-Caveat Lector-
The Independent - 21 May 1999
Waco II
The second coming of the curse of David Koresh. By Paul Vallely
All at once it got very serious. Ken Newport looked up from the
600-page document he had printed from the Internet. He had been
ploughing through its interminable ramblings about horsemen and
brides, scrolls and seals, beasts and Babylon, demon armies and divine
punishments. But then something clicked. What it meant, he realised
with a sudden chill, was blazing gun battles, burning buildings and
more dead children. The survivors of Waco were looking for a repeat of
the awful inferno in which some 80 people died in the siege of their
headquarters in Texas six years ago. How, he wondered, did an unknown
academic from Liverpool like him go about contacting the FBI?
It had all begun innocently enough. Dr Newport is a theologian who,
for the past two years, has been gathering material for an academic
volume on how groups throughout history have interpreted Revelation,
the final book of the Bible which is consumed with surreal visions
about the end of the world.
Almost without exception, he discovered, those who became obsessed
with the Apocalypse became filled with the conviction that it was a
timetable of real events and that the end was about to come in their
own time. The 17th-century Baptist, Benjamin Keach, thought it would
happen in 1689. One of the founders of Methodism, Charles Wesley,
thought Doomsday would be 1794. Perhaps most famously, the American
preacher William Miller gathered his followers around him on 22
October 1844, all having sold their worldly possessions, quit jobs and
moved to upstate New York, which was where Christ was due to return.
The members of the Branch Davidian cult at Waco, under their wild and
charismatic leader David Koresh, were seized with the same mindset.
But there was something more. From time to time there appeared a group
that was not simply content to wait for Armageddon. They saw it as
their duty to provoke it.
It was in gathering material on the history of the Branch Davidian
cult that he came across evidence that Koresh's successors, who style
themselves the Students of the Seven Seals, are engaged upon a process
whose logic seems to be taking them remorselessly to the creation of
another Waco - sometime between now and Friday 6 August, when they are
convinced that the world will end.
Sitting in his neat modern study at Liverpool Hope University College,
amid racks of box files and a world away from the madness of Waco, Dr
Newport began to correspond - by letter and e-mail - with the new
generation of Branch Davidians, who have fled Texas and are now
dispersed throughout the US and UK. He contacted them through their
websites and by writing to the seven members who are in American
jails, serving a total of 238 years between them. Slowly he began to
piece together the story which has so unnerved him.
The first piece in the jigsaw went back to 23 October 1844 - the day
after the world didn't end as William Miller had predicted. It was
then that his followers began the long process of coming to terms with
what they dubbed The Great Disappointment. Among the several new
groups which sprang from the disillusioned Millerites was the Seventh
Day Adventists, whose recruits included one John Kellogg, who
developed for his brethren a special vegetarian breakfast food called
cornflakes.
Yet it was a movement doomed to schism. A washing machine salesman
called Victor Houteff led a breakaway called the Davidian Seventh Day
Adventists. And after Victor's wife and successor Florence gathered
the movement's 940 members together for another unsuccessful Doomsday
on 22 April 1959, it split again, with Ben Roden and his wife Lois
forming the Branch Davidians.
In theory, the succession should have passed to their son George. But
by then David Koresh was on the scene and things began to turn from
the merely eccentric to the downright dangerous. To settle the
leadership issue, Ken Newport discovered, George Roden dug up the
remains of an 85-year-old Davidian who had died some 20 years earlier,
and challenged Koresh to a Resurrection Contest. A gun battle ensued
and, though the police arrested everyone, no one was convicted -
though George was given six months for contempt of court for
threatening the judge with plagues and herpes. (George was later sent
to an asylum after drawing a third Davidian into a row over whether
George or Koresh had been chosen by God to be the seventh and final
angel named in the Bible; when the third man insisted it was neither
of them but him, George chopped him up with an axe.)
But it was none of this which prompted the Davidians' letters and
e-mails to Ken Newport suddenly to halt. Nor was it his questions
about the awful events at Waco, at which the FBI acquitted themselves
so poorly. The cult members began to get wary when Dr Newport started
to ask about their belief that Koresh is due to return from the dead
in the near future. Their massive documents on the Web revealed that a
code-breaking of a combination of dates in Revelation and the
prophetic book of Daniel suggested that Koresh would return on 6
August, at the head of 200 million horsemen (see Rev 9:16) to cleanse
the earth and slaughter the rest of us. Those of Koresh's followers
who were not consumed in the flames of Waco were to prepare for the
event under the guidance of a Davidian by the code name of The Chosen
Vessel.
It was when Ken Newport began to find out who this might be that all
communication was ended with a final e-mail: "We perceive now that you
are not a seeker after the truth."
But Dr Newport continued to comb through what had already been made
available to him. The conclusions he was forced to disturbed him. For
the survivors to join Koresh's divine army they, too, would have to be
dead before 6 August. But there was no reference to self-sacrifice in
any of the documentation. Rather there was the suggestion that the
remnant, under the direction of The Chosen Vessel, would have to be
killed by the same forces who killed Koresh.
"The logic is clear," says Dr Newport. "It all makes perfect sense if
you take on board the hypotheses they start with. It is entirely
possible that they are provoking some horrendous confrontation with
the US authorities." His estimate is that around 40 to 50 individuals
might be involved in such an outrage.
Across the world, security services have decided they have to take
this kind of thing seriously. The propensity of cults to turn fantasy
into grim reality is evident from a mere recital of names like
Jonestown, the Solar Temple, Heaven's Gate, Aum Shinri Kyo. The
authorities in Israel recently expelled 14 members of a Denver-based
Doomsday sect called Concerned Christians, accusing them of plans to
attack the al-Aqsa mosque in an attempt to spark off the apocalyptic
war of Armageddon. In the UK, the anti-terrorism squad is alive to
fears that a fanatical US group has targeted the Millennium Dome for
attack. In Montana, the FBI is monitoring groups it fears are storing
explosives for some millennium outrage.
Perhaps they have learned the lessons of Waco. When I contacted them
in Washington this week, their cults department was remaining
taciturn. The FBI knows that its strategists made fools of themselves
over Waco. "Had they taken the trouble to find out anything about what
was going on in the heads of those in the Waco compound, they might
have defused the whole situation peacefully," says Ken Newport.
Instead of which, their actions seemed calculated to produce the worst
possible outcome.
"The demonisation of the US government which is found ubiquitously in
Seventh Day Adventist sources predisposed members of the
Branch-Davidian movement (nearly all of whom, including Koresh
himself, were drawn from the Adventist church) to view the siege of
their headquarters by the FBI as of apocalyptic significance," he
says. The law authorities added to such a perception by shining
unceasing lights into the compound, playing demonically loud music
alternately punctuated, one Waco survivor claimed, with the sound of
rabbits being slaughtered and of Tibetan monks chanting. It all fitted
into the weird end-of-the-world scenario of those final chapters of
the Bible.
"They were dealing with a group which believed that, just before the
end of the world, the great Satanic power would seek to destroy the
last faithful remnant of God's people," says Dr Newport. "No wonder
that, with all that going on outside their Mount Carmel compound,
Koresh's people thought that the eschatological dawn had broken. The
chilling thing is that all the ingredients for another major incident
are in place. And the logic leads uncompromisingly to 6 August." Only
this time the FBI cannot say that they have not been warned.
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