Davidians’ Key Weapon Was Their Unpredictability : Standoff: Cultists kept officials guessing with prophecies of doom and promises of surrender. Even suicide fears were grounded in opinion.

The torrent of words issuing almost daily from the Branch Davidian compound never seemed to lack for bluntness. Sometimes, it assumed the stern Biblical cadences of a wrathful Jehovah. Sometimes, it carried the taunting jibes of a street tough.

“Do you want me to pull back the heavens and show you my anger?” cult leader David Koresh asked darkly in one letter he said was written in God’s own hand. “Let’s get it on!” he barked at an FBI negotiator over a secure telephone line on another day.

Yet as bared and barbed as his words were, Koresh’s ultimate intentions about ending the government’s siege of the Ranch Apocalypse at Mt. Carmel were impossible to discern.

Even the well-founded fear that his disciples might be set on a course of mass suicide--a possibility raised early in the siege by federal agents seeking to justifying their aborted raid on the compound--was grounded in little more than rumor and opinion.

One day warlike, the next meek as lambs, Koresh and his disciples went toward their fiery Armageddon steeled with their own unpredictability, one of the few weapons left that authorities had been unable to disarm or deflect.

From the moment they surprised federal agents who raided their compound Feb. 28 by firing through the walls of their own sanctuary to wound and kill the intruders, the Branch Davidians remained a force to reckon with simply because no one could be certain what they would do next.

Koresh “always kept the option of talking one way and acting another,” said William Pitts, a cult expert and professor of religion at Baylor University. “The government would make one interpretation, but he would always keep his options open to proceed another way.”

The difficulty that posed to law enforcement officials was obvious--it was always left to them to take action, while Koresh had the ability to wait and react, to lie baldly about his plans or endlessly modify his demands.

In the past week alone, Koresh had issued two warlike missives that warned of doom to his enemies, kept negotiators and his own attorney up in the air over whether he would emerge after his sect’s celebration of Passover, then appealed for a word processor to speed work on his written revelations of the Seven Seals, the biblical portents he claimed would prefigure the day of judgment.

“As canny as this guy was, even his desperation worked for him,” said one FBI analyst. “Every time he said one thing and then did another, it gave him a little more time, ticked off our people a little more. But there comes a point where you have to take some kind of decisive action.”

Until the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms launched its ill-fated raid seeking illegal weapons at the Branch Davidians’ Texas hill country fortress last Feb. 28, Koresh and his followers had seemed unlikely targets of a massive government paramilitary incursion.

Remnants of a messianic offshoot of the Seventh-day Adventist religious order that flourished and then dwindled in the Waco, Tex., area since the 1930s, the sect members lived a secluded Spartan existence. For a while, the Branch Davidians lived like hobos, sleeping in battered tents and school buses that might easily be mistaken by outsiders for just another downtrodden trailer park.

Then they erected their buff-colored compound on a plain surrounded by cow pastures. Their diets were rigidly controlled. All the adults learned to shoot guns and took turns drilling and standing sentry, according to federal affidavits.

Koresh, who had returned to the area after an interlude in Southern California, was their inspiration, guide and master. Disgruntled cult members complained that he swilled beer while the others abstained. Explaining that he was a new messiah, one who lived with sin, Koresh had sex with some of their wives and daughters, blithely explaining that they would find better partners in heaven.

A Dallas-born Adventist who dropped out of school because of a learning disability, Koresh found his power in the Bible. Reportedly memorizing the entire New Testament at the age of 12, he artfully wielded its passages, sometimes to threaten, sometimes to seduce. In the last resort, it was always useful as a refuge in which he could find a citation to excuse almost anything.

“You can use the Bible to interpret almost anything you want your way,” Pitts said. “He could have found things to justify either a peaceful or a violent end. What’s interesting is that I can’t think of any passage that justifies mass suicide.”

Authorities had long been worried about that possibility. Just hours after retreating from their botched raid on the sect’s fortress with four dead agents in tow, ATF officials insisted that one reason they had approved the operation was because of intelligence reports that Koresh and his deputies had been making preparations for mass suicide.

During the government’s first press conference after the initial raid, an emotional Ted Royster, the agent in charge of the Dallas ATF office, said authorities had moved in to confiscate weapons because they feared a repeat of the 1978 debacle in Jonestown, Guyana, in which 912 followers of cult leader Jim Jones killed themselves by ingesting a cyanide-laced fruit-flavored drink.

Federal agents feared that the Branch Davidians would carry out a “suicide in order to make a public statement,” Royster said.

By the second week of the standoff, former Branch Davidians were coming forward with chilling tales of preparations that rivaled Jones’ “White Night.” Kiri Jewell, 12, who lived with the cult for four years and whose mother may have perished in Monday’s inferno, told a hushed audience on the “Donahue” TV program in March that Koresh has schooled his followers in suicide.

Explaining how she was taught to place a gun barrel in her mouth and how to kill herself with cyanide, the teen-ager urged authorities to storm the compound. “Better a few people die than all of them,” she said.

Lawyers for several cult members who have left the compound over the past 51 days claim that many of the former Davidians were exaggerating or even lying to destroy the sect.

“There’s been a lot of tough talk coming out of that compound the last month and a half or so, but I haven’t heard word one that would lead me to believe they would plan anything like this,” said Jeff Kearney, a Ft. Worth attorney who represented Rachel Jones, one of the cult members presumed dead in the fire.

And Bob Ricks, one of the senior FBI officials on the scene over the last 52 days, said Monday that investigators had contacted 61 former Branch Davidian cult members scattered around the world, making sure to quiz each of them about the possibility of mass suicide.

“The vast bulk of those outside believed they would not commit suicide,” Ricks said.

But as happened so often in dealing with Koresh, even the FBI’s meticulous research was contradicted by other intelligence. According to Ricks, agents learned that on March 2, the day Koresh had agreed to surrender after the FBI allowed him to broadcast a one-hour religious sermon, he secretly planned to wire himself with hand grenades and pull the pins as federal agents approached to take him into custody.

His disciples had been told of his intentions. Everything was apparently set.

“He had kissed the kids and was going to go outside and kill himself in full view of the TV cameras,” Ricks said. “At the last moment, he chickened out.”

Their knowledge of the failed plan made FBI negotiators question Koresh again and again about his intentions as the weeks of stalemate dragged on. Four times, they asked him directly if he countenanced mass suicide, Ricks said.

“ ‘Can you promise us you will not commit suicide? . . . ‘ “ Ricks recalled on Monday. “He told us: ‘No.’ His attorneys asked him if suicide is a possibility. He promised them suicide was not in the cards. He was always playing his games.”

Siege Ends in Cinders

Fire destroyed the cult compound after FBI agents in an armored vehicle smashed the buildings and pumped in tear gas in an attempt to end the 51-day siege. Here’s what transpired Monday:

THE FBI STRIKES COMPOUND

Federal agents telephone the cult compound and warn that the cultists will be gassed if they don’t surrender. Cult members refuse. Authorities send in a tank to ram holes in the complex and shoot tear gas through the holes.

Underground bunker

Water tower

Observation tower

Pool

Suspected weapons cache

Dormitory (men on first floor; women on second)

Several holes knocked in the compound by armored vehicle

Compound main entrance

THE BLAZE ERUPTS

Flames appear in three locations simultaneously. A Justice Department spokeswoman later says two cult members were seen starting fires at two areas of the complex.

Flames first spotted

Flames spread to observation tower, then engulf complex

Area of major explosion during fire: David Koresh’s living quarters

MONDAY’S EVENTS (all times CDT)

--About 5:50 a.m.: Federal agents reportedly call compound and inform cult members to give up or they will be gassed. Person inside compound reportedly hangs up on caller.

--About 6:04 a.m.: An armored vehicle smashes through front wall of compound just left of front door. A volley of gunfire is returned from inside the building.

--About 8 a.m.: Armored vehicle rips into second floor of compound and minutes later another hole is punched into back of compound.

--About 9 a.m.: President Clinton says he was briefed and U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno has given go-ahead for tactical plan.

--About 9:20 a.m.: Armored vehicle returns to compound and bashes another hole in front wall of compound, taking out front door.

-- About 11:30 a.m.: Armored vehicles continue battering cult buildings.

-- 12:05 p.m.: Flames and smoke begin to pour from compound.

-- 12:28 p.m. Person with hands raised walks to armored vehicle and appears to surrender. A second person appears to come out of compound, dragging something--possibly another person -- toward armored vehicle. Fire has destroyed much of compound.