Cultists wired electrodes to their heads while
chanting ancient mantras and logging on to computer
nets. Methamphetamine, LSD, and truth serum the
product of homemade laboratories equipped with the
latest gear ran through their veins. Those same
labs worked at refining enough chemical and
biological weapons to kill millions. Other cultists
attempted to build a nuclear bomb while massive
facilities were built to manufacture handguns and
explosives. All this activity went toward preparing
for and then unleashing Armageddon.
In 1984, guru Shoko Asahara had a one-room yoga
school, a handful of devotees, and a dream: world
domination. A decade later, Aum Supreme Truth boasted
40,000 followers in six countries and a worldwide
network that brought it state-of-the-art lasers, lab
equipment, and weaponry. Aum's story moves from the
dense cities of postindustrial Japan to mountain
retreats where samurai once fought, and then overseas
to Manhattan and Silicon Valley, Bonn and the
Australian outback, and finally to Russia. It is
there, in the volatile remains of the Soviet empire,
that the cult found ready suppliers of military
hardware, training, and, quite possibly, a nuclear
bomb.
Aum leaders systematically targeted top Japanese
universities, recruiting brilliant but alienated
young scientists from chemistry, physics, and
engineering departments. They forged relations with
Japan's ruthless crime syndicates, the yakuza, and
with veterans of the KGB and Russian and Japanese
militaries. They enlisted medical doctors to dope
patients and perform human experiments that belong in
a horror movie.
For years this went on, with barely a question
from police or the media on three continents. Before
long, Aum had become one of the world's richest, most
sophisticated, and most murderous religious sects.
Few would know the scope of the cult's madness until
Aum burst onto the world scene in March 1995 with a
cold-blooded nerve gas attack in the subways of rush
hour Tokyo.
In a world poised between the Cold War and the new
millennium, the tale of Aum is a mirror of our worst
fears. Heavily armed militias, terrorist cells,
zealous cults, and crime syndicates all find their
voice in the remarkable ascent of this bizarre sect.
For years, experts have warned us: the growing
sophistication of these groups, combined with the
spread of modern technology, will bring about a new
era in terrorism and mass murder. The coming of Aum
Supreme Truth shows just how close these nightmares
have come to reality.
The story of Aum is the story of its charismatic
and increasingly psychopathic leader, Shoko Asahara.
The son of a dirt-poor weaver of tatami mats, Asahara
attended a boarding school for the blind. There the
partially sighted boy grew into a bully, dominating
and scamming his classmates. Eventually, he opened an
acupuncture business that specialized in quack cures,
but in 1986, the ever-ambitious Asahara was traveling
the Himalayas in search of enlightenment.
On descending the mountains, Asahara transformed
himself into a guru, shopping the world's religions
to form Aum. He blended mystical Buddhism with Hindu
deities, added the physical rigor of yoga, and, from
Christianity, drew on the concept of Armageddon. But
Asahara the con man never lay far from the surface.
The aspiring guru also began to offer an array of
high-tech devices, shortcuts on the road to
enlightenment for the youth of Japan. There were
electrode caps, astral teleporters, magic DNA one
could give Aum credit for enterprise, at least.
Unfortunately, the cult's darker side would not be
limited to scamming naive kids out of their
hard-earned money.
The best and brightest
They came from college campuses, from dead-end
jobs and fast-track careers. Thousands flocked to
Asahara's embrace, seeking Aum's promise of
enlightenment, community, and, most of all,
supernatural power.
They were nearly all young, wide-eyed kids in
their early and mid-20s. Some dropped out of Japan's
finest schools to join the cult, leaving behind
families, friends, and bright futures. Others left
the nation's top companies in steel, computers,
insurance, and other fields.
Asahara found the weak point in Japan's new
generation and then pressed with every resource he
had. In magazines, videos, and books, he took his
message to the youth of his country, appealing to the
lost and alienated. Aum members wrote stories and
placed ads claiming they had gained powers of
telepathy and levitation, offering to teach others
these secret skills. Their favored publications: a
booming genre of science-fact, science-fiction
magazines with names like Mu and Twilight Zone.
The magazines were only part of a wave of popular
culture that dealt in the far-out and the fantastic.
Young people immersed themselves in a world of
fantasy movies, cartoons, computer games, comics
in violent tales of half-human, half-computer
cyborgs and explosive, galactic battles fought
between superbeings. All this was fertile ground for
Asahara and his apocalyptic vision.
A whole generation grew up watching anime,
brilliantly animated cartoons like Space Battleship
Yamato and Naushika in the Valley of the Wind. Many
graduated to the gekiga ultraviolent, book-length
comics drawn with realistic pictures and dramatic
narratives, filled with graphic depictions of rape,
murder, and a decadent, retrograde future.
Of those seeking out Aum, many were students of
the sciences or technical fields like engineering.
More than a few were the otaku Japan's version of
computer nerds technofreaks who spent their free
time logged on to electronic networks and amassing
data of every type. They were invariably described as
quiet kids, with little apparent interest in the
outside world. They spent what free time they had
absorbed in their comics and their computers.
If Japan's youth retreated into these far-out
worlds, one could understand why. For many, there was
nowhere else to go. They were pushed there by a
culture that crushes individualism. And nowhere was
this more true than in the schools.
Studies dominate the life of young Japanese.
Students spend 240 days at school each year a
third longer than their American counterparts. Late
afternoons are spent at cram schools, working to pass
the examinations that begin in kindergarten. Nights
are spent doing homework. The system has helped breed
a generation of nerds, of technically literate,
highly knowledgeable young people who lack basic
social skills and have little understanding of the
outside world.
If the schools don't drive you into your own mind,
the environment does. In a land where urbanization
knows few bounds, where homes and offices are torn
down in endless succession, the only land most
Japanese know is the growing sprawl of the
megalopolis. Mile after mile the cities of Japan go
on, a relentless, urban sea of power lines, roads,
and uninspired buildings of steel and concrete. There
are crowds seemingly everywhere, on the trains, the
streets, the highways. In an area the same size as
California are crammed more than four times as many
people.
One can understand why, then, the Japanese say
they prefer to cultivate inner space the inside of
their homes, the inside of their minds. And Aum
offered the ultimate inner space, one that would take
its followers on a direct line to outer space.
"Aum members lived in a purely imaginary
world," observed Shoko Egawa, a journalist who
followed the cult for years. "One that combined
primeval fear with a computer controlled, cartoon
version of reality." Adds another Aum-watcher,
"It was virtual reality made real."
So they came. Not just the curious and alienated,
but the very bright and very talented. By 1989,
remarkably, Asahara had gathered around him some of
the finest young minds in all Japan chemists,
biologists, doctors, computer programmers. The
high-tech children of postindustrial Japan were
fascinated by Aum's dramatic claims to supernatural
power, its warnings of an apocalyptic future, its
esoteric spiritualism.
There was Seiichi Endo, 28, who left prestigious
Kyoto University, where he did experiments in genetic
engineering at the medical school's Viral Research
Center. Another, Masami Tsuchiya, 24, a first-rate
graduate student at the University of Tsukuba,
abandoned cutting-edge work in organic chemistry to
join the cult. Fumihiro Joyu, 26, arrived with an
advanced degree in telecommunications from Waseda
University, another leading school, where he studied
artificial intelligence. Joyu had gone to work at the
National Space Development Agency of Japan, but
resigned after only two weeks. "The job,"
he told stunned officials, "is incompatible with
my interests in yoga."
And then there was Hideo Murai, the
astrophysicist. Brilliant, intense, and soft-spoken,
Murai would become the chief scientist of Aum and
engineer of the apocalypse. A quiet kid who enjoyed
bicycling and science, he won acceptance to
prestigious Osaka University, where he earned an
advanced degree in astrophysics from its highly
competitive Graduate School of Science. There, he
studied the X-ray emissions of celestial bodies and
proved a whiz at computer programming. On graduation,
he joined Kobe Steel, a ¥1.1 trillion (US$10.5
billion)-a-year conglomerate with interests in
metals, machinery, electronics, and biotech. Murai
worked in the firm's R&D section, running
experiments to make steel supermalleable, like hot
caramel. Interesting work for the young physicist,
but not terribly fulfilling.
After two years at Kobe Steel, Murai's behavior
began to change. While browsing through a bookstore,
he had picked up an Aum publication on yoga and ESP,
and he was hooked. He spoke to colleagues at work
about how levitation and telepathy might be possible
and lost interest in his career. For his wedding, he
brought his fiancee not to Hawaii, as do many
Japanese men, but to Nepal. On his return, Murai
announced to all that he was quitting the company to
devote himself fully to Aum and his new spiritual
life.
Murai's parents tried desperately to talk him out
of it. But their son simply handed them a copy of
Jonathan Livingston Seagull, the onetime best-seller
about a seagull's struggle to learn to fly. The
novel, he told them, expressed his true feelings.
("I hate that book," his mother later
said.)
Murai thrived inside Aum. He devoured Asahara's
teachings and became a prize disciple. So ascetic was
Murai's life that he moved permanently into a tiny
cell used for meditation. "This room is very
small and dark for those who want to escape," he
once said. "But if one wants to meditate, it is
as big as the universe."
The 30-year-old Murai was the senior scientist at
the cult, and Asahara looked upon him with growing
favor. Murai and the others had ideas about how to
push forward Asahara's ideas, using the tools and
techniques of modern science. There were ways to
analyze the unique qualities of their guru's blood
and brain waves, Murai explained. And there were
technologies the cult could use to protect itself
from the coming dark age.
Murai and the other scientists lent chilling
detail to Asahara's vision of an apocalyptic future.
The guru was fascinated as his young brain trust
talked of fantastic weapons that would hasten the
world's end: lasers and particle beams, chemical and
biological agents, new generations of nuclear bombs.
The land would be laid to waste as never before, they
assured their leader.
For Hideo Murai, the astrophysicist, he at last
had found a place in the world. What he heard from
his master's voice fit perfectly with his own
thoughts of the universe. Indeed, all this had been
predicted before, he told the others. Far more
important than Jonathan Livingston Seagull was
another work by an American writer. And this man's
books would serve as the master plan for the
scientists of Aum.
Planet Trantor
"The Empire will vanish and all its good with
it. Its accumulated knowledge will decay and the
order it has imposed will vanish." It could be
Shoko Asahara talking. But it is Hari Seldon, a
science fiction figure 10,000 years in the future.
Seldon is the key character in the Foundation series
Isaac Asimov's classic sci-fi epic and he would
give Murai and Aum their high-tech blueprint for the
millennium and beyond.
Seldon is a brilliant mathematician who discovers
"psychohistory," the science of true
prediction, and warns that the galactic empire will
fall into ruin for a thousand generations.
"Interstellar wars will be endless," Seldon
tells a skeptical but threatened government.
"Interstellar trade will decay; population will
decline; worlds will lose touch with the main body of
the Galaxy."
The empire fails to heed his warnings, prompting
Seldon to take matters into his own hands. Asimov's
core trilogy, written in the 1940s, depicts his
hero's efforts to save humanity by forming a secret
society that can rebuild civilization in a single
millennium, instead of the 30,000 years they face.
At the center of Asimov's universe lies Trantor,
the ruling planet of an empire that spans 25 million
worlds across the galaxy. Trantor is a planet of 40
billion souls that, writes Asimov, holds "the
densest and richest clot of humanity the race had
ever seen." The surface of the planet comprises
a single, vast megalopolis, extending a mile deep
into the ground in an endless, mind-boggling
labyrinth of humanity. Nature has long since
disappeared, replaced by the sight of gray metal
protruding skyward and delving deep underground. All
that remains of the natural world is the emperor's
palace, an island of trees and flowers amid the sea
of a planetary city.
It is not hard to see the parallels between
Trantor and modern Japan, right down to the leafy
grounds of the emperor's palace that stand in central
Tokyo. For years, in fact, Japanese engineers have
worked at developing what they call "superdepth
construction," with plans to build the world's
first underground city by 2020.
The coincidences could not have escaped Hideo
Murai as he read a Japanese-language copy of
Foundation. But the similarities did not end there.
In Foundation, Hari Seldon gathers the best minds of
his time scientists, historians, technologists
and, like monks in the Middle Ages, sets about
preserving the knowledge of the universe. Seldon,
however, has in mind no less than controlling the
future.
Hari Seldon dies, but true to his predictions the
empire falls into chaos. To survive, Seldon's secret
society (the Foundation) transforms itself into
what else? a religion. His followers create a
hierarchy of scientist priests whom the rest of the
galaxy, having lost the command of science and
technology, look upon as wizards and holy ones.
"The religion we have is our all-important
instrument," explained one follower. "It is
the most potent device known with which to control
men and worlds."
The similarities to Aum and its guru's quest were
remarkable. Aum's central mission seemed a mirror
image of the Foundation's struggle to save humanity.
"If Aum tries hard, we can reduce the victims of
Armageddon to a fourth of the world's
population," Asahara had preached.
"However, at present, my rescue plan is totally
delayed. The rate of survivors is getting smaller and
smaller."
In an interview, Murai would state
matter-of-factly that Aum was using the Foundation
series as the blueprint for the cult's long-term
plans. He gave the impression of "a graduate
student who had read too many science fiction
novels," remembered one reporter. But it was
real enough to the cult. Shoko Asahara, the blind and
bearded guru from Japan, had become Hari Seldon, and
Aum Supreme Truth was the Foundation.
Brain waves
"We have a new initiation," said the
cult doctor. "Please drink this."
It was September 1994, and Dr. Ikuo Hayashi was
experimenting. A cardiovascular surgeon, the
48-year-old Hayashi had joined Aum after nearly
killing a mother and daughter in a car accident. With
his anesthesiologist wife and a dozen cult doctors
and nurses, Hayashi presided over a horror shop of
human testing, drugging, and crackpot medicine.
The victim this time was a Japanese army veteran,
a 25-year-old personal bodyguard for Asahara. Hayashi
had summoned the cult member and handed him a glass
used for urine samples. Inside was a yellow liquid.
"Soon I got dizzy and was knocked out," the
man recalled. "When I came to, I was on a bed
and didn't know what was going on. It seemed many
days had passed, but I had no memory. When I touched
my head, there were swollen spots they were so
painful both inside and outside my head. It was a
dull, aching pain."
The "spots" were in fact surgical
incisions, made at four points in the man's skull
one at each temple and two in the back. Each cut was
1 centimeter long and 2 centimeters wide. Fresh scars
and swelling bald spots showed through what was left
of his hair.
The man was later rescued and nursed back to
health. "When I went home I had a thorough exam
of my brain," he said. "But a CAT scan
showed nothing. As for the four scars Š I think
they might have put electrodes in my head."
"Electrodes in my head" the phrase
echoes, as if from some distant retrograde future.
Aum, the high-tech death cult, had met the cyberpunk
world of Neuromancer, William Gibson's science
fiction classic. In Gibson's book, a "console
cowboy" called Case prowls the holographic
backstreets of Tokyo and wires his mind directly onto
computer nets. He might have felt right at home
inside Aum's laboratories.
Aum's scientists were fascinated by electronics
and the brain. Their main focus, though, was not so
much in logging on, but in locking up in finding
new ways to achieve mind control. Dogma, drugs, and
brainwashing apparently were not enough to keep
Asahara's legions in line. What Asahara really wanted
to create was a realm of zombies.
Brain wave patterns had always interested Aum's
scientists. These were, after all, the basis of the
electrode caps worn by the cult priesthood. But the
scope of their experiments expanded radically. One
set of tests performed by Dr. Hayashi used electric
shocks to wipe the memories of suspicious followers.
According to Hayashi's detailed medical records, 7
shocks of 100 volts each, delivered to the scalp,
were enough to blank the short-term memory of one of
Asahara's drivers, who had been branded a spy. The
man couldn't remember he had ever driven the guru's
car.
A worker at the compound who tried to escape
received 11 shocks, while a male follower accused of
sexual relations got 19. During one three-month
period beginning in October 1994, Dr. Hayashi
administered more than 600 electric shocks to 130
followers. Afterward, some of them forgot which cult
they were in, what the guru was called, even their
own names.
Body snatchers
Like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the classic
1950s sci-fi film, Aum's insidious influence seemed
to reach into every corner of society. The cult
reportedly counted among its flock as many as 40
young bureaucrats from Japan's top ministries
education, post and telecommunications, justice,
construction, transport plus tax collectors and
regional judges. One judge was said to have donated
¥1 million (US$9,505) to the cult. There were also
reporters and editors, including a program director
at NHK, the national broadcaster.
Aum's membership list also included more than 100
experts in engineering, communications, computing,
and other fields from companies like Toshiba,
Hitachi, and IBM Japan all high-tech firms whose
state-of the-art technologies Aum coveted. Some
eventually left their firms to join the cult full
time; others merely donated large sums of money.
There were also those considered "sleepers"
nonmembers who perhaps only attended yoga classes
but could, with the right plan, be recruited into the
cult.
Aum's tentacles reached deep into the Japanese
military. Nearly 40 active duty members of the Self
Defense Force had enlisted in Asahara's army plus
another 60 or so veterans. One member at the National
Defense Academy slept under a large poster of Shoko
Asahara and vowed to recruit others before
graduation. Even more helpful was a first lieutenant
in Japan's second Antitank Helicopter Unit who leaked
reams of classified data to the cult.
When infiltration failed to get what Aum wanted,
the cult turned increasingly to wiretapping. Like
biochemical technology, the tools to conduct
electronic eavesdropping are now within the reach of
everyday people and Aum took full advantage. The
first tap had been discovered as early as 1991 by
NTT, the national phone company. Aum's technique was
simple enough. It reportedly obtained NTT uniforms
and ID badges, and put together a tapping manual for
its security and recruiting teams. Favorite targets
were rich potential donors and Aum enemies. Opponents
claim at least seven wiretaps were found in homes
belonging to relatives and others opposed to the
cult.
It was the police that most occupied the minds of
top Aum officials. Fortunately for Aum, its
recruiting had paid off here, too at least a half
dozen members of Japan's finest had joined up. One
top official admitted that two of them belonged to
the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department, widely
considered the elite of Japanese law enforcement.
Shadow government
Infiltrating the Japanese establishment was not
enough Aum needed arms for Armageddon. The cult,
now endowed with millions of tax-free dollars,
launched crash programs to develop weapons of mass
destruction. Aum's scientists had built a vast
automated plant to mass-produce sarin, the Nazi nerve
gas that would prove their weapon of choice. Others
worked on synthesizing mustard gas, VX, and other
chemical killers. In cult biolabs equipped with the
latest gear, technicians cultured agents that cause
anthrax, Q-fever, and botulism. At the same time,
assembly lines were set up to produce 1,000 Russian
machine guns and tons of TNT. All this would enable
Aum to survive apocalypse and inherit the Earth.
In cult publications and radio broadcasts, Aum
experts described in macabre detail the weapons of
the future and how their followers alone would
survive Armageddon. Murai spoke admirably of the
plasma cannon, which concentrates microwaves into a
single beam of 4,000 degrees centigrade. The weapon
burns away living tissue while leaving structures
intact. Such a weapon has been researched by the
Pentagon, but Murai claimed the Americans had already
deployed it in the Gulf War, evaporating Iraqi
soldiers by the thousands. That was why, he said,
only 8,000 bodies were found, while Iraq claimed it
had lost 100,000.
Murai also claimed the superheroes of Aum would
survive this devastating attack. "Enlightened
believers produce an electromagnetic field,"
Murai explained. "When the plasma from outside
affects your body, you can take it as your own
energy, and you will be more powerful."
Another "ultimate" weapon was the
"fixed-star reflection cannon," which Aum
swore Russia was then developing. A stationary
satellite focuses solar energy onto an Earthbound
target. The intense heat melts everything in its path
except Aum believers. "Enlightened believers
can separate their bodily senses from their
consciousness," an Aum text explained. "So
they can withstand the high heat that would burn
ordinary people. That's why they have been trained by
submerging for 15 minutes in hot water of 50 degrees
centigrade (122 degrees Fahrenheit)."
Like the indestructible comic-book heroes of their
youth, Aum followers believed that they alone would
rise from the ashes of Armageddon. Then, as Asahara
prophesied, they would build the millennial Kingdom
of Aum. But what would the kingdom look like? How
would it be governed?
Endowed with superpowers, armed with weapons of
mass destruction, Aum lacked only one thing: a state.
In the summer of 1994, Asahara ordered a sweeping
reorganization, setting up the cult as a shadow
government. At least on paper, Aum now resembled a
cross between a medieval theocracy and postwar Japan.
A constitution was drafted, spelling out the
structure of the new nation and the duties of its
subjects. Citizens, for example, "shall be
liable to military service in order to protect the
sacred law."
To govern the republic, Aum set up 24 ministries
that eerily reflected the Japanese state its members
were so eager to destroy. The cult's chief scientist,
Murai, became minister of science and technology. The
other appointments were not without irony. Kiyohide
Hayakawa, the engineer intent on giving Aum the means
of mass destruction, was made minister of
construction. Microbiologist Seiichi Endo, who spent
his time culturing bacterial weapons, rose to
minister of health and welfare.
Aum Supreme Truth, of course, was no democracy,
nor was the state it sought to create. The millennial
kingdom was from here on dubbed The Supreme State,
leaving no doubt about who would inherit the world.
And on top of the great empire, ruling serenely over
the cosmos, sat Shoko Asahara, now deemed by law the
Holy Monk Emperor.
Death ray
Next to Murai's Ministry of Science, no part of
Aum was more vital to the cult than the Ministry of
Intelligence and its 25-year-old chief, Yoshihiro
Inoue. And no mission was more important to Inoue
than the pilfering of sensitive data from Japan's top
high-tech companies. To the enterprising Inoue, the
Mitsubishi Heavy Industries compound in Hiroshima was
a virtual library of classified military secrets. MHI
designed tanks, escort ships, and nuclear power
plants, and its Hiroshima facility was a
technological gold mine one that Inoue was about
to plunder.
It was about 11:30 p.m. on December 28, 1994, a
dead hour in the middle of the slow holiday season.
While millions of Japanese lived it up at overseas
resorts, Inoue's five-man team sped through MHI's
front gate in a rental car. Sergeant Tatsuya Toyama,
a member of an elite Japanese paratrooper unit, was
at the wheel. Inoue sat beside him. There was another
paratrooper in the back, one more curled up in the
trunk.
Also in the backseat sat cult member Hideo
Nakamoto, a 38-year-old MHI senior researcher.
Nakamoto had provided Inoue's squad with the MHI
uniforms they now wore, and his company ID ensured an
easy passage through the 24-hour security at MHI's
gates. Once inside the compound, Toyama stood guard,
swinging a flashlight. The others walked swiftly into
the building.
Then the thieving began. Inoue's team logged onto
MHI's mainframe and downloaded megabytes of
restricted files onto a laptop computer. What they
couldn't fit on disks was photocopied or simply
pilfered. Among Inoue's loot was a description of
laser sighting devices for tank guns, and a document
marked "Top Secret to Company Outsiders"
containing data on laser technology to enrich
uranium. Afterward, Toyama helped carry cardboard
boxes full of documents and disks out to the car.
Then Inoue and his squad drove out the way they'd
come in through the front gate.
Breaking into MHI was so easy that Inoue returned
again and again. The information he stole was
funneled back to Aum scientists, injecting new energy
into the sect's grandiose designs to develop a
dazzling variety of futuristic weapons.
Chief among them was the laser, which Aum had been
studying for several years. In fact, just two months
before the MHI break-in, residents at Mount Fuji had
witnessed a bizarre sight a sharp beam of red
light streaking across the night sky. It was 4 inches
wide and emanated from one of Aum's buildings. For
two hours, the beam was locked on to another sect
facility about a mile away. Cultists later told
locals that Aum was merely conducting a "laser
irradiation experiment." The real reason was
less reassuring. They were out to make laser weapons.
The cult's firearms factory had used laser cutters
capable of slicing through iron plates since April
1994. But the guru had long been obsessed with the
dark beauty of lasers. "I believe that in the
end a giant laser gun will be developed,"
Asahara preached in 1993. "When the power of
this laser is increased, a perfectly white belt, or
sword, can be seen. This is the sword referred to in
the Book of Revelation. This sword will destroy
virtually all life." The guru's passion for
lasers was easy to understand. After all, what was a
high-tech death cult without the classic "death
ray" seen in a thousand sci-fi movies?
During the Cold War, the US and the Soviet Union
spent billions of dollars trying to create such a
"death ray." With the guru's blessing, Aum
was spending millions, too. But lasers were just one
of myriad technologies preoccupying the sect's mad
scientists. On one encrypted optical disk, they had
compiled a wish list of cutting-edge research:
studies on advanced liquid and gel explosives,
blueprints of rocket ignitions, data on missile
targeting systems for fighter jets Aum wanted it
all.
But while Aum prepared for Armageddon, the
extraordinary happened Armageddon came early. On
January 17, 1995, an earthquake of awesome power
struck Kobe in central Japan, toppling freeways,
crumbling apartment blocks, and igniting a firestorm
of destruction. More than 5,500 people perished in
what became Japan's worst disaster since World War
II.
For Asahara, the Kobe earthquake was stunning
proof of the coming apocalypse. Aum's chief scientist
Hideo Murai, however, did not believe the quake was
an act of God. He was a scientist after all, and
scientists have rational explanations.
"There is a strong possibility that the Kobe
earthquake was activated by electromagnetic power or
some other device that exerts energy into the
ground," Murai later told an assembly of
international reporters. This device, he added, was
possibly operated by the US military. Murai's
attempts to explain further were drowned out by
derisive snorts from reporters. A device capable of
triggering massive seismic movements sounded
hopelessly sci-fi and far-fetched. But as it turned
out, Aum wasn't the first to be fascinated by the
idea.
"Nikoratesura" is the closest Japanese
rendering of Nikola Tesla (1856 1943), the brilliant
Croatian-American who discovered alternating current
and pioneered radio, the electric motor, and remote
control. Tesla studied the possibility of
transmitting electric energy over long distances by
taking advantage of electromagnetic waves emitted by
Earth in effect, using the planet as a giant,
wireless conductor. In 1899 at Colorado Springs,
Tesla lit hundreds of lamps about 40 kilometers away
using a large induction coil, a device that produces
an electric current by changing magnetic fields. He
afterward claimed that the same method could in
theory be used to send a signal through the Earth
that could be picked up on the other side.
Nikola Tesla's remarkable mind led him to a field
we now know as telegeodynamics. Here his theories
grew extraordinary. He believed that by manipulating
the Earth's electromagnetic forces, one could
dramatically affect both climate and seismic
activity; in other words, play god. Tesla warned that
his discovery could split the planet in two
"split it as a boy would split an apple and
forever end the career of man."
Although many geologists dismiss this notion as
comic-book nonsense, recent research has shown that
earthquakes are preceded by unusual emissions of
low-frequency electromagnetic waves, produced by
small cracks in lower layers of plates in the Earth's
crust. Tesla's ideas were in fact taken very
seriously by both the US and Soviet militaries.
Portions of the man's papers, seized by the US
government after his death, remain classified even
today. Some US experts reportedly believe the Soviets
used a "seismic weapon" to trigger an
earthquake in Beijing in 1977.
An earthquake machine! It's not hard to see why
the idea excited Murai. He wanted to know more, and
that's where the six members of the Japan Secret
Nikola Tesla Association came in. A month after the
Kobe quake, the members began a series of trips to
the Tesla museum in Belgrade, where many of his
papers reside. There they searched for data on
seismology and electromagnetism. Meanwhile, the
cult's New York office contacted the International
Tesla Society in the US, asking for information on
Tesla's inventions, patents and writings. The Kobe
tremor may have been an act of God. Hideo Murai was
determined that Japan's next earthquake would be an
act of Aum.
The deed
The hit squad drove out of Mount Fuji at sunset.
There were five of them one doctor and four vice
ministers in the Science and Technology Ministry. The
men chosen to unleash terror in the heart of Tokyo
were among Aum's, and Japan's, brightest minds.
The first was Dr. Ikuo Hayashi. As the brains
behind Aum's clinics, the good doctor had coldly
presided over the wholesale doping, torture, and
death of many followers. Still, he found it hard
crossing the line from gross medical malpractice to
mass murder, if later reports are to be believed.
"I didn't know why I was chosen for the
attack," Dr. Hayashi said. "I wanted to
refuse, but the atmosphere didn't allow it."
Less likely to refuse the mission was the squad's
second member, Yasuo Hayashi. The good doctor's
namesake was a 6-foot-tall ethnic Korean who had
grown up in Tokyo. Hayashi was a mean-looking
37-year-old with Neanderthal brows and a fur of acne
on each cheek. His qualifications included an
electrical engineering degree and a criminal record
of substance abuse. His fascination with the
supernatural had led him to India, then to drugs, and
then to Aum. He became a monk in 1988, and proved
adept at abduction, wiretapping, and intimidation.
The subway attack would earn him a new nickname from
Japan's media: "Killer Hayashi."
The next man, 30-year-old Kenichi Hirose, had
graduated at the top of his class in applied physics
from Waseda University in 1987. He turned down a job
at a big electronics firm to join the cult, but often
returned to the university to question his professor
about laser research. The professor was baffled by
Hirose's choice. "Floating in the air violates
the law of inertia," the professor once said,
referring to Asahara's trick of appearing to
levitate. "Why would a student of physics
believe such an outrageous thing?" Hirose
replied: "Because I saw it."
Masato Yokoyama, 31, was another graduate in
applied physics. His classmates at Tokai University
outside Tokyo remember him as a quiet student who
dressed in preppy clothes and enjoyed bowling. On
graduation he joined an electronic parts maker and
secretly attended Aum yoga classes. Then one day
Yokoyama presented his boss with a cult book.
"Please read this and study," he said. On
the last page of the book, he had scribbled:
"Those who handle this book carelessly will pay
for it." Soon after, Yokoyama quit work and
joined Aum "to save mankind," he told
his protesting family.
The fifth and final attacker was 27-year-old Toru
Toyoda. He studied particle physics as a graduate
student at Tokyo University, Japan's top school,
where his copious note taking made him popular among
classmates. Toyoda was relatively outgoing. Before
joining the cult, he entertained his fellow lab rats
with a mean impersonation of Shoko Asahara during
Aum's 1990 election campaign. The guru had the last
laugh. Toyoda was converted to Aum by another Tokyo
University student and, in the spring of 1992, signed
up.
On the morning of March 20, 1995, these five Aum
members blended with the rush-hour crowds in Tokyo's
subways. The cultists boarded five trains at
different ends of the vast network. They knew the
exact times and locations for each train and each
station. They also knew that by 8:15 a.m., all five
trains would converge upon Kasumigaseki, the center
of power in Japan, home to the bureaucracies that
rule more than 125 million Japanese.
It was here that Aum's high-tech terrorists would
strike their preemptive blow to paralyze the
Japanese state and begin the cult's historic mission
of world domination. Police were threatening to raid
cult facilities, leaving Aum no choice but to attack
first.
By 7:45 a.m., each member of the hit squad sat in
his designated train, clutching a cheap umbrella and
a package of sarin wrapped in newspaper. A few stops
from Kasumigaseki, the cultists laid their bags on
the car floors and punctured them with the umbrella
tips. Then, as the car doors opened, they darted into
crowds and out of the station, where getaway cars
waited.
Only one cultist seemed aware of the carnage
ahead. Aum physician Hayashi was standing on the
Chiyoda line platform. The doctor was having a
last-minute fit of morals. He looked around and saw a
young girl waiting in line behind him. Go away, he
thought. If you get on here, you'll die.
The train pulled up. Dr. Hayashi boarded the first
car, as instructed, and sat close to the door. He
caught the eye of a woman in her 30s and quickly
looked away. You too will be dead soon, he thought.
His sarin package was wrapped in two newspapers: Red
Flag, the Japanese Communist Party daily, and Seikyo
Shimbun, published by a rival religious group. Dr.
Hayashi hoped the choice of reading would later throw
police off.
His station was announced over the intercom, and
the train slowed with a lurch of brakes. Kasumigaseki
was now four stops away. Dr. Hayashi placed the
package at his feet and stuck the umbrella in several
times. He felt one of the bags rupture, but wasn't
sure about the second one. He wasn't waiting around
to find out.
By 8:10 a.m., Dr. Hayashi and the four other
cultists were back on the street, looking for their
drivers. Soon after, the cars were nudging through
morning traffic, heading back to the hideout. In the
tunnels below, 11 bags of nerve agent on five subway
cars thundered toward the city center, along with
thousands of unlucky commuters.
Within minutes, the air in the cars was thick with
choking, invisible fumes, and passengers were
groaning with nausea. On one train, a man kicked the
offensive package onto the platform when the doors
opened, but not before two commuters collapsed on the
ground, their bodies shuddering with spasms.
Incredibly, the train did not stop, but pulled out a
minute later, bang on time. It would make two more
stops until the growing panic inside the cars reached
critical mass. Passengers tumbled from the train,
gagging and vomiting, clutching handkerchiefs across
their faces, gasping for breath. Five collapsed on
the platform, foaming at the mouth. Three others lay
inside the car, their bodies jerking violently. As
commuters staggered toward the exits with pinhole
vision and crashing headaches, an announcement echoed
across the station: "Evacuate, evacuate,
evacuate."
Above ground it was pandemonium. Pavements and
roads were blanketed with casualties. The victims
were eerily quiet the nerve gas had crippled their
lungs and stolen their voices. Soon ambulance sirens
cut through the silence, and TV helicopters throbbed
overhead. Even as police tried to work out what had
happened, more reports were coming in. Another subway
line had been hit Š and another, and another.
Soon, wave after wave of blind, disoriented
victims flooded nearby hospitals, baffling doctors
with their symptoms. Meanwhile, Tokyo's brutally
efficient subway continued to spread Aum's killer
chemical. One train passed through Kasumigaseki three
times before its deadly cargo was discovered.
By the time the subway system finally ground to a
halt, the whole nation reeled at the news. The death
toll eventually climbed to 12. More than 5,500 were
afflicted, many with appalling injuries. At least two
passengers now slept eternally in vegetative comas.
One woman was admitted to a hospital in agony after
the nerve agent had fused her contact lenses to her
eyeballs. In the end, she had both eyes surgically
removed.
Preview of the 21st century?
A psychopathic band of brilliant scientists, bent
on indiscriminate murder and the world's end Aum's
story seems more at home in the world of science
fiction novels and TV thrillers. Yet it happened in
real life. More frightening still, it will happen
again.
"We've definitely crossed a threshold,"
warns terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman. "This is
the cutting edge of high-tech terrorism for the year
2000 and beyond. It's the nightmare scenario that
people have quietly talked about for years coming
true."
In the weeks following Aum's subway attack,
terrorists in Chile and the Philippines threatened to
unleash their own chemical arms. In America, Ohio
traffic cops pulled over an outspoken white
supremacist and found three vials of the bacteria
that cause bubonic plague. Meanwhile, two members of
the Minnesota Patriots Council one of scores of
heavily armed US militia groups were convicted of
planning to use ricin, a biological toxin, to kill
federal agents. The trial was a sign of the times:
the men were the first convicted under a 1989 US law,
the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act.
It would be easy to dismiss Aum as a peculiarly
Japanese case, and indeed, there are conditions in
Japan that shaped the cult's unique character. The
straitjacket schools and workplaces, the absentee
fathers and alienated youth no doubt helped fuel
Shoko Asahara's rise to power. But to suggest that
what happened in Japan could not happen elsewhere
would be a dangerous mistake. Ineffective and
bungling police, fanatic sects, and disaffected
scientists are hardly limited to the Japanese.
Aum's forays into conventional weapons its
explosives and AK-74s were alarming enough, as
were the cult's eerie experiments with electrodes,
drugs, and mind control. But where Asahara and his
mad scientists charted new ground was in their
pursuit of the weapons of mass destruction. This,
unfortunately, will prove Aum Supreme Truth's lasting
legacy: to be the first independent group, without
state patronage or protection, to produce biochemical
weapons on a major scale. Never before had a
subnational group gained access to so deadly an
arsenal.
The word is out. A college education, some basic
lab equipment, recipes downloaded from the Internet
for the first time, ordinary people can create
extraordinary weapons. Technology and training have
simply become too widespread, too decentralized to
stop a coming era of do-it yourself machines for mass
murder. We are reaching a new stage in terror, in
which the most fanatic and unstable among us can
acquire the most powerful weapons.
Surf the net...
...And watch our goverment
