly and emotional reactions that the blast has set off in the pentagram of institutions and organisations that surround the investigation. These five are the government, the press, ASIO, Special Branch, and the Hilton task force itself with its 58 detectives. A fatal bombing at an international political gathering has set forces in motion that, in turn, set off others; all manner of old wounds and agendas flare up. People can respond very badly or foolishly when they are terrorised.

For a moment let's leave Norm Sheather and the Hilton detectives hunting down the movements of Abhiik Kumar over the last eight or so months, interrogating suspects and waiting for Interpol requests for terrorists' MOs to come in. Let's see what's going on in the public arena. Let's test the public mood.

To be frank, three days post-bombing the mood is far from good. For the first 36 hours the Australian people reel in shock. The
Sydney Morning Herald
's editorial sums up the public horror:

Throughout the country the bombing is regarded as a game changer — a moment the nation is thrust violently into the global arena of terrorism. Within days the government is copping criticism for its failure to protect its citizens. First, of course, there is a chorus of attacks about the inadequacy of the security for CHOGRM and the hotel. Then, attacked with equal vehemence, is Fraser's decision to call in the Army to provide security for the international guests in the
following days. Everything the federal and state governments do in the days following the blast is regarded as misguided, kneejerk or corrupt by someone in the media. The conservative elements in the Australian press accuse the South Australian and New South Wales premiers of undermining the power of Special Branch in South Australia and ASIO in New South Wales because they have been investigating allegations that both agencies were keeping ‘dirt files' on private individuals.
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When New South Wales Premier Neville Wran drops the inquiry into ASIO in the immediate wake of the bombing, the more liberal elements of the press are critical. This inquiry, about events in the early 1970s concerning ASIO and a Liberal party politician, Peter Coleman, has nothing to do with New South Wales Special Branch and is not an attempt to shut ASIO down. Nevertheless, from this point onward arguments will be made that dropping the inquiry is proof that ASIO and New South Wales Special Branch planted the bombs themselves.
³

There are a few things to remember about the late 1970s in Australia. The first is that people on the left hated Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser with a passion that I doubt has been matched before or since. I mean hated him like spurned lovers, or like betrayed and vengeful Shakespearean characters. Think Medea. Think Macbeth. Big hate. Fraser was regarded as the illegitimate ruler who had snatched power from the
forward-thinking Labor leader Gough Whitlam in 1975 in the most unsportsmanlike, underhanded and dastardly manner. The Dismissal sat fresh, raw and oozing in the minds of the left. My mother was one of the true believers who was so enraged that night of 11 November 1975 that she left my elder brother and me without a babysitter so she could attend a hastily organised protest at the Royal Motor Yacht Club in Newport where Fraser's equally loathed henchman, Governor-General John Kerr, was heading for dinner.

Even a little over two years later, in February 1978, these true believers were having no difficulty maintaining their rage.

The other thing to remember is that papers such as
Nation Review
and the
National Times
were made up of bright, intelligent new voices. They weren't just a bunch of scruffy ratbags — they were well-educated, thoughtful and credible. Emerging in the early 1970s these journalists instigated dozens of explosive investigations revealing corruption in big business, among politicians and within the police. The ‘first comprehensive account of the Hilton Hotel bombing' in the now legendary
National Times
was written by Paul Kelly, David Leitch, Anne Summers, Andrew Clark, David Hickie and Evan Whitton.
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The special report titled ‘The Blast that Shook Australia' is convincing and disturbing:

For this new breed of journalist it is not the loss of innocence that is of concern but ‘[t]he psychological effect of the bombing' on the government and the population; the response to the crisis ‘has transformed the meaning of security protection for VIPs in Australia'.

For the journalists this has generated two troublesome tendencies since the Monday blast:

1.
The way the bomb blast transformed the political climate in favour of strong security measures advocated by the Prime Minister and against the softer ‘civil liberties' line espoused by Labor premiers Wran and Dunstan; and

2.
How swiftly the legal and constitutional processes were effected to make the entire military apparatus available to the government to quell domestic disturbance.

The report is full of detail and analysis that on a minute level seems very well considered, but on another level, through a headline like ‘Bombing a Boost for ASIO',
⁶
it helps create the crucible that will forge the conspiracy that the secret and not-so-secret services — ASIO, Special Branch, the military and potentially Fraser himself — colluded and planted the bomb so they could maintain and extend their power.

The other aspect of this report is that the authorities are characterised as buffoons, which undermines the idea that ‘they' hatched a sleek, sophisticated and malevolent plan to place the bomb themselves. The authors assert there was:

Not that the mainstream press is much kinder to Fraser — they also see the Army call-out as absurd and misjudged: ‘In the over-reactions at Bowral we looked faintly ridiculous — babes in the woods.'
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Overlaying this disapproval are the unambiguous images of three
little girls — Christine and Susan Carter, aged seven and nine, and Cassandra Favell, seven
⁹
— at their respective fathers' funerals on 17 February, and the stark headlines, five days later, reporting that young Constable Paul Burmistriw had died from the injuries he received in the blast.

In a state of shock and collective pain in the days after the bombing, the public demands swift action, which is counter to the slow gathering of evidence by investigating police. The frustration is palpable in the papers, which complain loudly and regularly with headlines such as ‘“Ring us” plea to bomb warning man'
¹⁰
and ‘Police frustrated in bomb investigations'
¹¹
and accompanying articles that depict the Hilton task force as being at the mercy of the public, who either fail to give them leads or waste valuable police time by making bomb hoax calls.

Fraser does what anyone else in his position would do when harassed from all quarters — he decides to hold an inquiry. The inquiry, announced 12 days after the bombing, is to be expensive and extensive and helmed by the best expert one can get. In the timehonoured Aussie tradition of getting someone from overseas — preferably white and male and from the UK — to come over and sort us out, Fraser appoints Sir Robert Marks, former head of Scotland Yard, to come and take names and find someone to blame.
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At the very least, it takes the heat off the government.

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.