MALCOLM GLADWELL ON THE GOVERNMENT AND THE BRANCH DAVIDIANS.

There is a telling moment during the siege when Schneider is talking to an F.B.I. negotiator about an undercover A.T.F. agent who used the name Robert Gonzalez. The A.T.F. believed that the Branch Davidians—who ran a small business selling weapons at gun shows—had converted a batch of firearms from semiautomatic to automatic without the proper permits. Gonzalez’s job was to infiltrate the Davidian community and look for evidence. (He found none, a fact that—along with the A.T.F.’s bizarre decision to serve a warrant on Koresh by force, rather than arresting him on those numerous occasions when he ventured into town—loomed large in the many Waco postmortems.) Here is Schneider and a negotiator talking about what happened after the Davidians realized that Gonzalez was not who he said he was:

F.B.I.: Why didn’t you have a confrontation [with Gonzalez] and say look, l just . . . don’t appreciate you being here?
SCHNEIDER: Well . . . because here’s a possible guy, here’s a soul maybe, here’s someone like myself—
F.B.I.: Yeah. But he wasn’t there to have his soul saved, right?
SCHNEIDER: Well, who knows, though? You never can tell.
F.B.I.: Wait a minute. I know . . . I worked under cover years and years ago and I wasn’t there to have somebody save my soul.

The F.B.I. agent expected that the Davidians, like a fragile cult, would turn paranoid and defensive in the presence of a threat. He didn’t grasp that he was dealing with a very different kind of group—the sort whose idea of a good evening’s fun was a six-hour Bible study wrestling with a tricky passage of Revelation. It was a crucial misunderstanding, and would feed directly into the tragedy that was to come. . . . In the government’s eyes, the Branch Davidians were a threat.

On a related note, let me recommend David Kopel, et al., No More Wacos: What’s Wrong With Federal Law Enforcement and How to Fix It. It would be an understatement, however, to say that the advice contained therein hasn’t been much followed.