Phil Arnold predicted that David would decide whether to come out during Passover, which ran from April 7 to April 14. On April 4, David and Steve confirmed this prediction to DeGuerin and Zimmerman. We took it as a good sign when in early April the FBI allowed a Passover Haggadah, sent by Pablo Cohen’s Israeli mother, Shulamit, into Mount Carmel.
During Passover, David went into an intense spiritual mode. His intensity radiated throughout the building, warming us all with hope and faith. Even the kids picked up on this mood; I could see a new brightness in their eyes. For me, that rare quality of “holiness,” of being close to a true spiritual presence, never felt more pure. It seemed that through hardship and hunger, through the pain of his wounds and the delirium of his nightmares, David had finally come into his own.
I saw him several times and was amazed by the serene look on his face. It was as if he’d arrived at the center of himself after a long journey through the wilderness of his own soul.
The impromptu Passover Bible study he gave one evening to a few of us lingering in the hallway where he lay propped up against the wall to ease his wounds was quiet in tone but very moving. His text was the opening of the 40th Psalm: I waited patiently for the Lord; and he inclined unto me, and heard my cry. He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock.
David’s low voice vibrated with tenderness as he ruminated on the mercy that balances divine judgment. “The mercy is in the judgment,” he said softly, “the judgment is in the mercy,” and for an instant I felt I was given an insight into a dimension in which all paradoxes are illusory, a trick of the clouded eye.
In the presence of that man, who was simultaneously so ordinary and so amazing, all of my life seemed focused. For a flash of time I was given not a vision but a view of how the spiritual qualities in our lives were one and the same as the bodies and characters we carry around; how the “me” that yearned to be better than I was and the “me” that was no better than I was would always be brothers under the skin; uneasy siblings to be sure, but sharing the same blood.
As soon as Passover ended, David knew what he must do. On April 14, the day the festival was done, he sent a letter to Dick DeGuerin, informing him he’d been granted permission to write down his interpretation of the Seven Seals. He wrote:
“I am presently being permitted to document in structured form the decoded messages of the seven seals. Upon completion of this task, I will be freed of my waiting period. I hope to finish this as soon as possible and stand before man and answer any and all questions regarding my activities.… I am working night and day.… As soon as I see that people like Jim Tabor and Phil Arnold have a copy, I will come out and then you can do your thing with this beast.”
The significance of this letter was huge. Until then, David had never written down his message, except for the notes he’d scribbled in the margins of his Bible, like Talmudic commentaries. He’d long believed that his message could not and should not be written down until he received permission from God. And now, at last, it was granted.
With high energy, David immediately set about writing and taping his interpretation of the Seals. Steve edited the text, knowing that David, a dropout plagued by bad grammar and poor spelling, was more at ease with the spoken than the written word. Judy Schneider tried typing the edited version, but her injured index finger had a splint, so she handed the task over to Clive Doyle and Ruth Riddle, who transcribed David’s words onto a disk in the computer we powered with the last dregs of fuel for our emergency generator. At the rate he was going, David reckoned it would take him about two to three weeks to complete his exposition. In the community there was calm and joy as we dreamed of our release from the long ordeal.
To keep the lines open during those last days, David sent out a flow of letters filled with quotations from Old Testament prophets. The feds, characterizing them as “cryptic,” handed the letters to a self-proclaimed cult-buster they’d retained as a consultant, who characterized the biblical quotations as “rampant, morbidly virulent paranoia.” Jeff Jamar dismissed David’s crucial letter to DeGuerin as “just another delaying tactic.” When Dick informed the FBI that we would come out when David had finished writing his document, Special Agent Bob Ricks, second in command of the operation, was contemptuous. The agents caricatured David as Lucy from the comic strip “Peanuts,” who always moves the football at the last moment before Charlie Brown is about to kick off. Even worse, it appears that Attorney General Janet Reno, still new to the office, was never shown this crucial letter lest it influence her to call off the already planned attack. The FBI continued to claim that the negotiations were “at an impasse.”
David’s manuscript begins with a poem:
Search forth for the meaning here,
Hidden within these words
’Tis a song that’s sung of fallen tears.…
David saw himself as the Lamb, the figure chosen to open the Seals and bring about the final fulfillment of prophecy. Quoting biblical chapter and verse in his complex, highly individual fashion, he explained that this Lamb, coming at the end of days, will be scorned and bad-mouthed, just as he had been. Yet those who accept the message of the Seals will be invited to the divine wedding of the spirit. It ends: “Should we not eagerly ourselves be ready to accept this truth and come out of our closet and be revealed to the world as those who love Christ in truth and in righteousness?”
On April 16 Steve told the FBI that David said the first section of the manuscript he was writing was twenty-five to twenty-eight pages long. To counter the FBI’s skepticism that David’s decision to write down his interpretation of the Seals was no more than a ploy to buy time, Steve, who was editing the tapes, offered to send the feds an example to show that the work was progressing quickly. He even asked for typewriter ribbons so that he could send them a sample of David’s writings.
Instead of showing appreciation for this good-faith offer, the feds sent a Bradley crashing into the wall of the building right where Graeme Craddock was lying in his bunk, injuring his shoulder. David’s son, Cyrus, who happened to be in the room, was terrified. To cap it all, the FBI demanded that fifty people must be sent out next day or they would have to “take action.”
In an attempt to soothe the feds’ impatience, David sent out a powerful drawing by our artist, Cliff Sellors, illustrating the statue from the Book of Daniel. The agents dismissed this as just more “Bible stuff,” and Steve retorted that every time we did something to cooperate with the authorities their response was more destruction.
The First Seal was completed April 18, and David was deep in the draft of the Second Seal, dictating to Ruth Riddle for four solid hours the Sunday night before the FBI launched its massive final assault. Tabor later remarked that “in a short time, under most trying circumstances, Koresh produced a substantial piece of work”—the first section of a manuscript Tabor estimated would have run between fifty and seventy-five pages that “might have taken him another week or more to write.” Tabor added: “There is not the slightest doubt in my mind that David Koresh would have surrendered peacefully when he finished his manuscript.”
Jack Zimmerman confirmed this. “When Dick DeGuerin and I talked to them [the Davidians] on the day after Passover—April 14, 1993, they were ecstatic,” he said. “The ‘waiting period’ described in the Bible would soon be over, and they were coming out.”
Looking back, it’s clear that the view from inside our besieged building during those last weeks was totally at odds with the way the forces facing us perceived the situation. Whereas we’d come to hope for a peaceful, spiritual resolution derived from David’s explication of scriptural texts, the feds were lurching toward violence.
In late March, after four weeks’ staging outside Mount Carmel, the tactical agents were getting tired and irritable. They were shivering in the cold prairie winds, eating the same cold pizzas, day after day, forced to listen to the same crazy loudspeaker racket they were blasting a
t us. I sympathized with their dislike of the arid Texas landscape, but at least they had heated shelters to retreat into, unlike us, who shivered when the nighttime temperatures dipped below freezing. And those pizzas would have been welcome comfort after living for weeks on bland K-rations.
“Tempers were fraying,” the Justice Department report later stated. To make matters worse, the bosses in Washington were increasingly embarrassed by the agency’s failure to subdue a bunch of religious nuts despite all the force and power they’d mustered.
Some seven hundred law enforcement officers were deployed around Mount Carmel. The FBI committed 250, the ATF 150, including agents and support personnel. In addition, there were officers from the Texas Rangers, the Waco police, the McLennan County Sheriff’s Office, U.S. Customs, the Texas National Guard, the Texas Department of Public Safety, and the U.S. Army. The cost of maintaining this considerable force has been variously reckoned at around $500,000 per day, the final total exceeding $30 million.
Along with the feds’ impatience, the Waco locals were growing restless, resenting the heavy government presence and the terrible rep their town was receiving in the global media circus, where “Waco” and “wacko” were now synonymous. Waco hotels were bursting at the seams trying to quarter more than 1,000 reporters and their crews. And though Wacoans surely welcomed the money these accidental tourists brought in, they were by nature uncomfortable with outsiders.
Meanwhile, at FBI headquarters in Washington, a diabolical final assault plan on Mount Carmel was hatching. The key concept in the so-called Jericho Plan was the use of tear gas to force us from the building. If we weren’t driven out by the gas, “walls would be torn down to increase the exposure of those remaining inside,” despite the stated “risk [of] harming the children.” Failing that, the fallback became total demolition of our home by tanks and bulldozers.
Even the slightly more sympathetic federal negotiators were sucked into this sinister mode. For instance, FBI chief negotiator Byron Sage had agreed to get the FBI to turn off the loudspeakers to avoid a sacrilegious desecration of the Passover. But at dusk, as the festival period began, the feds rudely cut Steve off when he phoned to complain that the racket was still blaring. When Steve went outside in an attempt to talk to the FBI, they drove him back into the building with a few hurled flashbang grenades that might well have wounded him badly.
Speculating that the grenades came from the antagonistic tactical agents, Steve tried to reach Sage, screaming into the phone that he wanted to meet the negotiator to clear up the apparent confusion. But he got nowhere. When he tried to go outside again, he was greeted by more grenades. On April 15, after Passover, several of the people inside Mount Carmel, anticipating a peaceful end to the conflict, tried to leave the building, but they were also driven back by grenades. So much for the feds’ claim that we were being held hostage by David.
These incidents should have shaken our optimism and warned us that something sinister was in the works, but somehow we accepted them as part of the process. Several people were skeptical, but nobody really wanted to listen to their deepening self-doubts. Passing along the upstairs corridor one morning, I overheard a woman’s voice: “Those guys just like to be rude. It don’t mean a thing.” On April 15, we cheered when a helicopter struck a guywire on takeoff and lurched around just off the ground like a huge, drunken dragonfly. It put a real dent in the G-men’s super-macho image.
Still, we kept trying to keep the feds happy. On April 16, to calm their doubts about our intentions, David had this conversation with an FBI negotiator named Dick, recorded on government tapes:
David: Dick, it’s a real world, and that’s why I’m sympathetic with your position. I realize you’re frustrated and I agree with you.
Dick: But—just tell me this David—are you saying that when you finish that manuscript—
David: Then I’ll be out, yes, definitely.
Dick: That could mean a lot of things, David. That could mean—
David: I’ll be in custody in the jailhouse. You can come down there and feed me bananas if you want.… I’ll be splitting out of this place. I’m so sick of MREs, Dick.
Dick: I’m gonna let you go so you can get back to work because, David, frankly, I’m eagerly awaiting this manuscript.
David: Well, I’ll tell you what. It’s gonna blow your socks off.
The conversation continued in a cordial fashion, and at one point David said jokingly, “Will you take a shower for me? Thank you.”
Later that day they talked again:
Dick: Well, I’m asking you… a simple question—
David: And I’m giving you the simple answer. Yes. Yes. Yes. I never intended to die in here.
On April 18, the day before the assault, David talked to another, unnamed, agent:
David: The general’s out here, right? You have a hard time controlling them, right?
Agent: I don’t control them. No.
David: Okay. Well, look, we’ve done everything we can to be able to communicate in a nice, passionate way.… We’ve not been your everyday kind of terrorist.… These [FBI] generals… they’re not only destroying private property, they’re also removing evidence.… Like that ’68 SS El Camino that belonged to Paul Fatta… they’re not showing good faith.
Agent: This thing has lasted way too long.
David: It should never have gotten started this way.
Agent: You’re right.
David: I’m a life, too, and there’s a lot of people in here that are lives. There’s children in here.… I was at the front door. I was willing to talk to them. They shot at me first.… Whoever wants to go out can go out.
In mid-March, Janet Reno, soon to be the leading lady in this deadly drama, took her place at center stage.
When we heard that Reno had been sworn in as U.S. Attorney General, we felt a collective surge of hope. Perhaps a woman, a prosecutor from Dade County, Florida, known for her concern for children, coming from outside the Washington political and bureaucratic circus, would stop this federal steamroller in its tracks. We prayed that Reno’s cool head would prevail; that she would shake the government to its senses and compel it to realize that the feds had allowed a botched, questionable raid by the ATF to become the occasion for a macho display of official revenge.
And indeed, on April 12, when FBI Director William Sessions and Assistant Attorney General Webster Hubbell, among other Justice Department officials, presented Reno with the agency’s 568-page Jericho Plan for a final assault on Mount Carmel, her instinctive reaction was, “Why now? What are the arguments for waiting?”
In her response, Reno was echoing the attitude of her immediate predecessor, Acting Attorney General Stuart Gerson. Until Gerson, a Bush appointee, left office on March 11, the only escalation he’d allowed the FBI at Waco was to move extra armored vehicles into the vicinity. “I felt there was no need to force a change in the status quo,” he later testified. “We were getting people out.”
However, Reno’s native caution was soon undermined. In the weeks immediately following her confirmation as America’s top lawyer, William Sessions and Webster Hubbell were breathing down Reno’s neck, urging her to make a decision.*
Attorney General Reno also spoke with past and present commanders of Delta Force, the Army’s crack assault unit, about the FBI’s attack strategy. Their final solution to the Mount Carmel problem was to urge her to blitz the entire building. If they want Armageddon, the thinking went, let ’em have it!
In the end, the FBI’s marginally less drastic Jericho Plan called for a “step-by-step process” in which tear gas would be pumped into our building to drive us out over forty-eight hours, but no armored vehicles or gunfire would be used against us. The cocktail favored by the feds to subdue us was a mixture of a white crystalline powdered chemical called orthochloro-benzalmalononitrile (CS) in a solution of methylene chloride, a potent depressant of the human central nervous system. CS causes nausea, disorientation, dizziness, shortness
of breath, tightness in the chest, burning of the skin, intense tearing, coughing, and vomiting. In January 1993 the United States and 130 other countries had signed the Chemical Weapons Convention banning the use of CS gas in warfare; apparently there is no prohibition on its use against American citizens.
The use of this chemical on civilians has been condemned by organizations across the board, from Amnesty International to the U.S. Army. The Army’s manual on civil disturbances states that “excessive exposure to CS may make them incapable of vacating the area.” The company that makes CS warns that when the gas burns it gives off fumes that can kill. Benjamin C. Garrett, director of the Chemical and Biological Arms Control Institute in Alexandria, Virginia, explains that CS is even deadlier for kids, because “the smaller you are, the sooner you would feel the response.”
Describing the effects upon a child exposed to CS gas they had examined in an earlier incident, some pediatricians observed that immediately after exposure the child “required suctioning to relieve upper airway obstruction” and suffered from cyanosis, turning purple from lack of oxygen. The infant these doctors examined developed pneumonia and chemical first-degree burns on the skin and required four weeks of hospitalization. Harvard law professor and psychiatrist Alan Stone, who was later asked to review the FBI’s actions by the Justice Department, suggested that CS made the kids vomit uncontrollably from symptoms of chemical pneumonia. “To use it with babies, I continue to believe it was like holding a gun to the parents’ head,” he said.
Federal Laboratories, which supplies CS to the FBI, warns in its manual: “Under no circumstances should [CS] grenades, cartridges or projectiles designed for use in riots be used in confined areas. A hazardous overdose could be created by the release of… even one full-sized grenade in a closed room.” CS is effective at a concentration of ten milligrams per cubic meter of air. Over a six-hour period on April 19, the FBI delivered 1,900 grams of CS chemical agent into our building, creating concentrations in some rooms almost sixteen times that amount, or twice the density considered life-threatening. No greater concentration of CS has ever been sprayed by government agents at U.S. civilians.
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