Word: koresh
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...theory voiced by ATF agents holds that the agency's skittishness may have contributed to its spectacular failure in the initial 1993 raid at Waco, in which four agents and six Branch Davidians were killed. David Koresh, so the theory went, made an ideal safe target -- an apparent madman leading a cult that had armed itself with vast quantities of weapons. While it was the FBI that directed the final assault in which 81 people died, it was the ATF that targeted the compound in the first place. Says Kubicki, without a trace of irony: "Waco was a need...
...undercover house adjacent to the compound and installed eight agents there under the guise of students at Texas State Technical College. But they were too old to be convincing. They carried briefcases and drove cars too new and expensive for students to afford. Raid planners gravely underestimated David Koresh's savvy and suspicion--the review team discovered that Koresh had had checks run on the cars and found that three of the four had no credit liens outstanding...
...raid planners had chosen a direct assault in part because they believed Koresh never left the Branch Davidian compound, and thus could never be isolated from his followers. But Koresh did leave the compound--several times in late 1992 and only weeks before the February 1993 raid. ATF just never knew it. The report blamed this on its "failure to establish an effective intelligence operation...
...their jurisdiction. I had other responsibilities to attend to. I thought it was already being taken care of by the Justice Department." Attorney General Janet Reno, he pointed out, made the decision to stage the final April 1993 raid that ended with a conflagration in which cult leader David Koresh and 80 of his Branch Davidian followers were killed. Republicans questioned how a treasury secretary could not have known of such a large operation being planned by one of his agencies. Said Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.): "This is quite an operation and I'm just disappointed that your people...
...scale and with the level of secrecy and precision the militias envision. After all, government is run by the same people who once paid $640 for toilet-seat covers, who went ahead with the initial raid on the Branch Davidians even though they knew David Koresh had been forewarned, who couldn't figure out that Aldrich Ames was selling secrets to the Soviet Union even when the $70,000-a-year cia officer moved into a half-million-dollar mansion and began driving to work in a spiffy new Jaguar. While government might seem faceless and all-powerful to outsiders...