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Flight training in Florida. Acquisition of lethal materials. A quick accumulation of wealth. All this was accomplished by the cult responsible for the gas attack in a Tokyo subway in 1995. Somehow the group passed under our radar, Congress was told.
By DAVID BALLINGRUD
© St. Petersburg Times, published October 14, 2001
In 1987, a large, rich, weapons-obsessed cult with strong anti-U.S. beliefs, went shopping in this country for the tools it would need for mass killing.
Aum Shinrikyo would become known for a deadly nerve gas attack on five Toyko subway trains in 1995, but for eight years before that they left footprints and fingerprints all over the U.S.
And in doing so, some say, they also left a wake-up call that U.S. intelligence agencies dozed through right up to Sept. 11 of this year.
In Florida, at a private flight school in Opa Locka, Aum Shinrikyo -- or Supreme Truth -- trained pilots, just as the Sept. 11 attackers did.
From an office in New York, just a short walk from the World Trade Center, they worked their way down a long shopping list of items needed to make and use weapons of mass destruction.
An incomplete accounting includes a device to measure plutonium, powerful lasers, gas masks, and "clean room" equipment needed to make chemical and biological weapons. They also visited university web sites, and helped themselves to sensitive computer software.
In congressional hearings after the 1995 Tokyo attack, which killed 12 people and injured more than a thousand, members of the U.S. intelligence agencies said they had little knowledge of the group, despite its 70,000 members, billion-dollar bank account and unbridled hostility toward the U.S.
Somehow the group passed under our radar, Congress was told.
Today, with criticism coming again for failure to warn prior to the Sept. 11 attacks, critics are asking what -- if anything -- did U.S. intelligence learn from its failure to detect the Aum Shinrikyo threat?
"How does a violent, avowedly anti-American, apocalyptic cult purchase these things (weapons of mass destruction) -- much of it our own country -- without our intelligence agencies being able to spot it?" asks Dan Gelber, a former federal prosecutor who lead a U.S. Senate investigation into Aum Shinrikyo.
How did we not know, he asks, first about Aum Shinrikyo's growing arsenal, and later the Sept. 11 attacks? And most importantly, how do we guard against a third failure?
Gelber is a Florida state representative now -- D-Miami Beach. He is also vice chair of the state's new House Select Committee on Security. Before that, though, he was Georgia Democrat San Nunn's chief of staff when Nunn chaired the U.S. Senate's permanent subcommitee on investigations. In that role he directed the Senate's lengthy investigation into the Aum Shinrikyo cult.
He said the subcommittee was shocked by how little the U.S. intelligence agencies knew about the cult -- "essentially nothing" -- despite its activities in this country and its dark vision of war between the U.S. and Japan.
The cult was, according to the subcommittee's final report, "a clear danger not only to the Japanese government, but also to the security interests of the United States."
Its activities were "a frightening case study of the threat modern terrorism poses to all industrialized nations," the report states, and serve "as a harsh wake-up call for the United States, which until recently was rather complacent about the threat of terrorism."
Was the Aum Shinrikyo attack an unheeded warning?
Could a terrorist trail have been uncovered in this country before the Sept. 11 attack?
Or, in a large nation with open borders, and a populace that prizes its personal freedoms, is safety from a determined terrorist unrealistic -- just too much to ask?
U.S. Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., chairman of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee, points out that intelligence agencies -- because they must keep secrets and protect sources -- are easy to criticize.
"In the battle against terrorism, your victories tend to be anonymous and your defeats extremely public," he said.
The 1995 attacks in Japan, he said, "sent us an important but not properly understood message about the diversity of methods that terrorists can and will use."
Graham stopped short of blaming the nation's intelligence agencies, however.
"If success is to be narrowly defined as stopping an act of terrorism before it occurs, then, yes, the Sept. 11 attack constituted a failure of the intelligence agencies. But with so many vulnerabilities as we have in this country, it's not reasonably possible to shut down every terrorist threat.
"The only way to fundamentally eliminate terrorism," he said, "is to attack it at its source. We can't chase down every possible means of a terrorist to attack."
Nevertheless, there are defects in the U.S. intelligence bureaucracy, and they can no longer be ignored, according to the U.S. House Intelligence Committee, which recently urged structural changes and more funding.
The committee noted, however, that while two Bush administration reviews of intelligence are under way, "if history serves . . . no major substantive changes will occur after these reviews are complete. The administration must broadly address the shortfalls and needs of the community, lest we continue to suffer attacks such as those inflicted on Sept. 11, 2001 -- or worse."
The agencies -- the CIA around the world and the FBI domestically -- are traditionally protective and closed, Gelber charged, even to other agencies in the same business of protecting the nation.
"A major challenge facing the intelligence community is figuring out how to assure the right person can easily obtain the right information," he said. "This was clearly one of the reasons why the Aum and other sub-national groups can go undetected.
"We live in an open society; we are a nation of soft targets. Our best hope lies in good intelligence gathering and sharing. We absolutely have to have that."
A dangerous cult goes shopping
Although it directed most of its anger toward Japan, Aum Shinrikyo was loudly anti-American. The United States, in its view, would soon plunge the world into a terrible world war, which the cult planned to survive.
In mid-June of 1995, Japanese public television reported it had obtained parts of the confession of the cult's chief physician, in which he admitted the cult was planning to mail packages of sarin gas to unnamed locations in the United States. A cult member was to take possession of the packages for delivery elsewhere. The plan apparently was never carried out.
"A core belief of the Aum (Shinrikyo) was that the U.S. was an enemy," the Senate report states. "War with the U.S. was a central component of their prediction of Armageddon."
The cult recruited effectively in all income and educational groups. At one point it had between 40,000 and 70,000 members worldwide, more in Russia than anywhere else. It controlled assets of a billion dollars and roamed the world looking for just about any kind of large-scale weapon imaginable, from biological and chemical agents to nukes, tanks and theoretical "earthquake machines."
It's not entirely clear how the cult became so wealthy, but a significant event in its development came in 1989, when the Japanese government granted it religious corporation status. That meant authorities were prevented from investigating its broadly interpreted "religious activities or doctrine."
Growth was immediate and fast. From a net worth of about $4.3-million at the time of religious incorporation, the group's assets leaped to $1-billion by 1995.
According to Senate investigators, Aum Shinrikyo came to the United States in 1987 and registered in New York City as a tax-exempt religious organization called Aum USA Company Ltd., ostensibly to sell its books and recruit followers.
The office's real purpose was to arm the cult. Prime targets were high-tech equipment and computer software. How much the cult acquired is not known. In some cases the U.S. sellers became suspicious; other sales apparently were interrupted by the cult's March 20, 1995 attack in Tokyo, which clearly revealed its intentions.
In some cases, however, the group "was able to access technology whose use is still unaccounted for . . . ultimately we will never know how successful the Aum was in its efforts to militarize in the U.S.," the subcommittee report states.
Within days after the subway attack, a cult official appeared at the New York office, gathered records of transactions and took them back to Japan.
Senate investigators found plenty of activity, however, including this representative sampling:
In 1993, the cult attempted to obtain a Mark IVxp Interforometer from the Zygo Corp. in Middlefield, Conn.
The Mark IVxp has some commercial applications, but is also used to measure plutonium, fuel for a nuclear weapon. As such, the Commerce Department prohibits export of this machine to countries such as Cuba, Iran, Libya and North Korea. The purchase attempt was halted when suspicious Zygo officials notified the U.S. government.
From a New Hampshire company the cult bought clean-room filtration materials, the kind needed for some computer assembly, but also used in the handling and production of chemical and biological weapons.
Just before the March 20 attack, the cult attempted to purchase a half-million-dollar laser system from Hobart Laser Products of Livermore, Calif.
Company representatives were "confused" by the cult's announced use of the device, however, and by the hurry-up nature of the order. "Hobart representatives were told it was required immediately, and cash was available," the investigators wrote. As company suspicions grew, that deal fell apart, too.
In 1993, two Japanese followers of the cult visited the United States to obtain licenses to fly private helicopters. They received lessons, the investigators said, from Kimura International, a private flight school in Opa Locka. Soon after they got their licenses the cult bought a helicopter in Russia.
Similar acquisition efforts were under way in other nations, too, including Germany, Taiwan and the former Yugoslavia.
The 1995 attack left Aum Shinrikyo in disarray, and the group hasn't staged any similar acts since. But it is still around, with a new name -- Aleph. The name change didn't keep it from making the State Department's current list of terrorist organizations.
"The ease with which the cult accessed the vast international supermarket of weapons and weapons technology is troubling," the Senate report concludes.
But could they have been stopped?
Should their statements and their activities have tripped a wire someplace, drawing the curiosity of the U.S. intelligence services?
But that, too, raises questions
"We always thought it was very interesting that some of the Aum's attempts to buy materials were thwarted by suspicious businessmen, one of whom actually notified the government," Gelber said. "I think the next question should be, what happened when the government was informed?"
Stopping terrorists altogether, breaking apart all their cells before they can act, is not realistic, according to most experts.
"Sometimes the bad guys win. Sometimes we take a hit," said Eric Croddy, senior research associate at the Monterey Institute for International Studies, who has researched Aum Shinrikyo.
"But that doesn't mean we have to blame anyone other than the terrorists," he said. "There's not a lot you can do if they cover their tracks carefully. There's too much activity in industry, too much white noise to sort through. But that's the price we pay in our society. You can't investigate everybody at the drop of a hat."
Kyle Olson, a senior staffer of the Arms Control and Proliferation Analysis Center of TASC Inc., testified before the Nunn committee. The U.S. intelligence community "let us down," he said.
Aum Shinrikyo made several highly publicized chemical and biological attacks on the Japanese citizenry, he said, long before the infamous sarin nerve gas incident in the subway trains. One in particular, he said, was "the first non-military use of nerve gas. . . . It was the biggest news story in the second most powerful nation in the world for weeks."
But somehow, Olson testified, the issue came to be regarded as an "Oriental curiosity. . . . It fell off our screen until" the Tokyo attack.
The easy availability of lethal materials in the marketplace and on the Internet today has created an enemy that may be first noticed by civilians and businessmen, Gelber said. "We may have to expect more from merchants who sell (these) technologies so that they become a line of defense."
Graham agreed that a successful fight against terrorism must be rooted in strong public support.
In the 1920s, he said, "organized crime was in control of a number of American cities, including some in Florida, and a lot of business enterprises, too. But when people decided they would not tolerate this anymore, there was an effort made nationally to roll this back.
"I'm not saying we eliminated it, but its influence is much less now."
The world can do the same with terrorism, Graham said, "as long as we stay patient, consistent and smart."