Leon Whiteson

It is hell. Day and night booming speakers blast us with wild sounds—blaring sirens, shrieking seagulls, howling coyotes, wailing bagpipes, crying babies, the screams of strangled rabbits, crowing roosters, buzzing dental drills, off-the-hook telephone signals. The cacophony of speeding trains and hovering helicopters alternates with amplified recordings of Christmas carols, Islamic prayer calls, Buddhist chants, and repeated renderings of whiny Alice Cooper and Nancy Sinatra’s pounding, clunky lyric, “These Boots Were Made for Walking.” Through the night the glare of brilliant stadium lights turns our property into a giant fishbowl. The young children and babies in our care, most under eight years old, are terrified. The dismal racket and the blinding lights are tortures invented by the small army of law enforcement officers armed with tanks, armored vehicles, and automatic weapons who’ve surrounded the complex we call Mount Carmel for the past seven weeks. These torments are intended to sap our wills and compel us to surrender to an authority that refuses to accept that we are a valid religious community with deeply held beliefs. All our attempts to explain our commitment to what we believe have been dismissed as mere “Bible babble.” As the days drift by, we’ve begun to fear that, in their disregard for our faith and their frustration at our refusal to submit to naked force, the seven hundred or so agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF), plus the officers of several state and local police forces besieging us, may be edging toward an action that will end up wiping our small community right off the map.

Sometimes he’d deliberately provoke us, to jar us out of a trance. “You know, I hate black people,” he said once, out of the blue. I cringed reflexively. The crowd, which was around one-third black, was shocked. You could cut the hush with an axe. “And I hate yellow people,” David went on after a pause. “And I hate white people. The people I value are people of light.”

As David’s grasp of his role in the fulfillment of prophecy evolved, he had a further series of revelations. One of the most important and startling of these was his “New Light” experience during the summer of 1989, in which he foresaw the crucial role of sex and procreation in what he called the coming New World Order—a phrase later echoed by President George Bush around the time of the 1991 Gulf War. The New Light revelation was so radical it shocked some of his people and shook their faith. Simply put, it mandated celibacy for everyone except David. Single men in the community had to give up sex. Married men, such as Steve Schneider and Livingston Fagan, had to separate from their wives and cease making love altogether. Sex was a distraction, David told his people, an untamed power seducing the spirit away from its focus. Only David was given the right to procreate with any of the women, married or single, to generate the inner circle of children who would rule the coming kingdom to be established in Israel. In David’s spiritual logic, he saw himself assuming the burden of sexuality for the entire community, both male and female. The children David would have with these women, married and single, ranging in ages from fourteen to forty, would represent the most sacred core of the community. “They are our hope and our future,” he said simply.

The keystone in the ATF’s attack plan was the scripting of an affidavit as the basis for a warrant to search Mount Carmel and arrest David. A corrupt document on its face, the affidavit served as the original act that brought about the obliteration of our community. The ATF affidavit was built upon deliberate deceptions concerning charges that were legitimately under ATF jurisdiction, such as firearms violations; however, it raised issues that were not the agency’s concern, such as child abuse and drug trafficking. (We only got to see the sealed warrant during the siege, on March 19, weeks after the ATF attack. For the public, the warrant remained sealed until after the fire, too late for the media to examine it and question its validity.) The most blatant lie in the ATF affidavit was the drug charge. ATF agents told Texan officials that the community was “involved in drug trafficking.” In addition, the ATF involved IRS agents by dropping hints of drug “money laundering.” These trumped-up allegations allowed the ATF to requisition military materiel, normally forbidden to nonmilitary agencies under the 1878 Posse Commitatus Act. (The drug charge dated back to George Roden, who had allowed speed dealers to operate in Mount Carmel during the mid-1980s. But local law officers knew that when David—who hated drugs—took over Mount Carmel in 1987, he’d kicked out the dopers and called the Waco sheriff to have the methamphetamine lab removed.) A few weeks after the initial ATF assault, ATF spokesman David Troy blandly denied that there ever was any “suspicion of illegal drug activity” in Mount Carmel. Later, sources within the ATF quietly admitted to reporters that the drug-lab story was “a complete fabrication,” concocted to deflect sharp questions from Texas officials about the deceitful use of the National Guard and other state agencies. When challenged for their “dishonesty and misrepresentation” by the then-governor of Texas, Ann Richards, Troy contradicted himself with a claim that an “infrared overflight [by] a British military aircraft brought over from England” had found evidence of a meth lab in our building. According to Bill Cryer, her former spokesman, Richards “was surprised, and she was furious about the original attack. She thought it was unnecessary.” At the 1995 congressional hearings a New Hampshire Republican congressman, Bill Zeliff, commented that “ATF agents responsible for preparing the affidavits knew or should have known that many of the statements they were making were false.”

David’s suspicion of the FBI remained high all through the discussions about the surrender. “You are all going to kill us,” he told one negotiator during the morning. Another negotiator, trying to reassure him, said that the military vehicles circling our building were there “for tactical reasons only,” whatever that meant. “They took their guns off,” a guy named Jim argued over the phone. “It’s strictly a bullet-proof shield.” We were suspicious of this jargon—rightly so, as it turned out. And we weren’t the only ones wary of the feds. Noting the FBI’s mobilization of military equipment, former McLellan County District Attorney Vic Feazell lamented the FBI’s Storm Trooper tactics (his words) and the “vulgar display of power on the part of the feds.” Feazell told the Houston Chronicle on March 1: “The Feds are preparing to kill them. That way they can bury their mistakes and won’t have attorneys looking over what they did later.… I’d represent these boys for free if they’d surrender without bloodshed, but I’m afraid I’m going to wake up and see the headlines that say they all died.”

A prime example of this “pernicious dualism” was displayed on the March 25 episode of Oprah. In front of millions of viewers, and while we were in the midst of the siege, the popular host linked David’s name with that of Jim Jones by inviting Jones’s former attorney as a man who “understands the cult mentality.” Oprah’s program that day was titled “Inside Waco and Other Cults.” On the show, Oprah tried to manipulate Jeannine and Robyn Bunds into admitting that we were all under David’s diabolical spell. Though Jeannine repeatedly denied this, Oprah kept pushing. “Did you, at the time, recognize that—that it was indeed a cult and that you were being brainwashed?” she persisted. “No. I didn’t feel that way at all,” Jeannine replied. “Do you believe he’s evil?” “I don’t believe that he is evil,” Robyn Bunds answered.

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 claims, 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.”

Official lies survived the blaze intact. The day after Mount Carmel burned, FBI spokesman Bob Ricks stated that the agents in charge had not expected a fire. However, a nurse in the burn unit at Waco’s Parkland Memorial Hospital reported that an FBI agent contacted her at 5:00 A.M. on April 19, an hour or so before the feds sent in the tanks to inject Mount Carmel with tear gas. The agent, said the nurse, wanted to know how many casualties the unit could handle. Two other local hospitals were also approached by the FBI early that morning. (As it turned out, the feds refused to pay for the treatment of our people in the Parkland burn unit, and the hospital administrator had to file a lawsuit against the agency to get the government to pay up. The hospital’s claim was settled out of court.)

The charred corpse of six-year-old Star, David’s oldest daughter, was found with her spine bent into a backward bow until her head almost touched her feet. Her muscles were contracted by the combined effect of the fire’s heat and the cyanide in her body, a byproduct of CS suffocation. Cyanide contraction is so violent it can break bones, which is why prison death-chamber officials who use the gas strap their victims down.

The Israeli mother of my friend Pablo Cohen, herself a survivor of the Nazi death camps, said that never in her worst nightmares did she expect her son to die by gassing and incineration in America.

I now realize that David Koresh made huge mistakes. He was guilty of statutory rape and slept with a number of women, among them Michele, who was fourteen at the time. [...] It should be noted that the age of consent in Texas at that time was fourteen (with parental permission) and although David’s actions might have been legal at the time, they were morally reprehensible, as well as bigamous.