Koresh, page 40
The FLIR evidence was studied by a number of experts in the field. It turned out that FLIR analysis was very much an art, and different technicians saw different things in the tapes. The Washington Post showed them to fourteen different experts. Seven said they showed gunfire; seven said they showed solar reflections.
Revelations about pyrotechnic rounds and the emergence of the FLIR tape gave fresh oxygen to conspiracy theories that continued to flourish around the Waco siege. Polls showed confidence in the government’s story was weakening. Janet Reno ordered the 1999 Danforth investigation to get to the bottom of the new allegations. Danforth commissioned a study of the FLIR footage from Dr. Dan Frankel of Photon Research Associates. He submitted a thirty-four-page report on September 11, 2000, making three main points:
First, the flashes were not caused by weapons discharging. “Their duration is far too long and their spatial extent is far too great.” Frankel concluded the glints were most likely caused by the sun’s reflections or heat energy from FBI vehicles reflecting off debris or pools of water on the ground.
Second, the FLIR video technology wasn’t designed to pick up muzzle flashes from small arms fire. The FLIR camera scanned any given point in the field of view once every 16.67 seconds, which meant that shorter duration events, like gunfire, might not be picked up by the device at all.
Third, there was strong evidence that the Davidians were firing at the federal agents during the insertion of the tear gas, “but none of their muzzle flashes are detectable on the videotape.” This made it clear that the FLIR was not recording gunshots. “The absence of muzzle flash detection on the FLIR tape does not prove that weapons were not actually fired during the final assault,” but the flashes found on the tape were not evidence that they were.
The finding was buttressed by the coroner, who found no evidence that bullets fired by the FBI or anyone outside the compound had wounded or killed any of the group members. (He also found that none of the Davidians had died as a result of the tear gas.)
Another charge leveled against the government concerned the original February 28 raid by the ATF. Many people—including some inside the ATF and FBI—believed that the raid was intended to gain a high-profile win for the bureau. In early 1993, before the raid, the ATF had suffered a spate of negative press. Former agents were suing the bureau for racial discrimination and sexual harassment. 60 Minutes had aired a highly critical segment on the bureau, citing those lawsuits. And the ATF was scheduled for congressional budget hearings on March 10, only a week and a half after the Mount Carmel operation.
Mike Wallace, the 60 Minutes correspondent, interviewed numerous ATF members after the raid and reported that “almost all the agents we talked to said they believe the initial attack on that cult in Waco was a publicity stunt—the main goal of which was to improve A.T.F.’s tarnished image.” Chuck Hustmyre agreed. “Yeah, I mean, that was my impression,” he said. “When Waco happened, there’s no way that these guys weren’t primarily looking at, ‘Hey, man, we’re going to get a news coverage. It’s going to be a big operation, it’s going to be a successful operation and, God, our budget’s going to skyrocket next year.’ That had to be what they were thinking about.
“But it’s not like it’s unique to ATF. Every agency is trying to make themselves look good. All the guys at headquarters level or even SAC level, all they ever worry about is the budget.”
No evidence of the budget theory has emerged: no memos, no testimony by ATF administrators, no internal reports.
For their part, Bill Buford and the other planners of the mission vehemently deny they were ever pressured to stage a raid because of the congressional hearings or other concerns. The idea that they would send agents to face a .50 caliber sniper rifle in order to acquire more funds remains, to them, grotesque.
Three decades after the raid and the siege, many still question who was ultimately responsible for Waco. The standoff fueled the rise of a new generation of right-wing patriot groups and militias, who believed that the ATF, the FBI, and the US government had revealed their true nature during the crisis. At the congressional hearings on the tragedy, one of the spectators held up a sign: “ATF KILLS FAMILIES.” For those who believe the Davidians were targeted and murdered by the government, the events of April 19 were the clearest example of the tyranny that Americans now lived under.
“Waco can happen at any given time,” Mike Vanderboegh, a leader in the Patriot movement, which had emerged a decade before and brought together American populists, nationalists, far-right militia members, and tax resisters. “But the outcome will be different this time. Of that I can assure you.”
In the years after Waco, Timothy McVeigh wrote the ATF two letters. “All you tyrannical mother fuckers,” he said in one, “will swing in the wind one day.” McVeigh was dreaming of action by then. He and his friend Terry Nichols went to work building a five-thousand-pound bomb out of ammonium nitrate and nitromethane. When it was finished, they installed the bomb in the back of a Ryder rental truck and parked it in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, chosen because it hosted offices of the DEA, the Secret Service, and the ATF. McVeigh wanted to kill federal employees, who he believed to be fascist thugs in service of a tyrannical cabal. He also wanted to create a tableau equivalent to the ruins of Mount Carmel: a federal building in the middle of the American heartland smoking and in ruins. A photo negative of Waco.
On the morning of April 19, 1995, the second anniversary of the Waco inferno, McVeigh detonated the device, killing 168 people, including 19 children. Two dead for every Davidian.
With the mass murder at Oklahoma City, the chain that had started at Ruby Ridge (three dead) and had continued through Waco (ninety-two dead in total) reached a new casualty level. McVeigh became one of the first archetypes of the far-right domestic terrorist, the clear-eyed white loner who becomes a patriot and then a murderer, out of necessity, if you ask them.
It’s intriguing to think of what David would have thought of McVeigh and the long line of political killers that followed him. David had embraced the “live free or die” credo late in life, but it was always part and parcel of his religious visions. Steve Schneider was much more the resident conspiracy theorist at Mount Carmel, the “Don’t Tread on Me” guy.
McVeigh and the others stripped David of his original meaning. In their view, he was a free man who’d been burned alive by fascists, a somewhat different slant than David would have chosen. The fact that the Davidians had never really been able to speak to the press after the first day of the siege meant that their inner lives were a mystery. They could be written over—and they have been, many times.
Before he was executed in 2001, McVeigh spoke about the tragedy: “Waco started this war. Hopefully, Oklahoma would end it.” But it didn’t end it. The far-right imagination is inspired by resentment, and it needs to be constantly refreshed with proof of the crimes against it. Waco in flames remains the glimpse behind the curtain, hidden truth made visible. It still inspires.
The journalist Mark Potok, who’d spent the entire siege covering the siege for USA Today, went to see Waco: The Rules of Engagement at the Capri Theater in Montgomery, Alabama. It was one of two influential documentaries that came out in the years after the conflagration. The film was getting great reviews. Outlets like NPR had praised it.
The Capri was the only arts cinema in Montgomery, a home for indie and foreign films and a kind of oasis for hipsters and lefty types in conservative Montgomery. There were about fifty people in the audience. Potok knew many of them. Most, like him, were old-school liberals.
Potok had spent a lot of time researching Waco, reading the negotiation transcripts and studying the after-action reviews. He’d covered the trials of the Davidians after the fire. The conspiracy theories that had taken root troubled him.
When the movie started, Potok’s spirits sank. The film accused the government of murdering the Davidians, and the FBI of firing into the compound during the inferno, things he knew were untrue. As he listened to the other viewers around him, he realized that many of them accepted the film’s version of events. “Oh my God, oh my God,” someone gasped, “the government murdered them!”
Potok felt he was watching a myth being cemented into place.
FBI agents who were at Waco struggled with this growing misperception of the feds’ responsibility. One agent’s father asked him if the bureau had set the fire, killed those kids. His father had always been a true-blue supporter of the FBI.
Byron Sage received a letter: “I hope you get everything that’s coming to you. You know what the penalty is for first degree murder. Signed, A Patriot.” One of the penalties for murder in Texas was death. Byron considered it a threat.
Others would be at parties and hear the most outlandish theories, tossed off as if they were banal truth. The White House aide Vince Foster, who participated in discussions about the FBI’s tear gas plan, was killed because of what he knew about Waco. Koresh was running a CIA safe house. Clinton had ordered the raid to get rid of ATF agents who were privy to his personal secrets. But the main line of argument was this: The federal government didn’t like people with strange ideologies and a fondness for guns, so they’d exterminated them.
It was often housewives, lawyers, chamber of commerce types saying these things. Ordinary Americans, not fringe groups. The controversy had slipped into the American mainstream.
Jim McGee, the HRT member who’d saved Ruth Riddle from the fire, later estimated that the Davidian children were sixty feet from where he was that day. He wondered if they were still alive while he shouted at Ruth Riddle. He wondered if he might have saved them.
McGee eventually got divorced, with stressors following Waco a contributing factor. He left the FBI and became a professor of criminal justice at William Carey University in Mississippi. There he found that his students, most of whom hadn’t been born when Waco happened, believed all kinds of things about it: The FBI had used flamethrowers. The FBI had intentionally killed babies.
McGee had a sequence of photos from the scene blown up, eight or ten of them. They showed him coming out of the Brad and running toward Ruth Riddle, then dragging her out of the building. He asked the students: “So, do you really think that I would be doing that if we were on the other side of the compound shooting flamethrowers into the compound? You think that as the Davidians came out we were grabbing them and dragging them back in?”
50
Specters
SANDY MOVED AGAIN and kept moving. It was like she was still running from David, even though he was dead.
After the fire, some people Sandy had known for forever started looking at her differently. It was like she was a witch who held the power of life and death over certain people. As they saw it, she’d jilted this cult guy and caused him to go off the deep end. What kind of magic did she possess? There were a few letters, even death threats.
Sometimes she wondered if they were right. Had she been the trigger that set off the disaster? Maybe if she’d let David put her in that car trunk, and married him, barefoot and pregnant, there would have been no Waco.
Or maybe you would have burned up along with everyone else, she said to herself.
Bonnie returned to her job. Every so often, she would receive letters from supporters of the Branch Davidians. Other notes arrived, too, condemning her for raising David. Once, someone sent her a Mother’s Day card. It was signed, “Your Boy.” She cried when she opened the envelope.
The curse of the family’s mental illness returned. In 2009, Bonnie was taking care of her younger sister, Beverly, who was found to be schizophrenic decades before. One morning, Bonnie arrived at Beverly’s house to take her to the doctor. Inside the home, Beverly stabbed her to death.
Kat Schroeder was charged with first-degree murder in the deaths of the four ATF agents. She testified against her fellow Davidians at trial, then accepted a plea bargain on the reduced charge of resisting arrest. She was sentenced to three years in prison. She was the only Davidian to plead out.
Her youngest son, Bryan, would tell those who asked where she was: “You know the war that killed my father? She’s in jail because of the war.”
The Waco Tribune-Herald’s “Sinful Messiah” series was named as a finalist for the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for investigative journalism. But members of the Waco media were often blamed, erroneously, for what happened. The Trib reporter Mark England left journalism in 2000 and rarely spoke about Waco afterward. One of his former editors talked to him one time about the events at Mount Carmel. “We’d started out to change the Davidians,” England said, “but in the end we changed ourselves.”
“I think he felt the blackness of it more than the rest of us,” the editor said.
The KWTX cameraman Dan Mulloney was officially cleared by congressional investigations. But the fog of suspicion initiated by the ATF’s cover-up was never dispelled. One law enforcement official compared it to a cancer that ate at Mulloney from inside. Mulloney spiraled, drinking on the way down. He eventually took a job at a Waco bar, Charlie’s Corner, the only thing he could find. In 2001, he passed away from alcohol-related causes.
Jim Peeler, who had inadvertently alerted one of the Davidians to the impending ATF raid, continued working at KWTX but he felt his life had ended on February 28. “Have you ever seen the movie The Sixth Sense, where a man was completely dead but really didn’t know that he’s dead?” he told a journalist who looked him up years later. “Well, that’s me, ya know. My body, physically, doesn’t know that it’s dead, but my heart, my heart really knows that it’s over with.”
George Roden escaped the Big Spring psychiatric hospital in 1993. Not long after, his lawyer received a call. It was George, asking for money for a plane ticket to Israel. He wanted to celebrate Yom Kippur there. He was captured soon after.
George filed several suits against the state of Texas demanding, among other things, that residents of the psychiatric facility be taught martial arts, “because as patients and convicts we are denied the use of guns to protect ourselves . . . when we are released into the free world society.” He asked for $200 million in damages. The suit was dismissed.
Two years later, George went missing again. He traveled all the way to New York City, where he was recaptured outside the Israeli Consulate, where he’d gone to request a visa for travel to the country. Roden told consulate officials that he was Jewish and that assassins from the Palestine Liberation Organization were attempting to kill him.
In 1998, he escaped a third time, but was found on the grounds of the hospital. He had died of a heart attack.
The ATF agents who’d taken part in the February 28 raid suffered largely in silence. “We’d lost so much,” one agent wounded in the raid told a journalist. “I live in constant pain. I lost a big chunk of my leg. I had friends who were killed.”
The subject became taboo at the bureau. The byword was: “Don’t talk about Waco.”
Bill Buford, the agent who helped plan the raid, suffered from panic attacks for years afterward. He would have vivid dreams, too, in which he was back in that room in Waco, feeling himself getting shot. In this dream, the Davidian he fired at—the one who was waiting in ambush in the hallway—came back into the room and took aim at Buford.
The dreams were just dreams. Other things, he couldn’t shake off. When he’d returned from Vietnam, Buford had been called a baby killer. After Waco, he was called it again.
Later, long after the raid, Buford was talking with some of the guys from the Houston office. They talked about going into Chuck Sarabyn’s office after the February 28 operation and finding rolls of film that had been shot by the surveillance team at Waco. They had never been developed or been sent to Buford. In every operation he’d been on that required surveillance, film like that would have been processed and the photos sent to the planners. This time, nothing.
Then there was the pit. The guys told him that, out of the thirty-plus days they’d surveilled the compound, the Davidians were working in the pit maybe fourteen of them. “Our whole plan would have been different had we known that,” Buford thought.
Why didn’t he see the photographs? Why wasn’t he told that the Davidians didn’t go to the pit every day? He could never understand it.
After leaving the Branch Davidians, which he’d been part of since he was five years old, David Bunds became a regular Sunday-keeping evangelical in Glendale, California. One day he was at a retreat in the San Bernardino Mountains. It was a bunch of Christians getting together to do Christian things and talk about God and Jesus and have meetings and hang out and fellowship together.
David looked around at the others on the retreat. He noticed how average everybody was. Christians were always going on about Jesus or the spirit and “We’ve got this belief and we’ve got that belief and it’s just so amazing.” But to David, he couldn’t get over how ordinary everyone looked. “It’s just people,” he said to himself. Ordinary people and all their ordinary daily things.
It was just so mundane. David was like, “Where’s, where’s it gone? Where’s all this crap that we’re talking about all the time?” A question occurred to him. He said, “What would it be like if Christianity really was just man-made? If it wasn’t handed down from God. What if it was just a thing that people do?”
If Christians got together, what would it be like if God wasn’t real? And he thought to himself, well, it would be just like this.
It was like an epiphany. Right then, Christianity just fell apart for him. A couple of months later he’d stopped going to church and become your average, secular American. He didn’t believe in anything.
Years after the fire, Marc Breault returned to Mount Carmel with his wife, Elizabeth Baranyai Breault. As they approached the compound, they listened to one of David’s Bible studies on the car’s tape player. David’s voice rose and fell, at times quiet and soothing, other times rasping with menace.
