SYNOPSIS OF SURVEILLANCE—FEBRUARY 19, 1993; FRIDAY
On February 19, 1993, Special Agents Robert Rodriguez and Jeffrey Brzozoski in an undercover capacity, went to the Davidian Compound and met with Leader David Koresh and two other male members for the purpose of shooting the AR-15 rifles. When both agents arrived at the compound they were asked to enter the compound and wait for David Koresh. When David Koresh arrived, he examined the two AR-15 rifles very carefully…. After examining the firearms, Special Agents Rodriguez and Brzozoski followed David Koresh and the two males through the inside of the compound towards the back…. Before the shooting started David Koresh went back inside the compound and brought some .223 caliber rounds for the agents to shoot…. After shooting the rifles, Special Agent Rodriguez allowed David Koresh and the two males to shoot Rodriguez’s .38 Super pistol….21
The agents had no trouble getting David Koresh to leave Mount Carmel; they simply asked him to go shooting. Koresh was unarmed until one agent loaned him a gun. If this was not a good time to make the arrest, it would have been simple to arrange a repeat performance.
The Report of Investigation went up the chain of command, with the Assistant Resident Agent in Charge, the Austin Office, and someone acting for the Special Agent in Charge for Houston signing off on it. That Koresh could easily be brought to leave Mount Carmel was no secret within BATF.
If David Koresh could have been brought in so easily, why did BATF go with a plan that required shipping in seventy-six agents plus support personnel and laying hands on three military helicopters? Why prefer the expensive and complicated to the cheap and simple? That brings us to a number of deeper questions.
WHAT WAS THE REASON FOR THE RAID?
BATF was (and is) a troubled agency. For decades, it held a comfortable if sometimes dubious existence as an IRS division tasked with suppressing moonshiners. As moonshining died out in the 1970s, killed by the high cost of sugar, the agency transitioned to enforcing the then-new Gun Control Act of 1968. For a time, the agency prospered in its new role, largely prosecuting gun collectors and licensed dealers, safe targets that allowed for impressive statistics on the number of arrests made and guns seized. Agents could visit a gun show, sucker five collectors into technical violations, arrest them, and confiscate hundreds of guns in a single day.22
That sort of activity had a political price. In 1986, Congress reformed the Gun Control Act to require proof of illicit intent for most violations and to narrow the power to confiscate. BATF’s arrests and seizures fell even as its budgetary demands increased. By 1993, its firearms enforcement operations were spending $369 million annually to produce barely more than fifteen thousand gun seizures—or about $18,650 per gun seized.23
Bill Clinton had pledged to promote more federal gun control measures, so when he was elected President in 1992, BATF might have felt a little more hopeful. But the new Administration also came to town with pledges to reinvent government and do away with inefficient agencies—a description that seemed to fit an agency that spent $18,650 for each cheap pistol it took off the street. Outside Washington, “reinventing government” sounded like one more campaign slogan. Inside the Beltway, it was cause for panic. In 1993, the Washington Post ran 248 articles mentioning the new Administration’s proposals, with headlines like “To Slim Down the Federal Goliath” (January 16); “Doing More with Less: Time to Tame the Federal Behemoth” (January 31); “Texas Brand of Belt-Tightening Could Be Model for The Nation” (February 16).
A dramatic Waco raid was BATF’s answer, a bureaucratic insurance policy: helicopters racing in as a diversion, scores of agents pouring from concealment in horse trailers, and press conferences with officials standing behind tables laden with seized guns. Journalist Carol Vinzant discovered as follows:
In the jargon of at least one ATF office, the Waco raid was what is known as a ZBO (“Zee Big One”), a press-drawing stunt that when shown to Congress at budget time justifies more funding. One of the largest deployments in bureau history, the attack on the Branch Davidian compound was, in the eyes of some of the agents, the ultimate ZBO.24
On February 28, BATF had established a “raid headquarters” in a building a few miles from Mount Carmel. A videotape shot by an agent inside raid headquarters shows agents laughing and taking memento photos of one another. One is reading the newspaper comics. The PR team seems to have the only focused people in the room, standing behind long tables boasting rows of word processors, photocopiers, and fax machines, ready to spread the word coast-to-coast.
But one thing is missing from their preparations: ammunition. Agent Mayfield later testified he had carried only thirty rounds of pistol ammunition25—that is to say, enough cartridges to fill the magazine in his gun and probably one other. Agent Champion testified he did a bit better: three magazines.26 Agent Dan Curtis, who carried an AR-15 rifle, had only twenty rounds—the contents of one small magazine.27 The agents were equipped for a show-and-tell, not for a fight. For all BATF’s portrayal of the Davidians as heavily armed fanatics, the Bureau regarded actual resistance as inconceivable. The battle cry that would begin the raid really was ironically accurate: “It’s showtime!”
The military is authorized to provide equipment and its operators to law enforcement agencies. The military must be reimbursed for its costs, unless the law enforcement operation is antidrug, in which event the aid must be given for free. The BATF and FBI took liberal advantage of this, falsely claiming that Waco was part of the War on Drugs. Years later, the Army realized it had been swindled and forced BATF to reimburse it for $6,857, and the FBI to cough up over $199,000 (the FBI had kept, among other things, nine night-vision scopes, priced at $5,000 apiece).28
WHO FIRED FIRST?
Both the Davidians and the BATF witnesses agreed that as the horse trailers halted in front of Mount Carmel, David Koresh left the safety of the building, ran out, and began calling to the agents. There is general agreement that he attempted to defuse the confrontation with a comment like “Be careful, there are women and children here.”29 Only after gunshots rang out did he turn to run back into the building.
Koresh’s rushing toward the agents strongly suggests that he did not expect a battle—he was leaving cover and running right into everyone’s field of fire. Survivor David Thibodeau said that Koresh had earlier told the Davidians: “They’re coming, but I want to talk it out with these people, so don’t anybody do anything stupid. We want to talk to these people, want to work it out.”30 Koresh’s conduct is consistent with these admonitions.
Add to this the fact that the Davidians said the right side of the double doors had bullet holes that proved BATF shot first, and that the right door mysteriously vanished from a crime scene controlled by the government; the evidence for BATF opening fire in the front of the building seems quite strong.
DID THE DAVIDIANS DELUGE THE BATF AGENTS WITH MACHINE-GUN FIRE?
One photo made as the gunfight began shows three agents standing or kneeling before the front door, guns at the ready or perhaps already firing, and without benefit of any cover whatsoever—hardly a posture they would have taken if facing a hail of bullets coming outward through the door.31
By the time of the Davidians’ criminal trial, the agents had had time to assemble a most impressive story: BATF claimed that its agents were raked by a veritable battery of Davidian machine guns, firing from multiple positions. Agent Jim Curtis claimed to have heard five-shot bursts from a .50-caliber heavy machine gun in the center of the building,32 and also firing from M16s on the left.33 Agent Bill Buford stated under oath that he heard a Browning Automatic Rifle (a World War II vintage light machine gun, .30-06 caliber) or perhaps an M60 (Vietnam-era belt-fed machine gun, 7.62 mm NATO caliber).34 Agent Gerry Petrelli testified that he had heard full-automatic fire from multiple M16s and AK-47s, plus .30- or .50-caliber belt-fed machine guns.35 M16s, AK-47s, Browning Automatic Rifles, M60s, .50-caliber machine guns—by that measure, the Davidians could have stocked a National Guard arm
ory with fully automatic weapons. Based on this testimony, many of the surviving Davidians were sentenced to long prison terms for having used machine guns in a violent offense. With the results of the FOIA suit we now know that the Davidians were sentenced based on perjury.
BATF had positioned a van filled with radio equipment and operators near Mount Carmel. The “radio van” was charged with coordinating radio traffic during the raid. It contained an audio recorder connected to an “open mic” that picked up all sound in the van, including the gunshots from the battle at Mount Carmel and the voices of the radio van operators.
During the FOIA suits, BATF fought hard to keep the resulting tapes a secret, first claiming falsely (and under oath) that the tapes were full of “secret agent identifiers,” which the court found were just agents’ last names or badge numbers. The agency followed with other claims; only after the court rejected those did the agency reluctantly turn over the tapes.
The released tapes provided an excellent record of the gun battle in front of Mount Carmel. Plenty of gunfire was audible, ordinary gunfire, not machine guns. About twelve minutes into the fight, two bursts of full automatic fire, about five to ten shots each, are audible. The first burst comes as such a surprise that one of the radio van operators cries out in shock “F__king machine gun!”
Shortly thereafter, a voice on the radio asks the snipers, “Can you shoot tower two?”—the central tower. Forty seconds after the first machine gun burst, a garbled transmission is received, and the same radio van operator voice rejoices, “Hey, hey, we got the machine gun!”
A recent event has confirmed this conclusion. Fifteen years after the gunfight, BATF Agent Wendel Frost published his account of the day, ATF Sierra One Waco, which disclosed that he had been the sniper who carried out the command to shoot. Watching through a telescope sight, he had seen and shot two people who were using fully automatic guns—a man in a white shirt firing a MAC-10 submachine gun and a man in a black shirt firing a converted AR-15.36 Agent Frost’s account tallies perfectly with the radio van tape: exactly two Davidians fired fully automatic firearms, one burst each, and they died in the shoot-out.37 The testimony to being raked by fire from multiple machine gun nests does not hold up when compared with actual evidence. None of the surviving Davidians could have fired a machine gun on February 28, 1993.
WERE THE DAVIDIANS BLOODTHIRSTY ANTI-GOVERNMENT RADICALS?
Also obtained in the Freedom of Information Act suits were audiotapes from the sheriff’s 911 line. These enabled reconstructions of the firefight from the standpoint of the people inside Mount Carmel. Once the firing started, the Davidians did a remarkable thing: they called 911. Davidian Wayne Martin was a lawyer with a Harvard degree, and only a few seconds into the shooting he called 911 and reached Lt. Larry Lynch of the Sheriff’s Department. The 911 tapes show that Martin begged, “There are seventy-five men around our building and they’re shooting at us at Mount Carmel. Tell them there are children and women in here and to call it off!” As BATF bullets pierce the wall around him, Martin has to take cover, but he turns the speakerphone on, so all sounds within Mount Carmel can be heard. The rapidity of the gunshots declines after three minutes, only to temporarily pick up ten minutes later and then again taper off. Martin continues to cry out, “Want a cease-fire.”
Lt. Lynch cannot reach BATF, because no one had given him a phone number or radio frequency. Inside Mount Carmel, Wayne Martin continues to shout, “Tell them to cease fire” and “want a cease-fire.” By twenty minutes in, the firing has virtually ceased; when a few shots are heard, a Davidian can be heard crying out, “That’s not us, that’s them.” Finally, half an hour after the raid began, Lt. Lynch is able to contact BATF by asking a Texas State Technical College policeman to drive over to the raid headquarters and stay in radio contact. Lynch begins working out a cease-fire so BATF can recover its wounded.
That was not the only surprise on the 911 tapes. Around forty-five minutes after the first shots, David Koresh himself calls 911, asking, “What’d you guys go and do that for? Now there’s a bunch of men dead, a bunch of you guys dead, and that’s your fault.” He adds: “We’re not trying to be bad guys.” On the other 911 line, Wayne Martin is asking the dispatcher, “Please arrest these people. They came on our property and started shooting at us.” A cease-fire is worked out, an ambulance arrives for an especially badly wounded agent, and the other agents withdraw.
By the end of the gunfight, the under-supplied BATF agents are running out of ammunition, with no way to retreat across a flat, open field. Had the Davidians intended an antigovernment bloodbath, they needed only to continue the fight.
The understanding is reinforced by an even more remarkable tape made sometime on February 28 after the gunfight. David Koresh had been badly wounded—a bullet entered his groin, blew a two-inch hole through the side of his pelvic bone, and exited from his side.38 He is talking over a telephone to a BATF supervisor, Jim Cavanaugh. In terrible pain, Koresh might be expected to be angry; instead his tone is friendly. He tells Cavanaugh, “I wish you knew the Seven Seals.” He mentions BATF undercover agent Robert Rodriguez, adding, “I really liked that guy, too. I’ve always loved law enforcement, because y’all guys risk your lives every day, you know.” Koresh talks of his wound. Cavanaugh asks, “Anything else hurting?” and Koresh replies, “Just my feelings.”
Koresh rambles on, asking, “Why did you start it? Why?” and then answers his own question with “You figured we were the bad guys, and now you know we aren’t.” Later, Koresh would assure Cavanaugh, “We are commanded by Scripture to abide by the laws of the land in every degree, so long as those laws don’t 100 percent conflict with the law of God.”
If there is one thing the 911 tapes can rule out, it is that David Koresh and the Davidians were government-hating cop killers. No wonder a memorial to the four dead BATF agents rests on the Davidians’ church lawn.
WAS THE CS GAS ASSAULT INEVITABLE?
The inability of FBI negotiators to talk the Davidians into surrendering laid the groundwork for the CS gas assault. That failure had several causes, but one was predominant: no one in the FBI could grasp the Davidians’ central motivation. The Davidians took their religion very seriously and believed that they were at a critical point in Christian, and world, history. Their religion centered upon the Book of Revelation, and the opening of the seven seals by the otherwise unidentified person described as “the Lamb.” Most Christian religions assume that Jesus Christ is the Lamb, but reading Revelation in conjunction with the Book of Daniel, the Davidians concluded that the Lamb would be a mortal, a prophet. In Revelation, the seven seals divide up the final days into periods, and the Lamb’s opening of each seal marks the transition from one period into another. Since the events are cloaked in symbolism (the bad guys are “Babylon,” for instance), the interpretation is no simple thing.
The Davidians believed they stood at a critical moment of history—why else had an army of tanks and aircraft descended upon a church in the Texas countryside?—but which moment was it? What part of the seven seals were they experiencing, and what did God want them to do? Until that could be resolved, they could not act.
Their consensus appears to have been that they were toward the end of the fifth seal, which speaks of persecutions of the faithful, and close to the opening of the sixth, which is when things begin to heat up, beginning with a massive earthquake and the sun becoming “black as sackcloth of hair” while the moon becomes “as blood.”
As the sixth seal progresses, four angels seal the foreheads of 144,000 of the faithful; these are presumably the same 144,000 who appear with the Lamb on Mount Sion or Zion in the Holy Land.39 But that number, for the Davidians, led to a problem. The Davidians felt they were the persons who would be sealed, but as of spring 1993 they numbered barely a hundred rather than 144,000, and they were trapped about ten thousand miles away from Mount Zion. Was their interpretation in error, or had God left a loophole somewhere?
Tw
o religious scholars, Phillip Arnold of the Reunion Institute and James Tabor of the University of North Carolina, had studied eschatological religions, ones that focus upon the end of the physical world. They had heard about the Waco standoff and set out to study the Davidian religion. They quickly concluded they could solve the impasse: the problem was that the FBI had no idea of how to address the Davidians’ concerns. The FBI ignored their offers of aid, but early in March, Arnold appeared on a local radio program to explain their understandings. The Davidians obviously listened, because they sent out a note asking to talk directly with Arnold. The FBI refused, but the two theologians persisted on their own.
On April 1, Arnold and Tabor appeared on another radio program, one the Davidians were known to favor. Their solution to the paradox facing the Davidians was essentially: (1) David Koresh must give himself up to be judged, thereby proving he is indeed the Lamb; (2) the worldwide publicity resulting from the Davidians’ trial would offer hopes of generating the required 144,000 converts; (3) the Lamb could create a “little book” (referenced in Revelation 10:8) to summarize his understanding of the seven seals and thus win the converts.40 Arnold and Tabor’s interpretation would enable the Davidians to fit a surrender into their religious worldview.
Shortly after the broadcast, the Davidians began to celebrate their Passover, during which they refrained from communications. Upon its ending, on April 14, David Koresh sent out a detailed letter. It began: “I am presently being permitted to document, in structured form, the decoded messages of the Seven Seals. Upon completion of this task, I will be free of my ‘waiting period.’ I hope to finish this as soon as possible and to stand before man to answer any and all questions regarding my actions.”41 He added that “as soon as I can see that people like Jim Tabor and Phil Arnold have a copy, I will come out and then you can do your thing with this beast.”42 FBI bugs planted inside Mount Carmel began to relay sounds of rejoicing and of people anticipating their departure.43 Two days later, Koresh told an FBI negotiator over the telephone that he would come out as soon as the “little book” was finished. The negotiator asked for clarification, and Koresh responded, “I’ll be in custody in the jailhouse. You can come down there and feed me bananas if you want.”44
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