[helicopter whirring]
[gunfire]
- All we knew was that a shootout had occurred.
- Four law enforcement agents are dead and at least
14 injured in a shootout with heavily-armed
religious cult members outside Waco, Texas, tonight.
- They were an apocalyptic group.
- Well, you know what they think of me?
They think I'm the Son of God.
- Do they? - Yeah.
- It was very, very confused. [sirens wailing]
What happened, how it happened--
- The 75-member group stockpiles
military-type assault weapons in preparation
for the end of the world.
- We wanted to get the kids out of there.
- You know, we train for these situations.
- You can't point guns in the direction
of my wives and my kids.
[bleep], I'll meet you at the door any time.
- All of that went downhill fast.
[dramatic music]
- This is every law enforcement's worst nightmare.
[gunfire]
narrator: In the FBI, we make a lot of headlines.
♪
Drug busts, mob stings,
terrorist takedowns...
- Get down! Get down!
narrator: We understand why
people want to tell stories about us.
- Mark it. - Freeze!
- FBI. - FBI!
- Action!
narrator: But they don't know the half of it.
[officers shouting]
What really goes down?
We save that for each other,
when we're talking agent to agent.
This is "FBI True."
[tense music]
♪
narrator: Kristy Kottis is a 24-year veteran of the FBI.
She worked gangs, crimes against children,
as well as human and drug trafficking.
Kottis was the supervisor of the FBI's
threat response squad
overseeing the bureau's response to terrorism threats
in New York City.
- The Waco siege started February 28.
Where were you? How did it start?
- I was reading the Sunday morning paper,
an article about the Branch Davidians
that I'd never heard of.
narrator: Rick Shirley is a veteran
of the Austin Police Department,
where he served as a crisis negotiator for 28 years.
- It was a history of the Branch Davidians,
and mostly about Vernon Howell, AKA David Koresh.
The newspaper was referring to them as a cult at the time--
religious cult.
- Howell claims his group is an offshoot
of the Seventh Day Adventists.
The Adventists say they cut off all contact with the group
more than ten years ago.
- They were an apocalyptic group,
and their beliefs were based on Revelations of the Bible.
And the main function or main focus that David Koresh had
was on the seven seals that's mentioned in Revelations.
♪
According to him, he was the Lamb of God
because he could reveal the meaning of the seven seals.
- I don't care if you're an alcoholic.
I don't care if you can't keep your marriage together.
All I care about, without judgment, is one thing.
Do you want to know the seven seals?
Do you wanna know where they are?
- He calls himself the Lamb of God,
and also the one who will be in charge of the Book of Life
and the seals mentioned in Revelation.
- Is he as dangerous as he appears to be?
- He's extremely dangerous.
- And the state had already looked into him,
because there was a lot of things going on there.
narrator: As an FBI special agent, Charlie Rasner
worked domestic terrorism and civil rights cases
before joining the FBI's
Hostage Rescue Team as a sniper.
He was awarded the FBI Shield of Bravery
for his courage in the line of duty.
- A lot of the people that came there were lost people.
They were just mixed-up people.
They came seeking a greater truth.
And he took advantage of them, and he convinced them
to give him all their worldly possessions and their wives
and their underage children.
He had had sex and had children with
many, many underage girls.
- This is my family.
It may not be like your family.
- We knew early on from the intelligence
that we were given,
ATF had been doing an investigation on him
for a while.
- It makes nobody's business whether we have
a gun or not at this place.
- UPS, a driver, was delivering all kinds
of suspicious packages to them,
and he was always troubled,
he said in statements to the ATF,
about what was going in there.
And finally, one of the packages broke open,
and these grenades spill out.
- The hand grenades, those were inert hand grenade casings.
But they also had been buying gunpowder
and other types of materials
to turn those into functional grenades.
And in fact, they did.
The neighbors would also hear explosives
going off from time to time.
And the Sheriff's Department, they contacted ATF.
- That, and the automatic weapon fire.
It's pretty noticeable to hear, you know,
when an automatic weapon is being fired.
It's going to be, boom, boom, boom.
narrator: Jim McGee began his career as a firefighter
for the National Forest Service.
As a member of the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team,
he received the Medal of Valor for exceptional heroism.
- His Mighty Men were out there training
in a range they had built.
- Now, who are the Mighty Men?
- The Mighty Men was a group of his male followers
that he kind of designated as the beginning of his--
called it "army of God."
They would be there when that confrontation came
between the Davidians and the government.
- Yeah.
♪
- And they were expecting some form of government
to come knocking at the door anyway,
because they weren't stupid.
They knew that their behavior
and the things that they were doing that were criminal
were going to get somebody's attention eventually.
So they actually trained for dealing with the government
before all of this took place.
The straw that broke the camel's back that morning,
February 28th, was the lost reporter
that pulled over the mailman.
- The reporters, they knew the raid was going to take place.
One of the reporters got lost,
and he pulled over, flagged over a mailman.
And he asked him the directions
to the Branch Davidian compound.
And I think there's some words exchanged to the fact
that there was going to be a big event there today.
And so the mailman was a cult member.
- And the mailman immediately told him that ATF was coming.
- Sadly, now, federal agents have learned
what the locals long suspected,
that the group calling itself God's Marines
would not give up without a fight.
- All of this started with a search warrant
and a cache of allegedly illegal weapons.
[siren wailing, horns blaring]
♪
[indistinct radio chatter]
- I was in Old Town, Alexandria--
there was still snow on the ground.
And all of a sudden, I look on the news--
- In Waco, Texas, four law enforcement agents
are dead and at least 12 injured
in a shootout with a religious cult.
The first dramatic pictures have just come in
from our Waco affiliate, KWTX,
and we caution you, they are graphic.
- All of a sudden, I get the 333 on our pager,
which meant "report to Quantico immediately."
When I got to the HRT facility at Quantico,
people were saying, dude, aren't you from Waco?
I said, well, yeah.
And they said, well, ATF just got in a big shooting there,
and there's four of them dead.
[gunfire]
Another 16 were wounded.
And they need us, because it's out of control.
[somber music]
- A Texas prairie ten miles east of Waco
is ground zero in a smoldering holy war.
- Authorities were trying to serve
a search warrant on the group's leader when gunfire broke out.
One of the cult members was killed as well.
- The ATF negotiators, are they engaged with Koresh
on the phone yet, or anybody from the compound?
- Yes, they had been engaged with him for some time,
as well as Steve Schneider.
And then, a little later in the afternoon,
the first FBI negotiator that arrived on the scene--
and they had been on the phone with Koresh as well
as with Wayne Martin, who was one of the Branch Davidians
that was actually an attorney.
- Through the beginning negotiations,
you could hear rounds going on.
[gunshots]
- They're basically yelling at the negotiators
that y'all need to back off.
We have children-- women and children in here.
[gunfire]
- Tell them that they need to stop firing,
and the whole time, you could hear
they were firing from inside.
[gunshots]
- Koresh was wounded.
- Not as bad as he tried to indicate that he was,
but he was wounded.
- And so things were kind of going back and forth.
[tense music]
- They negotiated a ceasefire
at that point in time that afternoon.
- I thought to myself, well,
I'm going to be getting the 333.
- And next thing you know, I'm on a plane.
- So I got paged that I had to go to Waco.
♪
[tense music]
♪
- Our team sergeant at the time,
he said it looks like we're going to have
a negotiate situation.
[helicopter whirring]
[car horn beeps]
Initially, they sent us in to the wrong place.
They sent us into the perimeter area,
where the tactical team was set up.
- There are people moving, and it's pitch-black
and pretty eerie.
And so then, they finally figured out
who we were and got us rerouted
to the airport manager's office.
And that's where the ATF negotiator was,
along with the Texas DPS negotiators.
And so we went in and saw they were pretty well stressed out.
- Oh, yeah, I can't imagine.
- My name is Jeff Jamar.
I'm the special agent in charge of FBI operations
here in Waco.
We're here because David Koresh and his followers
killed four ATF agents.
The area is a crime scene.
The goal is to resolve the situation,
ultimately, in federal court, with no further bloodshed.
- We knew that ATF was there.
Legally, they had a search warrant signed
by a federal judge, looking for firearms,
illegal firearms.
We knew we had four federal agents dead,
and FBI investigates, as you know,
assaults on federal officers.
This is what we do. We were there.
This was our mission.
We're unpacking our gear, and there's the sheriff.
And he said, oh, God, I'm so sorry about what happened.
He felt genuinely distressed.
He was sad.
He said all those boys got shot.
He was talking about the ATF folks.
We didn't know how many Davidians
had been shot at that time.
And he said, I feel so bad. I was talking to David,
and I thought we were going to be able to work things out.
[somber music]
- This is every law enforcement's worst nightmare.
What's going through your mind?
It must have been very confusing,
not just because of the logistics, but emotionally.
What are you thinking?
- Personally--and I think this was probably consistent
with the team we've got,
you know, federal law enforcement officers,
you know, our brothers and sisters.
- Absolutely.
- And you know, I'm thinking, they have spouses.
They have children. They have siblings.
They have parents.
You know, this is devastating for these families.
♪
- So we came in and set up our equipment
and got everybody on the headphones and stuff,
and get ready to roll.
[tense music]
I'd been a negotiator for only about five years
at the time that this happened.
Although I had a lot of experience
with dealing with suicidal people
and at least one hostage situation,
nothing compared to this scale.
- Federal agents continue trying
to negotiate with the group by phone,
in hopes of arranging a peaceful conclusion.
- It's dark by the time we got to the perimeter
of the compound.
Probably a mile out from the compound.
[sirens wailing]
- The situation remains at a standoff.
- Myself and another operator, we were sent out into that,
you know, that pasture and told to set up a location there.
And we basically just hunkered down
and tried to set up a 360 perimeter for ourselves
so that we could monitor
and make sure none of the Davidians
were trying to escape from the compound
or attack our positions.
- So Connie, we are just waiting to see
what daylight brings here.
- In reality, we really couldn't see anything
until it started to become daylight.
But it didn't take long, daybreak,
to realize this is a massive compound.
If we're going to try to do any type
of deliberate assault on this place,
it's going to stretch our resources to the max.
- Did some bullets come in your room?
- Yeah. - How many?
- A lot.
- What was your--
what did your mom tell you to do?
What were you doing? - We were getting--
we got on the floor.
- Were you scared? - Yeah.
- The children were always paramount in our concerns.
We wanted to get the kids out of there.
- That was a big question among the operators.
Are there hostages involved here?
From our perspective, the children are the hostages.
'Cause they don't have a choice.
- A lot of beliefs people have may seem abnormal
and sort of strange to other people.
But that doesn't mean that it's not right, though.
♪
[indistinct radio chatter]
- A cult compound near the city of Waco
is surrounded by hundreds of law enforcement officers
almost a day after four federal agents
were killed in a shootout.
- There was rumors that there may have been tunnels
coming out of the compound.
We didn't know where those tunnels led to
and where they came out.
They had an arsenal of weapons.
.223-caliber AR-15 that have been converted
to fully automatic shoulder weapons.
And then, the one that really concerned us was--
- .50-caliber sniper rifles,
which could shoot about a mile, accurately.
They were actually used in the Iraq War for sniper kills.
And they had used them against the ATF,
and they're very deadly weapons.
And you're not going to get wounded by that.
You're going to die if it hits you.
- You know, the way we were positioned
around the compound,
there initially were two,
we would call "sniper-observer positions."
And one was what we called the Sierra One,
and the other was what we called the Sierra Two.
Then, in support of those sniper teams,
we had our assault teams, and there were two assault teams
at each of those Sierra One and Sierra Two positions
to provide protection to the snipers
in case they were rushed or something happened.
[helicopters whirring]
♪
- So the negotiators, what do they want to talk about?
- We were going for hours
where he's doing most of the talking,
where he's talking about the Revelations
and the seven seals.
- If we try to discuss the things that initially
drew the government's attention to them,
that would tend to firing Koresh up a little bit,
because he did not want to be accused of any wrongdoing.
- And as far as he was concerned,
that was their house,
and that we were infringing upon their privacy.
- You can argue with me.
You come and argue with me.
You come pointing guns in the direction
of my wives and my kids?
[bleep], I'll meet you at the door any time.
- So it is still a waiting game,
the messianic cult leader holed up in his fortress
with dozens of followers,
surrounded by hundreds of lawmen
who say they are waiting-- willing to wait
as long as it takes
to end this confrontation without bloodshed,
if possible.
♪
- What were some of the negotiations
that were conducted that made people believe,
or made the negotiators believe this might be a success?
- There was a lot of events that took place early on that--
that we thought that this situation
was going to be resolved relatively quickly.
We first started getting some of the children out of there.
- The bright note during the night
was that eight of the children
were brought out of the compound.
- For a couple of days, he had agreed
to surrender and have everybody come out.
We worked out an agreement with him
that he would do a recording to address the--
his knowledge of the seven seals,
and we would have that publicly transmitted over the air.
- It was broadcast, and then they were able to listen
to those broadcasts inside.
- The plan was that everyone would
come out and load up on buses
that they were going to bring in there.
And then they would transport them down to the facilities
where the other people had been taken to,
down at the Sheriff's Department.
- Charlie and Jim, when you see those buses pull up,
did you get a sense like, oh, good,
this is going to finally come to an end?
- We were hopeful. We thought, this is it.
We've--the negotiations have worked.
Let's get out of here. We're done.
The rest of the children are going to be safe,
which was the goal all along.
- As it turned out,
he declared that he had heard from God
that now is not the time to surrender.
- And then, when they never came out,
that all of that went downhill fast.
- The best thing that has happened here
in the last 24 hours
is that more children have been released.
But there has been a big disappointment as well.
Cult leader David Koresh promised to surrender,
but then he didn't.
- He says that he did not fulfill his promise
to leave immediately with his followers
because God told him to wait.
- When they left with nobody on them,
we said, OK, we're dealing with a complete psycho
who's not going to give up easy,
and it's going to be
a different ending, unfortunately.
- The dangerous standoff drags on.
Cult members remain sealed inside the compound.
Federal agents remain on alert.
The families continue their agonizing wait,
and no one knows when or how this will all end.
[thunder booms]
- We have a slew of people coming out and saying,
he's had sex with 14- and 13-year-old girls.
- Have I committed adultery is what you're fixing to ask?
- Have you committed adultery?
- [laughs]
- They knew they were running the show.
- It was pressure, like a balloon.
And every day this thing goes on,
and more pressure gets in that balloon,
and it gets more and more dangerous every day.
[helicopter whirring]
- Then, I see, on the red-white corner, a wisp of smoke.
- We can see flames from two miles away.
Now, the flames-- oh, my goodness.
- And I'm like, they're starting fires.
[explosion] - Oh!
[sirens wailing]