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Mount Carmel: The Day Surprise Was Lost and Four Agents Died
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
On February 28, 1993, seventy-six ATF agents drove cattle trailers toward Mount Carmel Center — and David Koresh already knew they were coming. This is where the Waco siege began, and where the unanswered questions started.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
On the morning of February twenty-eighth, nineteen ninety-three, seventy-six federal agents drove cattle trailers down a dirt road outside Waco, Texas. They believed they had the element of surprise.
To understand why the raid happened at all, you need to understand what was happening inside that compound. Mount Carmel Center sat on seventy-seven acres northeast of Waco.
The weapons were the formal reason for the raid. Branch Davidians had been converting semiautomatic rifles to fire automatically.
The morning of February twenty-eighth, a television news crew was out on the road near Mount Carmel. They were lost, looking for the compound.
The ATF pulled back. The FBI took over.
By April, the FBI had been seeking approval to introduce CS gas into the compound. CS gas is a tear gas compound with strong irritant effects.
The central contested fact is who started the fire. The FBI maintained from the beginning that Branch Davidians set multiple fires deliberately, consistent with Koresh's apocalyptic theology.
Waco didn't end when the fire went out. In some ways, that's where its real history begins.
Here's what the record shows clearly. The ATF commanders who proceeded with a raid after learning the element of surprise was lost were found by their own department's investigation to have lied about it.
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