The Ghosts of Mount Carmel
In the ten years since a devastating fire took the lives of 74 Davidians, a group of survivors has returned to the windswept plains east of Waco, like ghosts haunting the site of their former compound. A new church has been built at Mount Carmel, and inside, they listen to their leader preach the same apocalyptic doctrine, and they wait for David Koresh to return.
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On this day there were also two itinerant evangelists, Galina and James. Galina was a heavily accented Russian woman with shoulder-length black hair, and James was about six-four and 250 pounds, with a long beard, and looked like a giant version of the hirsute dwarf warrior Gimli, in Lord of the Rings. Clive, who with his hair combed back resembles an old rockabilly, sat in a chair, facing everyone, reading and discussing verses and occasionally asking questions. Mild-mannered, Clive will never have the cult of personality Koresh enjoyed. About an hour into his study (they can go on all afternoon), Clive explained how the book of Revelation is a book of judgment, and James asked, “But isn’t God a God of love?” Well, yes, said Clive, of course he is, but we’re talking here about the book at the end of the Bible, the one about the end of the world. James, who had obviously been waiting for this moment, pressed on. “But Jesus Christ brought a new testament—a testament of love—he said to love your enemy, not hate him. Not take up arms against him.” Then, after a brief pause, he asked, “Did you take up arms, back in 1993?” Clive didn’t hesitate. “I didn’t take up arms. Neither did Catherine, neither did Sheila. And we were under attack.”
The two men argued for 45 minutes, each quoting Scripture for their points—Jesus as a man of war, Jesus as a man of peace; judgment versus love; the very meaning of and justification for the Davidians’ existence. This was not your typical service. Still, there was more passion about the nature of God in that heated conversation than you might witness in years of mainstream churchgoing.
As we finished up, at around three o’clock, Clive, James, and everyone else stood around chatting peacefully. For a moment it seemed as though a rare calm had settled on the place. Then I heard something shouted from far away. “Murderers! Murderers!” I went to the door. “Damn you all! Slaves of Satan!” About two hundred yards away, at the front gate, a man stood, yelling. “This is an abomination! It is a whorehouse, not a church!” Ron walked up beside me and shook his head: “Andrew.” He knows Andrew (a.k.a. Andrew X98; né Robert Arnold) well; they knew each other in Philadelphia. Andrew came to Mount Carmel in 1996, fleeing a life of drugs and crime. “I came here a destroyed person,” Andrew told me later, “searching for my God.” A Muslim, he also believed Koresh was a prophet, and so he came to study with Clive, staying on the property for three and a half years and serving as the caretaker. But when construction of the new chapel began on a Saturday, the Sabbath, Andrew was outraged. This was, he says, the “abomination that maketh desolate.” He left the church at about the same time his friend Ron first visited, at Andrew’s invitation. Ron became the new watchman; Andrew the adversary.
Down at the gate, a little white car drove by once, twice, a third time, and finally pulled in. Andrew, who shows up at the gate only occasionally, approached the driver, and Ron tried to intercede. Andrew ignored him. “That damn thing was founded on the Sabbath,” he said loudly. “It’s an abomination of God.” He went on to tell the driver how, during the siege, government agents had massacred the Davidians. “The children were mutilated, hacked to death. Arms and legs and heads cut off; in a couple of cases, the heads were never even found.” When Koresh was here, he had a way of bringing harmony out of chaos, whether it was from the pages of the Bible or the lives of the sincere misfits who were drawn to him. On days like this, his presence is missed.
The visitor nervously tried to drive off, and Andrew handed him some flyers, saying, “God bless you, folks. Here are some Internet sites you can work off of, to show you George Bush did do this thing.”
I left during the siege because my mother wasn’t there, and she needed me. My daughter was pushing me out. She said she thought that something bad was going to happen. I didn’t want to come out. I thought we had the truth. I thought we had the truth. I thought this was supposed to happen.—Ofelia Santoyo, 72, Davidian survivor
We’ll probably never know for certain who fired first when those 50 agents ran up to the front of the compound. This is understandable. In the ten years since the 51-day siege, an Academy award-nominated documentary, Waco: The Rules of Engagement, has been released, as well as a dozen books, and all tell conflicting stories. For example, when Koresh opened the door, according to several Davidians, he said, “Wait a minute. Get back. There are women and children here—let’s talk about this,” closed the door, and that’s when gunfire erupted from outside. The ATF agents said that as soon as the door closed, gunfire came from the inside. Whoever fired first, by the end of the day, 4 ATF agents and 6 Davidians were dead and 20 agents and 4 Davidians were wounded, including Koresh, who was shot in the hand and the stomach. Within 24 hours, the FBI had taken over for the ATF. Byron Sage soon emerged as the chief negotiator—he would lead 51 agents who would talk to Koresh and his lieutenants. The bulk of the rest of the team were field agents, some driving combat engineered vehicles (CEVs).
The next day, Koresh made a deal: If he could broadcast his views on a national radio network, he and his followers would come out. That night, stressed-out Davidians expecting to leave broke into the forbidden-foods cache and ate candy, drank whiskey, and smoked cigarettes. Koresh was furious. The next day he taped a rambling 58-minute sermon that was played on the Christian Broadcast Network but, after intense praying, told his aide Steve Schneider to call the negotiators. “He says his God says that he is to wait,” Schneider said. According to at least one survivor, Koresh felt that the Davidians had sinned with the forbidden foods and now needed to atone. To the FBI, he was a liar; to his people, he was just following the chain of command.
The episode typified the next twenty days, as one difference in interpretation followed another. There were some 950 phone conversations between the two sides over more than 210 hours, yet there was little actually communicated. The FBI called it a “complex hostage/barricade rescue situation,” though the Davidians weren’t hostages and didn’t want to be rescued (14 adults and 21 children reluctantly left during the siege). The government saw Koresh as a con man, child molester, and gun nut, while his followers saw him as a savior, father figure, and provider. The government considered the Davidians a cult of weirdos; the Davidians saw themselves as a family of true believers.
On March 9 the FBI, growing impatient, began to ratchet up its pressure, turning the compound’s electricity off and on again for the next few days. Soon agents set up bright lights to shine into the building and then speakers to blast tapes of sirens, babies crying, dental drills, rabbits being slaughtered, and Tibetan chants (the Dalai Lama complained, and the latter were stopped). At times, the FBI’s aggressiveness led the agency to sabotage itself. On March 12, over the objections of some negotiators, the agents cut off the compound’s electricity for good. Koresh was furious. According to researcher Mark Swett, who is working on a book about the siege, Koresh had been planning to send out twenty people the next day but now changed his mind; they never left.
In its defense, the FBI had never dealt with a situation like this. “Our experts were saying Koresh was getting more and more paranoid,” FBI spokesman Bob Ricks told me. “He was trying to bring this to a magnificent end—sooner rather than later. The only way to stop it was a tactical intervention.” As the weeks went by, agents rallied around a plan to gradually teargas the compound and drive the Davidians out. They presented it to Attorney General Janet Reno on April 12, with assurances that children and pregnant women would not be permanently harmed by the gas.
Two days later Koresh announced that the wait was over: God had told him to write a manuscript on the Seven Seals and then the Davidians could give up. Koresh went to work, but he was a slow writer, spelling phonetically. FBI higher-ups were skeptical—he’d changed his mind before—and pushed hard for their tear gas plan, which called for gradual insertion over 48 hours, unless they were fired on, in which case more tear gas would be put in. Reno okayed the plan for Sunday, April 19.
At 5:59 on Sunday morning, Sage phoned inside the compound and warned that tear gas was on the way. A few minutes later, two CEVs outfitted with long booms began knocking holes in the walls and spraying the gas. Davidians responded by firing back, and the FBI immediately escalated the gas, using Bradley armored vehicles to shoot mortarlike “ferret rounds” through the windows. The assault went on all morning, with the CEVs knocking more holes in the walls, some quite big. The plan was to create escape routes for the Davidians to flee the gas; unfortunately, according to Dick J. Reavis’ book The Ashes of Waco, debris wound up blocking stairways and the trapdoor leading to the buried school bus.
Some time that morning, Koresh directed most of the remaining women to take the 21 children (12 were his) to the concrete vault at the base of the compound’s tower. A little after noon, smoke was first seen by agents, and within minutes three separate fires were going. Fifteen minutes later, agents heard “systematic gunfire”; fifteen minutes after that, the whole compound was in flames. Nine Davidians got out but 74 didn’t, including all the children. Two fetuses were also found with their dead mothers.
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