Koresh, page 31
One issue was the .50 caliber Barrett gun. It was a major concern; a .50 caliber bullet would go right through the armor the HRT guys wore. So they wanted eyes on that gun at all times.
About a week into the siege, the HRT guys spotted the .50 cal in one of the towers on the fourth floor. They called it in. But then one of the negotiators told the Davidians, hey, we know where the .50 cal is. So what did the Davidians do? Moved it somewhere else.
That rubbed the HRT guys raw. The negotiators had blown it. Now the gun was hidden somewhere and they were screwed.
That’s how the HRT guys heard it. What actually happened was quite different.
Hours before the gun was removed, the negotiators were sitting in their command room when the door burst open. It was Rogers and Jamar. The negotiators had pinned a schematic of the compound to the wall. Rogers went up to the map and put his finger on the northwest tower. He hit it so hard he nearly put his finger through the thing.
“There’s a fucking .50 caliber Barrett right here,” he said. “And it’s pointed at Sierra Two.” A Barrett was a sniper rifle and Sierra Two was the main tactical position. “Get on the phone and get that thing out of there.”
So that’s what the negotiators did. On Rogers’s express orders. But word hadn’t gotten down to the guys lying in the mud that Rogers had ordered the sniper gun removed. He never briefed the HRT guys about it. So naturally they blamed the assholes talking to Koresh.
The negotiators wanted to stretch things out, wear down the Davidians mentally and emotionally. They were trying to form a bond with David, get to a level of trust and empathy where they might say, “Hey, let me offer you an idea of how this could work out better for you.” But the HRT knew the longer you waited, the more Koresh could make plans. Harden his positions, move his guns around to optimal spots. If the HRT had to go in, that meant it was going to be tougher. More time, potentially more dead agents.
A hostage situation often brings out the latent tension between negotiators and tactical leaders, and Noesner and Sage had experienced similar conflicts on other cases. But Waco brought with it unique stressors: the four dead federal agents, the 24/7 media coverage, and David’s changeable nature and his narcissism, all of which contributed to an atmosphere where trust quickly eroded. The break between the two teams would never be repaired. And its full cost would take weeks to reveal itself.
41
Double-minded
AS THE SIEGE neared the end of its first week, Jamar and the negotiators were able to agree on one tactic: building trust with David. They decided to send in a video camera so the Davidians could make tapes of themselves. The videos that would emerge might also give the FBI clues about the internal dynamics among the Davidians and the physical conditions inside.
On March 4, an agent approached the compound with the camera in hand; he left it near the front door. A Davidian soon emerged, grabbed it, and carried it inside. With the camera, the agents sent in their own home movies, showing the negotiators talking about themselves and their families. They wanted David to be able to put faces to names, hoping it would deepen his connection to the men he was talking to.
The video seemed to endear the negotiators to David. Like he had with the sheriff and Robert Rodriguez and many others, David fantasized about hanging out with the FBI guys, being pals. David always had one eye on alternate lives he’d never got to lead.
DAVID: I mean, if, if, like, me and you had not met like this way—
NEGOTIATOR: Um-hum.
DAVID: You know, we could have been out fishing or something. And I could have been there and I could have been sitting there fishing and you could have said, you know, “How you doing?”
“How you doing?”
“You know, what do you do?”
“Well, I’m a musician . . . What do you do?”
“Well, I’m, I’m an FBI agent.”
“Oh, really, you know. Glad to meet you. Boy, I bet you got a real hard job, you know.” And then you’d end up being surprised to find out I’m involved in something like this later on.
It wasn’t unusual for David to tell one of his favorite negotiators that he loved them. They responded in kind.
The men bonded over jokes. At one point, David asked for his followers not to be put in prison with any big dudes.
NEGOTIATOR: (laughs)
DAVID: That’ll poke us in the rear.
NEGOTIATOR: Well, see, see—
DAVID: It’s against our religion.
The men started joshing with David about a possible movie after Waco was all over. Who would play whom?
DAVID: Right. Steve, what was that actor’s name. Mel what?
STEVE: Mel Gibson.
DAVID: Mel Gibson. I want Mel Gibson to play my part, huh?
NEGOTIATOR: You’ve got a good sense of humor, huh?
DAVID: Well, he’s, he’s—
NEGOTIATOR: He’s a piece of work.
DAVID: He’s crazy, isn’t he?
When David wasn’t on the line, the negotiators kidded Steve about the prophet’s powers. As often as not, the jokes sailed past him. One time they were talking about David’s ability to see the future.
NEGOTIATOR: I’d like to have him figure out when the next hurricane’s blowing through, huh?
STEVE: Well, yeah . . . He did tell us about the Gulf War before it came about.
But just as quickly, the good vibes would evaporate and Steve and David would rail about the tactical teams zooming around the property in their armored vehicles. They were crushing cars, coming close to the compound.
This was mostly true. The HRT had flattened some vehicles and they did drive their Bradleys up and down in front of the compound. The moves were meant to intimidate and to clear the property of obstacles and potential Davidian positions, should they stage a breakout.
The men bickered about it like old husbands and wives:
STEVE: Are you listening to me?
NEGOTIATOR: I am. You told me yesterday you weren’t going to yell.
Small annoyances festered. David had requested milk for the children inside; he’d even sent one of the Davidians out with an envelope containing $1,000 to pay for it. The follower left the money near the front door and an agent retrieved it. But the FBI wanted a couple of kids to be released before they sent in the milk. An even swap. David said no deal.
David felt the FBI was messing with his manhood. The destruction of the cars in the yard showed the FBI’s contempt for him. Not to mention the HRT guys that David was convinced were giving the Davidians the finger and even pulling down their pants to moon the compound. HRT operators vigorously denied any such things ever happened, but David was convinced he was being disrespected.
DAVID: Let me explain something to you. You are taking me as a fool.
NEGOTIATOR: Absolutely untrue.
“Bringing these tanks and stuff around here,” David said at another point. “I’ll tell you what, being an American first, I’m the kind of guy that I’ll stand in front of a tank. You can run over me but I’ll be biting on the tracks.”
He had an idea how the government could make it up to him. “Let’s respect this . . . seventy-seven acres, let’s respect this in this nation as Europe respects [the] Vatican, okay?” Many of the negotiators happened to be Catholic. What they thought of David’s demand to be recognized as equivalent to the Holy See went unrecorded.
The FBI tried to sweeten David up. A negotiator explained why the tactical guys were out there zooming around in the Bradleys.
NEGOTIATOR: You and I both know . . . that sometimes tactical people, you know, they, they like to put on their gear, they like to jump out of helicopters and they like to do those kinds of things, they like to drive around those little tanks . . . You know, they’re young, they’re not [as] mature . . . as you and I are perhaps . . .
Some of these folks driving those tanks, you know, this may be the only opportunity they ever have to drive one of those Bradleys, and boy, I want to get that Bradley up and down the road and, you know, they, they get, they get impatient, they get, they get excited. “Hey here’s my chance, let me push this vehicle, let’s, let’s see what this baby will do!”
David didn’t buy a word of it.
On March 6, Steve’s usually cheery voice turned macabre.
STEVE: Listen, listen—if you ever wanted—if you ever wanted to use snipers or whatever else, you know, you go ahead and you do what you feel you’ve got to do.
The negotiators told him, no, they weren’t going to kill the Davidians at his invitation. But Steve returned to the idea again and again.
STEVE: Let me tell you, between you and me, I like it that you’re bringing in the tanks and you’re digging the ditches and, and there’s more armaments and so forth. I’m hoping that they’ll bring in Apache helicopters and they’ll bring in a lot more. I—
NEGOTIATOR: Why? Why, why would you want to see more of that stuff?
STEVE: Well, because I believe in the Bible and it’s . . . a revelation, a fulfillment of the Book of Nahum.
On rare occasions, Steve could be as twitchy as David. He alternated between pleading patience—his usual stance toward the FBI—and a pressing, even wild, urgency. In the latter mood, he often encouraged the agents to attack the compound. Steve seemed tired of life. He wanted an answer, either way.
But Steve and David were double-minded, just like David Bunds had been years before. Despite asking for an FBI attack, when the Abrams tanks, the biggest and most powerful models in the American armory, finally arrived in Waco around March 9, the two freaked out. Steve called the negotiators “damn belligerent bullies . . . with a double tongue.” The FBI guys tried to calm him down.
NEGOTIATOR: Have David talk to me, and—
STEVE: Did you hear what, no, no, Dick, did you hear what I said to you?
NEGOTIATOR: Steve, what did, yesterday you said you weren’t going to yell—
STEVE: I’m going to put the phone down, we’ll pull the plug, you won’t talk to anybody.
It went on and on. By now, each side had now built up enough resentments to fuel long, punchy dialogues that doubled back and doubled back some more before petering out in bleak exhaustion. Steve and David joked that there was a factory somewhere in the country churning out FBI negotiators. They all sounded the same, they were all named John, they were all full of deceit. “Every one of them sounds like they came off the same cookie sheet,” David told one of the negotiators. “There’s not a genuine ounce of blood in these men.” It was like talking to an IBM computer.
Steve was exasperated by this, but for David it went deeper. He felt like he was back in Garland, Texas, dealing with Roy Haldeman.
What had begun as a bloody, badly planned raid had turned into a waiting game whose momentum was hard to gauge. The FBI brought in profilers and psychologists to try and analyze David. Two experts from the behavioral science division contributed one of the first evaluations.
The memo’s lead author was Peter A. Smerick, an FBI criminal profiler and forensic scientist. He concluded that, if the FBI assaulted the compound, there was a high probability David would kill himself: “When the Davidians sensed the FBI was closing in on the compound or performing some tactical maneuver, Koresh’s prophecy would be confirmed . . . Do the OPPOSITE of what he is expecting . . . consider moving back . . . Attacking the compound could result in a tremendous loss of life.”
The HRT did not move back. And in an administrative notebook kept by the HRT, agents mocked Smerick’s analysis. “Psychological profile of an [expletive] by jerks,” wrote one unidentified contributor.
Smerick felt pressure to alter his findings. He eventually wrote an “acquiescent” final report that deleted his recommendations to ease pressure on the Davidians. Instead, prompted by his FBI supervisor in Washington, he skewed more toward the tactical approach. On March 17, the profiler left Waco “in frustration.” He later said that the “traditional independent process of FBI criminal analysis . . . was compromised at Waco.”
Outside experts were brought in. They often disagreed on the way forward. Their reports saw David as too narcissistic to be a high suicide risk.
“We felt this was an individual who was extraordinarily vain and very fearful of physical injury,” said one consultant, Dr. Murray S. Miron, a psychology professor at Syracuse University. “It appeared all of his actions were defensively aggressive.”
This analysis got a boost from the negotiations. David did talk about the End Times and judgment and death, but at other times, he focused on what he was going to do when he got out of Mount Carmel. He wondered what the jail would be like, about food he would eat, and especially about spreading his message far and wide. A man who’s planning suicide, the experts reasoned, wouldn’t be thinking about book deals and even movie contracts. One bureau official told reporters that the time he felt the most hopeful during the entire siege was when David said he was going to sell his memoir to the highest bidder. He must be coming out, the official thought.
But no consensus emerged. If one analyst saw a sliver of light, the next one snuffed it out. The bureau turned to the highly experienced Dr. Park Dietz, who’d examined John Hinckley Jr. after his assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan and declared him sane enough to stand trial. He’d done the same for the Milwaukee serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. Dietz turned in a written evaluation: David would not leave Mount Carmel, he predicted, and would not permit anyone close to him, including the children he’d fathered, to leave, either.
Sometime around March 6, Gary Coker, the Waco lawyer who’d defended David and the Mighty Men in the 1988 trial, got a call from FBI Director Sessions. Coker had been a Sunday School student of Sessions’s back when the FBI director was living in Waco.
Sessions told the lawyer this was an unofficial call; he hadn’t told anyone at the agency about it. He was calling, he said, in search of “the key to Koresh.”
They talked about David. Coker told the director that Koresh wasn’t some religious ascetic; he was a man of the world who loved fast cars and high-end guitars. David had grown up in a broken home; he was a narcissist who needed “strong, strong control.” Coker was of the opinion that the FBI was coming on too hard. The Branch Davidians were regular folks who had some unusual views on religion, and the FBI was treating them like they were John Dillinger’s gang.
Near the end of the conversation, Coker said he was willing to talk to Koresh. He said, “Why don’t you come down here, and maybe we can get Judge Logue,” a local magistrate, “to come with us and we’ll walk in and talk to Vernon Howell.” Sessions said, let me see what I can do.
Five minutes after Coker had hung up with Sessions, the phone rang again. It was Bob Ricks, the FBI’s main spokesman at Waco. He and Coker had both gone to Baylor Law School years before, but this wasn’t a friendly call. Ricks was worked up.
“I’m a lawyer and you don’t have a right to go in there,” Ricks said, talking about Mount Carmel.
Coker started talking about the Davidians’ rights.
“They don’t have any rights!” Ricks half-shouted.
“They do have rights.”
“If you say that one more time, I’m going to hang up.”
“But Bob,” Coker replied, “you called me.”
Coker waited for Sessions to get back to him, but it never happened. The lawyer took it as a sign that the FBI director didn’t have the juice to get him into the compound.
That weekend, the original ATF raid was being hashed over in the media. The ATF director, Stephen Higgins, went on Meet the Press and claimed the Davidians hadn’t known the raid was coming. “This plan was based on the element of surprise,” he said. “We would not send our agents into a situation where we didn’t think we had the element of surprise.”
It was untrue.
Others in the ATF repeated the mistruth. Chuck Sarabyn, the ATF commander informed by Robert Rodriguez that Koresh knew they were coming, denied that the agent ever gave him that information. ATF administrators backed both of them. Rodriguez, who felt intense guilt for how the raid had turned out, believed he was being made the scapegoat. At work, he felt like he was being shunned. Everybody avoided him except his fellow agents.
ATF administrators ordered all agents not to speak to the press about the initial raid. Anyone who did would be fired from their jobs.
The main target in the week after the operation, however, was the press. The day after the raid, the KWTX reporter John McLemore had gotten a call at the station. It was Stephen Higgins, the head of the ATF. McLemore braced for a tirade; he thought Higgins was going to rip him for shooting footage of agents wounded during the operation. Instead, Higgins said, “John, I want to thank you for everything you did, for your bravery.” McLemore had helped get three wounded agents away from the compound and to a medical triage site. All three survived.
But the day after the phone call from Higgins, Kathy Fair, a journalist from the Houston Chronicle, went on Nightline, a popular late-night news show on ABC. People within the ATF were telling her that “reporters for, I believe, the TV station, allegedly were hiding in the trees when federal agents arrived.” Her ATF sources “have told me they think they were set up by at least one reporter” who had “tipped off the sect.” It was just as hollow as Higgins’s assertion—the cameraman Jim Peeler had unknowingly discussed the impending raid with one of the Branch Davidians the morning it launched, but no one had “tipped off” the followers. Still, the accusation stuck.
People began calling in to KWTX, wanting to know why McLemore had snitched to the Davidians. He noticed people in Waco were treating him differently. His wife, who worked as a receptionist at a local bank, was harassed by co-workers wanting to know if her husband had alerted the Davidians and got those feds killed.
42
The Trilateral Commission
EIGHT DAYS INTO the standoff, David was feeling irritable. He treated FBI negotiators to long, rambling monologues on theology, which they were thoroughly sick of by now. In certain moments, he sounded unstable, manic even.
About a week into the siege, the HRT guys spotted the .50 cal in one of the towers on the fourth floor. They called it in. But then one of the negotiators told the Davidians, hey, we know where the .50 cal is. So what did the Davidians do? Moved it somewhere else.
That rubbed the HRT guys raw. The negotiators had blown it. Now the gun was hidden somewhere and they were screwed.
That’s how the HRT guys heard it. What actually happened was quite different.
Hours before the gun was removed, the negotiators were sitting in their command room when the door burst open. It was Rogers and Jamar. The negotiators had pinned a schematic of the compound to the wall. Rogers went up to the map and put his finger on the northwest tower. He hit it so hard he nearly put his finger through the thing.
“There’s a fucking .50 caliber Barrett right here,” he said. “And it’s pointed at Sierra Two.” A Barrett was a sniper rifle and Sierra Two was the main tactical position. “Get on the phone and get that thing out of there.”
So that’s what the negotiators did. On Rogers’s express orders. But word hadn’t gotten down to the guys lying in the mud that Rogers had ordered the sniper gun removed. He never briefed the HRT guys about it. So naturally they blamed the assholes talking to Koresh.
The negotiators wanted to stretch things out, wear down the Davidians mentally and emotionally. They were trying to form a bond with David, get to a level of trust and empathy where they might say, “Hey, let me offer you an idea of how this could work out better for you.” But the HRT knew the longer you waited, the more Koresh could make plans. Harden his positions, move his guns around to optimal spots. If the HRT had to go in, that meant it was going to be tougher. More time, potentially more dead agents.
A hostage situation often brings out the latent tension between negotiators and tactical leaders, and Noesner and Sage had experienced similar conflicts on other cases. But Waco brought with it unique stressors: the four dead federal agents, the 24/7 media coverage, and David’s changeable nature and his narcissism, all of which contributed to an atmosphere where trust quickly eroded. The break between the two teams would never be repaired. And its full cost would take weeks to reveal itself.
41
Double-minded
AS THE SIEGE neared the end of its first week, Jamar and the negotiators were able to agree on one tactic: building trust with David. They decided to send in a video camera so the Davidians could make tapes of themselves. The videos that would emerge might also give the FBI clues about the internal dynamics among the Davidians and the physical conditions inside.
On March 4, an agent approached the compound with the camera in hand; he left it near the front door. A Davidian soon emerged, grabbed it, and carried it inside. With the camera, the agents sent in their own home movies, showing the negotiators talking about themselves and their families. They wanted David to be able to put faces to names, hoping it would deepen his connection to the men he was talking to.
The video seemed to endear the negotiators to David. Like he had with the sheriff and Robert Rodriguez and many others, David fantasized about hanging out with the FBI guys, being pals. David always had one eye on alternate lives he’d never got to lead.
DAVID: I mean, if, if, like, me and you had not met like this way—
NEGOTIATOR: Um-hum.
DAVID: You know, we could have been out fishing or something. And I could have been there and I could have been sitting there fishing and you could have said, you know, “How you doing?”
“How you doing?”
“You know, what do you do?”
“Well, I’m a musician . . . What do you do?”
“Well, I’m, I’m an FBI agent.”
“Oh, really, you know. Glad to meet you. Boy, I bet you got a real hard job, you know.” And then you’d end up being surprised to find out I’m involved in something like this later on.
It wasn’t unusual for David to tell one of his favorite negotiators that he loved them. They responded in kind.
The men bonded over jokes. At one point, David asked for his followers not to be put in prison with any big dudes.
NEGOTIATOR: (laughs)
DAVID: That’ll poke us in the rear.
NEGOTIATOR: Well, see, see—
DAVID: It’s against our religion.
The men started joshing with David about a possible movie after Waco was all over. Who would play whom?
DAVID: Right. Steve, what was that actor’s name. Mel what?
STEVE: Mel Gibson.
DAVID: Mel Gibson. I want Mel Gibson to play my part, huh?
NEGOTIATOR: You’ve got a good sense of humor, huh?
DAVID: Well, he’s, he’s—
NEGOTIATOR: He’s a piece of work.
DAVID: He’s crazy, isn’t he?
When David wasn’t on the line, the negotiators kidded Steve about the prophet’s powers. As often as not, the jokes sailed past him. One time they were talking about David’s ability to see the future.
NEGOTIATOR: I’d like to have him figure out when the next hurricane’s blowing through, huh?
STEVE: Well, yeah . . . He did tell us about the Gulf War before it came about.
But just as quickly, the good vibes would evaporate and Steve and David would rail about the tactical teams zooming around the property in their armored vehicles. They were crushing cars, coming close to the compound.
This was mostly true. The HRT had flattened some vehicles and they did drive their Bradleys up and down in front of the compound. The moves were meant to intimidate and to clear the property of obstacles and potential Davidian positions, should they stage a breakout.
The men bickered about it like old husbands and wives:
STEVE: Are you listening to me?
NEGOTIATOR: I am. You told me yesterday you weren’t going to yell.
Small annoyances festered. David had requested milk for the children inside; he’d even sent one of the Davidians out with an envelope containing $1,000 to pay for it. The follower left the money near the front door and an agent retrieved it. But the FBI wanted a couple of kids to be released before they sent in the milk. An even swap. David said no deal.
David felt the FBI was messing with his manhood. The destruction of the cars in the yard showed the FBI’s contempt for him. Not to mention the HRT guys that David was convinced were giving the Davidians the finger and even pulling down their pants to moon the compound. HRT operators vigorously denied any such things ever happened, but David was convinced he was being disrespected.
DAVID: Let me explain something to you. You are taking me as a fool.
NEGOTIATOR: Absolutely untrue.
“Bringing these tanks and stuff around here,” David said at another point. “I’ll tell you what, being an American first, I’m the kind of guy that I’ll stand in front of a tank. You can run over me but I’ll be biting on the tracks.”
He had an idea how the government could make it up to him. “Let’s respect this . . . seventy-seven acres, let’s respect this in this nation as Europe respects [the] Vatican, okay?” Many of the negotiators happened to be Catholic. What they thought of David’s demand to be recognized as equivalent to the Holy See went unrecorded.
The FBI tried to sweeten David up. A negotiator explained why the tactical guys were out there zooming around in the Bradleys.
NEGOTIATOR: You and I both know . . . that sometimes tactical people, you know, they, they like to put on their gear, they like to jump out of helicopters and they like to do those kinds of things, they like to drive around those little tanks . . . You know, they’re young, they’re not [as] mature . . . as you and I are perhaps . . .
Some of these folks driving those tanks, you know, this may be the only opportunity they ever have to drive one of those Bradleys, and boy, I want to get that Bradley up and down the road and, you know, they, they get, they get impatient, they get, they get excited. “Hey here’s my chance, let me push this vehicle, let’s, let’s see what this baby will do!”
David didn’t buy a word of it.
On March 6, Steve’s usually cheery voice turned macabre.
STEVE: Listen, listen—if you ever wanted—if you ever wanted to use snipers or whatever else, you know, you go ahead and you do what you feel you’ve got to do.
The negotiators told him, no, they weren’t going to kill the Davidians at his invitation. But Steve returned to the idea again and again.
STEVE: Let me tell you, between you and me, I like it that you’re bringing in the tanks and you’re digging the ditches and, and there’s more armaments and so forth. I’m hoping that they’ll bring in Apache helicopters and they’ll bring in a lot more. I—
NEGOTIATOR: Why? Why, why would you want to see more of that stuff?
STEVE: Well, because I believe in the Bible and it’s . . . a revelation, a fulfillment of the Book of Nahum.
On rare occasions, Steve could be as twitchy as David. He alternated between pleading patience—his usual stance toward the FBI—and a pressing, even wild, urgency. In the latter mood, he often encouraged the agents to attack the compound. Steve seemed tired of life. He wanted an answer, either way.
But Steve and David were double-minded, just like David Bunds had been years before. Despite asking for an FBI attack, when the Abrams tanks, the biggest and most powerful models in the American armory, finally arrived in Waco around March 9, the two freaked out. Steve called the negotiators “damn belligerent bullies . . . with a double tongue.” The FBI guys tried to calm him down.
NEGOTIATOR: Have David talk to me, and—
STEVE: Did you hear what, no, no, Dick, did you hear what I said to you?
NEGOTIATOR: Steve, what did, yesterday you said you weren’t going to yell—
STEVE: I’m going to put the phone down, we’ll pull the plug, you won’t talk to anybody.
It went on and on. By now, each side had now built up enough resentments to fuel long, punchy dialogues that doubled back and doubled back some more before petering out in bleak exhaustion. Steve and David joked that there was a factory somewhere in the country churning out FBI negotiators. They all sounded the same, they were all named John, they were all full of deceit. “Every one of them sounds like they came off the same cookie sheet,” David told one of the negotiators. “There’s not a genuine ounce of blood in these men.” It was like talking to an IBM computer.
Steve was exasperated by this, but for David it went deeper. He felt like he was back in Garland, Texas, dealing with Roy Haldeman.
What had begun as a bloody, badly planned raid had turned into a waiting game whose momentum was hard to gauge. The FBI brought in profilers and psychologists to try and analyze David. Two experts from the behavioral science division contributed one of the first evaluations.
The memo’s lead author was Peter A. Smerick, an FBI criminal profiler and forensic scientist. He concluded that, if the FBI assaulted the compound, there was a high probability David would kill himself: “When the Davidians sensed the FBI was closing in on the compound or performing some tactical maneuver, Koresh’s prophecy would be confirmed . . . Do the OPPOSITE of what he is expecting . . . consider moving back . . . Attacking the compound could result in a tremendous loss of life.”
The HRT did not move back. And in an administrative notebook kept by the HRT, agents mocked Smerick’s analysis. “Psychological profile of an [expletive] by jerks,” wrote one unidentified contributor.
Smerick felt pressure to alter his findings. He eventually wrote an “acquiescent” final report that deleted his recommendations to ease pressure on the Davidians. Instead, prompted by his FBI supervisor in Washington, he skewed more toward the tactical approach. On March 17, the profiler left Waco “in frustration.” He later said that the “traditional independent process of FBI criminal analysis . . . was compromised at Waco.”
Outside experts were brought in. They often disagreed on the way forward. Their reports saw David as too narcissistic to be a high suicide risk.
“We felt this was an individual who was extraordinarily vain and very fearful of physical injury,” said one consultant, Dr. Murray S. Miron, a psychology professor at Syracuse University. “It appeared all of his actions were defensively aggressive.”
This analysis got a boost from the negotiations. David did talk about the End Times and judgment and death, but at other times, he focused on what he was going to do when he got out of Mount Carmel. He wondered what the jail would be like, about food he would eat, and especially about spreading his message far and wide. A man who’s planning suicide, the experts reasoned, wouldn’t be thinking about book deals and even movie contracts. One bureau official told reporters that the time he felt the most hopeful during the entire siege was when David said he was going to sell his memoir to the highest bidder. He must be coming out, the official thought.
But no consensus emerged. If one analyst saw a sliver of light, the next one snuffed it out. The bureau turned to the highly experienced Dr. Park Dietz, who’d examined John Hinckley Jr. after his assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan and declared him sane enough to stand trial. He’d done the same for the Milwaukee serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. Dietz turned in a written evaluation: David would not leave Mount Carmel, he predicted, and would not permit anyone close to him, including the children he’d fathered, to leave, either.
Sometime around March 6, Gary Coker, the Waco lawyer who’d defended David and the Mighty Men in the 1988 trial, got a call from FBI Director Sessions. Coker had been a Sunday School student of Sessions’s back when the FBI director was living in Waco.
Sessions told the lawyer this was an unofficial call; he hadn’t told anyone at the agency about it. He was calling, he said, in search of “the key to Koresh.”
They talked about David. Coker told the director that Koresh wasn’t some religious ascetic; he was a man of the world who loved fast cars and high-end guitars. David had grown up in a broken home; he was a narcissist who needed “strong, strong control.” Coker was of the opinion that the FBI was coming on too hard. The Branch Davidians were regular folks who had some unusual views on religion, and the FBI was treating them like they were John Dillinger’s gang.
Near the end of the conversation, Coker said he was willing to talk to Koresh. He said, “Why don’t you come down here, and maybe we can get Judge Logue,” a local magistrate, “to come with us and we’ll walk in and talk to Vernon Howell.” Sessions said, let me see what I can do.
Five minutes after Coker had hung up with Sessions, the phone rang again. It was Bob Ricks, the FBI’s main spokesman at Waco. He and Coker had both gone to Baylor Law School years before, but this wasn’t a friendly call. Ricks was worked up.
“I’m a lawyer and you don’t have a right to go in there,” Ricks said, talking about Mount Carmel.
Coker started talking about the Davidians’ rights.
“They don’t have any rights!” Ricks half-shouted.
“They do have rights.”
“If you say that one more time, I’m going to hang up.”
“But Bob,” Coker replied, “you called me.”
Coker waited for Sessions to get back to him, but it never happened. The lawyer took it as a sign that the FBI director didn’t have the juice to get him into the compound.
That weekend, the original ATF raid was being hashed over in the media. The ATF director, Stephen Higgins, went on Meet the Press and claimed the Davidians hadn’t known the raid was coming. “This plan was based on the element of surprise,” he said. “We would not send our agents into a situation where we didn’t think we had the element of surprise.”
It was untrue.
Others in the ATF repeated the mistruth. Chuck Sarabyn, the ATF commander informed by Robert Rodriguez that Koresh knew they were coming, denied that the agent ever gave him that information. ATF administrators backed both of them. Rodriguez, who felt intense guilt for how the raid had turned out, believed he was being made the scapegoat. At work, he felt like he was being shunned. Everybody avoided him except his fellow agents.
ATF administrators ordered all agents not to speak to the press about the initial raid. Anyone who did would be fired from their jobs.
The main target in the week after the operation, however, was the press. The day after the raid, the KWTX reporter John McLemore had gotten a call at the station. It was Stephen Higgins, the head of the ATF. McLemore braced for a tirade; he thought Higgins was going to rip him for shooting footage of agents wounded during the operation. Instead, Higgins said, “John, I want to thank you for everything you did, for your bravery.” McLemore had helped get three wounded agents away from the compound and to a medical triage site. All three survived.
But the day after the phone call from Higgins, Kathy Fair, a journalist from the Houston Chronicle, went on Nightline, a popular late-night news show on ABC. People within the ATF were telling her that “reporters for, I believe, the TV station, allegedly were hiding in the trees when federal agents arrived.” Her ATF sources “have told me they think they were set up by at least one reporter” who had “tipped off the sect.” It was just as hollow as Higgins’s assertion—the cameraman Jim Peeler had unknowingly discussed the impending raid with one of the Branch Davidians the morning it launched, but no one had “tipped off” the followers. Still, the accusation stuck.
People began calling in to KWTX, wanting to know why McLemore had snitched to the Davidians. He noticed people in Waco were treating him differently. His wife, who worked as a receptionist at a local bank, was harassed by co-workers wanting to know if her husband had alerted the Davidians and got those feds killed.
42
The Trilateral Commission
EIGHT DAYS INTO the standoff, David was feeling irritable. He treated FBI negotiators to long, rambling monologues on theology, which they were thoroughly sick of by now. In certain moments, he sounded unstable, manic even.
