Koresh, page 34
The same abstraction that Marc had seen happening to the Davidians under David’s leadership was now happening in the wider culture. The followers were becoming symbols of something or other. Extremism, God squadism run wild, gun worship.
It would be foolhardy to try and pinpoint a moment when Americans’ patience with the siege finally began to thin out. But by the second full week of the siege, many had traded fascination for annoyance. The Davidians had hijacked their TV screens and given them little in the way of action or excitement in return. The story was one in which nothing happened. It grated on the public’s tolerance.
44
Nebula
IN HIS DOWNTIME, one of the FBI negotiators was listening to the radio. The Rest of the Story, a popular show hosted by the broadcaster Paul Harvey, came on. Harvey was talking about a comet or a nebula, in the shape of a guitar, that was making its way through the solar system.
The negotiator mentioned it to the other guys. They thought, “Oh, my God, we’re negotiating with David Koresh, a rock star wannabe who sees visions. This is hot stuff.” They called Steve and he gave the news to David. He got back on the phone and the FBI guy told him this could be what David had been waiting for.
The FBI got a copy of the newspaper that covered the comet and read it to Steve over the phone.
NEGOTIATOR: You, you ready for this?
STEVE: Go ahead.
NEGOTIATOR: The Houston Chronicle, today, captioned, “This Is One Hot Guitar: Neutron Star Is Moving Darn Fast Through Our Galaxy.” They’ve got a whole article on it. . . . it’s three full columns. I can read you part of it—
STEVE: No kidding?
NEGOTIATOR: —if you’d like to hear it.
STEVE: Sure, sure. I’d love to.
NEGOTIATOR: It’s—it starts off, “Some very hot licks from the fastest star ever found has created a heavenly guitar-shaped glow, says astronomers.”
STEVE: Holy . . . Do me a favor.
NEGOTIATOR: Yeah.
STEVE: I would love to have [it]; if you can . . . tomorrow . . . can we work it out where you can get me a copy of it, seriously?
NEGOTIATOR: We’ll get it in to you tonight . . . And it’s talking how this thing is traveling at 1,800 kilometers a second and, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s a very interesting article.
STEVE: Wowie! . . . I think that would really lift David up, I would. I mean, I’d, I’d wake him up for that for sure.
The FBI did one better than sending the article in. They called up Paul Harvey’s people and asked him to repeat the segment on the guitar-shaped nebula, because no one in the compound had caught it the first time. In the meantime, Steve woke up David and one of the negotiators read the Chronicle story to him. He came to the phone to talk about it. David seemed unimpressed.
NEGOTIATOR: “It’s moving through our galaxy, the Milky Way, at a tremendous rate, perhaps 1,800 kilometers per second . . .”
DAVID: Moving pretty slow.
NEGOTIATOR: It’s fast by my standards.
DAVID: I know . . .
NEGOTIATOR: “In a million years it has moved from Serpens to Cepheus.”
DAVID: That’s incorrect.
NEGOTIATOR: Well, all I’m doing is quoting the—
DAVID: Yeah.
David didn’t think the nebula was a sign. The brief excitement faded.
The episode had the whiff of a flimflam. Maybe David really was a con artist like the tactical guys believed. A barracuda, soulless, prowling, looking only to stay alive another day or two. Another time, he told them: “If you can tell me what the Fifth Seal of the Seven Seals means, I’ll release a child.” The team grabbed the Gideon Bibles from their hotel end tables and searched the Scriptures. They called Baylor University and spoke to religious scholars. They found what was the accepted location of the Fifth Seal.
They told David. “Not even close,” he said, and refused to release the child.
A total of twenty-one children had come out of Mount Carmel. Dr. Bruce D. Perry, the chief of psychiatry at Texas Children’s Hospital, volunteered to work with them, along with a team of therapists. The FBI wanted the kids taken care of. But they were also hoping the children would give them some clues as to what was happening inside the compound.
The children were given physical exams. Their heart rates were high, around one hundred forty beats per minute, instead of the more normal seventy to ninety beats. It took weeks for the numbers to come down.
At the facility where they were being cared for, the kids were surprised and delighted by the toilets, which many of them had never seen before. Some flushed them again and again, watching the water swirl. Others would only drink tap water at first, the only thing they drank in the compound. They had their first taste of candy.
The therapists played board games and went on long walks with the boys and girls. And they spoke with them for hours. The therapists asked the children, whose ages ranged from four to eleven, about life inside the compound. They asked about what was going to happen at Mount Carmel, to their mommies and daddies.
The kids talked a lot about David, and how much they adored him. They drew pictures and decorated them with hearts. Some wrote “I Love David” at the bottom.
But as the therapists probed their experiences, they came to mistrust those statements. On March 11, Perry wrote a memo to the agency.
A permeating and pervasive fear of displeasing David or betraying his “secrets” is present in all of the children—even those as young as 4 years old. The children have a sense that he will be able to punish them if they violate his prohibitions. They even allude to the fact that he will be able to return from death and punish them or others who betray them.
The children saw the world in stark terms: “The outside was full of ‘bad guys,’ unbelievers without the ‘light,’ evil and hurtful people.” Their thoughts on the future were even darker. They had the sense “that there is going to be an absolute explosive end to [their] families.” Perry reported that when the children were asked to draw Mount Carmel, they produced sketches with the compound in flames, or bombs tearing through it. When the therapists asked them what the future held, they said things like “Everyone is going to die,” or “We’re going to blow you all up.”
The children asked to speak to their loved ones inside. When that happened, they would often ask their parents to leave Mount Carmel. Some of the kids would say, “Please come out,” or “Please come and get me!”
On March 12, Janet Reno was sworn in as the first female attorney general of the United States. Later, in the unremarkable brick courtyard of the Justice building, she gave a speech to a thousand of the men and women who would work under her, while others craned for a look from nearby windows.
“I’m the new kid on the block and I thought I should let you know my hopes and dreams and how I do things. While I’m Attorney General, we will address each issue with one question: ‘What’s the right thing to do?’ . . . Let us leave here today resolved to ask that of ourselves and others as we seek justice, remembering that sometimes doing the right thing is politically unpopular.”
The siege was now twelve days old. The previous morning, HRT requested permission from Washington to use tear gas as a pressuring tactic. They were told no. The next day, they cut the compound’s electricity permanently and shone spotlights on the front façade. The phone connection between the negotiators and the compound wasn’t affected.
David seethed for days about the cut-off. “We’re saying your commanders are a threat,” he told the FBI. “You have continued to digress on the things you promise. You keep yourselves in ignorance. You don’t understand.”
“I do understand,” the negotiator replied. “We’re running out of patience.”
Steve got on the phone and told the negotiator that twenty to thirty people had been ready to come out before the power was cut. Now they were staying.
Loudspeakers were trucked in and started broadcasting. The reason was that the phone line, which snaked across the ground from the FBI position into the compound, had gone on the fritz. One of the milk-carton bugs caught David responding to the move. “Someone stabbing me in the back,” he said. “Gonna go up and blow their heads off.”
The loudspeakers began playing music at volume, to increase the Davidians’ discomfort. The next day, the Davidians hung a sign from one of the windows. “FBI BROKE NEGOTIATION,” it read. “WE WANT PRESS.” The FBI continued to deny David access to the media.
The FBI suggested a face-to-face meeting and on March 15, Steve and Wayne Martin emerged from the compound’s front door. Byron Sage and Sheriff Harwell were waiting for them. They spoke for over an hour, with Sage and the sheriff making every effort to reach David’s lieutenants. They talked about getting medical care for the Davidians and about preserving the crime scene so that the truth would come out once the siege was over. And they assured Steve and Wayne that they’d be free to retain their own lawyers.
Wayne said he was concerned. He no longer knew what the United States stood for or whether or not the Constitution had been suspended in the middle of the night. Had dictatorship come into being while the Davidians slept?
Byron bristled. “There are two documents that I would give my life for,” he said. “One is the Constitution and one is the Bible, and I would give my life to defend both of them. That’s why I’m standing here in plain sight.” As he spoke, Byron looked Steve dead in the eye.
Steve seemed moved. He went back into the building and up to David’s room. One of the bug tapes picked up the conversation.
“Byron, I liked. Man, what a person. I liked his personality. I believe he was 100 percent sincere. I saw his concern in his face and eyes. I really, you know, I believe what he’s trying to do.” Steve was gushing.
That afternoon, David ordered his men to take hundreds of gallons of diesel fuel that were stored in tanks outside the building and switch them to five-gallon containers, which they then brought into the house. The men went out, under the gaze of the FBI snipers, and transferred the fuel using a long hose.
David grew more combative. One of the negotiators challenged his manhood, straight up. “If I were in your position, I would definitely want to get the women and children out. This is a man’s type of thing.”
“Oh really?” David snarled. “This is a thing of guns and bombs and blowing their asses up, boys . . . We just kill those fuckers the first time we went in there. Shit, let’s go ahead and just get the women and children out. We’ll put them all in jail and put the kids with foster parents and all that.”
The negotiator tried to interrupt, but David wouldn’t let him. “No, well, let me, let me, let me finish. Let me finish . . . Because the government is bigger than any power there is. And you’re going to spend your life in jail, or you’re going to get lethal injection . . . And John, I’m a man. And I’m a brave man. I’ve always been a brave man . . .”
The FBI was all punk talk to David. They walked into Mount Carmel and punched him in the nose. And now they wanted to talk peace?
By mid-March, the FBI was still unaware of the earlier grenade-and-guns suicide plan. But it hardly mattered, because David finally announced to his followers that it was canceled. He’d heard that some of the Davidians, in the days after the shootout, had gorged on junk food and cigarettes that they’d secretly hoarded before the ATF raid, celebrating their survival or trying to soothe their nerves. Some had even cracked open liquor bottles and had a drink.
“You’re all going to hell,” he told them.
Kat Schroeder was among the guilty. She’d smoked a cigarette. Kat was frustrated. She was constantly pressing David: “What is God going to do to keep my kids safe?” David would quote some Bible verses, but Kat was unappeased. “Well, maybe I ought to send you out with the beast, too,” he told her.
She didn’t argue. She wanted to be with her youngest son. David didn’t stand in her way. He was her messiah, but her lover, too. “He not only understood, he felt that,” she said.
On March 13, David decided that she and the others had shown a “reckless disregard for God’s laws [that] was going to cause the whole group to be held back.” Kat and the other transgressors were told to leave. She went that day.
On March 19, two more adults came out. It was the herky-jerky nature of the thing. Forward, back, stasis. Like previous followers who’d emerged from the compound, these new releases were arrested and placed in a local jail. The charges varied, but the Davidians were being held on suspicion of involvement in the deaths of the four ATF agents.
In the wake of these banishments, David’s anger continued to flare hot. “Don’t make me go out there and take one of those tank barrels and twist it around like a pretzel,” he told the negotiators, “and turn it around and scoot it off and put a wind-up toy in the back of it.” He also talked about the end of the world. It had already happened once, with Noah and the ark. The flood had ended the human world for a time. He thought that was awesome. “Of course, the prophets say that it’ll never be done with a flood again. It’ll be done with fire the last time.”
As the weeks passed, the negotiators struggled to come up with things to talk about with David. Sometimes the men just shot the shit. At one point, they got to comparing the local burger joints.
NEGOTIATOR: How do you like Whataburger? They do anything for you?
DAVID: Oh, man. Don’t even talk about—
NEGOTIATOR: Well, what can I tell you?
DAVID: —oversoaked cardboard meat.
NEGOTIATOR: What can I tell you?
DAVID: Man, you didn’t get them over there off of Bellmead, did you?
NEGOTIATOR: Where?
DAVID: That one off of Bellmead and 35?
NEGOTIATOR: I, I guess so.
DAVID: Nasty. Oh, that place is nasty.
Steve asked about prison. What could he wear there? “I guess they take your clothes from you or something like that and issue you something else?” Would he be allowed to bring his Bible and a concordance? The negotiators assured him he would.
It was encouraging. Better than when Steve went on about the Trilateral Commission.
On March 21, Steve shared big news. Seven people were coming out. There hadn’t been that large a number in days. Steve and David were feeling good about it.
The negotiators were thrilled. But hours went by with no release. They got antsy. Finally, Steve called.
NEGOTIATOR: They’re on their way?
STEVE: Guess what? Guess what, John?
NEGOTIATOR: What?
STEVE: They’ve decided not to come.
NEGOTIATOR: Don’t tell me that.
STEVE: Only kidding.
He was having a little fun.
The seven adults finally came out. Gary Noesner was delighted. It was a big step forward. In his theory of “trickle gush flow,” they’d reached the terminal stage.
Later that day, HRT agents took one of their tanks and drove it over a Davidian car, crushing it. It was another display of dominance. David’s response was ice-cold.
NEGOTIATOR: I talked to David, you know, and he said—
STEVE: He just told me now. Just right now. He said no one is coming out. Nobody.
Noesner was furious. What the fuck was this? What rival theory of negotiation had emerged from Rogers and Jamar’s room, that nuclear plant of testosterone?
The other negotiators were upset as well. “This is Dick Rogers’s doing” was the general theme. Rogers saw the Davidians coming out and thought, “These damn negotiators. Now they’re gonna win.” The Davidians would emerge in ones and twos and the FBI would be stuck in Waco for months. So he’d ordered the tanks in. To screw the negotiators. That’s how a lot of guys on Noesner’s team saw it, anyway.
Noesner resisted, at least at first. It was one thing for the Davidians to promote batshit conspiracy theories about the FBI, and another for agents themselves to do it. But try as he might, he couldn’t find another explanation for the tanks. Sending them in defied logic. Noesner could see no strategic reason for the move.
Noesner gave in. It had to be Rogers. He wanted control of the operation. It was as if the HRT’s real opponent wasn’t David Koresh. It was the negotiators.
Other things rankled, too. Why were the Brads always running over the phone line that connected the FBI to the Davidians? It would have been easy enough to avoid the area and keep the line pristine. But the Brads kept driving over the wire and the thing frayed and eventually broke. It had to be repaired, which took time and set back the talks.
And then there were the moonings. According to Steve and David, HRT guys were out there in the fields dropping trou and showing their backsides to the Davidians. Steve Schneider complained about it more than once.
If a negotiator had done that, Noesner would have yanked them out of Waco immediately. Brought them over to the Department of Justice and into their Office of Professional Responsibility. It was beyond the pale for an FBI agent to act that way.
But nothing happened. What was that about?
Noesner got a call from his boss at the FBI Academy in Quantico. “Hey, we’re going to sub you out,” he said.
Negotiators usually worked on a three-week rotation, in order to reduce the stress on them. Noesner had been on scene for longer than that. And he had a long-scheduled training mission in Amman, Jordan, that he was due to attend.
But Noesner believed the rotation was an excuse. He was being moved out so the bureau could bring in someone who was more in line with the tactical approach. Noesner went to Jamar and told him he was leaving. “I’m not asking you to leave,” Jamar said. “This is coming from headquarters, not me. I’m happy with you being here.” Noesner didn’t know what to think.
