War of Nerves

by Jonathan Tucker

  On the evening of Saturday, March 18, Asahara held a crisis meeting with three of his top lieutenants—Murai, Niimi, and Inoue—at a cult-owned restaurant in Tokyo. Asahara said that it would be necessary to prevent the impending police raid by causing a major diversion. Murai thought for a while and then suggested spraying Sarin on the Tokyo subway. “That would cause panic,” Asahara said approvingly, and he ordered Murai to take charge of the operation.

  EACH WORKDAY, more than five million commuters in the Tokyo metropolitan area ride thirteen subway lines covering 293 kilometers of underground and surface tracks. The system is clean, safe, efficient, and almost unfailingly punctual. During rush hour, the trains are so densely packed that white-gloved attendants push riders into the cars so that the doors can close. To ensure that a Sarin attack on the Tokyo subway would have maximum impact, the Aum plotters decided that the primary target should be the Kasumigaseki transfer station in the heart of Tokyo. Because Kasumigaseki was close to the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department, the National Police Agency, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Finance, and other Japanese government agencies, a Sarin attack at the height of the morning rush hour would cause enormous disruption.

  Murai planned the simultaneous release of Sarin in five subway trains traveling on three different lines—the Hibiya, Marunouchi, and Chiyoda—that would all converge on Kasumigaseki station between 8:00 and 8:10 a.m. Conducting the operation would be five two-man teams of Aum cultists, each consisting of a subway rider and a getaway car driver. As the subway riders, Murai selected four members of his Ministry of Science and Technology, along with Dr. Ikuo Hayashi, Aum’s sadistic Minister of Health. Although some of the chosen cultists were terrified by the assignment, they were too cowed to resist. Expressing even the slightest doubt about Asahara’s directives was considered a sign of shallow faith and inadequate religious training.

  Because Asahara had ordered the subway attack for early Monday morning, the cult scientists had only twenty-four hours to produce an adequate supply of Sarin and devise a suitable delivery system. At Murai’s direction, Endo and Tsuchiya decided to synthesize the nerve agent from the leftover supply of DF that Nakagawa had buried. Murai told Nakagawa to recover the stash and bring it to Endo’s personal laboratory in a windowless prefab, which was equipped with a crude fume hood made of wood and glass that vented to the outdoors.

  Under Tsuchiya’s supervision, Endo and Nakagawa, wearing homemade oxygen masks as an additional precaution, worked through the night of March 18 to produce about seven liters of Sarin under the fume hood. They performed the synthesis in three-necked flasks containing a mixture of DF, hexane solvent, and a catalyst. Controlling the reaction temperature, the Aum chemists slowly dripped isopropyl alcohol into the DF solution to produce Sarin. Because there was no time to distill the final product, it was only about 30 percent pure. The cultists also added a small amount of acetonitrile, a volatile solvent, to the Sarin solution to help jump-start its evaporation.

  Concerned that the nerve agent was too dilute to inflict the required number of casualties, Endo went to Asahara’s quarters in Satian 6 to seek his blessing. The guru shrugged and said that given the need to disrupt the imminent police raid, dilute Sarin was better than nothing. Endo conveyed Asahara’s message to the others. Then, using the glove box, the cultists injected the Sarin solution into empty plastic bags made of tough nylon-polyethylene, each of which held about twenty ounces. There was enough liquid to fill eleven bags, which were then heat-sealed. To prevent leakage, each bag of Sarin was sealed inside another, slightly larger plastic bag. Murai told Endo to fill five similar bags with water so that he could train the cultists who would carry out the subway attack.

  On the evening of March 19, Inoue met with the five two-man teams at an Aum hideout in Tokyo and assigned them their targets. At about 10:00 p.m., the subway riders left the meeting and traveled to their respective stations, where they boarded trains and identified the spots where they would release the Sarin and the escape routes. After midnight, the group met for a late dinner at a Thai restaurant. At 1:30 a.m., Murai ordered the team members to drive to the Mount Fuji Center and pick up the Sarin-filled bags. He then telephoned Inoue and told him to go to an all-night convenience store and purchase seven vinyl umbrellas.

  Shortly after 3:00 a.m., the operatives met on the ground floor of Satian 7. A cultist had sharpened the umbrella tips with an electric lathe, and the subway riders practiced using them to puncture the water-filled bags. To make the Sarin-filled bags appear less conspicuous, the cultists decided to wrap them in morning newspapers before boarding the trains. Murai handed out antidote tablets containing PAM, which he told the subway riders to take two hours before the operation began. At 6:00 a.m., having stayed up all night, the five operatives swallowed their pills and left the hideout with their drivers, heading for downtown Tokyo.

  SHORTLY BEFORE 8:00 a.m., the five Aum operatives boarded their respective trains and prepared to carry out the attack. Jammed into one of the packed cars was Kenichi Hirose, thirty, the cult’s Vice Minister of Science and Technology. He had graduated at the top of his university class in applied physics and turned down an offer from a major electronics firm to join Aum. Though aware that he might die in carrying out the attack, he did not feel overwhelmed by fear. He wanted to avoid death if at all possible and continue his spiritual training, but his chief desire was to implement Asahara’s orders as efficiently as possible.

  Hirose was about to remove the Sarin-filled bags from his knapsack and place them on the floor when he met the eyes of a pretty young woman standing directly in front of him. Realizing that he was about to kill a living human being, he felt queasy and was unable to proceed. His heart pounding, he got off the car at the next station. After meditating for a few minutes to calm his thoughts, he boarded the next train, telling himself that he was engaged in a “deliverance mission.” As he dropped the bags of Sarin on the floor and pierced them with the sharpened umbrella tip, he silently recited a mantra. Visualizing Asahara’s face, he prayed that his sins would not adversely affect the transmigration of the victims’ souls and that they would be joined in eternal bliss with the Holy Master.

  After puncturing the bags of Sarin, each operative got off the subway train at the next stop and met his driver at a prearranged location. During the drive back, the cultists stopped on the bank of a river in the Tokyo suburbs, where they burned their contaminated clothes and threw the sharpened umbrellas into the water. On arriving at the hideout, some of the subway riders felt ill from low-level Sarin exposure and were given injections of atropine and PAM. The cultists then met with Asahara, who led them in a celebratory mantra.

  Eight of the eleven plastic bags had been punctured successfully during the operation, releasing a total of 159 ounces of dilute Sarin. The nerve agent seeped through the layers of newspaper surrounding each bag and formed a puddle on the floor of the subway car. As the liquid slowly evaporated, the invisible fumes filled the lower half of the car, drifting out onto the station platform each time the doors opened. Some of the passengers aboard the affected trains smelled a noxious odor and felt intense eye irritation and darkened vision; others had trouble breathing or experienced muscle weakness.

  THE FIRST NEWS of the disaster broke at 8:09 a.m., when the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department received a garbled report of an explosion in the subway system, with numerous casualties suffering burns and carbon-monoxide poisoning. Minutes later, ambulances from several major Tokyo hospitals converged on the fifteen affected underground stations, along with fire trucks, rescue squads, and police emergency vehicles. As disoriented commuters began streaming out of the subway exits into the sunlight, dozens of firefighters, policemen, and paramedics raced down the steps in the opposite direction. Lacking gas masks and other protective gear, the responders were soon overcome themselves by the toxic fumes.

  Meanwhile, scenes of horror were playing out underground. At Kamiyacho station next to Kasumig
aseki, stricken people lay sprawled on the platform, vomiting uncontrollably, foaming at the mouth, bleeding from the nose, or wracked by convulsions, their arms and legs thrashing. Other victims leaned against the station walls and benches, gasping for breath, unable to see clearly, and terrified that they were dying. Because of the confusion, subway trains continued to stop at the affected stations, spreading the contamination further. Outside the subway exits, the sidewalks were covered with casualties. The growing chaos was accompanied by the throbbing hum of TV helicopters hovering overhead, transmitting live images of the terrifying scene to the nation and the world.

  The Sarin attack was the largest disaster to hit Tokyo since World War II. In addition to the hundreds of victims taken to hospitals by 131 ambulances, thousands more arrived in minibuses provided by the fire department, in taxis and private cars, and on foot. More than eighty hospitals and clinics in Tokyo were inundated with a total of 3,227 victims, of whom 493 were admitted. Because of the general lack of preparedness, paramedics did not intubate seriously injured patients or insert intravenous lines until after they had reached the hospital. Not knowing the cause of the poisoning, emergency physicians began treating the victims symptomatically.

  About two hours after the attack, the Tokyo Metropolitan Fire Department misidentified the toxic chemical as acetonitrile, a solvent that the cultists had added to the Sarin solution to accelerate its evaporation. Around 11:00 a.m., the National Research Institute of Police Science finally identified the agent as Sarin but failed to inform the hospitals; doctors treating the victims learned the identity of the poison only by watching television.

  In addition to ten immediate deaths, two victims died a few weeks later from the complications of irreversible brain damage caused by oxygen starvation, bringing the total number of fatalities to twelve. The nonfatal casualties were divided into three categories. Seventeen patients were in critical condition with generalized convulsions, cardiac or respiratory arrest, or other symptoms requiring intensive care; some of these individuals suffered permanent neurological damage that left them in a vegetative state or severely disabled. Thirty-seven patients were in serious condition, complaining of shortness of breath, vomiting, severe headache, muscular twitching, or gastrointestinal problems. Finally, nearly 1,000 victims had mild symptoms, such as impaired vision, runny nose, and headache; they were treated with antidotes and recovered fully. The remaining casualties, most of whom had self-reported to hospitals, were “worried well”: they had not been exposed to Sarin poisoning but instead were suffering from severe anxiety and psychosomatic symptoms.

  The nerve agent release also produced some unexpected ripple effects. Because of the failure to decontaminate victims before evacuating them to hospitals, the off-gassing of Sarin from their clothes caused the secondary exposure of 135 ambulance workers and 110 medical staff, thirty-three of whom required hospitalization. The Sarin attack also terrorized Tokyo for months, causing some residents to develop posttraumatic stress syndrome and deterring people from riding the subways. For the first time in the postwar era, the vast metropolitan area felt like a city under siege.

  Despite the grave consequences of the subway attack, the damage could have been far worse. The low purity of the Sarin solution, the crude method of delivery, and the excellent ventilation in the subway system all helped to reduce the number of fatalities. Had the Sarin been 80 percent pure rather than 30 percent and delivered in a more efficient manner—both of which might well have been the case if the cult had had more time to prepare the attack—the dead might well have numbered in the thousands.

  Despite the small volume of Sarin released, a major cleanup effort was required to decontaminate the subway system and the victims’ belongings. On March 21, the day after the attack, Mitsumasa Furuya, the president of a Tokyo waste disposal company, was called to Metropolitan Hiroo General Hospital, which had treated scores of casualties. In the laundry room in the basement of the hospital, he was shown about two hundred plastic bags filled with five tons of Sarin-tainted clothes, possessions, and uniforms of hospital staff. To assess the level of contamination, Furuya stuck one end of a plastic tube into a bag of clothes and the other end into a sealed cage of laboratory mice. Two hours later, the mice had developed pinpoint pupils and begun to spasm. Furuya moved a large steel vat into the parking lot next to the hospital laundry room and filled it with a concentrated solution of caustic soda. Donning rubber gloves, plastic goggles, and an industrial gas mask, he set to work, soaking the contents of each bag. It took him half a day to finish the job. Because the caustic soda ruined the clothes, they could not be returned to their owners.

  AFTER THE SUBWAY ATTACK, the Aum cultists fled throughout Japan and attempted to destroy documents and other incriminating evidence. On March 22, two days after the incident, some 2,500 members of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department launched the largest law enforcement operation in the nation’s history. Wearing gas masks, they conducted simultaneous raids on twenty-five Aum facilities and arrested more than 400 cult members. Because the police lacked field detectors for nerve agents, they went to pet markets and purchased dozens of caged canaries, which they carried with them as crude warning devices. A search of the Mount Fuji Center turned up huge quantities of precursor chemicals used in Sarin production, including fifty tons of phosphorus trichloride and ten tons of sodium fluoride.

  Asahara and the other top cult leaders, most of whom had gone underground, were now the focus of intense attention from the news media. On the evening of April 23, 1995, Hideo Murai was about to give a press conference in Tokyo when a small-time gangster stabbed him in the stomach with a seven-inch butcher’s knife. The murder was carried live on prime-time television and the killer was arrested on the spot. Although he was almost certainly a contract assassin, it was not clear who had hired him. One theory was that Japanese organized crime had wanted Murai dead to prevent him from exposing Aum’s links with the yakuza in the trafficking of illicit drugs. But it was also possible that Asahara had ordered Murai’s murder to prevent him from saying too much to the police.

  Meanwhile, the cult leader remained at large. During a search of Satian 6 on May 16, 1995, a police investigator noticed that the positions of the ceiling panels had shifted from a previous visit. On inspecting the ceiling, he discovered a secret crawl space where Asahara was sitting cross-legged in the darkness, and placed him under arrest. That same day, forty-one other Aum leaders were taken into custody on suspicion of accessory to murder. To track down the remaining suspects, the police distributed 1.6 million posters and flyers. Over the next few months, 192 Aum members were indicted for serious crimes.

  The attack on the Tokyo subway caused police and fire departments in New York, London, and other major cities to worry that they lacked the equipment and training to handle the deliberate release of a nerve agent. In October 1995, the U.S. Senate Governmental Affairs Committee held hearings on the threat of chemical and biological terrorism and heard a detailed staff report on Aum Shinrikyo. A CIA counterterrorism official testified that Aum had not been on the “radar screen” of the U.S. intelligence community because it was a religious cult rather than a traditional politically motivated terrorist organization.

  The Tokyo subway attack also drew attention to the fate of the Chemical Weapons Convention, which had been submitted to the U.S. Senate on November 23, 1993, but continued to languish in the Foreign Relations Committee. Although the United States had signed the CWC in January 1993, it would become a full party only if the Senate gave its consent to ratification by a two-thirds majority vote. Because the CWC had not been a high priority for incoming president Bill Clinton, the administration had passed up the opportunity to seek a ratification vote in 1993 or 1994, when the Democrats held a majority in the Senate. This delay proved to have been a serious miscalculation when, during the midterm congressional elections of November 1994, the Republican Party unexpectedly won control of the Senate.

  One consequence of the Repu
blican victory was that Senator Jesse Helms became chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which has jurisdiction over treaties. Helms and other conservative senators opposed the CWC on the grounds that it was “unverifiable” and would impose excessive burdens on the U.S. chemical industry. Supporters of the treaty countered that it was “effectively verifiable” and that the chemical industry’s leading trade organization, the Chemical Manufacturers Association, not only endorsed the CWC but was actively lobbying for its approval. This attitude was in marked contrast to the spoiler role that the U.S. chemical industry had played in 1925, when it had helped to block Senate ratification of the Geneva Protocol.

  One reason the Chemical Manufacturers Association supported the CWC was that its representatives had worked closely with U.S. government negotiators for several years to ensure that the treaty provisions related to inspections of commercial plants and the protection of trade secrets were acceptable to the chemical industry. The association also worried that if the United States did not ratify the CWC, American companies would be subjected to restrictions on trade in certain treaty-controlled chemicals. Finally, the U.S. chemical industry wanted to improve its public image by demonstrating that it no longer manufactured chemical weapons and strongly favored their elimination. Despite industry’s support for the CWC, however, Senator Helms exploited his power as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee to block a ratification vote in the Senate for the next two years.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  THE EMERGING THREAT

  IN 1996, five years after the end of the Persian Gulf War, an UNSCOM inspection team led by Dutch chemical weapons expert Cees Wolterbeek began to investigate the ruins of the administration building at the Muthanna State Establishment. The three-story concrete structure had received a direct hit during the coalition bombing campaign and collapsed with the floors sandwiched together. Although Iraqi workers had attempted to clean out the building in the spring of 1991, before the U.N. weapons inspectors arrived, the presence of unexploded bombs had made the ruins too dangerous to disturb. Wolterbeek suspected that secret documents remained inside filing cabinets and safes buried deep in the rubble, a potential gold mine of information about the history of the Iraqi chemical weapons program.