Word: koresh
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Meanwhile word quickly spread through the compound that "the Assyrians are coming." Koresh garbed himself in black and grabbed an AR-15 rifle. By the time the 91 ATF agents pulled up Double EE Ranch Road, most adults inside the compound were armed. Brandishing a search warrant, an ATF agent approached the open front door. By the ATF's account, a man slammed the door and gunfire erupted from within. Koresh's attorney counters that ATF agents fired first. Either way, the cult's barrage of automatic fire so overwhelmed ATF agents that some never got off a shot...
...bureau chief, found himself returning pell-mell up Highway 6 from a weekend at home, knowing that the patient journalistic groundwork was about to be tested. He and Atlanta bureau chief Michael Riley, Los Angeles correspondent Sally Donnelly and stringer Carlton Stowers stared at the hot ruins of David Koresh's compound and tried, like the rest of the nation, to understand the meanings, motives and mystical beliefs that had gone up in smoke. To start, they continued to work contacts within the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, visited sources wherever they could find them...
THERE WERE OCCASIONS WHEN David Koresh enforced discipline among his followers the hard way. One of his hand-picked lieutenants would paddle the rule breakers with an oar on which were inscribed the words IT IS WRITTEN. Most of the time that wasn't necessary. In the manner of cult leaders before him, Koresh held sway largely through means that were both more subtle and more degrading. Food was rationed in unpredictable ways. Newcomers were gradually relieved of their bank accounts and personal possessions. And while the men were subjected to an uneasy celibacy, Koresh took their wives and daughters...
...just confirmed his power in the eyes of his flock. And for anyone who thought it odd that a holy man lived out a teenage boy's sexual fantasy, Koresh had a mangled theological rationale. He was Jesus Christ in sinful form, who because he indulged the flesh could judge mankind with insights that the first, more virtuous Messiah had lacked. Or as he put it in one of his harangues to the faithful: "Now what better sinner can know a sinner than a godly sinner...
Equipped with both a creamy charm and a cold-blooded willingness to manipulate those drawn to him, Koresh was a type well known to students of cult practices: the charismatic leader with a pathological edge. He was the most spectacular example since Jim Jones, who committed suicide in 1978 with more than 900 of his followers at the People's Temple in Guyana. Like Jones, Koresh fashioned a tight-knit community that saw itself at desperate odds with the world outside. He plucked sexual partners as he pleased from among his followers and formed an elite guard of lieutenants...