(Pat Robertson seems to have changed his tune since 1993)

Source: CBN News
Published: September 15, 1999 Author: Pat Robertson

Documenting the Facts of the Waco Crisis

September 15, 1999

-- Michael McNulty, Academy Award nominee and researcher for the documentary, "Waco: A New Revelation,"
talks about the evidence against the FBI in the Waco standoff.

P. ROBERTSON: Well, joining us now by satellite is Michael McNulty. He's the investigative researcher for the soon-to-be
released documentary, "Waco: A New Revelation." His previous documentary "Waco: Rules of Engagement," was nominated for
an Academy Award. Mr. McNulty comes to us from Ft. Collins, Colorado.

And, Mark, before we start off, I understand that your mother is in surgery and needs prayer and so we would ask our people to
pray for her as well at this time.

MICHAEL McNULTY (Producer, MGA Films): We'd appreciate it, Pat, very much. Thank you.

P. ROBERTSON: We have a clip from your documentary that says people were firing into the Branch Davidian compound. Are
you sure that the shapes there are actually human beings firing rifles?

McNULTY: Well, Pat, we've looked at this very carefully, the whole team at MGA Films, and that would include people like Dr.
Edward Allard and a number of other FLIR experts, and the evidence is very compelling that the shapes that we're seeing there
are, indeed, human beings. You have to remember, the vehicle that they're coming out of was a Desert Storm vehicle that had
been air conditioned. And the FLIR tape itself measures temperatures.

And the individuals coming out of that vehicle came out of an air-conditioned environment into a much warmer environment. So in
the concept of FLIR, they would show up as dark oblong objects. Now in FLIR, you can't see details of faces and noses and the
like, but you will see the general shapes. And you do in this footage. Now as those bodies warm up and gain the temperature of
the surrounding soil, an amazing thing happens. They disappear, because insofar as the thermal imaging equipment is concerned,
they are the same temperature, which is what it's measuring, as the soil around them and the rubble and debris.

However, when their guns fire, the muzzle flashes are very distinctive, as you can see in that footage. And those muzzle flashes
repeat cyclically as an automatic weapon would fire, as a matter of fact. They fire or they appear on the image at the same rate
as does the rate of a gun fire of about 600 rounds per minute.

P. ROBERTSON: Let me ask you about this canister. I understand there was a 40-meter canister that was fired into that building.
Where did it go, I should say, into the building? It was fired, but where did it go and what was the effect of it?

McNULTY: Well, actually there were several. The first two that we're aware of are U.S. Military CS gas rounds and they're
pyrotechnic in nature. Now these two rounds we have never claimed and don't claim now that they were involved in the fire
setting they, in fact, landed on the roof of a structure about 30 yards away from the main compound, or the main structure. And
this roof was made of plywood, covered in tar.

The fact is, is that my colleagues and I at MGA Films have looked at this and, you know, we've come to the conclusion this is sort
of a red herring being offered by the government. The fact remains that it is significant in as much as these two
projectiles--they're XM-651E1s, which is a classification of CS pyrotechnic round used by the military -- were indeed fired. There
is videotape of them being fired. And the effects of them being fired, giving off a cloud of white smoke, is clearly visible in the
videotape. This is also included in the film "Waco: A New Revelation."

I think the key here is all the significance that is attached to those two projectiles is the fact that it verifies that the government has
lied for six years about the existence of the use of pyrotechnic rounds. Now there are some other rounds that were used. We're in
the process of conducting an examination of these rounds. Dr. Frederick Whitehurst leads our investigative team and he is a very
well-known scientist in the areas of explosive residue and residues that would associated with these projectiles. So we can
determine by back engineering exactly what the function of these projectiles were. Now these two projectiles were also found in
the evidence locker by myself and my colleagues in our first visit to the Austin evidence locker.

We found these projectiles and took residue samples under the supervision of the Texas Rangers, and those samples again are
being tested. So we're not quite prepared to tell you exactly what they were. There are indications in the evidence--and some
compelling evidence I might add--that indicates that these projectiles passed through the building. They had a submunition inside of
these projectiles. The projectiles themselves were designed to penetrate doors, walls and windows and they appeared to have
done just that and expelled their submunition on the interior of the building.

P. ROBERTSON: One last question. It is against the law of the United States for military forces to be involved in a situation like
this without certain safeguards being carried out. We understand that there's some FBI surveillance footage that indicates that
Delta Force troops were actually shooting. They shot a number of rounds into the compound. Expand on that.

McNULTY: Well, sir, the fact is that there's footage that was taken by the Department of Public Safety, as well as the FBI, and
some still photos and a number of documents that will appear in our new film that have been confirmed by virtue of eyewitnesses
who have looked at this material and confirmed that indeed, these individuals that are seen in this footage are members of the
vaunted Delta Force.

Now when you and I raise that name, the government rolls its eyes and said, `Well, there's no such thing as Delta Force.' Well, in
effect they're true. That's a popularized fictional name; that's sort of a moniker that's been picked up in Hollywood, so to speak, in
films, etc. The proper name for this organization is the Combat Applications Group of Ft. Bragg, North Carolina.

And indeed, we have gotten confirmations, multiple sources, several of which appear in the new film, "Waco: A New Revelation,"
as confirming that indeed these individuals are members of Delta Force. They're fully armed. And in the infrared video, we
suspect that, indeed and have been told that the individuals firing the weapons in the infrared video are a mixed group of hostage
rescue team members and Delta Force.

P. ROBERTSON:Our time is unfortunately running out, but who is in position in the United States government to order a Delta
Force team into operation? Where would that order have to come from?

McNULTY: Well, sir, I'm afraid we have another one of those Lewinsky types of mysteries here. The fact is the president of the
United States is the only authority who can issue an order to Delta Force to take action as they appear to have at Waco. Exactly
what's going on here we're not sure yet, because, of course, Mr. Clinton has denied that he signed a waiver for the presence of
these forces. But there are indications, some of which are shown in the new film, that, in fact, they did have a waiver and they
were there with presidential authority.

P. ROBERTSON: Michael McNulty, thank you very much for the work you're doing. We appreciate so much your being with us.

McNULTY: Thank you, sir, for the opportunity.

P. ROBERTSON: Ladies and gentlemen, the problem we've got here is one more example of this particular administration
scoffing at the law, lying to the American people, covering up and then some terrible thing takes place. This is not the province of
crazies. Michael McNulty has already gotten an Oscar nomination for one of his films and it's a very careful documentary. But
this is one of many pieces of evidence that is coming to light on this tragic situation.

You say, `Well, why couldn't we do this?' Well, ladies and gentlemen, whatever we may have thought of David Koresh and the
Branch Davidians--and I certainly don't agree with any of their theology--but nevertheless, in a free society, people have a right to
express differing points of view and different lifestyles.

And if we bring down the FBI, the Delta Force and the power of the government and burn out people we disagree with, or if we
assassinate them as we did Randy Weaver's wife on Ruby Ridge, then we are in danger of losing our freedoms. And that's why
this is a very important matter and somebody should pay the price for this kind of thing.

This was premeditated murder of innocent women and children by government forces in this particular thing. At least that seems
to be the charges being levied. But of course, they're saying, really the Davidians set themselves on fire so it was mass suicide.
But from what we're beginning to see, there wasn't as much suicide as it was a clear attempt by the government to rid our nation
of this troublesome group. And that, to me, is a very dangerous precedent.

Rules of engagement revisited

In the movie "Rules Of Engagement," the
Oscar-nominated documentary about the massacre at
Waco, Harvard psychiatrist and lawyer Alan Stone says
that when he was first appointed by the Justice
Department to the panel investigating Waco, he "thought
the main problem would be to understand the
psychology of the people inside the compound. "After I
got into it," he says, "I quickly became aware that the
psychology of the people outside the compound was
more important to coming to an understanding of the
problem."

The Davidians had undergone an assault that began on
Feb. 28, 1993, with the ATF shooting of their Alaskan
Malamute, Fawn, and her four pups in a pen outside the
compound. Shooting dogs is apparently a pet tactic of
the ATF who did the same at Ruby Ridge, killing Randy
Weaver's Golden Retriever. Though someone in the
initial Waco assault was trigger-happy, it is still unclear
whether the shooting was started by the Davidians or
the ATF. The steel door through which the initial shots
were fired survived the fire, but is now missing. One of
the Davidians, Wayne Martin, a black Harvard law
graduate can be heard in "Rules of Engagement" calling
911 from inside the compound begging for help.
"They're shooting, they're shooting!" he yelled. "We're
under fire! There are women and children in here! Tell
them to call it off! I have a right to defend myself!" he
yelled as the sounds of gunfire popped on the 911 tape.
Alas, though the ATF had brought fax machines and
their public relations office had notified reporters of the
upcoming raid that they referred to as "Showtime," they
had brought no fire trucks, ambulances, phones or
radios! The 911 operator sounded desperate. Though
he could hear gunfire, he was unable to get through.

Even an arrest by constituted officers of the law can be
legally resisted if the arresting officers use excessive
force. A jury in San Antonio ruled that the four dead
ATF agents were killed by the Davidians, who had lost
six of their own that day, in self-defense. Though no
good reason has ever been given for the huge show of
force in the initial ATF raid, other than that it was a
massive publicity stunt to offset the ATF's growing
reputation as a rogue agency a few weeks before their
appropriations hearing, Henry Ruth, one of three
independent reviewers of the Treasury Department's
Report on Waco, said, "part of the ATF's motive, never
stated but definitely there, was to enforce the morals of
society; to enforce the psyche of right-thinking by
retaliating against these odd people."

There is no need to believe in any widespread
conspiracy theory regarding government behavior at
Waco. The government went to Waco, armed not with
not a conspiracy, but with an attitude and a set of beliefs
that, after the ATF agents were killed, hardened into a
mission of revenge. Though the Hostage Rescue Team
was there, and there were at least 25 children inside,
rescuing hostages was a strategy abandoned in favor of
a military assault. "A negotiation strategy was
abandoned in favor of a military mentality," said Alan
Stone, "nor was there any third party brought in who
could speak the same language as the Davidians. The
attitude was to show them who's boss." When David
Koresh's grandmother appeared at the standoff, telling
agents she was sure she could bring him out, she was
refused permission to speak with him. "I hope she has
told him good-bye," one of the agents was overheard
saying as she walked away.

Though it's still not clear who started the final fire, it's
obvious to anyone who sees "Rules Of Engagement"
that the FBI engaged in extensive psychological warfare
and had fire on its mind. At night, the Davidians were
harassed with Nancy Sinatra singing, "You keep
thinking that you'll never get burned. Well, I just got me
a brand new box of matches, and what I got you ain't
got time to learn. These boots are made for walkin', and
that's just what they'll do. One of these days these boots
will walk all over you." An FBI negotiator asked the
Davidians if they had any fire extinguishers inside the
house. The answer came back that there was one.
"Somebody just better buy some fire insurance," said
the negotiator.

"The (FBI) saw all this as working from a military point
of view because the people inside weren't shooting
back," says Stone, "but they didn't realize they were
driving the Davidians to a point of desperation."

Democratic pollster, Pat Cadell, said recently that Janet
Reno is a example of Affirmative Action in reverse. If
she wasn't a woman she would have been fired long
ago, he said. "Rules of Engagement" shows a clueless
Reno testifying before Congress that the tanks knocking
over the walls at Waco were unarmed, and just "pieces
of equipment similar to a good rent-a-car," she said.
"Tanks going into a building were like rent-a-cars?"
asked an incredulous congressman. More recently, we
learn that the Justice Department held back from
Congress the 49th page of an FBI report saying they
had used pyrotechnic devices at Waco, and hid the
probability that the Delta force was active in the
shootout at Waco. Mike McNulty is producer of a new
Waco documentary which he says shows agents'
machine guns firing on the Davidians as they tried to
emerge from the inferno. Rep. Dan Burton is having the
film analyzed for accuracy.

Alan Stone says one "of the most inadequate parts of
the Justice Department's report is their failure to
describe the decision-making process at the Command
Post. I think that is unpardonable. There is nothing in the
investigation of what was going on in Washington where
they had a situation room constantly in touch with
Waco. High officials of the FBI and Clinton
administration were making the decisions. What were
the communications? What were the decisions?"

John Danforth said his mission will be to answer the
dark questions -- did the government kill anyone, and
was there a cover-up. He should add to his mission a
requirement that the FBI and ATF and others rethink
their rules when engaged in a standoff against American
men, women and children so that such reckless and
murderous government overreactions cannot be
repeated.

Jailed Branch Davidians wait, hope as Waco probe reopened
(pulled off CNN)

From National Correspondent Tony Clark

BEAUMONT, Texas (CNN) -- At the U.S. Penitentiary outside Beaumont, Texas, Jaime Castillo waits and hopes that the renewed investigation into the Waco tragedy will bring what he terms "justice."

Castillo, 31, is one of seven Branch Davidians still serving time for their involvement in the 1993 shoot-out with agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, which precipitated a 51-day siege.

Castillo and fellow inmate Brad Branch -- both convicted on weapons charges and voluntary manslaughter -- were at the front door of the compound that the Davidians called Mt. Carmel with their leader, David Koresh, when the ATF raided the complex on February 28, 1993. They dispute the ATF's assertion that the Davidians fired first.

'David opened the door ...'

"They fired first," says Branch. "David opened the door, and, to me, it was courageous. He opened the door, and he put his hand out."

"I heard him say, 'Wait a minute, there are women and children here. Let's talk,'" says Castillo. "And then I heard a gunshot from the outside. He backed off, slammed the door and by then, there was sporadic gunfire everywhere."

Throughout the ensuing standoff, the Davidians' distrust of the FBI increased as armored vehicles circled the building and electricity was cut off.

"What I remember of those days is listening to radio news reports constantly and wondering when the American people were going to stand up," says Kevin Whitecliff, another Davidian who was convicted of weapons charges and voluntary manslaughter.

"I mean, I thought ... this has never happened in this country. I'm sure these people are going to come ... down and they're going to ask questions. Why? Why did this take place? Why are there tanks on this property?" he says.

Whitecliff and Branch left Mt. Carmel 20 days into the standoff. Castillo was there until the end.

"A lot of individuals such as myself didn't want to leave because we were directly being challenged, not so much on the circumstances that happened but with respect to our faiths, our beliefs," Castillo said.

The Davidians, Castillo says, thought the FBI and ATF weren't just after their guns but attacking their faith -- and that just stiffened resistance inside the compound.

While Congress and a special investigator prepare to take another look at what happened at Waco, there is little talk about the Davidians who remain behind bars.

"I want to know what they're going to do about innocent people who are convicted and are spending 40 years in federal prison," says Rocket Rosen, an attorney for the Davidians. "I never hear that talked about."

Rosen defended two Branch Davidians during their 1994 criminal trial.

"We're finding out what the government had and didn't turn over," Rosen says. "What else did they have? What else haven't they turned over?"

Branch and other Davidians believe there has been a widespread cover-up, and the prospect of another congressional probe doesn't give him much hope.

"We don't need another dog-and-pony show like the 1995 (congressional) hearings," he says.

'Just another cover-up'

There is even concern that the scope of former Sen. John Danforth's investigation won't go far enough.

"He says he's only going to investigate the day of April 19, and he wants to show, or he wants to ... investigate if there were lies and cover-up," Branch says. "To me, to only do April 19 is just another cover-up."

April 19, 1995, was the day that the 51-day siege ended when a massive fire destroyed the Branch Davidian compound. The bodies of Koresh and some 80 of his followers were found inside. Most died from the fire; a few died from gunshot wounds.

Until now, Castillo says everyone has taken the government's version of events as gospel.

"I think if people really look into the case and analyze it objectively, they'll say, 'Yeah, we've been done wrong,'" he says.

Seven Branch Davidians remain in federal prison in connection with the shoot-out. One is expected to be released in 2006 and another in 2010. The other five, including Branch, Castillo and Whitecliff, aren't expected to be released until 2028.

"The Children of Waco"
by Peter J. Boyer
First published in The New Yorker (May 15, 1995)
Reprinted by permission of the author

Two years ago, a woman named Amo Bishop Roden came to live in the place where David Koresh and eighty-five of his Branch Davidian followers had just died. At first, the authorities kept her away from the site, and she lived in a ditch alongside the gravel road leading to the property, but eventually the officials left and she moved in, fashioning an eight-by-eight-foot home for herself from scattered fence posts, pallets, sheet metal, and some screens that were used to sift evidence from the ashes. Amo says she came because she was instructed by God to keep alive the true "end-time church," charged with gathering up the righteous before the destruction of the world. Also, she sold T-shirts, photographs, and other Davidian memorabilia. From the beginning, there was a public. "People come by every day, " she told me last week. "And usually it's running around a hundred a day."
As a tourist attraction, the site does not offer much; after the incineration of the compound, on April 19, 1993, bulldozers razed what remained of the buildings, and also the concrete bunkers below. Still, some people have come--a constant flow of them, determined to walk among the ruins, gaze at the foundations beneath the rubble, or glimpse the Davidian swimming pool, which the bulldozers somehow left in place. They walk through the grove of young crape myrtles, each bearing a cross and the name and sometimes the picture of a Davidian who died in the fire. But only a few of the visitors are motivated by religion. "Most of them are tourists, but some are constitutional activists," Amo says; that is, members of that portion of the American extreme fringe which believes the F.B.I. raid on the Davidian compound exemplified a government at war with its citizens.
To them, Waco is a shrine, and April 19th is a near-mystical date, warranting sober commemoration. Last month, on the second anniversary of the Waco conflagration, among those gathered at the site were former Attorney General Ramsey Clark, who represents some Davidian survivors and families, and who believes that a special prosecutor should investigate the government's actions, and an honor guard from the Northeast Texas Constitutional Militia, which showed up in full military dress to dedicate a stone monument listing the names of the dead. It was also on that morning, of course, that a bomb exploded at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, in Oklahoma City. Timothy McVeigh, the principal suspect in the bombing, had himself made the pilgrimage to Waco, an experience that is said to have fed his rage against the federal government. The phony driver's license that McVeigh handed to the police officer who arrested him listed the issue date as April 19th.
If the Oklahoma City horror alerted the American mainstream to a dangerous and heretofore mostly unregarded fringe, it also served as a reminder that Waco remains a piece of unfinished national business. Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, who was a Vietnam War prisoner, likens the brooding enshrinement of Waco to the dark mosaic of conspiracy and mistrust made of the unknown fates of missing American servicemen in Vietnam. McCain feels that a tortured yearlong congressional inquiry into the P.O.W. question firmly answered the question of the missing servicemen. But the government has never convincingly addressed the question of its own culpability in the Branch Davidian disaster, and its failure to do so has created a psychic void that is filled by paranoiac scenarios. Dr. Alan A. Stone, a professor of psychiatry and law at Harvard University, who was one of ten experts invited to review the Waco event, believes that the mistakes made at Waco will continue to fuel extremism until they are acknowledged. "The further I get away from Waco, the more I feel that the government stonewalled, " Stone says. "It would be better if the government would just say, 'Yes, we made mistakes, and we've done this, this, and that, so it won't happen again.' And, to my knowledge, they've never done it." McCain, among others, has called for congressional hearings into the handling of Waco, so that "when people say that the government plotted to go in and kill women and children, we can say, 'Wait a minute, here are the facts that came out in a congressional hearing.'" Representative Bill McCollum, Republican of Florida, has announced that the House Subcommittee on Crime will hold hearings. Robert Dole, the Senate Majority Leader, has said he wants the Senate to investigate as well. The media, including the Times, have also begun to take a second look.
The resurrection of Waco cannot be a welcome development for the one living person most closely associated with the tragedy--Attorney General Janet Reno, who approved the F.B.I plan to move in on the Davidian compound with Bradley tanks and tear gas. The event defined her publicly, for better or for worse, and privately it haunts her still. "I don't think she has put it behind her, and I don't think she ever will," says Sara Smith, an old friend of Reno's. "I think it is part of her soul." In the coarse, nasty world of the militant extremists, Reno has become an evil icon because of Waco and also because of her stout opposition to guns. The week before the Oklahoma City bombing, Reno's sister, Maggie Hurchalla, received a phone call from a friend who expressed alarm over a recorded telephone message disseminated by a local racist, which, to understate it, wished "Butch Reno" an unhappy demise.
Janet Reno's decision on Waco was made, it seems in retrospect, under impossibly difficult circumstances. The Davidian standoff--begun with the abortive February 28th raid by agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms--had become a ripe crisis before Reno, an obscure local prosecutor from Miami, was even confirmed. That she was suddenly thrust into the position of resolving it was largely an accident of politics. After the election, Bill Clinton's campaign promise of diversity in his staff was transmuted by "Nannygate" into a premium on childlessness. Having lost his first two Attorney General nominees, Zoe Baird and Kimba Wood, to domestic-help difficulties, Clinton reached down his list for a self-described "awkward old maid" who had been suggested to him by his brother-in-law over dinner. (In interviewing Reno, the White House vetting staff, twice burned, focussed on such questions as "Whom have you hired as domestic help?" and "Whom have you hired as a nanny?" and "Have you ever hired any other helping hands?")
From the moment Clinton introduced Reno to the nation in a Rose Garden press session, in February of 1993, she seemed a species apart from that which national politics naturally breeds. Tall (six feet two) and slightly slope-shouldered, and walking as if her feet hurt in shoes, she was as unglossed as raw timber, and as new. After living nearly all her fifty-four years at home in Florida with her mother, Reno came to Washington to live alone in an apartment where even the coffee-maker and the clock radio were rented. She was not a Friend of Bill, nor did she have close allies in the White House. She was close to no one in the top rank of the Justice Department she now headed, and her requests for two deputies she had met and admired during the confirmation process were denied. So in mid-April of 1993 Janet Reno was in a new job, in a new town, and was taking advice from a roomful of virtual strangers--Webster Hubbell, nominal assistant, was a Clinton crony from Arkansas--when she was obliged to make her first important decision as Attorney General, one of life-and-death consequence. Furthermore, evidence seems to suggest that a key misrepresentation and an omission by the F.B.I. played a part in winning her eventual approval of the plan it had devised for the ending of the siege.
Ever since the Davidians' February shootout with the A.T.F., the F.B.I. had been on the scene outside Waco, trying to talk Koresh out. The Bureau's stated objective, endorsed by President Clinton, was peaceful resolution of the standoff, "no matter how long it took." Over the weeks, negotiations brought the release of twenty-one children and several adults, but the process was a slow and frustrating one. Complicating the effort was the fact that there were two camps among the F.B.I.'s forces at Waco--the Hostage Rescue Team and the negotiators. The rescue team comprised the F.B.I.'s elite tactics specialists, who by instinct and training were inclined toward action. (It was they who ultimately conceived and executed the tear-gas plan). The negotiators' approach was to build trust over time and then exploit it toward the desired end--getting people out of the compound without further loss of life to either side. At times throughout the impasse, the two factions were distinctly at odds. While negotiators were talking with Koresh and others in the Branch Davidian compound, the tactics team was increasing pressure, often without consultation. At one point in March, the negotiators successfully talked Koresh into allowing two people out, but that very night the tactics squad turned off the electricity to the compound, enraging Koresh. Several days later, the negotiators won the release of seven more people, but the tactics team bulldozed Davidian cars outside the compound and broadcast loud music into the night. As the standoff continued, the tactics-team maneuvers came to include the exploding of stun devices whenever a Davidian wandered past a certain boundary without permission.
The negotiators complained that the trust they'd built was being undermined. Among those who supported them in that view were some of their colleagues in the F.B.I. By the second week of the standoff, Peter Smerick and Mark Young, psychological profilers for the F.B.I., began to worry that the tactics people were "action-oriented" and inclined to move too quickly toward a tactical rather than a negotiated solution. They warned, too, that the tactical methods would drive the Davidians closer together in their faith in Koresh by demonstrating that the government agents were the enemy, just as Koresh claimed. The lack of progress in negotiations, which was cited as one justification for the tear-gassing, seems to have been at least partly attributable to the harassment from the tactics team.
As the plan for using tear gas began to advance within the F.B.I., officials rejected advice that escalating the pressure dramatically -as in tear-gas action-would provoke the very apocalypse that Koresh had hinted at. Smerick and Young said that the tactics people should move away from the compound and that tactical pressure "should be the absolute last option we should consider." Clinton Van Zandt, of the F.B.I.'s National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime--the so-called "Silence of the Lambs" team--and Dr. Joseph Krofcheck, a psychiatrist, studied a letter given by Koresh to the F.B.I. on April 9th, which contained scriptural references to destruction by fire and explosion, and concluded that an F.B.I. confrontation with Koresh might "bring this matter to a 'magnificent' end, in his mind, a conclusion that could take the lives of all of his followers and as many of the authorities as possible."
Despite the impasse in talks with the Davidians, the majority of the negotiators were willing to continue their efforts, and at least some of them strongly believed that further negotiations would bring more adults or more children from the building. "I'll always, in my own mind, feel like maybe we could have gotten some more people out," one negotiator said in an interview several months after the event.
By the time the F.B.I. came to Reno for approval, on April 12th, its leaders were presenting a united front. A Justice Department report, compiled after the conflagration, offers no indication that Reno was ever informed of the dissension within the Bureau, or that she was told that some negotiators still hoped to talk more people out of the compound. Reno, on the job for just a month, had not yet built constituencies in the Justice Department, and had no cadre of confidants.
The report, which was made public in October of 1993, insists that "F.B.I. did not try to 'railroad' her," but a careful reading of the Department's own chronology strongly suggests that the senior Bureau officials who intensively briefed Reno in the week before the assault sought to eliminate her reservations to the gas plan by ruling out alternatives and by satisfying her doubts. And at least one F.B.I. official went beyond that.
During a briefing by the F.B.I. on April 12th, Reno was told that the plan was tentatively scheduled for April 14th. Reno asked the question that President Clinton would late ask her: "Why now?" The F.B.I. officials, led by then Director William Sessions (whose job was under attack, and who desperately needed to save his career), argued that Koresh's surrender seemed unlikely any time soon. Reno did not approve the plan.
On April 14th, Reno again met with Sessions and his deputies. This time, they brought along the current and former commanders of the United States Army's Delta Force commando squad. The Army people told her that the tear gas was safe, that it was used every year on United States soldiers during training, and, apparently, that it wouldn't catch fire. Dr. Harry Salem, an Army toxicologist, told Reno that the gas would likely not hurt the kids or pregnant women. Richard Rogers, the head of the Hostage Rescue Team, said his men would soon need to "stand down" for rest and retraining. Reno wanted to know why, if they needed relief, SWAT teams couldn't be sent in. She was told, according to the report, that the rescue team was "essential." So by the second meeting the F.B.I. had added a new element of urgency: the tactics guys, essential for controlling the scene, would soon have to withdraw if the plan wasn't approved.
The next day, April 15th, Reno again asked, "Why now?" Her advisers telephoned Byron Sage, who was one of the principal negotiators. He believed further negotiations would be fruitless. Koresh was being disingenuous in his discussions about such Davidians as the "Seven Seal," and Sage said he'd never seen such a total impasse. Besides, he said, agents on the ground were getting tired and their tempers were fraying. Hubbell related this conversation to Reno, who still did not approve the plan.
On April 16th, Hubbell reported a decision: Reno's answer to the F.B.I.'s gas plan was no. But, instead of accepting her decision, Sessions and his two top deputies, Floyd Clarke and Larry Potts, came to the Justice Building, and Sessions asked to see Reno personally. Reno, still unconvinced of the urgency, asked for a documented statement outlining the plan, the current state of negotiations, and the situation inside the compound. By the next day--a Saturday--Reno had received the documentation. She then reversed herself, and approved the plan. The tanks moved in on Monday.
What changed Reno's mind? The implication in the main body of the Justice Department report on Waco is that the documented statement Reno had requested from the F.B.I. somehow swayed her, because after receiving it she began discussing the rules of engagement with Sessions, Clarke, and Potts, but a footnote in the report notes that Reno "did not read the prepared statement carefully, nor did she read the supporting documentation provided along with her statement. She [merely] satisfied herself that 'the documentation was there.'" It subsequently became clear that Reno's decision to approve the plan was influenced by her belief that there was ongoing child abuse inside the Davidian compound. The F.B.I.'s briefing book on the Waco situation, which was compiled that final weekend, mentioned allegations by former Davidians and by psychiatrists of child abuse by Koresh--his belief that even girls in their early teens were potential "wives" and the Davidians' practice of corporal punishment--but there was no evidence of ongoing abuse. However, sometime during the week of meetings with Reno, in which F.B.I. officials were addressing her reservations about an assault, someone from the Bureau had told Reno that children inside the compound were being abused. The Justice chronology reports that "someone had made a comment in one of the meetings that Koresh was beating babies." Reno had pressed that official ("I double-checked it," she later said), and got "the clear impression that, at some point since the F.B.I. had assumed command and control for the situation, they had learned that the Branch Davidians were beating babies."
In fact, the Department report states the opposite conclusion, noting that, because Koresh had been wounded in the February 28th shootout, his mobility was so restricted during the standoff that he would have been unable to abuse children sexually or physically even if he had been so inclined. Dr. Bruce Perry, chief of psychiatry at Texas Children's Hospital, was the head of the crisis team that took charge of the twenty-one children released from the Davidian compound during the standoff, and therefore know as much as anyone on the outside about the likely condition of the children on the inside. During nearly two months of close evaluation of the children, Perry and his team probed for signs of physical, sexual, or emotional abuse, and also for insights regarding life inside the compound which could be projected into assumptions about the possible outcome of the standoff. Perry found socialization problems with the children, but he concluded in his report that " the children released from Ranch Apocalypse do not appear to have been victims of sexual abuse" or of physical abuse severe enough to warrant state intervention. Perplexed by Reno's insistence that the tear gas assault was necessary to save the children, Perry later told me he could only conclude that Reno had been strongly urged toward that conclusion: "The FBI maximized things they knew would ring a bell with her."
Reno had arrived in Washington with the reputation, perhaps unique among big-city prosecutors, of being a child advocate. As Dade County State Attorney, she was able to dictate policy on such difficult child-related crime issues as whether or not to recommend imprisonment for a drug addicted mother. Her answer was no, because imprisonment would separate the child from its mother and thus in Reno's view, accelerate the cycle of neglect and crime. In the mid-ninteen-eighties, Reno got so involved in the child-welfare issues created by the crack epidemic that she considered adopting a crack baby. (She decided her schedule was too demanding.) Her social-worker impulse led critics to nickname her Root Cause Reno, because of her insistence that crime was not committed by bad people but caused by dysfunctional homes. "She was more an advocate for juveniles than she was a traditional prosecutor," Seymour Gelber, her first boss in the Miami prosecutor's office recalls.
This child motif, which has characterized Reno's public identity, grew out of rough, deeply felt experiences in her own childhood in the wild country at the edge of the Everglades. In fact, her family lived a ninteen-forties version of what might now be considered a crank survivalists' life style. Her father, Henry Reno, had been a legendary crime reporter at the Miami Herald . Her mother, Jane, was a lawyer's daughter who refused to become a Southern belle and, in rebelling against her family's expectations, opted for the bohemian literary life. She was genuinely eccentric. "I can still see Jane with Janet in her lap and a cigarette and a highball, saying, 'Now don't upset mother's gin,'"an old newspaper friend named Jack E. Anderson recalled before his death last year. "She drank too much, and she would get argumentative. And she'd throw her shoes off and get down!" In the early years of the marriage, the couple's home became a sort of salon for the young Miami newspaper set and assorted writers and artists. (One of Janet's most vivid early memories is of her mother sobbing beneath a banyan tree on the day of F.D.R.'s death. "Stories of Roosevelt were part and parcel of our upbringing," she recalled when I spoke with her in the fall of 1993.)
After the war, Janet and Henry bought twenty one acres of land at the edge of the Everglades-a place so remote that the nearest store was five miles away. Jane decided to build a home, literally. She drew the plans, dug the foundation, and did much of the construction on a cracker-style house, which came to be known as Reno Ranch. The project took several years, and in the meantime the family lived in a small, ramshackle place that blended with its environment."It was character-building," Janet's sister, Maggy, recalls. "There was no heat except for a smelly old kerosene stove. The wind blew through the cracks. You couldn't keep the mice out." In a time that for most kids was an era of rigid conventionality, the Reno's lives were utterly without it. As television was bringing images of idealized, "Donna Reed" housewives presiding over pristine homes, theirs was handmade and permanently unfinished. (In its physical primativeness, Reno Ranch had something in common with Ranch Apocalypse.) There were no doors to the bathrooms, and one day Jane just stopped working on the ceiling, leaving a section of it open to the rafters. Jane didn't believe in housework, and the place usually showed it. The few school friends who made the trek out to Reno Ranch were sometimes rudely treated. When the children were still in grade school, Henry suddenly began to withdraw. He had often stayed out late, working or drinking, but increasingly he was not coming home at all. "I think he had a slight stroke," Janet recalled. "We've never been quite sure.... And that's when I was about in the fifth grade, and I think he started drinking more heavily after that. And he became more removed from about the time I was eleven."
After Henry Reno's departure, the children lived in a world created and ruled by Jane Reno. In most respects, she was a remarkably creative and devoted dictator. But Maggy, asked about stories suggesting that life with Jane could be somewhat difficult, responds, after prolonged laughter, "My mother was not 'somewhat difficult.' My mother could be extremely difficult!" Some of the ways in which Jane showed her individuality were plainly embarrassing: she swore; she didn't wear makeup or a bra; she didn't fix her hair or attend to her teeth, which eventually went bad and came out(not to be replaced by bridgework); and she drank. On one mortifyingly memorable occasion, the kids were called in the the middle of the night by the Coral Gables Police Department, which had Jane in custody. She had passed out on the sidewalk. "She had walked away from a party," Maggy recalls, "and decided it was too late to bother the friend that she was going to see, so she curled up on the sidewalk and went to sleep. Whereupon she was awakened by a very huffy policeman and taken to the Coral Gables jail, where she proceeded to play 'Shave and a Haircut' on the plumbing until we came to get her."
The children sometimes felt the lash of Jane's sharp tongue, and often she gave her disapproval physical expression. She spanked her children, apparently quite hard, when they provoked her wrath; sometimes she used her hand, sometimes a switch, and sometimes she whipped them with a pony bridle. When Janet was fourteen, she told her mother that she meant to become a lawyer one day. Her mother forbade it. But when Janet wanted to go to Cornell Jane sold off a piece of land to pay for her years there, and when Janet was accepted at Harvard Law School Jane "wept with joy," Janet recalled. Theirs was a powerful and complicated bond, and when Janet finished law school she returned home to live with her mother. Jane had not mellowed with age. Sara Smith remembers an incident that exemplified the value of forbearance regarding Jane. She and another friend went with Jane and Janet to see "The Belle of Amherst," the play about Emily Dickinson, who was Jane's favorite poet. "And at some point they had Julie Harris up there simpering into her handkerchief, and Jane, at the top of her lungs, said, 'Goddam it to hell! Emily Dickinson never simpered once in her entire life!' And, of course, every head ahead of me turned, except Janet's. Janet knew exactly where the outburst came from, knew exactly who it was. Now, Janet would not have apologized for her. Jane was Jane, and you handled it."
Friends sometimes cringe when Janet tells them about the whippings and Jane's other unpleasant behavior, and more than one acquaintance has characterized it as abuse. Janet, however, doesn't see it that way. "Mother loved us hard and she spanked us hard," she has often said, and when Jane died, in December, 1992, her eldest daughter conveyed in her eulogy the mixed passions that Jane inspired. "She could say 'I love you' better than anyone I know," Janet Reno said. "Even in the last days, as we came onto her porch she would say, "Hello, my darling. I love you!'" But later in the eulogy Reno also noted, "I take some small comfort today in knowing that Mother will not insult anyone or embarrass the family. She was responsible for the most excruciating moments of my life."
From this intense and complicated growing up, Reno may have derived an impulse (said to be common among children of drinkers) to step into the breach. "Despite being a strong person who's very opposed to crime and injustice of all sorts," Janet Mc Aliley, and old friend, says, "Janet is a rescuer." Waco wasn't the first time Reno's concern for children may have affected her judgement. When she became state attorney in Dade County, her office became known for its prosecutions of cases involving ritualistic sexual abuse of children in day care. Reno's office enlisted the services of two outside child-abuse specialists to question the children, using interview techniques that aimed at prompting disclosure. Although many of the children seemed reluctant to "disclose" the abuse, the interviewers eventually elicited from them horrifying tales of bizarre ritualistic abuses. Charges were brought, and convictions were obtained. One Satanic-ritual-abuse case involved a fourteen-year-old boy, Bobby Fijnje, who worked as a babysitter at a church. Again, specialists helped children "disclose," and a good number of the children at the church told tales of Bobby killing and eating babies, and leading naked dances around a campfire, witches flying, and eerie journeys to a cemetery where, one child said, Freddy Krueger came out of a grave. Much of this was said to have occurred during daytime services at a Presbyterian church in an affluent suburban neighborhood.
The jury in that case found Bobby Fijnje innocent, and he was freed, having spent a year and eight months in jail. Since then, of course, the whole phenomenon of ritual-abuse cases has been cast into doubt by developmental research experts who have discovered that merely questioning a child repeatedly about an alleged incident can convince the child that the incident occurred. Stephen Ceci, of Cornell University, who has studied this syndrome, called "confirmatory bias," says that it is often exhibited by child advocates whose willingness to believe in child abuse hinders objective analysis. It seems clear that in at least some child abuse investigations the chief problems the children face are those created by the insistence of well-meaning rescuers.
The "rescue" attempted with Bradley tanks and tear gas near Waco came to the apocalyptic end that David Koresh had predicted. A monumental policy failure that bore Janet Reno's signature, it might well have ended her career. Instead, oddly, it made her a national hero.
The Clinton Presidency had by then revealed its essentially equivocal nature, and enabled Reno to distinguish herself merely by refusing to dodge. Just hours after the raid, Reno held a televised press conference in which she declared, "I made the decision. I am accountable . The buck stops here." She repeated that mantra over and over--on "MacNeil/Lehrer," "Larry King Live," and "Nightline"--and the effect was transcendent. Before the site of the Davidians' incineration had cooled enough to allow body count, Reno was well into a remarkable metamorphosis from "awkward old maid" to political heroine. There was something so unlikely, so unexpected, about the way Reno welcomed responsibility for Waco that in claiming the tragic failure she achieved a stunning success; overnight, she became by far the most popular member of the Clinton Administration. Reno's non-style style betokened substance, and created a kind of anti-slick vogue. She mispronounced Ted Koppel's name, and the Beltway crowd chuckled approvingly. She refused the ministrations of television makeup artists, and feminists lauded a new role model. Barbra Streisand stopped by for lunch. There was even speculation about her future on a national ticket.
One of the effects of Reno's sudden popularity was that the national appetite for serious inquiry into Waco became blunted. Representative Patricia Schroeder, Democrat of Colorado, voiced the prevailing sentiment in Washington when she told Reno, "You've raised the responsibility and accountability of public service to an incredibly high level in a way we've never seen before." Democrats, then in control of Congress, were not eager to launch a probe that might embarrass the Administration, and Senator McCain notes, "Frankly, I never heard any groundswell Republican demand for a hearing, either...I think you could make a case that both parties in Congress, especially in the Senate, may have been somewhat derelict in their duties."
The Administration ordered the Justice Department investigation, which produced a three-hundred-and-forty-eight-page report on Waco that managed to find no fault on the part of any Justice employee, from Reno on down through the ranks of the F.B.I. Among the questions that remained unanswered, however, were some that implied serious malfeasance. Who told the Attorney General that there was ongoing child abuse? And was the misrepresentation intentional? ("I remember it specifically," Webb Hubbell told me, "but I can't remember who said it.") Reno herself told me that she didn't remember who the person was. The F.B.I. pumped tear gas into the compund periodically during the first hours of the assault--until the supply of gas was exhausted. Then agents sent to Houston for more, and exhausted that supply, too. Was the Attorney General informed that the gas put children at the risk of, as Dr. Alan Stone discovered on his own, "fulminating chemical pneumonia and death?" Or that infants do not have the lung capacity to use gas masks? Was Reno aware, in approving the plan to save the children, that gas packets, fired from a grenade launcher, could penetrate wooden doors and explode inside? Did Reno really mean to present the Davidians with the choice of surrendering or watching their children die? The plan that Reno is alleged to have approved was to have been "passive"; that is, the agents were to have inserted gas into a portion of the compound and then retreated and awaited evacuees before approaching again. This restrained approach was supposed to have been followed for as long as three days, but it lasted just twelve minutes. The operation then escalated: walls were breached and the door was knocked down. Was the deviation from the plan warranted? Or was it an overreaction?
By the time the Justice Department report appeared, in the fall of 1993, attention had long since turned from Waco to Whitewater, health care, and other issues. Meanwhile, Waco festered. "People like the militia have a whole bunch of crazy ideas," Dr. Stone says. "However, they have two pieces of truth in all the craziness. One is 'Look at what happened at Waco. And the government hid its mistakes and concealed its misdeeds.' And the other piece of truth is that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms made this attack on Waco because Koresh's followers had guns. And the militas have guns. So the militias have these two kernels of truth in all their craziness about our government: Waco, and the fear that the government will come after them because they have guns."
Although the mainstream media quickly forgot Waco, the event was kept alive in the eddies outside the mainstream--the fax networks, talk radio, C-SPAN call-in shows, and the Internet. That is how Senator McCain began to realize that the issue was gaining its own, potenitally monstrous life: "I can tell you that we have had a lot of mail, a lot of phone calls, and a lot of times when I've been on talk shows and people have brought that up, and it has surprised me--the legs that this story has."
In the days following the Waco event, Reno termed it "one of the great tragedies of our time." When we talked about it in the late fall of that year, she was still clearly pained by the results of the miscalculation she had endorsed. "One of the tragedies is that we'll never know," she said. "What was the right thing to do?" She told me she still didn't beleive she had been misled. Privately, however, she appears to have harbored suspicions.
"I don't think Janet would ever publicly criticize agencies," says Sandy D'Alemberte, one of Reno's early Florida mentors and a close friend. "But I think she learned something of the perils of dealing with people who may not always give you full assessments. She took responsibility for the decisions, but, boy, she just felt awful about those kids."
That is Reno's lasting share of the Waco tragedy, whose horror is still unspooling in unimagined ways two years later. When authorities arrested Francisco Duran last fall for spraying gunfire at the White House, they found a bumper sticker on his truck the read "Fire Butch Reno." Timothy McVeigh (who is being held in an Oklahoma town called, as it happens, El Reno), was, of course, a Waco pilgrim, and ever since the Oklahoma bombing overt threats on Reno's life have markedly increased. Both Reno and President Clinton have denied any rational connection between Waco and Oklahoma, and they are right; the connection is not rational. But it is real, and the echo from Waco heard in Oklahoma can only heighten the personal tragedy of the devoted child advocate who once sent tanks and tear gas on a mission to save the children.