ENGINEER OF DOOM

By Anthony Spaeth

Apocalyptic prophets are figures of fun because they're always wrong. Armageddon fails to arrive when they say it will. In Shoko Asahara's case, however, the prophet apparently made plans to ensure that his predictions would come true. They almost did.

Since Japanese police arrested the guru of the Aum Shinrikyo cult on May 16, frightening facts have emerged indicating that Asahara had the money, the means and the intention to wreak his version of Armageddon on Japan. The March 20 nerve-gas attack on the Tokyo subway system, which killed 12 people and sickened 5,500, and the thwarted attempt to spread deadly hydrogen cyanide gas in the Shinjuku station on May 5 were intended as preludes to worse disasters, police sources are suggesting in leaks to the Japanese press. The big show was apparently set for November, when plans called for cult attacks on government buildings, the Diet and the Imperial Palace to spark what Asahara saw as a world war.

It could have been horrific. To triumph in that war, the cult built a series of munitions factories within its complex at the foot of Mount Fuji. Aum researchers were trying to develop germ weapons -- including the Ebola virus -- and an assembly line was about to produce automatic rifles. Behind one building's false walls was a $700,000 lab able to turn out 60 to 80 kg a month of the nerve gas sarin -- enough to kill 6 million to 8 million people. One plan called for releasing the sarin over Tokyo from 1.65-m-long remote-controlled helicopters. Asahara would follow up the attack by overpowering the Japanese Self-Defense Forces and taking control of Japan with his own tanks and fighter jets. "It sounds incredible," says a former cult member who goes by the name of Akio Kawaguchi for fear of being found out by the cult, "but Aum is capable of anything."

Capable of planning anything, perhaps. But the police accounts include details that challenge the group's technical proficiencies, portraying it as a cult that couldn't shoot straight. The remote-controlled helicopters, purchased from a dealer in northern Japan for $20,000 each in 1993, crashed during the first two practice sessions. The germ-warfare team, despite experiments with botulism, never produced a working weapon. During one of its experiments, a chemical vaporized into a foul-smelling gas, escaped into the outside air and precipitated, coating nearby cars with brown ooze.

Police put together their picture of the group's plans from the interrogations of 34 senior cultists arrested since the subway attack. Asahara had long been predicting a 1997 world war in which the U.S.would try to take over Japan, and he was determined that the cult should survive it. By March 1994 that vision had altered dramatically. Asahara apparently had become interested less in surviving the war than in starting it, and for unexplained reasons he moved the timetable forward to 1995. He had funds -- a senior cult member admitted that Aum has assets of more than $1 billion -- and an inner circle of Ph.D.s that was split into groups to produce conventional arms, chemical weapons, biological weapons and drugs. The least successful initiative was germ research, even though Aum sent a medical team to Zaire in 1992 following mistaken reports of an outbreak of Ebola. The most successful was the sarin production unit. Chief chemist Masaya Tsuchiya, 30, told police that he concocted a total of 25 kg of sarin between November 1993 and the Tokyo attack. Details are fragmentary. Incomplete cult memos have been confiscated suggesting that Aum wanted to buy lasers, fighter jets and tanks. No police report has fully explained the March subway gassing and May's thwarted attack on Shinjuku station. Ikuo Hayashi, a doctor who admitted planting gas on one of the Tokyo trains, was quoted in newspapers as saying the goal was to wipe out the Kasumigaseki section of Tokyo, where many government offices are located. "The attack was launched so that the guru's prophecy could come true," Hayashi reportedly told interrogators.

Asahara is expected to be indicted this week for murder and attempted murder. Police are also preparing to charge the guru on suspicion of ordering the first sarin-gas attack in June last year in Matsumoto, in central Japan, which killed seven and injured more than 200. Meanwhile, his wife Tomoko Matsumoto, 36, is in the process of taking control of the group, which has yet to see major defections. Fear may be a factor: reports say Aum members under arrest have confessed that a cement-grinding machine found at the cult's main commune was used to pulverize the bones of members who died during initiation rites or were otherwise done away with.

But nothing in such disclosures, even in the immediate aftermath of the subway attack, could have prepared the Japanese for what police now believe. The man in the deep pink pajama suit seems to be the incarnation of that implausible villain in thriller novels: a megalomaniac who marshaled money, scientific expertise and loyal followers to act out his prophecies of doom and destruction.

--REPORTED BY IRENE M. KUNII/TOKYO

With reporting by Irene M. Kunii/Tokyo