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Most people first heard of David Koresh, the charismatic leader of the religious sect that came to be called The Branch Dividians , and the Dividians themselves, in February of 1993, but the Branch Dividians had existed for fifty years before Koresh was even born.
They were a break off of the Seven Day Adventist s Church, and were originally lead by a man by the name of Victor Halhead. They were formed in 1935, and based their lives around the belief that God would once again visit them in the form of a living profit. Halhead claimed to be this prophet, and relocated the group from California to Mount Carmel, which is located 10 miles outside of Waco, Texas.
They studied the Bible as literal truth. The book of Revelation and it s cryptic seven seals. The Christians believe that the seven seals tell God s plan for the sequence of events leading up to Judgment Day, and can only be deciphered by a messiah who would come near the end of days.
Five years after Halhead s death, the Dividians gathered at Mount Carmel, believing Armageddon, the final fight between good and evil described within the Bible, was close at hand.
The Dividian church almost disappeared after that, but Bill and Lois Roden kept a small group together. After Bill s death, Lois continued on, and began training a young Vernon Howell as her understudy. When Lois Roden died, a power struggle between Vernon and Lois s son George began for leadership.
The majority backed Howell. When Roden chased them away at gunpoint, they temporarily lived in Palistine, Texas, sleeping in rusted out buses and tents. But in late 1987, Howell returned with seven male followers, dressed in camouflage and armed with five .223 caliber semi-automatic assault rifles, two .22 caliber rifles, two twelve-gauge shotguns, and nearly four hundred rounds ammunition. During the gunfight, Roden was shot in the chest and hands (www.disinfo.com).
Vernon and his followers were put on trial for attempted murder. The seven were aquitted and a mistrial was declared in Vernon s case. Howell told the jury that he and his followers had gone to Mount Carmel to search for evidence of corpse abuse by Roden, and their shots were aimed at a tree.
George Roden was later convicted of murder in an unrelated matter.
Thus, Vernon Howell came into power and became the official leader of the Branch Dividians. He then legally changed his name to David Koresh. David because he believed he was now head of the Biblical House of David, and Koresh because Koresh is the Hebrew translation Cyrus, the Persian king who allowed the Jews held captive in Babylon to return to Israel.
He did not claim to be Jesus, but instead to be that final messiah mentioned in the Book of Revelations, the seventh messenger. He claimed to be the Sinful Messiah mentioned in the book. The phrase Sinful Messiah was picked up by the Waco-Tribune, and used in a negative tone. It was not meant to be the negative title the paper made it seem. It simply meant that, unlike Jesus, this messiah would be an ordinary human, one who is not without sin.
Attracted by Koresh s teachings, the congregation grew. They took the lumber from the cottages they had lived in before, and used it to build the Communal Church, referred to as a Compound during the upcoming siege.
The Dividians were well respected members of the Waco Community. As Jack Harwell, the sheriff of McLennan County said,
They were good people. Sure, they had different beliefs than you and me, in their way of life, and especially in their religious beliefs, but they were still good people. I was around them a lot. They were always nice, well mannered, never overbearing. I liked them
(Waco: Rules Of Engagement, SP 00:12:00)
One of the major prophecies which existed among the Branch Dividians was that there would be a massive confrontation between God s people (those of Mount Carmel) and the forces of an armed Apostate power, called Babylon. Due to this belief, Koresh and his followers became interested in guns. David was a strong believer in the 2nd amendment, and peoples right to defend themselves. He believed that this was a great government. He said What s great is that we have freedom. Not freedom for speech, or freedom for religion, but freedom for all (Waco: Rules Of Engagement, SP00:20:30) He pretty quickly found out there was lots of money to be made at gun shows, and before long, they began going to gun shows. They bought and sold. The combination of their being a cult, and the fact that they were stockpiling weapons , brought them attention from the ATF. Now, whether the ATF was justified in targeting the Dividians for this is debatable, as all gun dealers stockpile weapons. But either way, this helped convince the ATF that the Dividians were a threat to the population as a whole, and action needed to be taken.
On the morning of Feb 28, ATF agents and the local police blocked the roads leading to the Mount Carmel center. The ATF raid team was suiting up, planning to surprise the Dividians. Most of 130 Branch Dividians within the compound were unaware of the impending raid until just minutes before it began. A group of news personnel had set themselves up out side, and apparently that s what tipped them off.
Robert Rodriguez was an ATF agent undercover in the compound. When Koresh told the Dividians of the upcoming raid, and told them to get prepared, Robert ran outside and over to the command post, telling the team of coordinators the element of surprise had been lost, the raid must be called off. His warning went unheeded, and this proved to be a grave mistake.
Three helicopters arrived at first, and were supposed to fly behind the compound and distract the Dividians while the ground troops were approaching from the front in covered cattle trailers.
As the cattle trailer stopped in front, dozens of ATF agents jumped out. There is much debate over from where the first shot came, whether an ATF agent fired or a Dividian did. But regardless of that, the firefight had begun. ATF agents took cover behind the cattle cars and fired through the front metal door at Dividians who were firing out at them. Meanwhile, more agents set up ladders and climbed onto the roof of the compound, breaking windows and attempting to fire through at those inside. Helicopters flew over head, and armed men within these leaned out and fired through any windows they could get good aim at. 17 year-old Peter Gentless climbed atop a silo to try and see what was happening. There is video in which you can clearly see a helicopter fly over head, and then the Dividian s body drops out of view and doesn t stand up again, making it appear he was shot by the agent within the helicopter, despite the Peter s being unarmed. The Dividians were not allowed to remove the body from the water tower for five days.
What should have been a peaceful serving of a warrant, an agent approaching the front door and explaining the terms of the warrant, had become a blood bath. As the rest of the agents were battling it out with the Dividians, one agent walked over to the pen in which the children s five Alaskan malamutes dogs were kept, and shot the dogs in cold blood. Wayne Martin, a Branch Dividian called 911 during the attack and begged for them to call the agents back, that there were women and children in danger. Eventually, the ATF was forced to fall back and call a cease fire at noon. A call was put out for an ambulance, and the ATF got its wounded men to a hospital. The ATF had done poorly in the confrontation. They had measly 9mm s, while the Dividians were armed .45 caliber s and the such. The ATF lost four agents, and more than twenty were injured.
One Dividian was searching for his friend Winston after the ATF agents had been forced to retreat and fall back. As he neared Winston s room, he could hear water running. He turned the corner to find Winston lying dead in a pool of blood next to his bed. The window had been shattered, and the water tanks outside had been riddled full of bullets. The angle suggests that the bullets had to have come from a helicopter.
The Dividians refused to surrender. A siege ensued, and 668 FBI personnel were eventually called in. (Hamm, pg.104)
During this siege, Jim Cavanaugh, the FBI s negotiator, had many recorded conversations with David Koresh, such as this one, in which they talk about what s going to be happening next;
Jim: If you die… you tell me… if you die from that wound, I want you to tell me what s going to happen.
David: Well, I m not going to be around any more, am I, to influence anybody, right?
Jim: David, listen…
David: No Jim, listen…
Jim: This has been painful for all of us…
David Koresh: Jim listen… listen Jim… There s nothing that hurts me more than being called a cult leader, alright? If I m wrong, people like me don t deserve to live, OK?
Jim: …listen … listen…
David: Do you understand me Jim? If you let the people, think, cause you know, they re all scared around here now. You know, don t burn our building down…
Jim: Awe… we won t do that.
David: Don t shoot us all up… they ve got to have that time.
Jim: But David, if you die, you re leaving your people helpless.
David: Look, they re God s people… I m just an instrument, OK? I show them out of a book what God teaches. Then it s for them to decide. (Waco: Rules Of Engagement, SP01:07:30)
Jim and David also had other conversations. Jim was mainly trying to calm David down, make sure he was acting rationally. And if he had to double-talk, that s what he would do. Unfortunately, Koresh saw through his lies, such as when Jim continued harping on the fact that the helicopters had no mounted guns , when it was fairly obvious that there were men inside the helicopter firing on them with sub-machine guns.
Some Dividian parents sent their children outside of Mount Carmel, where they were delivered to a rendezvous point. A story appeared in many newspapers claiming that three Dividians had tried to shoot their way through ATF agents to safety. This was completely made up.
On March 1rst, the ATF handed control to the FBI. The FBI proceeded to set itself up accordingly.
The Dividians were surrounded. FBI snipers were set up in two sandbag positions, Sierra One, guarding the front end, and Sierra Two, hidden in back, invisible to the cameras. Anyone trying to leave the compound would be easily gunned down.
At one point during the negotiations, it was believed that an end was in sight. On March 2nd, Koresh had agreed to come out if a local radio station would play the message he had recently made for the world. However, after the message had been played, and David was approached to fulfill his part of the deal, and come out of the compound, he claimed he could not, that God had told him to stay, and not come out just yet.
As one FBI agent was heard to remark The FBI wasn t prepared to share David Koresh s contingent that we should wait on God to resolve. The FBI is God. It s gonna decide how this is resolved. (Waco: Rules Of Engagement, SP1:17:07)
Agent Pete Shmireck was in charge of drawing up the physchological report on Koresh, and advise a course of action. He advised for a calm, cautious, non-confrontational method to be taken in regards to Koresh and his followers. According to Schmireck, he was pressured by FBI officials to change his assessments to co-align with a more confrontational approach.
This was to justify the FBI s next decision, to engage in psychological warfare. They would do things like play tapes of rabbits being slaughtered, chainsaws, and Nancy Sinatra singing. They would bring out lights at night, and, in essence, were essentially trying to cause dangerous amounts of sleep-deprivation, and take a man who they already viewed as unstable, and push him over the brink! And then they would get mad when he does something they think is irrational.
(Waco: Rules Of Engagement, SP01:18:42)
At one point, the Dividians hung a banner out of a window stating God help us, we want the press! Reporters jokingly replied with the statement God help us, we are the press!
Eventually, the FBI became plain-out immature after an entire month of doing next to nothing. FBI agents mooned Dividians, flicked them the bird, and ran over graves with tanks.
David Koresh s grandmother came to talk to him, to try and get him to lay down his arms and come out. This, of course, failed as well. As David s grandmother left, one FBI official was heard to remark, I hope she has told him goodbye,
On April 14th, there was a major breakthrough in negotiations. In a letter to one of the FBI s negotiators, Koresh wrote that he d received his mission, that he was working on his translation of the seven seals, and that everyone within the compound was relieved that the prophecies were not coming true, and that they would not have to die. David would come out when he had finished his writing.
(Waco: Rules Of Engagement, SP01:30:00)
This, however, was dismissed as a stalling technique by Janet Reno, our Attorney General. No good would come from waiting. It was decided that negotiations were over, and now was the time for the FBI to mobilize and take action.
President Clinton described the FBI s plan as an operation prepared by the FBI designed to increase pressure on Koresh and persuade those in the compound to surrender peacefully. They would use tear gas that would not cause permanent harm to health but would . . . force the people within the compound to come out and surrender.
(Hamm, pg.108)
On April 19, 1993, the FBI had two specially equipped Abrams tanks and four Bradley armored vehicles punch holes in the compound, literally knocking out sections of wall, and spray CS gas into the compound, while soldiers outside fired Ferret rounds of the gas into the building. Ferret rounds are like miniature grenades fired from a hand-held grenade launcher. Tear gas is released as the tip disintegrates. Despite the claim that all this was done to minimize causalities, Ferret rounds pack enough force to kill, and were aimed at any window in which movement was spotted. It was announced over a sound system that those within the compound should put on their masks, and that although they were releasing tear gas into the building, this was not an assault.
The gas used was CS gas, which is not a common tear gas. More than one hundred nations, including the US, have banned CS gas in warfare: but at Waco it was used on women and children. (Hamm, pg. 108) In a video of boot camp trainees being subjected to CS for only a few seconds, we can see them, teary eyed, red, even throwing up and having trouble breathing. The Dividians received ten times that dosage, for six hours. In a 1975 U.S. Army publication, it stated that Generally, persons reacting to CS are incapable of executing organized and concerted actions and excessive exposure to CS may make them incapable of vacating an area. So Clinton s explanation that it was to be used to force the Dividians to come out and surrender was the exact opposite of the truth.
CS isn t a gas, it s a chemical powder. For use in Waco, it was dissolved in Methylene Chloride, a volatile chemical used for stripping paint. It created a fine aerosol mist when sprayed through the tanks nozzles or released from a Ferret round. In closed spaces, this mixture can be ignited by a spark into a fireball. When CS burns, it creates hydrogen cyanide, the same gas used in prison gas chambers. Here it was used on young infants and senior citizens. Sure, they gave everyone in the building gas masks, but guess what? Gas masks do not fit on babies!!!
The women and children fled to the safest place within the church while the gassing continued, the kitchen storage room. A reinforced concrete room, it was a former vault. Because the children didn t have gas masks to fit them, they were covering themselves with wet towels. A tank then broke through the very center of the building and began releasing gas right into the concrete room, a virtual cul de sac (French for bottom of the bag ), with no ventilation, not acknowledging the lack of gas masks being worn by a good percentage of its occupants. They were most likely coughing, choking, and some probably were dead. Some were most likely inert. They were still alive and breathing, but they weren t going to be doing anything.
The tanks had been breaching holes into the building, lots of holes. As Joseph Perino, Former Chief of The Houston Fire Department put it, They had just unintentionally setup the configuration of a potbelly stove. You want it to burn slow, you close up the vents. You want it to burn fast, you open them. The compound was going to burn fast. . . .even without the CS gas, and the flammable liquids. . . it s going to burn fast because of the venting. (Waco: Rules Of Engagement, SP01:55:49)
Less than a minute after the final tank had finished it s final injection of CS gas, the first of three separate fires, which started in three different spots, within three minutes of each other began on the second floor of the compound, in an area where the gas was still at it s most volatile as a fine mist. David Thibodeau says he was in a room on the outside of the main hall when he saw a fireball that ran the front length of Mount Carmel, possibly causing a second fireball to ignite, which set fire to the kitchen/dining room area. This was, unfortunately, right next to the concrete room where the women and children had been gassed earlier.
About a minute later, another armored vehicle approached the gymnasium in the rear of the church, then backed away. About half a minute later, Derek Lovelock, the other survivor who saw a fireball, claims he saw one streaking from the rear of the compound to the front, igniting everything in its path.