The Aum CultThe Cult Of Poison GasAum Shinrikyo Scribbling found in notebook 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 ultra-sophisticated 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.
Nicola Tesla 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.")
Aum chief scientist Murai clutches
abdominal wound 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.
Cult's number two man 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 bewildered 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 body-gurdas 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.
Hideo Murai A brilliant astrophysicist was Aum's Minister of Science and Technology. 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.
Yoshihiro Inoue Aum's Minister of Intelligence
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 interrogators 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.
Seiichi Endo, Aum's biological weapons chief. He has a Ph.D in molecular biology and cultured some of the deadliest organisms on Earth. 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 para-miltary training from elite Russian military units. It's almost surprising that the police didn't find a full- fledged H-bomb somewhere 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.
Police raid Aum's headquarters in spring 1995 and found huge stockpiles of more than
200 chemicals, 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."
Dr. Ikuo Hayashi, director of Aum's medical services, presided over a horrible array of human experiments, drugging and crackpot medicine.
Masami Tsuchiya, Aum's top chemist. 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 All pictures were added to the article by The Gnostic Liberation Front.
Asahara with Dalai Lama in the late
1980's.
Tomomitsy
Niimi, Aum's Minister of
Internal Affairs.
The remains of sheep killed by nerve gas
Aum's Mt Fuji headquarters
Asahara in days of glory.
Go to : Asahara's AUM Cult Page 2
|
