Sunday, February 28, 1993, I awoke and went out to the living room, about 10:30 a.m. I turned on the television and changed the channel to CNN.
The first item to assail my senses was a video feed from the Mount Carmel complex near Waco, Texas. The audio informed me that two agents of the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) were known killed and four wounded.
I had tried to contact my father, an agent with ATF, three days before. A different agent who answered my call told me that my father was in Waco on business. He knew that I had grown up twenty of my twenty-five years the son of an ATF agent that I would understand that he could not tell me any more. Remembering that call, I was faced with the very real possibility that my father might be dying, or dead. In the best case, he was somewhere in the melee playing itself out on the screen before me. People who called themselves Branch Davidians were doing all in their power to add him to the casualty lists. Of course, he had gone there with other men and women, all agents, each trained to keep themselves, and each other, off those lists. Training, unfortunately, only goes so far.
Nearly a year later, I noted in a convenience store the new "Men of the Year" issue of Time magazine and made the purchase. Within the pages of that issue was a list purporting to give the "Winners and Losers of 1993." In the Losers column I found ATF. The short descriptor read, "Few had even heard of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms until the Waco assault." Everyone, however, has heard of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
A few questions occurred to me:
"Why should so few have heard of ATF?"
"Why should so many have heard of the FBI?"
"Why should ATF be the losers of the year?"
To make a comparison of FBI to ATF we find that FBI has many thousands of agents the world over, and a tremendous budget, also they had a former director a man so infamous and recognizable, for forty-eight years, as J. Edgar Hoover whose overriding concern was to make "FBI" a house hold term. The creed was "Don't embarrass the Bureau." Appearance and statistics were everything. Director Hoover was successful enough in this public relations bid to generate several highly popular television series, innumerable movies and serials, and even to allow people to believe that Eliot Ness and his Untouchables were actually his men. Kevin Costner's Ness even asks his wife about naming a boy "J. Edgar," that Ness was a Treasury man and the Prohibition Task force was a forerunner of the ATF not withstanding. Director Hoover was successful enough to induce people to ask me about "your father who works for FBI."
"No, he works for ATF."
"That's Federal, right? It's the same thing."
Hardly. Their budget dwindles in comparison. So much so that during the Mount Carmel raid, not all the agents had the military style helmets such as the one that saved my father's life. The helmets they did have had been donated to ATF by the Army.
ATF is staffed by only 2000 agents, and prosecutes 37% of all cases brought before Federal courts, the majority of those being federal firearms violations. Compare that to the 47% of cases investigated by the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), who heads the list of busiest agencies. It is still a good chunk.
Examine the figures. DEA and ATF account for fully 84% of all cases brought before the federal courts. The remaining 16% falls to all other federal law enforcement agencies, a few of which are: Secret Service, Department of Agriculture, U.S. Forestry Service, Department of Energy agencies, and Coast Guard. The Federal Bureau of Investigation can claim only a portion of 16% of cases prosecuted.
A movement is now afoot to give the enforcement of firearms laws to the FBI and to dissolve ATF, or return them to their days of collecting revenue on illegally produced and sold alcohol, which they still do, though to lesser priority. If FBI needs more work for their agents, the simpler solution would be to make some of those FBI agents ATF agents. The personnel would certainly be put to use.
I find myself wondering "just why should the ATF be so anonymous?" The answer must be that the mythical "fourth estate" does not give them the coverage or the credit. When a bomb explodes and the pictures make their way to my television screen, I can see and recognize the blue jackets, blazoned in gold, "ATF Agent," that regularly are on the scene.
ATF is rarely, if ever, mentioned. A case in point is the World Trade Center Bombing. The news anchors and the print media all informed us that the FBI was on the case, and despite the clearly marked ATF agents in the pictures, only a fraction told of their contribution as, again, the FBI took credit for another agency's work. Credit that was readily doled out by the press who never dug for a precise answer to the prevailing questions of their stories.
No matter. In that February 28 raid, four ATF agents lost their lives: Conway LeBleu, Todd McKeehan, Rob Williams, and Steve Willis. My father and fifteen other agents were wounded, all in service of arms to their country as surely as any soldier or sailor ever did, and to whom we must not withhold our respect. They did their jobs: their lives given and forever changed in an action that the tactical experts all say would have worked had the mission not been compromised, by members of the press.
It is the press who carries the blood on their hands of all who died at Mount Carmel, agent and cult member alike.
Time's analysis falls short of the mark and only adds insult to injury. Do not misunderstand, neither are the ATF's to bear, but the public must. Our intelligence is debased and our knowledge of our world is wounded by those who are supposed to inform and enlighten. Journalism, again, compromised by the press, was the big looser of 1993.