Original subtitles

A frightening development this morning,

a chemical weapon, nerve gas,

was released inside a crowded subway system in Tokyo today

and police say it's a deliberate attack by terrorists.

It was like a scene in a science fiction movie.

People with no apparent injuries collapsed.

Commuters stumbled into the open air gasping for breath.

The deadly gas that spread through

the city's subway system Monday morning was sarin.

It's a deadly nerve gas

first developed by the Nazis during World War II.

Tokyo was a mixture of a very futuristic city,

but also a little bit backward at the same time.

I mean, when I first arrived there, I remember standing

in a hotel room looking out across the vista.

It was just like all the movies I'd seen,

just like all the films I'd seen.

So, it didn't disappoint in that way.

And, of course, there were lots of high-tech elements about the city.

But also, I lived in an apartment that if you put

the toaster on, turn too many lights on,

all of the fuses would blow and would go out.

So there was that sort of...

shell of oldness about it, too.

I was born in London.

I moved up to Scotland quite early in my life,

and came to journalism really quite late.

And then there was a kind of crossroads.

I got a call from my girlfriend at the time

who was just been offered a teaching job in Japan,

and she said, "Do you want to come along? It's well paid.

You can come and hang out for a few months,

and we can have a look at Japan."

And I said, "Why not?" And I tagged along.

I got a job as the deputy editor

of a Tokyo city magazine called Tokyo Journal,

which was this kind of very eccentric mix between

hard-hitting political profiles and practical jokes.

- I think a very interesting time

to be in Japan, because, viewed from the West,

this was a time where Japan was approaching the end

of its mission of total global domination.

I was tired, and I think a lot of people are tired of watching

other countries ripping off the United States.

Japan is one of the wealthiest machines

ever created, Saudi Arabia--

And it's not-- hey, let me tell you,

I'm a big beneficiary of Japan.

They buy my apartments in spades...

By 1989, the stock market had peaked,

and Japan was really entering this period

of economic stagnation and possibly a sort of

cultural and political stagnation as well.

And I think what was about to happen was a symptom of that.

The first day of 1995, when I read a story

in the Yomiuri Shimbun, and that story was about

traces of sarin had been found by the police

at this place called Kamikuishiki.

It was on the flanks of Mount Fuji.

It was a very, very small story and didn't go into

any more details than that, but....

a Nazi nerve gas had leaked

in an otherwise obscure city.

It was a mystery that begged to be solved

and begged to be investigated further.

And so the next day, I went to Mount Fuji

and set out to investigate.

I mean, Fuji itself is an amazing mountain.

It's a symbol of Japan.

It's been this pilgrimage site for centuries.

And then plunked on the flanks of the mountain

are these great big ugly facilities.

At the time, I thought, "They look like

a cross between factories and prison camps."

It was interesting when I went to talk

to the people of Kamikuishiki

who lived near the facilities.

It was clear that for years, the people of Kamikuishiki

had been in massive conflict with the group

who were really, really bad neighbors.

There'd be round-the-clock construction noise.

They'd leave bags of garbage

and empty chemical containers in the fields.

There would be, like, chanting coming out of there

all times of the day and night.

And there'd be leaks of weird smelling stuff

coming out of these compounds too.

Yeah. And I remember going to this one area in a forest...

...And pulling some tarpaulin aside.

And behind was this massive Russian helicopter.

I decided to try to look deeper into it

and started talking to members there

and seeing their operation.

Joyu, he was a graduate

of a top Japanese university

and a very smooth talker,

both in Japanese and in English.

He worked for a while at Japan's space agency,

it's the Japanese equivalent of NASA.

How can I start?

My fellow Americans,

thank you for sharing your time with me tonight.

What if free people could live secure

in the knowledge that their security did not rest

upon the threat of instant US retaliation

to deter a Soviet attack?

I think Asahara was really good at promotion.

Aum had lots of magazines,

they had just a huge number of books.

They also made a lot of cartoons of anime.

And that was a really, really good recruiting tool.

Asahara, I think, was a very charismatic person.

He described himself as the reincarnation of Buddha.

He called himself the messiah of the last century.

I think he was very down to earth and approachable

and I think he knew how to talk to the young people.

Later on, he became a very different figure,

somebody to fear and worship.

Aum was a strict hierarchy.

So at the very top you had Asahara

and then under him were like his priesthood.

They'd recruited

extremely good scientists and chemists.

They were like the top of Aum

and everybody else was kind of beneath that.

Followers were totally fleeced.

All their money was essentially

leeched away from them by Aum.

Aum would slowly work on you, then work on your property,

work on your parents' property and bank accounts,

and they just, you know, suck all of the money out.

There were a number of initiations.

They charged huge amounts of money for these.

One was called the blood initiation,

where followers would actually-- supposedly drink some of his blood.

That cost a lot of money.

There was something else called "miracle pond,"

which seemed to be vials of his own bathwater,

which you could drink.

Later on, an Aum badge was found at the scene.

So, they were really the prime suspect from day one.

I'm an investigative journalist by profession.

The one place I've spent more than anywhere

outside the States has been Japan.

I was working with Andrew Marshall at Tokyo Journal.

Aum received an extraordinary amount of deference

from Japanese authorities at almost every level

During the '30s and '40s

Shinto became the official state religion,

and all other religions were heavily prosecuted.

The infamous Tokko, the thought police,

and you could be thrown into jail

for having the wrong thoughts.

So, the police and the Japanese authorities in general

didn't want to be seen as cracking down on religion in any way.

They didn't want to be associated

with that extremely dark time in Japanese history.

And I think actually the Aum, you know, milked that for all it was worth.

It gave them a certain amount of space

in which to expand and operate with impunity.

To what extent did he believe...

the things that he said were happening?

To what extent did he believe

in the supernatural powers he had?

I mean, it's really hard to tell, but he believed in the impact.

They got him-- I mean, they got him worshippers,

they got him incredible wealth.

And that's quite a step-up for someone

that was born into-- into poverty

and had so many challenges early on in life.

His blindness probably had an impact on who he was,

I mean, how could it not, in a way?

But it didn't seem to stop him doing most of what he wanted to do.

He seemed to parlay it into, you know,

part of the whole Asahara personality

He sold kind of quack remedies.

Uh, there was one called "almighty medicine,"

which was just pieces of tangerine in alcohol.

I think he was a hustler right from the beginning.

I think money was the issue.

He found that through this acupuncture clinic,

he could sell these remedies which would earn him money.

And I think it just kind of snowballed from there.

He starts these yoga schools which bring in more money

and bring in more people who come regularly,

they become his followers.

I mean, it's just a very successful business model

in a way, isn't it, starting your own religion.

In 1990, there was a general election in Japan,

and Asahara and Aum decided to contest 25 seats

in Japan's House of Representatives.

So Asahara would be one of the-- the candidates.

At that point, the money had been flowing in,

the-- the members had been flowing in, 10,000 or more,

and they poured millions and millions into this campaign.

They had these very, very bizarre campaigns

where Asahara would, you know, sit on the stage

and followers wearing these papier-mâché hats

in the shape of-- of Asahara.

Dance around to a song which consists of--

just of his name being repeated over and over again.

It might seem bit odd that a religious group

should, you know, make a strike into politics, but there was a precedent.

So, there's a group called Soka Gakkai, a Buddhist group,

and back in the '60s they started a political wing,

which became a political party and quite a powerful one in Japan.

It was a disaster.

They didn't win any of the 25 seats they contested.

And in Asahara's district,

I think he got fewer votes in that district

than there were Aum members registered in that district,

so not even every Aum member voted for him it seemed like.

Imagine you're a cult leader, everyone's adoring you,

you're being told that you're a grandmaster and a spiritual leader,

and that you're the second coming of God,

and it's a little hard to lose a local election.

I think this was a turning point because

up until then, the money had been flowing in,

the members had been flowing in.

And then you have the expenditure

of all these millions on an election campaign

which ends in not just failure,

but a very, very public failure.

Also, a number of Aum members

started leaving the cult around this time,

because perhaps, because as campaign workers,

they were interacting with the public again

and started coming to their senses.

And it's really after that

that you can see a change in Asahara's direction.

Armageddon becomes very much

a, you know, a bigger part of-- of his teaching.

And also the war, this sort of decisive,

apocalyptic war starts to get closer.

And that was a really, really good recruiting tool

for the cult to say, "Look, a war is coming.

We live in these incredibly unstable times,

but come to Aum and we'll give you

the sort of spiritual, physical abilities

to withstand this coming war

and you'll be the sole survivors," essentially.

In Moscow, the hammer and sickle

is lowered for the last time

and an era comes to an end.

Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev

has been removed from power

and there are tanks now in the streets of Moscow.

Again, his timing was quite impeccable.

Soviet Union, Russians were struggling.

I mean, this was a chaotic and difficult time for them.

And in walks this, you know,

this man in robes from Japan

and offers salvation,

offers to sort of speak to Russian souls.

And he was very successful there.

The numbers went up to 20 or 30,000.

In a very short amount of time,

they had more followers in Russia than they did in Japan.

During the first Russian salvation tour, Asahara rented out

the Olympic stadium and filled it with thousands of Russians

and did a meditation session for all of them.

So, you know, obviously he had pulling power.

At the time, Russian technology, Russian weapons

were on the world market.

They were experts in-- in chemical and biological weapons

that the US and other Allied powers were quite worried about

the potential for proliferation.

You'd never had a country collapse

with thousands of nuclear weapons.

Aum sees the apocalypse coming

and they want to arm themselves.

What do you arm yourselves with?

Weapons of mass destruction.

WMD.

Asahara met a guy called Oleg Lobov,

who was part of Boris Yeltsin's circle.

He helped them expand not just in Moscow,

but other places in Russia.

Asahara was interested in science,

so Lobov gave him access

to a number of young scientists

who perhaps have information that he needed.

And his construction minister, a guy called Hayakawa,

actually did crisscross these former republics

looking for all sorts of things.

They were looking not only at chemical weapons

and biological agents, but also nukes.

They were looking at nuclear weapons.

Aum got some kind of training from Russian military types.

They bought Kalashnikovs, assault rifles

and also a helicopter that I ended up seeing in Mount Fuji.

They were looking at how to build an electromagnetic gun.

Asahara was really interested in lasers,

you know, right from the beginning.

He met with Nikolai Basov,

who won the Nobel Prize

for physics for his work on lasers.

And also massive production of narcotics.

They put electrode caps on people's heads

to stimulate the brain

and synthesized LSD and mescaline

that was given to people during meditation.

The operations in Russia were run by Joyu.

He had a reputation as being just super loyal to the guru.

He was one of Asahara's favorites.

I think, you know, he's very clever.

He's been very cautious in his approach.

His behavior in Russia was never really looked at.

The Russian operation was-- I mean, it was pretty grim.

A lot of the Russian followers were mistreated.

They were possibly experimented on.

That was something that should have been

investigated properly, but wasn't.

After the Russian operation, Aum started to accelerate.

When Aum was on the rise, there was a lot going on in the world.

So you had, you know, '91, you had the breakup of the former Soviet Union.

You had war in Bosnia, which started out-- that was a big war in,

in Europe for the first time in a long time.

So there were other things on the global security radar.

CIA offices overseas

have collection priorities.

They have orders, more or less,

on what they're supposed to report intelligence on,

and what a new age religious cult

outside of Tokyo was doing was not on the list.

So after I'd investigated the sarin incident

at Kamikuishiki, in the village,

the first thing I did was look again at the incident in Matsumoto,

which was this city in the Japan Alps.

Dozens of people falling sick, some people dying.

And one of the victims was this machinery salesman

called Yoshiyuki Kono.

When the ambulance arrived,

Kono was saying to the ambulance man,

I ate Thai rice pilaf for dinner.

So he at this stage, Kono still thought

that he had some kind of violent form of food poisoning.

The police focused in on Kono,

because he had chemicals in his house.

Supposedly, he had a license to mix them.

Previously, he'd been a pharmaceutical salesman.

And then traces of sarin was found in his back garden.

So he was really the prime suspect in this case.

The Japanese media had really sort of pointed the finger at him.

Somebody had even flown a helicopter over his house

to look for sort of sarin patches in his back garden.

And afterwards, actually, Kono was briefly detained.

I think they needed someone to pin it to.

It was such a mystery and such a devastating

and sort of horrific attack.

His wife was still in hospital.

His two daughters had also spent time in hospital.

As he explained to me,

"Look, you know, if I knew so much about chemicals,

why would I mix a herbicide

that was going to cause damage to my wife and kids?

Why would I do that?"

I mean, that seemed like impeccable logic to me.

And as Kyle Olsen, this biochemical weapons expert,

told me at the time, you know, you don't take chemical A

and chemical B and mix it and just get sarin, you know,

the chance of that happening are vanishingly remote.

So when I left Kono's house that day,

I was absolutely convinced he was innocent

and really couldn't see why everybody else didn't think that, too.

So after I'd returned from Matsumoto,

I started to draw a line between the Matsumoto sarin leak

and the cult, and I started writing the story.

In 1995...

there was the Kobe earthquake in January, which was devastating.

Thousands of people were killed.

And I think that for Asahara really showed.

It really helped his apocalyptic creed

to have something as awful as that happen.

But the cult also made a mistake.

They abducted this man called Kariya,

who was a notary public.

His sister had been in the cult

and he'd been trying to get his sister out of it.

The war was very, very real for Aum members,

because it was constantly drummed into them by Asahara.

You know, we need to prepare for this war that's coming.

And as police attention and other people's attention

focused in on the cult, that just became confirmation

that the cult had to prepare even more

because they were at the center of this persecution.

In my story, I quoted, uh, Kyle Olsen, and he thought

that the Matsumoto sarin attack was actually a terrorist attack,

and it was a trial run for another attack,

probably on a big city, probably Tokyo.

A frightening development this morning,

a chemical weapon, nerve gas,

was released inside a crowded subway system in Tokyo today.

The police says it was a deliberate attack by terrorists.

...the deadly gas that spread through the city subway system

Monday morning was sarin,

said to be even more powerful than cyanide.

It's a deadly nerve gas first developed

by the Nazis during World War II.

Attackers had sharpened umbrellas.

They had bags of sarin.

Once they got close to Kasumigaseki,

they puncture them with the pointed umbrellas,

and the sarin would seep out.

There were about a dozen people killed in Tokyo

and thousands injured.

My reaction was, of course, shock.

I couldn't quite believe, I couldn't really process.

The attack on the Tokyo subway was an attempt

to stop the police from investigating the cult.

An attempt really, to-- to slow them down.

So they had five attackers, and they--

they had three subway lines,

and the idea was to puncture sarin

on each of these lines when the trains intersected

at a place called Kasumigaseki,

and Kasumigaseki is right in the center of Tokyo.

It's where all the police agencies are, and it's where all of the--

a lot of the government ministries are as well.

So it was seen as a kind of strike not just at the police,

but, you know, at the heart of the Japanese bureaucracy.

So this is the copy of Esquire in which my story ran.

It's actually dated April,

but it came out in the first few days of March...

just about a week before the subway attack.

"The Nazi nerve gas mystery. When death came to a Japanese village."

And it's got quite a number of pages inside.

You know, I'd written this story, and in it there'd been this prediction

that there would be this subway attack.

Uh, I know on a rational level

that the publication

and writing of that story didn't cause the attack,

but I still felt this kind of guilt that this awful thing

that had been predicted in the article had come true.

The police began raiding the Kamikuishiki headquarters

quite soon after the subway attack.

And a lot of it was carried live on Japanese TV.

And a lot of us were just rooted to the screens.

You know, you had police wearing these full biochemical warfare kits

with big gas masks sort of rolling into these facilities,

just bringing up unbelievable amounts

of barrels of chemicals and so on.

So right from the beginning, from those initial raids,

you got the feeling that we were dealing with something quite exceptional.

Each facility was called a Satyan,

which was supposedly derived from a Sanskrit word meaning "truth."

So you had Satyan one, two, three, four, et cetera, et cetera, and...

probably the most important one was Satyan 7.

Aum said this was actually a place of worship.

But Satyan 7 was really where the sarin

was manufactured in large quantities.

The cult also had a factory where they were

trying to make Kalashnikov assault rifles.

And the plan was to make a thousand of these assault rifles.

This helicopter that I saw, it was the Mi-17, which is a cargo carrier.

You can actually convert it to carry missiles and machine guns.

It's a heavy duty Russian helicopter.

They bought it in Russia and dismantled it

and then just brought it in through the port of Yokohama.

Asahara went into hiding before the gas attack,

and he hadn't been seen in public for quite a while.

You know, even though there were hundreds of people on these raids,

they didn't find Asahara.

It wasn't like when the police started

raiding the facilities, everything went back to normal,

in fact, everything seemed to really speed up.

I mean, we all felt in Tokyo a real sense

of vulnerability that we hadn't felt before.

Japan's police chief, who has been leading the investigation

into last week's gas attack on the Tokyo underground

has been shot and seriously wounded.

Takaji Kunimatsu was shot four times from close range

outside his home by a masked gunman who fled on a bicycle.

Then a couple of weeks after that,

there was an attempt to release hydrogen cyanide at Shinjuku,

which is a very big station in central Tokyo.

And then you add to that following month

there was the bombing in Tokyo.

All of these events, when you wound them into one,

just created this incredible sense

of apprehension and fear, of sarinoia,

as somebody called it, that just went on for weeks.

Asahara was still at large and a real focus of interest

became the Tokyo headquarters of the cult.

And the cult members would come back and forth

because they were still at large. They weren't--

weren't being arrested in those very early days.

So one day Murai comes through the crowd and then...

...a man steps out of the crowd,

and this is in front of all the cameras,

and stabs him fatally.

He dies later.

Hideo Murai was the chief scientist of the cult.

He was very much Asahara's right hand man

when it came to the science and the architect

of the biochemical weapons program.

An attack which was done by a Yakuza gangster.

The attacker said that he'd been ordered

by the head of a crime syndicate to do it.

But the mystery still does remain, who ordered that hit?

And of course, Asahara was still at large then,

a number of the other senior cultists

who had murder to their name were still out there

and people would do anything really to shut up Murai, I suppose.

Aum had contacts in lots of different organizations.

Uh, they had contacts in the media,

they had contacts in the military,

they also had contacts in the police.

And I think this is one reason why the police

did such a poor job of going after the cult,

is that the cult had advance knowledge sometimes

of what the police were going to do

and could adjust their plans accordingly.

So Asahara was hiding out

in one of the Mount Fuji facilities all along in Satyan 6.

And in preparation for his raid,

the police put up these floodlights.

Uh, it was very, very dramatic.

It was covered live on TV.

They found him kind of secreted

in this secret compartment between two floors.

And in within there were supposedly a cassette player,

some medicines, a stack of cash,

and by some reports he had a Kalashnikov in there as well.

He was asked by the police, "Are you Asahara?"

And he replied, "I am the guru."

So right to the end, he's still the guru,

not just a mere mortal with a mortal name.

And as police led him away,

he said to one of the police, "Don't touch me.

I don't even let any of my followers touch me."

Asahara was, after his arrest,

he went on trial fairly quickly.

He was charged with multiple counts of murder and sentenced to death.

He really spends the rest of his time in jail,

fighting rather in a futile way

these court cases against him.

He was executed in 2018,

along with 12 other members of the cult.

After the subway attack,

Kono was pretty much cleared of suspicion

because it was very clear who was responsible.

They still seem to be very present for me, I think.

It's not sort of consigned to history as far as I feel.

And I imagine a lot of people in Japan,

it's a pivotal event for them as well.

I mean, it suddenly felt like a turning point in the '90s

that you had this-- this country that had been

so exceptional in coming back from the war years

and had this very sort of hedonistic decade

where everything seemed to be going right for them.

And then suddenly the lost decade,

the 1990s began and smack in the middle of it,

you get this dreadful event happening

and this dreadful event that was done by Japanese to Japanese.

I think that's the thing that's really, really hard to--

to get a grip on for many people there.

I don't think that you'd have another religious sect

in a developed country that would develop

that many weapons and be able to get away with it.

But in terms of cults, I mean, cults haven't gone out fashion at all.

There's still people that join them.

When you look at how polarized politics is in the US

and in the UK, there's certainly a cult-like element

of that where you have both sides,

they have their own sort of alternate reality,

if you like, where they have their own facts

and they're really,

you know, immune to outside influence

or what the other side would call facts.

So it is a worrying time,

and you can see elements of Aum in our modern lives.

The interesting thing about Aum was that

we just didn't see it coming.

It makes me wonder now what our blind spots are.