Conflicted by Ian Leslie

Author:Ian Leslie [Leslie, Ian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harper Business
Published: 2020-12-26T00:00:00+00:00

FBI: What I’m saying is that if you could make an agreement with your people that they’re walking out of there and you could –

Koresh: I am not going to tell them what to do. I never have and never will. I show them out of a book what God teaches. Then it’s for them to decide.

At one point, the FBI asked the Davidians to make videotapes of people inside the building so that they could see everyone was OK. The Davidians happily complied. The videos included Davidian women explaining, with apparent authenticity, that they lived at Mount Carmel because they liked it there. Koresh himself appeared, asking why the ATF couldn’t have just arrested him ‘at the side of the road’ one day, instead of pointing guns at the women and children of Mount Carmel. The FBI did not release the tapes to the public.

The FBI continued to believe they were dealing with dupes being controlled by a psychopath. The Davidians thought of themselves as intelligent, spiritual people who had freely chosen to live in a community that did not conform to society’s norms. The two sides also had radically different ideas about what kind of conversation they were having. The FBI negotiators approached it as an exercise in pragmatism. Their aim was to drain the conversation of emotion in order to engage in a bargaining process: You give me this, I’ll give you that. The Davidians were not interested in bargaining. Like Schneider in that opening exchange, they wanted to talk about what was happening in the context of God, scripture and the meaning of existence. But whenever Koresh or the other Davidians offered a religious interpretation of events, they were dismissed or ignored. The FBI kept trying to bring the conversation back to what they took to be the real issues; to the Davidians, God was the real issue.

Early on, the FBI and Koresh came to an agreement that the Davidians would leave the compound if a message, recorded by Koresh, was broadcast on national radio. The broadcast was made, but the agreement dissolved when Koresh told negotiators that God had ordered him to wait. The negotiators began pressing him on what they perceived as a personal commitment:

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