The main compound of the Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult, located in the vicinity of Mount Fuji in Japan. The three-story building in the foreground is Satian 7, where Aum attempted to manufacture large quantities of Sarin. Ventilation pipes can be seen protruding from the side of the building at the lower left.
On the third floor of Satian 7 were a dozen small offices for Aum chemists and engineers, divided by thin partitions and crammed with laboratory equipment, computers, and books on chemistry and weapons technology. Another room contained a bar stocked with bottles of plum, grape, and rice wine. Although Asahara prohibited ordinary members from consuming alcohol, cult leaders held secret drinking parties there.
Day and night, about a hundred Aum members labored in shifts to get the Sarin plant into full operation, but technical problems led to repeated delays. Leaks of toxic fumes from faulty welds caused nosebleeds, eye irritation, and severe fatigue. Meanwhile, the nearby residents of Kamikuishiki village began to smell foul odors reminiscent of burnt plastic. Their dairy cows stopped producing milk and the leaves on the trees bordering the Aum compound wilted and died. Frightened and angry, the villagers called the district police and demanded an investigation, but cult officials denied responsibility for the odors and threatened legal action. Intimidated by Aum’s aggressive tactics and wary of its protected status as a religious organization, the police backed off.
To deliver the tons of Sarin that would be produced in Satian 7, Asahara planned to use a large helicopter to spray the nerve agent over key targets, such as the Japanese Parliament building. Aum’s Russian affiliate company, Mahaposya, bribed senior Russian officials to purchase a MIL Mi-17 military helicopter, which was shipped to the Mount Fuji Center. In December 1993, Asahara sent two cult members to the United States to study for helicopter pilot licenses.
By mid-February 1994, Tsuchiya had synthesized a total of 44 pounds of Sarin in Satian 7 and his personal laboratory in the Kushtigarba prefab next door. Asahara demanded that Satian 7 be ready for mass production by April 25. In the meantime, Aum began using Sarin on an experimental basis as an assassination weapon. The cult’s first target was Daisaku Ikeda, the honorary chairman of the Soka Gakkai, the largest and most popular of Japan’s new religions. Deeply jealous of his rival’s success, Asahara ordered three cultists to murder Ikeda while he gave an evening lecture. The attackers planned to use an industrial sprayer, mounted on a truck parked near the building where Ikeda was speaking, to vaporize two pounds of Sarin. But the device malfunctioned and sprayed the nerve agent on the Aum security chief, Tomomitsu Niimi. He collapsed in convulsions and was saved only by a prompt injection of antidote.
To verify that Sarin would be an effective weapon when delivered as a vapor, Aum scientists conducted field tests at a sheep station in Western Australia that the cult had purchased in April 1993. The 500,000-acre ranch was located near the remote town of Banjawarn, about 375 miles north of Perth. Tsuchiya set up a crude testing facility there, including a small laboratory equipped with computers, Bunsen burners, glassware, and chemicals. Wearing protective suits and gas masks, Aum scientists tethered twenty-nine sheep to wooden stakes and exposed them to lethal mists of Sarin. The animals collapsed, convulsed, and died within minutes, demonstrating the potency of the nerve agent. Several years later, Australian police officials investigating the cult discovered the bones of the dead sheep, scattered over the ground.
IN JUNE 1994, Aum leaders planned their first large-scale operation involving the use of Sarin. A lengthy trial against the cult had recently ended in Matsumoto, a tourist and industrial city at the foot of the Japanese Alps, about a hundred miles northwest of Tokyo. Several local landowners had filed suit against Aum in May 1992, alleging that the cult had fraudulently purchased land through a front company. Although the stated purpose of the land acquisition had been to construct a food-processing plant, the two-story building had turned out to be a new branch office of Aum. Angered by the deception, the original owner had sued to invalidate the sale. A decision on the case by the three-judge panel was scheduled for July 19, and Aum’s legal adviser had predicted that the court would rule against the cult. To prevent this outcome, Asahara ordered the assassination of the judges. He was also eager to test the effectiveness of Sarin against a populated target.
On June 20, Asahara met at his private office in Satian 6 with Aum chief scientist Murai and three other high-ranking cult leaders to discuss the operation. The plotters decided to target the local office of the Nagano District Court. To prepare for the attack, Aum technicians under the direction of mechanical engineer Kazumi Watanabe repaired and improved the Sarin vaporizer. Installed in the back of a customized refrigerator truck, the new system consisted of a steel tank filled with Sarin that was bolted to the truck’s loading platform, an electric heater powered by thirty car batteries that weighed about 1,000 pounds, and a fan that would blow the lethal vapor out through a small window in the side of the vehicle.
Because Matsumoto was experiencing cool temperatures and rain showers, which would reduce the effectiveness of Sarin, the plotters waited for a change in the weather. On June 27, the skies cleared and the temperature soared, and Asahara ordered the cult leaders to take advantage of the hot, dry conditions to stage their attack. That afternnoon, Murai and his team drove the modified refrigerator truck to Matsumoto, followed by a group of lower-ranking cultists in a rented minivan. They took back roads to avoid observation by the highway police and because the weight of the batteries prevented the truck from going more than thirty miles per hour. By the time the team arrived in Matsumoto, the work day was over and the court-house was closed. They therefore decided to attack the judges’ dormitory, which was located in a residential neighborhood called Kaichi Heights on the north side of Matsumoto Castle, a city landmark dating from the sixteenth century.
Around 10:00 p.m., the refrigerator truck pulled into a supermarket parking lot in Kaichi Heights. While the occupants of the minivan kept lookout, the senior cultists prepared for the operation: the team doctor injected them with Sarin antidote, and they donned homemade gas masks consisting of a plastic bag connected by a tube to an oxygen cylinder. The two vehicles then drove to a vacant lot about sixty yards upwind of the judges’ dormitory and parked behind a stand of trees. Surrounding the dormitory were private homes, town houses, and a midrise apartment building owned by the Meiji Insurance Company.
At about 10:40 p.m., with the truck’s headlights turned off but the motor running, the cultists opened the side window, switched on the bank of car batteries, and opened a spigot that began to drip liquid Sarin onto the heating plate. Because the Sarin solution contained excess hydrochloric acid, the drops hitting the hot surface erupted into a dense white mist that filled the interior of the truck with acrid fumes. Struggling for air, one of the cultists began to panic. Soon, however, the fan began to blow the toxic fog out the window. After about twenty minutes, several liters of Sarin had been vaporized, forming a cloud that, hugging the ground, floated on a light breeze in the direction of the judges’ dormitory. The Aum cultists then fled Matsumoto, forgetting in their haste to turn off the vaporizer and spreading the poison further.
After the attackers had left, the wind shifted and began to carry the Sarin cloud away from the judges’ dormitory and toward the Meiji Insurance apartment building. Because the summer night was pleasantly warm, many of the residents had left their doors and windows open, allowing the lethal gas to enter freely. One man was smoking a cigarette on his balcony when he became aware of a pungent, irritating odor and then developed a throbbing headache, dizziness, shortness of breath, and a blurring and darkening of vision. A woman was taking a bath when her nose began to flow with watery mucus; she experienced severe stomach cramps before losing consciousness.
At 11:09 p.m., Yoshiyuki Kono, forty-four, a machinery salesman who lived in a house near the judges’ dormitory, telephoned the Matsumoto Emergency Services to report that his wife had suddenly cried out in pain and then co
llapsed and begun to convulse. Five minutes later, a Fire Department ambulance arrived on the quiet residential street. When Kono came out to meet the emergency medical team, he looked pale and disoriented and said that his wife had fallen into a coma. The ambulance evacuated the stricken couple and their two daughters to Kyoritsu Hospital. During the trip, a paramedic performed CPR on Kono’s wife, but she had already suffered massive brain damage from oxygen starvation.
Over the next few hours, paramedics discovered five residents of Keichi Heights dead in their homes and evacuated some three hundred others to local hospitals, where fifty-four were admitted. When blood tests indicated that the victims had extremely low levels of cholinesterase, doctors treated them symptomatically for organophosphate poisoning. Two more victims died in the hospital, bringing the total number of deaths to seven, but the cause of the incident remained unknown.
AT 5:35 THE NEXT MORNING, June 28, Matsumoto police detectives wearing protective clothing and portable air supplies investigated the crime scene. Under a grove of trees near the vacant lot they found several dead animals, including dogs, sparrows, a dove, and a large number of caterpillars, and the nearby leaves and shrubs were shriveled and discolored. Kono, the first victim to report the incident, became a prime suspect when the police discovered chemicals in his home and dead fish and crayfish in a small pond in his yard. The local police investigators, who lacked scientific or forensic training, theorized that the salesman had been preparing a homemade batch of herbicide for use in his garden when the reaction had gone out of control and generated a cloud of lethal gas.
Although the Matsumoto police pressured Kono to confess, he claimed that he was innocent and had purchased the chemicals for his photography hobby. During a monthlong stay in the hospital to recuperate from minor brain damage, he was hounded relentlessly by the Japanese news media. On July 3, however, analytical chemists at the Nagano Police Science Investigation Institute identified traces of a Sarin breakdown product in samples collected near the vacant lot, where eyewitnesses had seen a van releasing a whitish vapor. Because the chemicals found in Kono’s house could not have reacted to produce Sarin, it was clear that he was innocent and that the real perpetrator remained at large.
ASAHARA WAS PLEASED with the success of the Matsumoto operation— seven dead, more than two hundred injured—and the fact that Aum had not been implicated. Although the three judges targeted by the cult had survived the attack, they were too ill to attend court, forcing an indefinite postponement of the ruling in the land-fraud case. To eliminate any incriminating evidence of Aum’s involvement in the incident, the attack squad had dismantled the truck-mounted vaporizer and cleaned the truck and rental van with decontamination solution. Still, in commemoration of the Matsumoto attack, an anonymous cult member penned a song that appeared in a secret Aum manual on Sarin production. The lyrics ran:
It came from Nazi Germany,
A dangerous little chemical weapon,
Sarin, Sarin!
If you inhale the mysterious vapor,
You will fall with bloody vomit from your mouth.
Sarin, Sarin, Sarin,
The chemical weapon.
Song of Sarin, the Brave.
In the peaceful night of Matsumoto City,
People can be killed, even with our own hands,
Everywhere there are dead bodies.
There! Inhale Sarin, Sarin,
Prepare Sarin! Prepare Sarin!
Immediately poison gas weapons will fill the place.
Spray! Spray! Sarin, the brave Sarin.
Determined to stockpile enough nerve agent for mass-casualty attacks in Tokyo and major U.S. cities, Asahara set a production target for Satian 7 of two tons of Sarin per day. His goal was to amass a total of seventy tons in roughly forty days of operation. Under Murai’s supervision, Satian 7 began to manufacture DMMP, a key Sarin intermediate. Because of the highly corrosive nature of the reactions and the poor quality of the welding, foul-smelling chemicals leaked from pipe fittings, dripped onto the floor, and crystallized on surfaces. Plant workers jury-rigged repairs with buckets, plastic sheeting, and duct tape, all the while suffering from dim vision, nosebleeds, and muscle spasms caused by exposure to the toxic fumes.
On July 9, 1994, a serious malfunction at Satian 7 caused DMMP to overflow the reaction tank and leak into the soil outside the building, causing foul odors and patches of dead vegetation. When villagers complained to the district police, cult officials said they were producing agricultural chemicals and threatened to sue the local authorities for harassment. Four months later, on November 16, another leak occurred, but this time chemists from the National Police Agency took soil samples from the patches of dead grass. Chemical analysis at the National Research Institute of Police Science revealed the presence of methylphosphonic acid, the Sarin degradation product that had been detected after the Matsumoto incident in June. The police also discovered that an Aum front company had purchased large quantities of precursor chemicals used in Sarin production. This circumstantial evidence clearly implicated the cult in the Matsumoto attack. Yet Japanese law enforcement agencies did not pursue the investigation aggressively because they lacked strong leadership, were overly dependent on confessions, and hesitated to confront Aum because it was a religious organization and was belligerent and litigious.
In December 1994, cultists working at Satian 7 converted the DMMP into sixty liters of DF, the immediate precursor of Sarin, which was stored in large plastic tanks inside the factory. Nevertheless, the chronic leaks in the production line made it too hazardous to start combining DF with isopropyl alcohol to make Sarin. Fumihiro Joyu, the chief of Aum’s Moscow operation, attempted to recruit Russian chemical engineers who had experience with Sarin manufacture and might be able to fix the defective equipment. When that effort failed, Tsuchiya decided to shut down the production line. The planned aerial delivery system for Sarin was also unusable. Although a Russian military helicopter had been delivered to the Mount Fuji compound in June, the cult engineers had been unable to get it in working order.
After the failure to mass-produce Sarin in Satian 7, Tsuchiya worked in his personal laboratory to synthesize 340 grams of VX, which cult members used for a series of attempted assassinations. The targets included a lawyer working on behalf of Aum victims, an old man sheltering a dissident member of the cult, the head of the Aum Shinrikyo Victims’ Association, and the leader of a rival religious organization called the Institute for Research into Human Happiness. Only one of these attacks was successful. On December 12, 1994, Niimi and another cultist posing as joggers used a syringe connected to a plastic tube to sprinkle drops of VX on the neck of Takahito Hamaguchi, twenty-eight, a former Aum member living in Osaka who was threatening to investigate the cult for production of illicit drugs. Hamaguchi chased his assailants for a hundred yards before collapsing. Comatose, he was rushed to Osaka University Hospital and died several days later without regaining consciousness. The cause of his death remained a mystery to the Osaka police.
BY EARLY 1995, Aum Shinrikyo had reached the height of its power and influence. The cult had twenty facilities scattered throughout Japan, branches in six countries, and a total membership of more than 40,000, of which about 10,000 were in Japan and 30,000 in Russia. Yet Asahara felt increasingly under siege. On January 1, 1995, Japan’s largest newspaper, Yomuri Shimbun, reported that police scientists had detected Sarin degradation products in the soil near the Aum compound in Kamikuishiki village and suspected that the cult had been involved in the Matsumoto poisoning incident.
Alerted by the newspaper article that Aum was under police surveillance, Asahara feared an imminent raid on the Mount Fuji compound and told Murai to organize a cover-up by destroying the left-over stocks of Sarin in Tsuchiya’s laboratory and converting the ground floor of Satian 7 into a worship hall. Cult members washed the interior of the building with neutralizing solution, removed contaminated topsoil from around its base, destroyed documents, emptied ta
nks of phosphorus trichloride and refilled them with kerosene, and dumped a large quantity of DMMP into a nearby well. Although Asahara ordered cult scientists to discard the remaining stock of DF, the physician Tomomasa Nakagawa did not fully implement this directive. Because he considered the chemical intermediate too precious to destroy, he secretly buried three pounds of it and later told Murai what he had done.
Once the cleanup was complete, Asahara sought to refute the Yomuri Shimbun allegations by inviting journalists to visit Satian 7. On January 4, several reporters were ushered into the dimly lit shrine, which was filled with clouds of incense and dominated by a fifteen-foot Styrofoam statue of the Buddha. Although the rest of the building was off-limits to visitors, the reporters were told that the second floor was used for meditation classes and the third floor for storage. At a press conference, an Aum attorney accused the Japanese government of attacking the cult with nerve gas, a claim elaborated in a videotape titled Slaughtered Lambs.
In early 1995, Asahara self-published a book called Disaster Looms for the Land of the Rising Sun in which he warned that Armageddon was imminent and that only those who followed his teachings would be saved. Over the next few months, the pressure on Aum continued to build. In early March, provoked by the brazen abduction and murder of a Tokyo notary public whose sister had fled the cult, the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department planned simultaneous raids on the Mount Fuji Center and other Aum facilities around the country. Police officials, fearing attacks with nerve agents, asked the Japan Self-Defense Forces to supply them with three hundred gas masks and chemical protective suits. On March 16, 1995, two Japanese army sergeants who were members of Aum learned of the police request and tipped off the cult leadership.
War of Nerves Page 40
