Reno Believed a Mass Suicide Was Unlikely

The decision to flood the Branch Davidian compound with tear gas, approved by Atty. Gen. Janet Reno and cleared with President Clinton, was intended to be one of a series of steps stretching over several days that would push cult leader David Koresh toward surrender--not to trigger an apocalyptic showdown, officials said Monday.

While they had recognized mass suicide by cult members was a possibility from the outset of the 51-day standoff, Reno and FBI officials who gave a green light to the plan said they had concluded that the likelihood of such an outcome was remote.

“We considered it highly unlikely,” Reno said in response to a news conference question about why federal agents had failed to anticipate cult members’ apparent decision to turn their compound into a raging inferno that claimed 86 lives.

“Obviously, if I thought the chances were great of a mass suicide, I would never have approved the plan. Everything that we were told, every indication of the reactions to the pressure up to that point, was that there would not--that would not occur,” she said.

Moreover, Reno said, experts advising the government on tactics had emphasized that mass suicide was an option Koresh and his followers could exercise at any time--whether or not new steps were taken to end what they considered an increasingly unstable impasse.

Reno took full responsibility for the action: “I made the decisions. I’m accountable. The buck stops with me, and nobody ever accused me of running from a decision that I made based on the best information that I had. I don’t do spin stuff.”

The question of why officials decided to escalate the pressure on Koresh after weeks of seeming to follow a wait-him-out strategy, and of whether they adequately assessed the dangers, parallel the questions raised by the initial assault on the compound by agents of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

That attack, in which ATF agents were seeking to seize possibly illegal weapons, left four federal agents and several cult members dead and at least 16 people wounded.

In both cases, officials set in motion what they described as carefully crafted plans to deal with Koresh while minimizing risks. And both times, their calculations went dramatically awry--apparently because they underestimated the cult leader’s capacity for unreasoning violence.

Describing the opening stages of events Monday, Reno and other officials said their goal was not to bring the long standoff to an abrupt end, but rather to push Koresh and his followers into giving up.

“We made a decision today--and there is no perfect timing, there is no perfect day, and there is no trigger--that we would increase the pressure today, but today was not meant to be D-Day or The Day,” Reno said.

“We were prepared to carry it out tomorrow and the next day and do everything we could to effect a peaceful resolution of this matter. . . . This was just a step forward in trying to bring about a peaceful resolution by constantly exerting further pressure,” Reno said.

Why did authorities adopt such a plan instead of continuing to carry forward the siege?

Reno and others said they acted for a number of reasons, none by itself sufficient to force action but which in the aggregate tipped the scale.

Among the factors were deteriorating medical and sanitary conditions inside the compound, reports that babies were being mistreated by Koresh, and fears that cult members would attempt an armed breakout--possibly using children as shields.

In addition, Reno said the FBI’s special 50-member hostage rescue team, which had been manning the perimeter of the besieged compound, was reaching the point of exhaustion and needed to be relieved. No adequate substitute unit was available, she said, and officials were especially concerned about the threat posed by the Davidians’ possession of at least one .50-caliber machine gun, which has a range of more than a mile.

Such firepower was also the reason fire trucks were not positioned close to the compound and why helicopters kept their distance from the scene even after flames first began erupting from the compound’s buildings, Reno said.

She also rejected suggestions that Monday’s action might have been made in haste. The plan was submitted to her by the FBI a week ago, she said, and she outlined it for Clinton over the weekend.

In the meantime, she said, she repeatedly questioned planners about the details and possible alternatives.

“I asked question after question. I met with experts, I talked with as many people as possible and asked questions, and essentially the plan was exactly as it had been presented to me. I think the FBI very, very carefully thought it out. They talked to medical experts, they talked to others, and everything we did to review their careful planning indicated that they had planned it very carefully,” she said.

Extra attention had been paid to the possible danger children inside the compound, she and other officials said. Tear gas was initially kept away from the area where children were believed to be, they said.

And Bob Ricks, one of the FBI’s field commanders at the scene, said planners had expected that when the gas was pumped into the compound, mothers would grab their children and rush out to surrender.

At the same time, Ricks tacitly acknowledged that after an armored vehicle had penetrated Koresh’s inner sanctum--which was protected by walls of concrete blocks--and flooded it with the gas, the cult members’ options became dangerously narrow.

“We believed that once we pierced that interior protective room that they had . . . that the time was really running out on them, with regard to how long they could stay in there,” Ricks said.

“We put massive gas in there. They made the decision that they could no longer maintain that environment. Their gas masks, by that time, had to be failing. It had been an extended period of time. They had to make the decision: Were they going to come out and face the charges--they were facing charges for killing four ATF agents--or were they going to commit suicide. David Koresh, we believe, gave the order to commit suicide, and they all followed willingly his orders.”

The first step in the plan was taken over the weekend, when armored vehicles were used to tow cars owned by Koresh and other cult members away from the compound, which earlier had been ringed with razor-sharp concertina wire to prevent anyone from entering or leaving the compound.

The second step began at about 5:30 a.m. Monday, when federal agents used loudspeakers to renew their calls for cult members to surrender.

Then armored vehicles began a series of sallies at the compound’s buildings, punching holes through the walls and injecting the gas into the structures. Reno, Ricks and others emphasized that neither the gas nor the propellant used to disperse it were flammable.

“We did not introduce fire into this compound. It was not our intention that this compound be burned down,” Ricks said.

And even though Ricks said Koresh and others had little chance of continuing to hold out once their inner bunker had been filled with gas, he expressed shock at what happened.

“I can’t tell you the shock and the horror that all of us felt when we saw those flames coming out there. It was: ‘Oh, my God, they’re killing themselves.’ We did not want that to occur.”

Members of both the Senate and House Judiciary Committees said they would look into the wisdom of the FBI’s action.

Rep. Jack Brooks (D-Tex.), chairman of the House panel, said it would look into “whether steps could have been taken to minimize the loss of life or whether it was a mass suicide attempt . . . that could not have been prevented.”

Sens. Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), a committee member, called for hearings into the tactics used in both the Feb. 28 assault by ATF agents and in Monday’s gas attack.

“One has to question whether the deaths of the federal agents during the initial raid and those who may have died today could have been avoided,” Hatch said.

Specter said that “at this moment I think it is impossible to evaluate the wisdom of what the FBI did. I think we will have to wait until the events cool off . . . to take a look at it.”

Rep. Don Edwards (D-San Jose), chairman of the Judiciary subcommittee on civil and constitutional rights, which oversees FBI operations, said: “The escalation caught me off guard. We are going to look at it in great detail.”

He said he had fully expected that the FBI would “wait out” Koresh and his followers. “We are going to find out all about the decision-making issues.”

Rep. Henry J. Hyde (R-Ill.), another House Judiciary Committee member, said: “It just seems to me law enforcement ran out of patience. Wasn’t there some other way and why wasn’t it used?”

Times staff writer Robert L. Jackson contributed to this story.