TWELVE

TWO HOURS AFTER THE GUN BATTLE, the Justice Department was scrambling. In the crisis center on the eleventh floor of the marshals’ headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, computers, telephones, fax machines, teletypes, and videocassette recorders hummed, spreading the horrible news that one of their best had been killed. Tony Perez and G. Wayne “Duke” Smith—the number three man in the service—worked the phones, gathering intelligence about the shoot-out from Dave Hunt, who tried to remain calm as he told them the marshals weren’t taking any more fire, but that they were in danger and needed to be rescued. A map quickly went up on the wall and a telephone call went out to Mike Johnson, the U.S. marshal for Idaho.

“Where the hell is this place?” someone from headquarters asked Johnson.

“It’s at the top of Idaho,” Johnson said, “right by Canada.”

In Washington, the director of the U.S. Marshals Service, Henry Hudson, met with FBI brass, told them one of his deputies had been killed, and repeated that two others were “pinned down.” After the meeting, FBI officials briefed director William Sessions and the head of the bureau’s criminal division, Larry Potts, who decided to call in the Hostage Rescue Team, from Quantico, Virginia. The head of that team, Richard Rogers, gathered his top three aides, loaded a helicopter and other supplies in the FBI’s private jet, and left for Idaho to set up the details of the mission before his team arrived.

The marshals service’s Duke Smith needed a ride west, and so he met Rogers at the FBI airstrip. On the jet, they sat down together to figure out what to do.

By that time, the overstatement of danger had reached high levels in the Justice Department, coursing through offices, faxes, and telephones like a virus. Hours after Hunt made it clear that the deputy marshals were no longer taking fire, one of his bosses told FBI officials they were “still pinned down by gunfire.” The same bad information was relayed through a series of top-level meetings, working the Justice Department into a bureaucratic frenzy over William Degan’s death.

The version of events spreading through the FBI and U.S. Marshals Service had the Weaver’s dog discovering the deputy marshals and the family chasing them through the woods and gunning down Degan, who stepped out to demand their surrender and was killed without firing a shot. Some officials believed Weaver and Harris had fired from a truck and that the deputies took a round of automatic weapon fire from the cabin. Most critically, officials thought the surviving marshals were caught in an ongoing firefight and were pinned down by the Weaver family. Randy Weaver, they believed, was a highly trained Green Beret and Aryan Nations member who might have booby-trapped his mountain with bombs and grenades.

In reality, the situation was hazy at best, and much of the information being spread around Washington was simply wrong. There was no truck, no automatic weapons. Even if Degan was killed before Roderick shot the dog, he had fired seven shots himself, possibly before he was hit. There was every indication the Weavers didn’t know what they were chasing (Vicki strolling back to the house, Kevin and Sammy walking along the trail). There was no evidence that Randy Weaver had any more than a glancing affiliation with the Aryan Nations or that he had shot at anyone or had booby-trapped anything. The federal officials flying to Idaho knew nothing about Sam Weaver being killed or the dog being shot. But the biggest mistake they made was to overestimate the “ongoing firefight,” since the actual gun battle had lasted only minutes, and Hunt said clearly there had been no gunfire for hours. The misperception that the Weavers had the marshals “pinned down” and were firing automatic weapons at them from the house would color everything that happened for the next two days, as the government’s fear of the Weavers began to gather its own momentum, a landslide of blunders, bad information, cold decision making, and eventually, cover-up.

At FBI headquarters, Potts, the bureau’s assistant director in charge of criminal investigations, met with deputy assistant director Danny Coulson. The Weavers possessed every tactical advantage, Potts said. They had supporters in the woods who might come to their aid, turning the mountain into a war zone. There was such a high risk of casualties, FBI agents who went into this situation had to be given the opportunity to defend themselves. Potts figured that Bill Degan had died because he underestimated how dangerous the Weavers were and had stepped out and demanded their surrender. Coulson and Potts concurred: Because of the rugged terrain, the antigovernment sentiment of North Idaho, the Weavers’ extreme beliefs, and the fact that they had gunned down a deputy marshal without provocation, this might be the most dangerous situation the Hostage Rescue Team had ever faced. Before Rogers left, he and Potts talked about revising the FBI’s rules of engagement—which stipulated that agents could fire only if someone’s life was in danger—to allow snipers to shoot at the Weavers without provocation. Potts approved changing the rules, Rogers said later.

Another FBI official, E. Michael Kahoe, talked to a legal adviser about changing the rules. The adviser said the FBI could change them if the situation was that dangerous and if it was the only way to control the situation and protect people from being hurt. He told Kahoe the final decision about how dangerous the situation was needed to be made in Idaho. And, no matter what happened, before any shots were fired, they had to demand the Weavers’ surrender.

THE FLIGHT LEFT WASHINGTON, D.C., about 6:30 p.m. eastern time, five hours after the gunfight. Aboard the FBI’s Saberliner jet, Duke Smith briefed Rogers on everything the marshals service had done the last eighteen months, how stubborn, committed, and dangerous the Weaver family was, and how even the children were well-armed extremists. The marshals service had commissioned a psychological study of Vicki and Randy Weaver, done through information gathered by deputy marshals, Smith said. It showed that she was as zealous in her beliefs—and maybe more so—than was Randy Weaver. She wanted so badly to keep the family together, there was even some fear that she would kill her own children, Smith said.

They went over aerial photos of a cabin atop a rocky, defensible knob—a fortress, practically—with deep forest all around it. Smith told Rogers about Operation Northern Exposure and gave him all the information he’d gotten from Hunt and from the case file, including misconceptions about the ongoing firefight and the weapons the Weavers might have stored away. Rogers had the impression of a mountain rigged with grenades and explosives and a highly trained family hiding in bunkers, waiting to shoot anyone who came up. Flying across the country, they agreed the case called for drastic measures. Clearly, the family knew authorities were up there; they’d already proved they would kill federal agents. Rogers and Smith reasoned that to send HRT and SOG members up there with the normal rules of engagement would be tying their hands in a very dangerous situation. If it was indeed an ongoing firefight, then FBI agents were in danger the minute they stepped on the mountain. Rogers drafted new rules:

“If any adult is seen with a weapon in the vicinity of where this firefight took place, of the Weaver cabin, then this individual could be the subject of deadly force…. Any child is going to come under standard FBI rules, meaning that if an FBI agent is threatened with death or some other innocent is threatened with death by a child, then clearly that agent could use a weapon to shoot a child.”

Rogers called Potts on the jet’s telephone and went over the new rules of engagement. Potts gave preliminary approval to the rules—said they sounded good—but Rogers knew he would have to send the detailed rules in writing before enacting them. Duke Smith called his boss, Henry Hudson, and advised him of the rules as well.

The U.S. marshal for Idaho, Mike Johnson, met the FBI jet at the airport and told them the state police were in the process of bringing the deputies out.

“How far is this place?” Duke Smith asked.

“We’ve got a good two-, two-and-a-half-hour drive,” Johnson said. They rented cars and hit the freeway going east at about seventy-five miles per hour. It was forty freeway miles to Coeur d’Alene, just across the Idaho state line, then another seventy miles north, through the woods, to Naples. Near Ruby Ridge, they turned on the wrong mountain road, and—rather than end up in the middle of the night at the Weavers’ back door—the officials decided to go to the sheriff’s office in Bonners Ferry and find someone to lead them to the federal base camp. It was nearing dawn by the time they finally arrived at the meadow, where fifty federal and state agents were now setting up tents and supplies and guarding the woods against Weaver supporters.

A trailer had been set up as a command post near one of Wayne and Ruth Rau’s outbuildings, and Rogers, Smith, and Johnson found Special Agent-in-Charge Gene Glenn inside. Glenn, the top FBI agent from Salt Lake City, briefed them on what had happened so far; they had gotten the deputy marshals down and were trying to secure the woods and the roads leading up the mountain.

The deputies who had been in the firefight were back at their condo by the time Rogers and Duke Smith arrived. And so the officials sat in the command post with Gene Glenn, setting up plans and beginning to revise the rules of engagement without even talking to the deputies who’d actually been in the gun battle. Glenn was told they needed some time to compose themselves.

One problem, Glenn acknowledged, was that they had no one at the top of the knoll yet, “no eyes on the cabin.” Rogers said that was okay, the HRT would be there soon and then his sniper teams would move up there.

THE HOSTAGE RESCUE TEAM had trouble getting a flight out to North Idaho from Washington, D.C. They finally arrived on a transport plane Saturday morning, drove to Bonners Ferry, and set up for a 9:00 a.m. briefing at the armory there.

There were hundreds of SWAT teams, operations groups, and special tactics units used by the law enforcement agencies around the country, but the FBI’s HRT was the elite, trained to battle terrorism and to handle tactical missions involving hostages or barricaded criminals. Unlike the marshals’ SOG team, the HRT was a full-time outfit and its members did nothing but train and go on missions. HRT members had to be experienced street agents, had to endure a rigorous two-week tryout, and then had to pass tough physical and mental training.

The HRT consisted of two sections that were mirror images of each other—the Blue and the Gold—each divided into two separate kinds of members—assaulters and sniper/observers. The snipers would crawl into place on the perimeter of a crisis site, keeping their eyes and guns on the situation, and then the assault team would move into place on the ground, bust down all the doors that needed to be busted down, wrestle the bad guys to the ground and—in the sanitized vernacular of federal law enforcement—”stabilize the situation.”

A bright, disciplined graduate of West Point, Lon Horiuchi had joined the HRT after only two years as an FBI agent. There was a friendly, proud sort of competition between the assaulters and the snipers—each chiding the other about who was more important to the team. That was why it was so strange when Horiuchi jumped ship after four years and moved from the assault team to the sniper team. But he knew that to advance in the bureau he needed as many different kinds of experiences as he could get, and with his intelligence, his steady, businesslike demeanor, his crack shooting on the range and his eyesight—a couple of feet better than 20/20—he soon became one of the FBI’s best snipers. By 1992, Horiuchi, a compact, muscular Asian-American, was in charge of the six agents on one of the Blue sniper/observer teams. In truth, the job consisted of a hell of a lot more observing than sniping and, when Horiuchi and the other members of the HRT flew out to North Idaho, it had been three years since an HRT sniper had even fired a shot on a mission.

The team members knew right away this was a big case. For the first time anyone could remember, both teams—the Blue and the Gold, all fifty HRT agents—were sent on a single mission.

Inside the Bonners Ferry Armory, the camouflaged HRT members sat on their packs or on folding chairs while Richard Rogers briefed them about the mission. Rogers had stayed up all night, working out the details of the operation and the rules of engagement with Gene Glenn and Duke Smith. Now the twenty-year FBI agent stood up and told the HRT members that they were going into a situation that was a continuation of the firefight that had started the day before. He mistakenly said the marshals were still pinned down by fire from the cabin. Rogers gave descriptions and intelligence information about each member of the Weaver family and Kevin Harris. Vicki Weaver, he said, was the most zealous member of the family. He gave them general descriptions of the rugged terrain, the rock outcroppings, and the wooded field beneath the cabin.

There will be “no long siege,” Rogers said. And then he gave the HRT members the modified rules of engagement.

“If Randall Weaver, Vicki Weaver, Kevin Harris are observed with a weapon and fail to respond to a command to surrender,” Rogers said, “deadly force can be used to neutralize them.”

Outside the armory, Duke Smith told his marshals that the FBI was going to “go up there and take care of business.” He said that Rogers had assured him the standoff “was not going to last long, that it was going to be taken down hard and fast.”

In the armory, the HRT’s hostage negotiator, a heavy-set, former street agent named Fred Lanceley, wasn’t sure he’d heard right. He’d been involved in about 300 hostage situations, and he’d never heard anything like these new rules of engagement. Clearly, with rules like these, there would be no need for a negotiator.

The rules had been drafted with bad information and with little investigation of the circumstances of the initial shoot-out, no interviews with the deputy marshals who’d been up there. Then the rules were revised several times, going through a slight evolution of verbs—from “deadly force could be used” to “deadly force can be used.” That evolution would continue and would create problems the FBI had never faced before.

MORNING LEFT LITTLE DOUBT how the locals—at least some of them—felt about the shoot-out and the ever-growing federal army. The old highway curved gradually past the roadblock, where two dozen state and federal officers now stood, wound through picket-fenced pastureland and underneath a railroad underpass where someone overnight had painted the words “Entering Dead Cop Zone.”

At first, Bill Grider wasn’t too choked up about what had happened to his old friend Randy Weaver. He’d seen Randy once in the last year, when he’d gone riding up to the cabin on a horse and come across Sam Weaver near the Weavers’ driveway. Bill climbed off the horse, and Sam held the dog on a leash toward him.

“Get back on your horse, Bill,” Sam said. “Striker is mean.”

And then Randy came out.

“Got a cup of coffee for an old friend?”

“Sorry, Bill,” Randy said. “But I don’t know who is a federal agent, there are so many feds out there.”

So when he heard that Randy had finally gotten into it with the deputy marshals—”Randy went on a tear!” one of the sawmill employees told him—Grider figured Randy was a grown man and could take care of himself. I did everything I could for him, Bill decided. Half an hour later, though, Judy Grider came through the doors of the sawmill, sobbing, and so Bill decided to go down to the roadblock with her. The Griders began to burn as they watched cars and trucks full of cops stream past.

“The man ain’t done nothin’,” Grider said. “He isn’t hurting anybody up there, and he has never hurt anyone.”

On Friday, police had evacuated nine families whose houses were strung out on the logging roads that etched up Ruby Ridge, and they stood around the roadblock with some of Weaver’s friends and a dozen or so reporters and photographers.

Lorenz Caduff was thirty-seven years old, a chef from Switzerland who’d escaped a crowded resort town just six weeks earlier to buy the Deep Creek Inn, a bar, restaurant, and motel on thirty acres just off the old Naples Highway, a quarter mile from the bridge where state police were setting up the roadblock.

Lorenz saw an ambulance sitting in his parking lot and walked outside to ask what was happening. He didn’t know anyone, not the Weavers or the Aryan Nations, but he began to worry as police cars raced past.

“What’s going on?” he asked in halting English.

The ambulance driver wouldn’t tell him.

“This is my place! I want to know what’s going on!”

Finally, he told Caduff that a criminal had gotten in a shoot-out and killed a federal officer. “This is shocking,” Caduff said. “We know these things, but they are from the TV, from what you call Wild West.”

When armored personnel carriers—tanklike vehicles known as APCs—began rolling on their metal tracks past his restaurant, Caduff did a double take. It was like World War II. It was unbelievable that the American government would do this to its own people. “Do you think we are in danger?” he asked his wife, Wasiliki.

Lorenz pitched a tent in his front yard for some of the people evacuated from Ruby Ridge, and when the temperatures dipped into the thirties Friday night, he allowed them to sleep on the floor in his family’s apartment above the restaurant. He couldn’t believe it when a Red Cross truck drove right past the evacuated people and turned up the hill to provide food to the federal officers. The Red Cross was founded in his native Switzerland as a neutral aid organization. They weren’t supposed to take sides!

Red Cross officials said when they tried to help the people at the roadblock, they were chased off with clubs and sticks.

Two of Randy and Vicki’s friends, Jackie and Tony Brown, tried to cross the bridge and were turned back by state police, who manned the line with assault rifles. Jackie stood on the bridge, crying and begging that they at least let her go up and try to bring the children down. “I’m just worried these kids are going to be killed.”

More people gathered on Saturday, newspaper and television reporters and as many as twenty-four friends, neighbors, and people who shared the Weavers’ beliefs. Their cars stretched for a couple of hundred yards on either side of the turnoff to Ruby Ridge. Bill Grider went into the North Woods Tavern and rallied the off-duty loggers and farmers and brought them back to the roadblock. They formed a football huddle and talked about their strategy for protesting. “Tell the Truth” they wrote on cardboard and “Go Home Feds” on the bottom of an empty half rack of Ranier Beer. By afternoon, they stretched banners along the banks of the old highway—”Freedom of Religion” and “Stop the Violence.”

When the APCs and military trucks began rolling up the hill, a few protesters became outraged, screaming and pointing and running up to the vehicles.

“Baby killer!” yelled Kevin Harris’s foster brother, Mike Gray, as he jabbed his finger at the window of a Humvee, a short, squat Jeep-like vehicle. “Which one of you is going to shoot the baby?”

Kevin Harris’s mom, Barb Pierce, sat huddled under a blanket with Kevin’s girlfriend and his two-and-a-half-year-old son, Jade, while his stepfather, a Spokane paralegal named Brian Pierce, paced and tried to get some answers from the stone-faced law officers on the other side of the police tape.

Barb had been finishing a customer’s nails when she heard about the shooting on the evening news the night before. Now, they didn’t know if Kevin was dead or alive, and the authorities wouldn’t let Brian go up there to try to talk Kevin down. “I don’t share Randy’s beliefs,” the bearded, constantly frowning Brian Pierce told anyone who listened. “I just want to get Kevin down from there before he gets killed.”

Finally, by late afternoon, Brian Pierce couldn’t take it anymore, and he ducked under the police tape and began walking up the road. He only made it a few steps before officers grabbed him, handcuffed him, and dragged him off to jail. At least seven more people would be arrested or turned around in the coming days, trying to get past the smothering line of federal officers, either to talk Randy down or help him fight.

A FEW MINUTES OF FITFUL SLEEP didn’t keep the shots from coming again or keep the woods from racing past or keep the life from draining out of Billy Degan’s face, and in that way, the night faded into morning, and Dave Hunt and the other deputy marshals woke up, if you could call it that.

Joe Thomas made them a big breakfast—bacon and eggs—and they showered and dressed in the condominium on Schweitzer Basin. They drove to Bonners Ferry, to be debriefed by their own people and to be interviewed by the FBI and by U.S. attorney Ron Howen, who had been assigned the case. After all they’d been through, it bugged Hunt to have to sit down for two hours and be quizzed by FBI agents who had no idea how complicated this case was and how long he’d been working it. The agents themselves were okay and he knew they had a job to do, but he didn’t appreciate their cocky, coming-in-at-the-eleventh-hour-to-save-your-butt attitudes. He’d always felt the FBI didn’t deserve its bulletproof reputation. It was the agency that investigated Congress and judges, and as a result, Hunt believed, neither was tough enough on the FBI.

But what really got him was the FBI’s arcane method of interviewing: the agents took notes, wrote them up, sent them back to the subject for review, and then revised them. Why didn’t they just tape-record interviews, so there was no doubt what someone said? It was idiotic, a throwback to the J. Edgar Hoover FBI.

After the interviews, the deputy marshals drove to the armory, talked with Duke Smith and some other marshals officials, and watched the Hostage Rescue Team get ready for its mission. Then they drove up to the meadow, past the protesters, the graffiti—”Entering Dead Cop Zone”—and the signs—”Leave Them Alone!”

They checked in at the meadow, expecting to brief the Hostage Rescue Team about what they would find up at the cabin and what kind of people the Weavers were. Instead, the FBI agents ignored them as they went about the business of preparing for their mission. It was cold and rainy, and the marshals felt out of place, so they drove back to their condominium late in the afternoon. There, they talked about Billy Degan’s death and made flight plans to be in Boston for his funeral on Wednesday.

They sat out on the condo’s balcony and stared out over the cool mountain lake they’d talked about fishing once the mission was all finished. This country was the most beautiful Dave Hunt had ever seen, the kind of place where black bears wandered out of the forest and sunned themselves in parking lots, where dense, unspoiled forests lapped up against ski hills and resort towns, so that from their condo balcony, seen through exhaustion and sadness, the Selkirk Mountains seemed like some tempting borderland between civilization and all that was dark and wild.

HOMICIDE MEADOW WAS A COLD, drizzling, muddy mess on Saturday afternoon. Federal agents and state police propped up green army tents in the middle of the field while a cold mist soaked them like grocery store produce. Cars and trucks carved the wet field into deep ruts amid the only traffic jam ever in these parts—police cars, moving trucks, Jeeps, motor homes, telephone company trucks, and every other kind of vehicle lined up in the meadow, unloading men and supplies. At the far end of the pastureland, the Hostage Rescue Team set up its tactical headquarters, a sealed, solid-walled, modern white tent with some sort of generator for heat and air-conditioning that made the other federal agents, in their damp, drafty army tents, stare at it longingly.

In the trailer that served as the overall command center, the top FBI agent, Gene Glenn, was wrestling with logistics that were as muddy as the terrain. By mid-afternoon, they’d established a perimeter all the way around the knoll, but—twenty-eight hours after the gunfight—they still had no one close enough to watch the cabin. Glenn had the armored personnel carriers he needed, and the hostage negotiator was ready to go up there and demand the Weavers surrender, but the state officers wouldn’t turn over the keys without authorization from their commander, who was out of town. And Glenn wasn’t going to have civilian guardsmen driving the APCs up the mountain to face the Weavers and whatever white supremacists might have joined them, with whatever arsenal Randy Weaver had assembled.

Across the trailer, the marshal for Idaho, Mike Johnson, was working the telephones when Glenn pointed at him.

“Hey, you know the governor?”

“Sure,” Johnson said.

“Can you help us out?”

Johnson called the governor’s office and, once he’d reached him, handed the phone to the state officer who had the keys to the APCs.

“Yes, sir, Governor. Thank you, sir.” They had the APCs. But there was no communications system between the two gunless tanks, and so they still couldn’t move out.

In the meantime, Gene Glenn, Richard Rogers, and the other FBI agents were trying to finalize the rules of engagement so they could send the snipers onto the hills around the Weaver cabin. The interviews with Roderick, Cooper, and the other deputies had presented them with new information—specifically, Vicki Weaver apparently hadn’t been involved in the original gunfight. There would be no arrest warrant for her, and so, once again, the rules were revised. They wrote the new rules on a large pad in the command post.

One of Rogers’s assistants showed him the rules and he told the assistant to scratch out what he’d written and to include “and should” after the verb can. It was the final, critical evolution of verbs: from could to can and should.

“If any adult in the compound is observed with weapons after the surrender announcement is made,” Rogers read to his assistant, who would brief the HRT, “deadly force can and should be used to neutralize this individual. If any adult male is observed with a weapon prior to the announcement, deadly force can and should be employed if a shot can be taken without endangering the children. If compromised by any dog, the dog can be taken out.” For the children, he wrote, “Any subjects other than Randy, Vicki and Kevin, presenting threat of death or grievous bodily harm, FBI rules of deadly force apply.”

Since Rogers had arrived in Idaho with Potts’s approval to revise the rules of engagement, there had been little discussion of whether they were appropriate. But it was still up to Gene Glenn to finalize and enact the rules. About 12:30 p.m. Saturday, Glenn got off the telephone with Potts and said that the FBI official had approved the modified rules of engagement. He still had to fax the total operations plan to FBI headquarters and to the U.S. Marshals Service. But FBI agents and marshals officials disagreed on the plan, which a marshal said would “get our men killed.” The FBI agents remarked that they didn’t hear any better suggestions coming from the marshals. Finally, they came up with an operational plan: surround the cabin with snipers, who would be able to shoot Randy Weaver and Kevin Harris if they came out of the cabin armed. Bring in armored vehicles and demand the family’s surrender. If they didn’t surrender by Sunday, destroy the outbuildings by ramming them with the armored vehicles. They also considered ramming the house and firing tear gas inside but decided the tear gas might be lethal to Elisheba.

At 2:40 p.m., Glenn faxed the operational plan to headquarters, including the rules of engagement. After thirty-some hours on duty, Potts said later, he had gone home, and the deputy assistant director, Danny Coulson, read over the first page of the draft plan. Amazingly, Coulson claimed that he never saw the second page of the fax—which contained the altered rules of engagement—possibly because he was so upset by the first page. In his 1999 autobiography, No Heroes, Coulson wrote that when he saw the plan his first thought was: “These dumb shits.”

The plan called for the Hostage Rescue Team to surround the cabin. Then two armored personnel carriers would lumber up to the cabin and a loudspeaker would be used to order the family to surrender. If the Weavers didn’t come out after two days, the APCs would flatten the outbuildings and tear gas would be fired into the house.

As Coulson wrote years later, “What I had in my hand didn’t resemble anything that the HRT or any law enforcement agency should do. It was a military assault plan…. What the plan boiled down to was this: We’d gas the place and rip it up until everybody inside was too hysterical to think straight, and then HRT operators would go into close-quarter battle with women and children.”

Coulson told Glenn to back up and rework the operational plan with a better option for negotiations. Fred Lanceley worked out some plans for negotiations, and Glenn faxed back the negotiations addendum and Coulson approved it. Later, no one at FBI headquarters would admit seeing the modified rules of engagement, even though they’d been faxed to the office as part of the total operations plan. When Justice Department investigators tried to find out who approved the rules, they found no record of Potts’s or Coulson’s discussion of the rules, a “lack of documentation” that was “significant and serious.” Meanwhile, in Idaho, the FBI believed it had permission to shoot any adult who came out of the Weaver cabin with a gun. Problem was, most of the time nobody left that cabin without a gun.

IN FORT DODGE, IOWA, David and Jeane Jordison frantically dialed the phone numbers for Dave Hunt, the sheriff, and the other law enforcement officers they’d met and talked with over the last eighteen months. They couldn’t get any people, let alone any information. All they knew was the bizarre military talk they heard from officials on the television news: that the Weavers lived in “a compound” or “a fortress”; that the children were armed and dangerous; that the dead marshal was “a hero” who had been ambushed by the family; that federal officers had surrounded the cabin and might be planning to raid it.

None of it made sense to David Jordison. It was no fortress. He’d built better barns than that old plywood mess. And the kids? Dangerous? They were just kids. It almost sounded like they were trying to find enough reasons to go up there with their guns blazing and raid the house, to get some retribution for the death of the marshal. That’s why Vicki’s dad especially wanted to find Dave Hunt, to see if Hunt could arrange for him to somehow talk to Randy and Vicki. David Jordison had just talked to Hunt on the telephone about a week before. “Don’t worry,” Hunt had said. The marshals were committed to arresting Randy peacefully, Hunt had insisted, and they wouldn’t do anything drastic. “We won’t do anything before your visit.”

That’s what made it so unbearable. It was only a few days before David and Jeane’s annual trek to the mountains. They were so excited to finally see little Elisheba. Lanny was even coming this time, planning to see his sister for the first time since she left Iowa nine years earlier. The truck was half loaded with the things from Vicki’s winter list, along with five or six boxes of clothes, a wonderful batch of tomatoes, some flour, sugar, and soybeans. Best of all, David had found another gas-powered washing machine to replace Vicki’s old one—a 1920s roller washer with a kick start and an engine that he had painstakingly restored. Growing up in the Depression on a farm without electricity and other conveniences himself, David knew how much Vicki would appreciate the new washer, and he was looking so forward to seeing the look on her face when he surprised her with it.

Vicki’s sister, Julie Brown, had always known the guns were going to cause Vicki problems. She had resigned herself to her sister’s beliefs, but she didn’t think there was any reason to give guns to children and to spend your life drilling for war. She’d worried Friday night and Saturday with the rest of the family, but by Saturday afternoon, her husband, Keith, talked her into going to a Ringo Starr concert at the Des Moines fairgrounds to get her mind off what was happening in Idaho.

“There’s nothing we can do here, anyway,” Keith said.

But as they were walking into the concert, Julie burst into tears.

“What is it?”

“I’m afraid I’ll never see Vicki again.”

“Oh, Julie,” Keith held her. “It’s probably all over by now.”

But by nightfall on Saturday, David and Jeane Jordison still hadn’t heard anything. Jeane held Vicki’s most recent letter—dated August 16—

which had just arrived a day before. There was no hint of trouble, just small talk about the weather (“We’ve all been miserable with the heat”) and Elisheba (“She’s got a tooth that’s coming through”) and not one word of antigovernment stuff.

Hope you get this before you leave. We’ll be expecting you anytime the last week of August. Be prepared for dust…. Take care and don’t work too hard.

Love,
Vicki & all

Finally, they just couldn’t take it anymore. Just before 8:00 p.m. central time—about the same time the snipers were moving into place around Vicki’s home 1,000 miles away—David, Jeane, and Lanny Jordison climbed in Lanny’s pickup truck and left for Idaho.

IN TEN YEARS as an FBI agent, Lon Horiuchi had never heard rules of engagement like these. Back at headquarters in Quantico, Virginia, in one of the classrooms used for the HRT training, the FBI’s standard rules of engagement were framed and hung on a wall and members were expected to know the rules as well as their own phone numbers:

Agents are not to use deadly force against any person except as necessary in self-defense or the defense of another when they have reason to believe they or another are in danger of death or grievous bodily harm. Whenever feasible, verbal warning should be given before deadly force is applied.

Those rules were clear. An agent fired only in self-defense or in defense of another person. More important to a sniper, those rules allowed him to make his own decisions about how dangerous a situation was, Horiuchi thought. This time, it appeared that decision had already been made for him. A marshal had been shot and killed, and the Weaver family and Kevin Harris had shown they would shoot indiscriminately at federal officers.

Horiuchi listened to the new rules: Any armed adult male can and should be neutralized. And once the family had been given the chance to surrender, that changed to any adult—male or female. That meant Kevin Harris and Randy Weaver could be shot immediately if they were armed, and later, Vicki Weaver could also be shot.

Posted on the walls of the HRT tent were surveillance photographs of everyone in the family and the team members stared at the pictures and familiarized themselves with them.

Later that weekend, other FBI agents from around the West who had been called to the scene were given the modified rules of engagement. Some were shocked. One Denver agent turned to another and muttered, “You’ve got to be kidding.” Several felt the rules were inappropriate and planned to ignore them. Another agent later told federal investigators the rules amounted to: “If you see ‘em, shoot ‘em.”

But it wasn’t Lon Horiuchi’s job to determine the morality of the orders he’d been given; it was his job to react by using his own judgment and the rules of engagement. He had waited all afternoon for vehicles to drive the snipers up to the ridge top and, by 5:00 p.m., when the APCs still weren’t ready to go, the snipers decided to go on foot.

Horiuchi talked it over with the leader of the other sniper team. If Randy Weaver and Kevin Harris came out of the cabin with weapons, they would wait until both men were outside, and then they would shoot them. If they saw one target outside and fired, they’d never get the other one out of the house. The team leaders agreed.

By 5:30 p.m., eleven sniper/observers—some of the FBI’s top marksmen—were ready to move into position around the cabin. They followed one of the deputy U.S. marshals who had been on Art Roderick’s early teams during the first two stages of Northern Exposure. The snipers crept to the adjacent ridge north of the cabin, near where Dave Hunt and the other two marshals from the observation post had photographed the Weaver family the morning before. Because of the steep climb. Horiuchi carried a minimum of equipment—binoculars, a radio, and two guns: the sniper rifle and an M-14 assault rifle. He needed two guns because the FBI was afraid other white separatists might come up the mountain and help the Weavers. But Horiuchi knew the guns were for extreme situations. Mainly, their job was to watch the cabin, gather intelligence, and pass it on to the assault team; let them figure out how to get the people out of the cabin.

The weather was cool and rainy, the clouds slung low over the Selkirk Mountains. The ground was slippery because of the rain, and they spent much energy breaking through brush. When the lowest clouds drifted away, Horiuchi could see snow at higher elevations on the surrounding peaks. He crawled the last 200 yards into position.

The camouflaged snipers wedged themselves between trees and rocks, crouched in bunches of grass, and lay in brush along the hillside, two rising and falling football fields from the Weaver cabin. Lon Horiuchi had a very good spot, across a dip from the plywood home. He watched the cabin through his binoculars. He didn’t have to wait long. A low grumble from one of the armored personnel carriers in the meadow drifted up the hill, and once again, one of the Weavers’ dogs began to bark.