on February 24, 4 days before the raid, he visited a junkyard in Waco. A junkyard employee testified under oath to that.

If, as Mr. Hartnett told the Congress, they had never seen him off the compound and they had him under surveillance, I don't understand what their surveillance people were doing.

Next question becomes, in the Treasury Department's report on the events at Mount Carmel, it says that the raid failed, causing the death of those four agents and the wounding of others because the element of surprise was lost. I think that you all should probe to see if the element of surprise was important. The advice the ATF was given before the raid by the Green Berets, and after the raid by almost every commentator, was that if you want to surprise someone you raid them at dawn.

Two men were dismissed from the ATF, Agents Sarabyn and Chojnacki, because they allowed the raid to go ahead despite knowing that the element of surprise was lost. They were fired, but they kept their mouths shut. Everyone who was still on active duty in the ATF was under a gag order. They kept their mouths shut and appealed to a civil service court, to arbitration. Sarabyn's brief in that civil service arbitration says, and I'll read a direct quote, For the agency to contend that surprise was the focus of Agent Sarabyn is to misstate the decision to proceed with the raid, end of quote. That civil service arbitration hearing was not open to the public, and I don't know on what basis it made its decision, but it reinstated both Sarabyn and Chojnacki.

The next question that I think is important involves the helicopters that flew over Mount Carmel. According to the ATF's report, they came simultaneously. According to the testimony of their pilots in the San Antonio trial, in which Mr. Jahn was prosecutor, they came perhaps 30 seconds after the ground troops had arrived. But at that trial, two Waco reporters Dan Mulloney and John McLemore showed a film they had made. They had been a half mile away from Mount Carmel at an intersection, 2491 and Double E Ranch Road, filming helicopters as these helicopters made three passes over Mount Carmel at close range. They got the third pass on film. They were putting away their equipment when the cattle trailers drove by carrying the ATF ground raiders. So they pulled in behind those cattle trailers and followed them into Mount Carmel and produced the footage we've all seen.

What their testimony and film proves is that those helicopters came over first probably a minute and a half before the ground troops got there, and that's important because the first shot, both sides say-in this context, both sides would have to say--was either toward those helicopters or from those helicopters.

At the San Antonio trial, Mr. Jahn and his associates were able to bring about a conviction of a man named Kevin Whitecliff for having shot at those helicopters. The residents of Mount Carmel say that those helicopters shot at them. They claim the shots came first. Attorneys Dick DeGuerin and Jack Zimmerman, who visited Mount Carmel during the siege, say they examined bullet holes in the roof and Zimmerman is a Reserve Marine officer. He'll let you know that in a minute. And he says those bullets came from above, from up in the air, into the house.

At the trial, no one in that helicopter-a pilot testified that he thinks no one in his helicopter fired, but none of the ATF agents who were armed in those helicopters took the stand. One of them will come before you in this hearing, Davey Aguilera. I would like for you all to ask him if he or anyone else in those helicopters fired upon Mount Carmel.

The use of the helicopters is controversial because in order to get them, or in the process of getting them, the ATF told both the Ďepartment of Defense and the Texas National Guard that it needed them for drug interdiction. It claimed there was a methamphetamine lab at Mount Carmel and 11 drug traffickers.

The list of 11 drug traffickers was presented to Congress in one of the hearings, and I checked out the names. One man at Mount Carmel was busted for pot in 1983, 5 years before he came to Mount Carmel. Two of the names listed were the names of people who David threw out of Mount Carmel in 1988, because he suspected them of running a drug lab.

Mr. ZELIFF. Mr. Reavis, your time has just about expired, if you would try to summarize.

Mr. REAVIS. I will finish this right on. One of the people named was a 71-year-old lady, who—I called the arresting officers cited by the ATF in Congress, and they said they'd never heard of her. The same for Katherine Schroeder and her husband Michael. That charge of the drug lab is fabricated.

I will close now without talking about the fire but I want to make one appeal to you all. Like any good journalist, I started my book by writing the Government agencies involved and asking for information. The Freedom of Information Act has become the stalling act. I received letters 2 months later saying wait 6 months at a minimum. Some of the documents I requested were scheduled for release in 1999, and the year 2000. The Freedom of Information Act in all the agencies I know is being ignored. How can the Government tell the people what really happened if the Government won't turn loose of its records?

Thank you.

Mr. ZELIFF. Thank you, Mr. Reavis.

[The prepared statement of Mr. Reavis follows:]

PREPARED STATEMENT OF DICK J. REAVIS, AUTHOR OF "THE ASHES OF WACO”

I would like to thank the members and staff of this committee for the

opportunity to talk to our government about the 1993 events at Mt. Carmel.

It is my purpose to give you an overview of what happened there, and insofar as I can, to explain why.

The community that we today know as Mt. Carmel was founded in 1934 after a Bulgarian immigrant named Victor Houteff was ousted from the Seventh Day Adventist Church, a Protestant denomination which now claims some 8 million members around the globe, a million of them in the United States. Houteff bought land in the Waco area, and with his followers, raised an encampment which included a community store and a theological school. At Mt. Carmel during Houteff's reign, each morning students swore allegiance to a flag of Christianity, and afterwards, to the flag of the United States. Yet the settlement lived in peace with its neighbors.

Houteff called his community Mt. Carmel, after a Biblical reference, and called his organization the Davidian Seventh Day Adventist Association. While he lived, Mt. Carmel prospered and its faithful put down roots, though they regarded their long stay with irony. The original settlers hadn't planned to be in Waco for long. They thought that Houteff was "the

antitypical Elijah," here on earth to announce the Second Coming of Christ.

When the announcement was made--it never was--they expected to move to Palestine to greet the Returned Savior on Mt. Zion. This expectation never

died at Mt. Carmel, and David Koresh's followers still look forward to a

future reunion in today's Israel.

During Houteff's tenure at what would be called the Old Mt. Carmel,

the residents adopted a set of rules for self-government which, in effect, made their leader a king. All authority derived from the man whom the followers believed was a living prophet. Nothing in those rules had changed by the time of Koresh's rise as Mt. Carmel's leader, in 1987. For nearly fifty years before the events of 1993, Mt. Carmel lived in obedience to a theological king. Yet there was no conflict with the outside world.

A struggle for succession ensued when Victor Houteff died in 1955, and its winner, at least in the Waco area, was a faction that called itself the Branch Davidian Seventh Day Adventist Association, led by Benjamin Roden. Roden settled his flock at what was then called the New Mt. Carmel, the site that we know as Mt. Carmel today.

Seventh Day Adventists of all stripes base their faith on the Bible and upon the voluminous writings of a 19th century American seer, Ellen G. White. Davidians--and there are still groups which bear the name and practice--cite Houteff's works as inspired as well. Roden's Branch Davidians added the works of their leader to the sect's canon, and when Benjamin Roden died in 1978, his successor, Lois Roden, contributed new doctrines of her own. In honor of her innovations--Lois is best-known for saying that the

Holy Spirit is female--she renamed the group the Living Waters Branch Davidian Seventh Day Adventist Association. When David Koresh, then known as Vernon Howell, drifted into Mt. Carmel in 1983, Lois Roden was its prophet. Howell was an acolyte in a group with a cumbersome name and an increasingly complex theology, and his status called upon him to follow, not lead. One may call a group such as this a cult--or a nation, or even a menagerie--but terms like that do violence to the facts. The followers of David Koresh did not practice a new religion--their religion was Christianity-and they were not sufficiently organized or widespread as to be a denomination. They were a sect, like thousands of other groups that have uneventfully come and gone in the past.

A part of the prophecies that Vernon Howell inherited from the Bible and his predecessors called for a confrontation between God's believers and the forces of an apostate power which, in the fundamentalist milieu, is usually identified as the United States or the United Nations. Koresh's interpretation of these doctrines was that the confrontation would probably take place in 1995. Perhaps in preparation for that eventuality, in late 1991 he began buying guns and studying armaments. In the process, he learned that fortunes can be made by vendors at weekend gun shows. Within a few months, Koresh and a handful of associates were not only buying but also selling goods at the shows--ammunition vests, or "mag bags," gas masks and Meals-Ready-to-Eat, or packaged military rations. They did it for fun, to learn, and to make a profit. They were later accused of having "stockpiled" weapons;