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Waco

Page 17

by David Thibodeau


  There was an outburst of objections, but from what I overheard David was unmoved. “That’s the way I’m going to play it,” he insisted. “God has sent Robert to us, and we must trust that gift.”

  Of course, Robert refused David’s offer to come live with us. But in knowing the power of David’s sincerity and the force of his mind, I could not dismiss the possibility that the agent might indeed be turned. David treated him like a friend, speaking to the human being under the law enforcement official, and Robert was very human. It was obvious that he was seeking his own kind of truth in the stresses of his life and duty.

  In an interview with the Waco Tribune-Herald published in May 1993, Rodriguez admitted that David’s scriptural studies had almost convinced him. “He was close,” he told the reporter. “The thing that probably saved me is I didn’t have to stay there.”

  Apart from the visits of Rodriguez and his crew, there were other incidents that showed we were being scrutinized. On January 27, a guy with long hair, wearing sloppy clothes, turned up at our door, pretending to be a UPS employee. He asked to use the bathroom, and David Jones sent him to the men’s outhouse. When the man left, David called the sheriff’s office to complain about being spied upon.

  Around this time, Mark England of the Waco Tribune-Herald phoned David a couple of times. He was interviewing people for a series the paper was preparing on David and the community, and he asked David for comment. David invited England to visit Mount Carmel or to meet with him in Waco, but England persistently refused. It was obvious to me, listening to the conversation, that the reporter didn’t want to hear our side of the story for fear it might sully his subjectivity.

  “They’re going to trash us,” Steve said miserably. “We’ll sue,” Wayne suggested. But David merely shrugged.

  To me, these omens signified that events would definitely end badly—and soon. Oddly enough, I was exhilarated by that possibility. “I’ve been in this for a couple of years now, just waiting for this stuff to happen,” I told Jaime. “Let them come!” He looked at me askance, but I argued that, at last, the prophecies might be fulfilled, providing a kind of confirmation that we had been true to David’s teachings and hadn’t put up with the hardships of life on the Anthill for nothing.

  At the same time, I was truly scared shitless. The thought of being blown away gave me night sweats. Yet I was in a state of mind in which I hoped for something—anything—to happen. The music had faded out of my life, I’d hardly touched the drums for months, and, apart from that one lapse, I hadn’t had sex for more than two years. I’d learned a lot about myself, had established some control over my appetites and impulses, had achieved some insight into a more profound way of being. I had become capable of thinking at a level I’d never imagined possible. But now something just had to happen. That was my gut feeling in response to the clouds gathering over our heads. I imagined a dramatic lightning storm ripping the sky, offering a release for all my pent-up energy.

  However, I wondered what was actually going on in David’s mind. Was he loaded down with a moral as well as a spiritual responsibility in this situation? Did he feel any trepidation that his faith in Scripture might cost all of us our lives? And if he did, how might he act? Could he simply surrender to the feds, offer himself as a sacrifice to save us, especially the forty-three children in his care? Or were we all to be sacrificed? I wanted to talk to him about these thoughts, but somehow I couldn’t find the right way to phrase them. Also, I feared they might show up the gaps in my understanding. For David, Revelation was the key text. And unlike many of the books of the Old Testament, Revelation is a mystical, not a moral, story. In St. John, punishments are rained down alike upon the virtuous and the vicious. For the virtuous, such pains are part of the withering experience, the process of purification; for the vicious, they are just damnation. So we, like Job, would likely suffer terrible torments on the way to becoming God’s true people. For David, a surrender to temporal authority would be a betrayal of his prophetic role; a betrayal that would damn him, and all of us. In his light, since God had not forsaken him, he couldn’t forsake God.

  Despite my terrors, I wanted to share the community’s fate, whatever David and the forces gathering against us decided it might be. However, a couple of weeks before the ATF attack, I had a disturbing hint that I might be excluded from the community’s worst scenario.

  On February 13, my twenty-fourth birthday, David, Steve, and I drove into Waco to have a celebratory evening meal at a Denny’s. In light of what we expected to happen, the occasion was rather solemn. We spoke little, but I felt very close to David and Steve; they were like family to me, only more so.

  Steve was talking about the people “across the street,” when I said, out of the blue, that the one thing I wanted most was not to be left out. “I don’t care what happens,” I declared. “I don’t care if the music goes forward or not, if we die or go to jail. I just don’t want to be left without the group.”

  This outburst startled me, but I meant it at that moment. And in saying it, I realized how deeply I’d come to identify myself with the community—to the point of sharing a common violent end, if necessary. The fear of being left out was now greater than any fear of death. Of course, death was an abstraction, and the Mount Carmel community and my friends there were very concrete. All the same, I was utterly sincere.

  David was silent. His face was stony, and my blood ran cold. He just stared at me for about thirty seconds. In that instant I realized that he believed I was going to be a survivor, whether I liked it or not. The premonition that I would not be killed in the coming confrontation with the authorities seemed more a condemnation than a reassurance.

  The keystone in the ATF’s attack plan was the scripting of an affidavit as the basis for a warrant to search Mount Carmel and arrest David. A corrupt document on its face, the affidavit served as the original act that brought about the obliteration of our community. The ATF affidavit was built upon deliberate deceptions concerning charges that were legitimately under ATF jurisdiction, such as firearms violations; however, it raised issues that were not the agency’s concern, such as child abuse and drug trafficking. (We only got to see the sealed warrant during the siege, on March 19, weeks after the ATF attack. For the public, the warrant remained sealed until after the fire, too late for the media to examine it and question its validity.)

  The most blatant lie in the ATF affidavit was the drug charge. ATF agents told Texan officials that the community was “involved in drug trafficking.” In addition, the ATF involved IRS agents by dropping hints of drug “money laundering.” These trumped-up allegations allowed the ATF to requisition military materiel, normally forbidden to nonmilitary agencies under the 1878 Posse Commitatus Act. (The drug charge dated back to George Roden, who had allowed speed dealers to operate in Mount Carmel during the mid-1980s. But local law officers knew that when David—who hated drugs—took over Mount Carmel in 1987, he’d kicked out the dopers and called the Waco sheriff to have the methamphetamine lab removed.)

  A few weeks after the initial ATF assault, ATF spokesman David Troy blandly denied that there ever was any “suspicion of illegal drug activity” in Mount Carmel. Later, sources within the ATF quietly admitted to reporters that the drug-lab story was “a complete fabrication,” concocted to deflect sharp questions from Texas officials about the deceitful use of the National Guard and other state agencies. When challenged for their “dishonesty and misrepresentation” by the then-governor of Texas, Ann Richards, Troy contradicted himself with a claim that an “infrared overflight [by] a British military aircraft brought over from England” had found evidence of a meth lab in our building. According to Bill Cryer, her former spokesman, Richards “was surprised, and she was furious about the original attack. She thought it was unnecessary.”

  At the 1995 congressional hearings a New Hampshire Republican congressman, Bill Zeliff, commented that “ATF agents responsible for preparing the affidavits knew or should have known that m
any of the statements they were making were false.”

  Special Agent Davy Aguilera, the mastermind behind the corrupt affidavit, had visited Henry McMahon’s house in July 1992, when Aguilera refused David’s invitation to come and inspect our weapons. Apart from listing the legal gun parts and explosive ingredients in Mount Carmel, Aguilera’s affidavit claimed that an “informant” had seen magazines like Shotgun News in Mount Carmel, offering that up as evidence we were a dangerous bunch. But Shotgun News is an established trade magazine with close to 150,000 subscribers.

  Aguilera also interviewed a number of former community members who’d turned against David, including Jeannine and Robyn Bunds, Poia Vaega, David Block, and, of course, Marc Breault. Breault told Aguilera that David might kill agents who tried to serve him with a warrant; or, if we were forewarned, we’d hide all our guns. Marc also asserted that David might order a mass suicide or start a “holy war” if agents tried to investigate Mount Carmel. The ATF’s affidavit also quoted social worker Joyce Sparks as saying that David had told her that “when he ‘reveals’ himself the riots in Los Angeles would pale in comparison to what was going to happen in Waco.” However, Sparks said she heard this on April 6, 1992, weeks before the L.A. riots broke out on April 30. Throughout the affidavit the loaded word “cult” was used to describe and damn us.

  Aguilera even misrepresented an incident in which a neighbor of ours had claimed he’d heard a machine gun firing on our property. When deputies investigated the complaint, they found that the supposed machine gun was actually a perfectly legal “hellfire device,” a trigger attachment that merely simulates the sound of a machine gun—nothing more than a grown-up toy that appealed to some of our more macho characters. In the affidavit, however, it was simply stated that a neighbor had reported machine-gun fire, without explaining the rest.

  Also, there were gross technical inaccuracies about firearms, all in a document prepared by an agency that was supposed to regulate them. For example, the affidavit declared that David had bought devices called “upper and lower receivers” to modify AK-47 rifles to fire as full automatics. However, any gun expert could have explained that an AK-47 has a solid receiver that cannot be deconstructed.

  To top things off, David was portrayed as a raving child molester and abuser. Poia Vaega claimed that she’d been “imprisoned” for three and a half months and that her sister, Doreen Saipaia, had been physically and sexually abused. But in a February 23 memo, later reported by the Dallas Morning News, the FBI stated that no information had been developed to verify allegations of “child abuse and neglect, tax evasion, slavery, and reports of possible mass destruction.” Apart from the falsity of all these charges, the point is that none of them, except the firearms issue, were under the ATF’s jurisdiction.

  In fact, the ATF blatantly ignored the FBI, along with Texas authorities at every level, deeming them untrustworthy. The ATF flew Marc Breault in from Australia in January, and Kiri Jewell’s father, David, an ally of Marc Breault’s, revealed later that he was transported to and from Waco by the ATF “because there was a concern of [sic] the integrity of local law enforcement.” The ATF’s overall concern was to grab for itself all the glory that would result from a raid against Mount Carmel. Well in advance of the event, ATF Special Agent Sharon Wheeler planned a press conference to feature the triumphant attack on Mount Carmel immediately after it was concluded. For days before February 28, she phoned TV stations and other media to invite them to attend. And ATF representatives collaborated with the local Tribune-Herald for months during the time the newspaper was preparing its “Sinful Messiah” series on David. The agency told the paper’s editors when it was going to mount its assault, and the Tribune-Herald arranged to begin publishing its articles at the same time.

  In truth, the ATF was badly in need of some good press. The botched Ruby Ridge engagement had shown the agency in its worst light thus far—incompetent and trigger-happy. In addition, allegations of sexual harassment by female ATF agents were aired in a segment on CBS’s 60 Minutes during January 1993. As a consequence, the ATF seemed to many inside and outside government to have lost its coherence and perhaps its purpose. It was said that its law enforcement functions could be more efficiently handled by other agencies, such as the FBI, and its funds had long been threatened by federal budget-cutters.

  Facing a congressional budget hearing on March 10, 1993, the ATF was sure that a video of a dramatic raid on Mount Carmel would mend its image. The bureau leaders seemed to envisage the attack as an episode on a reality-TV program like Cops, in which the cameras follow law enforcement officers on actual operations.

  As I pointed out earlier, the ATF affidavit fudged the crucial issue of proof of our intent to use guns for criminal purposes. Even ATF chief Stephen Higgins later confessed that the warrant was weak in this regard. Though we were legally “ordering various parts and components and bringing them onto the premises,” Higgins explained, he had no valid reason to believe we intended any illegal use whatsoever of our guns.

  The issue of intent is central here, and it deserves an explanation. For example: It’s illegal to own an unregistered sawed-off shotgun; but that does not mean that anyone who owns a standard shotgun and a hacksaw automatically intends to cut off its barrels. Intent must be demonstrated under law before officials are allowed to come and inspect a person’s weapons, and the ATF had no real evidence of intent in our case.

  There’s another legal issue to consider in preparing a warrant: “staleness.” In a later comment on the ATF’s affidavit, Professor Edward McGlynn Gaffney Jr., a noted expert on constitutional law, declared that “the general rule is that information submitted to a magistrate must be based on recent information that supports the conclusion that the item sought in a search warrant is probably still in the place to be searched.” Most of the information Aguilera and his colleagues gleaned from people like Marc Breault was years old, yet those “facts” formed the core of the document submitted to U.S. Magistrate Dennis Green. “I conclude that… the [ATF] raid was an improper exercise of governmental authority,” Gaffney wrote.

  Gaffney also concluded that “no one has yet adduced credible evidence that Koresh’s community was likely to come out of their compound with guns blazing.… All the evidence of ‘inciting or producing imminent lawless action’ points to the BATF and the FBI, not to the Branch Davidians.”

  In any event, the warrant issued by Judge Green on February 25 was not the “no-knock” variety that allows law enforcement officers to burst into a place without warning—the infamous dynamic entry. It was, in fact, the kind of warrant that requires law officials to knock and request entry. Only if such peaceful access is denied may violent means be used. Under federal law, an officer or agent serving such a search warrant “may break open any outer or inner door or window of a house, or any part of a house, or anything therein, if, after notice of his authority and purpose, he is refused admittance.” The ATF’s own manual states: “Officers are required to wait a reasonable period of time to permit the occupants to respond before forcing entry.” This is the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition of unreasonable search and seizure in action.

  Former FBI Special Agent Clinton R. Van Zandt, who was assigned to Waco three weeks after the February raid, later declared: “I believe that the initial confrontation between the ATF and the Branch Davidians should not have taken place, at least not as an armed confrontation between citizens and those sworn to protect the citizens.”

  Apart from all this, it was obvious that David could have been arrested outside Mount Carmel at any time during the month of February prior to the ATF raid. After all, he was the only one actually named in the affidavit, and if the ATF’s main intention was to take out our leader, the agents need never have mounted their massive assault.

  In January and February, many of us, including David, regularly went jogging along Double EE, right past the house where Robert Rodriguez and the other ATF agents were living. A couple of times I saw
a big truck pull out of the house’s driveway. The three guys with cowboy hats and Chuck Norris mustaches sitting in the front seat waved to us as we ran by. Clearly, they could’ve arrested David, or any of us, at any time. During this period David went into Waco on several occasions and could have been quietly taken into custody.

  But that would have spoiled the ATF’s dynamic-entry photo-op. As Congressmen Bill McCollum and Bill Zeliff, co-chairs of the House investigation into the Waco siege, commented: “In making this decision ATF agents exercised extremely poor judgement, made erroneous assumptions and ignored the foreseeable perils of their course of action.”*

  As it happened, Showtime was almost upstaged by a far more threatening occurrence. On February 26, two days before the planned attack on Mount Carmel, Islamic fundamentalists bombed New York City’s World Trade Center. Six people died, and more than a thousand others were injured.

  Immediately, John P. Simpson, U.S. Treasury’s acting secretary for enforcement, directed that the Waco raid be called off, citing “grave reservations over the adequacy of precautions to ensure the safety of ATF agents and the Davidians.” Army special forces briefing papers from that period reveal that the ATF expected casualties, including agents as well as “civilians.”

  Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Ron Noble agreed with Simpson, but ATF Director Higgins insisted the raid should proceed, assuring Simpson and Noble that “those directing the raid were instructed to cancel the operation if they learned that its secrecy had been compromised.” This was a surprising remark, given that the ATF agents in the Waco area had made no effort to conceal their preparations and had already alerted the media.

 

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