by Gary Noesner
Perhaps more than a lack of communication and poor coordination, fundamentally different views of how to resolve the matter began to erode the trust between the HRT and negotiation teams. Dick Rogers called me personally from the forward area one evening, enraged that the Davidians were pointing one of their .50 caliber sniper rifles toward HRT personnel. He angrily told me to make contact and tell them in no uncertain terms that they should remove the weapon immediately or be fired on. I instructed the primary negotiator to do just that. He spoke with Schneider and the weapon was quickly pulled back.
Days later I would learn that HRT personnel were absolutely livid that the negotiators had told the Davidians to pull back the heavy weapon. They preferred knowing where it was so they could keep an eye on it. I asked Lloyd Sigler, the capable HRT representative now working in the NOC, to explain to the HRT team members that we had been ordered by Dick Rogers himself to have the weapon removed. Lloyd passed on the information, but it never seemed to filter down to the team members. At no time did Dick Rogers ever explain to his own team, during or after the incident, that it was he who had ordered the weapon removed. Instead, HRT team members were left with the impression that we had undercut them.
Despite these problems, Jamar continued to approve my suggested initiatives to get things back on track with the Davidians. The next day, we offered to send in a suture kit to treat Koresh. To personalize ourselves as human beings, rather than as some faceless enemy, we included a brief videotape showing each of the primary negotiators who had spoken with him so far. Each one of us held up a photograph of our own family and stated how important we knew Koresh’s large family to be to him. We each signed off by stating our strong desire to see everyone come out unharmed. This was unprecedented.
By Sunday, March 7, day eight, we found the negotiations with Koresh becoming increasingly challenging. His resistance to our efforts clearly increased; he began to subject the negotiators on the night shift to long religious diatribes, which only among ourselves we would call his “Bible babble.” Our conversations to date had been pretty practical and secular in nature, but now his religious worldview came to dominate his side of the conversations.
We tried to discourage these long telephone conversations when we realized that they kept Koresh up all night, which meant that he would sleep much of the following day. When he was asleep, no one else inside the compound could authorize the release of any more children. We also knew that no children had been released while we had been talking about religion.
We would notice that while Koresh spoke in lofty terms of his religious philosophy, he occasionally digressed into decidedly less spiritual realms. One evening in the midst of one of these religious diatribes Koresh stopped and asked one of the negotiators what the team was eating for dinner. He was told by negotiator John Cox that they usually sent someone out to Whataburger, a nearby fast-food chain and the only place open late at night. In response, Koresh said, “Whataburger! That meat is terrible. If it turns out that I am the son of God, the world will find out about Whataburger.” This did not sound to us like the comment of a man who truly believed in his own divine status.
Just after lunch on March 7, Koresh told us that he would send out another child if we could accurately tell him the meaning of the third seal in the book of Revelation. Aware of the limits of our own biblical knowledge, we again consulted religious scholars at Baylor University. Armed with what they told us about the most common interpretation of the third seal, we reported back. Koresh listened, then told us that we were not even close, but said nothing more. He made no effort to tell us how we were wrong, and he refused to release anyone. It’s unlikely he would have agreed with any answer we came up with.
Koresh was regaining his strength and returning to his normal pattern of manipulating those around him, including us. While it might have been tempting to be confrontational with him, we continued to try to push toward our goal of getting people out. My task was not to settle scores with a sociopath but to save all the lives I could.
Soon after this we were presented with an unexpected opportunity. One of our negotiators heard a story on the then-popular Paul Harvey radio show about a fast-moving, guitar-shaped nebula blasting across the skies at thousands of miles per hour. Koresh was a guitar player and led a band made up of his followers, so we thought we could present it as a sign that it was time to come out.
The negotiator on duty called up Schneider and asked if he had heard about the comment on the radio. Schneider said that he had not, but he became very excited, speculating that this could be the sign that Koresh was waiting for, a message from God that they should come out. We contacted Paul Harvey’s staff and requested that his show rebroadcast the report. After the rebroadcast we called back and asked Schneider if Koresh had heard it. Schneider sounded disappointed. They had listened, but Koresh’s only response was to say, “That’s not very fast.” That was the end of that.
I was beginning to feel increasing pressure to show results if we were going to delay more aggressive tactical action. When Koresh indicated that the children inside the compound needed milk, we decided to call on McLennan County sheriff Jack Harwell to help work out a deal to get that milk to them. Harwell was not only a down-to-earth and straightforward law enforcement professional but an affable and easygoing man. He seemed to know how to talk to and get along with almost anyone. We felt that he might be able to serve as an intermediary and help overcome Koresh’s resistance to our entreaties. Since the incident began, Jack had spent a great deal of time sitting in the negotiation room wearing his white cowboy hat, patiently listening to our conversations with Koresh.
In the fall of 1992, when accusations of child abuse had first been leveled at Koresh, it was Jack who met with him to discuss the issue. The gentle sheriff, who didn’t even wear a gun, had been polite and respectful, and they seemed to have gotten along well. At one point Koresh had even said that he might well have surrendered had Harwell come to arrest him rather than the heavily armed men from the ATF.
A little after one on Monday afternoon, March 8—the ninth day of the siege—Jack called the compound, and the rest of us listened on headsets. Jack was magnificent. With just the right tone he was able to project his genuine concern. Koresh greeted him warmly; he obviously had great respect for the sheriff. Jack soon asked Koresh what he could do for the children, and, as expected, Koresh mentioned the need for milk. Jack told him he would make it happen. Even though we had been prepared to send in milk all along, having it appear to come from Jack would, we hoped, reestablish his bona fides with Koresh. It would also show he could get things done with the FBI. At 3:50 that afternoon, we left six gallons of milk just outside the compound.
A couple of hours later we were surprised to receive a videotape of Koresh, his wife, Rachel, and their children, and also some of the other children Koresh had fathered. We popped it into our VCR and observed him on the tape commenting about the tape we had sent, the one in which we talked about our kids. I had the sense that he appreciated what we had done and that this was his way of reciprocating. He even introduced us to several of his family members on tape. He also took the opportunity to show us his wounds. During the initial shootout a bullet had grazed his wrist just above his left thumb. He showed us where that same bullet had continued on and struck his left side, leaving a clearly visible bullet hole. He told us that the sutures we had sent in earlier had helped, and he thanked us for them. Using a faux John Wayne voice, he joked that the pain was nothing a tough guy like him couldn’t handle. Koresh was idiosyncratic and unpredictable, but we seemed to have reestablished a kind of rapport. We looked on that tape as a very positive sign, and I conveyed this to Jamar.
But again, a moment of progress would be thwarted by the actions of our colleagues. At two-thirty the following morning, unbeknownst to me, Jamar approved a recommendation from someone to turn off all the power going into the compound. Coming as it did on the heels of the successful conversation between
Koresh and Jack Harwell, the milk delivery, and the Koresh video, the timing could not have been worse. My team rightly felt that the rug had been pulled out from under us yet again. And so in addition to trying to convince Jamar to coordinate better, I also had to manage their growing frustrations. Even Steve Schneider questioned how he was expected to keep the just-delivered milk cold if the power was off. He had an excellent point.
Turning off a hostage taker’s power during a siege can be a useful tool. Lack of electricity makes those inside less comfortable, which can sometimes make them more willing to compromise. But turning off power should never be done without weighing the pros and cons. This technique is also much less effective in a situation such as Waco, when all the subject wants is for us to go away. Moreover, the Davidians already lived a very spartan lifestyle; Koresh’s quarters were the only part of the compound that had electricity anyway.
While I didn’t know for certain, I suspected that Jamar’s actions came as a result of pressure from Rogers. I imagined Dick asking how in the hell we could send milk to these guys without getting people out, particularly after Koresh had jerked us around.
I went to Jamar and expressed my grave concern that we were working at cross-purposes and that turning off the power was going to negate the progress we’d just made. He listened to my views but said that he saw no inconsistency between what we were saying and doing.
I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how he couldn’t see the inconsistency there, but I knew he wouldn’t change his mind. To be fair, Jamar was under a great deal of pressure by this point, with a long and expensive siege going on, and he had the impression that Koresh was manipulating the FBI and that we needed to be more confrontational. But the result of this was that he was choosing to support both my recommendations and those of Dick Rogers, which would continue to put us at cross-purposes. I renewed my efforts to convince him that the more we tried to bully Koresh, the more he’d dig his heels in.
Seven hours after the power had been turned off, I was able to convince Jamar to turn it back on, just in time for the Davidians to watch the regularly scheduled 10:30 a.m. press conference with SAC Bob Ricks from the Oklahoma City FBI office. Of all the various FBI commanders who came to Waco, Bob took the most time to visit with the negotiation team and listen to the conversations we conducted with those inside the compound. He supported our efforts. We gave him talking points for these encounters with the media, and he was very good about getting them across in a natural way. Mostly, the idea was to take the main themes we had discussed with Koresh and Schneider on the phone, and to use television and radio broadcasts to drive these home to all the Davidians in the compound.
Throughout these days, we kept pushing for the release of more kids. Of the twenty-one released so far, the last had come out on March 5. On March 7, after we continued to press for more releases, Koresh had finally snapped at us, saying, “Hey! You don’t understand. The rest of the kids in here are my children—they’re not coming out!” We found this angry declaration worrisome, to say the least; we knew we had a major problem on our hands. The innocent children were always our primary concern; their parents had made their own choice to follow Koresh.
I now put in motion an idea that we had gotten from the Koresh videotape. I sent a team of negotiators to the Child Protective Services home where all of the released Davidian children were being kept. We had worked with Texas authorities to ensure that the children would be kept there in Waco awaiting their parents’ surrender. We made clear to the parents that, contrary to their instructions, their children were not being sent off to live with relatives. Instead, they were waiting here for the parents to come out. I hoped that this fact would weigh on their minds and lead them to conclude that they had to go on living for their children rather than throw their lives away defending Koresh. We made a short videotape of all of the Davidian children in the home where they were being kept. We showed them playing, relaxing, and clearly being well cared for. We made arrangements to have the tape and still photos of the kids delivered on March 9 at 2:04 p.m.
One detail we had not noticed was a young boy named Bryan Schroeder sitting on the floor looking forlorn. His mother, Kathy Schroeder, was one of the most strident and angry women in the compound. She and her second husband, Michael, had lived there with three of their children: two boys from Kathy’s prior marriage and their son Bryan. Michael was killed on the day of the initial shootout with the ATF, and Kathy was understandably bitter. All three children had left the compound, and Kathy’s first husband, who had joint custody, came immediately to Waco to claim the two older boys. With the two older half brothers removed, this left young Bryan alone in the home with the other Davidian children. As the parents inside the compound watched the video, Kathy noticed that Bryan looked sad and lonely, and she became concerned.
At 10:25 on the evening of March 9, Koresh sent out another tape in response to ours. This tape showed additional Davidian families who were living in the compound, further helping us to identify individuals and better understand the relationships at work. This seemed to be the kind of positive exchange we were trying to promote.
The next evening, the power was shut off again, then turned back on in time for the next nightly press conference. In my view, turning the power off and on only served to demonstrate that we were trying to aggravate those inside, which is not helpful. Despite these less than ideal conditions, in an attempt to build on our earlier efforts the negotiation team filmed a second video of the Davidian children and sent that in as well on March 11, just after 1:00 p.m.
While we were attempting to build on the rapport we had established, the forward command continued on its separate and contradictory course. They requested additional Bradleys and some M1 Abrams tanks, the biggest and most imposing in the U.S. arsenal. These vehicles arrived at 9:30 that evening, after which Jamar made a rare visit to the negotiation room. Standing in front of a schematic of the interior of the compound, he enthusiastically cited statistics on the powerful armament: weapons capability, fuel capacity, engine power, weight, and size. Then, placing his finger on the map of the compound, he pointed out how an M1 was powerful enough to drive from one end of the long compound all the way through and out the other side without stopping. He seemed excited by the possibility.
The negotiators in the room were speechless. Surely he wasn’t serious. Had he forgotten about the women and children inside? Having dealt with SAC Jamar repeatedly, I was somewhat accustomed to this type of bravado, but I could see the shock on the faces of the other negotiators. Jamar soon left the room, leaving a stunned group shaking our heads. For the first time, they understood what I had been dealing with.
Earlier on Thursday, March 11, Kathy Schroeder had called the negotiation team to complain about her son Bryan being left in the Child Protective Services home without his older half brothers. She said that she could see on the videotape we had sent in earlier that the boy was clearly upset. John Dolan, now the primary negotiator, patiently explained the legal issues that had forced us to turn over the two older boys to Kathy’s ex-husband. Still, Kathy continued to rail at us.
As John listened to her, I wrote a note on a three-by-five index card and passed it to him. The note said: Bryan needs a hug from his mommy. John looked up at me, a big smile on his face, and nodded.
Kathy continued to vent her anger. Then John quietly and gently said, “You know, Kathy, I think what Bryan really needs now is a hug from his mommy.” Kathy’s silence spoke volumes. John waited, then built on the emotion he knew she was feeling. He talked about how the young boy needed her and how she was the only one in the world who could take care of him. By the time their conversation ended, he had convinced her to come out and give Bryan that hug. Without hesitation or equivocation, Kathy told us she would exit the next day. Koresh had repeatedly said anyone was free to come out at any time, but we were not convinced that he was not pressuring the adults to do otherwise. After the call, John gave me a high five
and said, “You give good note.”
At 10:41 the following morning, Friday, March 12, the thirteenth day of the standoff, Kathy Schroeder came out of the compound and surrendered to us. We immediately took her to a building nearby where her son Bryan was waiting for her. Once again, we had our video camera on hand to capture this emotional reunion of mother and son, hugging each other and crying for joy. The smile on little Bryan’s face when he saw his mother brought tears to all our eyes.
We then arranged for a second delivery of milk to be sent in around three that afternoon. Two hours later, we put Kathy Schroeder on the telephone to speak with Steve Schneider. By this time she had visited not only with Bryan but also with all of the other children being taken care of at the Child Protective Services home. Kathy sang the praises of those caring for the children, providing reassurance to all the parents inside that their kids were well. She also spoke of the gentle treatment she had received at our hands. Steve Schneider seemed stunned, which was just the kind of reaction we were after. By being restrained and professional, we hoped to win them over, one by one.
At 6:00 p.m., a nineteen-year-old named Oliver Gyafras decided that he, too, wanted to come out. Both he and Kathy had each been forced to sit through a lengthy “exit interview” with Koresh before they could leave. During his talk with each of them, Koresh never told them they could not leave, but he reminded them that they were surrendering to the forces of evil that had attacked the compound and persecuted them for their religious beliefs. Fortunately, their desire to come out and live was stronger than any loyalty they felt for Koresh.
We had now brought out two non-elderly adults, both previously devoted Davidians. We believed that, after a certain number of such defections, even Koresh might come around, if only to salvage what he could of his leadership status. He seemed more committed to his followers’ adulation than to any particular principle. I tried to explain to Jamar and the other commanders the nature of our “trickle, flow, and gush” strategy. I told them we were aiming not at a grand resolution strategy that would bring everyone out at once, but rather at a steadily increasing attrition of individuals leaving the compound. Our hope was that each subsequent release would weaken that much more the stranglehold Koresh held over the larger group.