by Gary Noesner
Just before 6:00 a.m. on April 19 the Davidians awoke to winds gusting at sixty miles per hour and a calm message from Byron Sage on the telephone.
He told Schneider that they were about to be subjected to nonlethal tear gas. It wasn’t an assault, Sage told him, but everyone was being ordered to exit the compound immediately.
A minute later the Davidians threw the field telephone we had installed for them out the front door. There seemed to be no further need to talk. Sage then began to broadcast his appeals for surrender over the speaker system.
I was now back from Jordan and at FBI headquarters watching as the armored CEVs began pumping in the gas. Shortly after, those on the perimeter began to hear the ping of ricocheting bullets around them. The Davidians had begun to fire at them from inside the compound for the first time since the shootout with the ATF fifty-one days prior.
No one was coming out.
This was followed by a series of assumptions and decisions that would quickly bring the crisis to a head. Rogers speculated that the women and children were being physically blocked from leaving. And so Jamar ordered the CEVs to begin smashing into the compound’s walls, opening up holes large enough that those who wanted to leave could do so.
Still no one came out.
As I watched, I wondered how the Davidians could see this as anything other than an assault. How on earth could mothers with children be expected to rush to safety toward armored vehicles when those same vehicles were punching holes into their home? An argument for inserting tear gas and letting it slowly do its work could perhaps be made; however, smashing holes in the compound constituted a dramatic escalation from the approved plan.
At 12:13 that afternoon, the FBI observed a curl of smoke emerge from the southwest corner of the building and soon more smoke and then flames. Hidden-microphone recordings, reviewed after the incident but not monitored live, picked up the voice of Schneider ordering a conflagration, and an HRT observer testified that he saw a Davidian pouring gas on piles of straw and lighting them. Stoked by the high winds, the fire quickly engulfed the compound.
Only nine of the remaining Davidians would make it out of the compound; the others were back in the center. Seven of the nine who came out that day had accelerants (fuel) on their clothing (sleeves and pant legs). One woman actually tried to go back into the burning compound but was tackled and brought to safety by a heroic HRT operator, Jim McGee. The crime scene examination that followed showed that most of the bodies were located in a central area where Koresh had assembled his followers to await their fate. The autopsy report suggested that some of the young children had been killed, presumably by their parents, to spare them the pain of burning to death. Koresh’s body was found next to Steve Schneider’s. Koresh had a bullet wound to the brain. Schneider had a bullet wound to the upper palate inside his mouth. It appeared as though Koresh had ordered Schneider to shoot him, after which Schneider killed himself. In all, seventy-five individuals died; an independent investigation would verify that the Davidians had started the fires that killed them.
As I watched the television pictures of the compound going up in flames, I felt sick to the pit of my stomach. I was as angry as I have ever been in my life. How could this have ended so badly? I was mostly angry at Koresh and the senseless waste of life he had ordered, but I was also mad that the FBI had not handled this as well as I knew we could have. I’m certain that with a little more patience and finesse we could have saved many more lives. I stood and walked out of FBI headquarters without saying a word to anyone. I didn’t ask permission to leave; I just walked out in disgust and drove home. It was the saddest and most painful day of my career.
That day and into the night I called every individual on the negotiation team I could reach to assure them that what happened was not their fault and not their failure. I told them how proud of them I was and that their efforts had saved thirty-five people who otherwise would have perished. In fact, I’m as proud of the work of this team as I am of anything else in my entire career.
Waco was for the FBI a self-inflicted wound that would take years to heal. It caused the public to doubt the organization as never before, and once a reputation is tarnished, it’s extremely difficult to regain the public’s confidence. Some good would eventually come from it: several official inquiries and congressional hearings made clear that the negotiation and tactical teams had been at cross-purposes, and those sitting in judgment came to appreciate that the negotiation team had been on the right track and that Rogers and Jamar had got it wrong. Neither man was dismissed, however Waco would prove to be the effective end of both men’s career advancement.
At the time of this writing, the FBI has not managed a major siege operation in over a decade. Few if any current top leaders in the FBI have even been present during a significant siege incident, and none has commanded one. It is my hope and desire that they will learn much by reading the account of what went wrong at Waco. If I anger some former colleagues with my candor and my effort to assist in this process, then so be it. The future of the FBI, its standing with the American people, and the maintenance of its hard-fought and well-deserved reputation cannot afford anything less than excellence in these matters.
CHAPTER EIGHT
PICKING UP THE PIECES
We seek the truth, and will endure the consequences.
—CHARLES SEYMOUR
The morning after the fire at Ranch Apocalypse, I was sent to the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville, where an inmate uprising had been going on for a little more than a week. Ordinarily, I was always ready to say, “Put me in, coach,” but at this point, utterly exhausted and emotionally spent, I was hoping the incident would be over before I got there. Then again, I also needed to get Waco off my mind, and maybe this situation would give us a chance to get it right. Lucasville was a complex situation, though, with what in fact were three competing hostage situations taking place simultaneously.
I flew to Columbus, Ohio, where a local FBI agent picked me up and drove me to the prison, just north of the Kentucky border. After a two-hour trip through farmland, we saw the light gray buildings spread out on the edge of town. With its simple lines and no structure more than two stories, the prison could have been a typical American high school. Except, of course, for the double perimeter of ten-foot-high fences topped with concertina wire.
We pulled up to the administration building, which, again, had a driveway that looked suitable for parents to drop off and pick up their kids. Off to my right, just outside the fencing, I saw the twisted carcass of a state police helicopter that had crashed in the early days of the standoff—engine trouble. Fortunately, no one had been killed.
I got out and walked inside, where the wide hallways and linoleum floor extended the high school look and feel. But instead of football banners, the wall outside the warden’s office displayed a photograph of bulky inmates working out with weights. The caption said, What are you doing to stay in shape?
My driver introduced me to FBI Cincinnati Field Office Assistant Special Agent in Charge Paul Mallett, the senior FBI official on the scene. In turn, he introduced me to the Lucasville prison warden, Arthur Tate, who had been an FBI agent earlier in his career and was very receptive to having our assistance and advice. Through our conversation, Art struck me as the kind of thoughtful leader you want managing a crisis. He told me that he very much wanted a negotiated resolution if at all possible. He wasn’t just interested in punishing the inmates for what they had done; his focus and attention were on doing what was best to secure the safe release of his people and restore order to the facility.
Also present was profiler Larry Ankrom, an FBI colleague and good friend with whom I had worked at WFO and Quantico. Larry, who was from Ohio, had been in the area visiting family when prison officials asked the Bureau to supply them with a profiler. After the movie Silence of the Lambs came out, local authorities often asked for a profiler when what they really needed was a negotiator. Larry was an ex
cellent profiler, but he also knew his limitations in the negotiation arena, so he had suggested that they send for me.
On the muted television set in the warden’s office, left on to monitor media reporting of the situation, I faced the rebuke of a seemingly endless loop of footage from the Waco fire the previous day. Mallett and Tate both asked me about it, but I tried to get past their questions as quickly as possible. I told them that it had been the most difficult situation I had ever worked. I also said that it was a great tragedy that I wanted to help avoid here.
These men seemed both open and receptive to advice, which made them polar opposites from Jamar and Rogers. I couldn’t help wondering how the standoff with the Davidians might have turned out differently if men like these had been in charge. The more immediate question was whether or not these men could maintain their demonstrated self-control long enough to peacefully resolve their own very complex situation.
The crisis had begun on Sunday morning, April 11, when inmates staged a fistfight in the prison’s exercise area, an expansive series of playing fields. Inmates have endless hours to study how correctional officers respond to flare-ups, and they know that the guards in the yard don’t carry guns. Typically, prisoners stage a scuffle, which forces the guards to converge. At that point the shanks (homemade knives) come out. The inmates overpower a few guards, then use their captives as bargaining chips to gain control over others.
Seven hundred inmates, roughly half the prison population, had been out in the recreation area when the first hostage taking occurred. Three hundred twenty-one of the inmates on the scene wanted no part of what was happening and retreated to the other side of the field, where prison authorities over loudspeakers instructed them to remain. The others went back into L Block and barricaded themselves inside with a total of eight correctional officers held as hostages.
The warden explained that the initial uprising, which occurred on Easter Sunday, was driven by several of the prison’s black Muslims, who objected on religious grounds to a prison requirement that they be inoculated against tuberculosis. But this was merely the fuel tossed on a preexisting tinderbox of grievances. After the firestorm broke out, other factions within the prison population took the opportunity to forward their own agendas. The two other principal groups in play were the Gangster Disciples, a black gang with no pretense of religious motivation, and the all-white Aryan Brotherhood. Given the dynamics within the prison, it appeared that each group felt the need to take their own hostages to, as they saw it, guarantee themselves a voice in any resolution that emerged. One faction barricaded themselves in the gymnasium, another in the cafeteria, the third in a classroom.
At dawn on April 12, prison officials cut off water and electricity. Later that day, correctional officers calling from the negotiation center in the main administration building contacted each of the three different inmate groups by telephone and negotiated the transfer of the bodies of the six prisoners known to have been killed during the initial riot. Correctional officers also moved into the yard and escorted away the 321 prisoners who had remained outside, then set about housing them in other units.
My first impression from that initial briefing was that Lucasville had a long history of overcrowding, as well as violence between inmates and staff and between the convicts themselves. The warden told me that negotiators had already heard a litany of grievances, including the desire to stop forced integration, the need to hire more black guards, the need to remove certain white supervisors, access to the media, relaxation of time limits on activities, and increasing recreational and educational activities.
“Those don’t strike me as unreasonable demands,” I said. “Which may improve the odds that we can negotiate our way to a resolution.”
On the positive side, the warden and his colleagues told me, the white prisoners had released correctional officer Darrold Clark on the evening of April 15. In exchange, prison officials had allowed a live broadcast on local radio by an Aryan Nations inmate.
The next day, the Muslims requested a similar exchange. They released correctional officer James Demons, after which they were allowed to make a broadcast to air their grievances.
“We were pretty optimistic,” the warden said. “But then, later that day, we found out that one of our guys, correctional officer Robert Vallandingham, had been murdered. We think an inmate just had it in for him from before the riot.” There had been no demands made before his execution, so I suspected that was correct.
Then Warden Tate looked at me. “We’re getting frustrated. If we thought the murder of Officer Vallandingham was the shape of things to come, we’d be ready to move in. It’s important that we begin to make some progress on getting the hostages released. I’d like you to meet with our negotiation team, absorb what they’re doing, and then make some recommendations. I’d like your help figuring out how we get ourselves out of this mess.”
The negotiation room was a large conference area just down the hall from the warden’s office. Glancing out the window, I could see L Block, a nondescript slab of concrete, some two hundred yards away.
The team consisted of eight Ohio correctional officer negotiators brought in from other facilities. All had received negotiation training but none had yet had any actual experience. They were being assisted by Dave Michael, the negotiator from the Dayton Police Department who had trained them. They had set up a dedicated telephone line for communicating with the inmates.
We went around the table and introduced ourselves. Michael was the only one who had ever negotiated an actual hostage incident, but they all seemed focused on the mission at hand and prepared to do what they needed to do. Michael himself seemed a bit aloof at first. I sensed that he viewed my arrival as threatening to his status as the most experienced negotiator on the scene, but once I established that I wasn’t there to take over, he proved to be a good team player. I quietly listened as the team presented me with a comprehensive briefing on what they had been doing and how they saw the situation they faced.
When they were done, I told the team that as I saw it, our first task was to help these inmates figure out and clearly articulate what they wanted. It’s hard enough to negotiate with one person when he doesn’t know what he wants. At Lucasville, we faced three opposing factions that did not communicate well, had different agendas, and refused to cooperate with one another. In addition, no one group wanted to give up their bargaining chips—the correctional officers they held hostage.
“You guys know prisons,” I started in. “But my experience with prison incidents tells me that inmates sometimes need several days to vent their emotions, exercise their frustrations, and generally act out. Perhaps they’re finally getting to a point where they can be channeled toward a productive dialogue.”
The correctional officers nodded in agreement.
“My hope is that we’re nearing the time when they can settle down and make some better decisions. Maybe some cooler heads can start to step up.”
“We need to find those cooler heads,” Michael added.
“And find a way to encourage them along,” I added.
The challenge I put on the table was this: how could we help the inmates get organized so they could figure out what they were after? Only when realistic concerns were on the table could we identify underlying needs and begin to structure an effective negotiation approach and then a reasonable resolution strategy. We knew we had to help them assemble a leadership team that we could negotiate with. We needed to focus on the most sensible of the inmates the team had spoken with so far, and to find ways to promote these individuals. Of course, this was easier said than done.
The primary negotiator was Dirk Prise from the Ohio Department of Corrections. His major challenge was going to be fielding calls from each of the three major factions.
“I’ve got individual inmates calling up at random to rant and rave,” he said. “ ‘I want my charges dropped.’ ‘I want to see my girlfriend.’ ‘I want to talk to Jesse Jackson.’ �
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“What do you tell ’em?” I asked.
“Mostly I say, ‘I’m not authorized to do that.’ ”
I smiled at him. Dirk seemed far more affable and far less inflexible and authoritarian than some of the correctional officers I had known in the past. I felt he would do very well as the primary negotiator.
“Step one, I think, is to get beyond that. We need to give the inmates a sense that they’ve been heard. That will reinforce the idea that they can gain some concessions.”
We began making a list of action points. There was bad blood between the inmates and the authorities. To overcome long-standing mistrust, we needed to introduce an outside intermediary who could facilitate discussions and serve as a neutral arbitrator. To begin having serious talks, we had to impose some structure. This meant encouraging each faction to list their concerns and have one individual as their representative to meet with us.
After Tate and Mallett agreed with our assessment, we sought an agreement to meet face-to-face with inmate leaders away from the larger prison population, so that they would feel no pressure to posture or perform. We proposed setting up two tables facing each other, one for the inmates and one for the authorities, on opposite sides of the inner perimeter fence. It took a while, but Dirk got the inmates to agree, in part by allowing them to feel that the format was their idea.
On April 21, the eleventh day of the incident, at 10:40 a.m., the selected inmate leaders, one from each of the factions, came out and sat down opposite officials of the FBI and Ohio State Police. Also sitting outside the fence was attorney Niki Schwartz, a well-known criminal defense attorney and former head of the Ohio chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, who was serving as the neutral intermediary.
After a few minutes of preliminary discussion, the inmates agreed to having Department of Correction representatives, including Dirk Prise, come to the table to join in on the talks. Larry and I watched with binoculars through a window in a hallway near the negotiation room, eager to observe the body language. Everyone seemed calm and respectful—no grandstanding or obvious signs of anger. Maybe this could be the breakthrough we needed.