It was nearly 9:00 p.m. when U.S. Magistrate Judge Dennis Greene signed the search warrant and handed it back to BATF Agent Davy Aguilera. The warrant authorized federal agents to search Mount Carmel for firearms, machine guns, bombs, and other weaponry.
Attached to the warrant was a lengthy affidavit from Aguilera, giving the reasons why he felt that evidence of a crime would be found. It discussed how the agency had been contacted by the sheriff’s office, passing on a report from a local UPS delivery office that a package intended for Mount Carmel contained army surplus grenade casings and black powder. Both of these were legal, but BATF had thought the case merited investigation. Further probing had found that the Davidians had purchased large numbers of new semiautomatic rifles from a licensed firearms dealer in the area and bought gun parts from a number of suppliers.
But the core of the warrant was that the Davidians had bought dozens of AR-15 rifles, which could—with extra parts and work in a machine shop—be made to function as machine guns. The grenade hulls and black powder they had purchased could be combined to make improvised, low-power grenades.4
In short, the Davidians had rifles that could be turned into machine guns and components that could be turned into grenades; either action would be a serious federal crime.5 Or the items could be left as they were, the rifles kept for investment, and the grenade shells sold at gun shows (which the Davidians would later claim was the case, and which was quite legal). Which was it?
That was where Aguilera’s affidavit skated on thin ice. It cited a neighbor’s statement that he had heard machine-gun fire from the area of Mount Carmel a year before. Aguilera added that a former Davidian had told him that she had seen David Koresh shoot a machine gun, some four years ago. The problem with these statements was that it is legal to own a machine gun, provided that it was made before 1986 and the owner registers it with the federal government. The owner can then let others fire it, so long as he is present. Aguilera’s affidavit stated that he had checked the government registry of machine guns and found that Koresh had no machine guns registered to him. But the affidavit failed to deal with the possibility that the owner of a registered machine gun might have visited Mount Carmel a couple of times and let Koresh shoot his gun.
The Aguilera affidavit also alleged, at some length, that David Koresh had been having sex with underage girls. This seemed out of place: BATF’s jurisdiction extends to gun crimes, not to sexual ones. On the other hand, nothing draws media coverage like sex and (incipient) violence.6
Early the next morning, a Friday, BATF Public Information Officer Sharon Wheeler began calling reporters to tip them off that a big operation would soon be going down, and making sure they knew how to reach her over the weekend. A few hours later, Christopher Cuyler, BATF’s liaison to the Treasury Department, alerted Treasury headquarters to the operation, adding, “It is felt this operation will generate considerable media attention, both locally (Texas) and nationally.”7
That would prove to be an understatement.
FEBRUARY 28, 1993
BATF Special Agent Robert Rodriguez had lived an undercover role for weeks, gathering information on the Davidians. He was one of several agents installed in the house across the street from the Davidian residence, pretending to be students at a local college (their cover did not last: the Davidians quickly deduced that the middle-aged men driving large cars were not there to attend the junior college). Rodriguez had regularly walked over to Mount Carmel and discussed religion, guns, and gun rights with David Koresh. Now he had a more difficult role. Several miles away, BATF was mustering a giant raid team of agents plus support personnel, a fleet of vehicles, and three borrowed military helicopters. The agents would climb into long horse trailers, drive up to Mount Carmel, emerge, and execute the search warrant. Just before the trailers pulled up, three military helicopters carrying BATF agents would make a loud, low-altitude run at the back of Mount Carmel as a distraction. Taken by surprise and distracted, the Davidians would submit rather than resist.
On that day, Rodriguez would visit Mount Carmel and see if its residents had a clue what was coming. He had a pleasant chat with David Koresh, who left the room to take a phone call … and returned in a state of shock, telling Rodriguez that a federal raid was incoming. In that instant, Rodriguez realized that Koresh knew he was undercover. But instead of snatching him as a hostage, Koresh shook his hand and wished him good luck.
Rodriguez returned hastily to the undercover house and called raid leadership to let them know the Davidians knew they were coming. Surprise had been key to the plan, he thought, and surely the raid would be canceled.
Except that it wasn’t. An hour or so later, two trucks towing horse trailers loaded with seventy-six heavily armed BATF agents turned onto the dirt driveway. Moving slowly, they turned in front of Mount Carmel, halted, and agents charged out, guns in hand, while the three helicopters made a belated run at the back of the building.
Koresh ran out of the front door of Mount Carmel, calling for restraint. A few shots rang out, triggering a fusillade from both sides that lasted for hours. By the time a cease-fire was worked out and the agents trudged back up the driveway, four agents and six Davidians were dead and Koresh was seriously wounded.
The FBI’s elite Hostage Rescue Team arrived to take over, backed by numerous FBI Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams. Soon Mount Carmel was ringed with barbed wire, sandbagged positions, and a collection of armored military vehicles headed by a state-of-the-art M1 tank.
APRIL 19, 1993
Fifty-one days later, armored vehicles came down the driveway with a purpose: injecting Mount Carmel with massive loads of “tear gas,” technically described as liquid CS. CS causes much more than tears—the burning sensations sear the eyes and throat; an overwhelming feeling of suffocation, and violent retching, crying, coughing, sneezing, and temporary blindness ensue, among a host of other physical reactions.
Combat engineering vehicles, tanks designed to build or destroy things, tore holes in Mount Carmel with their elevated booms, then shot in liquid CS—CS dissolved in the toxic industrial solvent methylene chloride. Agents in Bradley fighting vehicles used 40 mm grenade launchers to fire hundreds of plastic projectiles filled with the same liquid. When that did not force the Davidians out, the combat engineering vehicles began to demolish the building, driving into it, tearing large holes and collapsing parts of it.
Six hours into the gassing, winds quickly whipped up a fire the length of Mount Carmel. Half an hour later when the Waco Fire Department was allowed to pass down the driveway, firefighters found the church building reduced to glowing ashes, with the seared bodies of seventy-four Davidians—men, women, and children—dead in the ruins.
All in all, a lot of history for a country driveway a couple of hundred yards long.
THE DEMONIZING OF THE DAVIDIANS
During the siege, twenty-four years ago, these quiet and tolerant people became the most hated group in America. As the review of a made-for-TV movie rushed out while the siege was under way summarized, “Religious fanatics are barricaded in a building, and surrounded by police. But they’re not going to surrender, they prefer to die.”8 Time magazine issued a special report with the cover showing an artist’s impression of a maniacally laughing David Koresh superimposed on the burning Mount Carmel. In the FBI archives is a foot-thick stack of letters from the public volunteering suggestions for dealing with the Davidians; most of the suggestions can be summarized as crush them by whatever means are necessary.
Department of Defense files list a staggering variety of military equipment loaned or given to the FBI to use against members of this church, a list capped by M1 tanks, with special Chobham armor, just in case the Davidians had somehow gotten TOW (tube-launched, optically tracked, wire-guided) antitank missiles.9 All this to deal with a group that numbered barely eighty people, two-thirds of them women and children, and none with any military training.
How things came to that pass is simple.
Reviewing the press coverage today would be comical, if it were not so tragic. During the siege, the FBI kept the media several miles away from Mount Carmel; reporters could only see the scene through telescopes raised on construction scaffolding, and could only relay the contents of daily government briefings, their sole source of information. From those briefings, the media learned and duly reported the following:
• The Davidians were a cult, blindly following the orders of self-styled apocalyptic prophet, David Koresh. Koresh was described as charismatic and cunning, a madman with a hatred for law enforcement and an insatiable lust for women and violence.
• BATF had tried to arrest Koresh peacefully, but Koresh was a reclusive paranoid who never left the “cult compound” at Mount Carmel. When BATF raided the compound, the agents were caught in a hail of bullets, as multiple Davidian machine guns raked them in a murderous crossfire.
• FBI negotiators attempted to reach a peaceful outcome, but for 51 days the Davidians resisted every effort. With negotiations thwarted, the FBI decided that a tear gas assault was the only hope for ending the siege. The CS tear gas would be dispensed using fireproof injection systems that posed no danger to the children inside.
• Things did not go as planned. For six hours, the Davidians responded to the negotiators’ pleas with a hail of gunfire. Then the maniacal Koresh ordered his followers to put the compound to the torch, and twenty-four children and more than fifty adult Davidians perished in the flames.
We could be sure of these events because they were confirmed in 1993 by official investigations launched by the Justice and Treasury Departments (BATF then being a Treasury agency); in 1994 by sworn testimony during a seven-week criminal trial that convicted most of the surviving Davidians; and in 1995 by three different Congressional investigations, one of which culminated in a seven-hundred-page report.
More than two decades later, we know there is one small problem with this history.
Scarcely a word of it is true.
The remarkable thing is how far the FBI and BATF were willing to go to try to prevent us from figuring that out.
THE INCREDIBLE VANISHING EVIDENCE
The February 28 raid had been the biggest law enforcement operation in the history of BATF; the following fifty-day siege was the largest such operation in the history of the FBI. The April 19 assault involved weeks of planning and coordination and was carried out in front of a ring of government closed-circuit television cameras, with aircraft circling overhead videotaping and taking photographs. After the fire, the scene was studied with techniques borrowed from archeology, such as using ribbons to divide the area into small boxes that could be searched individually. But the fire had hardly died down before the evidence began vanishing with a speed that would have amazed a professional magician. A few examples:
• On the first day’s gunfight, BATF conceded to Congressional investigators that it had several video cameras recording the scene as the agents rushed Mount Carmel, cameras that would have recorded who fired the first shot. But BATF claimed that every camera had malfunctioned and no data could be salvaged.10
• BATF also claimed that it had no record of its radio traffic during the raid and gun battle.
• BATF Public Relations Officer Sharon Wheeler reported that she had taken some photographs—but her camera had been stolen off a table—a table in BATF raid headquarters, where everyone present was a sworn law enforcement officer.
• Although the FBI had ringed Mount Carmel with closed-circuit TV cameras, it insisted it had not a single video record for the day of the fire.11
• The FBI was known to have had an aircraft circling Mount Carmel on the day of the fire equipped with an infrared camera that recorded to videotape. The gassing began predawn, but according to the FBI no one thought to turn on the video recorder until nearly 11:00 a.m., leaving no tapes for the first five hours.
• The bodies of the deceased Davidians were autopsied by the Medical Examiner and then placed in a refrigerated trailer. Somehow the trailer warmed up, and the bodies decomposed.12
• One of the largest pieces of evidence to disappear was a twenty-square-foot metal door. The main entry into Mount Carmel was through a steel double door. The Davidians insisted that the battle began as BATF fired a blind fusillade into the right-hand door, and BATF insisted with equal fervor that the battle began when the Davidians fired a volley outward through the same door.13 During the siege, the Davidians had (all too naively) told FBI negotiators that the right door’s metal surface clearly showed that the bullet holes all came from the BATF agents outside.
After the fire, the right metal door vanished. Its twin left door survived and showed marks of having been run over by a tracked vehicle, but no fire damage.14 A critical piece of evidence escaped from a tightly controlled crime scene, where searching authorities were said to have made a “fingertip to fingertip” search.15 Years later, a Texas Department of Public Safety officer would reveal that while ashes were still smoldering and before any search could be made, FBI agents brought in a van and loaded it with material from the site. One of the items removed was an object the size and shape of the vanishing door.16
With virtually all the hard evidence (supposedly) nonexistent, the agencies were free to invent anything they wanted to fill the gaps. When the Secretary of the Treasury and the Deputy Attorney General commissioned blue-ribbon panels to investigate the events, the reports reflected the agencies’ official stories.17 Koresh could not be arrested peacefully, the Davidians had deluged the BATF agents with machine-gun fire, and the FBI had been helpless to stop the Davidians’ mass suicide. The official reports are filled with errors and inventions; how we came to know that is a story in itself.
MIKE MCNULTY AND THE VIRTUES OF PERSISTENCE
The Waco debacle aroused the interest of the late Mike McNulty,18 an insurance broker turned documentary film producer. Soon a team had formed—McNulty as producer, Dan Gifford as executive producer, and Bill Gazecki as director—a team that would create the Oscar-nominated documentary Waco: The Rules of Engagement. Mike’s investigation spanned several years, and coordinated with the three years of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits conducted by this author. Archives of information that the official Treasury and USDOJ investigators had never pushed to see became (after much courtroom fighting) available for investigation, including videotapes of BATF raid headquarters before the first day’s shoot-out, an audiotape made in the BATF van that coordinated radio communications, 911 tapes showing that the Davidians had called for help, videotapes of internal FBI briefings, aerial photographs, meeting notes, and more.
McNulty leveraged his information in a meeting with Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Johnston, who had prosecuted the surviving Davidians but was an honest man who took his work seriously. Johnston revealed that the feds had rented a warehouse filled with Waco-related evidence controlled not by the federal agencies, but by the Texas Rangers—a detail that had allowed the agencies to claim they had turned over all the evidence in their control, while actually keeping massive amounts of information hidden. McNulty arranged to visit the warehouse.
What he found staggered his imagination. By the Rangers’ own measure, twelve tons of material were logged into two large rooms—videotapes, audiotapes, documents, and materials recovered from the fire—guns, clothing, gas masks, soil samples … all that remained of a building that had housed over a hundred people. No one outside the government had seen this evidence since the fire, and only a few people were even aware that the tons of evidence existed.
This was the Waco tragedy’s King Tut’s tomb, an enormous time capsule sealed in April 1993. Mike’s treasures were not made of gold but of aluminum. He found photos of metal cylinders recovered after the fire that had been logged in as silencers—but the U.S. Army markings on these “silencers” showed them to be military-issue CS tear gas projectiles for the 40 mm grenade launchers the FBI had been using.
Mike was holding hard evidence that imp
licated the FBI in a string of lies—many told under oath. Tear gas projectiles fall into two main classes. One class is non-pyrotechnic and safe for use against buildings. The other class is pyrotechnic; these expel the tear gas (actually a fine dust) by a burning gunpowder-like fuel. Pyrotechnic rounds are not for use against buildings since they will start fires. To fire pyrotechnic rounds into a dry wooden building full of women and children would be considered criminal negligence, if not premeditated murder. The FBI and Attorney General Janet Reno had repeatedly sworn that on the day of the fire the FBI had fired no pyrotechnic rounds.19 But the military rounds that the FBI had retrieved from Mount Carmel were pyrotechnic.
McNulty’s efforts succeeded where multiple Congressional investigations had fallen flat. As a result of his persistence, we can finally set the record straight regarding the deadly confrontation outside Waco. We’ll start with the core question.
COULD BATF HAVE ARRESTED DAVID KORESH PEACEFULLY?
The official Treasury Department investigation concluded that BATF had properly ruled out a peaceful arrest because Koresh never left Mount Carmel. BATF had, weeks before its raid, installed several undercover agents in the “undercover house” across the street from the Davidian residence, with instructions to keep an eye out for Koresh. The official 1993 Treasury investigation determined that the undercover house agents “never saw Koresh leave the Compound … and they never took the additional measures necessary to find out.”20
It is obvious that BATF had withheld critical information from the Treasury Department investigators. The FOIA lawsuits also turned up evidence that clearly showed that BATF agents in the undercover house knew what David Koresh looked like and that he left Mount Carmel.
They knew this because he had left it. To go shooting. With them.
A BATF Report of Investigation authored by Special Agent Davy Aguilera nine days before the BATF raid reveals that, tasked with investigating the Davidians’ firearms, the agents in the undercover house took a direct approach:
I'm from the Government and I'm Here to Kill You Page 11
