COLUMN ONE : Will Smoke in Waco Ever Clear? : After 51 days, the siege at the compound is finally over. But the gulf between cult members and federal officials widens as survivors recount David Koresh’s fiery end.

In the end, the yawning gulf between federal authorities and David Koresh proved unbridgeable in almost every imaginable respect.

The gap widened even in death. How exactly did Koresh and his followers perish in the blaze that incinerated their fortified Ranch Apocalypse compound?

The contrasts between the two versions--the government’s account of a meticulously planned assault greeted by hasty executions and a fiery mass suicide, and survivors’ tales of a botched federal operation that went fatally awry when a tank knocked over a kerosene lantern inside the compound--seem no less connectable than the worlds of the Branch Davidians and the FBI-led army that surrounded them for 51 days.

Throughout the siege, “each side insisted on being in control, but they were both boxed in,” said Richard Ofshe, a sociologist who teaches criminal justice at UC Berkeley. “The federal negotiators were hemmed in by the strategy they chose. The longer they waited, the fewer options they had left. As for Koresh, it was either jail or death for him, and his ego wouldn’t let him choose jail.”

With each new tack taken by federal officials to persuade or badger Koresh into surrendering--appeals to his humanity, pre-dawn telephone jousts over the meaning of the Book of Revelation, ear-splitting renditions of rabbits being slaughtered--the messianic ninth-grade dropout careened wildly back and forth over his own jagged course of responses. Sometimes he was the soul of reason, at other times spewing profanities--and often threatening to become an architect of doom.

Even at the beginning of the crisis, as government agents viewed with alarm reports of an apocalyptic cult stockpiling a huge cache of weapons and ammunition, there was little chance of a compromise. Koresh preached a violent end, and the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents who approached with search warrants and body armor fit the picture of evil intruders perfectly.

“If we went in 30 days ago or three months from now, it would be the same results,” said Byron Sage, the first FBI negotiator on the scene in Waco and the last to talk to cult lieutenant Steve Schneider moments before he cut off communication after learning that the assault was imminent. “It was his (Koresh’s) plan for a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

The battle will soon be taken to forensic reports, congressional hearing chambers and federal courtrooms. “When the smoke clears, we’ll see what the truth is,” said Jeff Kearney, a Ft. Worth lawyer who represents Jaime Castillo, one of nine Branch Davidian survivors.

On Thursday, a Texas medical examiner heightened the divisions by reporting that coroners thus far have found no evidence to substantiate government claims that some of the dead cult members had gunshot wounds to the head.

“There is absolutely no evidence of people shot at this stage,” said Tarrant County Medical Examiner Nizam Peerwani. Rodney Crowe, a forensic dentist, added that many of the victims were so thoroughly burned that their faces were “completely powdered.”

By nightfall, medical examiners said that they had inspected the remains of 35 fire victims, many of whom were found clustered in a flattened bunker at the center of the burned compound. A group of reporters led to the scene by officials saw the locations of bodies marked by orange flags. The Star of David that once fluttered above the peach-colored fortress was replaced by an ATF flag, four gold stars added to honor the agents slain during the failed Feb. 28 raid.

The descriptions by Perrwani and Crowe seemed to bolster accounts by survivors that none of the cult members were killed to prevent them from fleeing the compound. The survivors, according to Houston lawyer Jack Zimmermann, “didn’t escape, couldn’t escape” the flames.

Federal officials were skeptical of Peerwani’s conclusions, noting that he had conducted only one autopsy of a cult member so far.

But Zimmermann--who represented Schneider, who is believed to have perished in the blaze--and several other defense lawyers who represent the survivors or dead cult members now seem intent on attacking the government’s main contention that Koresh and at least 80 other Branch Davidians perished by mass suicide.

“There were no orders, no instruction, nothing,” Zimmermann said Thursday. He bases his account on seven hours of interviews with four of the surviving cultists--all of whom, he said, have not been able to talk to each other since they were jailed.

According to Zimmermann, attorney Dick DeGuerin--Koresh’s lawyer--and several others, the final run against the walls of the Branch Davidian compound by a tank acting as a battering ram was what set off the fire.

Survivors have told the lawyers that the collapse of a wall and part of a ceiling tipped over a Coleman lamp, spewing burning kerosene over the floor and igniting part of the compound. The flames raced through the flimsy structures, driven by 30 m.p.h. winds.

Federal agent Jeffrey Jamar, the senior FBI official in charge of the Waco contingent, has insisted that eyewitness accounts by FBI agents in tanks and monitoring by heat-sensitive devices show that the fire was started in several locations. In coming days, the FBI intends to release thermal measurements taken from the air at the time of the raid that will show fires erupting simultaneously in three separate areas of the compound, government sources said Thursday. And FBI officials cited statements by several survivors who, they claim, admitted seeing or hearing evidence of arson minutes before the fire spread.

“At least three people observed a person spraying something, bent down . . . and then there was a flash of fire,” Jamar said Wednesday.

Lawyers for cult members say that none of the survivors saw Koresh after the fire started. Two of the Davidians, Zimmermann said, claimed to have last seen their prophet as federal tanks were pumping tear gas into the compound. Koresh was said to be walking in the hallway on the compound’s second floor, checking on his disciples and helping adjust their secondhand gas masks.

Survivors claim that until the fire exploded through the compound, the Branch Davidians endured in an eerie state of calm, reading their Bibles as they peered through gas masks, Zimmermann said. One survivor even insisted that as the walls crumbled and the building shook, several cult members ran to move several tanks of kerosene fuel out of range of an intruding tank because “we were afraid of starting a fire,” he said.

Zimmermann faulted the government for a “massive error in judgment. I think they just lost their patience. It was obvious from the briefings, obvious from the fact they wouldn’t let us back in” to talk with Koresh last week.

Federal officials insist that a variety of assault plans, which had been under study since the first days of the aborted Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms raid on the compound, were all designed “to get in there, isolate their weapons or Koresh.” One high-ranking Justice Department official acknowledged that “all the analyses had the same bottom line: Not without significant loss of life on our part or their part.”

One senior official in Washington said that those involved in tactical planning had even talked of trying to eliminate Koresh to bring a swift end to the stalemate. “We talked about that. But that would be a terrible precedent for law enforcement--to be the judge, the jury and executioner.”

When they finally won approval from Atty. Gen. Janet Reno last week to try to drive Koresh from his compound, FBI officials said, their plan was designed to prod Koresh and his followers out in an incremental pattern.

“We expected this to go on for days,” said Danny Coulson, the first leader of the bureau’s hostage rescue team and now deputy assistant FBI director. “We didn’t believe he could stay in there forever with the tear gas.”

But when hostage rescue team members in the tanks were met with 80 to 100 rounds of gunfire each time they went in, Coulson said, “We felt we had to put it in all over the place to protect our people.”

In a sense, the dashed expectations that federal law enforcement officials spoke of bluntly in the hours after the compound began to burn mirrored the shock etched on the faces of nearly 100 federal ATF agents as they retreated from their failed raid on the compound 51 days earlier. Four agents were killed in that attack, and senior ATF officials insisted later that the loss of the “element of surprise” had compromised their operation.

Tactical planners’ expectations that Koresh and his followers would either flee the choking tear gas or that some sect members’ “mothering instincts” would reemerge, spurring them to protect the children, never came to pass.

Still hoping against hope that the children might be alive, six members of the hostage rescue team put themselves in peril by attempting to enter the building, even as firefighters were still pouring water on the flaming rubble.

Wading through thigh-deep water clogged with rats and feces and what some agents concluded were body parts, the team found one of the compound’s underground tunnels and made its way to a buried school bus, where they hoped some of the children might have been taken for safety. The bus was untouched by the flames, but no children were there.

The sputtering dialogue between the negotiators and Koresh was always at its rawest and its most delicate when it came to the children, Sage said. Despite winning the release of 21 children in the siege’s early days, agents found that “every time we asked for the children (left behind) he became more and more resistant. . . . He considered them to be his, the bloodline of David Koresh.”

In one incident, Sage was trying to reach Koresh on a secure phone line when “a precious little voice, two or three years old, came on the line. ‘Are you coming down here in that tank to kill me?’ That didn’t come out of the precious child without some prompting.”

The seasoned FBI negotiators grew frustrated because they were not used to dealing with a hostage situation in which those inside did not feel held against their will. The talks were doomed, Sage believes, because Koresh had long sought a “hostage opportunity to engage in a siege. How do you bargain with an individual for whom you are doing a favor?”

The only access authorities had inside the compound was surreptitious--tiny bugs smuggled inside cassettes and supplies sent inside to the cult. But the devices have yielded little useful information. One was still operable when the fire started, but picked up mostly unintelligible noise.

There were only two men who visited the compound. Lawyers Zimmermann and DeGuerin saw cult members living a “Spartan” existence. Ranch Apocalypse had little in the way of furniture, Zimmermann said. The front entrance to the building was barricaded with a piano, sacks of potatoes, boxes of food and a large propane canister.

Everywhere he and DeGuerin walked, Zimmermann said, they saw bullet holes, mostly around the windows. There were hundreds of holes--in the walls, in the floors, in the ceilings. Amid this daily reminder of the tenuousness of their existence, Zimmermann said, the cult members appeared calm.

But one cult sympathizer, who sneaked by federal guards and made his way into the compound on March 24 and stayed until April 18, just five days before the fiery end to the siege, told Houston lawyer Paul Looney that some cult members had grown doubtful about Koresh and his insistence that he was a prophet.

Looney said Thursday that his client, Louis Alaniz, 24, a telephone service worker who has been described by his family as a religious fanatic, told him that several cultists inside the compound told him that if one of Koresh’s dire predictions was not fulfilled, they would leave on their own.

“People were starting to step back and ask, ‘Where’s the proof you are a prophet?’ ” Looney said.

Koresh’s prediction, Looney said, concerned what the messianic cult leader claimed was an imminent earthquake at a dam near Waco. Koresh made the prediction in one of five apocalyptic letters delivered to federal negotiators in the week before the FBI assault.

Those letters, said FBI officials, played a crucial role in their determination that they could no longer wait out Koresh and hope that he would come to his senses. Filled with doom-laden prose from the Book of Revelation, the letters contained at least one graphic threat that agents would be met with a large explosion if they entered the compound.

Some FBI agents believe that an explosion that ripped apart a great section of the compound after the entire building was awash in flames may have been such a device igniting.

Murray S. Miron, a forensic psychologist at Syracuse University who studied the five letters, says he came away feeling certain that they were not only a convincing portrait of the “madness of the man and his megalomaniacal posturings as God,” but they were also a dangerous call for cult members on the outside to act to aid Koresh.

Miron and others studying Koresh for the FBI did not put a premium on the potential for mass suicide. The greatest danger, he said, appeared to come from Koresh’s bellicose talk and the likelihood that he and his followers were itching for a final firefight in which they might suffer casualties, but also kill scores of agents.

“He was hoping he would take on the opposing government forces, even lure them into battle, and in doing so, win some sort of victory. If that was his intention, I guess he has his victory, as hollow as it is.”