On the Ground

ED: Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of Virginia, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.

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BRIAN: From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is BackStory.

ED: Welcome to BackStory, the show that explains the history behind the headlines. I’m Ed Ayers.

BRIAN: And I’m Brian Balogh.

ED: This year marks the 25th anniversary of one of the most infamous law enforcement confrontations in American history. It’s summed up in a single word– Waco. It began on February 28th, 1993. That’s when heavily armed agents from the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms tried to execute a search warrant.

BRIAN: Federal officials had been tipped off that the Branch Davidians had been amassing an arsenal of illegal weapons. They’d also heard that the group’s leader, David Koresh, had multiple wives, including teenage girls.

ED: The agents had a warrant to search the property. But when they got out of their vehicles, there was a shootout. Four ATF agents and six Branch Davidians were killed.

BRIAN: The FBI then encircled the property for the next 51 days, in an effort to get Koresh and the Branch Davidians to surrender. Some members did come out. But Koresh and most of his followers refused. For those two months, Waco dominated the headlines.

LEE HANCOCK: It had pretty much everything– guns, God, sex, a standoff. It didn’t end quickly. My name’s Lee Hancock, and I was the lead reporter for the Dallas Morning News for the 51 day siege, and then covered its aftermath.

ED: Reporters from all over the world descended upon Waco to cover the story.

LEE HANCOCK: I mean, it was totally surreal and dramatic and gripping. And no one knew how this thing was going to end. I mean, at the time it happened, it was the longest standoff in American law enforcement history.

ED: The FBI tried to force and end to the standoff. On April 19, government tanks punched holes in the building and pumped in military grade tear gas. The Branch Davidians plywood residence then burst into flames. More than 80 members died in the blaze, including about two dozen children. And all of this was broadcast live all around the world.

LEE HANCOCK: I’ve seen statistics that almost one in five American households watched in real time as the compound burned because they could see it on CNN. In some sense, this was an American tragedy that all of us in the country witnessed firsthand.

BRIAN: The story didn’t end on April 19, 1993. Waco spawned criminal trials, congressional hearings, and official investigations. It also became a rallying cry for the far right and militia groups, convinced that the government was coming after their guns.

Exactly two years after the fatal fire, Timothy McVeigh bombed a federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 178 people and wounding 700 others. He said it was payback for the government’s role in Waco. The siege also remains a cautionary tale about the militarization of law enforcement.

ED: So today on this show, we’re going to revisit the events of 25 years ago, also hear more about the Branch Davidians and their apocalyptic Christian theology. But first, let’s return to reporter Lee Hancock, who covered the 51 day standoff and siege for The Dallas Morning News. She was at home on the morning of February 28th, the day of the ATF raid. She was reading the Sunday paper when she got a call from an editor in the newsroom.

LEE HANCOCK: And he said that there was a shootout between police, and as he put it, a bunch of religious nuts. And said, this sounds like your kind of people. You better get down there.

ED: So she jumped into her car and drove the 100 miles to Waco. The police had set up roadblocks, so she couldn’t get very close to the Branch Davidians’ property. Law enforcement officials told reporters that they’d staged the raid to confiscate illegal weapons.

LEE HANCOCK: They had indications that all of this was happening in the context of a religious group with deeply apocalyptic beliefs and that Koresh and his followers were amassing it for some sort of a final confrontation or a war, to bring about Armageddon.

ED: But Hancock says she quickly heard a different version of events from people who knew the Branch Davidian or were sympathetic to them.

LEE HANCOCK: Saying no, no, no. These guns weren’t for some sort of a battle. That that was not what the Davidians were about. They claimed that these guns were investments, that the Davidians had decided to start buying and selling them to support themselves. So there were these two opposing explanations that popped up pretty quickly.

ED: Hancock says that even today it’s not clear who fired first during the ATF raid.

LEE HANCOCK: In all, though, courts and the Congress have said they believe that the Davidians fired first. There are a lot of people who believed that the government shot first.

BRIAN: During the 51 day standoff that followed, the FBI used a variety of tactics to persuade Koresh and the Branch Davidians to surrender. While one team of agents tried to negotiate with Koresh, a rival FBI team resorted to harsher tactics. They cut off the Branch Davidians water and electricity. They’ve beamed floodlights into the building at night to prevent the Davidians from sleeping. They also blasted recordings of crying babies, telephones ringing, and rabbits being slaughtered.

ED: Hancock says it was impossible to know how the Branch Davidians were responding to these tactics. The FBI had severed their phone lines. Plus, the Bureau prevented reporters from getting near the property, saying it was too dangerous, because the Davidians might open fire.

LEE HANCOCK: We did, very early on, get contact. But after those first two days, there was no contact with anybody inside. And so you couldn’t get their side of what was happening.

We were captive to this stretch of land where we had porta-potties and we had land lines installed. We had our own Fed Ex zip code. We even had a pizza delivery guy who was cleared to get through the checkpoint to bring us pizzas. Some news agencies, like The Associated Press, had personnel out there day and night, as did CNN and the networks. So it was incredibly taxing. And you know, it was in some ways very frustrating trying to find out what was going on.

BRIAN: But with a good telephoto lens, reporters could see the tower of the Branch Davidians’ residence. The Davidians hung banners from it in a desperate effort to communicate with the outside world.

LEE HANCOCK: They hung a banner fairly early on that said, God help us. We want the press. And so, being irreverent and getting tired of this thing dragging on, some of my colleagues hung a sign on a barbed wire fence facing the compound that said, God help us. We are the press.

We felt sort of caught between this group that we could only see a couple of miles away and federal authorities who, though they were doing news briefings every day, it was clear that they were seeing us as a means to shape public opinion to favor what they were doing there. So we were kind of caught in the middle.

ED: At dawn on April 19, Hancock learned from federal sources that they were going to end the standoff. They’d send in the tanks to knock holes in the Branch Davidian residence, and pump in the tear gas.

LEE HANCOCK: And there was a sense of relief, and almost an excitement that this is going to be over. These kids are finally going to get out of there. I mean, almost all, if not all of the media that had been there for a long time really thought that this was going to end with the Davidians somehow coming out.

BRIAN: Hancock went back to her hotel room to file an early story she had CNN on the television in the background.

LEE HANCOCK: I was talking to a source of mine in Washington. And he had CNN on, too. And then, as I was asking him a question, he said, look– there’s smoke.

ED: They both watched in horror as the Branch Davidians’s residence exploded into flames.

LEE HANCOCK: And just like everybody in the world, and certainly, everybody in America over their lunch hour, could watch it live on CNN, you didn’t see the actual people burning up. But you knew that there were more than 70 people in there, including more than a dozen kids.

ED: Here’s the story Lee Hancock wrote that afternoon for The Dallas Morning News.

LEE HANCOCK: “The Branch Davidian compound became a hell on Earth Monday, as David Koresh ordered his followers to set fire to their home, federal officials said. An estimated 86 sect members, including 17 children, were believed to have died in the blaze. As federal agents and a stricken public watched helplessly, the wooden structure was consumed by a wind driven wall of orange flames. ‘We can only assume that there was a massive loss of life,’ said FBI agent Bob Ricks. ‘David Koresh, we believe, gave the order to commit suicide, and they all followed willingly his order.'”

BRIAN: That’s the government’s version of events. But it’s still not clear whether the Branch Davidians committed suicide or if the FBI’S use of tear gas caused the fire. Looking back, Hancock says she feels a deep sense of failure about her own role covering the Waco tragedy. She’s not the only one.

LEE HANCOCK: Colleagues of mine, you know, we’ll get together and we start talking about this. And there’s a mixture of anger and, sometimes, tears about– did I let the FBI take advantage? Did I not ask hard enough questions? I mean, other people have a sense of having been lied to. The government didn’t come clean with all that happened, that they were at best airbrushing a pretty horrific story.

BRIAN: Lee Hancock says that she regrets referring to the Davidians as a cult. But she also says there’s plenty of blame to go around.

LEE HANCOCK: Particularly FBI saying that, well, it wasn’t our fault. We didn’t– you know, Koresh just wasn’t coming out. And it was the Davidians and their devotion to this guy that kept them in there, really downplaying how FBI actions and aggressive FBI tactics pushed the Davidians closer to Koresh. It cemented their apocalyptic beliefs.

ED: Hancock continue to investigate the story for years after Waco and to search for answers to some of the hard questions.

LEE HANCOCK: I don’t believe in closure. I hate the term. But I think people look for that with something like this, something to explain it away so it doesn’t trouble us anymore. And Waco, as an incident and as a cultural moment, continues to haunt. Every time there’s a confrontation with a marginal group, every time there is a religious group that engages in public weird behavior, particularly if there’s death involved, you always hear about Waco. I mean, it stays with us. And I think it always will.

BRIAN: Lee Hancock is a journalist who worked at The Dallas Morning News for 20 years. She’s writing a book about Waco. Four months after the fatal fire, a federal grand jury indicted 12 of the Branch Davidians who had survived the siege.

They were charged with aiding and abetting the murder of federal officers and with illegal possession of firearms. Nine of the Branch Davidians were convicted and served time in federal prison. All of them are out now.