Eighty people died in Waco after an FBI standoff gone wrong. Here’s how it became a rallying cry for the far-right
Thirty years ago, a 51-day confrontation between law enforcement and David Koresh’s Branch Davidians ended in a catastrophic fire. Clémence Michallon reports
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Your support makes all the difference.Thirty years ago, a lengthy standoff between FBI agents and members of a religious sect ended in fire. The Waco siege, a deadly 51-day confrontation in central Texas between law enforcement and Branch Davidians, an apocalyptic religious movement then led by David Koresh, remains one of the defining US events of the late 20th century.
The siege is the subject of a recent Netflix documentary (Waco: American Apocalypse), released on 22 March. It also made headlines when Donald Trump planned a rally there in March—a move decried by his niece Mary Trump as “a ploy to remind his cult of the infamous Waco siege of 1993, where an anti-government cult battled the FBI.”
The story of the Branch Davidians begins far before the events in Waco. The group’s roots date back to 1929, when Victor Houteff, a religious leader born in present-day Bulgaria founded the Davidian Seventh-Day Adventist Church (itself an offshoot of Seventh-day Adventism). It was under Houteff that Davidian Seventh-Day Adventists settled near Waco, at a location known as Mount Carmel.
Benjamin Roden, another religious leader, founded the Branch Davidians in 1955 -- after Houteff’s death led to some reorganization and splintering. In the wake of Roden’s death, his wife Lois Roden took over as leader and was eventually followed by a man named Vernon Howell. Howell, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, became “head of the Mount Carmel community” and “soon began taking ‘spiritual wives,’ several of whom were reportedly as young as 11.” He ultimately changed his name to David Koresh and was the Branch Davidians’ leader during the Waco siege.
By February 1993, authorities suspected that weapons were being stockpiled illegally on the group’s compound. The US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), a law enforcement agency within the US Department of Justice, obtained a warrant to search the premises, as well as an arrest warrant for Koresh. Per the Encyclopedia Britannica, more than 70 agents from the ATF raided the compound. This led to a shootout and a two-hour confrontation, during which five Branch Davidians and four federal agents died.
In response to the incident, the FBI sent hundreds of officials to the compound.
“During the next 51 days, over 700 law enforcement personnel participated in the effort to end the standoff,” reads an archived Department of Justice report. “Between 250 to 300 FBI personnel were present in Waco at any given time, along with hundreds of officers and agents from other federal, state, and local agencies.”
FBI agents wanted the people inside the compound to come out; they, under Koresh’s directions, would not. Koresh spoke on the phone with FBI negotiators, but those conversations were protracted. “
If they had entered the building, we would all commit suicide,” Kathy Schroeder, a survivor of the siege, says in Netflix’s Waco: American Apocalypse. “... It wasn’t a matter of, ‘How is this affecting me as a person?’ Because I’m not a person. I’m God’s tool.”
Koresh himself had been shot and was injured in multiple places, but even he wouldn’t come out to seek medical assistance. Per Netflix’s documentary, the FBI’s tactical unit and negotiation team occasionally clashed. On 21 March, after some Branch Davidians decided to leave the compound—a sign that the standoff might approach a resolution—the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team crushed Koresh’s car with a tank, a move described by former FBI negotiator Gary Noesner in the documentary as as a “f*** you”, “done in a very in-your-face way.”
“By mid-March, neither negotiations nor unorthodox tactics had produced the resolution that the FBI sought, and its agents were ill at ease in Waco,” Texas Monthly wrote in 1995. By then, the standoff had taken over Waco and its surroundings.
“The town’s first- and second-rate hotels were bulging with guests, and when the federal lawmen went looking for housing, they found that Waco’s apartment occupancy rate had been at 90 percent before the siege began,” Texas Monthly wrote. “... Early in March the Tourism Division of the Texas Department of Commerce had postponed a series of television ads, reasoning that nobody would want to visit the state anytime soon, and town residents, tired of the bad jokes and quips about ‘the wackos in Waco,’ began affixing to their cars stickers that read ‘Waco Proud.’ As each day passed, pressure built inside and outside the ranks for a speedy end to the standoff.”
On 19 April 1993, the FBI used tear gas in an attempt to make the compound uninhabitable, forcing the Branch Davidians out. “For more than five hours armored vehicles, some of which punched holes into walls, deposited 400 tear-gas canisters inside the compound; at 11:40 AM the assault ended,” the Encyclopedia Britannica wrote.
Around 25 minutes later, a catastrophic fire started. The DOJ found that some of the Branch Davidians inside the compound started the blaze in three different locations, citing multiple sources of evidence, including infrared video footage and still photos.
“The first indication that fire had started inside the compound appears on the aerial infrared tape, photographed from an FBI plane that had been circling over the compound during the fire. Still photographs taken from the infrared videotape establish that the fire started in three separate and nearly simultaneous points of origin,” the report reads in part.
“... The fire began at 12:07:41 Central Time on the second floor, front section of the building, in the southeast corner. Just over one minute later a fire that had already started was detected in the first floor, mid-section of the building in or near the dining room. By 12:09:30 the initial fire had increased in intensity, to the point of full room involvement. At 12:09:45, or just over two minutes after the start of the first fire, a third fire was detected at the first floor, right side (east side) of the building in the chapel area. This fire spread very quickly, and in less than 40 seconds it had fully involved both the chapel and the gymnasium. By 12:11:00 the fire had spread rapidly throughout the entire building.”
Back in 1995, PBS noted, in an FAQ accompanying an episode of the show Frontline dedicated to the siege: “Although several of the surviving Branch Davidians insist that they did not start the fire, a panel of arson investigators concluded that the Davidians were responsible for igniting it, simultaneously, in at least three different areas of the compound. Unless they were deliberatley set, the probability of the three fires starting almost simultaneously was highly unlikely, according to fire experts.
“Furthermore, the videotapes show the use of accelerants that strongly increased the spread of the fire. Although one Branch Davidian stated that a FBI tank had tipped over a lantern, videotapes show that the tank had struck the building a minute and a half before the fire began. Also some of the surviving Davidians’ clothing showed evidence of lighter fluid and other accelerants. In addition, FBI listening devices seemed to establish that the Davidians were overheard making statements such as, ‘Spread the fuel,’ some six hours before the fires began.”
According to the DOJ, 75 people died in the fire, including 25 children under the age of 15. In total, around 80 Branch Davidians and four federal agents died over the course of the siege, beginning with the ATF raid. Koresh died of a gunshot wound to the head.
The FBI and the ATF came under sharp criticism following the end of the siege. A number of members of Congress are featured in archive footage in Waco: American Apocalypse decrying their actions.
“There is no doubt that the ATF and FBI messed up, and messed up badly at Waco,” Chuck Schumer, then a Member of the House of Representatives, said. John Conyers, who was also a Representative at the time, called the events at Mount Carmel a “profound disgrace to law enforcement in the United States of America.”
Former FBI negotiator Gary Noesner tells Netflix in the documentary: “David Koresh is ultimately responsible, but that doesn’t mean we didn’t make mistakes as an organization, and we did. And in Waco, we did not save every life we could. Therefore, in my mind, it’s a failure.”
Jim Cavanaugh, a former ATF agent, shares a similar viewpoint, telling Netflix: “We tried everything, but we could not overcome the hold [Koresh] had on their minds. You could not convince them to come out, because that would be a repudiation of the person they believed was God.”
The legacy of the Waco siege has been linked to anti-government sentiment in the far-right. Two years after the siege, on 19 April 1995, white supremacist terrorist Timothy McVeigh detonated a truck bomb outside the Alfred P Murrah Federal Building, a government complex in Oklahoma City. The explosion killed 168 people and injured several hundred more. McVeigh had visited Waco during the siege; in letters to The Buffalo News published prior to his execution in 2001, he described the siege as a major factor in his radicalization.
“For the past three decades, [the Waco siege] has been a key element of far-right mythology: a rallying cry for armed resistance to the federal government and its representatives,” Nicole Hemmer, an associate professor of history and director of the Carolyn T. and Robert M. Rogers Center for the Study of the Presidency at Vanderbilt University, wrote in an opinion column for CNN in March, noting that “even after Oklahoma City, Waco remained a key part of far-right lore.”
In 2000, Hemmer noted, a man attended the opening of a new church at Mount Carmel, after leading a fundraising campaign for the rebuilding.
His name? Alex Jones.