76 people died on 19th April 1993 when the compound of a religious sect, the Branch Davidians, went up in flames. It had been under siege by government agencies for 51 days, but no one knows what started the fire.Don is joined by Jeff Guinn, investigative reporter and author of ‘Waco: David Koresh, the Branch Dividians, and a Legacy of Rage’ to find out why the United States’ Government was interested in this religious compound outside Waco, Texas, and how the situation escalated to this point.Produced and edited by Sophie Gee. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds/All3 MediaAmerican History Hit is a History Hit podcast.
Chapter 1: What happened during the Waco siege?
Und jedes Mal, wenn David Koresh das tut, zeigt es sich einfach an seinen Followern, dass er der Herr ist, weil wer sonst außer dem Herrn diese Bedeutung sehen könnte, die niemand jemals gefunden hätte.
Nice little tight racket there. One of the elements of his behavior that might have peeved George off was that he had an affair with his mother, with George's mother, Lois Rodin, who was quite a bit older than him.
That's true. And their excuse for that was that they were simply following a biblical injunction that the prophetess should grow heavy with child, even though she was beyond childbearing years. They had the sex, they didn't have the child, but that was okay because
David konnte immer sagen, wenn Dinge nicht komplett funktionierten, wie er propheziert hat, dass Prophezeiung nur passieren würde, wenn alle das tun, was sie geplant hatten. Wenn sie es nicht taten, dann würde die Prophezeiung nicht wahr werden und es war nicht seine Schuld.
Würde die Gesellschaft nicht so einfach sein, wenn wir es nur so gemacht hätten, wie wir gesagt haben?
Bis heute gibt es überlebende Branch Davidians, die mit dir verabschieden würden. Sie könnten denken, dass du ein Prophet bist.
I'll be right back after this short break. Meantime, if you'd like us to cover anything specifically, if you have any ideas of subject matter we should be looking at, send us an email at ahh.historyhit.com. We'd love to hear from you.
Hallo ihr Mäuse, wir sind Janni und Alina vom Podcast Wine Wednesday.
Und wir spielen am 12.6. im Kino am Olympiasee. Sagt man am Olympiasee?
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Chapter 5: What led to the tragic ending of the Waco standoff?
The Branch Davidians were sure that ATF was just going to come back probably that night. ATF thought they'd regroup and be sent back maybe in the morning. Neither one was right. It was just the beginning where both sides had thought maybe it was the end.
So you can get there now. So you can protect what you built. So you can create new value. PWC. So you can.
What a disaster for the ATF. So basically everybody moves in at that point. The feds gather their forces for a siege that will last 51 days. I mean, there were precedents for this in those days. I mean, we have a growing militia movement in this country at that time, even then. Und so what they do is they regroup, as you say, and a palpable military presence is brought up.
Show of tremendous force is the decision. Eventually, this force is consisted of 12 tanks, 4 combat engineering vehicles, 668 agents, customs officers, Texas National Guard. Texas Rangers, Texas Department of Public Safety. I'm just reading this list because it's extraordinary how they have gathered this amount of people. 899 people in total comprise this force, this federal and state force.
That enormous force, Jeff, I understand, has been gathered in these months, these weeks leading up to the final day. Idea being that they could just say that they would just frighten the guys. Is that the idea or were they really planning to remount this attack?
The FBI was called in the same night that ATF was driven away. And for the FBI, there was a certain amount of resentment. They were being called in to clean up somebody else's mess. Now there had been a similar sort of thing in Idaho called Ruby Ridge in October 1992.
Wenn ATF und die FBI eine weiße Militärin und seine Familie in ihrem Kabinett verabschiedeten, und es gab einen Schuss, und der Mannsweib wurde getötet, und es wurde wirklich dreckig, schlechte Publizität. Nun, in der Meinung der FBI, hat ATF dieses Ding von einem Ende nach dem anderen gespürt. Und sie wurden angerufen, und wenn es nicht gut endete, würden sie verurteilt werden.
Und unter dieser großen Menge von Agenten gab es zwei separate Gruppen. You have the negotiators. Let's just take whatever time we need. We're going to talk back and forth. We're going to get this worked out. And you have the tactical teams. Look, we got everybody. We've got tanks. We can go in there in 10 minutes. You know, we can control the whole thing.
And during the siege, there was great tension between these two groups. It particularly grew just a few days into the siege when Koresh suddenly announced If he were allowed to make a tape that would be broadcast on national radio about the seven seals and what the Davidians believed, that once that was played, he and all his followers would come out and surrender. The FBI let him do that.
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Chapter 7: How did media shape the perception of the Waco siege?
Anyone who doesn't remember this or was too young for that needs to look online and look at a few of those images. Because when you say Inferno, it truly is. It's a massive, massive fire. The entire place is in flames and it's high up in the air. It looks like an oil refinery went on fire. The results of this are tragic. 76 of those 85 Davidians die. Nine escape but are arrested.
Eight finally get convicted of firearms. It does end, but it ends in great death. On the government side, were there casualties that day?
The government came out intact in terms of people being killed on their side. But of course, they came out horribly in terms of public perception. The day after the event, about 65-70% of Americans polled believed that the government had acted responsibly. But less than six weeks later, well over half the public believes that the government has committed a monstrous act.
That's because different facts start to come out, starting with the fact that even though the government had initially claimed it wasn't true. There were a few combustible shells used. Now the fact that we had proof these were used five and a half hours before the fire started made no difference to the conspiracy minded.
If the government had lied about that, they must have lied about everything else.
I can speak for myself. I remember feeling all wiggly about it myself. I mean, it was undeniable that something extraordinarily unwise had happened and that excessive force was clearly apparent from the pictures that we saw. Why couldn't they have waited a few more weeks, was kind of the sense of it, negotiate this thing out.
The rumors of child abuse and things like that all seemed a little painted for us, you know, as a justification perhaps. I'm not saying I was right. I'm just being one of the masses who said, whoa, what happened here? And that was what was going on. By the way, one of those 76 is David Koresh, who dies. And so we never know from the leader what was being said inside.
The legacy of this event, Jeff, is profound, obviously. Both specifically having to do with something that happens two years later, but also what we live with still today. Two years later, on the second anniversary of Waco, a man named Timothy McVeigh... This is ground zero for the modern anti-government militia movement in America.
It starts so much off, which is why you wrote the book, I assume, because it's lasting with us today.
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