Blundering Toward Waco

Last March I crossed the Potomac River and headed toward the FBI's think tank and training center in Quantico, Virginia. At the time, my intention was to write an article on federal-agent training.

Halfway across the country, the now-infamous Ranch Apocalypse psychodrama had reached its tenth day. Four agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms lay dead and 16 others were injured after a raid aimed at David Koresh's $200,000 cache of weapons. The FBI had ridden to the rescue and its elite hostage rescue team was now working round the clock trying to talk--or force--Koresh and his followers into surrender.

It proved to be a uniquely unguarded moment for the crime-fighting experts at Quantico. They spoke to me with candor about the bluff FBI ethos. And they seemed serenely confident that the bureau would, as usual, get its man.

Of course, after Waco's disastrous conclusion on April 19--a tank and gas assault followed by more than 80 deaths--everything changed. A curtain of silence fell over the FBI, and the media filled the void by dissecting the Koresh clan, its beliefs, its dynamics, its sexual aberrations. The Davidians, it turned out, were a twisted crew, living under the thumb of a self-proclaimed messiah who had a taste for polygamy. In the court of public opinion, Koresh got what he deserved. Unfortunately, dozens of his benighted adherents were caught in the fallout.

But what of the FBI? From Janet Reno on down, we have heard admissions that the assault on the compound was misguided. Yet, in the ensuing months, FBI culture itself has somehow escaped scrutiny, remaining as obscure as Koresh's cult before the BATF stormed in. Did the FBI bring a mentality to Waco that made violent confrontation inevitable? Is there something in the FBI mind-set that blinded it to a solution better than ramming the compound?

On these points, the public record couldn't be less enlightening. But during my stay at Quantico, a time when no one imagined that Waco would end as a great embarrassment, I found some unsettling clues that help explain the FBI's miscalculation.

•

Virginia was still bleak with late-winter grays as I headed south from Washington, D.C. along Interstate 95. The capital's suburban sprawl soon gave way to rolling countryside broken by billboards that advertised the Black-Eyed Pea and the True Grit Family Restaurant.

Within an hour, an exit sign announced Quantico. The ramp snaked off the highway and ended at a government-issue placard. To the left was the Marine Corps Development and Education Command Headquarters, and the Marine Air--Ground Task Force War Fighting Center. To the right: Camp Upshur Weapons Training Battalion, C. A. Lloyd Rifle Range and the FBI Academy.

To law-enforcement insiders, Quantico is synonymous with the FBI Academy. Quantico is to the FBI what the Kennedy Space Center is to NASA, what Detroit is to the automobile industry or what Ranch Apocalypse was to Koresh's followers.

Like most people who had worked in criminal law, I held Quantico in a degree of awe. Once, while prosecuting at the Manhattan district attorney's office, I worked with a pair of agents following a trail of so-called hot paper, which led to a major business-fraud conviction. The agents stood out in every way from the cops who were my usual cohorts. They knew the law, showed up on time, spoke offhandedly about sophisticated forensic technology. Whoever trained this crew, I figured, must have known what they were doing.

They certainly have had practice. J. Edgar Hoover founded the FBI Academy in 1935. The program started out of one room in a Washington, D.C. federal building. Over the years the academy grew to become a mecca for law-enforcement culture--agents and cops alike. A federal hiring freeze has temporarily halted agent recruitment, but Quantico still gives advanced training to 1100 state and local police officers each year in its National Academy--and the waiting list is nearly 15,000 names long.

At the same time, many of the 120 special agents permanently stationed at Quantico work as instructors or specialists in offices such as the behavioral science unit, the national center for the analysis of violent crime or the hostage rescue team. Their expertise extends from advanced weaponry to DNA to sexual sadism. It was inevitable that after Koresh and his followers blew away the four BATF agents, Quantico telephones started ringing.

•

The road to the academy, down to two lanes, ran past fences topped with barbed wire, bunkers dug into hillsides, corrugated aluminum Quonset huts and rifle ranges. At a guardhouse at the end of the road I gave my name. A few yards farther on, a final sign for the academy pointed to a breach in the woods. I entered a parking lot that fronted a cluster of low-lying poured-concrete buildings with smoked-glass windows. Beyond that rose a 12-story dormitory. The complex looked like a group of federal buildings airlifted into the Virginia woods.

Inside, the academy entry was surprisingly well-appointed, at least by law-enforcement standards. A red carpet led to a reception desk of the sort encountered at Holiday Inns. On a red electronic sign above the desk, the figure of a tank rolled along a grid of lights, trailing the words Welcome to Quantico. (I wondered later if the tank has been removed, being a grim reminder of the Waco finale.)

A few hours later I found myself sitting across a coffee table from special agent Robert Grace. (It quickly became clear that all FBI agents are "special.") Grace, an angular, 50ish man who carries himself with the ease of a diplomat, is chief of special operations and research (known by its acronym, SOARs). With dozens of field offices across the country, SOARs deals in "strategic planning" and "crisis management."

I asked Grace how things were going in Waco. "I don't know how much I'm supposed to tell you," he said, "but Koresh is hurting. That's for sure. We've cut off the power. They're emptying the chamber pots out the window. It's just a matter of time." Like nearly every agent I would meet at Quantico, Grace spoke with a nonchalant Virginia drawl reminiscent of Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff.

Grace went on to explain that the SOARs task force in Waco had broken into factions:

"The man actually in charge, who calls all the shots, is Jeff Jamar. But in order to handle the crisis, he's feeding off advice given to him by his negotiators and by tactical people. And not that they're always at odds with one another. But by the nature of the beast, they truly are."

I asked Grace to elaborate.

"The overall objective is to resolve a situation without any loss of life. However," he said, "the tactical teams are obviously taught to be tactical. Their purpose is basically to be the more aggressive of the two components. Negotiators, on the other hand, gravitate to the less aggressive side. They want to try to talk them out. I'm learning that it's a very hard and demanding job."

History, of course, proved that the tactical team won out in Waco. But even at the time, a couple of Grace's remarks seemed odd. When I asked about weaponry, Grace listed a number of sophisticated guns and gases, infrared sights and listening devices. Yet he apparently felt that the standoff would never escalate above simple gunfire. "We would be able to take probably whatever we want to take in there," he said. "But we would probably stay within weapons that are less than lethal." Later, Grace added: "I can't imagine them blowing the place up with a tank, but who knows?"

What about the minds behind these machines? I wondered and asked whether hostage negotiators study psychology. Grace answered with an air of disapproval. "They do, some of them. But it's not necessary. Psychology certainly doesn't hurt them, but it's not a necessity." If not a psychologist, then what kind of agent gets assigned to deal with the likes of David Koresh?

Ordinary agents, Grace told me, volunteer for the elite position on the hostage rescue team as a part-time job. Grace himself--chief of the entire SOARs unit--acknowledged that he had never worked on a SWAT team or as a hostage negotiator, yet here he was giving advice and support to agent Jeff Jamar 1300 miles away in Waco.

"How did you end up as the head of SOARs?" I asked.

"It's amazing, isn't it?" he said, laughingly.

•

A maze of softly lighted and carpeted hallways with floor-to-ceiling windows connects Quantico's laboratories, classrooms and offices. The complex resembles a well-funded rural college. There are no paramilitary uniforms, no snappy yes-sirs. The shirt-and-tie (continued on page 170)Waco(continued from page 90) instructors exchange an easy locker-room banter:

"Hey, Hank. What's doing?"

"Just more of God's work. Money laundering."

"Well, come on over to Hogan's Alley and get shot. Our new paint bullets sting like hell, break skin and everything."

Yet the hale, confident talk belies the reality that Quantico is a serious think tank bristling with 21st century crime-fighting tools. Special agent Steve Allan, chief of the forensic science unit at Quantico, told me that drug-detection devices have become sensitive enough to detect cocaine residue on any random dollar bill. A chemical called Luminol can find a bloodstain even under paint. Infrared lights can determine the chemical makeup of a tire smudge. And once the composition is known, agents have figured out how to track down that particular batch of tires. Quantico scientists can even take a hair or skin scraping, replicate the DNA and identify a suspect with the precision of a fingerprint.

Agents in the arson and bombing squad and the behavioral science unit can take the smallest crime-scene details and generate a detailed profile of the likely offender. One profile, broadcast on Seattle television, proved so accurate that an arsonist's parents recognized their own son. They turned him in and he confessed to setting a series of 75 fires. The expert who cracked the case told me: "That case went so well, it scared me. I think it's time to retire."

But even though Quantico sleuths can perform futuristic feats of detection, Koresh's crude methodology rendered every piece of gear and offender profile irrelevant. Listening devices planted in groceries that were delivered to the compound, helicopters taking heat-sensitive photos and even high-volume audio assaults using the sound of clocks ticking and Tibetan chants all proved useless. The case, it was becoming increasingly clear, would ultimately hinge not on gadgetry but on judgment. And already agents were bickering over whether Koresh was a con man or a psychopath, and whether to talk or assault. But to understand just how the Koresh compound looked to the FBI, I would need to delve deeper into Quantico culture.

•

After completing a 16-week training course, all new agents swear to the FBI honor code, which appears at the close of a document entitled "Performance Dimensions of the Special Agent Position--Considered Critical to Effective Job Performance." In a few lines, the code stresses the pursuit of truth, excellence and honesty.

The curriculum, which covers firearms, physical fitness, criminal law and paperwork, molds agents into a tight-knit crew proud of its dedication and professionalism. FBI renegades do exist. But the agents I met spoke effusively about the privilege of working at the bureau. The older ones even became sullen at the mention of mandatory retirement at the age of 57. Yet one unspoken code seemed to define the Quantico ethos better than the codes of honor or bureau loyalty. It might be called "doing it."

Out on the grounds, agents were incessantly practicing tactical maneuvers. Students in black uniforms climbed walls, fired at pop-up targets or practiced drug raids on the side roads. It was a culture of action. Like every police officer I had ever known, agents live for the thrill of the moment, for the instant of a life-and-death confrontation, an event that is often the highlight of a career. Even members of the cerebral behavioral science unit reminisced with me about major busts and harrowing tales of murder.

But nowhere is the code of doing it more clearly embodied than in Hogan's Alley. Built at a cost of millions of dollars and based on Universal Studios in Hollywood, Hogan's Alley is a five-acre town used for simulating crimes.

At the entrance stands a pharmacy, the Bank of Hogan (known as the most-robbed bank in the world) and the Biograph Theater, eternally playing Manhattan Melodrama (a tribute to the movie theater near where John Dillinger was shot to death by federal agents). You round the corner and pass a pawn shop. Inside, a gambling casino is tucked away, complete with roulette wheel, blackjack tables and baccarat boards. The gambling gear came from real-life raids. As one agent put it: "The bad guys fund the good guys."

Past another corner stands a row of white-shuttered townhouses. Farther down are a seedy motel and a trailer park. A functioning luncheonette adds an unpredictable element of street life to crime scenarios. Many of the guys who sweated it out in Waco had cut their teeth in Hogan's Alley, talking role-playing agents out of blowing up buildings and forcing bank robbers to free their hostages. And many of the tactics considered in Jeff Jamar's briefing room were, no doubt, fine-tuned here.

During my visit to Hogan's Alley, I watched four agents attempt to capture a fugitive in the seedy motel. The team wore visors and carried pistol-sized paint guns. They split up into pairs, taking opposite sides of a door that opened into a darkened room. One student called out, "This is the FBI. Come out with your hands in the air."

Given the agent's angle and the darkness, the room seemed a confusion of shadows. Finally, one agent took out what looked like a car-radio antenna capped with a circular mirror. He dipped the mirror into the room and scoped out the blind corners. Still no sign of the fugitive. One agent lowered his hand. They all burst in, crossing in a V formation and yelling "Freeze." The fugitive, another trainee, sprang up from behind a dresser and fired. Paint exploded across the agents' visors.

In the debriefing session, the instructor seemed nonchalant about the raid's failure. "Well, you got yourselves killed," he began. Everyone laughed. He suggested some better strategies: entering with a "buttonhook," "slicing the pie" or using a percussion grenade.

Yet something about the exercise disconcerted me. Two of the agents had just made a mistake that somewhere down the road might cost them their lives. But these war games left you itching for the real thing, and they made the possibility of getting shot in the line of duty far less palpable. I thought of Koresh, holed up in Texas. Here was a killer whose actions demanded a swift response. Agents, however, were forced to hold off, lest lives unnecessarily be lost. The situation required the patience of a psychiatrist, not the guts of a crime fighter. And the mood, I imagined, surely must have been reaching the boiling point.

•

To teach restraint and judgment while instilling raw skill, the ingenious FBI has begun using a new device. FATS--short for firearms training system--occupies a pair of trailers with blacked-out windows joined to make one large indoor firing range. The system, of which I was given a guided tour, turned out to be a cross between a video game and virtual reality.

Instructor David Martinez handed me a laser pistol modeled after the FBI's standard 9mm. He showed me proper stance: both hands on the pistol grip, arms locked, upper body leaning forward to absorb recoil. Then the lights went out and the games began.

I stood a few yards from a floor-to-ceiling projection screen. Instantly, my field of vision filled with the high-resolution, life-sized image of a typical mall. A voice explained: "You are a member of the LAPD on patrol with your partner. You have just been told of a disturbance at an ATM. You proceed to investigate." My partner pokes his head into the screen and says, "Man, I hope this is no big deal so we can get some lunch." We turn a corner and there's the ATM. A young black guy is banging at the cash drawer. As we close in, he turns and holds up a knife. I raise my pistol and assume firing stance.

"Hey, man, it's cool," he says, and lays the knife on the ATM ledge.

I keep my gun on him. Then he starts to reach into his back pocket. I say, "Stop. Keep your hands where I can see them."

The next instant he pulls a pistol and fires straight at me. Instinctively, I fire back. My first shot misses, but with the second he falls, though he doesn't drop the gun. I lower my pistol. He rears up to squeeze off two more rounds. This time I shoot until he's dead.

Martinez offered me a second chance since, as it happened, I was shot and killed by "the bad guy" the first time around. The game begins as before. My partner and I approach the man at the ATM. He puts down his knife and reaches behind his back. Primed, I shoot him in the head just as his hand returns to view. The man collapses to the ground. Too late, I see he's holding a wallet instead of a gun.

After the second scenario, Martinez played back the exercises with my side of the battle displayed on an inset screen. My shots appeared as green marks. Martinez then froze the frame, clocking my reaction time to the 100th of a second.

The firearms training system has dozens of scenarios: car stops, women with pistols under their skirts, bank robberies, four-man ambushes. Good guys endlessly chase bad guys. It was impressive in a gee-whiz sort of way. Yet by the third scenario I was ready for the tricks and fired accurately at the proper moments, and I felt no greater tension than during a fire drill. These weren't even paint bullets that could break skin. If faced with a real pistol, I would still probably either panic and forget to return fire, or spray bullets at anything that moved.

How, then, could you possibly train agents for the bizarre standoff at Waco?

•

Five weeks after I left Quantico, David Koresh's apocalyptic vision was realized. Starting at 7:04 A.M. on April 19, the FBI sent in a tank to smash the first of three holes in the Koresh compound walls. At 11:00 A.M. they pumped in CS2, a non-lethal, nonflammable tear gas. Within the day, agents figured, the Davidians' gas masks would become saturated and the group would surrender. Then, shortly after 1:00 P.M., the first flames could be seen rising into the sky.

After I saw the footage on CNN, I thought of sage police theorist Egon Bittner, who said that law-enforcement officials are under the dual pressure to do something and to be right. "The need to disregard complexity," said Bittner, "is built into the occupation." For the FBI in Waco, of course, there could be no replays on the FATS machine, nor a Hogan's Alley debriefing. Koresh and his followers were playing with real weapons. And each stood knee-deep in complexity.

Much, therefore, can be said in the FBI's defense. The bureau inherited a disastrous situation from the BATF. How much better would any other team have fared? For that matter, what other team? Apart from the Defense Department's Delta Force--forbidden by law from operating on U.S. soil--only local police have experience in dealing with armed standoffs. On top of that, the FBI waited 51 grueling days--hardly displaying a trigger-happy mentality. Yet something about federal-agent culture makes the final conflagration seem, if not inevitable, then at least predictable.

Quantico is a world of insiders and outsiders. One secretary I met summed up what I had sensed but not consciously realized: "When I started work here," she said, "I thought, My God, these men all look exactly alike."

She was right. With one exception, a female writing instructor, every agent I met at Quantico was a clean-shaven, clean-cut white male. Most looked like well-muscled insurance executives. Some kept Bibles on their desks or repeated phrases like "We're doing God's work." (Koresh probably said as much to his adherents.) The only blacks I saw were serving lunch at the cafeteria or robbing banks on the FATS machine.

And not surprisingly, given the demographics of its personnel, Quantico teaches a world of clear moral delineation. Every crime scene is peopled with good guys and bad guys. One agent even told me he taught seminars "throughout the United States and the free world." I thought the phrase had gone out with the Berlin Wall. When dealing with a bank robber, or a serial killer, this attitude no doubt works well enough. But when facing someone like Koresh, black-and-white moral categorization is a handicap.

After the Waco fire, FBI negotiators insisted they had been certain Koresh would never commit suicide. Yet many people immediately noted that Koresh's messianic complex made suicide an all-too-likely response. It was subsequently revealed that within the FBI ranks there was dissension about Koresh's sincerity. But, true to their training, agents finally classified Koresh as a manipulative fraud rather than a sincerely deluded zealot, as just another bad guy incapable of moral convictions. A former hostage rescue team agent told me: "Koresh is just a con man. Some guys try to sell you the Brooklyn Bridge. Koresh uses religion." Con men like that, the reasoning at Waco seemed to have gone, don't die for their causes. And this misperception set in motion a chain of decisions that led to the final debacle.

In the face of a perceived Armageddon, mass suicide was only one of many possible disastrous results. What was to stop Koresh's band from tossing grenades at the tank? Or marching out of the compound with the children at gunpoint? And how could the FBI know that the compound walls weren't rigged with explosives?

In the end, however, these niceties lead back to the fundamental question: Why did the FBI suddenly escalate the conflict? Koresh was effectively under house arrest. And it has even come out that plans to build a concrete wall around the compound were considered but scrapped.

Most likely, the ingrained notion that any lawbreaker is probably just an ordinary, amoral crook, and the ethos of "doing it," tipped the balance toward a tactical solution. To the FBI, Koresh represented the supreme insult: a federal-agent killer stringing them along, taunting them with broken promises and bogus deals. It would be hard to imagine an agent not itching to ram down the Ranch Apocalypse walls rather than sweat out another month kowtowing to a con man. As one FBI official remarked: "These people had thumbed their nose at law enforcement."

But the blunt rebuttal to this remark has to be: Frustration comes with the territory. So does enduring a few slings and arrows. In this battle, passion overtook reason. It led to a misreading of Koresh's character and to an unnecessary loss of life.

The FBI is a powerful, pervasive force in our country, and it will become more so as its scientific sophistication increases. We need agents who possess the qualities that imbued Quantico: fearlessness, daring, zeal. But Waco is unsettling evidence that the judgments of agents do not always match the refinements of their technology and the boldness of their tactics. Patience, humility and insight are among the most valuable weapons missing from the FBI arsenal.

"Agents live for the thrill of the moment, for the instant of a life-and-death confrontation."