Waco siege failures led to big changes in ATF, FBI
All in all, the death toll of the Branch Davidian siege outside Waco in 1993 included four agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and more than 75 Branch Davidians, including 21 children.
The initial ATF raid on the compound and ensuing 51-day standoff involving FBI negotiators threw open the curtains on major shortcomings in policy and tactics between the federal agencies — shortcomings that ultimately contributed to the siege’s fiery end and a re-evaluation of law enforcement techniques.
Authorities believed the Branch Davidians had a stockpile of weapons, and the ATF obtained a search warrant for the compound as well as an arrest warrant for the group’s leader, David Koresh, accusing him of possessing ille
gal weapons. On Feb. 28, 1993, nearly 100 agents moved in to execute the warrants.
“The biggest problem we had was internal,” said Byron Sage, the lead FBI negotiator during the siege. “We brought it on ourselves. We created a crisis within a crisis.”
Sage, who lives in the Austin area, said there was a significant lack of communication between negotiators and tactical officers, including the Hostage Rescue Team and other SWAT teams that were brought in to help put an
end to the standoff. “Probably one of the biggest lessons learned from this is that the tactical teams and the negotiators absolutely need to be on
the same sheet of music. What we’re saying, they’ve got to be mirroring with their actions. And what they’re doing with their actions, we need to be aware of so that we can mitigate any kind of concern the (opposing side) might have with it. We didn’t have that — that was a major breakdown,” he said.
The show of force from the tactical side of the operation, too, might have served to strengthen the resolve of the Branch Davidians to hold their ground. Sage said a high-profile police tactical presence tends to drive people together, instead of apart.
The proper approach, he said, should have been to keep the pressure on while avoiding being overly threatening, and acquiescing to reasonable demands.
“That’s a huge motivator for someone to try to reach a peaceful (resolution),” he said. “We didn’t have that. We didn’t have it at the level we needed to have it.”
An unexpected gunfight
The day of the raid, ATF agents Blake Boteler and John Risenhoover donned their tactical gear with dozens of their colleagues and boarded horse trailers to serve a search warrant at the Branch Davidian compound outside Waco. ATF special response teams from Dallas, Houston and Louisiana had orders to move into the compound and arrest Koresh, who had led the Branch Davidians since 1990.
“When we went to it, this was going to be a warrant service that would last maybe a day or so for us to complete the search, then we’d go back to our world,” Boteler said. “We didn’t have that mindset that this was going to be one of the biggest law enforcement gunfights in history.”
Dubbed Operation Trojan Horse, the raid was supposed to allow ATF agents to get in close to the compound under the cover of horse trailers before the Branch Davidians realized what was happening. But shortly before the operation began, Koresh was tipped off. As Boteler boarded the lead trailer, he remembered hearing an agent say, “If they know we’re coming, why are we going?”
As a horde of agents poured out of the trailers and began to move in on the compound, Branch Davidians unleashed a hail of gunfire that immediately threw the agency’s plans into disarray.
The gunfire began just as Boteler stepped out of his trailer.
“We were getting shots from multiple windows, multiple locations with automatic weapon fire,” he said.
As he moved for cover behind a car, Boteler saw a bullet hit ATF agent Steve Willis in the head, killing him instantly.
Agents Conway LeBleu, Todd McKeehan and Robert John Williams also died in the gunfight, and 20 others were wounded. Six Branch Davidians were killed.
Risenhoover, an agent from San Antonio, hunkered down behind one of the trucks that had pulled the trailers onto the property. A .50-caliber round tore through the vehicle’s engine block and into his right leg. The agent beside him was left with a gaping wound in his calf.
“Mine actually sort of cauterized itself,” Risenhoover said. “You could see smoke coming out of my wound because the bullet was actually lodged in there.”
It took hours to get the agents to safety.
Communication flaws
Sage, the FBI’s lead negotiator, said he and the 52 other members of a seven-agency negotiating team urged the Branch Davidians to come out of the compound and take their grievances to court. But the siege ended with a rejected ultimatum and a deadly conflagration.
Shortly before 6 a.m. on April 19, 1993, federal agents called the compound and told the group to surrender or they would hit the compound with tear gas. A Branch Davidian threw the phone out of the door. At 6:04 a.m., an armored vehicle started punching holes in the building and sending tear gas inside.
Branch Davidians fired as many as 200 rounds at the agents in response; the FBI maintained agents did not return fire. Hours later, none of the Davidians had emerged from the compound, but agents continued using tanks and tear gas.
At 12:08 p.m., FBI agents saw fires pouring out of several second-story windows.
A half-hour later, firetrucks arrived from nearby Waco and Bellmead. Only nine Branch Davidians survived.
Sage doesn’t believe Koresh would have ever surrendered peacefully, but he admits there were failures. Even though agents had frequent briefings with investigations, intelligence, command, tactical and logistics elements, Sage said negotiators didn’t have a clear line of communication to the tactical agents who were out in front handling the most dangerous aspect of the siege.
“They needed to know why we were doing certain things to try to establish rapport and trust, because they’re trained up, and quite good, at doing surgical tactical assaults on a crisis site to rescue hostages, and they’ve had significant success,” Sage said. “But, in a situation like this, once you gain insight into the personalities and the dynamic of the people that are in crisis, then you need to tailor a strategy that leads you to the same conclusion that’s a safe resolution to the situation.”
‘Nothing even approaches it’
Before Sage went through negotiation training in 1976, he was a SWAT team leader for the Sacramento Division of the FBI. By the time he arrived in Waco, he had solid negotiation and tactical experience and understood the dynamic between both areas during a standoff.
And yet, neither Sage nor any of the agents who were part of the Waco siege were prepared for what they found there.
Up to that point, Risenhoover said, no one had ever mounted an ambush of such a scale on law enforcement officers before.
“You have to remember, we were in there with pistols, a couple of MP-5s and I think a total of four AR-15s,” he said. “I think only two of the AR-15s ever fired a round.”
The Branch Davidians were in a fortified position with grenades and automatic weapons, including a .50 caliber rifle.
“We weren’t in there for a gunbattle,” Risenhoover said.
Looking back, both Sage and Risenhoover said the operation should have been called off. A 501-page report released Sept. 30, 1993, by the U.S. Treasury Department agreed.
The ATF, then part of the Treasury Department, planned to hit the site in what law enforcement agencies call a “dynamic entry,” which seeks to gain control of a situation before anyone can start shooting. Sage said the tactic has three absolute requirements: the element of surprise, overwhelming power and moving as quickly as possible to secure the location.
But the Treasury Department’s report, while praising the dozens of agents involved, criticized the ATF’s management of the operation. The supposedly secret operation was fraught with leaks, bad intelligence, questionable tactics and faulty decisions by ATF leaders who proceeded with the raid knowing the Branch Davidians knew they were coming and would likely meet them with gunfire.
“Despite knowing in advance that the element of surprise was lost, the raid commanders made the decision to go forward,” the report concluded. “This decision was brutally exploited by Koresh and his followers.”
The botched operation led to the longest hostage- and barricade-type siege in law enforcement history.
“In 48 years in law enforcement, nothing even approaches it,” Sage said. “I pray every day that no other agency in the world will ever have to face something like this.”
But if something like Waco were to happen again, he said, the men and women who would respond today are better prepared.
Lessons learned
Back then, the ATF had 24 different special response teams, all of which trained differently. Tactical agents were underequipped for the task, lacking such equipment as helmets and gun belts, and though a handful of agents were carrying higher-powered AR-15 rifles that day, most never fired a shot during the raid.
Boteler said the agency had a crucial decision to make after the Waco siege.
“We either had to disband (the special response teams) and let other agencies run our warrants, or we had to stick to it 100 percent, and that meant the training, the equipment and getting everyone up to speed on current tactical processes,” he said. “They had to make that decision to go all in, and they did.”
After Waco, the ATF invested in tactical equipment and improved weapons systems, along with training on using tear gas and automatic weapons. The agency also standardized training across the board.
“We did everything the same,” Boteler said.
Agents began training with the Los Angeles Police Department through the National Tactical Officers Association, receiving specialized instruction in hostage rescue, warrant execution, breaching, tear gas and other capabilities the agency didn’t have in Waco.
Incident commanders also received a higher level of training and scrutiny.
“We run scenarios and put these incident commanders through scenarios where they see and make decisions in a training environment that challenge them to make the right decisions,” Boteler said.
Working together
The FBI, a vastly larger organization, also had to make changes after Waco. To improve communication and cohesion among the different elements involved in critical incidents like the Waco siege, the bureau created the Critical Incident Response Group. Notably, the agency’s tactical and negotiating teams now train together.
The group houses five sections: the FBI’s aviation program; crisis management and command posts; bomb technicians and the hazardous devices school; all the behavioral analysis units; and the tactical section, composed of the Hostage Rescue Team, negotiators, the tactical helicopter unit and support.
“The negotiators are occupying, living in, training with, exercising with and operating with the tactical operators every day. We’re housed in the same place,” said David Sundberg, chief of the Tactical Section and commander of the Hostage Rescue Team. “So, not just at a critical incident, but at all times before, we are working together. Individual tactical operators are very familiar with individual negotiators and then on up within the management and command structure of the Critical Incident Response Group.”
The various agents work to understand one another’s roles and capabilities so they can function alongside each other during complex and time-sensitive responses to critical incidents, Sundberg said.
“The more that the elements involved in the critical incident resolution train and exercise with each other prior to deploying to an incident, the more effective they’re going to be,” Sundberg said. “No matter how intelligent or experienced the commander of the response may be, that commander will be far more effective with specialists who are more adept at working together, sharing limited resources and providing broad informed opinions to their senior leaders.”
For law enforcement officers across the board, training is more uniform and more inclusive at local, state and national levels, Sundberg said.
Twenty-five years after the Waco siege, at a time when mass shootings have become more frequent, improving coordination between agencies is essential, he said. “If we are not coordinated at a minimum and collaborating better across agencies, then we are lagging behind our responsibility to handle these critical incidents.”
Boteler remained with the ATF through May 2016 and, in his decadeslong career, he saw the agency’s capabilities grow and evolve.
“The training and equipment that they have compared to what we had in 1993, I mean, it’s just night and day,” he said. The Associated Press contributed material to this story. Contact Mark Wilson at 512445-3636.