Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, March 30, 1993 TAG: 9303300186
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By STEPHEN LABATON and SAM HOWE VERHOVEK THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Long
Contradicting the official version of events, four of the agents involved in the raid and in a review of its aftermath said that supervisors had realized even before they began their assault that they had lost any element of surprise but went ahead anyway.
As the costliest and deadliest operation in the history of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms enters its second month, the agency leaders who planned it insist they did nothing wrong, that the operation was betrayed by a telephone call at the last minute, resulting in an ambush.
But the agency has provided only sketchy details of what happened, why the raid was attempted, and why it was carried out when it was.
The warrants that were the basis for the raid remain sealed. No criminal charges have been filed. And the government has never clearly articulated what laws members of the Branch Davidian sect were suspected of having broken before the raid, although some officials have said they believe its leader, David Koresh, violated federal firearms and explosives laws.
The official explanation for the shootout is that the operation was compromised at the last minute by the alleged telephone tip. But agents involved in the raid and its aftermath, agents from the FBI and soldiers skilled in raids all depict the assault as flawed from top to bottom. They cite these problems:
ATF supervisors knew they had lost the element of surprise even before the agents tried to surround the compound but ordered agents to move in anyway.
Helicopters carrying ATF agents came under fire over the compound before the assault began, yet the bureau pushed ahead with the mission, which relied on surprise.
The operation was plagued by a badly designed communications strategy that made it impossible for different squads surrounding the compound to talk to each other after their squad leaders had been wounded.
Some agents had not been supplied with contingency plans for encountering heavy gunfire, even though supervisors knew the cult had for years been stockpiling weapons and suspected they had been converting semiautomatic weapons into automatic weapons to make them more deadly.
Some agents' requests to take more powerful weapons were denied and many were supplied only with handguns to face the cult's arsenal, which included many rifles and at least one 50-caliber weapon.
Some agents had not been briefed about the operation until a day earlier and had never been told of the cache of assault-style weapons they would be facing.
The ATF did not bring a doctor or set up a dispensary to treat wounded agents, a practice of the FBI. Wounded ATF agents ended up being carried - some by other agents, others on the hoods of trucks and cars - down a muddy road hundreds of yards to await medical assistance.
As more details have emerged, the Clinton administration's support for ATF and Stephen Higgins, the director who approved the operation, has begun to erode.
In a recent television interview, Higgins said, "I've looked at it and rethought it. There was no problem with the plan."
But agents and others involved paint a much different picture. As the shock of the shootout and bloodshed has begun to wear off, the agents have come forward because, they said, they do not trust Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen's pledge of a thorough and independent investigation of the Feb. 28 raid, given the stakes for the agency and its director.
The agents spoke only after being assured they would not be identified. In a message sent March 15 from Washington, they were ordered not to discuss the raid publicly. The message implied that they could be punished, dismissed and prosecuted for describing what had happened.
The tip-off
The raid had its roots in a torn package. In July, a United Parcel Service package ripped open, exposing a hand grenade canister being shipped to the Branch Davidian compound, according to accounts by a federal official and Bob Kenney, a UPS spokesman.
UPS informed local officials, who already had begun an investigation into accusations that cult members had been stockpiling explosives and rifles and possibly had been converting them illegally into automatic weapons. Local officers passed the information on to the ATF, which launched its own investigation.
According to interviews with agents and cult members, undercover agents worked their way into the compound, although ATF agents and cult members now agree that Koresh and everyone else knew that they were law-enforcement officials.
The bureau leased a house 260 yards down the road from the compound to house agents who posed as students. To cult members and Koresh, the men looked too old and affluent to be college students and the sect suspected they were federal agents.
At the compound, the undercover agents discovered a trove of semiautomatic weapons, AK-47s, AR-15s, M-16s, 9mm handguns, Israeli assault rifles, handguns and other weapons that the Koresh followers had been collecting for years.
It also included weapons confiscated by the authorities in 1987 after Koresh was involved in a shootout with a rival leader. Koresh was tried for attempted murder, but after a mistrial, the weapons were returned to the cult.
There was nothing illegal about owning what Higgins has since described as "scores if not hundreds" of weapons. In an interview last week on the CBS program "48 Hours," Higgins said that it was the conversion of weapons from semiautomatic to automatic that had led to the raid.
In the weeks leading up to the raid, several teams of agents were sent to a nearby Army base at Fort Hood to run practice drills for the raid. But one agent said some agents involved in the assault had not participated in the practice drills.
The preparations
Shortly after 9:30 a.m. on Feb. 28, a Sunday, scores of agents from the bureau's Texas and Louisiana offices descended upon the plot of land known locally as Mount Carmel, a 77-acre spread 10 miles east of Waco that was the home to more than 100 members of the Branch Davidians.
Forty-five minutes later, four agents lay dead or dying, 16 others were wounded and an unknown number of cult members had been killed or wounded.
AFT has offered no explanation of why it decided to raid the Mount Carmel compound in daylight rather than the dead of night, when members presumably would have been asleep. It has also refused to make public a videotape it says it made of the entire episode.
Officials have said they timed the raid to take advantage of a period when, according to their undercover agents, the cult's routine would separate the men from both the weapons and the women and children.
The officials have not explained why, when they had an arrest warrant and with the knowledge that the compound contained scores of weapons, they did not wait to arrest Koresh when he was away from Mount Carmel.
At first, they said they believed Koresh remained in the compound for months at a time and could only be captured there, but many people in Waco insisted that they had seen him at bars and jogging in the weeks before the raid.
Then, in response to the apparent discrepancy, the bureau conceded that it never conducted round-the-clock surveillance of Koresh, so it did not know whether or how often he left the compound.
Nor has the agency fully explained why it believed it needed to use such heavy firepower. In fact, after the shootout in 1987 at Mount Carmel involving Koresh, local officers simply knocked on the door and introduced themselves; Koresh and other cult members who were being arrested on attempted murder charges gave themselves up peacefully.
According to ATF spokesman John Killorin, the raid was moved forward one day because The Waco Tribune-Herald began publishing a series about the cult on Saturday. Killorin said the agents feared that the cult might become more alert to the possibility of a raid once the series started.
The first installment of the series, titled "The Sinful Messiah," featured accusations that the cult had molested children and had stockpiled arms in anticipation of an apocalypse.
The leaks
By Saturday, it was clear that the Sunday raid was going to be a big event.
Scores of agents from Houston, Dallas and New Orleans had streamed into town for the assault, and there was no secret that something big was afoot. By Saturday night, Waco was buzzing with talk of the raid, particularly after publication of the first parts of the newspaper series.
Hotel chambermaids recalled watching Sunday morning as ATF agents in army fatigues spilled out of their rooms to head for a staging area near the compound. People in Waco also reported listening on their radio scanners to the ATF agents as they spoke on their walkie-talkies.
After the raid went awry, some officials suggested that someone in the media had tipped off the cult. One agent, acting on his own, has already sued The Tribune-Herald and accused it of alerting the Branch Davidians. But he has offered no proof, and the agency has distanced itself from the lawsuit.
Bureau officials initially insisted that the raid had been conducted under the strictest secrecy and that no members of the media had been given any information that could have been construed as a tipoff.
But later, when questions arose, they conceded that some news organizations had been called, although they had not been given precise details of the plan.
Editors at the ABC and NBC television affiliates in Dallas say they were called the day before the raid by Sharon Wheeler, a public information officer for the bureau, and told to be prepared for a major action soon.
"Sharon said, `We have something big going down,' " said Gary Nichols, assignments editor for the ABC affiliate in Dallas.
At least 11 reporters were at the scene before the raid began, but none has revealed how they were alerted. They said the bureau had done nothing to prevent them from watching and filming the raid as it got under way, and that the agents turned hostile only after it was clear that the raid had become a debacle.
Higgins has said several times that the only problem with the raid was that a single telephone call tipped off Koresh. Higgins also has said he thinks he knows who made the call, but he has repeatedly refused to provide details.
But according to Scott Peterson, a lawyer for Kathryn Schroeder, a cult member who was in the compound, the telephone call actually was arranged by another cult member who had figured out a raid could be imminent.
Peterson said that 45 minutes to an hour before the raid, a cult member in a car struck up a conversation with someone sitting in a white van or Blazer near the compound and apparently waiting for something to happen.
That person's identity remains a mystery, but it could have been one of the reporters or television employees who had been tipped off in advance of the raid.
The cult member decided to alert Koresh but realized he could not talk to him directly because Koresh was with the undercover agent. To lure Koresh away from the agent, he telephoned someone else and asked that person to call back; when the telephone rang, he summoned Koresh, who left the agent to take the call.
Once alerted that something suspicious was happening, Koresh walked back toward the agent reciting certain Scriptures. Clearly alarmed, the agent left the compound and was seen by cult members racing toward the house that was being used by some of the agents leading the raid.
The raid
Two agents involved in the case said the undercover agent then alerted Jim Cavanaugh, an assistant special agent from the Dallas office of ATF, that Koresh knew something was about to happen.
They said Cavanaugh and the other agents decided to move ahead as quickly as possible, aware that they no longer would surprise the cult, but hoping they could still get there before the Branch Davidians were completely ready for them.
At the staging area, about 100 agents got into two cattle trailers and hid under tarps as the trucks headed toward the ranch. Some of the agents said they had been briefed about the operation only a day earlier and were never told how extensively armed the cult had been.
Others, knowing they could be facing heavy fire, asked for permission to take automatic weapons. They were told they could use only their semiautomatic handguns.
Moments before the trailers arrived at the compound, two Scout helicopters and one Apache helicopter from Austin, filled with senior federal agents, circled overhead.
Agents said that at least two of the helicopters were hit by gunfire from Mount Carmel, and one bullet whizzed perilously close to the head of Philip J. Chojnacki, the special agent in charge of the Houston office and a leader of the raid who had decided to watch it from the air.
The shots at the helicopters erased any doubt about whether the bureau had lost its element of surprise, and several agents said that the correct move at that point would have been to have ended the raid.
"That was inexcusable," said one career agent. "As soon as those shots were taken, the raid should have been aborted. Instead, we were ordered to walk right into it." This agent and others said that the agents who were heading toward the compound on the ground were not warned by those in the helicopters that cult members were firing shots.
The consequences
Nearly 100 agents, men and women, emerged from beneath the tarps that covered the cattle trucks in which they were riding. Wearing bulletproof vests, their helmets and army gear emblazoned with "ATF Agent," in yellow and white letters, they approached the building.
But built into their plans were clear problems. Agents said the squads surrounding and approaching the building could communicate with other squads only through their squad leaders, so that as soon as the leader was shot - and at least one was - the squads could not send or receive messages.
More than a half-dozen agents climbed the roof using two steel ladders; and after one used an iron bar to break a window that led to a weapons room, three agents jumped in. But already gunfire had been coming through the window, and some bullets began to penetrate the wall next to the window.
Bullets struck one agent who was on the roof. He managed to hobble to a ladder and slide down. From the compound's watchtower, other cult members fired down on the agents.
Cavanaugh, who had given the green light for the raid, managed to contact the cult members and, by many accounts, heroically worked out a cease-fire so that the wounded could be moved to safety and both sides could figure out who had died.
Keywords:
PROFILE
by CNB