The Men Who Stare at Goats (20 page)

The U.S. intelligence community had been spying on Igor Smirnov for years. It seemed he’d succeeded in creating a system of influencing people from afar—putting voices into their heads, remotely altering their outlook on life—perhaps without the subjects even knowing it was being done to them. This was a tangible, real-life, mechanistic version of General Wickham’s prayer groups, or Guy Savelli’s goat staring, the kind of system the ambient composer Steven Halpern had suggested to Jim Channon back in the late 1970s. The question was: Could Igor do it to David Koresh?

Could he put the voice of God into David Koresh’s head?

The Branch Davidians, an offshoot of the Seventh Day Adventists, had been living around Waco, Texas, predicting an imminent Judgment Day, since 1935. When Vernon Howell took over the church’s leadership in the late 1980s, and declared himself a Christ-figure, the anointed one, the seventh and final messenger as outlined in the Book of Revelation, and changed his name to David Koresh and started selling weapons illegally to fund his congregation’s separatist
lifestyle, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms began to take an interest. They imagined that a high-profile raid on the church would be good for agency morale and PR. So they tipped off the local media, told them the Branch David-ians were theologically incomprehensible, nuts, and heavily armed (they were, but basically in the way that gun shops are heavily armed), and they were going in.

What the BATF failed to predict was that Koresh had been waiting for a confrontation like this, and relished the prospect. It was his destiny to be attacked by a hostile army representing an out-of-control, sinister, heavy-handed, new-world-order-type Babylon government.

On February 28, 1993, a hundred or so BATF agents stormed the church, but the raid turned into a gun battle, during which four agents were killed, and the gun battle turned into a siege.

There is something far too familiar, in retrospect, about the whole thing. At Waco, just as at Abu Ghraib, the U.S. government behaved like a grotesque caricature of itself. The anti-big-government American right wing had harbored paranoid fantasies about the Clinton administration heavy-handedly destroying the lives of simple people who wanted to live free, and Waco was the place where those conspiracy theories came true. Much of the Iraqi population had been fed similarly wild conspiracy theories about American imperialistic hedonism—that the United States was violently out of control and determined to force its corruption and decadence on the devout—and Abu Ghraib was the place where those conspiracy theories came true.

But there is a more disturbing parallel. David Koresh’s
Branch Davidians also seem to have been considered guinea pigs in the middle of a long-awaited golden opportunity, an opportunity to try stuff out.

Back in 1993, the problem for advocates of out-of-the-box thinking within the U.S. government and military establishments was that there was nobody suitably wicked out there on whom to test their ideas. The outlook was so hopeful, in fact, that a State Department social scientist named Francis Fukuyama declared in 1989, to widespread international acclaim, that it was the end of history. Western democratic capitalism had proved so superior to all its historical rivals, wrote Fukuyama, that it was finding acceptance everywhere in the world. There was simply nothing nefarious out there on the horizon. Although this eventually turned out to be just about the worst prediction ever, in 1993 it seemed too real. These were the fallow years for those who wanted to experiment with new ideas on suitable adversaries.

And then the Waco siege came along.

First there were the noises. Midway through the siege—in the middle of March 1993—the sounds of Tibetan Buddhist chants, screeching bagpipes, crying seagulls, helicopter rotor blades, dentist drills, sirens, dying rabbits, a train, and Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made for Walking” began to blast into the church. It was the FBI, in this instance, who did the blasting. There were seventy-nine members of David Koresh’s congregation in there, including twenty-five children (twenty-seven if you count the unborn ones). Some of the parishioners put cotton wool in their ears, a luxury that was later unavailable to Jamal at Guantanamo and the prisoners inside the shipping containers in al-Qā’im. Others
apparently tried to enjoy it by ironically pretending it was a disco. This wasn’t easy, as one of them, Clive Doyle, told me when I telephoned him.

Clive Doyle is one of the very few survivors of the fire that ended the siege.

“Very rarely did they play a song straight through,” he said. “They distorted it by slowing it down or speeding it up. And the Tibetan monks were pretty ominous.” Then, apropos of nothing, he said, “Do you think they blasted us with those subliminal sounds?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Do you?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “We figured they were experimenting in a lot of different areas. They had a robot that came down the drive one day, with a big antenna sticking out the top. What was that about?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Sometimes,” said Clive Doyle, “I think that the FBI were just like idiots, and it was just chaos out there.”

It did seem somewhat chaotic. Some of the noises blasted at the Branch Davidians, like the Buddhist chants, I have learned, came from the wife of an agent present at the scene. She worked in a local museum. She just scooped up the tapes and gave them to her husband. The dying rabbit noises were an exception. They came from an FBI agent who used the tape, under normal circumstances, to ferret out coyotes during his regular hunting trips. Furthermore, the FBI carried on blasting the Buddhist chants even after the Dalai Lama had written a letter of complaint because the agent in charge of the speaker system “didn’t have anything else to do at night.”

My guess is that, just like at Abu Ghraib, there was a
“casserole of intelligence” present, each with their own idea about how to direct the siege. Some of the ideas were inspired by Jim Channon, or inspired by people who were inspired by him. Others were more random. The FBI negotiators taped their telephone conversations with David Koresh and his deputies. Excerpts from these tapes illustrate two things: the people within the church were, somewhat alarmingly, of one mind—David Koresh’s mind; the people on the outside of the church were, even more alarmingly, of no cohesive mind-set whatsoever.

STEVE SCHNEIDER
(Branch Davidian): Who’s controlling these guys? You’ve got guys out there right now pulling their pants down, men that are mature, sticking their butts in the air and flipping the finger.

FBI NEGOTIATOR:
Uh. Give me a moment. The guys that gravitate towards riding in tanks, jumping out of airplanes, have a little different mind-set from you and I, would you agree?

STEVE SCHNEIDER:
I agree with you. But somebody’s gotta be above these guys.

FBI NEGOTIATOR:
Sure.

JIM CAVANAUGH
(FBI negotiator): I think we need to set the record straight. There were no guns on those helicopters.

DAVID KORESH:
That’s a lie. That is a lie. Now, Jim, you’re a damn liar. Let’s get real.

JIM CAVANAUGH:
David, I—

DAVID KORESH:
No, you listen to me. You’re sitting there telling me that there were no guns on that helicopter?

JIM CAVANAUGH:
I said they didn’t shoot.

DAVID KORESH:
You are a damn liar.

JIM CAVANAUGH:
Well, you’re wrong, David.

DAVID KORESH:
You are a liar.

JIM CAVANAUGH:
Okay. Well, just calm down… .

DAVID KORESH:
No! Let me tell you something. That may be what you might want the media to believe, but there’s other people that saw too. Now tell me, Jim, you’re honestly going to say those helicopters didn’t fire on any of us?

JIM CAVANAUGH
(after a long silence): David?

DAVID KORESH:
I’m here.

JIM CAVANAUGH:
Uh, yeah, uh, what I’m saying is those helicopters did not have mounted guns. Okay? I’m not disputing the fact that there might have been fire from the helicopters. Do you understand what I’m saying?

DAVID KORESH:
Uh, no.

UNIDENTIFIED LITTLE GIRL:
Are they going to come in and kill me?

UNIDENTIFIED NEGOTIATOR:
No. Nobody’s coming. Nobody’s coming.

And this, from a press conference that occurred midway through the siege:

JOURNALIST:
Mr. Ricks, is there a consideration to use psychological warfare? Have you discussed it at all?

BOB RICKS
(FBI spokesman): I don’t know what psychological warfare is.

JOURNALIST:
It was reported in the paper that you would play loud music, put bright lights on the compound all night, to try to agitate the entire group. Is that possible?

BOB RICKS:
We will not discuss tactics of that sort, but I would say the chances of doing that sort of activity are minimal.

I have met Bob Ricks. He has been one of the FBI’s most outspoken critics of the Waco siege, and he all but single-handedly prevented a similar raid from occurring on a group of white supremacists in northern Oklahoma, at a place called Elohim City. I don’t think that Bob Ricks was lying during the press conference. I think the FBI’s left hand didn’t know what its right hand was up to.

At Waco, just like at Abu Ghraib, the Jim Channon–like thinkers seem to have had to bide their time, wait for the finger flippers and the helicopter snipers to have their turn.

My guess is that the musical bombardment was inspired by a similar event that occurred four years earlier in Panama City. The battle between General Stubblebine and General Manuel Noriega had long been fought like two wizards
standing atop mountains throwing thunderbolts at each other. General Stubblebine had set his psychic spies onto Noriega, who had countered by inserting little slips of paper into his shoes, and so on.

In the end, Noriega turned up at the Vatican embassy in Panama City, and PsyOps arrived on the scene with loudspeakers attached to their trucks, which were used to repeatedly blast the building with Guns N’ Roses’ “Welcome to the Jungle.” If this event was inspired (directly or indirectly) by Jim Channon’s manual, it is appropriate that Noriega—who had given General Stubblebine so much hassle that he couldn’t concentrate on walking through his wall—was finally felled by another First Earth Battalion idea.

I telephoned a dozen witnesses to the siege at Waco—journalists and intelligence agents—and I asked them if they knew of any strange goings-on beyond the music and the robot with the antenna. Three of them told me the same story. I can’t prove it, so it remains a rumor—one that sounds plausible but, then again, entirely implausible.

The rumor I heard involves a man I’ll call Mr. B. He enlisted in the U.S. military in 1972, and between 1973 and 1989 he was in the Special Forces unit at Fort Bragg, where he took part in the various General Stubblebine inspired supersoldier programs. As a result he became—in the words of one man I spoke to—“not only the greatest surreptitious break-in guy in the armed forces, but in the whole government.”

Mr. B. could break in anywhere, unseen and unheard. He had, to all intents and purposes, wholly and extraordinarily mastered level three of Glenn Wheaton’s Jedi Warrior code: invisibility. But Mr. B. used his powers for bad. He was convicted,
in 1989, of breaking into women’s apartments and raping them. He was sentenced to life imprisonment.

A soldier I cannot name swears that, on April 18, 1993, he spotted Mr. B. surreptitiously entering David Koresh’s church. Perhaps his four years in prison had diminished his powers, for the soldier recognized him immediately. He said nothing at the time, because he knew he had witnessed a Black Op. An intelligence agency must have sprung Mr. B. from jail.

The rumor ends like this: Mr. B. entered the Koresh compound, checked that the bugging devices were in good working order, fixed those that weren’t, crept out again, was transported back to his jail cell in Colorado, and found God. He refused to grant me an interview because he said he no longer wanted to dwell on his past.

He remains to this day in a maximum-security prison.

That story remains a rumor, whereas Dr. Igor Smirnov’s involvement in the Waco siege can safely be considered true.