Ruby Ridge: The Truth and Tragedy of the Randy Weaver Family

by Jess Walter

  At FBI headquarters, Potts, the bureau’s assistant director in charge of criminal investigations, met with deputy assistant director Danny Coulson. The Weavers possessed every tactical advantage, Potts said. They had supporters in the woods who might come to their aid, turning the mountain into a war zone. There was such a high risk of casualties, FBI agents who went into this situation had to be given the opportunity to defend themselves. Potts figured that Bill Degan had died because he underestimated how dangerous the Weavers were and had stepped out and demanded their surrender. Coulson and Potts concurred: Because of the rugged terrain, the antigovernment sentiment of North Idaho, the Weavers’ extreme beliefs, and the fact that they had gunned down a deputy marshal without provocation, this might be the most dangerous situation the Hostage Rescue Team had ever faced. Before Rogers left, he and Potts talked about revising the FBI’s rules of engagement—which stipulated that agents could fire only if someone’s life was in danger—to allow snipers to shoot at the Weavers without provocation. Potts approved changing the rules, Rogers said later.

  Another FBI official, E. Michael Kahoe, talked to a legal adviser about changing the rules. The adviser said the FBI could change them if the situation was that dangerous and if it was the only way to control the situation and protect people from being hurt. He told Kahoe the final decision about how dangerous the situation was needed to be made in Idaho. And, no matter what happened, before any shots were fired, they had to demand the Weavers’ surrender.

  THE FLIGHT LEFT WASHINGTON, D.C., about 6:30 p.m. eastern time, five hours after the gunfight. Aboard the FBI’s Saberliner jet, Duke Smith briefed Rogers on everything the marshals service had done the last eighteen months, how stubborn, committed, and dangerous the Weaver family was, and how even the children were well-armed extremists. The marshals service had commissioned a psychological study of Vicki and Randy Weaver, done through information gathered by deputy marshals, Smith said. It showed that she was as zealous in her beliefs—and maybe more so—than was Randy Weaver. She wanted so badly to keep the family together, there was even some fear that she would kill her own children, Smith said.

  They went over aerial photos of a cabin atop a rocky, defensible knob—a fortress, practically—with deep forest all around it. Smith told Rogers about Operation Northern Exposure and gave him all the information he’d gotten from Hunt and from the case file, including misconceptions about the ongoing firefight and the weapons the Weavers might have stored away. Rogers had the impression of a mountain rigged with grenades and explosives and a highly trained family hiding in bunkers, waiting to shoot anyone who came up. Flying across the country, they agreed the case called for drastic measures. Clearly, the family knew authorities were up there; they’d already proved they would kill federal agents. Rogers and Smith reasoned that to send HRT and SOG members up there with the normal rules of engagement would be tying their hands in a very dangerous situation. If it was indeed an ongoing firefight, then FBI agents were in danger the minute they stepped on the mountain. Rogers drafted new rules:

  “If any adult is seen with a weapon in the vicinity of where this firefight took place, of the Weaver cabin, then this individual could be the subject of deadly force…. Any child is going to come under standard FBI rules, meaning that if an FBI agent is threatened with death or some other innocent is threatened with death by a child, then clearly that agent could use a weapon to shoot a child.”

  Rogers called Potts on the jet’s telephone and went over the new rules of engagement. Potts gave preliminary approval to the rules—said they sounded good—but Rogers knew he would have to send the detailed rules in writing before enacting them. Duke Smith called his boss, Henry Hudson, and advised him of the rules as well.

  The U.S. marshal for Idaho, Mike Johnson, met the FBI jet at the airport and told them the state police were in the process of bringing the deputies out.

  “How far is this place?” Duke Smith asked.

  “We’ve got a good two-, two-and-a-half-hour drive,” Johnson said. They rented cars and hit the freeway going east at about seventy-five miles per hour. It was forty freeway miles to Coeur d’Alene, just across the Idaho state line, then another seventy miles north, through the woods, to Naples. Near Ruby Ridge, they turned on the wrong mountain road, and—rather than end up in the middle of the night at the Weavers’ back door—the officials decided to go to the sheriff’s office in Bonners Ferry and find someone to lead them to the federal base camp. It was nearing dawn by the time they finally arrived at the meadow, where fifty federal and state agents were now setting up tents and supplies and guarding the woods against Weaver supporters.

  A trailer had been set up as a command post near one of Wayne and Ruth Rau’s outbuildings, and Rogers, Smith, and Johnson found Special Agent-in-Charge Gene Glenn inside. Glenn, the top FBI agent from Salt Lake City, briefed them on what had happened so far; they had gotten the deputy marshals down and were trying to secure the woods and the roads leading up the mountain.

  The deputies who had been in the firefight were back at their condo by the time Rogers and Duke Smith arrived. And so the officials sat in the command post with Gene Glenn, setting up plans and beginning to revise the rules of engagement without even talking to the deputies who’d actually been in the gun battle. Glenn was told they needed some time to compose themselves.

  One problem, Glenn acknowledged, was that they had no one at the top of the knoll yet, “no eyes on the cabin.” Rogers said that was okay, the HRT would be there soon and then his sniper teams would move up there.

  THE HOSTAGE RESCUE TEAM had trouble getting a flight out to North Idaho from Washington, D.C. They finally arrived on a transport plane Saturday morning, drove to Bonners Ferry, and set up for a 9:00 a.m. briefing at the armory there.

  There were hundreds of SWAT teams, operations groups, and special tactics units used by the law enforcement agencies around the country, but the FBI’s HRT was the elite, trained to battle terrorism and to handle tactical missions involving hostages or barricaded criminals. Unlike the marshals’ SOG team, the HRT was a full-time outfit and its members did nothing but train and go on missions. HRT members had to be experienced street agents, had to endure a rigorous two-week tryout, and then had to pass tough physical and mental training.

  The HRT consisted of two sections that were mirror images of each other—the Blue and the Gold—each divided into two separate kinds of members—assaulters and sniper/observers. The snipers would crawl into place on the perimeter of a crisis site, keeping their eyes and guns on the situation, and then the assault team would move into place on the ground, bust down all the doors that needed to be busted down, wrestle the bad guys to the ground and—in the sanitized vernacular of federal law enforcement—”stabilize the situation.”

  A bright, disciplined graduate of West Point, Lon Horiuchi had joined the HRT after only two years as an FBI agent. There was a friendly, proud sort of competition between the assaulters and the snipers—each chiding the other about who was more important to the team. That was why it was so strange when Horiuchi jumped ship after four years and moved from the assault team to the sniper team. But he knew that to advance in the bureau he needed as many different kinds of experiences as he could get, and with his intelligence, his steady, businesslike demeanor, his crack shooting on the range and his eyesight—a couple of feet better than 20/20—he soon became one of the FBI’s best snipers. By 1992, Horiuchi, a compact, muscular Asian-American, was in charge of the six agents on one of the Blue sniper/observer teams. In truth, the job consisted of a hell of a lot more observing than sniping and, when Horiuchi and the other members of the HRT flew out to North Idaho, it had been three years since an HRT sniper had even fired a shot on a mission.

  The team members knew right away this was a big case. For the first time anyone could remember, both teams—the Blue and the Gold, all fifty HRT agents—were sent on a single mission.

  Inside the Bonners Ferry Armory, the camouflaged HRT
members sat on their packs or on folding chairs while Richard Rogers briefed them about the mission. Rogers had stayed up all night, working out the details of the operation and the rules of engagement with Gene Glenn and Duke Smith. Now the twenty-year FBI agent stood up and told the HRT members that they were going into a situation that was a continuation of the firefight that had started the day before. He mistakenly said the marshals were still pinned down by fire from the cabin. Rogers gave descriptions and intelligence information about each member of the Weaver family and Kevin Harris. Vicki Weaver, he said, was the most zealous member of the family. He gave them general descriptions of the rugged terrain, the rock outcroppings, and the wooded field beneath the cabin.

  There will be “no long siege,” Rogers said. And then he gave the HRT members the modified rules of engagement.

  “If Randall Weaver, Vicki Weaver, Kevin Harris are observed with a weapon and fail to respond to a command to surrender,” Rogers said, “deadly force can be used to neutralize them.”

  Outside the armory, Duke Smith told his marshals that the FBI was going to “go up there and take care of buiness.” He said that Rogers had assured him the standoff “was not going to last long, that it was going to be taken down hard and fast.”

  In the armory, the HRT’s hostage negotiator, a heavy-set, former street agent named Fred Lanceley, wasn’t sure he’d heard right. He’d been involved in about 300 hostage situations, and he’d never heard anything like these new rules of engagement. Clearly, with rules like these, there would be no need for a negotiator.

  The rules had been drafted with bad information and with little investigation of the circumstances of the initial shoot-out, no interviews with the deputy marshals who’d been up there. Then the rules were revised several times, going through a slight evolution of verbs—from “deadly force could be used” to “deadly force can be used.” That evolution would continue and would create problems the FBI had never faced before.

  MORNING LEFT LITTLE DOUBT how the locals—at least some of them—felt about the shoot-out and the ever-growing federal army. The old highway curved gradually past the roadblock, where two dozen state and federal officers now stood, wound through picket-fenced pastureland and underneath a railroad underpass where someone overnight had painted the words “Entering Dead Cop Zone.”

  At first, Bill Grider wasn’t too choked up about what had happened to his old friend Randy Weaver. He’d seen Randy once in the last year, when he’d gone riding up to the cabin on a horse and come across Sam Weaver near the Weavers’ driveway. Bill climbed off the horse, and Sam held the dog on a leash toward him.

  “Get back on your horse, Bill,” Sam said. “Striker is mean.”

  And then Randy came out.

  “Got a cup of coffee for an old friend?”

  “Sorry, Bill,” Randy said. “But I don’t know who is a federal agent, there are so many feds out there.”

  So when he heard that Randy had finally gotten into it with the deputy marshals—”Randy went on a tear!” one of the sawmill employees told him—Grider figured Randy was a grown man and could take care of himself. I did everything I could for him, Bill decided. Half an hour later, though, Judy Grider came through the doors of the sawmill, sobbing, and so Bill decided to go down to the roadblock with her. The Griders began to burn as they watched cars and trucks full of cops stream past.

  “The man ain’t done nothin’,” Grider said. “He isn’t hurting anybody up there, and he has never hurt anyone.”

  On Friday, police had evacuated nine families whose houses were strung out on the logging roads that etched up Ruby Ridge, and they stood around the roadblock with some of Weaver’s friends and a dozen or so reporters and photographers.

  Lorenz Caduff was thirty-seven years old, a chef from Switzerland who’d escaped a crowded resort town just six weeks earlier to buy the Deep Creek Inn, a bar, restaurant, and motel on thirty acres just off the old Naples Highway, a quarter mile from the bridge where state police were setting up the roadblock.

  Lorenz saw an ambulance sitting in his parking lot and walked outside to ask what was happening. He didn’t know anyone, not the Weavers or the Aryan Nations, but he began to worry as police cars raced past.

  “What’s going on?” he asked in halting English.

  The ambulance driver wouldn’t tell him.

  “This is my place! I want to know what’s going on!”

  Finally, he told Caduff that a criminal had gotten in a shoot-out and killed a federal officer. “This is shocking,” Caduff said. “We know these things, but they are from the TV, from what you call Wild West.”

  When armored personnel carriers—tanklike vehicles known as APCs—began rolling on their metal tracks past his restaurant, Caduff did a double take. It was like World War II. It was unbelievable that the American government would do this to its own people. “Do you think we are in danger?” he asked his wife, Wasiliki.

  Lorenz pitched a tent in his front yard for some of the people evacuated from Ruby Ridge, and when the temperatures dipped into the thirties Friday night, he allowed them to sleep on the floor in his family’s apartment above the restaurant. He couldn’t believe it when a Red Cross truck drove right past the evacuated people and turned up the hill to provide food to the federal officers. The Red Cross was founded in his native Switzerland as a neutral aid organization. They weren’t supposed to take sides!

  Red Cross officials said when they tried to help the people at the roadblock, they were chased off with clubs and sticks.

  Two of Randy and Vicki’s friends, Jackie and Tony Brown, tried to cross the bridge and were turned back by state police, who manned the line with assault rifles. Jackie stood on the bridge, crying and begging that they at least let her go up and try to bring the children down. “I’m just worried these kids are going to be killed.”

  More people gathered on Saturday, newspaper and television reporters and as many as twenty-four friends, neighbors, and people who shared the Weavers’ beliefs. Their cars stretched for a couple of hundred yards on either side of the turnoff to Ruby Ridge. Bill Grider went into the North Woods Tavern and rallied the off-duty loggers and farmers and brought them back to the roadblock. They formed a football huddle and talked about their strategy for protesting. “Tell the Truth” they wrote on cardboard and “Go Home Feds” on the bottom of an empty half rack of Ranier Beer. By afternoon, they stretched banners along the banks of the old highway—”Freedom of Religion” and “Stop the Violence.”

  When the APCs and military trucks began rolling up the hill, a few protesters became outraged, screaming and pointing and running up to the vehicles.

  “Baby killer!” yelled Kevin Harris’s foster brother, Mike Gray, as he jabbed his finger at the window of a Humvee, a short, squat Jeep-like vehicle. “Which one of you is going to shoot the baby?”

  Kevin Harris’s mom, Barb Pierce, sat huddled under a blanket with Kevin’s girlfriend and his two-and-a-half-year-old son, Jade, while his stepfather, a Spokane paralegal named Brian Pierce, paced and tried to get some answers from the stone-faced law officers on the other side of the police tape.

  Barb had been finishing a customer’s nails when she heard about the shooting on the evening news the night before. Now, they didn’t know if Kevin was dead or alive, and the authorities wouldn’t let Brian go up there to try to talk Kevin down. “I don’t share Randy’s beliefs,” the bearded, constantly frowning Brian Pierce told anyone who listened. “I just want to get Kevin down from there before he gets killed.”

  Finally, by late afternoon, Brian Pierce couldn’t take it anymore, and he ducked under the police tape and began walking up the road. He only made it a few steps before officers grabbed him, handcuffed him, and dragged him off to jail. At least seven more people would be arrested or turned around in the coming days, trying to get past the smothering line of federal officers, either to talk Randy down or help him fight.

  A FEW MINUTES OF FITFUL SLEEP didn’t keep the shots from
coming again or keep the woods from racing past or keep the life from draining out of Billy Degan’s face, and in that way, the night faded into morning, and Dave Hunt and the other deputy marshals woke up, if you could call it that.

  Joe Thomas made them a big breakfast—bacon and eggs—and they showered and dressed in the condominium on Schweitzer Basin. They drove to Bonners Ferry, to be debriefed by their own people and to be interviewed by the FBI and by U.S. attorney Ron Howen, who had been assigned the case. After all they’d been through, it bugged Hunt to have to sit down for two hours and be quizzed by FBI agents who had no idea how complicated this case was and how long he’d been working it. The agents themselves were okay and he knew they had a job to do, but he didn’t appreciate their cocky, coming-in-at-the-eleventh-hour-to-save-your-butt attitudes. He’d always felt the FBI didn’t deserve its bulletproof reputation. It was the agency that investigated Congress and judges, and as a result, Hunt believed, neither was tough enough on the FBI.

  But what really got him was the FBI’s arcane method of interviewing: the agents took notes, wrote them up, sent them back to the subject for review, and then revised them. Why didn’t they just tape-record interviews, so there was no doubt what someone said? It was idiotic, a throwback to the J. Edgar Hoover FBI.

  After the interviews, the deputy marshals drove to the armory, talked with Duke Smith and some other marshals officials, and watched the Hostage Rescue Team get ready for its mission. Then they drove up to the meadow, past the protesters, the graffiti—”Entering Dead Cop Zone”—and the signs—”Leave Them Alone!”