Waco

by David Thibodeau

  Despite these ominous events, David did his best to reach out to the authorities. He invited local deputies to fish in our lake or join us in target practice, and he kept in contact with children’s service people, to assure them that the kids were happy and healthy. These attempts to soothe the temporal powers sprang from the worldly part of David’s personality, the man who didn’t want trouble.

  On the spiritual plane, however, David expected disaster. His Mount Zion vision had predicted that the End Time would come in Jerusalem; but after the 1991 Gulf War, David began to speculate that the first stage in the prophecies of Revelation, the obliteration of the community, would occur in Waco. And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul, he said bravely, but the look in his eyes was stark. “The truth will be suppressed,” he predicted, and my heart sank.

  During those last months he talked often about the doctrine of “quickening,” which he described as the bringing of the soul into harmony with the divine. Quicken thou me in thy way, the Psalmist says. For the truly devout, like Livingston Fagan, Mount Carmel became more and more a refuge from the threatening world, a place where, as he told me, “You can hear God’s word, while blocking out the artificial noise of humanity.”

  You could say we had created a self-fulfilling prophecy. We might possibly have weathered most of the charges made against us, including the most serious, like child abuse and gun stockpiling; yet David was vulnerable on the charge of statutory rape. That made it impossible for him to simply hire an attorney and challenge the authorities to prosecute us or leave us alone, as a totally innocent person or group might have done. Though the charge of statutory rape was never formally made against David, it tainted his claim of innocence on all charges. In that temporal sense, he’d provoked his own persecution—and ours. In a spiritual sense, he was destined to make that provocation, for, as he told us, the Seventh Angel comes clothed with a cloud.

  I found all this quite confusing. Were we meant for disaster by divine destiny? Or could we delay or avoid it by placating or bamboozling the authorities? And why was it happening so soon, in 1993, instead of 1995, as David’s Jerusalem vision had prophesied?

  Wayne Martin told me he believed that we were fated for destruction because we’d somehow let David down, had fallen short of the necessary discipline and harmony to honor our leader’s teachings. “We’ve learned a truth from him that nobody else could teach us,” he said, “and in spite of it all, we still couldn’t follow a few simple rules that he gave us. I’m overweight, like you. We were supposed to get in shape, we try our best, and still we come up short.”

  He shook his head. “If disaster strikes, it’s our fault. We’re the weak links in the chain that leads to God.”

  I wondered if we’d failed David in a vital sense, by being too much ourselves. Or had David failed himself by being too much himself?

  David was the “intercessor,” our intermediary between God and man, and this notion was reinforced by a vision Wayne told me David had received long ago, before my time. “David was lying on a bed, crying, ‘Where are you God?’ Suddenly, the bed fell out from under him and he was floating through space. He came to a place with a concrete wall, miles thick. A light penetrated this wall, an illumination so brilliant it would’ve obliterated him if the dense wall hadn’t shielded him.”

  Wayne paused, his eyes dazed with the memory of David’s telling. “He saw the spirit of Christ, who was himself an intercessor, and a great throng of people beneath the wall, bound for hell. ‘Give these people to me, Father,’ David pleaded. He was on his knees, crying, ‘Father, give them to me!’ When David told this to us, he was actually on his knees, reliving the experience, including the tears.”

  “What happened?”

  “The voice said, ‘Only those who come to you may you have.’ David pleaded for all humanity, interceding for our souls. ‘You don’t know what love is,’ David said. ‘It is simply the finality of the Law.’” Wayne’s smile was seraphic. “I saw love that day, was touched by a dimension in myself I’d never experienced. A dimension of eternity.” After a thoughtful pause, he added: “Maybe our moment of eternity is upon us.…”

  Around that time, David reinstated the ritual of morning and afternoon communions, which had lapsed while we were busy with the construction. At 9:00 A.M. and 3:00 P.M. we gathered for an hour’s Bible study, followed by crackers and grape juice. David explained that the community had to strive to intensify its harmony to confront the approaching troubles. Sometimes he seemed to be saying that if we achieved a high level of harmony we might not have to suffer a drastic outcome, but I imagined he was just trying to comfort us, and maybe himself.

  We hired a bulldozer to begin excavating the tornado shelter, dubbed the “pit,” in the west yard, just beyond where the old yellow school bus was buried. It struck me as odd that we should spend so much energy to protect ourselves from tornadoes when it was the feds who most immediately threatened our safety. David never gave me a clear answer on this, except to say the shelter might be used as a firing range. Whatever its purpose, we broke our backs shoveling earth and pouring concrete for the shelter’s walls; nevertheless, the excavation would be only partially roofed when the attack came. We also put fiberglass insulation between the studs of the main building and poured concrete into the wall around the front door to reinforce it against possible attack.

  I had a break from the increasingly tense situation in Mount Carmel during a quick visit to Bangor during the late fall. Partly, I was happy to get away from Texas for a while, but also I wanted to head off my mother, who was again pressing to come visit me. I feared that if she visited Mount Carmel and picked up on our dangerous situation she’d insist that I leave the community. This had happened with other people whose relatives had come visiting, like Katherine Andrade, whose mother tried hard to get Kathy to come away with her.

  In Bangor, however, Balenda and I found we had very little to say to each other. I was quiet, unwilling to talk about Mount Carmel or Scripture to people who’d be unsympathetic. The only one I could communicate with was my Uncle Bob, and he was impressed by my knowledge of Scripture. “But where’s it leading you?” he asked. “To where I have to go,” I replied.

  I understood my family’s concern, and I understood why I couldn’t explain things to them. Many of my relatives looked upon me as a black sheep, or, rather, a lamb that had lost its way. There was nothing I could say or do to change that old attitude, so I just kept quiet and waited till I could get back to what I realized was now my true home.

  The one person I could really be open with in Bangor was an old friend, Alisa Shaw. I’d exchanged letters with her from time to time, telling her about life in Mount Carmel and David’s teachings because she seemed interested. I never saw my role as finding new recruits for Mount Carmel; proselytizing—that’s not my style. But David had talked to her on the phone a few times, and Alisa told me when I saw her that she was dying to come to Waco. Knowing how gentle and impressionable she was, I tried to deter her. “That scene is heavy,” I warned her. “It could change your life.” Frankly, I didn’t want to be responsible for Alisa; I had a hard enough time being responsible for myself.

  But Alisa was eager to visit Mount Carmel. In February 1993 she came and stayed with us for a while, leaving just a couple of weeks before the ATF raid went down. David sent her home to talk to her family before she decided to come and live with us. During the siege Alisa returned to Waco and tried to get into Mount Carmel, but fortunately the authorities prevented her. Later, her family sent Alisa to a Scripture study camp, which convinced her to follow a different faith.

  Back in Mount Carmel, the dark clouds were thickening. Toward the end of the year we got word through the grapevine that the ATF had contacted Marc Breault in Melbourne, Australia. For a while Marc received almost daily calls from officials of the ATF, FBI, State Department, and the Texas Rangers. Marc told it this way in his book: “When the ATF approached me (I d
id not approach them), they told me they believed Vernon had amassed a huge arsenal of weapons and that some of those were illegal. I strongly advised the ATF that if they were going to arrest Vernon, they do so with no force, that they somehow lure Vernon away from Mount Carmel.”

  Around this time the ATF approached the Special Forces Command at nearby Fort Hood, asking for help in training agents. Under federal law, the U.S. armed services can only aid law enforcement officers if narcotics are involved, so the ATF lied, saying we were operating a drug lab. This was the hidden reason for their false accusations on this score.

  The Green Berets helped the agents build a mock-up of Mount Carmel, including windows that would be shattered in a “dynamic entry.” However, Major Philip Lindley of the Army’s Judge Advocate General office warned his superiors that the ATF’s use of military personnel and equipment in training and in a possible attack violated federal law and could lead to the Army assuming criminal as well as civil liability.

  The attack the ATF was planning was officially named Operation Trojan Horse, but the troops on the ground dubbed it “Showtime,” and the name stuck. An ATF advance crew arrived in Waco during mid-January 1993, setting up a command post on an airstrip northeast of the town. None of these activities was publicly announced, but by then we were well aware that we were in for a bad time.

  Actually, the feds were hard to miss.

  At Mount Carmel’s gateway, on Double EE Ranch Road directly opposite our main building, were two small houses owned by a rancher named Perry Spoon. One house was occupied, but the other had been empty for years, and Spoon told us he wasn’t planning to rent it, so we were surprised to see four men move into the house on January 10, 1993.

  What was suspicious about our new neighbors was that they brought with them hardly any furniture or possessions, apart from several large cases and what looked like an elaborate array of camera equipment. For the first few days they passed the time knocking golf balls around in the yard and taking potshots at a target, making their presence obvious in a ham-handed way, trying to pass themselves off as members of a regular household. The four men, in their thirties and forties, wore ritzy Stetsons, drove several spanking-new Chevy Blazers, and sported flash Serengeti sunglasses and Rolex watches—affluent accessories that seemed at odds with the bare-bones condition of the rented farmhouse.

  “These guys are weird,” Steve Schneider said, immediately suspicious. He sent David Jones, Greg Summers, and Neal Vaega to the house to welcome these neighbors with pizza and beer, but their reaction was startling. One man opened the door, grabbed the pizzas and beer, and slammed the door in the visitors’ faces. “They don’t want us to see what’s going on inside,” Steve concluded, when the guys reported back.

  However, it soon became clear that these strangers wanted to see what was going on in Mount Carmel. A few days after the beer-and-pizza incident, a couple of them came knocking at our door. They asked to take a look at a rusty, old iron horse walker situated near the pond. Henry McMahon, the gun dealer, was visiting at the time, and a few of us went out with Henry and David to talk to the visitors. They told us they were from Dallas and were looking to buy a country property. One claimed he’d been a ranch foreman in West Texas; but when McMahon asked him how many cattle a West Texas scrub ranch could carry per acre, he got confused.

  Hospitable as ever, David showed the men around the property. One of the visitors, a dark, powerfully built man who introduced himself as Robert Gonzalez, asked David what the tornado shelter excavation was for, and he seemed doubtful when David told him. “Boy, you really must be worried about storms,” he said. They had a lot of questions, squinting at the buildings as if sizing them up as prospective buyers. “The place ain’t for sale,” Steve said, and Gonzalez looked blank, missing the irony.

  That evening, Gonzalez came around again. David invited him in and we sat around in the foyer drinking beer. David began to talk Scripture, and I could see that Gonzalez was uneasy. When Steve asked him what he did for a living, Gonzalez said that he and his companions were students at Texas State Technical College (TSTC) in Waco.

  “What are you studying there?” I asked.

  “Philosophy,” Gonzalez replied.

  We tried not to laugh: Nobody went to TSTC to study philosophy. When Perry’s son, David Jones, who’d attended the college, asked Gonzalez about the campus, his answers were suspiciously vague.

  Gonzalez hung around for a couple of hours, half-listening as David talked about the Seals, his eyes constantly darting this way and that, taking in details. But David continued to treat the man courteously and seriously, as if he were a prospective member of our community. There was something he liked about Gonzalez, sensing a troubled but earnest quality in his restless black eyes.

  “You’re probably with the government, Robert, but I’m not going to let that bother me,” David remarked one morning. Gonzalez opened his mouth to protest, but David waved his denials aside. “Maybe I can show you something you don’t know but might really want to know. Perhaps you went to a Catholic school and no one could answer your questions, and maybe I can.”

  “Maybe you can, Dave,” Gonzalez answered, humoring him. “Maybe so.”

  After several hours, one of Gonzalez’s companions came to fetch him, obviously worried for his safety. “That’s not a bad person,” David remarked, when we were alone. “I see something there.”

  But the new neighbors really worried Wayne. He went into Waco to check their car registrations, and he found they were all named to the same address in Houston, the location of the nearest ATF office. “These people mean us no good,” he said.

  Gonzalez—whose real name, we discovered, was Robert Rodriguez—came to visit us frequently during the following weeks. David kept giving him scriptural studies, and I noticed Robert’s response subtly shifting from barely suppressed yawns to active attention. Robert confessed that, when he’d first visited us, he and his fellow agents hadn’t even known that the Book of Revelation was in the Bible. “When I mentioned the Seals, one of our guys thought I was talking about a circus act!” he laughed.

  We showed him a documentary put together by the Gunowners of America titled, Breaking the Law in the Name of the Law, about the ATF and its questionable methods. The film was clearly biased against the agency, but, all the same, Robert was visibly shaken.

  “Look, I know what it’s like to take the heat,” he said. For the first time Robert implied that he was an agent. “Some of the things I’ve had to do—” he began, then left the sentence hanging.

  David kept at him with scriptural studies, and Robert was drawn closer to the community, sharing our meals, often remaining while we went about our daily routine. Sometimes he stayed till midnight, and several times one or two of his colleagues came to call him away, no longer fearing for his safety as for his growing sympathy for us and respect for our community. During study sessions children clustered around his feet, and he occasionally bounced a little girl he’d taken a shine to on his knee. (Later, during the siege, he said he worried about what might happen to that child; she died.) He talked about playing college football, and I could see he was proud of the power in his linebacker’s body.

  Despite his growing attachment to us, Robert didn’t forget he had an assignment to carry out—namely, to discover how much firepower we possessed and if we were trained to use guns.

  One afternoon he came over with a weapon to show David. It was an AR-15 rifle, expertly and recently machined. “Is this a good gun?” Robert asked, pretending to be ignorant about firearms. David disassembled the rifle and examined it. “This gun has a hair trigger, meant for snipers,” he said, frowning. “A dangerous weapon, Robert.”

  Undeterred, Robert then produced a handgun he claimed to have put together from different parts. It was a scary thing, like something out of a James Bond movie, with holes in the side and a laser sight.

  Robert pretended to be very surprised. He told David that the gun shop he’d taken
the rifle to for machining had seared the pin too much, accidentally making it fully auto. Clearly, he was trying to provoke an admission that we also owned fully automatic weapons, but David kept his cool telling Robert, “I hope you had that taken care of, that’s illegal.”

  Robert later revealed that he reported to his superiors that, for all his snooping, he’d found no evidence of illegal guns or explosives in Mount Carmel. But that did not deter the ATF. It soon became clear that they had an agenda that had nothing do with “probable cause.” (At the 1995 congressional hearings, Robert, while testifying, made a blunt statement about his bosses: “They lied to the public.”)

  Wayne and Steve became concerned that Robert was getting too much inside information about us—information that might be used in a possible assault. But David kept saying he felt he was getting through to Robert, was sure he could turn him, get him to convince his superiors that we weren’t a threat to anyone. Steve angrily accused him of being naive, and Wayne suggested we might go to court to try to force the feds to show probable cause for their surveillance of our property. “We can see the camera lens flashing in the sun in the windows of their house,” he said. “A judge might help us force the ATF to show its hand, get it out in the open.”

  David grew impatient with Wayne and Steve. One morning, passing Perry’s office, I heard him tell them: “It doesn’t matter who the hell these people are or what they’re planning. The truth is going to go forward. Maybe there’s something in Robert that will respond and he’ll tell his superiors that nothing illegal is going on. Perhaps Robert can act as an intermediary. In fact, I think I’ll ask him to move in with us for a while, open our doors and hearts to him. What do you say?”