Commentary : PERSPECTIVE ON THE WACO TRAGEDY : Finally, the Truth Is Coming Out : Reno was prodded to move against a peaceful sect by a bunch of Washington bully boys.

Who started the fire?

This heated question has been central to the controversy that has raged since April 1993 when 74 Branch Davidians, including 21 children, died in a lurid holocaust seen on TV screens around the world.

Until now, the official story of this tragedy has been summed up in President Clinton’s dismissive statement, made in response to suggestions that Atty. Gen. Janet Reno should resign over the siege: “I was frankly--surprised would be a mild word--that anyone would suggest that the attorney general should resign because some religious fanatics murdered themselves.”

On Tuesday, the FBI retreated from its long-held assertion that it had not fired an incendiary device into the Davidian compound. The FBI has now been forced to admit that it deliberately shot “two pyrotechnic devices” into Mount Carmel, the home of the Branch Davidian community. With this confession, the official version of what happened on that terrible day is coming apart at the seams.

Even now, embarrassed FBI officials are still trying to fudge and fumble. A spokesman declared that the pyrotechnic grenades were aimed away from the main wooden building at a concrete so-called bunker 100 yards distant. In fact, the concrete structure, an old vault the community used as a food cooler, was located at the base of the building’s main residential tower. And, as the agents well knew through their monitoring devices, the vault was where the children and their mothers were huddling under blankets to avoid being suffocated by the tear gas.

The FBI’s implicit admission that it has lied to the American public about the Waco, Tex., fire comes as no surprise to anyone who’s scrutinized the facts.

To start with, there has never been any valid evidence to support the FBI’s false claim that the occupants of Mount Carmel set their home ablaze to accomplish some biblical apotheosis. In truth, the FBI injected huge amounts of a highly flammable form of tear gas into the Davidians’ flimsy structure for six hours on a windy day in the flat Texas plains, effectively transforming the building into a giant pot-bellied stove needing no more than a spark to ignite.

Deliberately misleading statements by the FBI also clouded the mind of Reno. Coming into office during the 51-day siege of Mount Carmel, Reno was hustled into going along with the FBI’s drastic final assault plan.

Reno was told that the main reason for the intended attack was that “law enforcement agents on the ground concluded that the perimeter had become unstable and posed a risk both to them and to the surrounding homes and farms.” Actually, the Branch Davidians, a radical offshoot of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, had been living peacefully with their Waco neighbors for 60 or so years, since the mid-1930s. Far from being the founder of a new “cult,” David Koresh was actually the third leader heading an established community. In fact, the charges about child abuse, gun stockpiling and drug labs on the compound were cooked up by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms as an excuse for its original abortive raid of Mount Carmel the previous February.

While Reno was still wavering about sending in the tanks, someone in the FBI chain-of-command told her that the besieged Koresh was “beating babies.” “You really mean babies?” Reno queried. “Yes,” the answer came, “he’s slapping babies around.” For Reno, this outright lie, soon retracted, was the hot button needed to ignite her fury.

However, despite the FBI’s proven trickiness in these respects, Reno later declared to Congress: “Nothing has given me any indication that the FBI misled me.” The sad truth is that she was lied to. Worse, she allowed herself to be elbowed into a thoroughly bad situation by a bunch of Washington bully boys. Primary among them were then-FBI Chief William Sessions and Asst. Atty. Gen. Webster Hubbell. But the buck, as she said back then, stopped with her.

In a desperate attempt to cover its rear, another FBI official now claims that the agency’s former denials of responsibility for the fire were meant to counter the anti-government paranoia of so-called “conspiracy theorists.” However, it can be argued that the memory of Waco and the feds’ clumsy attempts at a cover-up only added fuel to the climate of conspiracy that helped inflame the unstable minds of the Oklahoma City bombers.

Today, the bottom line is that a peaceful if eccentric community of religious folk with no political agenda whatsoever has, since its brutal destruction, become an icon for right-wing wackos. Along the way the public distrust of politicians and officials has been deepened to the point where increasingly cynical Americans are no longer surprised by such revelations of lying by a once-respected organ of government.

Whatever came after, the siege of Mount Carmel and the tragedy that ended it was absolutely unjustified. In Waco, bureaucratic stupidity and a horrible lapse of morality combined to produce a spectacle of a U.S. government agency incinerating men, women and children.