Waco

by David Thibodeau

  Mount Carmel’s operating expenses were around $15,000 a month, or $125 per person. Some of this money came from the businesses we ran, like the gun-show booth, the auto shop, the seamstresses, and so on. Other funds were provided by members who worked outside the community, such as Wayne Martin, who ran a law practice in Waco, Jeff Little, who had a job as a computer programmer, Scott Sonobe and others involved in the Yardbirds landscaping business, and Perry Jones’s son, David, who delivered mail. Another source of funds came from people who were affluent, like Paul Fatta and Donald Bunds. Members donated money and property, and I believe one elderly couple gave between $250,000 and $500,000 to the community.

  Perry Jones controlled the accounts, handling the bills and doling out cash when David needed it. He and David usually decided together when some extravagance should be bought, like the kids’ go-carts and minibikes. Steve, the shrewd operator, negotiated any deals we made with outsiders, and Paul ran the gun business. These four were the community’s financial Mighty Men.

  (The term “Mighty Men” came from King David’s psalms. It was not a term for some inner core of armed guards protecting David, as some people later claimed. Actually, it could be applied to anyone who was given strength by faith, including women. To me, the name sounded silly, a play on Mighty Mouse. One time I was doing pushups near the drum set, and David laughed, saying, “Look at Thibodeau fixing to be a Mighty Man.”)

  David always seemed to have a roll of bills in his jeans. Whenever I needed some pocket money, I’d tap him for it; not that I had much use for cash, stuck out at the Anthill. Maybe there was a childish dependency in the monetary arrangement I had with David—“hitting up the old man for a sawbuck,” as he put it cheerfully—but it didn’t bother me. I never felt demeaned by any aspect of our relationship.

  The fascination with guns was, in a sense, a kind of overgrown boys’ game played by David, Paul, Mike, and a few others. David loved taking the weapons apart, cleaning and greasing them, reassembling them. It was a sensual pleasure, a feeling for the way things work. He had a gift for machines, knew their shapes in his fingertips, enjoying a kind of intimacy with nuts-and-bolts technology.

  For the rest of us, shooting was hardly a major part of our daily lives. During the first couple weeks I was at Mount Carmel, David brought out a shotgun, and we took potshots at an old car wreck. After that, I had some intermittent, rather casual target practice in which someone tried to show me how to keep my breath steady and my trigger finger easy while firing an AR-15 rifle. The gun’s rough kick startled me, and I tried to avoid any more target practice. Personally, I hadn’t grown up with guns. My parents loathed them; as a kid I’d secretly played with a friend’s BB gun, but shooting harmless birds and squirrels wasn’t my bag. All that fascination with muzzle velocities, trigger pull weights, and upper and lower receivers went right over my head.

  Actually, these shooting sessions were seldom serious, though David said that everyone should know how to handle a gun, including the women, who practiced with handguns. For most of us, weapons were something we stayed away from as much as possible.

  Gun training at Mount Carmel was certainly perfunctory. After April 19, for instance, Graeme Craddock told the Texas Rangers that his entire experience with firearms had been to fire ten rounds from a pistol and five to ten rounds from a semiautomatic rifle. Since David considered him inexperienced with guns, he was issued an AR-15 and a 9mm pistol, but no ammunition.

  However, David did say we should never allow ourselves to be attacked without fighting back. Jesus may have gone meekly to the cross, but we should follow his command, according to the apostle Luke, to defend ourselves against anyone who threatened to destroy us. The time is coming, he said, and now is when he that has a cloak should sell it to buy a sword. In David’s view, a powerful action against attacking forces was our right and duty as Americans. We should not start any kind of violence, but we must respond fiercely to any armed assault. He had this primal Texan response about the right to bear arms, to protect yourself and your family. “I don’t care who they are. Nobody’s going to come to my home, with my babies around, without a gun back in their face. That’s just the American way,” he said on a videotape he sent out during the siege.

  David’s declaration on self-defense is backed up by the Texas Penal Code, which states: “The use of force to resist an arrest or search is justified; if, before the actor offers any resistance, the peace officer uses, or attempts to use, greater force than necessary to make the arrest or search, and; when and to the degree the actor reasonably believes the force is immediately necessary to protect himself against the peace officer’s use or attempted use of greater than necessary force.”

  Despite my aversion to guns, I unwittingly had a hand in getting David deeper into the business. In September 1990, on my first visit to Mount Carmel, I’d met a girl named Sherry at West Waco’s Chelsea Street Pub. It turned out that her stepfather, Henry McMahon, was a local licensed gun dealer. When I mentioned this to David, he asked me to introduce him to McMahon.

  Operating under the name Hewitt Handguns, Henry McMahon and his common-law wife, Karen, worked the Texas gun shows. Actually, they’d previously sold some handguns to people living at Mount Carmel, and Karen’s ’69 Camaro had been rebuilt and restored in our auto shop, located about four miles west of Mount Carmel. David and McMahon did some deals, and McMahon clued David in about how to judge the quality of various firearms to buy for resale. At the time, David knew little about the more sophisticated kinds of weaponry, being more familiar with the simple hunting guns he’d used as a kid. “He’d buy cheap guns and shoot them and they would break,” McMahon told ATF agents after the February 28 raid. But he was a quick study, and inside a couple of months, McMahon admitted, David knew more than he did.

  With typical energy, David plunged into the firearms trade. Since no one at Mount Carmel had a license to trade in weapons, David made a deal with McMahon in which the gun dealer bought and sold guns with funds supplied by us.

  McMahon showed David the business, telling him which guns and bullets were going to be banned, so the prices would go way up in value. The value of a converted semiautomatic AK-47, for instance, jumped from $500 to $2,000 when the weapon was outlawed. David saw an opportunity to purchase AR-15 parts cheap, assemble them, and sell the semiautomatics at a big profit to legally registered buyers.

  On July 30, 1992, ATF Special Agents Davy Aguilera and Jimmy Skinner visited Henry McMahon to question him about Mount Carmel’s “armory.” McMahon told the agents that David bought weapons to resell for profit.

  While the agents were in his house, McMahon slipped away and telephoned David. “If there’s a problem, tell them to come out here,” David replied. “If they want to see my guns, they’re more than welcome.”

  McMahon offered the phone to Aguilera. “I’ve got Koresh on the phone,” he said. “If you’d like to go out there and see those guns, you’re more than welcome to.”

  According to McMahon, Aguilera became paranoid, shaking his head and whispering, “No, no!” McMahon had to tell David that the agents refused to talk to him and wouldn’t be coming out to Mount Carmel to inspect our weapons. (Aguilera finally came to Mount Carmel on the day of the ATF’s February 28 raid, riding in one of the helicopters that circled our building.)

  Agent Aguilera’s refusal to come and inspect our weaponry reveals the ATF’s secret agenda: their search for an excuse to attack us. As one commentator later remarked, “The agency viewed this operation exclusively through strategic and political lenses, with no attempt to ascertain why this group had guns, and what they might want to do with them, and how the larger citizenry might be assured that no harm would result from the weapons that had been purchased.”

  Later, ATF official Philip Chojnacki discredited his own agents. There was no reason to inspect our guns, he told Congress in 1995, because “at that particular point in time, the weapons in question were completely legal firearms… bein
g transferred from licensed firearms dealer to an individual.”

  As far as firearms were concerned, we had nothing to hide at that time, so far as I knew. However, it seems that during the summer of 1992 David bought from McMahon a load of legal semiautomatic AR-15 rifles and the devices used to turn them into the equivalent of military M-16s. He probably intended to apply for licenses to convert them, then sell the popular automatic weapons for a profit. However, the conversion of semiautomatic AR-15s to automatic M-16s is a highly specialized procedure, and I wasn’t aware back then that anyone at Mount Carmel had the equipment and expertise to actually do this. McMahon got nervous after the ATF’s visit and canceled the contract, leaving us with an inventory of unlicensed guns.

  When it came right down to it, the only valid argument between the ATF and us was about filling out the right forms and paying the appropriate fees, not the possession of illegal firearms as such. Fully automatic weapons could be bought or converted, if the buyer or owner obtained a permit from the local police and paid a $200 registration fee. In 1993, around a quarter-million U.S. citizens owned legally registered machine guns and sawed-off shotguns.

  What federal law prohibits is the “manufacture, possession, transfer, transport, or shipment in interstate commerce [of] machine-guns, machine-gun conversion parts, or explosives which are classified, by Federal law, as machine-guns, and/or destructive devices, including any combination of parts, designed and intended for use in converting any firearms into a machine-gun, or into a destructive device as defined by Federal law, and from which any destructive device may be readily assembled, without them being lawfully registered in the National Firearms Registration and Transfer record” (emphasis added).

  In other words, even though it was possible that our technicians may have converted some semiautomatic weapons to fully automatic capacity, our punishable offense was not the actual possession of these firearms but our failure to have their conversion registered—an omission that should have cost Mount Carmel a modest fine plus suspended sentences for the people involved in the actual conversion of these rifles.

  In their affidavit of probable cause, submitted to obtain their search warrant in early 1993, ATF agents deliberately and maliciously altered a key phrase in the paragraph quoted above, to read: “including any combination of parts, either designed or intended for use in converting any firearms into a machine-gun.” This sleight-of-hand put a sly twist on the crucial demonstration of the intent aspect of probable cause required to authorize the ATF search. The altered language of the affidavit was included in the search warrant signed by U.S. Magistrate Dennis Green on February 25, 1993, three days before the agency’s assault on Mount Carmel.

  Anyway, the whole issue of weapons being stored at Mount Carmel must be considered against the background of gun ownership in the state of Texas. In 1993, Texas had 68 million registered weapons for 16 million inhabitants—an average of more than four guns for every man, woman, and child! Some people have suggested, tongue-in-cheek, that by Texas standards Mount Carmel had too few weapons for its self-defense. In any case, there was no state or federal law limiting the number of firearms anyone may own. We could’ve filled Mount Carmel with guns from floor to roof, so long as we had the right permits.*

  I don’t know why David tried to delay or dodge paying the registration fees. He was foolish to have bent the law in this way, and his negligence in this regard only served those who were out to get us. Though I didn’t know back then that David hadn’t complied with federal firearms registration procedures and that he had some forbidden items such as silencers and live grenades, I should have asked more questions, and David shouldn’t have kept most of us in the dark on that score. I blame both myself and him in this regard. But, disliking guns in general, I tried to keep well away from the whole weapons business.

  I did accompany Paul and Mike to a couple of gun shows around Texas, but I certainly never heard anyone say anything about stockpiling weapons. Most of the guns we had in storage were treated as inventory for the Mag Bag and remained crated up, ready for transportation and sale. At around 8:00 A.M. on the morning of February 28, 1993, an hour or so before the ATF attacked us, Paul had cleared out the Mount Carmel gun room and had driven away in his pickup to take the weapons to display at a show in Austin.

  That’s how eager and ready we were for battle on that brutal day.

  * Eight of these women and twelve of the children perished in the siege of Mount Carmel. Five women left the community before the conflict with the federal agencies, including Robyn and Jeannine Bunds, Dana Okimoto, Karen Doyle, and Lisa Gent. Kathy Schroeder and Sheila Martin left during the siege. Dana Okimoto, a Hawaiian of Japanese extraction, left Mount Carmel a few months before the siege, after having lived there for five years. A serious, quiet woman, she refused to speak against David after she departed, except to say that her reasons for leaving were private and that she wanted to move on and pursue her career. When the ATF questioned her before they attacked us, seeking inside information and slander, Dana told the agents she’d made a vow not to speak about Mount Carmel. All she would say was that, as regards the community, the ATF had no idea who they were dealing with. David was very upset when Dana moved out, taking two of his sons with her.

  * After the April fire, federal investigators claimed to have discovered around three hundred guns in the vicinity of the charred ruins, plus some illegal items, such as homemade rifle silencers and forty-eight converted, unregistered AR-15s. They said they also found dummy grenades, plus a few exploded ones, and around 500,000 rounds of ammo. I never saw any of these items, and no independent analysts have ever been allowed to examine them. However, during the siege, I did see some grenades, but I could not tell whether they were active or just dummies. In fact, while talking to FBI agents over the phone after the February attack, David sheepishly admitted that we did have some stuff we shouldn’t have had. “I mean, hey, if the Vatican can have its own little country, can’t I?” he joked. Dick DeGuerin confirmed this. “Koresh told me he had illegal weapons,” he said, when the attorney emerged after visiting Mount Carmel during the last weeks of the siege. However, we certainly owned no .50-caliber machine guns, as the feds claimed.

  BOOK TWO

  Prelude to a Holocaust

  9

  VISIONS AND OMENS

  During the second half of 1992 ominous portents were gathering in the air around Mount Carmel. The signs were internal and external, visionary and temporal, feeding off each other to create an increasing sense that we were entering the last phase of our communal life. Some powerful, unseen force generated by fate seemed to drive our story to the cataclysmic conclusion foretold in Revelation.

  “What are you going to do six months from now when this is all surrounded with tanks?” David said one summer afternoon, when four or five of us were finishing off the roof of the three-story residential tower.

  My hand, holding the hammer, froze in midair. “They’re not going to bring tanks against us!” I exclaimed. “Not tanks. That’s real paranoid, David.”

  David answered my challenge obliquely, launching into a commentary on the biblical Nahum: the chariots shall be with flaming torches.… I only half-listened to him. To me it was inconceivable that the federal government could actually use heavy armor to attack us. Not in America, I said silently—surely? At heart I’m a true patriot. As a kid I used to dream about fighting at Valley Forge, freezing alongside the rebel colonists battling the British, putting it on the line for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. David’s prediction, delivered in a flat, matter-of-fact tone, shocked me deeply.

  My faith in America was shaken a few weeks later. On August 22, after sixteen months of armed surveillance of Randy Weaver’s cabin in the mountains of northern Idaho by the ATF and the U.S. Marshal Service, Weaver’s wife, Vicki, and his fourteen-year-old son, Sammy, were fatally shot by a marksman belonging to the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team. A week later a wounded Weaver was taken to a hospi
tal under heavy guard.

  Randy Weaver was not a man we admired. On the contrary, he was a member of the Christian Identity Movement, a separatist group tainted by anti-Semitic rhetoric and a connection to the violent Aryan Nation militia. His ideas were repellent, but we felt that the violent way he’d been dealt with was an ominous portent; our community also lived by beliefs that the mainstream society might not tolerate forever. Also, we were troubled by the government’s use of all the machinery of military aggression—including snipers, concealed video cameras, planes, and armed helicopters—against a family with four children. That this could happen in America to Americans sent a collective chill down our spines. (Incidentally, Richard M. Rogers, the commander of the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team at Ruby Ridge in Idaho, would later be involved in the siege of Mount Carmel. And Larry Potts, assistant director of the FBI’s Criminal Investigation Section, played a leading backroom role in both events.)

  “Is it a dress rehearsal for an attack on Mount Carmel?” David wondered out loud. Looking into his anxious eyes, I wanted to reassure and protest, but I couldn’t summon up the conviction to argue with him.

  In July, when gun dealer Henry McMahon had phoned David to tell him that ATF agents were at his house asking questions about Mount Carmel, we had our first direct confirmation that the feds were actively focusing on us.

  This unwelcome attention became obvious when military helicopters began a series of low-level overflights around Mount Carmel in the summer. The aerial surveillance continued on and off through the fall and winter.

  On January 6, 1993, the Texas Air National Guard sent planes equipped with infrared radar cameras over Mount Carmel to scan for heat sources related to a supposed methamphetamine drug lab, in order to validate one of the trumped-up charges the ATF was brewing against us. The angry noise of the choppers’ blades slicing the hot air became, for us, the drumbeat of doom. But the kids had fun, pretending to shoot down the machines, rat-tat-tat, whooping with joy when one of the helicopters dipped as if hit by gunfire.