It is not known exactly how many people were killed in the Waco siege. Seventy-two bodies were recovered from the ashes, and the official count was eighty-six (including the six killed in the ATF raid) but this was almost certainly not the full count. All Koresh’s twenty or so ‘wives’ and fourteen of his twenty-two children died in the fire – four of them shot through the head. Two weeks after the siege, Koresh himself was identified through dental records; he had died of a gunshot wound in the head, apparently self-inflicted.
Confronted with a case like this, we are inclined to ask the obvious question: was Koresh simply a confidence man, or did he – to some extent – believe what he said?
The answer is: both. And when we understand how that is possible, we have achieved one of the basic keys to the whole messiah phenomenon.
The first thing we need to know about Vernon Wayne Howell – who became David Koresh – is that he spent the first part of his life looking for security. Born illegitimate (in 1959) to a fourteen-year-old girl, brought up by a harsh stepfather, educationally disadvantaged (he was dyslexic), bullied because he was small – he was once even raped by older boys – he was a shy and not particularly outstanding child. His refuge from his problems lay in religion – his school was affiliated to the Seventh Day Adventists – and he read the Bible in the way other children read comic books: to escape reality. By the age of twelve he had learned the New Testament by heart. Then his life suddenly changed. His teacher entered him for a race on the school sports day. Vernon had never thought of himself as the sporting type, and had avoided physical competition. But he had spent a great deal of time racing against his brother on the farm, and could take off like a whippet. He won the race – and several others – and the congratulations were an intoxicant. Suddenly he was asked to join teams; he became the school sports hero. Determined to maintain his new status, he went in for bodybuilding, taking an enormous pride in his physical strength. By the time he was thirteen, the shy, quiet boy had become a “sport-jock” and a leader.
Even as a teenager, Vernon’s natural charm and dominance made him popular with the opposite sex, and he lost interest in religion. Then, at nineteen, he had an affair with a sixteen-year-old girl, who bore his child. He wanted to marry her; she felt he was unfit to raise a child, and left him. The blow to his ego was painful, and in the emotional turmoil, he turned for solace to the religion of his childhood, and became a born-again Christian in the Southern Baptist Church. But now he was religious again, the strength of his sexual impulse began to worry him; he turned to his pastor, explaining that he was a compulsive masturbator. The pastor told him that if he prayed to Jesus, he would be given strength. When this failed to happen, he decided that the Southern Baptist Church lacked a true link with God, and returned to the Seventh Day Adventists.
He fell in love with the daughter of his new pastor, and while he was praying for guidance, seemed to hear God’s voice telling him that she would be given to him. When he opened his eyes he saw his Bible open at Isaiah 34, which declared that none should want for a mate. Convinced that this was a sign, he went to the pastor to tell him that God had given him his daughter for a wife. The pastor threw him out, and when he persisted, he was expelled from the congregation. (The girl herself seems to have agreed with her father.)
This conflict between his natural dominance and his inability to get his own way became a torment, undermining his self-belief. He wandered from place to place, doing odd jobs – he had been trained as a mechanic. And one day he found his way to Mount Carmel, near Waco, in Texas, and joined the Branch Davidian sect as an odd job man; for a long time he was the dishwasher. He later described himself as “the camp bum, the loser that did all the dirty jobs”. Yet he was also disliked by most of the other sect members, due to his arrogance and egotism.
By comparison, Lois Roden, the head of the sect, was everything he had dreamed about. Still attractive at sixty-eight, she was a famous TV evangelist, a friend of the rich and famous, who spent much of her time travelling around the world. She was also a favourite of the feminist movement, since she had announced that God was female, and began the Lord’s Prayer “Our Mother, who art in heaven”.
For a long time, she shared the general view of Vernon, and made him live in a small, unfurnished room to try to cure his conceit. Her view began to change when, two years after his arrival, he told her that the Lord (or Lady?) had revealed to him that he had been chosen to father her child, who would be the Chosen One. When her son George – who expected to replace his mother as president – found out about the affair, he did his best to eject the interloper. His mother, convinced she was pregnant, defended Howell. The power struggle ended abruptly when Howell announced that God had ordered him to marry a fourteen-year-old named Rachel Jones – which he duly did, alienating Lois Roden (who did not give birth after all). For a while, George was placated. Then his fury erupted again, and he opened fire with an Uzi sub-machine gun. Fortunately, his aim was bad; but Vernon and his few faithful followers decided to leave Mount Carmel.
For the next two years, Vernon Howell and his small group of followers (about twenty-five) lived in the “wilderness” – that is, they set up camp at a place called Palestine, and lived rough. But while his followers coped with lack of running water and sanitation, Vernon was often off on “recruiting drives” – in California, in Israel, even in Australia. He was hurled bodily out of a Seventh Day Adventist church in San Diego when he interrupted the service to announce that he was the Messiah. But although many potential converts began by regarding him as a madman, some of them ended by being swayed by his burning conviction, or by his insistence that they would be damned unless they followed him. The settlement at Palestine grew; so did the number of his under-age mistresses. When disciples had a teenage daughter, she usually became Vernon’s “wife”.
Back in Waco, George Roden – whose mother was now dead – was showing signs of the paranoia that tends to afflict religious fanatics. He announced that he was God, and ended prayers with “In the name of George B. Roden, amen”. And although Vernon and his followers were ninety miles away, in Palestine, Roden brooded constantly on unmasking “the impostor”.
In 1987, he devised a bizarre challenge. An eighty-five-year-old woman named Anna Hughes had died at Mount Carmel. George dug up the body, installed it in the chapel, and challenged Vernon to a contest: whichever could raise Anna Hughes from the dead was the true prophet of God. George had the satisfaction of seeing Vernon decline the challenge and slink away. But when Howell told his lawyer what had happened, the lawyer was delighted; George Roden had laid himself open to the charge of abusing a corpse. Vernon hastened to tell the police what had happened.
They were cautious, realizing that getting mixed up with the in-fighting of religious cranks could be a challenging experience. They explained that they would need a photograph of the corpse. Vernon agreed to supply one. But since that meant that he would have to enter Mount Carmel by stealth, he decided that he might as well make the best of the opportunity, and try to evict George. He and his followers bought weapons. On 3 November 1987, he and a team of disciple “Mighty Man Commandos” wriggled through the undergrowth at Mount Carmel towards the chapel, rifles slung on their backs. A dog spotted them and barked; George Roden rushed out with his Uzi and began to blaze away. Vernon and his eight commandos blazed back, none of them succeeding in hitting anything. The sound of firing brought the local police, and everyone was arrested – except one Mighty Man who managed to escape.
Vernon and one of the Mighty Men – who happened to be a millionaire – were released after paying $100,000 bail. To George Roden’s fury, Vernon seized the opportunity to tell his version of the incident on the local television news. Roden now made his fatal mistake; he wrote letters to the Texas Supreme Court threatening to strike everybody down with Aids and herpes unless they sentenced Vernon to life imprisonment. Instead, George was sentenced to six months for contempt of court. And when he appeared in cour
t as a witness against Vernon and his Mighty Men, and explained how he intended to raise Anna Hughes from the dead, the jury lost no time in acquitting Vernon and his commandos.
Fifteen months later, George Roden ceased to be a problem when he was sentenced to life imprisonment for murder. The story of how this came about is an interesting demonstration of the contagious nature of messianism. One day in the summer of 1988, an ex-alcoholic named Dale Adair came to see Vernon Howell and Marc Breault, declaring that he wanted to get back to God. Vernon harangued him for three days, trying to convince him that he, Vernon, was the Messiah. Suddenly Adair’s eyes glazed over, and he stared towards heaven. “My God, my God. After all these years I understand. I’m the Messiah. I’m the David. Now I know why I’ve suffered all these years.” “Dale lost his sanity right before our eyes,” said Breault. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone that Adair might not be the only one with delusions of divinity.
Against Howell’s advice, Adair hurried to George Roden to tell him that he was the Messiah, but Roden took the news badly, seizing an axe and splitting open Adair’s skull. Roden was convicted of murder, and since he owed thousands of dollars in taxes, Mount Carmel was put up for sale. Vernon’s followers raised the money, and later that year, Vernon Howell – now calling himself David Koresh (Koresh being a Hebrew transliteration of Cyrus, the name of the Persian king who allowed the Jews held captive in Babylon to return to Israel) – at last became owner of the Waco compound. From the time he had arrived there as Lois Roden’s lowest disciple, it had taken him eight years to gain total control of the sect.
Koresh spent the next four years ruling Mount Carmel like a king. He took his pick of the women and rarely worked, other than his multi-hour sermons/harangues and occasional trips abroad to find new converts. But he made his disciples work from dawn to dusk at menial and even pointless tasks. One was even heard to mutter: “Lord, I wish the Messiah wasn’t such a prick!” Yet this general dissatisfaction never led to any significant revolt, until Breault’s flight.
When he realised Breault had left, Koresh called an emergency meeting and launched a manhunt. But it was too late. Breault was determined to bring about the downfall of his former “master”. He wrote letters to the police, to state authorities, to members of Congress. His greatest coup was to organize the visit of an Australian television team to Waco. Unaware that Breault was behind it, Koresh allowed the team into the compound because he hoped for favourable coverage; but the programme – when it went out in April 1992 – left no one in any doubt that Koresh was a child molester with a dangerous god-complex.
In May 1992, the Waco Tribune Herald began an investigation into the Branch Davidian sect. One result of their revelations was the decision by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms to launch an investigation into the sect . . .
Now, over a decade since the ashes of the siege have settled, pointed questions remain – and not about the cult’s part in the tragedy. For example, the question as to who fired first during the original, botched ATF raid might have been settled by the compound’s metal front door. The ATF claimed the cultists opened fire through the door at them. Koresh, in telephone negotiations during the siege, said the ATF had first fired through it when he refused to come out. He pointed out that the bullet holes were all from the outside, coming inward. This evidence could not be checked after the fire, however, as the door mysteriously disappeared from the crime scene.
More damningly, some now believe that the federal authorities deliberately murdered the Branch Davidians. They point out that the CS tear gas fired into the building by the FBI tanks was not only potentially lethal, it was also highly flammable. The makers of CS gas specifically insist that it should never be used in confined spaces. Unable to disperse in open air, it can cause fatal poisoning (it contains cyanide). Then, when it settles a short time after being released, CS gas forms a fine dust that burns very easily and rapidly. When the fire started, every surface and person within the compound would have had a dusting of this powder.
The nine surviving cultists have always maintained that there was no “suicide pact” among the Branch Davidians, and some even claimed that FBI snipers shot at them as they escaped, preventing the others from leaving the building. Indeed, infrared aerial footage, taken by the FBI during the fire, reveals weapon flashes going off outside the flaming compound. On the other hand, the survivors suggest, the only shooting done by the trapped cultists was to save each other and their children from being burned to death.
In August 1999, the FBI was forced to admit that ‘pyrotechnic tear gas canisters’ were fired into the Waco compound after the tanks had deployed the CS gas, but before the fire was seen to start. They flatly denied that these were responsible for starting the blaze, but the incendiaries certainly could have ignited the wooden, sun-dried, CS-powder-coated buildings. At the very least, the use of such weapons under such circumstances was highly questionable.
But why would the United States government ruthlessly murder over eighty adults and children? The cultists claimed, during the siege and after, that gunmen in federal helicopters had fired blindly through the roof of the building – if true, this was a blatant act of child endangerment (of the very children the FBI claimed to be so desperate to save). Perhaps it was thought that the only way to totally destroy the evidence of such a crime would be to burn the building – and its occupants. The ATF also bulldozed what little was left of the compound before it could be properly examined. The head of the subsequent Senate investigation of the Waco siege, while exonerating the FBI, noted that getting the authorities to hand over evidence “was as difficult as pulling teeth”.
Secondly, it has been claimed that the US government wanted to frighten the various groups, like the Branch Davidians, who espoused anti-federalist doctrines (Koresh said the federal government was under the control of the Antichrist). These anti-federal religious sects, “militias” and “patriot groups” had been rapidly growing up across the US since the mid-1980s, and were no longer composed of just a few extremists and crazies. Hundreds of thousands of ordinary, middle-class Americans, tired of big government and big business ruling their lives, had joined or indirectly supported groups who were calling for an end to federal income tax and the dismantling of the monolithic federal government machine.
Those that believe the federal authorities were sending an intimidating message to these anti-federal groups – by slaughtering the Branch Davidians – point to the official title of the attack that ended the Waco siege: it was called “Operation Showtime”.
Shoko Asahara and the Aum Shinrikyo
On 20 March 1995, soon after 7 a.m., commuters on the Tokyo subway began to experience a tickling in the throat and a soreness in the eyes and nose; soon they smelled a stench like a mixture of mustard and burning rubber. Within minutes, dozens of people were choking or falling to the ground.
It was happening all over the Tokyo underground system. No one had any idea what was causing it. Fleets of ambulances ferried gasping or unconscious passengers to hospitals – the figure finally reached 5,500. Many seemed to be paralysed, and a dozen would finally die. Yet it was not until mid-morning that a military doctor made a cautious and incredible diagnosis: the victims were suffering from poisoning by a nerve gas called sarin, once used by the Nazis in their death camps.
This was not the first such terrorist attack. On 27 June 1994, in the city of Matsumoto, in the Nagano Prefecture, a similar sarin attack flooded the local hospital. Fortunately the gas had been released into the open air, so less people were affected, but seven died nonetheless. The bemused authorities decided it was a matter for the local police only – a decisive factor in allowing the Tokyo attack to take place.
After Tokyo, a national police investigation soon turned up a likely suspect: an immensely wealthy religious cult known as Aum Shinrikyo, or Aum Supreme Truth, led by a forty-year-old guru who called himself Shoko Asahara.
During the past six months police had r
eceived dozens of phone calls accusing the cult of fraud, abduction, and brutality. Things had come to a head a month earlier, when a sixty-eight-year-old lawyer named Kiyoshi Kariya had been kidnapped in broad daylight, grabbed by four powerfully built men, and bundled into the back of a van. Kariya’s sister had been a cult member who had absconded, and Kariya had received a threatening phone call, demanding to know where she was. After Kariya’s disappearance, his son found a note that read: “If I disappear, I was abducted by Aum Shinrikyo.” A police investigation began, but failed to find either Kariya or his body.
Now Aum Shinrikyo was the chief suspect in the gas attack. In spite of his protest (“We carry out our religious activities on the basis of Buddhist doctrines, such as no killing”) police raided Asahara’s headquarters on the slopes of Mount Fuji. Most of the cultists had left, taking crates of documents; but the police found a huge stockpile of chemicals like sodium cyanide and peptone for cultivating bacteria. But the cult insisted, through its spokesmen, that this was all for legitimate peaceful purposes.
On 23 April, the cult’s chief scientist, Hideo Murai, was murdered in front of a crowd of reporters and TV cameramen, stabbed repeatedly in the stomach by a small-time crook named Hiroyuki Jo, who then demanded, “Isn’t anyone going to arrest me?” Police quickly obliged.
But where was the guru? He had vanished without a trace. On 5 May, two months after the sarin attack, a bag left in the toilet of the Shinjuku train station burst into flame. Alert staff doused it with water, but not before it had begun to emit choking fumes. Police discovered later that, if left undiscovered, it would have given off clouds of hydrogen cyanide gas, called Zyklon B by the Nazis, which would have been sucked through the ventilators onto the platform.