Waco

by David Thibodeau

  Pete Smerick, one of the FBI’s behavioral experts, wrote four memos counseling restraint between March 3 and March 8. Smerick said he was “pressured from above” to alter the tenor of his fifth memo, written on March 9. “As a result, that memo contained subtle changes in tone and emphasis that amounted to an endorsement of a more aggressive approach against the Branch Davidians,” he said. Frustrated, ignored by his superiors, Smerick finally removed himself from his advisory role in regard to Mount Carmel. Later, after resigning from the agency, he told the Washington Times that “bureau officials pressured him into changing his advice on how to resolve the situation without bloodshed.”

  Special Agent Clinton R. Van Zandt, another member of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee that there was no coordination between command, tactical, and negotiation teams, which met only once during the five weeks he was in Waco.

  “The negotiation team leaders were refused access to the HRT [Hostage Rescue Team] to discuss the role of negotiations in attempting to resolve the incident,” Van Zandt stated. “The lack of coordination between the tactical team and the negotiators further exacerbated an already bad situation, and added emotional fuel to the physical fire that consumed the Davidians.” Unfortunately, Van Zandt was an all-too-rare exception to the majority of federal cult-bashers gathered in Waco. A fundamentalist Sunday-school teacher and devoted reader of his much-thumbed King James Bible, Van Zandt lamented bitterly: “The FBI is better than this.”

  The Justice Department’s own October 1993 report frankly acknowledged that “the negotiators felt that the efforts of the tactical personnel were directed toward intimidations and harassment. In the negotiators’ judgment, those aggressive tactics undermined their own attempts to gain Koresh’s trust as a prelude to peaceful surrender.”

  In a footnote to his evaluation of the operation, former Assistant Attorney General Edward Dennis commented: “Indeed, the ‘negotiations’ are characterized as ‘communicating’ with Koresh or ‘talking’ to Koresh because the Davidian situation lacked so many of the elements typically present in hostage barricade situations. Koresh made no threats, set no deadlines and made no demands. Koresh and his followers were at Mount Carmel where they wanted to be and living under conditions which were marginally more severe than they were accustomed to.”

  “Koresh is not delusional, not possessed by a messiah complex,” chief FBI negotiator Byron Sage stated. In late March, the negotiators sent a videotape to us in which they tried to put faces to the voices we were hearing. On the tape they talked to us like human beings and showed us photos of their families. For such strategies Sage earned the slander (or compliment) written by the tactical guys on an outhouse: “Sage Is a Davidian.”

  In return, David tried to treat each negotiator as an individual, as a soul to be saved, not as just the faceless representative of a hostile government. Early on, when one agent suggested that a colleague was “just a voice” for the authorities, David retorted: “No, Jim is a person.” On the day after the ATF attack, David expressed his regret over the four agents who had been killed and said that, had circumstances been different, they might have become his friends.

  Still, we were deeply frustrated by the negotiators’ lack of clout with their superiors. “They’ve got things being relayed all 1,000 or 1,500 miles back to D.C. It’s not a simple chain of command,” one FBI man told us plaintively. When David asked to speak to “one of your generals,” he was told it wasn’t possible. “Then why should I waste time talking to you?” he snapped. At times we thought the negotiators were pretending sympathy as a ploy, a kind of good cop–bad cop strategy. But from the exasperation in the negotiators’ voices you could tell they were truly upset about the way things were developing.

  Steve suggested we might exploit their frustration and turn the negotiators into our advocates. He tried this once or twice but soon bumped his head on the low ceiling of that rigid, official “culture of disbelief.” Pissed off with the negotiators’ powerlessness, David finally burst out with, “That’s what you people are, you’re professional waitresses!”

  Finally, Jeff Jamar and his cohorts whipped the negotiators into line, ordering them to cut through the Bible babble and get tough with us. We now know exactly how that strategy worked out.

  13

  RANCH APOCALYPSE

  During the first few days after the canceled capitulation, we struggled to adjust to yet another extraordinary situation. Still stunned by the recent ferocious attack, we had to get our heads around the possibility that we would again be besieged in the middle of Texas by our own government.

  I’d read of ancient sieges that had gone on for months, even years, until the surrounded folk were starved into surrender. When I heard a caller on a radio show suggest that the feds should just build a razor-wire fence around our property and withdraw, leaving us alone until we were driven out by hunger, my mind froze. Could we really be treated like a kind of social cancer that had to be isolated, starved, and left to wither?

  Dazed, unsure of my own feelings, I tried to gauge the general mood inside Mount Carmel, expecting a wave of despair. To my surprise I sensed a tide of triumph under the lingering shock of the assault and the bitterness of the loss of six of our people. “We’re still here,” Jaime said triumphantly. “We held off the feds!”

  His exultant words made me realize that we had, in fact, stood up against a host of heavily armed agents representing the almighty power of the U.S. government. This buoyant feeling was tempered by the realization that we now had to settle in for the long haul, cut off from the “real” world.

  Psychologically, we had to begin to reconcile ourselves to the possibility that we might be confined to the Anthill indefinitely—no easy thing. “I hate this place!” Steve said, over and over. Even David, during those early siege days, blurted to a negotiator that he had no intention of “sitting here rotting and dying. I’d rather live in prison than have to live in this cold place.”

  Spiritually, the siege put us in a kind of limbo. Though we seemed to be in the “little season,” its duration was uncertain and its outcome was out of our hands. There might be divine intervention, a sudden “translation” from earth to heaven, or the bloody end predicted in the Fifth Seal. Ironically, it was up to the feds to decide our fate, through patient negotiation, or by fencing us in and walking away, or by annihilation. All we could do was wait and stand by our beliefs.

  Frankly, I had little faith in translation, and a full comprehension of the Fifth Seal was beyond me. I no longer trusted anything the government was saying, so I had no idea how things might work out. Essentially, it was up to David.

  My feelings for David deepened during the siege. I saw how he suffered both physically and spiritually, his body and his soul tormenting him by turns. He had a rare kind of fortitude, it seemed to me: the courage to stick to his vision even though its consequences might be fatal for himself and the people he cared for with all his heart—not only his own children and the women who were close to him, but all of us. I’d never wanted to have that weight on my shoulders.

  Whether anyone believed it or not, David felt he had to wait on God’s word, and that Old Guy in the Sky takes his own, sweet time. I still didn’t consider David as “Christ” or the “Messiah”—as I’ve said, he always vehemently rejected those terms—but as someone who had been given a special teaching I valued tremendously. My loyalty was to the message he gave me, not to any godlike being; but I also felt a personal loyalty to a man I respected and who’d become my friend.

  Now my allegiance to the teachings and the man became more and more intense. During the siege, I often deliberately sat in front of the window close to where David was lying or standing, so that if a sniper wanted to take him out he’d have to go through me. And that was no mean risk. Apparently, FBI snipers had David in their sights several times.

  During the first five days of the siege, twenty-one children exited, along with
some of the elderly folks, like Gladys Ottman, James Lewis Lawter, Victorine Hollingsworth, and Annetta Richards, a Jamaican nurse. All of these people were sixty-something or older. In addition, several younger women, such as Sheila Martin and Rita Fay Riddle, soon departed Mount Carmel. Eight of the adults were held as material witnesses in McLennan County Jail, then some were released to a halfway house. Victorine, ailing and shaken by her experience, was sent to the hospital.

  As she saw her kids leave, one mother whispered, “See you on the other side”—a sentence than could be read several ways.

  To entice David’s seven-year-old son, Cyrus, to leave Mount Carmel, a negotiator spun Cyrus a yarn about his cousins, Kevin and Mark Jones: “We gave them some Coke and candy and they got to ride in that tank.” The agent told Cyrus that if we all came out “moms and stuff and everybody can stay together.” This was an outright lie, since many of the women were jailed.

  Another negotiator discussed with Rachel, Cyrus’s mother, the feeding of the children who’d exited. She suggested a healthy diet of fresh fruit, juices, and vegetables, maybe some hot dogs—but no pork, forbidden by our dietary rules. However, it soon became clear that the kids were, as Cyrus’s pal said, being fed a junkload of sodas and candy, which distressed Rachel and the other mothers.

  Custody hearings were held for children whose relatives had come to claim them. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, and sisters arrived from Florida and Hawaii, London and Australia. Kathy Schroeder’s former husband, U.S. Air Force Sergeant William Mabb, was given custody of the three children they had in common. When Kathy herself came out with her son, Bryan, Mike’s boy, she was held as a material witness, and Bryan was put in the care of the Texas Department of Child Protective Services for “evaluation.”

  Balenda and my Uncle Bob had flown in from Bangor a few days after the siege began. Later I learned that she supported herself by working the desk at Waco’s Brittany Hotel. She immediately began to pressure the feds to allow the families to connect with their relatives inside Mount Carmel.

  “How could it hurt for our voices to come in?” Balenda insisted. “We, the families, are not going to stand back and find we waited too long. I don’t want a dead son.”

  For all her previous activism, my mother had never experienced a situation as complex and confused as this one. After rejecting the advice of Rick Ross and his Cult Awareness Network, she had to learn on her own how to cope with both the feds and the media. A vivid, passionate person, she became the families’ spokeswoman in interviews with journalists like Katie Boyle of CBS-TV’s 48 Hours and Kathleen Davis of CBS-TV’s Morning Live.

  “I am really angry because I really feel there needs to be that middle ground, a faction, a voice that is not empowered by guns, but is empowered by love,” she said in an eloquent public statement. “Is there any reason that I can’t say goodbye to my child if in fact I’m going to lose him?”

  One of the FBI negotiators I talked to suggested that I should make a videotape and send it out to my mother. “We’ll get it to her, so she can see how you’re doing,” he said, faking concern for Balenda. Taking the man at his word, I made a short tape and gave it to Steve to hand over to the feds. On camera, I wore my zipped leather jacket and a University of Maine T-shirt, affecting a reassuringly casual look. I told Balenda I knew she was nearby, pulling for me. “I know it’s hard on you, but I have to see this through,” I said. “I’m always kind of teasing you for being emotional, Mom,” I added, knowing she’d understand that I appreciated her support and felt her love. (Of course the FBI lied again, my mother never got to see this tape at that time.)

  Ruth Mosher, Sherri Jewell’s mother, said: “When I flew to Waco on March 11, 1993, I tried to get the FBI to let me talk to Sher to see if there was any way I could talk her into coming out. The FBI refused to let me get near the scene.… Besides myself, there were parents who flew in from Hawaii just for that purpose, and they were also turned down.… My only regret is that I did not stay in Waco the entire time, like… Belinda [sic], David Thibodeau’s mother. At least David came out and was never incarcerated.”

  “Sheriff Harwell was skirting the fence,” Balenda told me afterward. “Being a typical live-and-let-live Texan, he felt you ought to have been left alone but had to bow to the feds. ‘My hands are tied, ma’am,’ he told me, but I kept at him.”

  I knew my mother wondered why I stayed inside Mount Carmel, risking my life. She felt that David had too much influence over me, and maybe she didn’t believe any of us really had the choice to come out at any time.

  She was wrong. Over the following weeks a few adults left, singly or in groups. On March 12, Kathy Schroeder and Oliver Gyarfas Jr. went out. On March 19, Brad Branch and Kevin Whitecliff departed, banished, in a way, for sneaking shots of whiskey. Two days later, seven more adults left. On March 23, David sent Livingston out as a spiritual emissary in a futile, last-ditch attempt to explain our feelings and beliefs to a deeply hostile audience.

  Most of the adults who exited did so reluctantly. In some cases, especially the women, David said he wanted chaperones for the children who’d already gone out. Maybe some of the people who departed did want to leave but didn’t like to admit it.

  On the three main videotapes we made during the siege and sent out to the feds (who didn’t show them to the media), a number of our men, women, and children explained why they had chosen to stay in Mount Carmel. The scratchy tapes, which the FBI was afraid to release, as one fed said, for fear that “Koresh would gain much sympathy,” were vivid snapshots of our community:

  “This is where existence is for me in the world,” says Bernadette Monbelly, a young black woman from England who died in the fire.

  Ofelia Santoyo, who later exited, tells her family “not to worry about me because these prophecies have to be fulfilled.”

  Livingston’s wife, Evette, speaks of regretting her decision to send her children out in the first week of the siege. “They’d be safer [here] than being in the hands of Babylon,” she declares.

  David, unshaven, leans against the corridor wall wearing a white sweatshirt, obviously in pain. He talks to a number of the kids, beginning with seven-year-old Cyrus, whose long, golden hair frames his small, serious face. Flashing his Harley-Davidson sweater, Cyrus says bluntly: “They tore up my motorcycle. Makes me mad.”

  “You love Daddy?” David asks his shy, six-year-old daughter, Star, and she coyly nods. David’s plump, sixteen-month-old girl, Bobbie, still unsteady on her pins, hugs her dad and mugs for the camera. “Our little clown,” David grins, kissing the baby.

  These three are Rachel’s children, David’s “legitimate” offspring. He goes on to introduce his other kids, the heart of the House of David, the future Elders of our faith.

  “How much do you love me?” he asks three-year-old, dimpled Dayland Gent, Nicole’s son. “I love you three,” the boy replies, who then goes on to recite his ABCs. Nicole joins David with her baby, Paige, “my Australian baby.” “We met at my mother’s house,” Nicole recalls, brushing back her long brown hair.

  Mayanah, Judy Schneider’s fair-haired two-year-old, is “my little mynah bird,” David says. “She’s a talker.” My favorite, Serenity, waves bravely to the camera, hiding her shy face and rosebud mouth. In answer to David’s question, she says, “I want to grow up to be a woman.” Aisha Gyarfas, very pregnant, cradles one-year-old Startle on her lap and flicks her auburn hair.

  Julie’s dark-skinned son, Joe, chatters on about his 50cc motorbike and his boxing and baseball gloves. He remembers the bullets that came close to killing him on February 28. “We got on the floor, scared, praying to God,” he says solemnly. David asks Joe’s little brother, Isaiah, “You love your enemies?” “No,” the boy retorts, provoking laughter.

  Two of the older girls explain why they’ve chosen to remain in Mount Carmel. “I don’t want to come out,” says Audrey Martinez, all of thirteen. Fellow teenager Rachel Sylvia declares: “Love is here. God is here.�
�

  Confronting the inquisitive lens, David says: “This is my family. It might not be like your family, but no one’s going to come in on top of my family and start pushing us around.”

  In a lighter vein, he compares his troubles with the ATF and the FBI to “getting into a fight with your neighbor. The little brother whips you, then big brother comes over to investigate.”

  An FBI negotiator’s log revealed why the agency feared the tapes would create sympathy for us. “Each person on the video—male and female, young and old, spoke in a calm, assured tone of their desire to remain inside, even after the experience of the ATF raid only a few days earlier,” the 1993 Justice Department report stated. “The abiding impression is not a bunch of ‘lunatics,’ but rather a group of people who, for whatever reason, believed so strongly in Koresh that the notion of leaving the squalid compound was unthinkable.”

  The FBI sent in a tape of the kids who’d gone out, and we gathered in the chapel to watch it on the VCR. Afterward, the mothers were very upset about how rackety the kids were. But I understood; it was like a party for them. Julie Martinez complained that the children out there were “hyper as heck,” and many of the mothers felt the kids were being defiled by the forbidden foods they were given.

  The overwrought way the children were behaving on this tape had a profound effect on Julie. Her five children—Audrey, Abigail, Joseph, Isaiah, and Crystal, ranging in age from thirteen to three—were the largest family, outside of David’s twelve children, remaining in Mount Carmel.

  The FBI had hoped that it would gain a psychological advantage if Julie had let her children exit, thereby leaving David and his family as the last holdouts, apart from the adult men and women, Wayne Martin’s two oldest daughters, Sheila Jr. and Lisa, plus thirteen-year-old Rachel Sylvia and six-year-old Melissa Morrison. David offered to let Melissa leave if the FBI would let him talk to Robert Rodriguez; but the FBI, suspecting Robert’s loyalty, refused. Melissa herself asked to stay in Mount Carmel with her mother, Rosemary, a black woman from Britain.