Koresh, page 25
This will be the last time, he told himself. He agreed to go.
On Saturday, the first installment of “The Sinful Messiah” debuted. That morning, a phone call came into the Trib. It was Steve Schneider. He said that David had read the article and was troubled. He was offering to speak to the Trib and give them “the real story.” It would focus on the Seven Seals and not the “seven days of lies” the Trib was planning to publish. The interview never happened.
At the compound, David showed his followers a copy of the Trib. “It’s going to be soon,” he said.
One follower remembered that morning:
When we came downstairs that morning, everyone was just kind of sitting there, kind of in shock. I saw a few newspapers lying around and heard David discussing the paper and the article about him. Then when we realized the article was set to run for the whole week we were dumbfounded, and rather embarrassed. We had been told that Robert Gonzalez was coming over today to join us for the morning Sabbath service. David had asked us all to come downstairs to meet Robert and let him get to know us. David wanted Robert to get to know who we were and what we were like, but the newspaper article seemed to cast a shadow over things.
35
Hood
ON FEBRUARY 25, the ATF’s training for the raid began at Fort Hood, an enormous Army base about an hour away from Waco. The agents stayed in busted World War II two-story Army barracks. Guys in their thirties and forties, used to checking in at the Holiday Inn while traveling for the bureau, were instead crammed into what was a glorified summer camp, down to the bunks and the common bathroom.
ATF agent Chuck Hustmyre couldn’t believe it. “This sucks,” he thought. “Now I remember why I got out of the military.”
Hustmyre hadn’t actually been assigned to go down to Fort Hood that first day. In fact, he had tickets to a George Strait concert he’d been looking forward to seeing with his wife. But his partner, Todd McKeehan, told him about this top-secret deal going on in Texas, and it sounded too good to miss, so he got rid of the tickets and jumped in a car for Fort Hood.
Todd was Chuck’s best friend. He came from a God-fearing family in East Tennessee, where people’s accents were so thick, they could have been speaking Klingon. When he met them, Chuck had trouble understanding what they were saying.
They’d met at a party thrown in Todd’s honor when he returned from the Gulf War. He told some funny-ass stories over the campfire: How, after invading Iraq, they’d heard about a Baskin Robbins opening back in Kuwait and they’d gotten on this line a mile long in 115-degree heat just to taste some butter pecan ice cream. And how he’d gone fifty-five days without a shower or a hot meal. Not bitching about it, just telling it.
Todd was a positive dude. Always looking forward to something in life. Chuck liked that about him.
Todd had served with the Marine infantry. A very Action Jackson kind of guy. When he got into the ATF, he loved kicking down doors and grabbing perps.
Once the agents had gathered, supervisors showed them aerial photographs of the compound. They talked about Koresh, held up some pictures of him. They laid out the case. “It’s a religious cult” was the basic message; “the guy’s kind of crazy, he’s got a bunch of young girls living with him. Some of them are underage that he was having sex with and gotten one or two of them pregnant. They’re kind of a death cult type of thing.” That was what Chuck Hustmyre remembered most. “We’re going to have to raid them because we’re afraid they’re going to be one of those Jonestown type deals.”
The aerial photos were from months earlier. Hardly fresh. Some of the agents wondered why the ATF just didn’t fly over again, find out what the place looked like now. There were other things that were slightly off, too. The supervisors talked about the surveillance house across the street from the compound who were watching him twenty-four hours a day. That turned out not to be true.
Then there was the mud. The main building at Mount Carmel sat about two or three hundred yards down a long unpaved driveway that branched off Double EE Ranch Road. During a briefing, one of the agents asked what if it rains the morning of the raid and the cattle trailers get stuck in the mud? “Well, we’re just going to get out and run” was the answer.
Hustmyre was like, a couple of hundred yards of completely wide-open terrain, just a big field of grass, no cover whatsoever? Charging up to a building that’s packed with armed religious fanatics who’ve said they’ll shoot it out with the government? That’s the backup plan?
“Is this real?” he thought. “Are these people fucking crazy?”
Hustmyre had been an MP in the Army before joining the bureau. Running straight ahead into gunfire wasn’t really the Army way. But his buddy Todd was an ex-Marine. And charging straight to the sound of guns, that was Marine protocol, for sure. Hustmyre thought, if Todd’s going to do it, then I’m damn well going to do it, too.
Three Special Response Teams, or SRTs, would carry out the raid, one from New Orleans, one from Houston, and one from Dallas. The teams would approach the compound in two cattle trailers, pulled by pickup trucks, and disembark yards from the compound’s front door. Chuck Sarabyn gave each SRT its assignment. Members of the New Orleans team would use ladders to reach the compound’s second floor. They would enter the armory, which the ATF believed was next to Koresh’s bedroom. Other team members would clear the bedroom. The rest of the team would guard the area at the base of the ladders. The bureau estimated that there were seventy-five men, women, and children inside the compound. In fact, there were closer to 115, with the youngest being six months and the oldest seventy years.
The Dallas SRT would enter through the compound’s front door and cover the second and third floors, as well as the observation tower. The ATF’s information was that those areas housed the women’s and children’s bedrooms. Half the Houston SRT would take the first floor and secure it. They would find the trapdoor that led to the buried bus that the Davidians were making into a bunker. The second part of the Houston team would go to the western edge of the property, where the pit/shooting range was, and hold the Davidian men there.
Once the entire property was under ATF control, David Koresh would be arrested and a thorough search would be conducted. If there were problems on the way to the compound, the two cattle trailers would divert at one of several crossroads along the route. In case the trailers or the agents came under fire from the Davidians, the agency requested smoke canisters from the US military. The request was never filled, apparently because it was delivered too late for the military to respond in time.
By the time the trailers arrived at the front of the compound, there would be no more chances to abort the raid, even if the element of surprise had been lost. The landscape around Mount Carmel offered little cover, so the agents would have to proceed with the operation regardless.
After meeting with Sarabyn, Bill Buford and the other SRT leaders talked to their teams and gave more details on their assignment. The undercover agent Robert Rodriguez gave a presentation, describing Mount Carmel’s layout. The agents ate their meals and retired to the barracks. The next day, Friday, February 26, they assembled at the Military Operations in Urban Terrain site, a training course dense with structures and obstacles built to resemble an average American city. Strips of tape on the floor re-created Mount Carmel’s layout. The teams practiced the dynamic entry and searches. Each action was timed down to the second. Afterward, the agents moved on to the firing ranges and practiced shooting.
There are three key components of a good dynamic entry: the element of surprise, superior firepower, and speed. The technique was designed to overwhelm a target before they could shoot back. At the briefings, two or three of them every day, the supervisors told the agents, “We’re going to have the element of surprise and it’s crucial to maintain it.” To have the best chance at success, they would need to catch the Davidians unaware. A few of the agents would be armed with the semiautomatic AR-15s, but most would be carrying only handguns. On the days of the raid, the ATF would be outgunned by the Davidians.
It was going to be a big, high-profile raid, the largest in the bureau’s history. Three SRTs. Eighty-plus agents. The bureau’s media relations department alerted the local news media beforehand that they were going to have a major story for them in the coming days. The administrators gave the raid a name: “Operation Trojan Horse.” But the guys at Fort Hood started calling it “Showtime.” Some agents thought they were sure to get on CNN.
But that Friday, as the agents trained, a van loaded with over a thousand pounds of urea-nitrate explosive blew up in the basement of the World Trade Center in New York City. A small group of Islamist extremists had staged an attack on American soil. Six people, including a pregnant woman, were dead. Over a thousand were injured.
ATF agents flooded into New York to investigate. Resources were stretched thin just as the Waco raid was moving into the operational phase. Hustmyre was pissed. “That’s it,” he thought, “that just knocked us off the fucking news cycle.” Their shot at getting on CNN and being called heroes for taking down a whacko cult was gone.
There was little talk about the possibility of the Davidians successfully resisting the raid. Most SRT members would have found that unthinkable. Collectively, the agents at Fort Hood had conducted thousands of raids over years and years, and in almost all of them, the ATF had prevailed.
There were exceptions, of course. Agents had died in the line of duty. But gun runners, confronted with a team of ATF agents pounding on their front door, rarely decided to fight back. They surrendered or they ran. No one thought, “Hey, let’s go to war with the US government. That’s a good idea.”
Hustmyre and his team worked New Orleans, which was then probably the most dangerous city in America. Guns everywhere. Murders up the wazoo. And, consistently, they kicked ass. Waco was going to be a gigantic version of that, Hustmyre figured. He estimated it would be over in ten minutes.
The bureau booked 153 rooms at three Waco hotels for the night of February 28. They notified local hospitals to be prepared to accept casualties and recruited sheriff’s deputies and Texas Highway patrolmen to block key roads and serve as support personnel. They brought in explosives experts, dog handlers, and lab techs to process any evidence from the scene.
Officials put in a large order for doughnuts at a local grocery store, to be picked up that morning. They also made sure there would be early-morning coffee for the agents at Bellmead Civic Center. One agent, Roland Ballesteros, went to the local Wal-Mart and bought candy bars for the children at Mount Carmel. Growing up, he’d watched those World War II paratrooper movies where the Yanks handed out candy to the French kids. When he got back to the barracks, he filled his ammo pouch with Snickers and other things.
The cattle trailers were brought to Fort Hood. They would ride up empty to Waco. February 28 was a Sunday. It didn’t occur to the planners at the time that Texas ranchers almost never transported cattle on Sundays.
On Saturday, February 27, at eight a.m., Robert Rodriguez made his way to the compound. Saturday was the Sabbath, and David would usually hold a morning and an early-evening Bible study.
Rodriguez sat among the Davidians and listened as David talked about the “Sinful Messiah” story. “Now, for sure, they’ll be coming,” he said. David told his followers that, when the Babylonian forces arrived, they shouldn’t panic. He’d trained them on what to do. He didn’t spell out what that was.
After the morning session, Rodriguez left the compound and met with one of the commanders on the operation, Phil Chojnacki. Chojnacki wanted to know if he’d spotted any weapons or heard of any plans to fight back against any raid. Rodriguez said no on both counts. Rodriguez went back for the second study session, which lasted from five p.m. to about midnight. Then he left. The forward observers who’d settled into the surveillance house in anticipation of the raid noticed that Rodriguez seemed unsettled, anxious.
The undercover agent got on the phone with Sarabyn, who told him to return to the compound at 9:15 the next morning for a last report. Rodriguez didn’t want to go in. He was worried that showing up a second day in a row might stoke the Davidians’ paranoia. He didn’t know if David would let him leave by 9:15, which was the drop-dead time for him to get out before the raid.
Eventually, Sarabyn convinced him to go back.
In Fort Hood, ATF agents drove around town looking for newspaper boxes. They wanted to grab copies of the Waco Trib, the one with David Koresh on the front page. They were getting them for their wives, parents, whatever. The ATF was going to play a small part in history, and it would be nice to have a memento.
36
The Element of Surprise
SUNDAY MORNING ARRIVED and the ATF agents at Fort Hood were grumbling. Some Army geek had announced a barracks inspection. They had to get their rooms cleaned up before they could head to Waco. The biggest raid maybe in the history of US law enforcement and the Army wanted them to make sure their beds were nice and tidy before they could leave. It was like an enhanced hallucination of being in the military.
They woke up around three a.m., most of them dead tired, and got to it. After a couple of hours, the Army prick walked into the barracks with an actual checklist in his hand. Had the showers been mopped? Check. Did you strip your bed? Check. It was farcical.
Before the sun came up, the place was finally spic and span. The Army guy left. The agents got in their cars and formed a convoy heading up the highway, led by one of the cattle trailers. There were about eighty late-model American vehicles, many of them with long antennas, all with their headlights turned on. The line extended about a mile down the interstate.
They hauled ass, heading northeast.
In Waco, the morning dawned cold and overcast, with light drizzle. The forward observers at the surveillance house studied the compound through their binoculars. Everything appeared normal. There were only a few Davidians outside, men walking around and women emptying the buckets that the followers used for their waste.
By around eight a.m., the trailers and ATF cars were pulling into the parking lot of Bellmead Civic Center in Waco. The agents got out of their cars and unloaded their equipment. Some went inside for coffee and doughnuts. Others threw their duffel bags up against the wall and lay down, trying to catch a few winks.
A bunch of agents stood outside, shooting the shit. They were wearing jackets with “ATF” emblazoned on the backs in bright yellow. A supervisor came hustling up and waved them inside the building. He was worried someone would see all the ATF jackets and alert the Davidians. While they waited, a supervisor issued another order. All the agents who were going to load onto the cattle trailers were to write their blood types on their necks in Magic Marker, in case they were wounded and needed transfusions.
Early that morning, two men, David Jones and Donald Bunds, drove out of the compound to find copies of the Sunday Trib, which featured the second installment of the Koresh series. Jones, who worked as a mailman, was driving a yellow truck with the “U.S. Mail” logo on the door. On the way, Jones spotted the KWTX cameraman Jim Peeler. Peeler was parked by the side of the road, clearly lost. Jones stopped and asked if he could help. Peeler said he was trying to find Rodenville, the old name for Mount Carmel. He had no idea Jones was a member of the Davidians.
As they talked, Jones pointed toward Mount Carmel and said he’d read the Trib story. Those people are strange, he said, talking about the Davidians. Peeler nodded and said that there was a law enforcement operation underway that morning, aimed at the compound. He said there could be gunfire.
The two finished up talking. Jones turned back toward the compound, driving fast. Peeler had unwittingly alerted a member of the Branch Davidians that the raid was underway, and Jones was eager to tell David.
One of the ATF surveillance agents witnessed the encounter. He reported it to his supervisor, who later said he called it in to the command center. But the agents at the center later had no recollection of the report.
As Jones raced back to the compound, Robert Rodriquez was in one of the first-floor rooms, talking with David. Things were normal.
David left the room. When he came back, he was agitated. His body, his limbs, they were actually shaking. David Jones had arrived and alerted him about the impending raid.
He turned toward Robert. “Neither the ATF nor the National Guard will ever get me,” he said. “They got me once. They’ll never get me again.”
What was going on? Robert said nothing. David walked over to the front window, pulled up the shade, and peered outside.
“They’re coming, Robert,” he said. “The time has come.”
Robert began to panic. Had the raid been moved forward without anyone telling him? Was that possible?
“Just relax, just relax, just relax,” he said to himself. “Don’t give yourself away.”
Maybe it was 9:15 already, or later. He’d lost track of time. He stole a furtive glance at his watch. It was just past 9.
Robert told David he had a breakfast date. David said nothing.
Some other Davidians filed into the room, all men. They arranged themselves so they were standing between Robert and the door. A coincidence?
Rodriguez felt as though his brain was glitching. What should he do? For a moment, he thought about jumping through a window and running.
“I really have to go,” Robert said again. He stood up. David turned and walked up to him. He held out his hand, something David never did. “Good luck, Robert,” he said.
“This is it for me,” Robert was thinking to himself. “They’re going to shoot me, man.” He was expecting to get out the door and get a round in the back. That’s the scene that was playing in his head.
Rodriguez opened the front door and walked toward his pickup truck. He braced himself for the sound of a gun.
