Gunning for Koresh
Wattenberg, Daniel
It was only when their funding was up for review—and a pattern of sexual harassment emerged at their agency—that the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms decided to make an example of...
...A boy who wants to grow up so he can carry a gun...
...role there...
...They got me once, and they will never get me again...
...But is the Rodriguez account precise...
...If so, Koresh's words are strange indeed...
...While there, he saw a metal lathe and milling machine usually operated by Donald Bunds (Robyn's dad, Jeannine's ex), who, he said, had "the capability to fabricate firearms parts...
...If the eight-month-old information on parts shipments was vulnerable to legal challenge as stale, then the material from the "new" witnesses is even staler...
...Because the parts and materials acquisitions so painstakingly documented by the bureau in June all occurred during 1992...
...Jeannine left the group in September 1991...
...In the eyes of local law enforcement, Koresh and the Davidians were private and territorial, but no threat to the surrounding community...
...A hung jury voted 9-3 to acquit him...
...Maybe it did the reverse...
...As can be readily verified by anyone who would trouble to plot the relevant dates on a timeline, five of the six former cult members contacted had each left the compound, left Waco, and left David Koresh and his sect behind well before that time...
...How many casualties...
...It turns out they were Oliver Stone's Oscar-winning Platoon, Stanley Kubrick's anti-war satire Full-Metal Jacket, and Hamburger Hill, a critically admired Hollywood failure that was not transparently hostile to the U.S...
...Omitted are the names of these movies...
...Koresh explained to Sparks, according to the affidavit, that his self-revelation "would be a 'military type operation' and that all the 'non-believers' would have to suffer...
...Jones, it happened, was a postman, who made his rounds in his own car, which bore the postal service logo...
...For almost six months, his investigation of Koresh appears to have been virtually moribund...
...But a bad-faith omission of this kind falls in another category...
...Koresh learned they were coming and let an agent go unharmed...
...They did kill Perry Jones with that first barrage...
...the time has come...
...I don't remember the date...
...Sparks asked him why he was in such a hurry to grow up, he replied that when he grew up he would get a 'long gun' just like all the other men there...
...Says DeGuerin, "The magistrate [has to] conclude that what they are searching for is there now, not that it was there at some time in the past...
...Koresh "wouldn't do ii unless you wanted it," says Jeannine Bunds, 51...
...While the age of sexual consent is just 14 under the Texas penal code's Indecency with a Child Statute, it is 17 under section 22.011, Sexual Assault...
...Mrs...
...It is strange that Koresh, allegedly readying himself for his long-sought showdown with the law, let an ATF agent go, rather than shooting him or keeping him hostage...
...As in being sent to bed without dinner...
...But that is a matter of interpretation...
...And he was met with, first, one shot that barely missed his head, hit the door right by his head, and then a barrage of shots, and he ducked back inside...
...Higgins did: "What we were dealing with [in June] were parts, as well as explosive materials, that only become violations if you make something out of them...
...That's a fact," she said...
...All of the information in the warrant gathered from these five former Davidians is at least eight months old...
...Block was present on several occasions when Howell would ask if anyone had any knowledge about making hand grenades or converting semi-automatic rifles to machineguns...
...On December 7, 1992, Aguilera interviewed ATF Special Agent Carlos Torres, who had assisted his investigation of the Branch Davidians...
...Oh, [expletive deleted...
...Machine-gun parts can be legally sold...
...After the five-and-a-half-month lapse, the ATF investigation resumed in December 1992...
...Davy Aguilera' s affidavit, submitted on February 25, 1993, contained no information less than eight months old on suspicious parts deliveries to the "Mag-Bag" metal shop the Davidians ran outside the compound, or to the Mt...
...Congressman Fish asked me if we had probable cause by February," Director Higgins testified to the House panel in April...
...Perhaps we will never learn if these practices were isolated or routine...
...Whether a computer design constitutes probable cause for a weapons search is open to question, but there is no question that Aguilera had serious doubts about the reliability of Block's weapons knowledge, noting that he mistook a British Boys .52 anti-tank rifle for a .50 caliber rifle...
...An immediate threat to the life and safety of every person in there...
...On close inspection, as we have seen, this material hardly establishes an immediate threat to the life and safety of every person in there...
...It wasn't about sex, but he was a very appealing, sexual person...
...They had their property line, and they were basically good people...
...He believed in spanking children...
...Koresh had not interfered with a Michigan judge's decision in a child-custody case to remove 12-year-old Kiri Jewell from the compound...
...Unless the man really was a prophet, he could not have told her this...
...Self-Defense...
...Phase two renders, or constructs, the portrait of a militarized, polymorphously criminal Caliban on a hair-trigger ruling over a squad of zombiefied zealots blankly awaiting zero-hour for the damned, a bomb ticking out the days on a piece of East Texas scrubland before blasting through the cosmos into eternity on a signal from Koresh...
...They didn't get him...
...It was appropriations season in Washington...
...In reality, these kits are known as E-2 kits...
...Remember Sparks's little fiction about her encounter with Koresh in the compound when he promised to make the L.A...
...Conceivably, she saw Koresh atplay with a frivolous toy he possessed, a "hellfire" device...
...On January 25, 1993, Aguilera interviewed ex-Davidian David Block...
...They started firing first...
...Worse, Aguilera suppresses the fact that this child abuse investigation was closed on April 30, 1992, having failed to produce any evidence...
...Do you want to try to work something out...
...The leader's polygamy...
...It was just screaming, yelling, like Marines storming the beach...
...According' to DeGuerin, "It was thrown in there simply to stink up the case...
...But it is highly unlikely that any of Koresh's teenage partners met this legal standard of promiscuity, because in his capacity as sexual lawgiver at the compound he rigidly policed the girls' sexuality, restricting them to the procreative sex they had with him...
...Carmel Center...
...The warrant is for the illicit manufacture of explosives and explosive devices which right away is an immediate threat to the life and safety of every person in there...
...In the one interview he has given, he described poignantly how a steady diet of Koresh's biblical teachings had almost hooked him...
...What a first impression the ATF would make on its new bosses...
...Texas Rangers recovered about 200 guns from the ashes of the Mount Cannel Center, roughly two per resident...
...With the plan locked in, the affidavit would have to do more than document probable cause to believe Koresh had violated the NFA—it would have to leave a record justifying a military-style assault...
...And yet she cites not a single instance of sexual abuse...
...The warrant is for an imminent threat to the life and safety of everybody in that compound...
...Forgetting, for example, that while it was Koresh who purportedly willed an apocalyptic showdown, it was the ATF that dictated—twice—the timing and setting of confrontation...
...Of course, there is a powerful social consensus that minors do not have the emotional maturity to responsibly consent to sex, and thus we have statutory rape laws...
...They opened the door for me to get out, and I said to myself, 'They were going to shoot me in the back,' " he told the Dallas paper...
...With the exception of one ATF undercover agent, the Block interview is the last one recorded in the affidavit...
...But the other thing that he did was to teach the philosophy that once anyone crossed that property line out there, it would be just like someone invading the United States...
...Indeed, it was local television cameraman John McLemore who, according to Harwell, inadvertently tipped off a Koresh follower he encountered on the road of the raid scheduled to commence later the same morning...
...This is a very, very convoluted, technical, angelsdancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin kind of argument," says Robert Sanders, former enforcement chief of the ATF...
...He had surrendered himself to the local sheriff in 1987 on a bizarre attempted murder charge far more serious than the weapons violations the ATF suspected him of...
...They are murderers...
...But what is this doing in the warrant...
...At about the same time, David Michael Jones, an associate of Vernon Howell, had arrived at the compound after learning that the compound might be raided that day...
...Shortly thereafter, the undercover agent left the compound...
...The government will use Koresh's chilling final words to the plant in support of its argument that Koresh methodically ordered his people to grab their guns and man their battle stations to repulse the expected raid...
...To be truthful I haven't really looked at that, that's been over a year and a half ago, so I'm not, I couldn't just get the dates for you, urn, but on one of my visits, yes, he did say that," she said...
...And they were linked explicitly, in somewhat Victorian fashion, to procreation...
...And there are no published rulings telling you what is and what isn't [a violation...
...Inside, Koresh was providing a biblical exegesis for Robert Rodriguez, an ATF undercover agent who had infiltrated the cult in early January, posing as a neighboring graduate student...
...And what conceivable jurisdiction could the ATF have over child abuse...
...David Koresh had never been convicted of a crime, violent or otherwise...
...Aguilera's blunder is significant in the context of an investigation to determine whether there was probable cause to believe Koresh's legal acquisitions of (unspecified, in the warrant) M-16 parts were intended for the purpose of illegal machine-gun conversions...
...Stale Witnesses If the purpose of the flurry of interviews forming Part II of the ATF investigation was to build on the ATF's previous work and bolster case for probable cause, then it must be deemed a near-total failure...
...This would be an idle quibble, however, because the Aguilera affidavit is wrong...
...With federal agents and Davidians alike dropping dead in the furious crossfire a few miles out of town, the local sheriff's department couldn't get a federal agent on the phone...
...She "objected," she says, to her agency's decision to close the case...
...Block also recounts observing Donald Bunds designing a "grease gun/sten gun"—a World War II–vintage British machine gun—on an Auto Cad computer on the premises...
...A Newsweek account gives a sense: To many girls being chosen by Koresh was an honor they eagerly sought...
...Another has a Davidian calling a relative instructing that relative to immediately call back and ask for Koresh...
...Indeed, it appears that the ATF had collected no reliable new information on suspicious weapons parts shipments to the Davidians after June 23, 1992, eight months before...
...Machine-gun conversions of the kind for which Koresh was under investigation constitute a new and tricky area of the law...
...a second 911 call...
...Aguilera's records search revealed that "most" of the forty or so foreign nationals who at some point gave the Mount Carmel Center as their local point of contact "have over stayed [sic] their entry permits or visas and are therefore illegally in the United States...
...The Los Angeles riots broke out on April 29, 1992, more than three weeks after Sparks had last visited Koresh...
...Vernon Howell was then summoned from the room by a fellow resident of the compound, Perry Jones, leaving the agent in the foyer area...
...I hear gunfire...
...She hedged, but repeated that it took place in the compound...
...And if the purpose of phase two was to build on the probable cause foundation so meticulously laid in phase one, it can hardly be counted a success...
...and he made you feel special...
...Hello...
...She "felt the entire walk through the compound was staged for her by Koresh...
...Koresh told Marc Breault, writes Aguilera, "that he was interested in acquiring the `Anarchist's Cook Book', which I know is a publication outlining clandestine operations to include instructions and formulas for manufacturing improvised explosive devices...
...LYNCH: Okay, David...
...Perhaps Rodriguez quoted Koresh accurately...
...Whether deterred by the daunting prospect of prosecuting these unusual sexual offenses, or by the thought that state intervention and dissolution of the Davidian families might be more damaging even than the status quo, the local law enforcement authorities with jurisdiction never stepped in to force this community to conform en masse to the norms of the world from which it had voluntarily withdrawn...
...How much of it is the product of sensationalized reporting, ignorance of Texas law, and panicky, irresponsible exercises in official self-justification, like Attorney General Janet Reno's wild claim (later repudiated by the FBI) that she ordered the FBI to smash and gas because "babies were being beaten" inside...
...And "60 Minutes" had first contacted ATF personnel around mid-November 1992, according to Bob Anderson, who produced the segment for CBS...
...Could there be a better way of washing away this taint of troglodyte sexism than mounting an operation against the self-proclaimed prophet they had under investigation down in Waco, this white, male, sexually predatory, patriarchal, tax-resisting, gun-loving religious nut with a fierce will not to be governed by secular authorities...
...On his return, he saw a driver who appeared to be lost, and stopped to offer help...
...The warrant supplies no more evidence in support of such an assumption than it does in support of an assumption that the explosion was innocuous, related perhaps to the Davidians' continuing construction work on their property...
...Other Aguilera goofs raise further questions about his reliability...
...In ATF agent Earl Dunagan's account in his affidavit, the details are left vague, but the meaning is clear: Early in the morning of Sunday, February 28, 1993, the undercover agent entered the Mount Cannel Compound and met with Vernon Howell, Steve Schneider, and other residents of the compound...
...One agent, Michelle Roberts, charged that agents had left dildos and other sexual devices on her desk...
...Obviously, in many areas of the country, teenage sexual promiscuity is rampant, and in some jurisdictions is tacitly condoned by the distribution of condoms in high schools...
...By now an attentive reader should have the answer...
...Jeannine Bunds, Robyn's mother, was interviewed on December 12...
...Early on the morning of the 28th, David Jones, a Koresh follower and Mount Carmel resident, went out for a newspaper...
...Sexual harassment...
...Now, you have casualties...
...The Firearms Cache From June 4, 1992 to June 23, 1992, the ATF aggressively investigated Koresh for federal weapons violations...
...A ppearing before the House Judiciary Committee nine days after the incineration of David Koresh's Mount Carmel Center and most of those who dwelt within its walls, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms director Stephen Higgins referred to the search and arrest warrants his agents had tried to execute two months earlier...
...Was it an illegal explosion...
...DeGuerin implied that, had Koresh lived, he would have petitioned to have the warrant nullified on grounds first established by the 1978 Supreme Court case Franks v. Delaware—which held that if an agent knowingly falsifies or misleads the magistrate in the issuing of the search warrant then the search warrant is invalid...
...At one point he also heard discussion about a shipment of inert hand grenades and Howell's intent to reactivate them...
...Yet, according to Aguilera, Breault "participated in firearm shooting exercises conducted by Howell"—which under the circumstances surely was illegal...
...At the moment of the alleged words, a panicked Rodriguez feared for his life...
...None of the allegations could be verified," according to an April 23, 1993 case summary released by the Texas Department of Protective and Regulatory Services...
...Today, one may still legally own a registered machine gun manufactured before May 19, 1986...
...If he was observed firing machine guns in February 1989 and talking about adding to his collection, why would he ask advice on how to convert semi-automatics three years later...
...In a third and final call, placed by Lynch, Martin repeatedly pleads for a cease-fire, offers to arrange one, and claims at one point that the people inside had ceased their fire, but that incoming fire had continued unabated...
...But quickly digested and taken at face value, this information would likely be interpreted as Killorin suggests it should, as justifying a massive raid on a split-second timetable that indiscriminately placed in danger every person in the compound, from the suspected wrongdoer to blameless infants and elderly and everyone in between...
...The Aguilera Affidavit Certainly, Higgins erred in his assertion that the ATF search warrant detailed "messages" imputed to Koresh that his religious vision "promised them all—and others who were in their paths—death...
...Despite intensive efforts in June, the ATF had failed to establish probable cause to believe that Koresh was illegally manufacturing and concealing machine guns and destructive devices...
...They were like living in another little country out there," observes Harwell...
...It is nonetheless a theory predicated almost wholly on forgetting...
...Space permits a look at only some of them...
...How come you try to be so big all the time...
...Is that an uncommon practice in McLennan County...
...The ATF invited television news crews along on this raid...
...Machine guns, which fire more than one shot automatically with one pull of the trigger, are not unconditionally outlawed in the United States...
...They might even have considered another possibility that has not yet made its way into the popular consciousness: Maybe the bureau never seriously tried to tailor its enforcement' means to the size of the actual threat...
...I think he really believed he was what he told everybody he was, and I think he was probably sincere in everything that he taught...
...Unless the government fired first...
...For the first time in twelve years a liberal would be in the White House, and with Congress still in Democratic hands, Washington was on the threshold of a new era of liberal activism...
...Koresh seems to have taken no steps toward Daniel Wattenberg is an investigative writer for The American Spectator...
...Of course, DeGuerin was not there at the time...
...In the first call, Wayne Martin, a top Koresh lieutenant and also a Waco attorneywell known and liked in the local legal community, pleads with Sheriff's Lieutenant Larry Lynch: LYNCH: Motint Carmel...
...This is his recollection of what Koresh told him after he would have had time to concoct at his leisure a version of events that indicated legitimate self-defense...
...Videotape of the bureau's precision raid on an armed and dangerous cult leader would have been fresh in the minds of congressional appropriators...
...With one shaky exception, none of them could have...
...Koresh would not speak with her, because "she had strict orders not to talk with anyone" unless Koresh was present...
...It is diffuse, undisciplined, deceptive, urgent, ominous, and concerned with alleged deviations from moral norms that fall far beyond the jurisdiction of the ATF...
...On her second visit, Sparks saw a buried school bus with the seats removed, and "at one end of the bus she could see a very large refrigerator with numerous bullet holes...
...At one point he mistakes the legal definition of "destructive devices" (bombs, grenades, etc...
...Or when he was at one of the many gun shows he regularly attended...
...ATF is pulling back, we're trying toKORESH: Why didn't you do that first...
...Koresh did not tell Sparks on her visit to the compound that "the riots in Los Angeles would pale in comparison" to his self-revelation in Waco...
...On Sparks's first visit, Mrs...
...Koresh even invited one of the deputy sheriffs to come back and fish in their lake, according to McLennan County Sheriff Jack Harwell...
...MARTIN: Yeah...
...If their record of successful, direct interaction with Koresh and his flock had been studied as a model...
...Interviewed in January 1993, Marc Breault lived at the Center from early 1988 until September 1989...
...Close inspection of the publicly available material on the ATF investigation of David Koresh invites just such a hypothesis...
...His association with Koresh is not specified, and his name never crops up again in the search warrant...
...They had been drilled in a plan to enter the front door within seven seconds after scrambling from two goose-necked cattle trailers, and to gain control of the compound within sixty seconds...
...Was Koresh a Threat...
...They are coming...
...But in my scouring of the record—the ATF warrant, two quickie books on Koresh, voluminous case files and press reports—I have found just one specific and detailed allegation that Koresh beat a baby...
...After making grimly ironic note of the lieutenant's name ("Hey, Lynch...
...The warrant reports on interviews conducted after December 1992 with six former Davidians who had resided for varying lengths of time at Mount Cannel...
...We know that Koresh had an unchecked libido, a filthy vernacular that he failed to clean up in the presence of children, that he had a harem of women of varying ages, and that, dating from his announcement of his "New Light Doctrine," he insisted on male celibacy in the compound, excepting only himself...
...After that, those on the inside ran to their rooms, got their guns and started firing back...
...And whether an M16 parts kit is a machine-gun kit depends on what M-16 parts are inside, and how they are used...
...How much of what can be verified is actually against the law...
...Perhaps he intended those words as a warning for Rodriguez to relay to his superiors...
...We told you we wanted to talk...
...First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, for example, wrote some years ago, "The so-called status offenses, incorrigibility, truancy, running away, sexual precociousness, represent a confused mixture of social control and preventive care that has resulted in the confinement of thousands of children for the crime of having trouble growing up...
...What we know is that a few defected and deprogrammed Davidians alleged child abuse, and many more loyalists, while they lived, denied it...
...Asked by Dallas Morning News writer Lee Hancock if Koresh ever got to him, he answered in a cracking voice, "He was close...
...Her other example has been widely repeated...
...But maybe that was not its primary purpose...
...He didn't say, 'Ooh, you've got sexy boobs.'" He just loved the idea of womanhood...
...The other related "clandestine" magazines are left unidentified...
...By now this is the generally accepted theory...
...How come you guys try to be ATF agents...
...Or, alternatively, when he was out shopping, as he often was, with his legal wife Rachel and their kids in local music stores and auto parts shops...
...But more importantly, these five offered no evidence that Koresh was assembling or converting those parts listed by the ATF into machine guns or other illegal destructive devices, because they were long gone from the scene by the time these parts were acquired...
...Magistrate Judge Dennis G. Green hastily approved search and arrest warrants on Koresh, without pausing long over the particulars of the bloated Aguilera affidavit...
...Her date of departure is unspecified and unnecessary to specify: she testified only that four years earlier she saw Koresh fire what she assumed was a machine gun and shortly thereafter overheard him discussing machine guns with associates...
...According to Aguilera's affidavit, Sparks told Torres that on her second and final visit to the compound on April 6, 1992, "Koresh told her that he was the 'Messenger' from God, that the world was coming to an end, and that when he 'reveals' himself the riots in Los Angeles would pale in comparison to what was going to happen in Waco, Texas...
...Still, it represents a large concentration of firepower in one place...
...Statewide in Texas, 17 million people own 60 million guns, or about four per resident...
...If he says they've been investigated for child abuse," says DeGuerin, "and yet the outcome of that investigation was they were cleared of it, then that's misleading:, How much of what we think we know about .Koresh and child abuse and sexual contact with minors is true...
...Prior to the McClure-Vollmer Act of 1986, machine guns were legal, provided the tax on them had been paid to obtain the necessary license...
...Since DeGuerin offered this unsubstantiated account, the 911 tapes have been released...
...That's child abuse...
...Not all support this consensus...
...Any Davidians present would surely have known this...
...This 15-page single-spaced document contains only one fragment of conversation that might possibly be construed as a "clear message" of the kind cited by Higgins...
...She had left the commune in 1990...
...In other words, the character of the ATF's Koresh investigation changed radically in the weeks just after bureau officials would have learned that "60 Minutes" had them in its sights...
...Certainly, the ATF raiding party and the FBI gas attack placed the Davidian children in far greater and more immediate danger than any they had previously faced...
...Koresh, in real time now, in the fog of battle, laments the government's failure to talk before shooting: KoREsH: You see, you brought your bunch of guys out here and you killed some of my children...
...Rodriguez gathered little evidence to bolster the government's case against Koresh...
...Stranger still, Aguilera reports no information of any kind pertaining to his Koresh investigation collected between June 23 and December 7, 1992, with three minor exceptions...
...Overwhelmingly, it is far older than that...
...LYNCH: All right...
...It was only when their funding was up for review—and a pattern of sexual harassment emerged at their agency—that the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms decided to make an example of David Koresh and his Branch Davidian followers...
...riots look like a tea party...
...He had been accumulating firearms, mostly legal semi-automatic AR-15s...
...Pressed to specify what kind of danger the children were in, Sparks answered, "There were indications that food was being withheld as punishment...
...Coming so late in the investigation, Block's story may strike some ears as a little too pat, but it does constitute evidence relevant to the investigative spadework done seven months before on parts and materials shipments...
...Let's talk about this...
...The ATF learned that they'd been snitched on and had lost the element of surprise—and proceeded...
...Maybe it first choreographed its lightning strike on the Davidians and later—for bureaucratic reasons best known to itself—fabricated from the disparate investigative materials at hand a threat of such frightening proportions that it licensed the otherwise inexplicable means...
...I don't know about Vernon Howell...
...How's that...
...Also on November 13, a local deputy sheriff told Aguilera of hearing a loud explosion on the Mount Carmel Center grounds and observing a large cloud of gray smoke dissipating from ground level...
...Tell me this...
...CPS was looking into complaints that Koresh was "running a commune-type compound, and that he was sexually abusing young girls," Aguilera notes portentously...
...In Texas, 16,500 residents own them...
...Aguilera himself mischaracterized the legal definition of a machine gun in the second paragraph of his affidavit...
...An hour passed before Lynch could reach the ATF on a secure line...
...Child Abuse One of the December interviews is with Joyce Sparks, the Texas Child Protective Services (CPS) investigator we met earlier...
...In their reporting on the ATF investigation, the media appear to have been struck dumb by the amount of evidence stuffed into Aguilera's 15-page affidavit...
...Maybe, maybe not...
...And Block, twoand-a-half years later, during his stint at the compound, "heard extensive talk of the existence of the 'Anarchist Cook Book.' " However nefarious the book may sound, there remains no allegation that Koresh ever had a copy in his possession...
...But Aguilera's brief is larded with filler, like the trivial exceptions to the five-and-a-half month hiatus in the Koresh probe...
...A Raid, Regardless By February 23-25, when Aguilera was drafting his affidavit, ATF Special Response Teams from three cities were already at Fort Hood, drilling for the imminent raid, and planning had been underway for months...
...There were indications that babies were being beaten...
...A spring attached to the trigger, the "hellfire," causes a gun to fire erratic three-round bursts automatically...
...Robyn's sister-in-law Deborah Sue Bunds was interviewed in January 1993...
...John McLemore, a cameraman with Waco's KWTX-TV, identified himself to Jones and warned him that agents would soon be on their way out there, prepared for a shootout...
...Is the ATF in the business of policing our borders...
...Robyn Bunds, according to Aguilera, said that "residents were subjected to watching extremely violent movies of the Vietnam war which Howell would refer to as training films...
...I asked if she was sure of the April 6 date...
...Doubtless, Robyn and Jeannine had, with the aid of "cult deprogramming," come to view Koresh's mother-daughter feat quite differently by the time they cooperated with the authorities, and one might legitimately question the objectivity of the information they supplied...
...The government cannot be expected, of course, to give both sides of the story in an ex parte search warrant...
...Curiously omitted from Aguilera's account is the fact, widely reported elsewhere, that Breault is blind...
...Might the outcome have been different if his and his department's accumulated insight into the ATF's prey been adequately tapped...
...Jones hot-footed it back to Koresh...
...While the segment didn't air until January 12, by which time planning was underway for the raid on Mount Carmel, it had been in production for some time...
...Thus, though some will see him as nothing but a wanton sexual predator, he in fact faced an unusually large area of legal vulnerability because he was a repressive regulator of sexual mores within his isolated realm...
...Poia Vaega, interviewed by telephone from her New Zealand home, resided at the compound for all of ten days back in March 1990...
...All right...
...But, scary though the composite seems, many particulars turn out, on inspection, to be less so...
...There is no law anywhere that requires someone to offer himself as target practice, to federal agents or anyone else...
...Under the National Firearms Act, a machine gun is defined as any "combination of parts designed and intended, for use in converting a weapon into a machinegun, and any combination of parts from which a machinegun can be assembled if such parts are in the possession or under the control of the person...
...Still, it raises questions about the claims of other former cult members that they saw Koresh firing machine guns years previously...
...There is an ironic socio-legal aspect here that has escaped general notice...
...He stepped out the door, held up his right hand and said, "Wait, go back, there are women and children in here...
...This composite might even have caused Green to swallow any doubts he might have harbored about the scale of the impending ATF raid—assuming, that is, that the ATF had clued him in...
...Elsewhere, he refers to two "M-16 E-Z" kits or "M-16 machinegun EZ kits" that were shipped to Koresh...
...W hy...
...That Aguilera was involved in establishing violations of a confoundingly technical area of the law may be just part of the explanation for his miscues...
...LYNCH: Okay, let's—let's try to resolve this now...
...Taken literally, they make no sense...
...As a member of Koresh's harem, the House of David, Mama Bunds, like her daughter, had slept with Koresh, each in the conviction, shared by all the other women in the House of David, that procreation was the function of sex with Koresh, and an extraordinary type of procreation at that: they believed they were receiving the seed of the Lamb of God and bearing God's grandchildren...
...If it was a machine gun at all, it obviously was not fabricated from the parts shipped four years later...
...Still, not an injudicious use of state power, I would say, if the purpose was to protect a community terrorized by a nest of heavily armed and criminally violent monsters...
...There is ample evidence that Koresh was a stern, even severe, disciplinarian...
...If, as the government contends, Koresh, after detecting the impending raid on the morning of the 28th, prepared his followers for armed resistance and sent them to their battle stations to repulse a legally authorized raid, then he and those who followed his commands are responsible for the deaths-of four federal agents...
...What more can you ask for...
...Now—now, that's your fault...
...The media have almost invariably characterized the Davidian arms cache as breathtakingly large...
...With one exception, none said anything about what Koresh might have made with the weapons parts and explosive materials he acquired in 1992, which formed the basis of the ATF case...
...But why would ATF have decided on a high-risk military-style raid when they might have picked Koresh up on one of his regular jogs...
...Is it possible this family crisis intervention specialist's definition of "child abuse" is somewhat broader than that of her colleagues, than that of the McLennan County sheriffs, than the norm in the rural East Texas community where she works...
...While Koresh did provide for the children of his "wives," he would have been liable to prosecution on sexual assault charges, second-degree felonies...
...In an affidavit filed in a Michigan trial over custody of Kiri Jewell (a child who lived with her mother at the compound), ex-Davidian Michelle Tom alleged that Koresh had beaten her eightmonth-old child Tara' s bottom until it bled...
...Indeed, they only touch, a little suspiciously, at one point in David Block's testimony...
...When I first asked her about it she confirmed it...
...The dark prophecy in question was related third-hand to ATF Special Agent Davy Aguilera, the ATF's lead investigator in the Koresh probe and the author of the affidavit...
...As recently as February 1992, he had escorted local sheriffs deputies and child-abuse investigators through the compound after they had called beforehand to say they were coming...
...On November 13, a lieutenant in the County Sheriff's Department told Aguilera that an anonymous UPS employee had told him that "Marshall Keith Butler, a relative of the person who wishes to remain anonymous, is a machinist by trade, and is associated with Vernon Howell...
...fulfilling any deadly vision except on two extraordinary occasions—February 28, when a hundred heavily armed ATF agents arrived unannounced at his door, and April 19, when combat engineering vehicles began tearing holes in his domicile and suffusing it with a severe chemical irritant known as CS...
...He had complied peacefully with lawful authorities at least four times...
...Whether the ATF succeeded in establishing probable cause or not, they had legal search and arrest warrants, signed by a magistrate...
...On February 28, 1993, a hundred ATF agents converged on the Ranch Apocalypse "cocked and locked," as Koresh was to put it...
...Its public image and morale had been devastated by a January 12 exposé on "60 Minutes...
...Dick DeGuerin, the Houston lawyer who represented Koresh during the Waco siege and now represents his mother, Bonnie Haldeman, argues that the ATF was working on "stale information," under standards derived from the 1932 Supreme Court case Sgro v. United States...
...There is another version of how the shooting started...
...With the right cornbination of machine-gun parts and conversion parts, semi-autos can be converted to fire full-auto, and a skilled machinist can, with the right parts, manufacture a machine gun...
...Because the visuals wouldn't have been sexy...
...At least the dates of his brief residence at Mount Cannel (March-June 1992) match up with those of the parts acquisitions...
...The outlines of the government's case have already been sketched in ATF affidavits filed after the initial shootout in support of charges against released cult members for conspiring to murder federal officers...
...But a half-hour elapsed between the first call and the first radio contact between the Sheriff's office and the ATF at the site...
...We decided at that point we did not, so we continued to gather information...
...This vignette is the closest we get to child abuse: "She talked to a boy about seven or eight years old...
...A matter-of-fact case of suspected violations of the National Firearms Act, on the other hand, would hardly have provided a reasonable basis for such extraordinary enforcement measures...
...Not much margin for reflection and reaction by Koresh, "kinked up" (the FBI's phrase) as he already was by an exposé of his unorthodox community that had begun just the day before in the local paper...
...One version has David Jones interrupting Koresh to ask him to step into another room to take a long distance call from England...
...How to warn Koresh without tipping off the undercover agent that surprise had been lost...
...The information about the child abuse establishes information concerning the level of threat to life and safety which exists within the compound," says ATF spokesman Jack Killorin...
...Starting in December, the ATF begins to caricature David Koresh as the Antichrist...
...The segment broadcast graphic allegations by female ATF agents that they had been sexually harassed on the job by male colleagues and that the agency intimidated and punished victims and witnesses who had pressed sexual harassment claims...
...But deployed in pursuit of one individual inside on charges of violating somewhat technical provisions of federal weapons laws, such means raise the question of proportionality...
...With the magistrate in mind, he deftly waves his red cape...
...But these were not normal times for the agency...
...Koresh himself places...
...Citing his familiarity with federal firearm laws, he stated that "any combination of parts either designed or intended for use in converting any firearm into a machinegun" is "unlawful...
...The driver asked Jones whether he was a postal employee, and Jones assured him—twice—that he was...
...There is no indication that Butler had any expertise in firearms...
...She also charged that after an undercover assignment, one agent had pinned her against the hood of a car while two others tore at her clothes...
...Lapsed visas...
...The [McLennan County] Sheriff's Department sabotaged our intervention," she claims...
...A short time later, Howell returned to the room where the agent waited, and exclaimed that the ATF and the National Guard were coming to get him., Howell continued, saying, "Neither ATF or [sic] the National Guard will ever get me...
...But Shotgun News is hardly clandestine: page 22 of the June issue of American Rifleman, the NRA's flagship publication, displays a column-length advertisement for the magazine, which, incidentally, accepts MasterCard and Visa...
...Breault claims no knowledge of illegal weapons or explosives possessed by Koresh...
...David Block stated "that he observed at the compound published magazines such as, the Shotgun News and other related clandestine magazines...
...The bureau's annual appropriations hearing was scheduled for March 10, 1993...
...Robyn Bunds, a former Davidian and the mother of a child by Koresh, was interviewed on December 11, 1992...
...MARTIN: Call it off...
...A union with Koresh was spiritual, says Robyn Bunds, who met with Koresh when she was 14 and slept with him when she was 17 . . . "He's perfect, and he's going to father your children...
...Aguilera apparently composed his 15-page brief in considerable haste between February 23 and February 25, 1993 (the ATF assault followed on the 28th), long after the information he had gathered about suspicious weapons shipments to Koresh would have been fresh in his mind...
...He was real nice to him, real congenial," he says...
...Stale Information It is worth noting here that one test of a search warrant's validity is the timeliness of the evidence it presents...
...The affidavit filed in support of the warrants, said Higgins, detailed some of Koresh's "clear messages that he and his followers were bound together in a vision that promised them all—and others who were in their paths—death...
...I have never heard an allegation to the contrary...
...KORESH: Now, there's a bunch of us dead, and a bunch of you guys dead...
...As we have seen, the applicable provision defines a machine gun as "any combination of parts designed and intended for use in converting a weapon into a machinegun...
...The Second Phase Phase two of the investigation is of a very different nature than phase one...
...Later Information This is not to say the ATF's resumed investigation added no evidence to the case for probable cause it had begun in June...
...In a society afflicted with an epidemic of "children having children," it is clear that statutory rape laws are often unenforced, though in many of these cases the children are abandoned by "deadbeat dads...
...Twice while under ATF fire, the compound placed emergency calls to the McLennan County Sheriff's 911 switchboard...
...Why does the ATF leave the evidence of illegal machine gun conversions and grenade manufacture dangling somewhere below the level of probable cause...
...After breaking with the Davidians, he became a Koresh nemesis, a one-man whistle-blower prophesying doom for the sect to whoever would listen...
...She maintained telephone contact with Koresh, because she was convinced, despite all the denials, that "the children were in danger...
...It reported, moreover, that no further allegations of child abuse had been received since the investigation closed, and that even interviews with children released from the compound during the 51-day siege "have not confirmed any of the allegations or described any other incidents which could verify our concerns that they have been victims of physical or sexual abuse...
...But, the ATF suspected, David Koresh wanted to "rock and roll"—that is, to convert semi-autos into machine guns...
...The dates in the affidavit don't match, and so far as the original weapons charges are concerned, the two halves of the investigation don't mesh...
...In normal times, it would likely have served as a powerful symbol of ATF enforcement prowess for years to come, much as the bureau's tracing of the gun John Hinckley used has served for years as a powerful symbol of its investigative prowess...
...Moreover, according to the affidavit: Mr...
...And stuff its warrant instead with a circuit-jamming array of extraneous, manipulative, luridly alarmist material bearing on subjects that fall well beyond the scope of the ATF's ostensible investigation and its jurisdiction...
...We had a review in here—in the headquarters office in December with respect to whether we had probable cause...
...Maybe a strong motion to suppress could have been filed...
...Dick DeGuerin relates what his client said when he visited with him inside the compound during the long stand-off with the FBI: He knew they were coming, and he was watching for them and saw these two cattle trailers roar up, and people start streaming out of the back of them, screaming at the tops of their lungs, not anything like, "This is a search" or "We're agents" or "Put up your hands"or anything like that...
...Indeed, they might have questioned whether the ATF affidavit even established grounds for believing that Koresh was apt to commit a violent crime or endanger anyone beyond the boundaries of his property...
...The Davidians had long since divined his true identity...
...I have a right to defend myself," he says at one point...
...That's a kind of funny name there...
...The child said that he could not wait to grow up and be a man...
...When Ms...
...This looks like a "rice bowl raid," undertaken to boost the agency's standing among the Washington bureaucrats and legislators who fund it...
...A ruse was devised...
...Robyn also told Aguilera that Koresh even kept a gun "under his bed while sleeping...
...We also know that his sexual relations with his female followers were consensual...
...Sheriff Jack Harwell, the chief law enforcement officer in the jurisdiction, had been largely left out of the loop by the ATF throughout the investigation and the raid...
...One might quarrel with Higgins's cavalier assertion that this single reported exchange supports the view that Koresh welcomed the deadly events of February 28 and April 19 as the fulfillment of some idiosyncratic eschatological vision...
...Although Higgins mischaracterized the warrant, he did faithfully encapsulate the government's theory of the Texas barbecue of the Branch Davidians: Koresh—or Vernon Howell, as he was originally called—set himself and his followers ablaze on April 19, and this mass self-immolation represented the inevitable self-fulfillment of his apocalyptic teaching...
...Had the members of the House Judiciary panel carefully read their copies of the affidavit, they might have questioned whether it warranted Higgins's confident conviction that Koresh willed the two-part holocaust that claimed the lives of four ATF agents and more than eighty Branch Davidians...
...0 The American Spectator...
...All those documented M-16 parts and grenade hulls and no probable cause...
...He sometimes used a wooden spoon...
...Tones mentioned an interview three days earlier of Joyce Sparks, a child-abuse investigator with the Texas Department of Human Services, who had twice visited the Mount Cannel Center to investigate reports that Koresh was "operating a commune type compound" and "sexually abusing young girls...
...Under that Texas law, Koresh would have been off the hook if his teenaged partners had been promiscuous before having sex with him...
...The viewing of Platoon...
...Confronted with this scary composite, one can easily see why U.S...
...All of 'em were good people...
...We were ordered to close the case...
...Koresh never had been taken by either the ATF or the National Guard...
...Told the exchange could not possibly have happened on one of her visits to the compound (her final visit was April 6, the riots were on April 29, the case was closed April 30) she responded, "We made several visits, and I con-tinned to have conversations with him even after the case was closed...
...Upon hearing of complaints from neighbors about his "hellfire," Koresh asked the McLennan County Sheriff's department to have a look at it, and he was assured the gadget was legal...
...But the cameras were there to capture footage of a hundred black flak jackets and blue ATF windbreakers swarming into Caliban's kingdom...
...Tell them there are children and women in here and to call it off...
...for that of "firearms...
Vol. 26 • August 1993 • No. 8
