Position: FARC founder and commander in chief.

Background: Since its inception in May 1966, the FARC has operated under the leadership of Pedro Antonio Marín (aka "Manuel Marulanda Vélez" or "Tirofijo"--Sure Shot). Marín was born into a peasant family in Génova, Quindío Department, a coffee-growing region of west-central Colombia. He says he was born in May 1930, but his father claimed the date was May 12, 1928. He was the oldest of five children, all brothers. His formal education consisted of only four years of elementary school, after which he went to work as a woodcutter, butcher, baker, and candy salesman. His family supported the Liberal Party. When a civil war erupted in 1948 following the assassination of a Liberal president, Marín and a few cousins took to the mountains. On becoming a guerrilla, Marín adopted the pseudonym of Manuel Marulanda Vélez in tribute to a trade unionist who died while opposing the dispatch of Colombian troops to the Korean War.

Pedro Antonio Marín  
(Photo courtesy of www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Lobby/6433/04.html)

A professional survivor, an experienced tactician, and a determined commander, Marulanda Vélez has been officially pronounced dead several times in army communiqués, but he has always reappeared in guerrilla actions. Although only five feet tall, he is a charismatic guerrilla chieftain who has long been personally involved in combat and has inspired unlimited confidence among his followers. He ascended to the top leadership position after the death of Jocobo Arenas from a heart attack in 1990. He is reported to be a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Colombia (Partido Comunista de Colombia--PCC), which has historically been associated with the FARC. According to author Alfredo Rangel Suárez, Marulanda "is not a theoretician by any means, but he is very astute and has a great capacity for command and organization." Rangel Suárez believes that Marulanda is a hardcore Marxist-Leninist. However, Marulanda's peasant origins and his innate sense of military strategy have earned him nationwide recognition as a leader among politicians, leftists, and other guerrilla groups.

Marulanda is not known to have ever married, although he reportedly has numerous children by liaisons with various women. According to journalist María Jimena Duzán, Marulanda lives simply, like a peasant, and without any luxuries, such as cognac. However, he smokes cigarettes.

Jorge Briceño Suárez ("Mono Jojoy")

Position: Second in command of the FARC; commander, Eastern Bloc of the FARC; member, FARC General Secretariat since April 1993.

Background: Jorge Briceño Suárez was born in the Duda region of Colombia, in the jurisdiction of Uribe, Meta Department, in 1949. His father was the legendary guerrilla Juan de la Cruz Varela, and his mother was a peasant woman, Romelia Suárez. He grew up and learned to read and write within the FARC. For years, he was at the side of Manuel Marulanda Vélez ("Tirofijo"--Sureshot), who is considered his tutor and teacher. Mono Jojoy is a jovial-looking, heavy-set man who wears a handlebar moustache and who normally wears a simple green camouflage uniform and a black beret. He is another of the new second-generation FARC military chiefs who was born in the FARC. Both he and "Eliécer"created the FARC's highly effective school for "special attack tactics," which trains units to strike the enemy without suffering major casualties. Mono Jojoy is credited with introducing the Vietnam War-style specialized commandos that consist of grouping the best men of each front in order to assign them specific high-risk missions. He is one of the most respected guerrilla leaders within FARC ranks. He became second in command when Marulanda succeeded Jocobo Arenas in 1990.

Unlike the other commanders who came to the FARC after university-level studies, Mono Jojoy learned everything about guerrilla warfare in the field. He easily moves among the Departments of Boyacá, Cundinamarca, and Meta. He is said to know the Sumapaz region "like the palm of his hand." He is known as a courageous guerrilla, who is obsessed with attacking the Public Force, has little emotion, and is laconic. His great military experience helps to compensate for his low intellectual level. He is said to be unscrupulous and to advocate any form of warfare in pursuit of power, including dialoging with the government as a ruse. Under his command, the Eastern Bloc has earned record amounts of cocaine-trafficking profits. He is opposed to extradition of Colombians, including his brother, Germán Briceño Suárez ("Grannobles"), a FARC hard-liner who was charged on July 21, 1999, in the slayings of three U.S. Indian rights activists, who were executed in early 1999. He is contemptuous of the prospect of U.S. military intervention, noting that U.S. soldiers would not last three days in the jungle. However, he would welcome U.S. economic assistance to rural development projects, such as bridge-building.

Germán Briceño Suárez ("Grannobles")

Position: Commander, 10th, 28th, 38th, 45th, and 56th fronts.

Background: Germán Briceño, younger brother of Jorge Briceño Suárez, was born in the Duda region of Colombia, in the jurisdiction of Uribe, Meta Department, in 1953. His father was the legendary guerrilla Juan de la Cruz Varela, and his mother was a peasant woman, Romelia Suárez. At the recommendation of his brother, Germán Briceño became an official member of the FARC in 1980. Even from that early date, Germán Briceño showed himself to be more of a fighter and bolder than his older brother, despite the latter's own reputation for boldness. Germán Briceño was promoted rapidly to commander of the FARC's 30^th Front in Cauca Department. After founding a combat training school in that department's Buenos Aires municipality, he began to be known for his meanness. He was reportedly suspended temporarily from the FARC for his excesses against the peasants and his subordinates, but later readmitted as a commander, thanks to his brother. However, he was transferred to Vichada Department, where he engaged in weapons trafficking and extortion of taxes from coca growers and drug traffickers.

In 1994, after being promoted to his brother's Western Bloc staff, Germán Briceño took over command of the 10^th Front, which operates in Arauca Department and along the Venezuelan border. Since then he has also assumed command of the 28^th, 38^th, 45^th, and 56^th fronts, operating in the economically and militarily important departments of Arauca, Boyaca, and Casanare. In 1994 he reportedly participated, along with his brother, in the kidnappings and murders of American missionaries Stephen Welsh and Timothy van Dick; the kidnapping of Raymond Rising, an official from the Summer Linguistics Institute; and the kidnappings of industrialist Enrique Mazuera Durán and his son, Mauricio, both of whom have U.S. citizenship. Germán Briceño is also accused of kidnapping British citizen Nigel Breeze, and he is under investigation for the murder of two Colombian Marine Infantry deputy officers and for the kidnappings of Carlos Bastardo, a lieutenant from the Venezuelan navy, as well as about a dozen cattlemen from Venezuela's Apure State. His kidnap victims in Arauca have included the son of Congressman Adalberto Jaimes; and Rubén Dario López, owner of the Arauca convention center, along with his wife. He has also ordered the murders of young women who were the girlfriends of police or military officers.

On February 23, 1999, Germán Briceño also kidnapped, without FARC authorization, three U.S. indigenous activists in Arauca and murdered them a week later in Venezuelan territory. The incident resulted in the breaking off of contact between the FARC and the U.S. Department of State. After a so-called FARC internal investigation, he was exonerated, again thanks to his brother, and a guerrilla named Gildardo served as the fall guy. Germán Briceño recovered part of his warrior's reputation by leading an offensive against the army in March and April 1999 that resulted in the deaths of 60 of the army's soldiers. On July 30, 1999, however, Germán Briceño once again carried out an unauthorized action by hijacking a Venezuela Avior commercial flight with 18 people on board (they were released on August 8).

"Eliécer"

Position: A leading FARC military tactician.

Background: "Eliécer" was born in the FARC in 1957, the son of one of the FARC's founders. He walked though the Colombian jungles at the side of his father. Tall, white, and muscular, he is a member of the so-called second-generation of the FARC. One the FARC's most highly trained guerrillas, he received military training in the Soviet Union. The late FARC ideologist Jocobo Arenas singled out Eliécer for this honor. An outstanding student, Eliécer was awarded various Soviet decorations. He then went to East Germany, where he not only received military training but also learned German and completed various political science courses. Following his stay in East Germany, he received guerrilla combat experience in Central America. Commander "Eliécer" became the FARC's military chief of Antioquia Department at the end of 1995. A modern version of Manuel Marulanda, Eliécer is regarded as cold, calculating, a very good conversationalist, cultured, and intuitive. By 1997 he was regarded as one of the FARC's most important tacticians. He and "Mono Jojoy"created the FARC's highly effective school for "special attack tactics," which trains units to strike the enemy without suffering major casualties. In Antioquia Eliécer was assigned to work alongside Efraín Guzmán ("El Cucho"), a member of the FARC Staff and a FARC founder who was 60 years old in 1996.

Revolutionary Organization 17 November (17N)

Group Profile

Since the group's initial appearance with the assassination of U.S. official Richard Welch in an Athens suburb with a Colt .45-caliber magnum automatic pistol on December 23, 1975, no known member of the shadowy Revolutionary Organization 17 November (Epanastatiki Organosi 17 Noemvri--17N) has been apprehended. Thus, the membership and internal dynamics of this small, mysterious, and well-disciplined group remain largely unknown.

It has been claimed in some news media that the identity of no member of 17N is known to Greek, American, or European police and intelligence agencies. However, the group's ability to strike with impunity at its chosen targets for almost a quarter century without the apprehension of a single member has reportedly made Western intelligence agencies suspect it of being the instrument of a radicalized Greek intelligence service, the GYP, according to the Observer [London]. According to one of the Observer's sources, Kurdish bomber Seydo Hazar, 17N leaders work hand-in-glove with elements of the Greek intelligence service. According to the Observer, 17N has sheltered the PKK by providing housing and training facilities for its guerrillas. Police were kept away from PKK training camps by 17N leaders who checked the identity of car license plates with Greek officials. Funds were obtained and distributed to the PKK by a retired naval commander who lives on a Greek military base and is a well-known sympathizer of 17N.

What little is known about 17N derives basically from its target selection and its rambling written communiqués that quote Balzac or historical texts, which a member may research in a public library. Named for the 1973 student uprising in Greece protesting the military regime, the group is generally believed to be an ultranationalist, Marxist-Leninist organization that is anti-U.S., anti-Turkey, anti-rich Greeks, anti-German, anti-European Union (EU), and anti-NATO, in that order. It has also been very critical of Greek government policies, such as those regarding Cyprus, relations with Turkey, the presence of U.S. bases in Greece, and Greek membership in NATO and the European Union (EU). In its self-proclaimed role as "vanguard of the working class," 17N has also been critical of Greek government policies regarding a variety of domestic issues. One of the group's goals is to raise the "consciousness of the masses" by focusing on issues of immediate concern to the population. To these ends, the group has alternated its attacks between so-called "watchdogs of the capitalist system" (i.e., U.S. diplomatic and military personnel and "secret services") and "servants of the state" (such as government officials, security forces, or industrialists). It has been responsible for numerous attacks against U.S. interests, including the assassination of four U.S. officials, the wounding of 28 other Americans, and a rocket attack on the U.S. Embassy compound in Athens in February 1996. The group justified its assassination of Welch by blaming the CIA for "contributing to events in Cyprus" and for being "responsible for and supporting the military junta."

Unlike most European Marxist-Leninist terrorist groups that are in their third or fourth generation of membership, the 17N group has been able to retain its original hard-core members. In 1992, according to 17N expert Andrew Corsun, the group's hard-core members were most likely professionals such as lawyers, journalists, and teachers in their late thirties and early forties. If that is the case, most of the group's core membership, which he estimated to be no more than twenty, would today be mostly in their forties. Moreover, the 17N communiques, with a five-pointed star and the name "17N," typically come from the same typewriter that issued the movement's first proclamation in 1975, shortly before Welch's execution. According to the prosecutor who examined the files on 17N accumulated by late Attorney General Dhimitrios Tsevas, the group comprises a small circle of members who are highly educated, have access and informers in the government, and are divided into three echelons: General Staff, operators, and auxiliaries. The core members are said to speak in the cultivated Greek of the educated.

There appears to be general agreement among security authorities that the group has between 10 and 25 members, and that its very small size allows it to maintain its secrecy and security. The origin of the group is still somewhat vague, but it is believed that its founders were part of a resistance group that was formed during the 1967-75 military dictatorship in Greece. It is also believed that Greek Socialist Premier Andreas Papendreou may have played some hand in its beginnings. After democracy returned to Greece in 1975, it is believed that many of the original members went their own way. N17 is considered unique in that it appears not to lead any political movement.

One of the group's operating traits is the fact that more than 10 of its attacks in Athens, ranging from its assassination of U.S. Navy Captain George Tsantes on November 15, 1983, to its attack on the German ambassador's residence in early 1999, took place in the so-called Khalandhri Triangle, a triangle comprising apartment blocks under construction in the suburb of Khalandhri and situated between Kifisias, Ethinikis Antistaseos, and Rizariou. The terrorists are believed by authorities to know practically every square foot of this area. Knowing the urban terrain intimately is a basic tenet of urban terrorism, as specified by Carlos Marighella, author of The Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla.

The continuing hard-core membership is suggested by the fact that the group murdered Cosfi Peraticos, scion of a Greek shipping family, in June 1997 with the same Colt .45 that it used to assassinate Richard Welch in 1975. The group has actually used the Colt .45 in more attacks than those in 1975 and 1997 (see Table 6, Appendix). Since the Welch assassination, its signature Colt .45 has been used to kill or wound at least six more of its 20 victims, who include three other American officials and one employee, two Turkish diplomats, and 13 Greeks. The rest have been killed by another Colt .45, bombs, and anti-tank missiles. The group's repeated use of its Colt .45 and typewriter suggests a trait more typical of a psychopathic serial killer. In the political context of this group, however, it appears to be symbolically important to the group to repeatedly use the same Colt .45 and the same typewriter.

Authorities can tell that the people who make bombs for the 17N organization were apparently trained in the Middle East during the early 1970s. For example, in the bombing of a bank branch in Athens on June 24, 1998, by the May 98 Group, the bomb, comprised of a timing mechanism made with two clocks and a large amount of dynamite, was typical of devices used by 17N, according to senior police officials.

Religious Fundamentalist Groups

Al-Qaida

Group Profile

In February 1998, bin Laden announced the formation of an umbrella organization called the Islamic World Front for the Struggle against the Jews and the Crusaders (Al-Jabhah al-Islamiyyah al-`Alamiyyah li-Qital al-Yahud wal-Salibiyyin). Among the announced members of this terrorist organization are the Egyptian Al-Jama'a al-Islamiyyah, the Egyptian Al-Jihad, the Egyptian Armed Group, the Pakistan Scholars Society, the Partisan Movement for Kashmir, the Jihad Movement in Bangladesh, and bin Laden's Afghan military wing of the Advice and Reform Commission (Bodansky: 316). Unlike most terrorist groups, Al-Qaida is more of a home base and financier for a global network of participating Islamic groups.

According to Bodansky (308-9), bin Laden and his close advisers live in a three-chamber cave in eastern Afghanistan, in the mountains near Jalalabad. One room is used as bin Laden's control and communications center and is equipped with a state-of-the-art satellite communications system, which includes, in addition to a satellite telephone, a desktop computer, at least a couple laptops, and fax machines. Another room is used for storage of weapons such as AK-47s, mortars, and machine guns. A third room houses a large library of Islamic literature and three cots. His immediate staff occupy cave bunkers in nearby mountains.

Bin Laden is ingratiating himself with his hosts, the Taliban, by undertaking a massive reconstruction of Qandahar. In the section reserved for the Taliban elite, bin Laden has built a home of his own, what Bodansky (312) describes as "a massive stone building with a tower surrounded by a tall wall on a side street just across from the Taliban's "foreign ministry" building." Bin Laden's project includes the construction of defensive military camps around the city. In addition, in the mountains east of Qandahar, bin Laden is building bunkers well concealed and fortified in mountain ravines.

After the U.S. cruise missile attack against his encampment on August 20, 1998, bin Laden began building a new headquarters and communications center in a natural cave system in the Pamir Mountains in Kunduz Province, very close to the border with Tajikistan. According to Bodansky (312-13), the new site will be completed by the first half of 2000.

Bodanksy (326) reports that, since the fall of 1997, bin Laden has been developing chemical weapons at facilities adjacent to the Islamic Center in Soba, one of his farms located southwest of Khartoum, Sudan. Meanwhile, since the summer of 1998 bin Laden has also been preparing terrorist operations using biological, chemical, and possibly radiological weapons at a secret compound near Qandahar.

By 1998 a new generation of muhajideen was being trained at bin Laden's camps in eastern Afghanistan and Pakistan. Bin Laden's Afghan forces consist of more than 10,000 trained fighters, including almost 3,000 Arab Afghans, or Armed Islamic Movement (AIM), which is also known as the International Legion of Islam. According to Bodansky (318-19), Egyptian intelligence reported that these Arab Afghans total 2,830, including 177 Algerians, 594 Egyptians, 410 Jordanians, 53 Moroccans, 32 Palestinians, 162 Syrians, 111 Sudanese, 63 Tunisians, 291 Yemenis, 255 Iraqis, and others from the Gulf states. The remaining 7,000 or so fighters are Bangladeshis, Chechens, Pakistanis, Tajiks, Uzbeks, and other nationalities. Bodansky (318) reports that the 5,000 trainees at one training center in Afghanistan are between 16 and 25 years of age and from all over the world. The Martyrdom Battalions are composed of human bombs being trained to carry out spectacular terrorist operations.

Leader Profiles:

Osama bin Laden ("Usama bin Muhammad bin Laden, Shaykh Usama bin Laden, the Prince, the Emir, Abu Abdallah, Mujahid Shaykh, Hajj, the Director")

Position: Head of Al-Qaida.

Background: Usamah bin Mohammad bin Laden, now known in the Western world as Osama bin Laden, was born on July 30, 1957, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, the seventeenth son of Mohammad bin Laden. The late Mohammad bin Laden rose from peasant origins in Yemen to become a small-time builder and contractor in Saudi Arabia and eventually the wealthiest construction contractor in Saudi Arabia.. He had more than 50 children from several wives. Osama bin Laden's mother was reportedly a Palestinian. Depending on the source of information, she was the least or most favored of his father's ten wives, and Osama was his father's favorite son. He was raised in the Hijaz in western Saudi Arabia, and ultimately al Medina Al Munawwara. The family patriarch died in the late 1960s, according to one account, but was still active in 1973, according to another account. In any case, he left his 65 children a financial empire that today is worth an estimated $10 billion. The Saudi bin Laden Group is now run by Osama's family, which has publicly said it does not condone his violent activities.

After being educated in schools in Jiddah, the main port city on the Red Sea coast, bin Laden studied management and economics in King Abdul Aziz University, also in Jiddah, from 1974 to 1978. As a student, he often went to Beirut to frequent nightclubs, casinos, and bars. However, when his family's construction firm was rebuilding holy mosques in the sacred cities of Mecca and Medina in 1973, bin Laden developed a religious passion for Islam and a strong belief in Islamic law. In the early 1970s, he began to preach the necessity of armed struggle and worldwide monotheism, and he also began to associate with Islamic fundamentalist groups.

Osama bin Laden  
(AP Photo; www.cnn.com)

Bin Laden's religious passion ignited in December 1979, when the Soviet Union invaded Muslim Afghanistan. Bin Laden's worldview of seeing the world in simplistic terms as a struggle between righteous Islam and a doomed West prompted him to join the mujahideen in Pakistan, just a few days after the invasion. In the early 1980s, he returned home to fund, recruit, transport, and train a volunteer force of Arab nationals, called the Islamic Salvation Front (ISF), to fight alongside the existing Afghan mujahideen. He co-founded the Mujahideen Services Bureau (Maktab al-Khidamar) and transformed it into an international network that recruited Islamic fundamentalists with special knowledge, including engineers, medical doctors, terrorists, and drug smugglers. In addition, bin Laden volunteered the services of the family construction firm to blast new roads through the mountains. As commander of a contingent of Arab troops, he experienced combat against the Soviets first-hand, including the siege of Jalalabad in 1986--one of the fiercest battles of the war, and he earned a reputation as a fearless fighter. Following that battle, bin Laden and other Islamic leaders concluded that they were victims of a U.S. conspiracy to defeat the jihad in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

By the time the Soviet Union had pulled out of Afghanistan in February 1989, bin Laden was leading a fighting force known as "Afghan Arabs," which numbered between 10,000 and 20,000. That year, after the Soviets were forced out of Afghanistan, bin Laden disbanded the ISF and returned to the family construction business in Saudi Arabia. However, now he was a celebrity, whose fiery speeches sold a quarter million cassettes. The Saudi government rewarded his hero status with numerous government construction contracts. Following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait on August 2, 1990, bin Laden urged the Saudi government not to compromise its Islamic legitimacy by inviting infidel Americans into Saudi Arabia to defend the country, but he was ignored..

Although bin Laden, unlike most other Islamic leaders, remained loyal to the regime while condemning the U.S. military and economic presence as well as the Iraqi invasion, Saudi officials increasingly began to threaten him to halt his criticism. Consequently, bin Laden and his family and a large band of followers moved to Sudan in 1991. While living modestly in Sudan, bin Laden established a construction company employing many of his former Afghan fighters. In addition to building roads and infrastructure for the Sudanese government, he ran a farm producing sunflower seeds and a tannery exporting goat hides to Italy. Sudan served as a base for his terrorist operations. In 1992 his attention appears to have been directed against Egypt, but he also claimed responsibility that year for attempting to bomb U.S. soldiers in Yemen, and again for attacks in Somalia in 1993. He also financed and help set up at least three terrorist training camps in cooperation with the Sudanese regime, and his construction company worked directly with Sudanese military officials to transport and supply terrorists training in such camps. During the 1992-96 period, he built and equipped 23 training camps for mujahideen. While in Sudan, he also established a supposedly detection-proof financial system to support Islamic terrorist activities worldwide.

In the winter of 1993, bin Laden traveled to the Philippines to support the terrorist network that would launch major operations in that country and the United States. In 1993-94, having become convinced that the House of al-Saud was no longer legitimate, bin Laden began actively supporting Islamic extremists in Saudi Arabia. His calls for insurrection prompted Saudi authorities to revoke his Saudi citizenship on April 7, 1994, for "irresponsible behavior," and he was officially expelled from the country. He subsequently established a new residence and base of operations in the London suburb of Wembley, but was forced to return to Sudan after a few months to avoid being extradited to Saudi Arabia. In early 1995, he began stepping up activities against Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

In mid-May 1996, pressure was applied by the Saudi government on Sudan to exert some form of control over bin Laden. That summer, he uprooted his family again, returning to Afghanistan on board his unmarked, private C-130 military transport plane. Bin Laden established a mountain fortress near the city of Kandahar southwest of Jalalabad, under the protection of the Afghan government. From this location, he continues to fund his training camps and military activities. In particular, bin Laden continues to fund the Kunar camp, which trains terrorists for Al-Jihad and Al-Jama' ah al-Islamiyyah. After attending a terrorism summit in Khartoum, bin Laden stopped in Tehran in early October 1996 and met with terrorist leaders, including Abu Nidal, to discuss stepping up terrorist activities in the Middle East.

A mysterious figure whose exact involvement with terrorists and terrorist incidents remains elusive, bin Laden has been linked to a number of Islamic extremist groups and individuals with vehement anti-American and anti-Israel ideologies. His name has been connected to many of the world's most deadly terrorist operations, and he is named by the U.S. Department of State as having financial and operational connections with terrorism. Some aspects of bin Laden's known activities have been established during interviews, mainly with Middle Eastern reporters and on three occasions of the release of fatwas (religious rulings) in April 1996, February 1997, and February 1998. Each threatened a jihad against U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia and the Holy Lands, and each called for Muslims to concentrate on "destroying, fighting and killing the enemy."Abdul-Bari Atwan, editor of al-Quds al-Arabi [London], who interviewed bin Laden at his Afghan headquarters in the Khorassan mountains, reports that:

The mujahideen around the man belong to most Arab states, and are of different ages, but most of them are young. They hold high scientific degrees: doctors, engineers, teachers. They left their families and jobs and joined the Afghan Jihad. There is an open front, and there are always volunteers seeking martyrdom. The Arab mujahideen respect their leader, although he does not show any firmness or leading gestures. They all told me that they are ready to die in his defense and that they would take revenge against any quarter that harms him.

A tall (6'4" to 6'6"), thin man weighing about 160 pounds and wearing a full beard, bin Laden walks with a cane. He wears long, flowing Arab robes fringed with gold, and wraps his head in a traditional red-and-white checkered headdress. He is said to be soft-spoken, extremely courteous, and even humble. He is described in some sources as ordinary and shy. He speaks only Arabic. Because he has dared to stand up to two superpowers, bin Laden has become an almost mythic figure in the Islamic world. Thanks to the ineffectual U.S. cruise missile attack against his camps in Afghanistan following the bombings in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998, thousands of Arabs and Muslims, seeing him as a hero under attack by the Great Satan, have volunteered their service.

In 1998 bin Laden married his oldest daughter to Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban's leader. He himself married a fourth wife, reportedly a young Pushtun related to key Afghan leaders. Thus, Bodansky points out, now that he is related to the Pushtun elite by blood,

the ferocious Pushtuns will defend and fight for him and never allow him to be surrendered to outsiders. Bin Laden's son Muhammad, who was born in 1985, rarely leaves his father's side. Muhammad has already received extensive military and terrorist training and carries his own AK-47. He serves as his father's vigilant personal bodyguard.

Ayman al-Zawahiri

Position: Bin Laden's second in command and the undisputed senior military commander.

Background: Al-Zawahiri, who claims to be the supreme leader of the Egyptian Jihad, is responsible for converting bin Laden to Islamic fundamentalism.

Subhi Muhammad Abu-Sunnah ("Abu-Hafs al-Masri")

Position: Military Commander of al-Qaida.

Background: A prominent Egyptian fundamentalist leader. He has close ties to bin Laden and has accompanied him on his travels to Arab and foreign countries. He also helped to establish the al-Qaida organization in Afghanistan in early 1991. He moved his activities with bin Laden to Sudan and then backed to Afghanistan.

Hizballah (Party of God)

Alias: Islamic Jihad

Group Profile

Hizballah, an extremist political-religious movement based in Lebanon, was created and sponsored by a contingent of 2,000 Iranian Revolutionary Guards (IRGs) dispatched to Lebanon by Iran in July 1982, initially as a form of resistance to the Israeli presence in southern Lebanon. Hizballah's followers are Shia Muslims, who are strongly anti-Western and anti-Israeli and totally dedicated to the creation of an Iranian-style Islamic Republic in Lebanon and the removal of non-Islamic influences in the area. Hizballah's following mushroomed in 1982 as both the Iranians and their local allies in Lebanon indoctrinated young and poor Shia peasants and young people in West Beirut's poor Shia suburbs through films, ideological seminars, and radio broadcasts. The Islamic fundamentalist groups in Lebanon have been most successful in recruiting their followers among the slum dwellers of south Beirut. By late 1984, Hizballah is thought to have absorbed all the known major extremist groups in Lebanon.

Hizballah's worldview, published in a 1985 manifesto, states that all Western influence is

detrimental to following the true path of Islam. In its eyes, the West and particularly the United States, is the foremost corrupting influence on the Islamic world today: thus, the United States is known as "the Great Satan." In the same way, the state of Israel is regarded as the product of Western imperialism and Western arrogance. Hizballah believes that the West installed Israel in the region in order to continue dominating it and exploiting its resources. Thus, Israel represents

the source of all evil and violence in the region and is seen as an outpost of the United States in the heart of the Islamic Middle East. In Hizballah's eyes, Israel must, therefore, be eradicated.

Hizballah sees itself as the savior of oppressed and dispossessed Muslims.

Hizballah's central goals help to explain the nature and scope of its use of terrorism.

These include the establishment of an exclusively Shia, Iran-style Islamic state in Lebanon; the complete destruction of the state of Israel and the establishment of Islamic rule over Jerusalem and Palestine; and an implacable opposition to the Middle East peace process, which it has tried to sabotage through terrorism.

The typical Hizballah member in 1990 was a young man in his late teens or early twenties, from a lower middle-class family. In Hizballah's first years, many members were part-time soldiers. By 1990, however, most of the militia and terrorist group members were believed to be full-time "regulars." In the early 1980s, Hizballah used suicide commandos as young as 17, including a beautiful Sunni girl, who killed herself and two Israeli soldiers. In the last decade or so, however, Hizballah has been using only more mature men for special missions and attacks, while continuing to induct youths as young as 17 into its guerrilla ranks. Hizballah's military branch includes not only members recruited from the unemployed, but also doctors, engineers, and other professionals. In 1993 Iranian sources estimated the number of Hizballah's fighters at 5,000 strong, plus 600 citizens from Arab and Islamic countries; the number of the party's political cadres and workers was estimated at 3,000 strong. Within this larger guerrilla organization, Hizballah has small terrorist cells organized on an informal basis. They may consist of the personal following of a particular leader or the relatives of a single extended family.

Hizballah is divided between moderates and radicals. Shaykh Muhammud Husayn Fadlallah, Hizballah's spiritual leader, is considered a moderate leader. The radical camp in 1997 was led by Ibrahim Amin and Hasan Nasrallah. The latter is now Hizballah's secretary general.

Leader Profile

Imad Fa'iz Mughniyah

Position: Head of Hizballah's Special Operations Command.

Background: Imad Mughniyah was born in about 1961 in southern Lebanon. He has been wanted by the FBI since the mid-1980s. He is a charismatic and extremely violent individual. His physical description, according to Hala Jaber (1997:120), is "short and chubby with a babyish face." Mughniyah served in the PLO's Force 17 as a highly trained security man specializing in explosives. In 1982, after his village in southern Lebanon was occupied by Israeli troops, he and his family took refuge in the southern suburbs of Beirut, where he was soon injured by artillery fire. Disillusioned by the PLO, he joined the IRGs. His first important task apparently was to mastermind the bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires in 1982, in which 22 people were killed. On September 2, 1999, Argentina's Supreme Court issued an arrest warrant for Mughniyah for ordering that bombing. His next important tasks, on behalf of Syria and Iran, were the truck bombings that killed 63 people at the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, in April 1983, and another 241 U.S. Marines and sailors at their barracks near Beirut airport the following October; the hijacking of an American airliner in 1985, in which one American was killed; and the 1995 hijacking of TWA flight 847 from Athens to Rome. He also kidnapped most of the Americans who were held hostage in Lebanon, including William Buckley, who was murdered, as well as the British envoy, Terry Waite. In December 1994, his brother was killed by a car bomb placed outside his shop in Beirut.

In mid-February 1997, the pro-Israeli South Lebanese Army radio station reported that Iran's intelligence service dispatched Mughniyah to Lebanon to directly supervise the reorganization of Hizballah's security apparatus concerned with Palestinian affairs in Lebanon and to work as a security liaison between Hizballah and Iranian intelligence. Mughniyah also reportedly controls Hizballah's security apparatus, the Special Operations Command, which handles intelligence and conducts overseas terrorist acts. Operating out of Iran, Lebanon, and Syria, Mughniyah is known to frequently travel on Middle East Airlines (MEA), whose ground crews include Hizballah members. Although he uses Hizballah as a cover, he reports to the Iranians.

Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas)

Group Profile

In December 1987, when the Palestinian uprising (Intifada) erupted, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and other followers of the Muslim Brotherhood Society (Jama'at al-Ikhwan al-Muslimin--MB), who had been running welfare, social, and educational services through their mosques, immediately established the Islamic Resistance Movement (Harakat al Muqawana al Islamiyyah--Hamas). Hamas's militant wing Al Qassam ('Izz al-Din al-Qassam) played a major role in the Intifada. Responsible for attacks on Israeli soldiers, Hamas gained a reputation for ruthlessness and unpredictability.

During the Intifada, two main organizational trends toward decentralization of Hamas developed: Hamas's political leadership moved to the neighboring Arab states, mainly Jordan; and grass-roots leaders, representing young, militant activists, attained increased authority and increased freedom of action within their areas of operation. Hamas's leadership remains divided between those operating inside the Occupied Territories and those operating outside, mainly from Damascus. Mahmoud el-Zahar, Hamas's political leader in Gaza, operated openly until his arrest in early 1996 by Palestinian security forces.

Impatient with the PLO's prolonged efforts to free the Occupied Territories by diplomatic means, in November 1992 Hamas formed an alliance with Iran for support in the continuation of the Intifada. That December, 415 Palestinians suspected of having links with Hamas were expelled from Israel into Lebanon, where they were refused refugee status by Lebanon and neighboring Arab states. They remained for six months in a desert camp until international condemnation of the deportations forced Israel to agree to their return. In September 1993, Hamas opposed the peace accord between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and maintained a campaign of violence within Israel aimed at disrupting the Middle East peace process. Its militant wing, Al-Qassam, claimed responsibility for two bomb attacks within Israel in April 1994 and for a further bus bombing in Tel Aviv in October 1994. All were carried out by suicide bombers.

The most persistent image of Hamas in the Western media is that of a terrorist group comprised of suicide bombers in the occupied territories and a radical terrorist faction in Damascus. However, Hamas is also a large socioreligious movement involved in communal work within the Palestinian refugee camps and responsible for many civic-action projects. It runs a whole range of cultural, educational, political, and social activities based on mosques and local community groups. In 1996 most of Hamas's estimated $70 million annual budget was going to support a network of hundreds of mosques, schools, orphanages, clinics, and hospitals in almost every village, town, and refugee camp on the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Consequently, Hamas has massive grass-roots support.

In 1993 Hamas's support reportedly varied from more than 40 percent among the Gaza population as a whole to well over 60 percent in certain Gaza refugee camps, and its support in the West Bank varied from 25 percent to as much as 40 percent. Hamas was reported in early 1996 to enjoy solid support among 15 percent to 20 percent of the 2 million Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. According to Professor Ehud Sprinzak of Hebrew University, Hamas is so popular among 20 to 30 percent of Palestinians not because it has killed and wounded hundreds of Israelis but because it has provided such important community services for the Palestinian population. Moreover, Hamas activists live among the poor and have a reputation for honesty, in contrast with many Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) activists. Hamas supporters reportedly cross both tribal patterns and family patterns among Palestinians. The same family often has brothers in both the PLO and Hamas.

Hamas's social services also provide both a cover and a recruiting ground for young Hamas terrorists. Hamas members have been recruited from among believers at Hamas-run mosques, which are also used for holding meetings, organizing demonstrations, distributing leaflets, and launching terrorist attacks. Hamas's ability to recruit leading West Bank religious activists into its leadership ranks has broadened its influence.

The Suicide Bombing Strategy

Sprinzak points out that Hamas's opposition to the peace process has never led it to pursue a strategy of suicide bombing. Rather, the group has resorted to this tactic as a way of exacting tactical revenge for humiliating Israeli actions. For example, in a CBS "60 Minutes" interview in 1997, Hassan Salameh, arch terrorist of Hamas, confirmed that the assassination of Yehiya Ayash ("The Engineer") by Israelis had prompted his followers to organize three suicide bombings that stunned Israel in 1996. Salameh thus contradicted what former Labor Party prime minister Shimon Peres and other Israeli leaders had contended, that the bombings resulted from a strategic decision by Hamas to bring down the Israeli government. According to Sprinzak, the wave of Hamas suicide bombings in late 1997, the third in the series, started in response to a series of Israeli insults of Palestinians that have taken place since the beginning of 1997, such as unilateral continuation of settlements. Similarly, Sprinzak notes, Hamas did not initially pursue a policy of bombing city buses. Hamas resorted to this tactic only after February 1994, when Baruch Goldstein, an Israeli physician and army reserve captain, massacred 29 Palestinians praying in a Hebron shrine. The professor's policy prescriptions for reducing Hamas's incentives to commit terrorist atrocities against Israel are to recognize that Hamas is a Palestinian fact of life and to desist from aggressive policies such as unilateral continuation of settlements and assassination of Hamas leaders.

Hamas thrives on the misery and frustration of Palestinians. Its charter, Jerrold Post notes, is pervaded with paranoid rhetoric. The harsh Israeli blockade of Palestinian areas has only strengthened Hamas.

Selection of Suicide Bombers

Hamas's suicide bombers belong to its military wing, Al-Qassam. The Al-Qassam brigades are composed of small, tightly knit cells of fanatics generally in their mid- to late twenties. In Hamas, selection of a suicide bomber begins with members of Hamas's military cells or with members of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, who circulate among organizations, schools, and mosques of the refugee camps in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The recruiter will broach the subject of dying for Allah with a group of students and watch the students' reactions. Students who seem particularly interested in the discussion are immediately singled out for possible "special merit."

In almost every case, these potential bombers--who range in age from 12 to 17 years--have a relative or close friend who was killed, wounded, or jailed during the Israeli occupation. Bombers are also likely to have some longstanding personal frustration, such as the shame they suffered at the hands of friends who chastised them for not throwing stones at the Israeli troops during the Intifada. Theirs is a strong hatred of the enemy that can only be satisfied through a religious act that gives them the courage to take revenge. The suicide bombers are of an age to be regarded by the community as old enough to be responsible for their actions but too young to have wives and children. Hamas claims that its suicide bombers repeatedly volunteer to be allowed to be martyrs. These young persons, conditioned by years of prayer in Hamas mosques, believe that as martyrs they will go to heaven.

These aspiring suicide bombers attend classes in which trained Islamic instructors focus on the verses of the Koran and the Hadith, the sayings of the Prophet that form the basis of Islamic law and that idealize and stress the glory of dying for Allah. Students are promised an afterlife replete with gold palaces, sumptuous feasts, and obliging women. Aside from religion, the indoctrination includes marathon sessions of anti-Israeli propaganda. Students entering the program quickly learn that "the Jews have no right to exist on land that belongs to the Muslims." Students are assigned various tasks to test their commitment. Delivering weapons for use in clandestine activities is a popular way to judge the student's ability to follow orders and keep a secret. Some students are even buried together in mock graves inside a Palestinian cemetery to see if the idea of death spooks them. Students who survive this test are placed in graves by themselves and asked to recite passages from the Koran. It is at this stage that the recruits, organized in small groups of three to five, start resembling members of a cult, mentally isolated from their families and friends.

The support granted by Hamas to the families of suicide bombers and others killed in clashes with Israel are considered vital to Hamas's military operations because they play an important role in recruiting. Graduates of Hamas's suicide schools know that their supreme sacrifice will see their families protected for life. For someone used to a life of poverty, this is a prized reward. Hamas awards monthly stipends in the range of $1,000 to the families of the bombers. Scholarships for siblings and foodstuffs are also made available. Hamas pays for the resettlement of all suicide bomber families who lose their homes as a result of Israeli retribution.

Before embarking on his or her final mission directly from a mosque, the young suicide bomber spends many days chanting the relevant scriptures aloud at the mosque. The mantras inculcate a strong belief in the bomber that Allah and Heaven await. For example, a favorite verse reads: "Think not of those who are slain in Allah's way as dead. No, they live on and find their sustenance in the presence of their Lord." This belief is strong enough to allow the bomber to mingle casually among his intended victims without showing any nervousness.

To ensure the utmost secrecy, a bomber learns how to handle explosives only right before the mission. This practice also minimizes the time in which the bomber could have second thoughts about his martyrdom that could arise from using explosives over time. In the past, it was common for the bomber to leave a written will or make a videotape. This custom is no longer practiced because the General Security Service, the secret service, known by its initials in Hebrew as Shin Bet, has arrested other suicide bombers on the basis of information left on these records. In November 1994, the names of 66 Al-Qassam Brigade Martyrs, along with their area of residence, date of martyrdom, and means of martyrdom, were published for the first time. In the late 1990s, the name or the picture of the bomber is sometimes not even released after the suicide attack. Hamas has even stopped publicly celebrating successful suicide attacks. Nevertheless, pictures of past suicide bombers hang on the walls of barber shops inside the refugee camps, and small children collect and trade pictures of suicide bombers. There is even a teenage rock group known as the "Martyrs" that sings the praises of the latest bombers entering heaven.

In late 1997, Iran reportedly escalated its campaign to sabotage the Middle East peace process by training Palestinian suicide bombers. The two suicide bombers who carried out an attack that killed 22 Israelis on January 22, 1998, reportedly had recently returned from training in Iran. After their deaths, the Iranian government reportedly made payments to the families of both men. On September 5, 1999, four Hamas terrorists, all Israeli Arabs who had been recruited and trained in the West Bank, attempted to carry out a mission to bomb two Jerusalem-bound buses. However, both bombs apparently had been set to explode much earlier than planned, and both exploded almost simultaneously in the terrorists' cars, one in Tiberias and another in Haifa, as they were en route to their targets.

Leader Profiles

Sheikh Ahmed Yassin

Significance: Hamas founder and spiritual leader.

Background: Ahmed Yassin was born near Ashqelan in the south of Palestine in 1937. After the

1948 Israeli occupation, he lived as a refugee in the Shati camp in Gaza. He became handicapped and confined to a wheelchair in 1952 as a result of an accident. He is also blind and nearly deaf. He received a secondary school education in Gaza and worked as a teacher and preacher there from 1958 until 1978. His association with the Islamic fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood organization began in the 1950s. He founded the Islamic Center in Gaza in 1973. In 1979, influenced by the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran, he established Gaza's Islamic Society (Mujamma') and was its director until 1984. Although he was allowed to use the Israeli media to criticize Yasir Arafat and the PLO, Yassin was jailed for 10 months in 1984 for security reasons. He was a well-respected Muslim Brotherhood leader in Gaza running welfare and educational services in 1987 when the Palestinian uprising, Intifada, against Israeli occupation began. He shortly thereafter formed Hamas. He was arrested in May 1989 and sentenced in Israel to life imprisonment for ordering the killing of Palestinians who had allegedly collaborated with the Israeli Army. He was freed in early October 1997 in exchange for the release of two Israeli agents arrested in Jordan after a failed assassination attempt there against a Hamas leader. Yassin then returned to his home in Gaza. He spent much of the first half of 1998 on a fund-raising tour of Sudan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, United Arab Republics, Iran, and Syria, during which he also received medical treatment in Egypt. Two countries, Saudi Arabia and Iran, reportedly pledged between $50 million and $300 million for Hamas's military operations against Israel. After his tour, and in frail health, Yassin returned to Gaza.

Sheik Ahmed Yassin  
(Photo courtesy of The News-Times, January 28, 1998)

Mohammed Mousa ("Abu Marzook")

Significance: Member, Hamas Political Bureau.

Background: Mohammed Mousa was born in 1951 in Rafah, the Gaza Strip. He completed his basic education in the Gaza Strip, studied engineering at Ein Shams University in Cairo, and graduated in 1977. He worked as manager of a factory in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) until 1981. He then moved to the United States to pursue his doctorate and lived with his family in Falls Church, Virginia, and Brooklyn, New York, for almost 14 years prior to his arrest in 1995. In the early 1980s, he became increasingly involved with militant Muslims in the United States and elsewhere. He co-founded an umbrella organization called the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP) and became head of its governing council. The IAP, now headquartered in Richardson, Texas, established offices in Arizona, California, and Indiana. Beginning in 1987, Mousa allegedly was responsible for launching Hamas terrorist attacks against Israel. In 1989 he became the founding president of the United Association of Studies and Research (UASR), allegedly a covert branch of Hamas responsible for disseminating propaganda and engaging in strategic and political planning, located in Springfield, Virginia. In 1991 he earned a Ph.D. degree in Industrial Engineering. That year he was elected as Chairman of the Hamas Political Bureau, as a result of the arrest of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in 1989. Known as an ambitious and charismatic figure, Mousa reorganized Hamas by centralizing political, military, and financial control under his leadership and developing foreign funding. Traveling freely between the United States and Europe, Iran, Jordan, Sudan, and Syria, he allegedly helped to establish a large, clandestine financial network as well as death squads that allegedly were responsible for the murder or wounding of many Israelis and suspected Palestinian collaborators. He led the resumption of suicide bombings in protest of the 1993 Oslo accords. In early 1995, under U.S. pressure, Jordanian authorities expelled him from Amman, where he had set up a major Hamas support office. After leaving Amman, he traveled between Damascus and Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, among other places.

On July 28, 1995, Mousa arrived at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York on a flight from London and was detained by Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) agents for being on a "watch list" of suspected terrorists. Three days later, Israel formally requested Mousa's extradition to face criminal charges of terrorism and conspiracy to commit murder. FBI agents arrested Mousa on August 8, 1995, pending an extradition hearing, and he was jailed at the Federal Metropolitan Correction Center in Manhattan. Mousa dropped his objection to extradition 18 months later, saying he would rather "suffer martyrdom in Israel than fight extradition through an unjust U.S. court system." Mahmoud Zahar, a top Hamas official in Gaza, then threatened the United States if Mousa were extradited. Wishing to avoid terrorist retaliation, Israel withdrew its extradition request on April 3, 1997. Mousa was thereupon deported to Jordan on May 6, 1997. In August 1999, Jordanian authorities closed the Hamas office in Amman and, on September 22, arrested Mousa and two of his fellow Hamas members. Mousa, who was reportedly holding Yemeni citizenship and both Egyptian and Palestinian travel documents, was again deported.

Emad al-Alami

Significance: A Hamas leader.

Background: Al-Alami was born in the Gaza Strip in 1956. An engineer, he became overall leader of Hamas after the arrest of Mohammed Mousa in 1995. However, in early 1996 he reportedly had less control over all elements of Hamas than Mousa had had. He was based mainly in Damascus, from where he made trips to Teheran.

Mohammed Dief

Position: Al-Qassam leader.

Background: Mohammed Dief is believed to have assumed command of the military brigades of Hamas (Al-Qassam) following the death of Yahya Ayyash ("The Engineer"), who was killed on January 5, 1996. Dief reportedly leads from a small house on the Gaza Strip, although he is known to travel frequently to both Lebanon and Syria. He is currently among the most wanted by Israeli authorities.

Al-Jihad Group

(a.k.a.: al-Jihad, Islamic Jihad, New Jihad Group, Vanguards of the Conquest, Tala'i' al-Fath)

Group Profile

The al-Jihad Organization of Egypt, also known as the Islamic Group, is a militant offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood movement, an anti-Western Islamic organization that has targeted Egyptian government officials for assassination since its founding in 1928. In 1981 Sheikh 'Umar Abd al-Rahman (also known as Omar Abdel Rahman), al-Jihad's blind theologian at the University of Asyut, issued a fatwa, or religious edict, sanctioning the assassination of President Anwar al-Sadat.

In 1981 more than half of al-Jihad's membership were students or teachers from vocational centers and at least eight universities. However, some of the 302 al-Jihad members arrested in December 1982 for coup-plotting in the wake of Sadat's assassination included members of the Air Force military intelligence, Army central headquarters, the Central Security Services, and even the Presidential Guard. Others included employees at strategic jobs in broadcasting, the telephone exchange, and municipal services.

Since 1998 there has been a change in the declared policy of the Al-Jihad group. In addition to its bitter ideological conflict with the "heretical" Egyptian government, the organization began calling for attacks against American and Israeli targets. Nassar Asad al-Tamini of the Islamic Jihad, noting the apparent ease with which biological weapons can be acquired, has suggested using them against Israel. In the eyes of the al-Jihad group, the United States and Israel are the vanguard of a worldwide campaign to destroy Islam and its believers, with the help of the current Egyptian government. This changed attitude was the result of, among other things, the Egyptian al-Jihad's joining the coalition of Islamic fundamentalist terrorist organizations led by the Afghans. The collaboration between the Egyptian organizations and Al-Qaida played a key role in the formation of Osama bin Laden's "Islamic Front for Jihad against the Jews and the Crusaders." Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Jihad's leader, who was sentenced in absentia to death or to life imprisonment on April 18, 1999, is a close associate of Osama bin Laden and one of the founders of the "Islamic Front for Jihad against the Crusaders and the Jews."

The movement basically seeks to challenge the West on an Islamic basis and establish an Islamic caliphate. However, the goals of the various al-Jihad groups differ in regard to the Palestinian issue. Islamic Jihad wants to liberate Palestine. Others give priority to establishing an Islamic state as a prerequisite for the liberation of Palestine. Islamic Jihad is very hostile toward Arab and Islamic regimes, particularly Jordan, which it considers puppets of the imperialist West. In the spring of 1999, the Islamic Group's leadership and governing council announced that it was giving up armed struggle. Whether that statement was a ruse remains to be seen.

The social background of the al-Jihad remains unclear because the group has never operated fully in public. By the mid-1990s, intellectuals occupied important positions in the leadership of the al-Jihad movements in both Jordan and the Occupied Territories, where it is a powerful force in the unions of engineers, doctors, and students. Their power among workers continues to be weak.

New Religious Groups

Aum Shinrikyo

Group/Leader Profile

The investigation into the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway on March 20, 1995, opened a window on Shoko Asahara's cult, Aum Shinrikyo. In 1995 Aum Shinrikyo claimed to have 10,000 supporters in Japan and 30,000 in Russia. Whereas doomsday cults previously had carried out mass suicides, Aum Shinrikyo set itself apart from them by inflicting mass murder on the general public.

What seems most remarkable about this apocalyptic cult is that its leading members include Japan's best and brightest: scientists, computer experts, lawyers and other highly trained professionals. But according to cult expert Margaret Singer of the University of California at Berkeley, these demographics are not unusual. "Cults actively weed out the stupid and the psychiatric cases and look for people who are lonely, sad, between jobs or jilted," she says. Many observers also suggest that inventive minds turn to Aum Shinrikyo as an extreme reaction against the corporate-centered Japanese society, in which devotion to one's job is valued over individual expression and spiritual growth.

Japan's school system of rote memorization, in which individualism and critical thinking and analysis are systematically suppressed, combined with crowded cities and transportation networks, have greatly contributed to the proliferation of cults in Japan, and to the growth of Aum Shinrikyo in particular. Aum Shinrikyo is one of at least 180,000 minor religions active in Japan. There is general agreement that the discipline and competitiveness required of Japan's education system made Aum Shinrikyo seem very attractive to bright university graduates. It provided an alternative life-style in which recruits could rebel against their families, friends, and "the system."

Numerous Aum Shinrikyo members were arrested on various charges after the sarin attack on the Tokyo subway system in 1995. According to Manabu Watanabe, none of them claimed innocence; rather, many of them confessed their crimes and showed deep remorse. "These people were proven to be sincere and honest victims of Asahara, the mastermind," Watanabe comments. Aum Shinrikyo became active again in 1997, when the Japanese government decided not to ban it. In 1998 Aum Shinrikyo had about 2,000 members, including 200 of the 380 members who had been arrested.

The story of Aum Shinrikyo is the story of Shoko Asahara, its charismatic and increasingly psychopathic leader. Asahara, whose real name is Chizuo Matsumoto, was born in 1955, the fourth son of a poor weaver of tatami mats, in the small rural village of Yatsushiro on Japan's main southern island of Kyushu. Afflicted with infantile glaucoma, he was blind in one eye and had diminished vision in the other. At age six, he was sent to join his blind older brother at a government-funded boarding school for the blind. Because he had limited vision in one eye, however, he soon developed influence over the blind students, who would pay him for services such as being a guide. Already at that early age, he exhibited a strong tendency to dominate people. His activities as a violence-prone, judo-proficient con artist and avaricious bully had earned him the fear of his classmates, as well as $3,000, by the time he graduated from high school in 1975.

After graduation, Asahara established a lucrative acupuncture clinic in Kumamoto. However, his involvement in a fight in which several people were injured forced him to leave the island for Tokyo in 1977. His stated ambitions at the time included serving as supreme leader of a robot kingdom and even becoming prime minister of Japan. In Tokyo he again found work as an acupuncturist and also attended a prep school to prepare for the highly competitive Japanese college entrance examinations, which he nevertheless failed. He also began taking an interest in religion, taught himself Chinese, and studied the revolutionary philosophy of Mao Zedong. In the summer of 1977, Asahara met Tomoko Ishii, a young college student; they married in January 1978, and the first of their six children was born in 1979. In 1978 Asahara opened a Chinese herbal medicine and acupuncture clinic southeast of Tokyo and reportedly earned several hundred thousand dollars from the business. In 1981 he joined a new religion called Agon Shu, known for its annual Fire Ceremony and fusing of elements of Early Buddhism, Tantric Buddhism, and Hindu and Taoist yoga. In 1982 he was arrested and convicted for peddling fake Chinese cures and his business collapsed as a result. Bankrupted, Asahara reportedly earned nearly $200,000 from a hotel scam that year.

In 1984 Asahara quit Agon Shu and, with the help of a few followers who also left Agon Shu, created a yoga training center called Aum, Inc. By the mid-1980s, the center had more than 3,000 followers, and in 1985 Asahara began promoting himself as a holy man. After a spiritual voyage through the Himalayas, he promoted himself as having mystical powers and spiritual bliss.

Beginning in 1986, Aum Shinrikyo began a dual system of membership: ordained and lay. Ordained members had to donate all their belongings, including inheritances, to Aum. Many resisted, and a total of 56 ordained members have been reported as missing or dead, including 21 who died in the Aum Shinrikyo clinic.

In early 1987, Asahara managed to meet the Dalai Lama. Asahara's megalomania then blossomed. In July 1987, he renamed his yoga schools, which were nonreligious, Aum Supreme Truth (Aum Shinri Kyo) and began developing a personality cult. The next year, Asahara expanded his vision to include the salvation not only of Japan but the world. By the end of 1987, Aum Shinrikyo had 1,500 members concentrated in several of Japan's major cities.

Shoko Asahara  
(Photo courtesy of Reuters/Ho/Archive)

In 1988 Aum Shinrikyo began recruiting new members, assigning only attractive and appealing members as recruiters. It found a fertile recruitment ground in Japan's young, college-educated professionals in their twenties and early thirties from college campuses, dead-end jobs, and fast-track careers. Systematically targeting top universities, Aum Shinrikyo leaders recruited brilliant but alienated young scientists from biology, chemistry, engineering, medical, and physics departments. Many, for example, the computer programmers, were "techno-freaks" who spent much of their time absorbed in comics and their computers. Aum Shinrikyo also enlisted medical doctors to dope patients and perform human experiments. The first young Japanese to be free of financial pressures, the Aum Shinrikyo recruits were wondering if there was more to life than job security and social conformity. However, as Aum Shinrikyo members they had no need to think for themselves. According to David Kaplan and Andrew Marshall, "The high-tech children of postindustrial Japan were fascinated by Aum's dramatic claims to supernatural power, its warnings of an apocalyptic future, its esoteric spiritualism."

Aum's hierarchy had been influenced by Japanese animated movies, cyberpunk fiction and science fiction, virtual reality machines, and computer games. For example, Aum Shinrikyo used Isaac Asimov's classic sci-fi epic in the Foundation Series as a high-tech blueprint for the millennium and beyond. Indeed, Asahara modeled himself on Hari Seldon, the key character in the Foundation Series. The fictional Seldon is a brilliant mathematician who discovers "psychohistory," the science of true prediction, and attempts to save humanity from apocalypse by forming a secret religious society, the Foundation, that can rebuild civilization in a millennium. To do this, Seldon recruits the best minds of his time, and, once a hierarchy of scientist-priests is established, they set about preserving the knowledge of the universe. Like Asimov's scientists in the Foundation Series, Asahara preached that the only way to survive was to create a secret order of beings armed with superior intellect, state-of-the-art technology, and knowledge of the future.

To retain its membership, Aum Shinrikyo used mind-control techniques that are typical of cults worldwide, including brutal forms of physical and psychological punishment for various minor transgressions. New members had to terminate all contacts with the outside world and donate all of their property to Aum. This policy outraged the parents of Aum Shinrikyo members. In addition, in 1989 Aum Shinrikyo began to use murder as a sanction on members wishing to leave the sect.

In July 1989, Aum Shinrikyo became more public when Asahara announced that Aum Shinrikyo would field a slate of 25 candidates, including Asahara, in the next election of the lower house of the Japanese parliament. To that end, Aum Shinrikyo formed a political party, Shinrito (Turth Party). All of the Aum Shinrikyo candidates were young professionals between the ages of 25 and 38. In addition, Aum Shinrikyo finally succeeded in getting official recognition as an official religion on August 15, 1989, on a one-year probationary basis.

In the political arena, however, Aum Shinrikyo was a total failure. Its bizarre campaign antics, such as having its followers dance about in front of subway stations wearing huge papier-mâché heads of Asahara, dismayed the public, which gave Aum Shinrikyo a resounding defeat in the 1990 parliamentary elections (a mere 1,783 votes). This humiliation, it is believed, fueled Asahara's paranoia, and he accused the Japanese government of rigging the voting.

Following this public humiliation, Asahara's darker side began to emerge. He began asking his advisers how they might set off vehicle bombs in front of their opponents' offices, and in March 1990, he ordered his chief chemist, Seiichi Endo, to develop a botulin agent.

Beginning that April, when Aum Shinrikyo sent three trucks into the streets of Tokyo to spray poisonous mists, Asahara began to preach a doomsday scenario to his followers and the necessity for Aum Shinrikyo members to militarize and dedicate themselves to protecting Aum Shinrikyo against the coming Armageddon. That April, an Aum Shinrikyo team sprayed botulin poison on the U.S. naval base at Yokosuka outside Tokyo, where the U.S. 7^th Fleet docked, but the botulin turned out to be a defective batch.

To prevent its dwindling membership from falling off further, Aum Shinrikyo began to forcefully prevent members from leaving, and to recruit abroad. The group's efforts in the United States were not successful; in the early 1990s, Aum Shinrikyo had only a few dozen followers in the New York City area..

By late 1992, Asahara was preaching that Armageddon would occur by the year 2000, and that more than 90 percent of Japan's urban populations would be wiped out by nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons of mass destruction. Apparently, Asahara's plan was to develop the weapons of mass destruction needed for making this Armageddon a reality. In 1992 Aum Shinrikyo began purchasing businesses on a worldwide scale. It set up dummy companies, primarily in Russia and the United States, where its investments served as covers to purchase technology, weapons, and chemicals for its weapons program. During 1992-94, Aum Shinrikyo recruited a number of Russian experts in weapons of mass destruction. Aum's Russian followers included employees in Russia's premier nuclear research facility, the I.V. Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy, and the Mendeleyev Chemical Institute. Aum's chemical weapons efforts were more successful than its nuclear efforts. After the Gulf War, Aum's scientists began work on sarin and other related nerve agents.

Aum Shinrikyo found that it could recruit at least one member from almost any Japanese or Russian agency or corporation and turn that recruit into its own agent. For example, in late 1994 Aum Shinrikyo needed access to sensitive military secrets held by the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) compound in Hiroshima, so Aum Shinrikyo member Hideo Nakamoto, an MHI senior researcher, obtained MHI uniforms, and Yoshihiro Inoue recruited and converted three paratroopers from the 1^st Airborne Brigade, an elite Japanese paratrooper unit. Nakamoto then escorted Inoue and the three paratroopers, wearing MHI uniforms, into the high-security facility, where they downloaded megabytes of restricted files on advanced weapons technology from MHI's mainframe. Other sites raided by the squad included the laser-research lab of NEC, Japan's top computer manufacturer, and the U.S. naval base at Yokosuka . Aum's membership lists included more than 20 serving and former members of the Self-Defense Forces.

Aum's sarin attacks were carried out by highly educated terrorists. Aum's minister of science and technology, Hideo Murai, an astrophysicist, led the cult's first sarin attack in the mountain town Matsumoto on June 27, 1994, by releasing sarin gas near the apartment building in which the judge who had ruled against the cult lived. The attack killed seven people and poisoned more than 150 others. Robert S. Robbins and Jerrold M. Post note that: "In 1994 Asahara made the delusional claim that U.S. jets were delivering gas attacks on his followers, a projection of his own paranoid psychology. Asahara became increasingly preoccupied not with surviving the coming war but with starting it." That year, Asahara reorganized Aum, using Japan's government as a model (see Table 7).

Source: Based on information from D.W. Brackett, Holy Terror: Armageddon

in Tokyo. New York: Weatherhill, 1996, 104.

The five Aum Shinrikyo terrorists who carried out the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway on March 20, 1995, included Ikuo Hayashi, 48, head of Aum's Ministry of Healing (aka Medical Treatment Ministry). The other four were all vice ministers of Aum's Ministry of Science and Technology and included: Masato Yokoyama, 31, an applied-physics graduate; Kenichi Hirose, 30, who graduated at the top of his class in applied physics at the prestigious Waseda University; Yasuo Hayashi, 37, an electronics engineer; and Toru Toyoda, a physicist.

Although no motive has been established for Asahara's alleged role in the nerve-gas attacks, some observers suggest that the Tokyo subway attack might have been revenge: all the subway cars struck by the sarin converged at a station beneath a cluster of government offices. Adding credence to this view, 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.

Shoko Egawa, an Aum Shinrikyo critic who has authored at least two books on the cult, observed that Aum Shinrikyo members made no attempt at reviewing the propriety of their own actions during the trial. When their own violations were being questioned, they shifted to generalities, and spoke as if they were objective third parties. Their routine tactics, she notes, included shifting stories into religious doctrine and training, making an issue out of a minor error on the part of the other party, evading the main issue, and feigning ignorance when confronted with critical facts.

Authorities arrested a total of 428 Aum Shinrikyo members, and thousands of others quit. The government also stripped Aum Shinrikyo of its tax-exempt status and declared it bankrupt in 1996. Nevertheless, Aum Shinrikyo retained its legal status as a sect and eventually began to regroup. In 1998 its computer equipment front company had sales of $57 million, and its membership had risen to about 2,000. In December 1998, Japan's Public Security Investigation Agency warned in its annual security review that the cult was working to boost its membership and coffers. "Aum is attempting to re-enlist former members and step up recruiting of new members nationwide. It is also initiating advertising campaigns and acquiring necessary capital," the report said.

Key Leader Profiles

Yoshinobu Aoyama

Position: Aum's minister of justice.

Background: Yoshinobu Aoyama was born in 1960. The son of a wealthy Osaka family, he graduated from Kyoto University Law School, where he was the youngest person in his class to pass the national bar exam. He joined Aum Shinrikyo in 1988 and within two years was its chief counsel. He was arrested in 1990 for violation of the National Land Law, and after being released on bail, he involved himself in an effort to prove his innocence. As Aum's attorney, he led its successful defense strategy of expensive countersuits and legal intimidation of Aum Shinrikyo critics. According to Kaplan and Marshall, "He had longish hair, a robotlike delivery, and darting, nervous eyes that made it easy to underestimate him." He was arrested on May 3, 1995.

According to Shoko Egawa, Aoyama's foremost traits during his trial included shifting responsibility and changing the story; speaking emotionally and becoming overly verbose when advocating Aum Shinrikyo positions, but speaking in a completely unemotional voice and making a purely perfunctory apology when addressing a case of obvious violation of the law; engaging in a lengthy dissertation on religious terms; deploying extended empty explanations and religious theory until the listener succumbed to a loss of patience and forgot the main theme of the discussion; deliberately shifting away from the main discussion and responding in a meandering manner to upset the questioner; resorting to counter-questioning and deceiving the other party by refusing to answer and pretending to explain a premise; and showing a complete absence of any remorse for having served the Aum Shinrikyo cult.

Seiichi Endo

Position: Minister of Health and Welfare.

Background: Seiichi Endo, born in 1960, was Aum's health and welfare minister. As a graduate student in biology at Kyoto University, he did experiments in genetic engineering at the medical school's Viral Research Center. Provided with a small but well-equipped biolab by Aum, he conducted research in biological warfare agents, such as botulism and the Ebola virus. In March 1990, three weeks after voters rejected 25 Aum Shinrikyo members running for legislative office, Endo and three others went on a trip to collect starter botulinum germs on the northern island of Hokkaido, where Endo had studied as a young man. In late 1993, Asahara also assigned Endo the task of making sarin nerve gas. In a 1994 speech made in Moscow, he discussed the use of Ebola as a potential biological warfare agent. Endo produced the impure sarin that was used for the Tokyo subway attack on March 20, 1995. He was arrested on April 26, 1995, and publicly admitted his role in the sarin attacks in the town of Matsumoto on June 27, 1994, and Tokyo on March 20, 1995.

Kiyohide Hayakawa

Position: Asahara's second in command and minister of construction.

Background: A key senior Aum Shinrikyo member, Kiyohide Hayakawa was born in 1949 in Osaka. He was active in leftist causes in the 1960s and during college. He received a master's degree in environmental planning from Osaka University in 1975. He worked in various architecture firms until 1986, when he joined the Aum's precursor group and soon distinguished himself as director of the Aum's Osaka division. Beginning in 1990, he masterminded Aum's attempt to arm itself and promoted its expansion into Russia. After becoming second in command, he spent a lot of time in Russia developing contacts there for the sect's militarization program. During 1992-95, he visited Russia 21 times, spending more than six months there. His visits to Russia became monthly between November 1993 and April 1994. His captured notebooks contain numerous references to nuclear and seismological weapons. Hayakawa participated in the murder of an Aum Shinrikyo member and the family of Attorney Tsutsumi Sakamoto, 33, a tenacious Aum Shinrikyo critic, in 1995. He was arrested on April 19, 1995.

Dr. Ikuo Hayashi

Position: Aum's minister of healing.

Background: Ikuo Hayashi, born in 1947, was the son of a Ministry of Health official. He graduated from Keio University's elite medical school, and studied at Mount Sinai Hospital in the United States before joining the Japanese medical system. Handsome and youthful looking, he was a respected doctor and head of cardiopulmonary medicine at a government hospital just outside Tokyo. His behavior changed after an automobile accident in April 1988, when he fell asleep while driving a station wagon and injured a mother and her young daughter. Despondent, he, along with his wife, an anesthesiologist, joined Aum, whereupon he began treating his patients bizarrely, using Aum Shinrikyo techniques. Forced to resign from his hospital position, Dr. Hayashi was put in charge of Aum's new clinic in Tokyo, where patients tended to live only long enough to be brainwashed and to sign over their property to Aum, according to Kaplan and Marshall.

Hayashi was also appointed Aum's minister of healing. Kaplan and Marshall report that "he coldly presided over the wholesale doping, torture, and death of many followers." His activities included using electric shocks to erase memories of 130 suspicious followers. He participated in the sarin attack on the Tokyo subway March 20, 1995.

Arrested on April 8, 1995, Hayashi was sentenced to life in prison on May 26, 1998, for spraying sarin in the Tokyo subway. In trial witness testimony on November 27, 1998, he said that he felt a dilemma over the crimes that he committed because they clashed with his social values, but he used Aum Shinrikyo doctrines to convince himself. Hayashi claimed he followed Asahara's order to commit murders not only out of fear that if he had disobeyed he would have been killed, but also out of a belief that Asahara had some religious power, that he had the God-like ability to see through a person's past, present, and future. Ikuo allegedly abandoned his faith in Asahara.

Yoshihiro Inoue

Position: Aum's minister of intelligence.

Background: Yoshihiro Inoue was born in 1970, the son of a salaried minor official. Kaplan and Marshall describe him as "a quiet boy of middling intelligence who devoured books on Nostradamus and the supernatural." While a high school student in Kyoto, he attended his first Aum Shinrikyo seminar. He became Aum's minister of intelligence and one of its "most ruthless killers," according to Kaplan and Marshall. Unlike other Aum Shinrikyo leaders, Inoue lacked a university degree, having dropped out of college after several months to dedicate his life to Aum, which he had joined as a high school junior. He was so dedicated to Asahara that he declared that he would kill his parents if Asahara ordered it. Inoue was also so articulate, persuasive, and dedicated that, despite his unfriendly face--lifeless black eyes, frowning mouth, and pouting, effeminate lips--he was able to recruit 300 monks and 1,000 new believers, including his own mother and many Tokyo University students. His captured diaries contain his random thoughts and plans concerning future Aum Shinrikyo operations, including a plan to conduct indiscriminate nerve gas attacks in major U.S. cities, including New York City.

In the spring of 1994, Inoue attended a three-day training program run by the former KGB's Alpha Group outside Moscow, where he learned some useful tips on skills such as kidnapping, murder, and so forth. That summer he became Aum's minister of intelligence, a position that he used as a license to abduct runaway followers, kidnap potential cash donors to the cult, torture Aum Shinrikyo members who had violated some regulation, and steal high-technology secrets. That year, Inoue and Tomomitsu Niimi were ordered to plan a sarin and VX gas attack on the White House and the Pentagon. Beginning on December 28, 1994, Inoue led the first of numerous penetrations of the high-security compound of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) in Hiroshima to pilfer weapons secrets. He was arrested on May 15, 1995, when police stopped his car at a roadblock outside of Tokyo. During his trial, he allegedly abandoned his faith in Asahara.

Hisako Ishii

Position: Aum's minister of finance.

Background: Hisako Ishii was born in 1960. She joined Aum's yoga classes in 1984, when she was an "office lady" at a major Japanese insurance company. One of Asahara's most devoted disciples, she became Aum's minister of finance and was behind the group's business success. She was also his inseparable mistress, until she gave birth to twins.

At her trial, Ishii spoke of her childhood fear of death, the fact that adults failed to initially reply to her questions concerning death, the fact that she trusted Asahara with pure feelings, and her determination to mature as a person within the Aum Shinrikyo framework. She then proceeded to speak of changes which took place after her arrest:

When I experienced a total collapse of the past more than 10 years during which I had matured within the cult as a religious person, I felt I had died. When all that I had believed I had accomplished within myself was destroyed, and I came to the awareness that all was just a fantasy of Asahara imbued in me, that he is not a true religious being, that he is not a guru, and that the Aum Shinrikyo doctrine was wrong, I experienced a form of death separate from the death of a physical being.

Ishii proceeded to read books banned by the Aum, such as religious books, books on mind-control, and psychology. She testified that as a result she had been resurrected through the process of learning the nature of genuine religion. Despite being impressed by the eloquence of her written statement, Shoko Egawa was dismayed by Ishii's total omission of anything about her

feelings for the victims who literally met death as the result of the many crimes committed by the Aum. Although charged with relatively minor offenses, such as concealment of criminals and destruction of evidence, Ishii asserted that she was innocent of each of the charges. She depicted herself merely as an innocent victim taken advantage of by Asahara and stressed her determination to resurrect herself despite all the suffering. She not only refused to testify about her inside knowledge of cult affairs, she cut off any questions of that nature. In May 1998, Ishii announced her resignation from the Aum.

Fumihiro Joyu

Position: Aum's minister of foreign affairs.

Background: Fumihiro Joyu joined Aum Shinrikyo in 1989 at age 26. He had an advanced degree in telecommunications from Waseda University, where he studied artificial intelligence. He quit his promising new career at Japan's Space Development Agency after only two weeks because it was incompatible with his interests in yoga. He became the sect's spokesman and minister of foreign affairs. As Aum's Moscow chief, Joyu ran the cult's large Moscow center at Alexseyevskaya Square. "Joyu didn't try to hide his contempt for his poor Russian flock," Kaplan and Marshall write. They describe him as "a mini-guru, a cruel and arrogant man who later proved to be Aum's most accomplished liar." They add: "...fluent in English, Joyu was looked upon by most Japanese as a dangerously glib and slippery operator with the ability to lie in two languages." However, with his charismatic, boyish good looks he developed admirers among teenage girls from his appearances on television talk shows. He was arrested on October 7, 1995, on perjury charges. He was scheduled to be released from prison at the end of 1999. He has remained devout to Asahara, and was planning to rejoin the Aum Shinrikyo cult.

Takeshi Matsumoto

Position: An Aum Shinrikyo driver.

Background: Born in 1966, Takeshi Matsumoto joined Aum Shinrikyo after telling his parents that he had seen hell. Personable but pathetic, he had dreams of becoming a Grand Prix auto racer. He drove the rental car used to kidnap Kiyoshi Kariya, 68, a notary public whose sister was a runaway Aum Shinrikyo member. Aum Shinrikyo members tortured and murdered Kariya after he refused to reveal his sister's whereabouts. National Police identified Matsumoto from fingerprints on the car rental receipt and put him on their "most-wanted" list. His fingerprints were the legal pretext long sought by the National Police to raid Aum Shinrikyo compounds and offices. While on the run, Matsumoto had Dr. Hayashi surgically remove all of his fingerprints and do some abortive facial plastic surgery as well. However, he was arrested in October 1995 and identified by his palm prints. He pleaded guilty to the abduction and confinement of Kariya.

Hideo Murai

Position: Aum's minister of science and technology, minister of distribution supervision, and "engineer of the apocalypse."

Background: Hideo Murai was born in 1954. After graduating from the Physics Department at Osaka University, he entered graduate school, where he studied X-ray emissions of celestial bodies, excelled at computer programming, and earned an advance degree in astrophysics. In 1987 he joined Kobe Steel and worked in research and development. After reading one of Asahara's books, he lost interest in his career. After a trip to Nepal, he quit Kobe Steel in 1989 and, along with his wife, enlisted in a six-month training course at an Aum Shinrikyo commune, where his life style turned ascetic and focused on Asahara's teachings. He quickly rose through the ranks because of his brilliant scientific background, self-confidence, boldness, and devotion to Asahara. He created such devices as the Perfect Salvation Initiation headgear (an electrode-laden shock cap), which netted Aum Shinrikyo about $20 million, and the Astral Teleporter and attempted unsuccessfully to develop a botulinus toxin as well as nuclear, laser, and microwave weapons technology. In early 1993, Asahara ordered him to oversee Aum's militarization program. "Widely recognized and feared within Aum, Murai," according to Brackett, "had a reputation as a determined and aggressive leader who liked to stir up trouble for other people." He was directly involved in the murder of the Sakamotos and at least one Aum Shinrikyo member. He led the team that attacked judges' apartments in Matsumoto with sarin gas in June 27, 1994, in which seven people were killed and 144 injured. Murai also masterminded the sarin attack on the Tokyo subway on March 20, 1995. David Kaplan and Andrew Marshall describe "the cult's deceptively unassuming science chief" as follows: "At first glance, Murai looked more like a provincial schoolteacher than a mad scientist. He had elfin features etched on a perfectly round face, with a fragile build that suggested he could do harm to no one. But a closer look revealed eyes that turned from benign to beady in a blink. His hair was short but disheveled, and he often looked lost in some unreachable thought." Just before he was to be brought in by police for questioning, Murai was stabbed with a butcher's knife by a Korean gangster on April 23, 1995, on prime-time TV in front of Aum's Tokyo headquarters, and he died six hours later.

Kiyohide Nakada

Position: Vice Minister, Ministry of Home Affairs.

Background: Nakada was born in 1948. He is described as having a shiny, shaven head, clipped mustache, and piercing eyes. His distinguishing feature, which is characteristic of a Japanese yakuza, or mobster, is a brilliant tattoo stretching from his neck to his calf. For years, he headed a gang affiliated with the Yamaguchi crime syndicate in the city of Nagoya. When he was serving three years in prison on a firearms charge, his wife joined Aum. Although Nakada disapproved of her joining Aum, he himself turned to Aum Shinrikyo when a doctor gave him three months to live because of a failing liver. After a miraculous recovery, he joined Aum, dissolved his gang, and donated his assets to Aum. Nakada became one of Asahara's two former yakuza conduits to the underworld. When Aum Shinrikyo began its militarization program in 1994, he became particularly important in obtaining weapons. He eventually became Tomomitsu Niimi's deputy in Aum's Ministry of Home Affairs, charged with enforcing security within the organization. As head of the Action Squad, he was responsible for abducting and killing defecting sect members and opponents of Aum. He was arrested in April 1995.

Tomomasa Nakagawa

Position: Head of Aum's Household Agency.

Background: Dr. Tomomasa Nakagawa, 29, an Aum Shinrikyo physician, is alleged to have murdered Satoko Sakamoto, 29, and her infant son with injections of potassium chloride, in 1995. Nakagawa joined Aum Shinrikyo while a medical student at Kyoto Prefectural College of Medicine in February 1988. After passing the national medical exam in April 1988 and practicing medicine for a year, he moved into an Aum Shinrikyo commune in August 1989. As head of the Aum's Household Agency, one of his primary duties was to act as personal doctor to Asahara and his family. He was also actively involved in Aum's sarin production.

Tomomitsu Niimi

Position: Aum's minister of home affairs.

Background: Tomomitsu Niimi was born in 1964. As a university student, he read law, as well as the works of Nostradamus and esoteric Buddhist texts. After graduation, he worked at a food company but quit six months later to join Aum. Kaplan and Marshall describe him as "a slender figure with a long neck, shaven head, and a reptilian smirk that seemed permanently etched upon his face."

As Aum's ferocious minister of home affairs, Niimi presided over Aum's mini-police state. His 10-member hit squad, the New Followers Agency, engaged in spying on, abducting, confining, torturing, and murdering runaway members. He is described by Kaplan and Marshall as Aum's "chief hit man" and a sadistic and ruthless head of security. He allegedly participated in various murders and abductions, including the murder of Shuji Taguchi in 1989, the slaying of the Sakamoto family, and the strangling of a pharmacist in January 1994. In February 1994, he was accidentally exposed to some sarin and lapsed into convulsions, but Dr. Nakagawa was able to save him. In the spring of 1994, he attended a three-day training course conducted by veterans of the former KGB's Alpha Group near Moscow. That year, Niimi and Yoshihiro Inoue were ordered to plan a sarin and VX gas attack on the White House and the Pentagon. On September 20, 1994, Niimi and his hit squad attacked Shoko Egawa, author of two books on Aum, with phosgene gas, but she survived. In January 1995, Niimi sprayed Hiroyuki Nakaoka, head of a cult victims' support group, with VX, but he survived after several weeks in a coma. Niimi also participated in the Tokyo subway attack on March 20, 1995. He was arrested on April 12, 1995. He has remained devout to Asahara.

Toshihiro Ouchi

Position: An Aum Shinrikyo operative.

Background: Ouchi joined the Aum Shinrikyo cult in 1985. Physically large and a long-time Aum Shinrikyo member, Ouchi functioned primarily as a leader of cult followers. Many of the followers and ordained priests of the cult with whom he had been personally associated became involved in crimes, and many remain active cult followers. Ouchi was indicted for involvement in two incidents. One case took place in February 1989, and involved the murder of cult follower Shuji Taguchi, who was making an attempt to leave the cult; the second case involved the destruction of a corpse of a cult follower who had passed away during religious training in June 1993. Ouchi's reluctant behavior gave Asahara doubts about his commitment; hence, he condemned Ouchi as a "cancerous growth on the Aum," assigning him to the Russian chapter in September 1993. Nevertheless, Ouchi continued to serve as an executive cult follower. He recruited new followers in Russia and provided guidance to them. During the investigation of the Sakamoto case that began in March 1995, Ouchi was alarmed when he learned that the Aum Shinrikyo was involved. The knowledge undermined his religious beliefs. He reportedly was shocked when he later received a letter from a former cult follower, who was an intimate friend, that discussed the misguided doctrine of Aum. His faith in Aum Shinrikyo shaken, he gradually began to alter his views about people outside the cult. In early April 1995, Russian police arrested Ouchi, who had been serving as Fumihiro Joyu's deputy in Moscow. Kaplan and Marshall report that Ouchi, "a grinning naïf," was described by one academic as "knowing as much about Russia as the farthest star." During his initial trial in Japan, Ouchi expressed repentance and apologized "as a former official of the Aum."

Masami Tsuchiya

Position: Head of Aum's chemical-warfare team.

Background: Masami Tsuchiya was born in 1965. Prior to joining Aum, Tsuchiya was enrolled in a five-year doctoral degree program in organic physics and chemistry at Tsukuba University, one of the top universities in Japan, where his graduate work focused on the application of light to change the structure of molecules. Although described by a professor as "brilliant," Tsuchiya lived in a barren room, was introverted, had no social life, and expressed a desire to become a priest.

Tsuchiya abandoned a career in organic chemistry to join Aum. After suggesting that Aum Shinrikyo produce a Nazi nerve gas called sarin, he was given his own lab (named Satian 7) with 100 workers and a vast chemical plant to develop chemical weapons. As Aum's chief chemist and head of its chemical-warfare team, he played a central role in Aum's manufacture of sarin. Kaplan and Marshall describe Tsuchiya as looking the part of the mad scientist: "His goatee and crew-cut hair framed a broad face with eyebrows that arched high above piercing eyes." Fascinated by Russia's chemical weapons stockpiles, Tsuchiya spent at least three weeks in Russia in 1993, where he is suspected of meeting with experts in biochemical weapons. When he returned to his Mount Fuji lab in the fall of 1993, he began experimenting with sarin, using a Russian formula. He was prepared to build a vast stockpile of nerve agents, such as sarin, blister gas, and others. Although poorly trained workers, leaks of toxic fumes, and repeated setbacks plagued the program, Tsuchiya succeeded in stockpiling 44 pounds of sarin at Satian 7 by mid-June 1994. However, Kaplan and Marshall point out that he was not the only Aum Shinrikyo chemist to make the nerve gas. Tsuchiya also produced other chemical-warfare agents such as VX. He had Tomomitsu Niimi, using a VX syringe, test the VX on several unsuspecting individuals. Police arrested Tsuchiya on April 26, 1995. He has remained devout to Asahara.