A Graveyard Called Waco
"Farris Rookstool was one of the first to see the bodies after the FBI's 1993 siege of Waco. Rookstool is out of the bureau now. He's free to talk."
TALK, November 1999
By Gerald Posner
RO0KST00L STRIDES through the 100 degree heat, kicking up clouds of the yellow and green grasshoppers that infest this desolate stretch of Texas flatland like a Biblical plague. He walks up the dirt road, past the prefab house that serves as the visitors' center, where an 84-year-old Australian woman hawks antigovernment propaganda and curates a makeshift memorial to the dead. He pushes on, past the shell of a burned-out bus, to the plot of freshly planted trees and small plaques, each commemorating another fallen disciple. Finally he arrives at a simple black post with a sign tacked on top, marking the spot where the front door once stood.
The normally voluble Rookstool Falls silent and turns about, trying to get his bearings. The landscape has changed since the first time he arrived at this juncture on a chilly spring day six years back. At last he finds what he is looking for: "It was right here where I first saw the top of a 1ittle sneaker popping out through an enormous pile of ammunition. That's when I knew we had found the bodies of the women and children."
The memories now come thick and fast. "They were huddled in a far corner. . .with blankets over the children, and the mothers lying on top to protect them." He recalls digging through the rubble to find a woman and child whose hands had been fused together by the blaze. Rookstool helped out as the two were cut apart. "When I lifted the child in my arms, her head came off. Then when I lifted the mother, her intestines broke out and spilled over me."
ROOKSTOOL WAS A BIT PLAYER in the FBI'S 1993 siege of the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas -first with the Hostage Negotiating Team, then as an official site photographer for the Evidence Response Team, known inside the bureau as "forensic ninjas." In that role he was one of the first from the FBI to inspect the burned shell of the compound after the conflagration.
What he saw there changed him, fundamentally. "It's hard to explain how disturbing all of that was," he says, sifting through the thick weeds that carpet the ground near the bunker. "These were people I felt I knew a little. I had heard their voices with the telephone taps and seen them on videotape. I had come to know them as real persons. When I picked up their charred bodies, it became very personal for me."
Rookstool's feelings about what happened at Waco have been problematic for the FBI. In 1993 he was asked to deliver a lecture on his experiences with the Evidence Response Team at the bureau's training academy in Quantico, Virginia. There he startled the class by announcing his belief that not all of the nearly 80 Branch Davidians who died on April 19, 1993, had committed suicide, as the bureau maintains. (Shortly thereafter, Rookstool says, his supervisor received a memo from on high warning that because the bureau might face litigation over its handling of Waco, all personnel were to refrain from further comment on the subject.)
In 1997 Rookstool repeated his assertion in Waco: The Rules of Engagement, an award-winning documentary. And today, as he surveys the rubble, he has decided to open up further - even as Washington prepares to conduct anew investigation, spurred by fresh revelations about the bureau's failure to disclose the use of pyrotechnic devices during the siege. Nobody inside the FBI at the time has ever spoken out so critically about what happened at Waco.
Rookstool feels obliged to do so. After 11 years with the bureau, he was fired in 1995. FBI spokesman Dave Miller says the bureau will not comment on personnel matters. Rookstool, however, says he was dismissed for filing an improper time card, making an unauthorized comment to the press during a Dallas murder trial, and for being slow to catalog his photos from the site of the siege. He is convinced that his views on what happened at Waco contributed to his fate. And he's enjoying the freedom to tell it as he saw it.
"[The press has] all been talking to `high officials' for six years, and look what it got us - lies and a cover-up," Rookstool says. "Maybe reporters should have been talking to people at my level, those of us on the ground. The problem, though, is that most of them arc still in the bureau and are afraid to talk lest the wrath of God fall on them. I'm out, so I'm free."
And letting fly. Rookstool arrived at Waco a week after the FBI had taken command, on the heels of the aborted assault by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, in which four federal agents were killed. Operating out of an enormous airplane hangar several miles from the compound, the Hostage Negotiating Team's task was to peacefully resolve the crisis. Its members conducted negotiations, monitored wiretaps and bugs inside the compound, and reviewed daily activity logs of everything that happened at the Davidian site at Mount Carmel. Rookstool's job involved assimilating those logs into time lines and evidence charts for use by the negotiators.
Another FBI group at Waco - the Hostage Rescue Team - had a different modus operandi. The rescue team is the FBI's elite paramilitary assault team - "fellows," Rookstool says, "who spend all day in training, at the gym, rappelling from helicopters, sniper shooting, and trying out the latest tech toys and weapons." The Hostage Rescue is typically brought in at the last minute, when diplomacy has run its course. But at Waco its members were on-site from the start.
"And that was a major mistake," says Rookstool. "These were action-oriented, testosterone-driven guys whose idea of negotiating was smashing down the door and get the hostages.'" That created what Rookstool terms an "Alamo mentality" inside the Davidian compound.
"They stayed in camouflage at the perimeter of the house, set up in sniper nests around the clock, and they simply got very antsy and impatient as the weeks wore on," Rookstool recalls. "We learned that they were flipping [the Davidians] the bird and mooning them. And this undermined our efforts to establish a relationship with the Davidians. - I mean, this was their home and church, and suddenly it's surrounded with a small army and tanks. That would petrify anyone. Would you release your children to those people?"
Compounding the problem, the cowboys and the diplomats never spoke to each other directly, but reported separately to the on scene commanders - a policy the FBI has since changed, Rookstool says.
Rookstool was not at the scene on the day the FBI discussed firing pyrotechnic tear-gas grenades into the compound. But drawing on his four years of training as an FBI radio operator, he offers a provocative theory: "Standard operating procedure would mean that that request was broadcast over a primary radio channel that could have been heard by up to 50 people at Waco and the command center in Washington," Rook stool says. If the audience was indeed that large, it is all the more remarkable that the use of pyrotechnics remained secret as long as it did - and would expand the pool of people who may face scrutiny from the new special counsel probing the events at Waco, former senator John Danforth.
Following the siege, Rookstool joined the Evidence Response Team and donned his camera. "We weren't even allowed to go to the site for one week because the place was still so hot and unstable after the fire," he remembers. "You can't imagine what it was like when we started searching for the bodies. For seven days they had been decomposing in unbearable heat." Since the Branch Davidians had no modern toilets, "there were literally hundreds of pounds of excrement everywhere. Flies and maggots had swarmed in. Food had spoiled. The stench was so bad that you could smell it half a mile away."
Rookstool saw his share of horrors. He found Branch Davidians whose brains had boiled, causing the tops of their heads to explode. Outside the house he photographed a Davidian who appeared to have been crushed by a tank. Near the end of his week of forensics work, he chanced across body of a child that had been thrown into a pile of garbage. "I felt as if I was the first person in at Dachau or Auschwitz." Says Rookstool. "It was like going to hell and coming back with the pictures to prove it."
Rookstool complained about the bureau's failure to provide proper protective clothing for Evidence Response Team members - a situation, he argued, that left them sloshing around in body fluids in their street clothes while breathing in dangerous blood here. "We were supposed to have hazmat suits, with respirators, and our own oxygen supply," Rookstool says. "Then they are supposed to decontaminate you by spraying you with a high-pressure hose in a closed off area, and then your suit is deposited in a double plastic bag. Instead, I'd leave the scene in my blood-soaked clothes and had to do my own laundry at my motel."
FBI spokesman Miller declined comment on Rookstool's charges. But shortly after I fax a list of questions about Rookstool to FBI to headquarters in Washington, I receive a call from his former supervisor - Oliver "Buck" Revell, who retired in 1994 as special agent in charge of the FBI's Dallas field office. Revell calls Rookstool "brilliant but eccentric, and says, "Farris often insinuates himself into situations where he has no reason to be there. He overplayed his role and has grandiose ideas about his own importance. Anything Rookstool says about Waco is either second or thirdhand, or a total fabrication. If he did insert himself into Waco, he had no official role, and it was without my permission."
Rookstool says he is flabbergasted by Revell's comments. He sends me a written statement, dated January 5, 1995, filed in disciplinary proceeding on Rookstool's conduct. In the statement, Revell defends Rookstool, arguing that his conduct, while errant, did not constitute a firing offense.
His statement reveals further that Revell did, indeed, assign Rookstool to Waco. "When I received a request that the Dallas Division supply an Evidence Response Team to aid in the Waco matter, I authorized dispatch of the team headed by SSA William Eubanks. Mr. Rookstool was a part of the team," Revell wrote.
Rookstool also showed me photos of himself with the Hostage Negotiating Team.
The dispute just adds one more painful memory to the legacy of Waco for Rookstool. He stares somberly at the site of the bunker where the women and children of Mt. Carmel had died. He's found something small, charred and crusted, about an inch long. `It's bone," he says, holding it up for me to see. "That's what you find if you search through here." Nearby, as he speaks, a few tourists arrive and walk around, posing and taking pictures. One heavyset man in shorts answers his cellular phone and starts having an animated conversation.
The skies above darken, as does Rookstool's mood. "People aren't giving it respect. They all come here to get a part of Waco. But they forget that this is where people had happy moments, read the Bible together. This was their home. They died here. And now souvenir hunters and tourists think it is another stop on their vacation. This is a graveyard now."
Gerald Posner is a Talk contributing writer.