War of Nerves

by Jonathan Tucker

  Equally troubling was the role of unscrupulous foreign suppliers in abetting the spread of chemical weapons. Despite the existence of the Australia Group, the huge volume and globalization of chemical trade made tracking shipments of dual-use chemicals extremely difficult. Proliferators could circumvent the Australia Group controls by ordering precursors from non-member states or by using middlemen, front companies, transshipment points, falsified end-use certificates, and other forms of deception. As Julian Perry Robinson of the University of Sussex observed, “There are so many brokers, so many intermediaries, that it takes a skilled investigator to track these things down. A single trainload of chemicals can change hands six times on its way from the factory to the port, so all trace of its origin gets lost.”

  Finally, intelligence information about the smuggling of chemical weapons precursors was often unreliable. In July 1993, for example, the U.S. intelligence community received a tip that the Chinese cargo ship Yin He (Galaxy) was on its way to Iran with supplies of two chemical weapons precursors: thiodiglycol and thionyl chloride. U.S. warships tailed the Yin He, and American officials requested to search the vessel at one of its ports of call in the Persian Gulf. After resisting the U.S. demand for several weeks, China finally agreed under duress to allow the ship to be inspected in the Saudi port of Damman from August 24 to September 4, prior to its arrival in Iran. Although inspectors searched the Yin He from top to bottom, they failed to find the prohibited chemicals. Some observers theorized that the illicit cargo—if it had actually existed—had been dumped at sea. Another rumor was that the chemicals had been delayed in the Chinese rail system and had arrived in Shanghai after the ship had left. According to this view, Chinese officials had agreed to the inspection only when they knew that nothing would be found. In any event, the Yin He incident embarrassed the U.S. government and sharply increased tensions with Beijing, which accused Washington of acting “in an utterly indiscreet and irresponsible manner.”

  IN ADDITION TO the proliferation of chemical weapons to rogue states such as Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, an equally frightening scenario was that they would fall into the hands of terrorist organizations. During the mid-1990s, the nightmare of chemical terrorism materialized in an unexpected place— Japan. The individual responsible for this development was equally improbable: a chubby, half-blind yoga instructor and cult leader known as Shoko Asahara, whose real name was Chizuo Matsumoto.

  Matsumoto had been born in 1955 to a poor family of tatami mat-weavers on Japan’s southern island of Kyushu. A case of infantile glaucoma had left him blind in his left eye and partially sighted in the right, exposing him to constant teasing and harassment from his childhood classmates. To escape this situation, Chizuo’s parents enrolled him in a boarding school for the blind, where he took advantage of his partial eyesight and stocky build to bully and dominate his classmates. After completing high school, Matsumoto aspired to wealth and fame, but he failed the entrance exam to Tokyo University—the Harvard of Japan—leaving him angry and bitter. His luck finally improved when he met a young college student and married. With money from her parents, Chizuo opened an alternative health clinic in Tokyo that treated patients with acupuncture and yoga and sold quack herbal remedies at exorbitant prices. The clinic soon became a thriving business, yet despite his newfound success and wealth, he continued to search for spiritual fulfillment.

  Matsumoto dabbled in geomancy (an ancient form of divination involving the “reading” of handfuls of soil scattered in the ground), Chinese fortune-telling, and meditation. In February 1984, inspired by the popularity of the “new religions” craze in Japan, the twenty-nine-year-old founded a yoga school called the Aum Association of Mountain Wizards. Matsumoto offered his followers “karmic cleaning,” or absolution for past sins, and supernatural powers such as the ability to levitate and see through walls. These promises of psychic awakening attracted alienated Japanese young people seeking to fill the spiritual void in their lives, and the cult grew rapidly.

  In July 1987, after a trip to the Himalayas during which he supposedly achieved enlightenment, Matsumoto renamed his yoga school Aum Shinrikyo, after the Sanskrit word aum, meaning the power of creation and destruction in the universe, and the Japanese word shinrikyo, or “teaching supreme truth.” He cobbled together a belief system from an eclectic mix of sources, including Tibetan Buddhist meditation, worship of the Hindu god Shiva, the prophecies of the sixteenth-century French seer Nostradamus, the Christian Book of Revelations, and occult and pseudoscientific ideas. Matsumoto also shed his prosaic identity and assumed the charismatic persona of a guru, a transformation that involved adopting the name “Shoko Asahara,” growing a thick black beard and shoulder-length hair, and dressing in the white robes of a holy man. Asahara claimed to be the reincarnation of Jesus Christ and the first enlightened being since the Buddha. He began to make millenarian prophecies in which he described an apocalyptic nuclear war between the United States and Japan in the year 2003 that would devastate Tokyo and other major Japanese cities, and that only members of Aum would survive.

  Shoko Asahara, the leader of the Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult, appears on Japanese television in 1995. The Japanese characters read: “Aum Shinrikyo Representative Shoko Asahara.”

  By 1988, Aum Shinrikyo had about 3,000 members and had opened branch offices in major cities throughout Japan. The cult established its main headquarters about seventy miles from Tokyo in Kamikuishiki, a village of 1,700 people in the Mount Fuji foothills, a picturesque region of parks, golf courses, and dairy farms. After a few years of intense construction, the cult’s walled compound, called the Mount Fuji Center, consisted of a motley array of wooden shacks, prefab buildings, warehouses, and ramshackle dormitories. Believers paid $2,000 to attend weeklong meditation seminars and training courses. Those who decided to become full-time “monks” or “nuns” lived in cult housing and had to donate their entire net worth to Aum, including real estate. In this way, the cult accumulated many valuable tracts of land at a time of skyrocketing property values.

  In April 1989, Asahara and about two hundred of his followers visited the Tokyo Metropolitan Building to protest the city government’s delay in recognizing Aum Shinrikyo as a religious organization. The cultists aggressively lobbied city officials and bombarded the vice governor with telephone calls at home. Four months later, the Tokyo government granted Aum official religious status, entitling it to special tax breaks and legal protections.

  In addition to the money donated by members, the cult invested in real estate and launched a series of lucrative businesses: cut-rate computer manufacturing and retail, yoga centers, a restaurant chain, and sales of books, videos, and religious paraphernalia. The latter included samples of Asahara’s blood, beard clippings, and even his dirty bathwater (known as “Miracle Pond”), which sold for $800 a quart. Aum also engaged in criminal activities such as extortion, kidnapping, insurance fraud, and the manufacture of illicit drugs and explosives, and formed links with Japanese organized-crime syndicates (the yakuza) to acquire firearms and sell drugs. Through these diverse ventures, Aum amassed a vast fortune worth several hundred million dollars and valuable properties in Japan and abroad, including a trading company in Taiwan, a tea plantation in Sri Lanka, and a sheep station in Australia.

  Aum’s organizational structure was rigidly hierarchical, with various levels of priests and laypersons reporting to Asahara, who was known as “His Holiness the Master.” Senior cult officials had the title “Seidaishi” (High Master) and, one rank below, “Seigoshi” (Master). To maintain control over the rank and file, cult leaders employed a blend of indoctrination, discipline, coercion, and physical violence. Whereas Asahara lived a decadent, luxurious lifestyle, Aum devotees were required to cut all ties to family and friends, eat a meager diet of boiled vegetables, sleep as little as three hours a night in spartan dormitories, and devote all of their waking hours to manual labor and the study of Asahara’s teachings. During Aum meditation services, cult member
s wore battery-powered caps containing electrodes that delivered light shocks to the scalp, supposedly synchronizing the wearer’s brain waves with those of the guru. Individuals who deviated from the rules or attempted to leave the cult were punished with beatings, solitary confinement, and even death. These effective “mind-control” techniques gradually caused Aum monks and nuns to suspend their personal judgment and conscience and subordinate their personality to Asahara’s will.

  In order to attract more adherents, Asahara gave sermons in which he depicted the coming nuclear Armageddon not as something to be feared but as an opportunity to eradicate the evils of society and bring about a spiritual transformation. From the ruins of the postapocalyptic world, he preached, the members of Aum would create a new race of superhuman beings. To heighten his followers’ sense of urgency, Asahara gradually moved up the predicted date of doomsday. “People who have acquired the power of God through the right kind of training will be the ones to create a new world after 1997,” he said. In addition to ordering the harsh treatment of deviant members, Asahara began to direct violent attacks against external critics, rivals, and other perceived enemies. To this end he portrayed extreme acts, including murder, as “challenges” to be overcome in the process of spiritual training. Asahara also developed religious concepts that rationalized killing: poa, or sacrifice for the benefit of the victim’s soul, and vajirayana, which justified eliminating anyone hostile to the Aum faith.

  Asahara’s dictatorial authority within the cult fed his megalomania and lust for power. Aspiring to high government office, he established a political wing called Shinrito, or Supreme Truth Party. In the February 1990 parliamentary elections, Asahara headed a slate of twenty-five candidates and ran for a seat from the fourth district of Tokyo. Much to his shock and dismay, none of the Aum candidates was elected and he himself received only 1,783 votes, fewer than the number of cult members living in his district. Because Asahara had never imagined that his election bid would fail, the defeat came as a crushing blow to his self-esteem. He also faced growing legal problems as Aum’s rapid growth and aggressive tactics embroiled it in a series of bitter disputes with its neighbors and the civil authorities, including lawsuits against the cult for land fraud.

  In the face of these setbacks, Asahara came to believe that the Japanese government had rigged the parliamentary election to deny him his rightful victory and that the lawsuits were conspiratorial acts of oppression by officials bent on persecuting and destroying him. Obsessed with these paranoid delusions, he abandoned the peaceful road to political power and began to plot the violent overthrow of the Japanese state, with the goal of establishing a theocratic regime under his unquestioned leadership. To prepare for the future takeover, Asahara organized the Aum leadership into a shadow government modeled closely after the Japanese executive branch, with twenty-two “ministries” led by top cultists. For example, the “Minister of Welfare” was Seichi Endo, thirty-four, who had studied biochemistry at Kyoto University and researched AIDS and cancer before joining Aum; the “Minister of Intelligence” was Yoshihiro Inoue, twenty-five, a former freelance writer; and the “Minister of Science and Technology” was Hideo Murai, thirty-six, who had studied astrophysics at Osaka University and worked at the Kobe Steel Company before becoming one of the founding members of Aum.

  FOR ASAHARA, ACQUIRING powerful weapons became the path to achieving his political ambitions, which he kept secret from all but the most senior cult leaders. At first he planned to establish a militia of several hundred armed troops, who would stage an uprising against the Japanese government and kill all high-ranking officials. This scheme entailed the construction of a factory to mass-produce Kalashnikov assault rifles with computer-controlled machine tools, and efforts to recruit members from the Japan Self-Defense Forces. Asahara also sought to acquire biological, chemical, and even nuclear weapons by recruiting brilliant but alienated young scientists from leading Japanese universities. Developing unconventional arms was the primary task of Aum’s Ministry of Science and Technology, whose 250 members made it the largest of the cult ministries.

  In 1990, Seichi Endo launched an effort to produce germ weapons. He and a team of cultists built a microbiological laboratory inside a prefab building on the Mount Fuji compound. Endo ordered a vial containing a sample of anthrax bacteria from a commercial supplier and cultivated it into a liquid suspension of bacterial spores. On July 1, 1993, Aum members staged a biological attack with the intent of killing many thousands of people. They dispersed the liquid slurry of anthrax spores with an aerosol sprayer mounted on the roof of an eight-story Aum building in Kameido, an area of eastern Tokyo. During the dispersal, neighbors complained to the local environmental health authority about a foul-smelling mist emanating intermittently from the building’s cooling tower. Much to Asahara’s disappointment, however, the release of anthrax spores did not cause any illnesses or deaths. Endo, trained in virology rather than bacteriology, had inadvertently ordered the Sterne strain, a harmless form of the anthrax bacterium that is widely used as a veterinary vaccine.

  Meanwhile, Aum was expanding its activities in Russia, where it had a large number of followers, a prime-time radio program, and several affiliated companies. When the cult had begun to operate in the Soviet Union in 1990, it had tried to build close ties with the ruling Communist Party. After the Soviet breakup in December 1991, Asahara moved to cultivate people close to Russian President Boris Yeltsin. Post-Soviet Russia was a “Wild East” of unbridled capitalism and corruption in which almost everything was for sale, and Aum operatives carried suitcases full of cash with which to bribe Russian officials. One such individual was Oleg Lobov, a top security adviser and longtime associate of Yeltsin from his hometown of Sverdlovsk. In return for payoffs of as much as $12 million to the Russia-Japan Foundation that Lobov chaired, he granted Aum access to senior officials in the Yeltsin government, arranged for the military training of cult members at Russian army bases, and had Aum removed from the list of organizations that the FSB kept under routine surveillance.

  In early March 1992, Aum’s public affairs officer, Fumihiro Joyu, organized a trip to Moscow for Asahara. Through Lobov’s personal intervention, the cult leader met with Russian Vice President Alexander Rutskoi and Speaker of the Supreme Soviet Ruslan Khasbulatov. Another purpose of the Russia trip was to further Aum’s pursuit of unconventional weapons. Asahara ordered one of his trusted aides, the engineer Kiyohide Hayakawa, to stay behind in Russia and collect useful information. Lobov helped the cult scientist to acquire Soviet chemical weapons expertise. Reportedly, Hayakawa purchased the blueprints of a Sarin production facility for about $100,000.

  In March 1993, Asahara met with Masami Tsuchiya, thirty, the head of the cult’s Department of Chemistry. Tsuchiya had earned a master’s degree in physical organic chemistry from Tsukuba University but had abandoned a promising scientific career to become a devout member of Aum. Sporting a crew cut and a goatee, he was an introvert whose sole obsession was the synthesis of interesting chemicals, including powerful explosives and illicit drugs such as LSD, methamphetamine, and mescaline.

  Asahara ordered Tsuchiya to synthesize a variety of chemical warfare agents in order to decide which one to mass-produce. Over the next few weeks, the chemist worked intensively in his small personal laboratory in the Kushtigarba building, a windowless prefab at the Mount Fuji compound that had double walls to prevent toxic gases from escaping. To handle lethal chemicals safely, he used a homemade fume cabinet with long rubber gloves into which he inserted his hands.

  By April, Tsuchiya had selected Sarin as the best agent because of its lethality, its relative ease of production, and the availability of raw materials. Asahara agreed that Sarin would be the ideal weapon to fulfill his apocalyptic prophecies and trigger the widespread chaos that the cult would need to take over the Japanese government. The cult leader was also intrigued by the fact that Sarin had been invented in Nazi Germany and was closely associated with his hero, Adolf Hi
tler.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  THE TOKYO SUBWAY

  IN JUNE 1993, Aum construction crews finished work on a windowless, three-story building at the Mount Fuji Center called Satian 7. (All major structures on the compound were given the name “Satian,” derived from the Sanskrit word for “truth,” followed by a number.) From the outside, the building was a shabby warehouse surrounded by piles of dirt, rubble, and empty boxes. A cluster of large air ducts emerged from one wall and fed into a shack containing powerful ventilation fans. Despite its nondescript appearance, Satian 7 was said to be so holy that only monks who had reached a high level of spiritual enlightenment could enter. Security guards stood at the front door and limited access to cultists wearing a special badge.

  Behind the heavy steel door of Satian 7 was a maze of narrow, dimly lit corridors that opened up into a shrine to Shiva, the cult’s chief deity, consisting of an altar and a golden statue of the multiarmed Hindu god of destruction. In fact, the shrine was an elaborate facade. Hidden behind the statue was a two-story distillation column, and above the false ceiling were stainless-steel holding tanks for raw materials and chemical intermediates.

  On the second floor of the building, behind a submarine-hatch door, was the heart of the Sarin manufacturing plant, which the cult had ordered through front companies at a total cost of about $10 million. Suspended on a steel scaffolding were five reactor vessels made of corrosion-resistant Hastalloy, along with heat exchangers, injectors, and pumps, interconnected with pipes and electrical wiring. A computerized process control system automatically regulated the flow of chemicals and the reaction temperatures. Next to the manufacturing area was a control room where Aum members, wearing white robes and electronic meditation caps, monitored the production sequence on closed-circuit television screens.