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The Aum Cult, the Cult of Poison Gas
Scribbling found in notebook
kept by Aum Shinrikyo "intelligence minister"
Yoshihiro Inoue
When police, following a trail of melons, finally caught up with the
Guru of Gas, they tried to take his pulse. All he said was, "Don't
touch me. I don't even let my disciples touch me."
Shoko Asahara may not have permitted his 40,000 followers to lay
hands on him, but he did let them drink his used bathwater. Even
his blood and his--eeewww--semen. For a price. The bathwater,
known to members of Aum Shinrikyo as "miracle pond," was one of
the few beverages permitted to the cultists. Asahara let it go for
about 200 bucks a pop. His blood was somewhat pricier. A few
swallows went for over $10,000 -- the same price as the special
electrode-fitted cap on sale to Aumsters that let them tune in to
their master's brainwaves.
But those heady days are over, now. Just fond memories for the
members of Aum "Supreme Truth" (the rough English translation of
"Shinrikyo"). Tuesday, May 16 was what the Japanese press had
been eagerly anticipating as "X-Day," the day that Japan's police
descended on an Aum-owned building called "The Sixth Satian,"
and found 40-year-old Asahara, self-proclaimed "Holy Pope" of the
religious sect- turned-doomsday cult-turned-latter-day-I.G. Farben,
lying prostrate in a cramped capsule hanging from the third floor
ceiling. On the floor of the little compartment was over $10,000
worth of Japanese yen. Asahara clung to the cash as if it were a
teddy bear as police dragged him away.
Almost two months after the March 20 poison gas attack on
Tokyo's subways killed 12, sickened 5,000 and disrupted the
morning commute for countless others, the bad guy was, at last,
busted.
A horde of reporters camped out for several days around the Sixth
Satian ("satians" are supposedly the elemental truths of Hinduism--
but Aum's "satian" buildings weren't exactly what the Hindus had in
mind; the "Seventh Satian," was revealed during police raids as a
covert chemical warfare facility). When Asahara was finally loaded
into a police van, crowds gathered on highway overpasses to watch
it go by and TV helicopters followed its progress from their vantage
point in the skies. All very O.J.-esque.
But while America fixes its gaze on the football star and his messy
domestic dispute, folks in Japan have a little more to fret about in
Aum. Since Asahara's arrest, Aum is looking less like a zany, quasi-
Buddhist mega-commune and more like an all-too-real plot to
overthrow Japan's government.
From the various confessions they've taken, the cops now say that
the subway attack plot was hatched two years ago, as a way to help
fulfill Asahara's doomsday prophecies. But as public as its become,
to the point where its doe-eyed telegenic spokesman Fumihiro Joyu
is giving wet dreams to teenage girls across Japan, Aum remains
mysterious.
The Japanese weekly press (the weeklies are Japan's sole bastion of
crusading and every-so-often reckless journalism) has been filled
with speculation about Aum's connection to the South Korean
Unification Church--the Moonies, which itself has long had strong
ties, even its origins, in the Korean CIA. This same speculation has
extended beyond the pulpy pages of the weeklies. Last week,
journalist Takashi Tachibana asserted the Moonie-Aum connection
in a TV interview, as well as widespread links between Aum and
prominent politicians.
Tachibana didn't cite any evidence, but he does have his credibility
to ride on. He's the journalist whose revelations played a leading
role in bringing down the government of Lockheed-scandal-
connected Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka.
One weekly reported that Asahara's own father is Korean. The
conservative daily press and TV won't touch that one, for fear of
stirring up anti-Korean resentment and, possibly, alienating the
South Korean government which Japan has recently been bending
over backwards to befriend. It was reported that, when the
crackdown on Aum began, the cult gave some of its assets to
another, unnamed religious organization for safekeeping. The
Moonies, perhaps?
Then there Aum's political contacts. The Sunday Mainichi
magazine reported that Asahara developed his connections to
Russian bigwigs with the help of a Japanese Parliamentarian. More
vague, but even more intriguing, Shin Kanemaru, the one-time
kingmaker who used to receive bribes so vast that the cash had to
be delivered in a wheelbarrow, owned a number of gold bars that
didn't bear the official goverment seal. Aum was in possession of
similarly unstamped gold bars, which has led the press to wonder if
the same forces that backed Kanemaru's reign also financed Aum.
While it's true that Aum pulled the old "turn over your worldly
possessions" trick on its followers--mostly the housewives and
elderly women among them--there's no way that Asahara could have
amassed the sums required to build the massive arsenal of
weaponry and ultrasophisticated chemical and biological warfare
facilities that have now been uncovered by bilking little old ladies.
Or by selling his semen.
There has also been speculation aplenty that Asahara, whose
30,000 Russian devotees were thrice the total of his Japanese
disciples, had something on Boris Yeltsin. Could Aum have been
channelling cash to the boisterous Russian neo-capitalist? Asahara
seemed welcome in Moscow, with whom he was negotiating to buy
laser weapons technology and other goodies. His visits were backed
by a major Russian university and he used to do a radio show from
Russia that would reach Japan. The day after the subway gassing,
there was a fire in Aum's Moscow office.
The connections grow ever more sinsiter. The cult had verified
links to the military. Something like 60 members of Japan's Self
Defense Force (the de facto military under Japan's postwar pacifist
constitution) belonged to the Aum organization and some are
suspected of tipping Asahara to the coming police raids. At least
two, according to the weekly, Shukan Bunshun operated within the
cult's "chemical unit." One 38-year-old officer--the same one who
gave Asahara a non-classified chemical weapons textbook--also
allegedly handed the guru a classified document with information
on the SDF's helicopter brigades and missile capabilities.
The cult owned an enormous Russian military helicopter and was
looking to buy more, leading police to the farly obvious conclusion
that Asahara envisioned his own helicopter strike force.
Revelations about the cult's ambitions get freakier by the day. On
May 25, the national Yomiuri Shimbun daily reported that six Aum
members journeyed in March to the Nikola tesla Museum in
Belgrade, Yugoslavia. According to police, Aum's internal
newsletters often discussed Tesla's theories--Tesla of course being
the overlooked genius of modern engineering whose discoveries,
his devotees say, could revolutionize the industrial world. Aum was
especially interested, according to the police sources, in Tesla's
theories about how to trigger earthquakes artificially.
As if that wasn't weird enough, a TV report said that an Aum group
had also visited Zaire last December, and that Aum publications
showed a keen interest in the Ebola virus.
The Rosetta Stone to all this bad craziness could be the
assassination of its "science and technology minister" on April 23
(see Conspiracy Currents No. 7 for a contemporaneous account).
Hideo Murai, 36, was an accomplished chemist who left academia
to join Aum and head its chemical production facilities. He was
killed--on live TV, no less--by a Korean member of a four-member
far-right group who was allegedly motivated by outrage at Aum's
dirty deeds.
It's pretty much the consensus throughout Japan that Murai's
murder was an inside job. The biggest story to come out relating to
his death was that, as his blood was draining away, he whispered to
a paramedic that he had been murdered by "Judas." If so, what does
that say about Aum's connections? The Korean killer had ties to
Japan's entrenched organized crime syndicate, the yakuza. The
Japanese far right and the yakuza have been cozy for decades and
yakuza/ultraright influence is often the unseen force guiding
Japanese politics (check out Conspiracy Currents No. 2 for a
summary of the relationship). Police arrested Kenji Kamimine, a
top member of the Hane-gumi syndicate, in connection with
Murai's stabbing. The Hane-gumi is (or was--it disbanded on May
14 after Kamimine's arrest) a subsidiary of the Yamaguchi-gumi,
the top yakuza crime family. ("Gumi" means, essentially, "gang.")
According to police, Murai's accused stabber, whose Japanese
name is Hiroyuki Jo, worked at Yamaguchi-gumi headquarters and
may have been a member of Hane-gumi.
Jo also had connections to Aum. He ran an events-promotion firm
and had done business with Aum on four occasions. One of the
Japanese tabloids, Tokyo Sports reported that Jo or someone who
looked just like him, had actually been sighted at an Aum gathering
a few years ago. The more credible Tokyo Shimbun daily reported
that a cult member had been in contact with Jo prior to the murder.
Later, Japanese television reported that an unidentified top member
of Aum told police that the cult's number two man, Kiyohide
Hayakawa, had commented shortly before Murai's murder that he
had "taken care of everything." The story was that the cult
leadership had not been at all amused at Murai's public admission
that fould odors emenating from an Aum building were the result of
chemical experiments. Murai said they were making fertilizer, but
even that was too close to comfort and according the source,
Asahara and his top henchmen decided to shut up their chief
scientist for good.
One of the many types of chemicals Aum allegedly produced was
an amphetamine-like stimulants and one theory has it that Aum
sold these drugs to the yakuza. It came out in April that the cult did
have a business "liason" to the crime syndicate (see Conspiracy
Currents No. 6).
There are also a number of Zapruder-filmish oddities about Murai's
murder. The tapes show that Jo stabbed Murai first in the arm,
which startled the chemist but didn't stop him. Murai was
surrounded by Aum bodyguards, but even as the bewlidered
chemist examined his bloodied arm for several seconds, his
protectors did nothing. Some observers claim that the tape shows
one bodyguard actually extending an arm to block Murai's path
after the first, non-fatal stab. Rumors are floating around Tokyo
that some of the bodygurdas were seen talking to Jo, who'd been
hanging around the Aum offices all day, earlier that afternoon.
When the gas attack struck Tokyo's subways, police had already
been planning a crackdown on the group, spurred on the by the
daylight abduction of a Tokyo notary worker who had tried to talk
his sister out of joining the cult. Two days after grabbing the guru,
police picked up Takeshi Matsumoto, the Aum stalwart who's the
chief suspect in that kidnapping. The notary worker has never been
found, but according to the confession of Aum's chief doctor, he
died in Aum's clutches.
Nor was the Tokyo subway affair the only gas attack. On June 27,
1994 in the somnolent mountain town of Matsumoto in central
Japan, sarin fumes wafted through the night from a source
unknown. Seven people died and 500 more got sick. Though police
were puzzled, suspicious eyes turned to Aum. The cult had recently
purchaed a considerable amount of land in the town using a front
company and the sellers were suing to get it back. The case was in
court when the gas attack occurred and as a result of the calamity, it
was postponed.
The aroma of Aum had been sniffed before. A year earlier residents
in Tokyo near one of Aum's buildings complained that noxious
fumes from the sructure were causing an outbreak of illnesses in
the area. Then, a month after the Matsumoto incident, people in
Kamikuishiki--home of Asahara's headquarters where he was
eventually arrested--noticed a nasty stench from one of Aum's
buildings. No one died or even became very sick. But leaves around
the town began to turn brown. Investigators found traces of
phosphorous around the offending building, though they wouldn't
search the place because Aum still claimed religious exemption.
In the familiar M.O. of all cults, from LaRouchies to militias,
conspiracy theories served as a unifying force against the hostile
outside (some might say, "real") world. Asahara's conspiratological
rants took on a decidedly anti-American tone. The U.S. military
was putting Aum under non-stop assault, Asahara preached. But his
paranoia bore a peculiar twist. He was obsessed with gas.
"We've been under deadly gas attacks since 1988," he said in an
April, 1994 sermon. "Gases are sprayed from helicopters or planes
wherever I go." But maybe that wasn't such a terrible fate. In a
sermon a month earlier, hed called it a "heavenly principle" to
"terminate one's life by using sarin and other gases developed
during World War II."
In a radio broadcast that December, Asahara informed his
followers, "I come under a gas attack wherever I travel and jet
fighters from U.S. forces fly around Mt. Fuji."
More than all talk, Asahara apparently acted out his theories. On
January 4 this year, Aum's attorney announced that the sect's
headquarters had been subjected to "a mustard gas attack from
outside." A gaseous PR blitz followed, with Aum releasing to major
media outlets a 48-minute video titled, "Slaughtered Lamb: A
Record of Poison Gas Oppression."
The video showed visual evidence of the gas attack--a lot of
scorched earth around the cult's compound. Police now say that
Aumsters sprayed their own lawns with weed killer. No mustard
gas was ever found. Even so, four days after the Tokyo subway
gassings, Asahara was quoted in an Aum handbill claiming to be
"very sick now because of poison gas attacks on me." Perhaps
Asahara finally decided to retaliate and unleash a gas attack of his
own.
Two days after his arrest Asahara was taking a "they weren't just
following orders" approach to his defense. He blamed his rogue
underlings over whom, he protests, he cannot maintain full time
supervision.
"I have so many followers, I don't keep track of everything they've
done," he reportedly told his interrogators. One might think that
gassing thousands of people on a crowded subway might be a detail
that would merit some attention. Though there's no doubt that some
in his flock were prone to fits of mischief. One of his more
enthusiastic rogue underlings, if rogue they be, Yoshihiro Inoue, is
suspected of leading the group that carried out the "commando"
subway gassing. Inoue was nabbed a day before Asahara, riding in a
car loaded with combustible chemicals. Apparently, he was cooking
up some kind of big bomb (the cult is said to have exhausted its
sarin supply) that would distract police in their quest to apprehend
Asahara.
The Guru of Gas Gets Got
Once the police figured out that Shoko Asahara was hiding
somewhere in the Sixth Satian, it still took them four hours to dig
him out. They'd heard that he was hiding in a secret compartment
sandwiched between the second and third floors. But there was no
such secret hideaway. Instead, they located Asahara sealed inside a
coffin-like cubicle suspended from the ceiling.
One of the clues that keyed the cops in to Asahara's presence in the
building was the Holy Pope's sweet tooth for melons. His disciples
aren't allowed to eat them, but he can't contain his craving. Asahara
recklessly dispatched his flunkies to a local fruit stand repeataedly,
to satisfy his urge to snack. (Last minute update: Four days after
his arrest, Asahara protested to his inteerogators that he was being
misrepresented in the media as some kind of fanatical melon-
nosher. Not so! says he. "I not only like melons," he told police,
"but all fruits.") When police took Asahara into custody they also,
for some reason, opened his family refrigerator (Asahara's wife
heads Aum's "Telecommunications Ministry" and his 12-year-old
daughter is listed as "Secretary General to the Pope"). They found it
stocked with melons. They also found such verboten-to-believers
delicacies as deep-fried prawns, junk food and orange juice.
(Another last minute update: Asahara also disavowed all meat and
fish products found in the fridge as not for him. "I don't eat any
kind of meat," the guru declaimed.)
Of course, those were but the most amusing of the many morsels
turned up in the course of the eight-week anti-Aum law
enforcement onslaught. Asahara prophesied that Aum would run
Japan by the turn of the century, and it's now disturbingly clear that
they were not skimping on preparations for the coup d'etat. Inside
buildings designated as religious facilities were full-scale chemical
and biological warfare laboratories. At one location, Aum's mad
scientists were attempting to cultivate botulism and if the
allegations against the cult hold up, it looks like they succeeded in
synthesizing sarin. In the 11 years since Asahara--then known by
his given name of Chizuo Matsumoto--opened a health food shop
and yoga school in Tokyo, his family business has exploded into an
international war machine and country-within-a-country in Japan.
It's like Dr. No come to life. Police even found a stainless steel tank
suitable for storing acid in a secret basement under an Aum
building and they wonder if that answers the question of how Aum
disposed of the bodies of its kidnap victims.
Aum commandos received paramiltary training from elite Russian
miltary units. It's almost surprising that the police didn't find a full-
fledged H-bomb somehwere among Aum's detritus. They turned up
nearly everything else from AK-47s to a bio-engineering facility
that was set up to manufacture botulism--a small vial of which,
properly disseminated, would wipe out all of Tokyo.
Aum was spooky from the start. The mostly-blind Asahara was first
arrested soon after opening his health-food business for peddling
an "all-purpose elixir" that consisted of little more than ground-up
orange peels. Changing his name to something more ethereal-
sounding than "Chizuo Matsumoto," he spread the word that he'd
studied Buddhism in the Himalayas and become the first Japanese
to attain enlightenment. It was his enlightened state that, more
recently, allowed his occasionally emaciated followers to excuse
his excesses of appetite. After one attains enlightenment, according
to the word of Aum, it's chow time.
Nonetheless, the sect seemed innocuous enough until November of
1989--just three months after Aum received the official government
OK as a bona-fide religious group--when a lawyer who'd been
representing clients who had a beef with Aum disappeared, along
with his wife and infant son. They've never been found and Aum
denies any involvement in their disappearance, just as the cult
officially still denies involvment in gas attacks or any wrongdoing.
The following year Asahara and a bunch of other high-level
Aumsters formed their own political party, called "The True
Teaching Party," and ran for parliament. At their rallies, hundreds
of devotees would show up wearing Halloweeny plastic masks of
Asahara's hirsute, pudgy mug. This was not much of a campiagn
strategy. Come election day, the Aum contingent was soundly
thrashed.
It a their political humiliation, Aum began to metamorphose from,
in the words of Japanese journalist Shoko Egawa, "a bunch of naive
people enthusiastic about their religion to a group of gloomy but
aggressive paranoids."
Now that he's in custody, Asahara has said little. Whenever police
have raise the subject of the subway gassing, he replies by griping
about his supposed liver ailment. Dr. No meets Woody Allen.
Lately, he's taken to flattering his interrogators, telling them they
"look cool, like detectives on a TV drama."
But his henchmen are flipping like burgers. Police say that Aum's
chief physician, the man who surgically removed fingerprints from
top Aum officials, has confessed to bringing sarin onto the subways
in plastic bags and then perforating them with specially sharpened
umbrellas to release the poison. Aum's top chemist (at least the top
one left alive) Masami Tsuchiya, 'fessed to brewing sarin--and to
using it in the Matsumoto gassing. He fingered Murai (an easy
target at this point) as the man giving direct orders not only to make
the Nazi nerve gas, but to "try it in Matsumoto."
Murai is taking a lot of posthumous heat. He's now identified as the
official who relayed Asahara's orders to carry out the subway
attack--for purposes of "mind control." He also, according to the
various Amu-member confessions leaked to the media, stage-
managed a dress rehearsal for the gassing using empty plastic bags,
then supplied the "commando" team with bags full of real sarin for
the attack itself.
The day after Asahara's arrest the sect's chief doctor (the
aforementioned fingerprint-remover) Ikuo Hayashi, dropped a
bombshell. He admitted, police say, that not only was the cult
responsible for kidnapping the notary worker early in 1995, but the
man died while being held captive by Aum. Hayashi said he was
ordered to kill the man by lethal injection, but found him dead
before he could stick the needle in.
Hayashi has been one of the most vocal Aum devotees now in
custody when it comes to recounting the sarin attack. In an
admission that can't help but restore one's faith in human nature,
Hayashi admitted that "my conscience really stung me" before
puncturing his sarin bag with a sharpened umbrella and stepping
off the train.
"I looked around and saw all those commuters and I thought, 'I'm a
doctor. I work to save people's lives.'" But the cardiac specialist and
graduate of one of Japan's best med schools went ahead and
released the gas anyway.
The arrest of Asahara, who according to the various confessions of
Aum top brass leaked by police masterminded the gas attacks (one
story reported that he was given a report on the Matsumoto gassing
and was "pleased" with the results), left many more questions than
it resolved. Where did Aum get the resources to build Asahara's
personal military-industrial complex? Who or what was behind
Aum's plan to take over Japan? Was the subway gassing part of a
plot to destabilize the Japanese government?
The sole certainty: Asahara's arrest did not put an end to Japan's
uneasiness. On X-day itself, a package arrived at the Tokyo
governor's office, addressed to the gov' himself. One of his aides
opened it and it exploded, depriving the unfortunate political
operative of most of his fingers.
Copyright c 1995 by Jonathan Vankin and John Whalen
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