Lies, spies and the Sydney Hilton bombing
Sydney, Australia,
February 13, 1978, 12.42 a.m.
Published on February
13, 2003, to commemorate the 25th anniversary
Note
(November 27, 2005):
An anonymous person posted on the Internet an untrue allegation against me,
referring to my investigative article below. This person wrote on
this page of Online Opinion (since removed by the forum's moderator):
"I think everyone should look closely at Almanacs
[sic] web site, and see his apparent connection to the Ananda Maga [sic] group.. and some mob called
'prout' [sic]. Given what appeared on his web site I can fully understand why they are the object of interest by the special branch. It might also explain some of his attitudes."
For the record: I am not and have never been
connected in any way with Ananda Marga or Prout. I have never attended an Ananda Marga
or Prout meeting, and do not know where any such meetings have ever been held. I have very little knowledge of Ananda Marga or Prout. I
have never read an Ananda Marga or Prout book, pamphlet or any other kind of
literature in my life. I have
never, to my knowledge, met a current member of Ananda Marga or Prout. In my
capacity as a magazine editor I met Tim Anderson, who I believe had left Ananda
Marga by that time. I am
not in any way a friend of Ananda Marga or Prout. On the contrary, from the
very little I have read about them in the press, I feel rather ill disposed
towards them. The anonymous slanderer made
this allegation following my public request for tolerance to people of the
Islamic faith. I have no association with that faith either.
Note (November 28,
2005): The moderator of the forum removed the defamation and, regrettably, my
refutation. More
Note
(November 29): The person has
graciously retracted and apologised. I have accepted his apology, with
thanks. I am leaving this here despite the retraction, not to punish or
embarrass the person but in case the incorrect original assertion has had
circulation further than the forum.
Who planted the bomb that killed two garbagemen
and a police officer? The courts jailed the wrong man and
after years of false imprisonment Tim Anderson was set free.
Evan Pederick, who said he did it and offered himself up for jail,
later said perhaps he was
mistaken about his confession
and now is studying to be a Church of England priest.
Police who were shown to have falsely claimed they arrested
men with a bomb, kept their jobs, their bravery medals,
their promotions and their salary increases.
Did the Ananda Marga cult do it?
Was it the first case of political terrorism in Australia?
Some people say that Police Special Branch did it.
Some say it was ASIO (Australia's intelligence service).
Can we ever name the Hilton bomber/s?
This is a true story of prejudice, politics, corruption, lies and murder.
It is a tale of thriller-like twists and turns, told here in brief by Pip Wilson
The preamble
On May
15, 1985, three youngish men walked free from a New South Wales (NSW) prison where they had been unjustly kept for most of the years since the Hilton bombing outrage had taken place more than seven years earlier. Justice Wood's judicial inquiry into the original conviction of
'the Ananda Marga Three' (Ross Dunn,
Paul Alister and Tim Anderson) had resulted in a pardon.
It was six years since the first of many high-profile Australians had begun expressing reservations about the safety of the original conviction of the Three. Among the first of those had been the Australian Shadow Attorney-General, Senator
Gareth Evans, who had written as early as
December 7, 1979 to NSW Attorney-General, Frank Walker, about his fears that there might have been a miscarriage of justice.
As Hamlet asked in his most famous soliloquy,
"For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, The oppressor's wrong ... the law's delay". Six years is a short time to the law, but an eternity to a person whose youth is wasted in jail by the law's delay, and by corrupt officers of the law itself. Some police officers had received medals and promotions for arresting these
'fanatical bombers'; even after the Three were pardoned, these crooked cops kept their jobs, their medals, their promotions, and their pay increases.
Shortly before the Ananda Marga Three were released, when it was obvious that Justice Wood's inquiry would find that they had been framed by NSW police, (not for the Hilton bombing but for another fabricated charge which will become clear later in this summary), Tim Anderson was allowed out of jail occasionally to attend university classes. It was on such an occasion that I met this quiet, apparently gentle and obviously highly intelligent man.
I met Tim when I was an editor, in order to discuss with him the content of an article I wanted him to write for a magazine I was editing, Simply Living (it appeared in Vol. 2, No 9). The angle I wanted him to explore was the nature of the spiritual resources he had used to survive such a long period of false imprisonment in an Australian
prison (never known for being holiday camps, especially in those days).
I have had numerous such dinners with journalists, but never before had I driven one home to one of Her Majesty's prisons. As I drove him the long journey from a public institution of learning to one of
'correction' -- from a college of knowledge to a school of crime -- a police car (quite innocently and coincidentally) followed behind for a few blocks. It was then that I made perhaps my most tasteless joke in a lifetime of unfortunate quips: with a grin I asked Tim what was in the briefcase he had left on my back seat. I still cringe; read on and you will understand how
'spiritually resourceful' he was not to deck me. For Tim Anderson as most Australians know, had forfeited his liberty and his youth over a non-existent bomb in a bag on the back seat of a car
-- a bomb that existed only in the perverted minds of certain NSW coppers, and I was making sick wisecracks. (It seemed funny at the time, Officer.)
Tim and I got to chat with each other quite a number of times over following years. His sense of humour, and seeming lack of bitterness, have been two of the most remarkable and inspiring human qualities I have had the pleasure to observe. Tim has every right to be bitter. If he is, it doesn't show. He is much too busy, I suppose, studying, writing, and working for causes such as prison conditions and Aboriginal issues. And then there are those spiritual resources.
During those years of seeing Tim out and about, after he was freed, I never expected that he would end up framed and thrown into jail yet again, this time framed for the Hilton bombing, and once again released from prison after a hellishly long time by a court inquiry, once again publicly exonerated as the victim of a
'stitch-up' or 'stitch', to use the Aussie term for a frame-up. It was then that I became involved in the Free Tim Anderson campaign, meeting at night in the print-shop office of the Prisoners' Action Collective, with a ragtag crew who were similarly passionate about this second injustice.
By my reckoning, Tim spent about eight and a half years of the prime of his life in two long laggings (jail lingo for sentences). On both occasions, the courts took their sweet time to work it out.
The story
"Dere is a bomb in der bin outside der Hilton"
Today, if you walk down George Street, the main street of the city of Sydney, Australia, and pass by the Hilton Hotel right in the centre of town, you will see a small plaque that marks where three men died on that very spot on
February 13, 1978.
Now, more than a quarter of a century after the Hilton bombing, there are lessons that can be learned. We learn to be more cautious about security and intelligence agencies; we learn that if Australia had capital punishment, at least one person would probably have been wrongfully executed for a crime he did not commit; we learn that
'terrorism' can be a term applied to something that is not always terrorism; and we learn a lot more besides.
I think we learn a lot about those spiritual resources I mentioned, and the dire situations that can arise from lying, when trust deserts our race and injustice wears lovely clothes. We can learn a lot about how xenophobia and intolerance of non-mainstream religions can result in witch hunts and oppression. All in all, I believe, we can learn a lot about our current situation. That is one of the reasons I am writing this article although
'the international war effort' is calling my keyboard to other duties.
The story of the Hilton bombing and its consequences and ramifications is far too long for an article, perhaps even far too long for a book or movie. Dozens of main characters, numerous court cases and seemingly interminable twists and turns
-- surprises worthy of an Agatha Christie novel -- make this a story a very difficult one to relate.
Perhaps that's why there is, to my knowledge, only one website (http://members.tripod.com/~Hilton_Bombing/index.html) that deals with Australia's most famous miscarriage of justice apart from the Lindy ("the dingo's got my baby") Chamberlain case, and that website doesn't come near telling the convolutions of this extraordinary case. How could it?
Nonetheless, I will try to present the Hilton in a nutshell, which is a bit like trying to put the whole nut tree back in.
The Hilton bombing
At 12.42 in the morning of Monday, February 13, 1978, a bomb exploded in the back of a garbage truck, killing two garbagemen and a policeman who was on guard duty outside the hotel where the leaders of 12 Asian and Pacific member nations of the (British) Commonwealth were staying for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Regional Meeting
(CHOGRM).
William Favell and Alex Carter emptied the garbage bin into the back of the truck as they did every morning, but little did they know that a warning had been phoned to the CIB (Central Investigation Bureau
-- a New South Wales Police agency) saying "Dere is a bomb in der bin outside der Hilton Hotel". They and Police Constable Paul Birmistriw were as much victims of CIB inaction as they were victims of the person or persons who planted the bomb.
Immediately, the police and the media sprang into action and started
'rounding up the usual suspects'.
The political climate
The bombing of the Hilton occurred at a significant time in Australian politics and the history of police intelligence agencies. Australia is a confederation, or
'commonwealth', of states, and each state has its own police force. The New South Wales police are the ones most involved in the unsolved Hilton case, because the bomb went off in Sydney, the capital of New South Wales. However, events in South Australia are material to this case.
In 1977, South Australia had a Labor government. Broadly speaking, the two main parties in Australian politics are the Labor Party (as with Labor's sister party in Britain, it's a leftish party, roughly equivalent to it or the US Democrats) and the Liberal Party, which, despite its name is a conservative party, much like the Tories in the UK, or the US Republicans.
The leader of the Labor Party in South Australia, and thus the premier of that state, was the late
Don Dunstan
(pictured at right). He is remembered for many things, not the least of them being his enthusiastic support of the arts, and his wearing of pink hot-pants in Parliament.
Many people on the left of Aussie politics during the 1970s had become very concerned about police surveillance. A Cold War culture had developed in the various state Police Special Branches
-- the agencies of criminal intelligence gathering. Many political activists on the left felt they had files being kept on them by reactionary police, for political purposes.
In 1977, the left-wing Dunstan initiated a judicial inquiry, under Justice White, into the Special Branch of his state. Justice White's report revealed that Dunstan's suspicions were correct: many people had Special Branch files on them: peace activists, members of the Australian Council for Civil Liberties, anti-Apartheid activists, trade union members, Labor Party members, even Labor candidates and Members of Parliament. Justice White said that an arbitrary definition of
'subversive' had been set by SA Special Branch police, in consultation with ASIO (Australian Security and Intelligence organisation), Australia's version of the CIA, with which it has always worked closely, as it did in the Cold War and does today in the current Iraq crisis. Dunstan, never a meek man, and proudly progressive, was furious.
South Australia's Police commissioner, Harold Salisbury, urged Dunstan not to publish the report, saying it would have a
"volcanic" effect on Special Branches in every state, as well as ASIO and even foreign intelligence services. On
January 17, 1978, less than a month before the Hilton, Dunstan fired Salisbury for having misled him on what was in all those files. On the same day, Dunstan tore up the relationship enjoyed by SA's Special Branch with ASIO, and wrote telling the Liberal Prime Minister of Australia,
Malcolm Fraser, why he was doing it. Salisbury's predicted
"volcano" erupted all around Australia: 'spooks', spies, and their traditional cronies in politics, the media and big business no doubt saw the writing on the wall, and knew the good old days were soon to end.
Labor's Don Dunstan had uncovered Special Branch dirty dealings that reached right into the Sydney buildings of the Parliament of the State of New South Wales, and on
February 9, just four days before the Hilton bombing, the Labor Premier of NSW, Neville Wran, announced that in five days time a judicial inquiry would commence in NSW, similar to the Dunstan-White inquiry of South Australia. This inquiry was to be equipped with particular terms of reference for the examination of certain alleged political abuses by ASIO and Special Branch involving the Liberal Leader of the Opposition, Peter Coleman.
Dunstan's crusade had now extended to Australia's international security agency, ASIO. Special Branch officers and other police and spies nationwide were surely in a state of urgency in early 1978 as these pinko politicians started dislodging them from their seats of power. No doubt they were wondering what they could do to withstand this onslaught. In those days, there was a fairly robust alternative press in Australia, and investigative reporting, in those post-Watergate days, was state of the art. Unlike today, authorities feared the much more skeptical press that existed, and parts even of the mainstream media were doing their journalistic duty. In the state of Queensland, a similar situation was emerging, and in Federal parliament, even the Cabinet of the conservative Prime Minister Fraser ordered an investigation of its own into the secret police.
Immediate aftershock
Prime
Minister Malcolm Fraser was asleep in the Hilton in the wee hours of
February 13, and was alerted that a bomb had gone off downstairs. The security around the Hilton was already tight, involving the NSW security agencies as well as those of the 12 Commonwealth countries whose leaders were sleeping in the Hilton.
However, an even tighter net was immediately thrown around the hotel, and later that day the Australian Defence Forces were called in by the Governor-General (representative of the Queen) because of
"terrorist activities and related violence". For the first time in Australia's history, the military forces were being used for a domestic threat. The previous plans for the CHOGRM leaders to travel by train to a country town the next day were secretly cancelled and they were helicoptered or driven to Bowral for their day out. Meanwhile, the decoy train went ahead.
Suddenly, for the first time in the nation's history, there was terrorist panic in Australia, especially amongst politicians. Suddenly, there was a crying need for security forces and Special Branch investigation. No one doubted that, as every man and his dog had 24 hours earlier.
Hundreds of police and spooks and spies sprang into action, sifting through the debris at Bin Zero and interviewing 1,500 people over ensuing weeks. Civil liberties was no longer a topic for the Australian editorial writers and shock jocks; that was the last thing on their minds. It was "catch the terrorists at all costs, and God bless Australia, God bless the police". A $100,000 reward (a huge amount in 1978) was posted for information leading to a conviction. However, by halfway through the year, the culprits still hadn't been caught and the media gradually allowed their attention to turn to whatever other pressing matters they decided upon at the time, or were directed to by the leaders of the day.
Then, on
June 11, The Sydney Morning Herald reported that the police were keeping an eye on the Ananada Marga, an Indian religious organisation (always referred to as 'cult' or 'sect' in the Australian media, but never a religion, society or organisation).
Four days later, the Ananda Marga Three were arrested. However, it wasn't for the Hilton bombing, but for conspiracy to murder a man named Robert Cameron, the leader of a neo-Nazi organization, the National Front. But everyone knew the "Hilton bombers" had been collared.
The Ananda Marga and the Hilton bombing
One of the national leaders staying in the Sydney Hilton that night was Prime Minister
Morarji Desai of India. Later that day, PM Desai blamed
Ananda Marga for the outrage, and the name sprang to prominence in the mind of Australians. For a number of years, Sydneysiders (as the residents of Sydney are known), had already been somewhat exposed to the activism of this religion, the origins of which were in India. This was because of a long campaign waged by Ananda Margis for the release from an Indian prison of their spiritual leader, PR Sarkar (1921-90), known also as Shrii Shrii Anandamurti (which means 'He who attracts others as the embodiment of bliss'), or simply 'Baba' (Father).
For quite some time, simple posters with the slogan 'FREE BABA' had been a feature of Sydney streets, as they had in other cities of the world. The non-Marxist, but nevertheless radical, Ananda Marga philosophy and ideology is known as Prout, and its clash with the Indian authorities (one of its strategies was participation in the civil service, and many Margis gained high office), particularly the regime of
Indira Gandhi, had let to 'Baba' being imprisoned for a lengthy period. The International Commission of Jurists had issued a report, in October 1976, severely criticising the Indian government over Sarkar's trial.
Tim Anderson was a member of the Australian branch of Ananda Marga, but not a monk nor a leader. He was appointed the public relations officer of the religion in Australia, and was active in promoting his group's causes through the media, as well as by direct action. On one occasion, in November 1976, Anderson was in a demonstration outside the Indian High Commission and was involved in an exchange of shouts with the High Commissioner. He was charged with obstructing the High Commissioner's passage, but a videotape made at the demonstration, unbeknown to police, showed that their evidence was completely false, and Anderson was acquitted.
Ross Dunn, Paul Alister and Tim Anderson
Ananda Marga in Australia maintained for years that they were subject to unreasonable harassment by police and others, and that there had even been a bomb threat on their headquarters. On
February 3, 1978, 11 days before the Hilton, the Margis lodged a complaint with the Commonwealth ombudsman about 17 incidents involving the police, including an incident in which one of their members had been charged in late 1977 with having marijuana in the pocket of his shirt
-- a shirt that was shown later in court to have no pocket.
One must note at this point that in 1977 there were incidents and demonstrations in which the Ananda Marga were definitely involved. As well, there was a severe act of violence against the military attaché of the Indian High Commission
(September 14). Tim Anderson issued a media release alleging that agents of the Central Bureau of Investigation (India) were trying to discredit the movement. Ananda Marga did not claim credit for the attack; rather, they condemned it and expressed condolences to the victim and his wife. The High Commission, however, claimed that the Central Committee of the "Universal Proutist Revolutionary Federation" had sent a letter claiming responsibility.
The media in Australia portrayed Ananda Marga as a fearsome organisation, and Australia's Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser, made sure that security was increased for Indian diplomatic staff. Meanwhile, there were other attacks and incidents in Australia and abroad that were, rightly or wrongly, linked to Ananda Marga, and PR Sarkar released a statement that "completely disowned" acts of violence, adding that "I will not obtain my release this way".
In the first week of 1978, the Australian government imposed a ban on the entry of Margis from abroad. The Minister for Immigration said this was because the Ananda Marga had been involved in the High Commission stabbing
-- quite inappropriately as it was a matter still before the courts. The judge in this case said that there was no evidence that Ananda Marga was involved, and that he assumed the accused acted alone. Meanwhile, Ananda Marga members in Australia said that they doubted the abovementioned "Universal Proutist Revolutionary Federation" actually existed, claiming that the Indian Government might be trying to discredit "legitimate followers of Baba". Certainly the Indian government was concerned at the large amount of influence members of the religion were having in the Indian bureaucratic and political landscape.
As PR officer for Ananda Marga, Tim Anderson received phone calls from journalists all Monday morning after the Hilton blast, even before PM Desai alleged later that day that he believed Ananda Marga was involved in the blast. The press in Australia did not report that in the same month in India, a man was arrested for writing death threats to Desai, and doing so in the name of Ananda Marga, though not a member. (In April, 1978, an Indian bank robbery gang also used the Ananda Marga name to muddy their trail, but this also was reported in India and not Australia).
The bomb had exploded, and three innocent men had died. Sleepy Australia had never experienced such an atrocity; the climate now became fervently anti-terrorist and such niceties as some civil liberties were readily set aside by governments and media. The spooks, spies and police immediately gained.
Don Dunstan's inquiry into unlawful connections between South Australian Police Special Branch and the Australian Security and Intelligence Agency (ASIO), was called off two days before it was due to begin. Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser persuaded
New South Wales Premier Neville Wran to call off his impending investigation into the same matter in NSW. The media, which in previous weeks had been running headlines about ASIO such as "More Power than the FBI", seemed suddenly to abandon the crusade. Three weeks after the tragedy, a new Bill was tabled in Federal Parliament that vastly increased AIO's powers of bugging, searching, entering premises and so on.
Terry Griffiths and others
Terry Griffiths was a police constable who sustained horrific injuries in the Hilton blast, yet he has been a supporter of the Ananda Marga Three ever since that dreadful night. From his knowledge of the events of the night of the bombing, as well as his years of tenacious investigation and conversations he claims to have overheard amongst police, Griffiths has alleged for many years that the Hilton was a stunt gone wrong, organised by the very security forces who are appointed for public protection. He claimed that a Special Branch officer had told him that Special Branch officers, observing the Hilton in dead of night, saw the garbage truck coming (when they didn't expect it) and hurriedly phoned other police anonymously in order to protect the police on duty.
Griffiths had seen security officers order garbagemen away from the bin on several occasions in the days preceding the explosion. It is his view that the bomb was planted to be found, not to explode. The Griffiths view
-- and the one that is held by many people in Australia, but which has never been tested in a judicial environment
-- is that certain security and police elements, feeling the political pressure on their slumping trade, hoped to 'find' a bomb in the bin outside the hotel. The purpose was to halt the political and public clamour calling for Special Branch to be closed down and to reduce ASIO's powers. However, the Sunday night schedule of the garbage trucks in George Street was not the same as for the other days of the week, and, the theory goes, no officer who was awake and working at 12.42 a.m. was aware that they had orders to 'wave the garbos on' as had happened the day before.
For three days, that garbage bin was the only one in Sydney not emptied, and was overflowing with rubbish. Faced with these and other facts, Griffiths campaigned long and hard for a royal commission into the Hilton. By February 1989 it looked like he might finally get his wish, but it is later in my account that we will see what happened in 1989.
There was more. Keith Burley, an army corporal in charge of bomb sniffer dogs, relates that his task of supplying dogs for Hilton security was strangely called off shortly before CHOGRM. Burley says that he traced the call he received to that effect, and it led to the Prime Minister's office of security, which was ASIO. Burley's dog team was called to the Hilton, but in the aftermath of the outrage, and he later wrote:
"... anytime there was a camera crew around someone called for the dogs to search a convenient location were we could be seen. It was bullshit in my opinion. We expressed that to the people in charge and they were not impressed.
"There was a lot of rumour and innuendo going around at the time we were on the scene. The strongest being that ASIO had stuffed up. It was common comment around at the time that ASIO had in fact planted the device and planned to find it for whatever purpose, but the garbage men were early that morning ...
"It is hard to describe in words exactly what the atmosphere was like, but I spent time overseas [dealing with actual terrorist attacks] and it was totally different to that. There was definitely something going on at that time." Source
A private secretary to a senator in the Federal Parliament of Australia, Peter Monaghan, was told by people claiming to be from ASIO that a Special Branch observation vehicle was present at the Hilton that night, and a bomb disposal unit was nearby as well. Monaghan was never interviewed by investigators, nor was he called before the coronial inquiry that followed.
In 1980, Frank Walker, then Attorney-General of NSW, stated publicly that he had been told by a disaffected government scientist that ASIO had asked CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation) to build the Hilton bomb. On February 13, 1978, it was clear that Ananda Marga members had been among the many disparate activist groups and individuals publicly demonstrating outside the Hilton during the several days of the CHOGRM conference. Given the political background, and endemic Aussie racism and prejudices against foreign religions, the scene was ripe for Ananda Marga members to be arrested for the Hilton.
That, however, is not what happened.
Richard John Seary
Less than three weeks after the Hilton bombing, Richard John Seary began meditation classes at the Sydney Ananda Marga centre. By June he was helping in the group's VSS
-- Volunteer Social Services, run by Paul Alister, whereby derelict and homeless street people were taken in by Ananda Marga and fed soup.
On the afternoon of
June 15, 1978, Seary contacted Detective Senior Constable Jan Krawczyk of NSW Police Special Branch. They already knew each other. Krawczyk had recruited him to infiltrate Ananda Marga. On this day, Seary told his masters in the NSW Police Special Branch that three Ananda Margis, Alister, Dunn and Anderson, were going out that night on a bombing mission. The target was to be Robert Cameron, leader of the National Front, a right-wing group, who lived in the Sydney suburb of Yagoona.
Detective Inspector John Perrin, head of Special Branch and Krawczyk's superior, approved a police action for that night. Seary was to go with the three Margis as planned with the 'conspirators', out to Yagoona, and the police would keep them under surveillance. Seary left the company of Krawczyk and Perrin, stole a car several blocks from police headquarters (despite having told the police he would borrow one from a friend), and picked up Alister, Dunn and Anderson in Carillon Avenue, a small, dark street near the University of Sydney. Little did the 'Ananda Marga Three' realise that their planned graffiti raid on a right-wing activist's fence would land them in prison, where they would remain for the golden years of their youth.
Tim Anderson was dropped back at Ananda Marga centre not far from Sydney University. Seary drove Alister and Dunn out to Yagoona while police followed secretly, in four vehicles. In Horton Street, Yagoona, the police cars quickly surrounded the suspect vehicle. With weapons drawn at their car windows, the police forced Seary's car to a halt. Seary ran it up onto the grass, the cops forced him and the two Margis out onto the ground, and on the back seat of Seary's car was found a bag containing a bomb. Back at Ananda Marga HQ, Anderson was arrested about an hour later by none other than Detective Sergeant
Roger
Rogerson.
Roger Caleb Rogerson, Australia's most notorious cop, wasn't a household name then as he is now. He earned his celebrity status well after 1978, not through the Hilton or Yagoona affairs, but through a string of murder, crime and corruption scandals, and his associations with some of the the Sydney underworld's 'Mr Bigs' (as the tabloids love to call the head honchos of organised crime).
Later that morning, the 'Ananda Marga Three' were brought before the Chief Stipendiary Magistrate of New South Wales, Mr Murray
Farquhar. Like Rogerson's, Farquhar's name was not a household word at this stage, and his fall from grace, and his great notoriety throughout Australia some years later, resulted from personal indiscretions unrelated to the affairs we are discussing.
With three Margis now arrested, the tabloid newspapers had a field day, with headlines that day including "TIME BOMB MURDER PLOT .... then suicide pact alleged" and "BID TO BLOW UP POLICE".
The trials
It is far beyond the scope of this article to delve deeply into the myriad events and convolutions associated with the two court cases regarding the 'conspiracy to kill Robert Cameron'. The first trial ran from February 19, 1979 till March, when it resulted in a hung (undecided) jury. The second trial ran from July to August of that year, resulting in the convictions of the three for conspiracy to murder Cameron. All three were sentenced to 16 years jail, making it the most expensive night of graffiti in Australian history.
It was not long (in non-prisoner time) before many people started to question the convictions. From 1978 to 1985, even some powerful voices raised their fears that a serious miscarriage of justice had occurred. However, all through these years, the media and the public were generally satisfied that the Hilton had been solved.
The Hilton? Did someone say the Hilton? Although the Three had been convicted of conspiracy to murder Robert Cameron, the juxtaposition of headlines and photographs (Anderson, for example, was generally photographed to highlight his hooked nose) led to the strange phenomenon of most Australians thinking that Alister, Dunn and Anderson were the convicted Hilton bombers. And if they weren't, they darn well should be and it was just as well that the nice police got them on something, at least.
On
February 1, 1982, after the three young men had now rotted in some of the heaviest prisons in Australia for two and a half years, Eric Mountier, a juror in the second trial, came forward and said that he believed the Yagoona case trial had been unfair and overwhelmingly prejudiced by the fact that during it, Richard Seary claimed that Dunn had confessed to him that he was the Hilton bomber.
Also in 1982, an inquest into the Hilton bombing was terminated (October) on a legal technicality. More than one year later, on
December 2, 1983, the High Court granted special leave to appeal for the Three. Justice Murphy of the High Court called Richard John Seary "the most unreliable person ever presented as the principal prosecution witness on a charge of serious crime".
The High Court, however, dismissed the appeal on February 13, 1984, the sixth anniversary of the event at the Hilton, for which the well-known 'Hilton bombers', the Ananda Marga Three, had never been charged. Meanwhile, another Hilton inquest was no-billed on
June 19, the day after the NSW Attorney-General, Paul Landa, announced that Justice Wood would conduct a judicial inquiry into the Yagoona conspiracy. By
May 15 the following year, 1985, after a lengthy investigation of the Yagoona affair, Justice Wood pardoned the men and they walked free from jail. Pardoned, but their convictions not quashed. Not given back their youth after seven years in prison. Not compensated financially, but free.
Richard Seary was denounced, through inquests and court cases, as a fantasist whose evidence was unreliable. He had been recruited by Special Branch for purposes one may only guess at. Evidence was given that some years earlier he had tried to inveigle the Hare Krishnas into blowing up the Homebush Abattoirs, the meatworks on the site where Sydney's Olympic Stadium now stands. It was strongly suggested that he even learned by rote a 1,600-word passage of his own evidence and was able to recite from it with ease at a later time, though he denied having done so.
Free, for a time
One might think that the days of travail were over for the protagonists of this story, but for Tim Anderson, it was not to be. For the next three years, he began piecing his life back together, working, writing books, studying for a PhD, and frequently campaigning against police corruption and the bashings that he, his colleagues and other prisoners sustained at the hands of police. When Detective Burke, who had been at Yagoona, became head of the SWOS squad that wrongly killed Aboriginal activist David Gundy, Anderson publicly called Burke a 'basher' and a 'verballer'. ('Verbals' were unsigned documents of confession, a police practice of former days that have since been outlawed, thanks in no small part to Tim Anderson.)
In the audience on that occasion that Anderson made this allegation, at a conference with many international judges and police commissioners present, was Superintendent Dennis Gilligan, who had been involved with the Yagoona case. With other police, including Detective Sergeant Aarne Tees, Gilligan was now on a police committee investigating police interview methods. Anderson believed that Gilligan had bashed his friend Ross Dunn, and Dunn and Alister had moved to the country, their health ruined. "At the sight of Gilligan something inside Anderson snapped", wrote journalist and author John Jiggens (Jiggens, John, The Incredible Exploding Man: Evan Pederick and the Trial of Tim Anderson, Samizdat Press, Brisbane, Australia, 1991).
At around the same time, Det. Serg. Aarne Tees reopened the Hilton bombing investigation. Two months later, and three years after he had walked free, on
May 30, 1989, Tim Anderson woke up at his home in the early hours of the morning to a familiar face. It was Aarne Tees. The conversation went something like:
"You're under arrest, Tim."
"Under arrest?! On what charge, Aarne?"
"The Hilton."
"The Hilton?! You've got to be joking, Aarne!"
Raymond John Denning
In 1989, Tim Anderson's life was turned upside down once again, this time by a bloke named Denning. Raymond John Denning was for some years Australia's most famous criminal. Born in 1951, he had a bit of a thug's face, but in a good looking sort of way, and he had a bent kind of charisma about him. He was the son of a thief and his youth had mostly been spent behind bars.
He would have been just another punk crim in the harsh, Byzantine system of New South Wales prisons, until one fateful day,
April 2, 1980, Ray got put out with the garbage at Grafton Jail and did a runner. It's wasn't his first escape from a prison, nor was it to be his last.
Denning was the only man ever to escape from Grafton in the
20th century. Everyone wanted to and many had tried; this maximum-security prison was notorious for cruelty and privation. In earlier times, when a new prisoner arrived he had to run the gauntlet of baton-wielding 'screws' (warders). Darcy Dugan, the all-time most famous Australian serial escapee
-- an antipodean Willie 'The Actor' Sutton'
-- wrote of Grafton screws throwing boiling water over the crims. Grafton was nasty as Devil's Island and tight as a drum.
Denning was serving life for bashing a prison officer who later died, but he always claimed he had been 'verballed' by the cops; that is, the police had tendered in court an unsigned record of interview that was false. While inside, Denning seethed with resentment at his lot. Busting out of Grafton would have been enough to bring him some attention, but Ray Denning did more. Apart from being a violent career criminal, he was what Australians call a 'larrikin', a cheeky bloke. While on the run, he appeared regularly on a national radio station, and once on TV's 60 Minutes, vehemently condemning NSW prisons, police (especially for verbals) and the whole criminal justice system. Naturally enough, Ray became a favourite of the Australian Left, a modern day
Ned Kelly.
So cheeky was he in his 19 months of freedom that he went to Police HQ and pinned a note on the door. He went to a prisoners' art show, strolling among the crowd near the likes of the Chairman of the Corrective Services Commission. If that wasn't enough, he sat in the gallery of Parliament. Naturally, he did a few stick-ups and ended up back inside in November, 1981. It was a few years before he went to Gowings (escaped) again. When they put him away, it was for numerous charges apart from escaping. While on the run, Ray had been a bad boy. For starters, there was the time he spent with Russell 'Mad Dog' Cox, and Queensland's biggest payroll robbery, the Transurety job
(September 22, 1981, netting $327,000). Denning was now rich, but you can't spend it in the boob (jail). Or can you?
Denning goes on the dog
Apart from being a rock spider, the worst thing you can be in an Aussie prison is a dog
-- one who dobs in (gives up) another person to the authorities. Rock spiders and dogs don't last too long. Sometimes, though, the pressure of prison can make even a bloke like Denning 'go on the dog'.
Like Tim Anderson, Denning was active in the NSW campaign against verbals, but unlike Anderson, he was not driven as much by principle as by self-preservation. On
May 30, 1989, when Anderson was arrested and charged, he discovered that Ray Denning was behind it. Denning had told the cops that when they were both in Parklea Prison years earlier, Anderson had told him that he (Anderson) had said "I did the Hilton".
After Denning's spectacular period of freedom in 1980-81, and his equally spectacular arrest at Manly Beach as Australia's Most Wanted, he had rotted a few more years in jail and was watched closely, but went over the wall again in 1988. However, he was only out for one hectic week. He quickly relieved a bank of $44,000 in Brisbane (about 1,000 km north of Sydney), then he and Mad Dog Cox were caught in a shoot out with police near a Brambles armoured van about 1,200 km south of Sydney, in Melbourne, capital of the State of Victoria. This time, Denning was 'done like a dinner', and ten Darcy Dugans couldn't get him out of this one. The screws and cops would be watching him like hawks for yonks. The Melbourne detectives had him on the Brisbane job as well as everything else, and 37-year-old Ray looked like growing old in prison. Think, Ray, think. How will you get out of it this time?
Although he was in a Victorian prison, Denning used an old girlfriend to get a message to Aarne Tees of the NSW Police that he wanted to talk. He told Tees that he and Tim Anderson used the prison 'phone' system to talk to each other. The phone is the toilet; you empty the water out and shout to each other through the pipes.
Evan Pederick, God's gift to Aarne Tees
Ray Denning fell out of heaven into the laps of the Sydney police, but heaven had even better things in store for Aarne Tees and the rest. The best was yet to come.
The day after Anderson's arrest, one Evan
Pederick (pictured at right), formerly a member of Ananda Marga, had an attack of guilt. The son of a Methodist minister, Pederick, by all accounts, is a very unnoticeable person. After hearing the news of Anderson's headlining arrest, he went to a priest in Brisbane, Queensland, where he was living, and confessed that he had done the Hilton. Furthermore, Tim Anderson had made him do it. The priest told the police, and very quickly Aarne Tees flew to Brisbane and interviewed Evan Pederick. In due course, Pederick went to jail for murder, his story untested by the court because he had confessed. Based on the evidence of Denning and now Pederick, Tim Anderson stood trial for murder, a trial that ran from
August 15, 1990 till
October 25 of the same year.
In ensuing court cases (the Anderson trials) Pederick's story chopped and changed many times (much like his own life). However, in a nutshell, his assertion was that on Sunday,
February 12, 1978, hours before the bomb went off (at 12.42 a.m. Monday), he stood across George Street from the Hilton Hotel, holding a remote control device, trying to make a bomb go off in the bin. Tim Anderson had put him up to it, and because Anderson had more personal authority than he in the Ananda Marga, he had obeyed. The target was to have been Prime Minister Desai of India.
Evan Pederick originally told Tees that he placed 50 sticks of gelignite in the bin outside the Hilton. A record of interview showed that Tees, recognising that 50 sticks would not have fitted in the bin, prompted him to revise his figure, and Pederick later settled on 20. To do this, in front of multiple security agencies from several British Commonwealth countries, he had dressed in the clothes of a 'derro', or derelict, homeless man, and wore a false moustache. He saw Moraji Desai arrive at the Hilton's George Street entrance where he was greeted by the imposing figure of the very tall Prime Minister of Australia, Malcolm Fraser, who shook his hand. Pederick flicked the toggle switch on the bomb that he said he had made, but it did not go off, and he gave up and hitch-hiked home to Brisbane. On his way, he had been filled with remorse about the whole scheme, but never thought to tell Sydney police that he had left a 50-stick (or 20-stick, depending on what his shifting memory recalled) bomb outside the Hilton.
The Jackal
The court case was long and drawn out, producing 2,000 pages of transcript which I can in no way condense into this article. When Ray Denning appeared in court, an unidentified, burly man in the gallery held up a large bone and called out, "Here's your lunch, Denning!" and left it on the gallery railing. Denning's testimony was demolished in many ways, not only because he was a notorious criminal and liar, but also because it was easily proved that he and Anderson had not been in Parklea Prison at the same time. Some 'phone'!
Who first noticed it is unsure, but over time it became apparent to many in the court that Evan Pederick's tale had a familiar ring to it. If you had read Frederick Forsyth's The Day of the Jackal, that is. Many elements of Pederick's story paralleled the story of a man who disguises himself in a boarding house near a central station in order slip through a police cordon to assassinate a politician. Unfortunately, on this matter, Pederick won the court exchange with Peter Hidden (Anderson's defence attorney) because
he knew the book better than Hidden. This in itself was interesting.
Be that as it may, there were many ways in which the Crown's case readily fell over, and it was clear that Pederick had confessed to events that simply could not have happened. Why he should do so remains a mystery to this day.
Many remarkable revelations occurred in the Anderson trial:
Dramatically, Prime Minister Fraser gave evidence that he had not met PM Desai in George St, but at the Pitt Street entrance of the Hilton, so Pederick could not possibly have seen them;
Prime
Minister Malcolm Fraser (left) greets Desai in Pitt Street
In court, police evidence was given about the arrival time of heads of state; one officer even said that he had flown to Canberra and obtained verification from Prime Minister Fraser. Not only did airline records show that the police claims were wrong, Fraser also testified that the officer was incorrect;
The events of the weekend in question were well documented, because the CHOGRM conference was such a big event. Numerous films and hundreds of photographs showed George Street from many angles over many hours, but Evan Pederick, the convicted Hilton bomber, was not in any of them. Anderson's defence attorneys made wry jokes about a "Spot the Pederick" competition;
Pederick's memory could be expected to be hazy after 12 years, but even the effluxion of time could not explain how his memory could be so frivolous. His story, in many of its elements, changed, twisted and turned, from police records of interview, to examination and cross examination. Anyone who has read the court transcript will stand amazed that his recollection could, in all seriousness, have sent him to prison in the first place, let alone have been used against Tim Anderson.
(An aside: I regret that I did not attend the trials of either Pederick or Anderson. There were two pieces of evidence that I personally noticed in the transcript on my own reading, but which have never been noted by any participant in any of the trials, that my own local knowledge showed to be incorrect. One involved the time taken for Pederick to travel by public transport from the suburb of Narrabeen to Central Station (both areas with which I had intimate knowledge). Another involved the time at which Pederick pitched camp by the highway leading north from Sydney when he hitch-hiked away from the Hilton. Again, my own knowledge of the Pacific Highway, which I had hitch-hiked myself, led me to believe that certain of Pederick's crucial evidence was wrong and not challenged by any lawyer. Lawyers tend not to catch buses or hitch-hike, as lowly almanackists do. I didn't discover these matters until after I had decided to get involved with the Free Tim Anderson Campaign; far too late, I'm afraid.)
The defence showed that no one could have added even 20 sticks of explosive into the bin on the Sunday, as it was full to overflowing with rubbish because police had consistently prevented its being emptied by garbagemen.
Pederick fell down time and again when it came to times. Although in between court experiences he "developed a memory" and corrected former evidence or what he had told police, often his corrections were also inconceivable. Some of his assertions of times were changed radically a number of times. The Crown endeavoured to come up with so many new theories about this and other matters (such as brown men whom one might mistake for PM Desai), that at times Anderson's defence team did not know which prosecution argument it was meant to be refuting;
Evidence from an expert witness about the time of day Anderson was photographed demonstrating outside the Hilton, proved that he was standing near the bin at the very time Pederick claimed he was trying to blow it up. This, among many other bits of evidence, made the "evil mastermind Anderson theory" look ridiculous;
It is difficult to enumerate or stress too much the amount of prevarication on the part of police in the trial. For example, retired Detective Sergeant Bruce Jackson claimed that when he had interviewed Anderson on June 30, 1978, Anderson had told certain lies. Although he admitted in this court case (1990) that at the time he had known Anderson to be a suspect in the Hilton case, he had not made a signed record of interview. It was his word against Anderson's. The lies Anderson was supposed to have told involved a shoulder bag he was wearing outside the Hilton, and had become significant to the case only in 1990;
The defence produced many documents obtained by subpoena. Among these was an ASIO wire tap of Tim Anderson's phone before the bombing. It clearly showed that he was planning an Ananda Marga demonstration (against Desai) outside the Hilton at the time Pederick claimed to be trying to blow the place up (on mastermind Anderson's instructions);
Anderson had scarcely met Pederick while they were both in Ananda Marga; there was no reason to believe that Anderson would plot such a huge event on such a slim acquaintance;
In April 1980, someone had found some sticks of gelignite in a student locker at the University of New South Wales. Police claimed that there was also a newspaper dated February 11, 1978. In his confession, Pederick had claimed that he had left the explosives in the locker. The defence showed that the locker was first hired out while Tim Anderson was in jail, and Pederick was not in Sydney, so Pederick's assertion collapsed. Incidentally, Pederick said the locker was at Macquarie University, though he claimed to have been at UNSW. In a police record of interview, Tees seems to persuade him that it was UNSW, and Pederick seems to change his memory.
Mysteriously, UNSW records showed that the first person to sign for the locker was an MJ Melton. University records show there was no MJ Melton there that year, but there was a JJ Melton. He was training as a weapons officer and his work was associated with the government. He was not called to the 1979 Hilton inquest, and at the inquest the gelignite was not even mentioned. In 1990, three months after Pederick mentioned it, unfortunately, JJ Melton committed suicide.
There were other things in the locker, some of which belonged to a Patricia Collinson. These were things that had been stolen from her at UNSW in May, 1980. Whoever had the locker was still using it at that time, at least.
Pederick's description of himself carrying a suitcase of the explosives that killed the three men was ludicrous. The whole amount of gelignite he said he had was 200 sticks (plus detonators) and would have weighed 25 kilos. He carried this, as well as a rucksack with a tent, sleeping bag and all his gear. In court, the defence showed how Pederick (not a large man) was stretching credulity that he lugged all this around by public transport and on foot for large distances. There are many unresolved matters about this and a zipper bag found in the locker, that have never been resolved.
There was much more besides, and on the day the jury was to deliver its verdict in Timothy Anderson's murder trial, at least one person in the Anderson support group brought champagne for the party. The prosecution case was in tatters and hopes were high for his acquittal.
However, Tim Anderson was found guilty of murder.
In conclusion
Happily, one can report that in due course, Anderson's hell finally came to an end, though how much hell was left in his soul after eight and a half years of false imprisonment on two separate frame-ups is anybody's guess.
Once again, he was pardoned. However, it was not without many more months of incarceration, lawyers, courtrooms and
-- perhaps worse -- going over and over old events that Anderson, at best, had very little to do with. One can put oneself in Tim's place, perhaps, and try to imagine the mental torture of having to fill one's mind with trivia from years ago about situations and events that were in one's life, and those which exist in the minds of people such as Tees, Seary, Denning, Pederick, as well as Crown prosecutors, journalists, radio commentators, politicians, prison warders, prisoners. If you had not done a bombing in 1978, or 1988, or even 1998, how would your head be trying to cope with the onslaught of an entire police force and media determined to show that you had? My mind boggles at the thought, let alone the thought of imprisonment, bashings and loss of opportunity.
I have tried in as few words as possible to present a tiny summary of the extraordinary and tragic events that enveloped the life of Tim Anderson. I know that I have not done justice to the story, as the tale is so vast and my skills inadequate. To the best of my knowledge, Tim Anderson and Evan Pederick are both innocent of any violent crime. It is noteworthy that Pederick, who is now free like Tim and pursuing a vocation in the Christian Church, publicly expressed (while in jail) his doubts about his state of mind when he confessed to the Hilton bombing, and whether he had done it at all.
There are many conclusions and ideas one may draw from the trials of Tim Anderson. As I write, in February, 2003, when terrorism is a topic we cannot ignore, the Hilton story provokes, in my mind, many questions and problems. As I am sure that this will be so with all who read my tale, I do not propose to canvass my own thoughts and conclusions. I think that would be rather too much. I will say, however, that I have no idea who the Hilton bomber was, nor whether the ASIO/Special Branch theory holds water. I only hope that those in a position to prevent the case fading from mind do not let it do so. The people involved in February, 1978, are not getting any younger, and memories weaken, people die, evidence is destroyed by moth, rust (and sometimes police as happened in earlier trials).
My one parting thought is that there seems to be a conspiracy of silence about the Hilton. Although Pederick served out his sentence, the Hilton bomber has, in my opinion, not been found. If that is so, the subject should not be allowed to rest.
