Compounding the terrors of this gas mixture is its potential for causing fire. The Dow Chemical Company’s Material Safety Data Sheet on methylene chloride states that this chemical “forms flammable vapor-air mixtures.” The warning adds: “In confined or poorly ventilated areas, vapors can readily accumulate and cause unconsciousness and death.” Eric R. Larsen, Ph.D., a retired Dow chemist, confirmed a later Associated Press report that “MeCl [methylene chloride] vapors will reduce the flash point of hydrocarbon fuels and thus will enhance the rate of flame spread. One might as well toss gas on a fire.” Poorly ventilated areas “could have been turned into an area similar to one of the gas chambers used by the Nazis at Auschwitz,” Larsen added.
This was the deadly brew the FBI brass was quietly cooking up for us while appearing to accept that we were getting ready to come out, as soon as David finished writing his interpretation of the Seals.
On Saturday, April 17, the day after David’s friendly chat with Agent Dick, Reno suddenly agreed to the use of CS gas. The next day she phoned President Clinton to tell him of her decision. Clinton wondered if they should hold off a while longer, but Reno, now hot to trot, talked him around. “Well, okay,” Clinton said vaguely, declaring it was her decision. (At an April 20 press conference, a Hamlet-like Clinton wondered rhetorically: “Is there some other question they [the FBI] should have asked? Is there some other question I should have asked? Can I say for sure that… we could have done nothing else to make the outcome different?”)
Once Reno gave the go-ahead to the FBI, she was caught up in the agency’s web of half-truths and outright lies. For instance, Reno has said she was told—and believed—that David, despite his wounds, was still having sex with young girls. This information came from Kathy Schroeder, who left in mid-March. She claimed that when she went to say goodbye to David, she found him in bed with a girl. If Kathy’s story was true, David was really superhuman, given his weakened state.
Reno also claimed she was told that armed groups of militiamen were converging on Mount Carmel to free us. She named the so-called Unorganized Militia of the United States as an example. However, the FBI itself had earlier declared that this “threat” consisted of an Indianapolis attorney’s plan to “drive a van with other people to Waco, Texas, to stage a protest in support of the constitutional right of assembly and to have weapons.”
Later, Reno added a new excuse: She said that the “first and foremost” reason for allowing the attack was that “law enforcement agents on the ground concluded that the perimeter had become unstable and posed a risk both to them and to the surrounding homes and farms.” This, of course, was absolute nonsense.
Despite the FBI’s proven trickiness, Reno stubbornly declared during a July 1995 interview with the Washington Post: “After over two years of review, nothing has given me any indication that the FBI misled me.” Either she was dumber than she looked or else she was just trying to be one of the boys, a good team player.
On Sunday, the day before they struck us, the feds began clearing ground surrounding the building, preparing the terrain for armored vehicles. Their flimsy excuse was that David Jones had several times sneaked out the back door and nosed around. The agents made no attempt to conceal their movements. On the contrary, they deliberately moved Koresh’s beloved, souped-up, black ’68 Camaro. Believing the feds would trash his car out of sheer spite, David was very angry. That same day, the FBI demanded that fifty of us should come out as “proof of good faith,” but the hostile actions of the FBI didn’t encourage us to oblige.
In response to these provocations, Steve threatened the FBI negotiator, saying David would slow his work on the manuscript and thereby delay our exit from Mount Carmel. Actually, David was so caught up in the writing, so swept along with inspiration, that he couldn’t have curbed his pace even if he’d wanted to. In fact, he was so juiced that he was awake at 5:00 A.M. on the morning we were attacked, having not slept the night before.
In those last moments before the final attack, sensing something terrible was about to happen, my mom and the relatives of other people in Mount Carmel pestered Reno with faxes and registered mail, pleading with her to allow family members to contact us and maybe act as intermediaries in the negotiations for a peaceful end to the siege. Reno later claimed she was never told about this.
A week or so before the attack, Joyce Sparks of the Texas Department of Child Protective Services was asked by the FBI if she would work with medical staff to prepare showers and clean clothes for the children who would be coming out of Mount Carmel as a result of a gas attack. Sparks, who had led her department’s investigation into charges of child abuse in our community a year earlier, was greatly disturbed by the prospect that our children would be subjected to a tear gas attack, and she let the feds know it. Their response was to tell her to “forget about it,” and she assumed that the agents had sensibly decided that the use of tear gas was too dangerous for the kids.
When Sparks saw tear gas being injected into Mount Carmel on TV at 9:30 A.M. on April 19, she exclaimed: “They’re going to kill them all!” It was evident to her that the use of tear gas was extremely hazardous; and from her knowledge of our community, gained over numerous visits, she knew this brutal strategy would never force us to leave the building. Disillusioned, hurt, and angry, Sparks condemned the feds for going ahead with the gas assault over her vehement objections.
It must be said that the intended use of CS gas also troubled Janet Reno. Carl Stern, director of the Justice Department’s public-affairs office, sent word to Reno that he was worried that there might be a public outcry over the use of tear gas on women and children, comparing it to Saddam Hussein’s gassing of the Kurds in Iraq. But a U.S. Army toxicologist she consulted unaccountably assured her that the gas would “cause temporary distress but no lasting damage.” And in the rush of events climaxing during that second week of April, Reno later admitted that she hadn’t known then that the United States was a signatory to the international convention banning the use of CS gas in warfare.
Despite pressure from the Beltway bureaucracy, Reno still hesitated. When she suggested waiting until the water supplies ran out, the FBI sent a plane loaded with spy equipment on April 15 and reported, falsely, that our rear water tank was full. Reno was also told that we had plenty of water and that we were rationing ourselves to a pint a day to enforce discipline. The FBI didn’t tell Reno that its agents had shot the tanks full of holes and smashed the well pump outside our building. We were heading into summer, and summers in Waco are dry. Until the previous August, for instance, barely half an inch of rain had fallen in our area.
Reno didn’t discover till later that the FBI had lied to her about this, as it had about many other things. “I asked the FBI to check the water supply again,” Reno said at the 1995 congressional hearings, “and I was advised the supply was plentiful and it was constantly being replenished.” To this day, the appendix to the Justice Department’s report keeps the “Water Intelligence” entries for April 13 and 15 blacked out.
While Reno wavered, some as yet unidentified person in the FBI chain of command told her that the bugs they’d secretly smuggled into Mount Carmel revealed that David was “beating babies.” “You really mean babies?” Reno queried. “Yes,” the answer came, “he’s slapping babies around.”
(The bugs the FBI managed to place inside our building, by hiding them in items they sent in for us, relayed audio and visual images back to the command center at Texas State Technical College, ten miles away. These devices included tiny cameras that could record a full-color picture of a whole room from a lens measuring no more than an eighth of an inch.)
The FBI was well aware that, with Reno’s background in prosecuting child-abuse cases, this charge was a hot button. On the evening of April 19, hours after our tragedy, Reno would appear on talk shows and state that the FBI had “hard intelligence” that children were being beaten.
It was bunk. Two days later the FBI denied Reno’s clai
ms, dropping her in the soup. “We did not tell the Attorney General there was evidence of abuse during the siege,” an agency spokesman declared. “We passed on the 1992 reports from last year.” That is, the FBI gave the Attorney General a copy of the report of the intense investigation carried out in early 1992 by the Texas Department of Child Protective Services, which had been terminated for lack of evidence. Sessions himself later admitted that the bureau had “no contemporaneous evidence” of such abuse.
In fact, Child Protective Services officials, who immediately examined the kids who came out during the siege, uncovered no evidence of child abuse. They found the children to be “surprisingly healthy, happy, well adjusted, well educated, and only wanted to return as soon as they could to their friends and relatives in the compound.” In the March 8 issue of the New York Times, Texas correspondent Sam Howe Verhovek wrote that none of these children “show any signs of physical abuse.”
On April 11, 1993, Dr. Bruce Perry, chief of psychiatry at Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston, examined the Mount Carmel children in official custody and described them as being friendly, happy, and likable. He also told the Associated Press that the kids “are in very good condition and show no signs of abuse.” Later, on May 5, Dr. Perry told the Dallas Morning News: “We have no evidence that the children released from the compound were sexually abused.” On April 23, 1993, Texas child welfare executive Janice Caldwell reported, “The [surviving] children have not confirmed any of the allegations or described any other incidents which would verify our concerns about abuse.”
The notion that we would mistreat our children or deprive them of food and water showed how little the outside world understood our community’s values. Maybe if Reno had seen the loving, caring videotapes of our kids we sent out during the siege or heard the child say to an agent on the phone, “Are you comin’ to kill me?” she might have had second thoughts about the spurious charge of child abuse.
Reno has claimed ignorance of our videos when she was fretting about the babies. Yet just three days after we sent out the third video, on March 28, FBI spokesman Bob Ricks publicly acknowledged that David had provided a tape showing sixteen of the seventeen children and all four of the teenage girls inside, and that all of these young people were well and in fine spirits. Though the Washington Post reported this fact, Reno missed it. Was she lying—or just criminally careless? Did the FBI somehow screen this information from her, fearing it might provoke some honest sympathy for the children’s plight? In any case, Dr. Park Dietz, another FBI “expert,” claimed in a memo to Reno that David would “continue to make sexual use of any children who remain inside.”
This scurrilous memo appeared to override the last remaining shreds of Reno’s common sense. Together, Sessions and Hubbell bamboozled the neophyte Reno into signing off on the FBI’s assault plan, tear gas and all. Fearing being labeled indecisive by a bunch of bullying males, she began to retreat from her earlier healthy skepticism.
Despite its diabolical intentions, the FBI assumed a phony tone of moral righteousness where the children’s welfare was concerned. On April 3, a government negotiator criticized David for the emotional and social damage being done to kids by his refusal to surrender. David’s response was cutting: “Why don’t you turn the music off on the outside there?” he demanded. “You know so much about social and psychological sciences and all that, buddy, what do you think you’re doing?”
A sardonic comment along these lines was made by Lawrence Lilliston, chair of the Department of Psychology at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. “But there was child abuse in Waco,” he wrote after the fact. “Knowing there were many children inside, federal agents incessantly assaulted the building with loud music and bizarre sounds, such as rabbits being killed. Knowing there were many children inside, federal agents used tanks as battering rams, crashing into the building and punching holes in the walls.… Knowing there were many children inside, federal agents pumped in tear gas.… Certainly these children’s last living moments must have been filled with unbelievable horror and agony.”
During the final attack, women and children in the concrete vault huddled under wet blankets and towels in a vain attempt to escape the heat and gas. Mothers wrapped children in sleeping bags for protection, unaware that CS is denser than air and settles near the floor. “It is likely that the children received not only the doses injected after the CEV [Combat Engineering Vehicle] broke into the center of the building, but also a goodly portion of that shot into the tower and the second floor,” one expert says. “Concentrations at the floor level of the bunker may have been astronomical.”
Reno’s decision to approve the FBI tear gas assault was severely criticized by Representatives McCollum and Zeliff, the co-chairs of the House investigation of the Mount Carmel tragedy. In their October 1996 preliminary report, the congressmen commented: “Evidence does indicate that CS insertion into the enclosed bunker… could have been a proximate cause of or directly resulted in some or all of the deaths attributed to asphyxiation in the autopsy reports.” Labeling Reno’s decision “premature, wrong and highly irresponsible,” the congressmen remarked that “the attorney general should have known that the plan to end the standoff would endanger the lives of the Davidians inside the residence, including the children. The attorney general knew or should have known that there was little risk to the FBI agents, society as a whole, or to the Davidians from continuing this standoff, and that the possibility of a peaceful resolution continued to exist.… The final assault put the children at the greatest risk.”
* A trickier Washington pair than these couldn’t be found. Sessions, tight-lipped and stiff, was already under a cloud for ethical improprieties and was forced to resign as head of the FBI a few months later. Before Reno took office, Sessions, in an excess of zeal, had wanted to go to Waco to take over command of the operation, imagining himself a latter-day Patton, but Gerson refused to allow it. For his part, Hubbell showed his true colors in a series of unrelated dealings. In 1994 Hubbell, as flabby as Sessions was lean, served eighteen months in prison on charges that he defrauded clients and partners of thousands of dollars from his Little Rock, Arkansas, law firm. Four years later he was indicted on fifteen counts of attempting to obstruct a federal investigation of transactions related to Whitewater.
15
HALF-TRUTHS AND OUTRIGHT LIES
Apart from the falsehood that we were beating babies, the feds spun even bigger lies about our community. These whoppers—accepted by Reno—included the charges that we were preparing to commit mass suicide by setting fire to the building, immolating ourselves in a self-created holocaust to fulfill some horrible biblical prophecy.
After April 19, the FBI rushed to make everyone believe that we, not they, set Mount Carmel ablaze. On Monday afternoon, thirty-five minutes after Mount Carmel had been reduced to ashes, a Justice Department spokesman in Washington announced that two “cultists” had confessed to starting the fire. The very next night this totally unproven statement was retracted. In fact, these wild official fictions revealed a total lack of understanding of our community.
The FBI’s reversal on the fire confession didn’t stop the feds’ campaign of half-truths and outright lies. The government “fire expert” appointed to head up the investigation was Paul Gray, a member of the ATF’s National Arson Response Team, whose wife worked in the ATF’s Houston office—hardly an impartial investigator. Gray claimed that infrared tapes made by government surveillance planes showed a “pattern of arson.” According to the tapes, Gray declared, the fire broke out at 12:07:04 P.M. on the second floor. But independent witnesses who examined the tapes stated that the building burst into flames earlier, at 11:59:16 A.M., in the gym at the back. It started as a tank backed out of the room. In fact, the tapes seem to show that the conflagration erupted in three places virtually simultaneously, exactly where the tear gas–spraying tanks had broken into Mount Carmel. And when the fire reached the area where we’d stored some
propane, a pall of black smoke and orange and yellow flames spurted two hundred feet into the air.
As I said previously, by noon the building was a tinderbox. A thick layer of methylene chloride dust deposited by the CS gas coated the walls, floors, and ceilings. Vapors of methyl chloride, from the four hundred–plus rocket rounds shot into our building, mingled with kerosene and propane vapors from spilled lanterns and crushed heaters. Two “pyrotechnic devices,” possibly unexploded flashbang grenades, were found by the Texas Rangers in the gym and in another place where the fire started. When a flashbang explodes it creates a small fireball, which would have set the whole area alight in that charged, gas-soaked atmosphere. With powerful Texas winds whistling through the holes ripped in the building’s sides and roof, Mount Carmel was primed to ignite.
According to chemistry professor George Uhlig of the College of Eastern Utah, the fire erupted so rapidly because the CS gas was diluted with acetone or ethanol, creating a liquid aerosol that “came into contact with a flame, and the flame front traveled from particle to particle to create the ‘fireball’ described by survivors”—like the terrifying sight that flashed before my eyes that day on the catwalk over the chapel. Professor Uhlig, a retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel, compared the aerosol concept to the design of fuel-air explosive devices he worked on while in the service. He added the dreadful detail that while the CS burned it mixed “with normal fluids in the lungs of people to generate hydrogen-cyanide gas.” Uhlig’s comments are reinforced by an Army field manual that warns: “When using the dry agent CS-1, do not discharge indoors. Accumulating dust may explode when exposed to spark or open flame.”
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