by Gary Noesner
In the bright glare of the mobile floodlights, correctional officers brought the food over on heavy aluminum carts. From our vantage point in the administration building, we watched through binoculars as the men came to the gate and immediately began to grab the food, even before the carts were rolled inside.
We waited about an hour, and then Pedro called again. Apparently the food had begun to work as we had hoped. There were sounds of celebration in the background, and the inmates who spoke sounded arrogant and cocky. “We want more and better food tomorrow,” they said. “You cocksuckers better deliver some real Cuban food this time.”
It appeared that the inmates had taken our bait and literally swallowed it, hook, line, and sinker.
HRT waited until well after midnight, then began to move their men into ready position. Pedro stayed by the phone, but I stepped outside to see two lines of big black SUVs slowly and deliberately roll across the campus toward Alpha Unit. The trucks stopped, and two agents in full armor ran ahead to the front gate, bent down for a moment, then ran back. At precisely 3:43 a.m., ten days after the siege had begun, a series of explosions blew open the front entrance of Alpha Unit and lit up the sky.
HRT and SWAT members piled out of the SUVs and stormed the building. They carried ladders, saws that could cut through steel, and additional explosives. Following the plan they had practiced, they fanned out through the building, quickly located the three separate rooms where hostages were being held, and secured their safety. Other teams of HRT and SWAT personnel then moved to their assigned sections and took control of all of the inmates. Despite the risks they faced, these tactical teams performed brilliantly and secured the prisoners and the prison without firing a single shot.
All the evidence suggested that our two-part plan had worked like a charm and that the rich feast, combined with a sense of victory, had lulled the inmates into a complacent slumber.
All hostages were freed unharmed, and the next day, thirty-one of the Talladega detainees were boarded onto an aircraft and flown back to Cuba.
This was a great moment for the FBI, compelling validation—as if more were needed—of the wisdom of the Bureau’s standard approach to crisis management, an approach that integrates negotiation and tactical operations as two parts of the same whole. From the beginning of the special operations units in the late seventies, authority for balancing the role to be played by each unit was in the hands of the on-scene commander, usually the Special Agent in Charge for that location. As I saw it, Talladega was a textbook case of how negotiation and tactical operations can work hand in glove to bring a dangerous situation to closure without bloodshed. Here negotiation had worked like an artillery barrage to soften up the opposition and gain critical intelligence information from a released hostage, enabling the tactical forces to move in with far greater chances of success. But as the after-action review took place I began to wonder whether the Bureau fully appreciated the negotiation team’s role in the successful rescue. Our negotiation staff at Quantico consisted of three people; HRT had sixty-five and had a budget and training time to match. Negotiation wasn’t even really thought of in the same light.
Unfortunately, it would soon become clear that in fact negotiators were considered by some as subservient to the tactical team. After Talladega, the balance would shift more toward tactics, giving those in charge of tactical assaults far more power and influence. The limited lesson that some officials took away from the Talladega success would have escalating and tragic consequences.
America in the early 1990s saw a series of antigovernment and cult-like groups, driven by extreme religious and political sentiments, retreating into psychological bunkers, as well as actual compounds where they chose to isolate themselves from mainstream society. These groups would provide one of the thorniest problems ever to confront the FBI. First, dealing with these groups would directly expose the unresolved tension within the Bureau that pitted negotiation advocates against those who favored hard-line tactics. Second, FBI missteps would quickly add fuel to the brushfire of separatist antigovernment movements.
The flash point for that brushfire was a confrontation involving a former army soldier and Iowa factory worker named Randy Weaver. He and his wife, Vicki, had sought to escape what they saw as a corrupt world by squatting on twenty acres of land in Idaho. Vicki, especially, was deeply religious. She saw the “end times” approaching, the apocalyptical battle described in the book of Revelation between God’s chosen few and the forces of evil. The Weavers hoped that they and their children could ride out the turmoil in their cabin on Ruby Ridge, near the town of Naples, in Boundary County, Idaho.
In 1984, a series of disputes over trespassing onto a neighbor’s property and frequent gunfire brought Randy Weaver to the attention of local authorities. In 1986, Weaver attended a meeting of the Aryan Nations, a right-wing separatist group, where he got to know a man serving as an informant for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF). In 1989, the informant claimed that Weaver sold him two sawed-off shotguns, weapons that federal law prohibits. In 1990, a grand jury indicted Weaver for making and distributing illegal weapons. Weaver was arrested and released on bail, but he failed to show up for his trial date. At that point, relations between Weaver and the government went from bad to worse.
To avoid further exposure to arrest, Weaver stayed holed up in his remote cabin on Ruby Ridge and he never left the property. On August 21, 1992, a surveillance team of six U.S. marshals carrying M16 rifles and wearing night vision goggles climbed up Ruby Ridge to scout out areas where they might arrest Weaver away from his cabin. Their movement and scent alerted Weaver’s dogs, which began to bark. Weaver, his fourteen-year-old son, Sammy, and Kevin Harris, a family friend, armed themselves, let the dogs go, and followed along to investigate.
How exactly it began is not entirely clear, but an exchange of fire broke out on Ruby Ridge, and within a brief while, Deputy Marshal William Degan lay dead, as did Sammy Weaver and one of the dogs. Randy Weaver and Harris retreated into the cabin, along with Weaver’s wife, Vicki, and the other Weaver children. The standoff that ensued would last for ten days.
I was in Bermuda with Carol at the time, celebrating our eighteenth wedding anniversary and attempting to get away from it all in a small guesthouse with no telephone or television. It was one of the few times in my career that I’ve been fully isolated. Nonetheless, I found a newspaper in a local store, and spread across the page above the fold was an article about the siege.
I used the phone at a nearby hotel and immediately called my boss, Charlie Prouty, back at Quantico. Charlie briefed me on what he knew and told me to continue with my vacation for now, but to be prepared to respond when I returned.
Already en route to Idaho was my partner, Fred Lanceley. With him on a military C-141 aircraft was Dick Rogers, who was in charge of HRT and had led the successful assault at Talladega. His HRT and my team were both at Quantico and we saw each other in the gym daily. He was cordial but a bit of a loner, and we hadn’t really gotten to know each other after Talladega. After joining the FBI, Rogers had been a field agent in Arizona, and he had also worked in the bomb tech section at FBI headquarters in Washington. True to his “Sergeant Severe” moniker, he epitomized the tough-guy school of law enforcement. As a grade 15 Assistant Special Agent in Charge (ASAC), the equivalent of a colonel in the army, Dick was one rank higher than either Fred or me. While FBI protocol was that the negotiation and tactical programs were to be given equal weight during any incident, the reality was the HRT had more than sixty-five agents, millions of dollars of equipment, and a more senior manager who, especially after the success at Talladega, had greater access to and influence with key FBI decision makers. The FBI’s historical desire to be tough on criminals naturally favored tactics over talk.
When they arrived in Idaho, Dick briefed his team on the current situation and issued the rules of engagement. It became clear to Fred that Dick had already decided that this was a tactical situatio
n only, and there would be no negotiation. Despite this, Fred said he would help develop information in the command post and be available if needed for negotiations.
Perhaps the death of a U.S. marshal had pushed Rogers immediately into action mode. But those of us who dealt with him could not escape the feeling that he also never appreciated the important supportive role negotiators had played in softening up the Talladega inmates, thus clearing the way for a successful assault. As would become obvious as events unfolded, Rogers had no interest in dealing with Randy Weaver through any means other than force. And in the absence of any other experienced, countervailing FBI command leadership on the ground in Idaho, Dick Rogers would literally call the shots.
Almost immediately upon arrival at Ruby Ridge on August 22, Rogers sent FBI HRT snipers and observers up the mountain to reconnoiter the Weaver cabin. He did so with rules of engagement that were substantially less restrictive than those customarily employed. The normal rules state that FBI agents may use their weapons only to protect their own lives or the lives of others, or if they feel they are in danger of serious bodily harm. But according to a Justice Department task force that subsequently investigated the incident, Dick Rogers’s rules “instructed the snipers that before a surrender announcement was made they could and should shoot all armed adult males appearing outside the cabin.” These rules not only contradicted long-standing FBI policy, they were later found to be unconstitutional.
This was a self-fulfilling approach, and it led quickly to disaster. Hearing the noise of an FBI helicopter, Weaver, his sixteen-year-old daughter, and his friend Kevin Harris stepped out of the cabin. They were unaware of the FBI’s presence. Without issuing a warning, an HRT sniper fired once, wounding Weaver. As the three retreated back toward the cabin door, the sniper fired again, thinking he had missed with his first shot. This second bullet went through a door, and hit Vicki Weaver in the head; it then passed through Harris’s chest. Harris would survive, but Vicki Weaver, who had been standing just inside the door, out of sight, holding her ten-month-old daughter, Elisheba, died on the spot.
With Weaver’s son Sammy and Vicki now dead, and Randy Weaver and Harris wounded, what remained of the Weaver family stayed in the cabin for another ten days. When FBI headquarters instructed that negotiation efforts commence, Fred went up the hill in an armored personnel carrier and used a bullhorn just outside of the cabin to try to communicate, but they now refused all of his efforts. Based on what had transpired, they could only assume that the government was intent on killing them; not too surprisingly, they were reluctant to talk.
Eventually, former Green Beret James “Bo” Gritz, a heavily decorated Vietnam vet who had made a second career as a survivalist, conspiracy theorist, and liaison to various right-wing groups, appeared on the scene, offering to serve as an intermediary in an effort to secure a peaceful surrender. He convinced the team that he had enough in common with Weaver that he would be able to talk him out. Fred coached Gritz on the approach he should take, which was to convince those inside that they would not be harmed if they came out peacefully. Over a period of several days, with Fred’s coaching, Gritz and Jack McLamb, another right-wing figure, helped convince Weaver and his family to come out by acting as their escorts down the mountain.
Harris surrendered first, followed the next day by Weaver and his three daughters. Despite all the violence in the first hours of this incident, once they established good communications, the situation was resolved without any further loss of life, a testament to the value of negotiations.
Weaver was charged in federal court with a variety of crimes, including murder, conspiracy, failure to appear, and making and possessing unregistered weapons. But given countervailing charges of government misconduct—primarily the use of excessive force—he was eventually acquitted on all counts except failure to appear. Ultimately, the federal government awarded Weaver $100,000 in damages and $1 million to each of his daughters.
Because of Hurricane Andrew striking Florida at the time, this infamous incident received only limited publicity at first, mostly in regional papers. However, news of the incident quickly spread to members of right-wing militias, becoming a rallying cry and recruiting tool for those opposed to government authority. It would be among the motivations for the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people.
Equally tragic, the FBI made no immediate attempt to learn from its mistakes. The same inclination to use force, or “action imperative,” would prevail with even more horrific consequences the next time the FBI was summoned to a major siege incident. This would occur only six months later with another group of people driven to extremes, gathered at a place with the inauspicious name of Ranch Apocalypse.
CHAPTER SEVEN
NEGOTIATING WITH THE SINFUL MESSIAH
There is nobody as enslaved as the fanatic, the person in whom one impulse, one value, has assumed ascendancy over all others.
—MILTON R. SAPIRSTEIN
On February 28, 1993, I was with my family, just leaving the parking lot of our local hardware store in Virginia, when my beeper sounded. I pulled in to a Burger King parking lot and called my boss, Rob Grace, at Quantico. An armed force of eighty ATF agents had just that morning converged on the isolated compound of a religious group living in Mount Carmel, Texas, near Waco. The plan had been to execute a search warrant on the compound and an arrest warrant on weapons charges against the group’s leader, Vernon Wayne Howell, also known as David Koresh. There were also past allegations of child abuse, so the plan included securing the group’s children, then conducting a thorough search. But apparently the action had been carried out more like an assault than an investigation. As the lead ATF agent approached the entrance to Koresh’s Ranch Apocalypse, all hell broke loose. Four ATF agents and several members of Koresh’s group were killed.
When I arrived at the small airport in northern Virginia, I saw two FBI planes, one large and one small. I stood on the tarmac and watched as Dick Rogers, along with other senior FBI and ATF officials, boarded the larger one, an executive jet. I boarded the much slower propeller plane to which I was assigned.
Virginia to Texas is a long flight for a piston-driven aircraft, especially one that needs to stop in Little Rock on the way to refuel. As I flew west, it occurred to me that the FBI’s travel priorities spoke volumes. The idea that the head of HRT needed to be rushed to the scene, while the head of the negotiation team could follow along later, was a clear indication of the mind-set after Talladega. The narrative that had emerged from that prison riot was that HRT had carried the day, to the exclusion of other components, and Dick Rogers’s stock had never been higher. The disaster that followed from his preemptive actions at Ruby Ridge had done nothing to tarnish that image within the FBI, at least not yet. If anything, critical accounts of what had happened there created something of a bunker mentality among certain elements at FBI headquarters. For my own part, I was surprised that Rogers still had his job in spite of having overseen the debacle at Ruby Ridge. Then again, meting out punishment to the HRT commander would have been an admission of the gross errors of judgment that had taken place in Idaho.
At 10:00 p.m. Central Time, our small plane came down on the runway of a former Air Force base a few miles outside Waco. This facility was now Texas State Technical College, and it would serve as our command post. I entered the hangar and made my way past a massive C-5 military aircraft there for repair, then up a set of concrete stairs along one side. As I reached the top, I observed a large office in which FBI technicians were setting up telephone lines and computers. I continued on toward a smaller office in the rear where I was told I would find Jeff Jamar, the Special Agent in Charge of the San Antonio FBI office. Jamar was the FBI on-scene commander.
As I entered the room I saw a big man with broad shoulders, around six feet four inches tall, who had the tense and focused look of a pro football player on game day. Jeff Jamar had a reputation as a no-nonsense leader, and his demeanor was so intimidating that,
as I would quickly learn, most of his subordinates tried to avoid him whenever possible. They also expended a great deal of energy speculating about, and trying to accommodate, his changing and often very angry moods.
I introduced myself, and he gave me a cordial but perfunctory summary of events so far. Dick Rogers and some of his tactical team had set up a forward command post just outside the Koresh compound, about eight miles away. He also confirmed that while ATF was still nominally in charge, the murder of federal agents was now a matter for the Bureau, not ATF. We were simply waiting for word from Washington that the attorney general had transferred authority to the FBI. The currently operating negotiation team was set up in an old military barracks building a short distance away, and Jamar deputized one of his assistants to show me the way.
As we walked across the base, the young agent briefed me on the overall mood of everyone involved. It was clear that the ATF personnel were in shock. He also shared some information about the group we were dealing with, who called themselves Branch Davidians.
In sum, David Koresh, born Vernon Wayne Howell, sounded like a charismatic con artist—perhaps more accurately described as an antisocial personality or sociopath. The Branch Davidians were a breakaway sect of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. He and more than a hundred followers had holed up at the ranch just outside town. Like Vicki Weaver, the Davidians believed in the book of Revelation’s prophecies that the forces of evil will be unleashed during the “end times,” and the righteous will have to do battle with them. In preparation, the Davidians had stockpiled automatic weapons and large amounts of ammunition, practiced defensive actions, grew their own food, and lived without modern amenities. Meanwhile, their unusual communal lifestyle also made them an object of curiosity and even suspicion among their neighbors. The Davidians were known to derive income from dealing in weapons. Koresh had a history of run-ins with the law, and there were persistent questions as to whether he was using his status as a religious leader to sexually exploit his followers, including young children. Koresh’s charisma allowed him to gain control over people desperately seeking religious enlightenment. Despite having a learning disability, he had memorized large passages of the Bible at a young age and could string together seemingly unrelated verses of scripture to prove any point he wished. He told his followers that he was both the son of God and a sinner—the sinful messiah. He alone was able to drink alcohol, have sex with most of the women, have air-conditioning in his room, watch television, and avoid doing any physical labor at the compound. In essence, he told his followers to do as he said rather than as he did.