My Not So Secret "Secret", by Ron Cole
"Don't go," she said, in a low voice so alien to me that I visibly recoiled. "They can send someone else. This isn't who you are anymore," she added in the same tone. She was staring daggers at me. I couldn't tell if she was angry or about to burst into tears. In either case it was more genuine emotion from her than I'd ever seen; my best friend and business partner who was not known for exhibiting emotion like that. I was actually speechless, another oddity of the moment.
Of course I had to go, if they put me on a plane, precisely because there was no one else who could take my place. If lives were at stake, and they certainly were, I couldn't put her feelings above that level of responsibility. I'd told Carrie, my partner, about what was happening out of necessity. If I was going to be on the other side of the country for some period of time, she was the only one who could keep the business running in my absence. But, beyond that, no one could know. Nobody knew about that part of my life. A few knew about the past that created it. Carrie knew, because she was my friend. But even in government internal documents I was known only by my code name: Corsair. Jetting across the country to intervene in yet another standoff between the FBI and armed militants was part of what I'd get called upon to do now and then. The FBI didn't pay me to do it. I stuck with the job of being Corsair because, while I'd paid debts to society for arguably questionable choices I'd made a quarter of a century before, I was still paying off a debt to myself. Besides, when someone calls you and gives you an opportunity to possibly save lives; to put the anguish of your own past to use in a positive way - you do it. You go.
David had gone to the door of the foyer. He'd just said, "I'm going to talk to them! Don't anybody do anything stupid!" The sound of approaching helicopters could be heard. Then there was yelling from outside. A lot of muffled yelling. Not from recognized voices. Then David's voice above it all, "We have women and children in here! Get Back! We want to talk and . . . " Gunshots drowned him out. Gunshots ad infinitum. Clouds of powdered sheetrock filled the rooms as chunks of lead bounced off everything solid or sank into flesh. Mothers grabbed their children and dove under the beds. One of them died right there, shot. David fell backwards into the foyer, seemingly hit. Another man behind him collapsed to the floor, holding his stomach, and began screaming bloody murder . . .
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| February 28, 1993 - The Raid |
That was the morning of February 28th 1993. The place was Mount Carmel Center just outside of Waco, Texas. David, was David Koresh. The people being shot and dying: those were my friends and family. My whole world under attack. Fifty one days later, all but a few were dead; shot to death, run over by tanks and dismembered, or burned to death by fire. Only a few traumatized souls survived out of a hundred people. And there was me. I was in my early to mid-20s then. When I went to Waco I'd never done my own laundry before, was still in school, and was merely searching for a meaning in life like a lot of people my age. I did what I could to be helpful, to visit the burn victims in the hospital, to help find housing for the homeless, and sort out legal issues. I was made the spokesman among the 'survivors' since I was well spoken in front of a camera and wasn't under threat of federal indictment. It was a lot for a 24-year-old to deal with, but I dealt with it. Nobody else could do it.
My relationship with the FBI began as those events unfolded in Waco and in the aftermath. The one person in town who knew of it at the time was critical of me. "Didn't Chamberlain meet with Hitler?" I'd said in my defense. But even at that stage of my life I wanted to be a peacemaker. I'd already seen so much hate and so much death and suffering. While I often vented outrage on television and in the newspapers, my innermost desire was to take a tragedy and turn it into a mechanism to avoid further catastrophes. There were surely better ways for people to resolve conflict than through machine guns and fire, especially when such violence was born out of a lack of understanding, paranoia, and fear. So, I met with the FBI and we talked for eight hours. In many ways we were opponents, but we shared a common interest. No more 'Wacos'. No more senseless death.
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| Me and my brethren, post-fire: David Thibodeau, on the far left, was one of only nine people who escaped the Waco fire - losing his wife and child in the process. Rita Riddle lost her brother, Jimmy, to the flames. Bonnie Haldemen, David Koresh's mother, lost her son and 21 grandchildren. Sheila Martin (in red) lost her husband and three children in the fire. The list goes on. These were, and remain, good people. |
I was recruited to gather intelligence. It was not my job to put people in prison. The FBI needed information about ideology, religious conviction, political thought, intended tactics of militants and their goals. I had a known history following Waco as a person with a great personal stake in what had happened there, and as someone who, as a consequence, was believed to have strong anti-government sentiments. I could walk into the midst of any group of militants or potential terrorists and be generally accepted as a sympathizer - especially as I voiced my own Waco-born political opinions in the media. The FBI came to refer to the latter, my media persona, as my "antenna". While I was officially told to be merely a "fly on the wall", the only way to be on the wall in the first place was to be very proactive; to get into the alternative reality within which anti-government groups lived, be a rabble rouser myself, and in many cases have the potential terrorists come to me.
That I thought I could perform that mission at that stage of my life, while caught within a post-Waco emotional tornado, was indicative of my unrealistic idealism of youth.
Over the next several years I intentionally plunged myself into a crazy life that few would believe existed in the United States. It was an alternative reality, where people believed they were being hunted by black helicopters, Martial Law was around every corner, and the only remedy that hoped to save the Constitution was an armed revolution of the most violent sort. Not only was I between the unstable minds of those 'revolutionaries' and a federal government prone to overreacting to them, but I was between factions among those militants who were often threatening violence amongst themselves. Eventually I was infiltrating militant Islamist groups as well, online and in person, and they possessed an even more unstable chemistry. Amid all of those passionate characters, it should go without saying that I experienced some harrowing moments; too many and most too complicated to go into in this short Blog.
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| The Fire |
I was still in my 20s throughout all of that madness. In retrospect I was hardly mature or wise enough to deal with it well. I was always on the front lines of every conflict in those days, every standoff and showdown - in Jordan, Montana with the Freemen, in the Republic of Texas hostage drama, and many others. I felt that in every major situation I'd helped the opposing parties understand each other and my positive contributions avoided escalations and violence. I felt genuinely fulfilled in that sense. But I'd also seen in myself a rise of disillusionment. I had never encountered anyone, be they Americans or foreign extremists, whose complaint I couldn't possess some empathy for. I'd experienced Waco, after all. I could be driven to tears pretty easily upon hearing a ruined midwest farmer describe how the bank foreclosed on his family business, or a Palestinian father saw his child die by Israeli 'rubber bullets'. I saw those people dealing with my kind of grief, but they were not presented with any remedy. I could medicate my outrage, as I'd been doing. They had no such outlets. The FBI had its own dispiriting problems. Their field agents were striving to avoid violence while their 'tactical' agents (HRT) seemed more motivated to put bullets in the heads of everyone who looked at them the wrong way. I came to feel that there were no good guys; no 'right side', and I started to take it upon myself to exercise my own judgement in cases when I should not have. I took sides. I played both sides. I stacked the decks. All of that was my own undoing, and when the FBI felt that they'd lost control of me - I paid a very heavy price through the loss of my freedom for quite some time. No one in the history of the United States had ever gone to prison for the silly tax violations that they put me away for. I was the first. In the words of one FBI agent who visited me after I was sentenced in federal court, "Well, we had to slap your hand just a little".
The trouble with being idealistic enough to think that you can take it upon yourself to save lives, is that you feel utterly responsible when you don't. The slapping of my metaphorical hand aside (and the FBI did that to me on more than one accession between 1997 and 2007), it was the ghosts of failed missions that got to me the most as the years progressed. I feel that I could have prevented the Oklahoma City bombing - but I failed. I feel that I might have prevented the 9/11 attacks. Again - I failed. As unreasonable as it may seem, I blamed myself in each and every case. As time passed, my overall disillusionment combined with that guilt to create what was, for me, a downward spiral of discontent; like a war veteran who, by right, has served his tour but can never get out of the war. I was feeling forever consumed by Waco, its aftermath, and I was unable to move on. I was replaying it over and over through so many other dramas; eternally in the grip of its consequences. I hadn't experienced the worst of what Waco had had to offer, unlike so many of my friends. But they had managed to move on in their lives while I had not.
I'd started to pull away from my cloak and dagger life, at long last, when I was married and started a family. That was in 2001. The environment in the country had, fortunately for me, changed a lot since the early to mid-1990s. The 'far-Right' counterculture that gave birth to the Oklahoma City bombing had lost much of its momentum. The economy had improved. More than once the FBI had articulated to me, 'So long as people can watch a football game while drinking a beer, they're not going to bomb the post office'. I invested myself into starting my career in industrial design and model making, moved to Los Angeles (hardly a hotbed of revolutionary activity), and began a new and far more prosperous life.
By the time my family and I had moved to Zanesville, Ohio in 2012, I was almost completely out of the game. I still had regular contacts with my FBI 'handler', as was legally required. Once a year we met more formally, with two other FBI witness, to have me sign papers. My identity was so secret that I didn't even sign my actual name. I signed, 'Corsair'. We usually met at the Niles, Ohio mall. I'd park and go in one door of Sears, then out the other side and into a waiting car. The James Bond element of it all had, however, long since lost its allure if there had ever been such an attraction. I was tired. I was suffering from 'Long-Term Post Traumatic Stress Disorder'. No, not sleeping with knives or having crazy meltdowns, but I couldn't get to sleep most nights. I would jump out of my skin at every barking dog. I could get emotional. When I knew I'd have to meet with the feds I'd be wracked with anxiety for days; a lot of little things that weren't getting any better. I needed to get out of my relationship with the FBI, but I was afraid. I feared that the FBI would pull me back in via some fashion that would hurt my family. By the time of those Niles meetings, though, I'd simply stopped producing intelligence of any value. I'd made myself a useless drain upon their resources. We would talk, but there would be little to talk about. By 2014 they'd 'closed my file'. "Once we do this," they warned me, "It'll be next to impossible to open it up again". Fine, I said. I was out. And, to my surprise, nothing bad happened to me.
I focused upon my business, my artwork, and eventually making new friends. The latter had taken me a quarter of a century to feel comfortable with. You don't make friends when you're seen as a member of a notorious cult. You don't make friends when your 'friends' are targets of federal investigation, and your association with them is in the capacity as a gatherer of intelligence. I had business associates, clients, and customers. But they didn't know me personally. I didn't just shove my past behind me because it was traumatic for me, I did it to rebrand myself, be positive, and build a bright career that was out from under the storm. I did agree, in 2016, to go back to work for the FBI in a very limited capacity. That was in response to the aforementioned incident. In spite of everything that I've revealed here, I'll probably never walk away from an opportunity to help people towards a positive end. It's my nature.
By 2016 I felt like a new man. I was a full time artist without the burden of living a double life. I had opened a gallery downtown. I had friends who were genuine. I no longer discussed politics, guns, religion, or any other former ingredient in a past far behind me. It wasn't that I was ashamed of what I'd been involved with. Far from that. I suppose it was little different from how war veterans deal with their past experiences. It just wasn't fun to remember. If I squirm in my chair while recounting that era it's not due to shame; I'm probably just thinking of somebody's dried pool of blood in the water tower, crows eating Mike's body out by the fence, or the feeling of a bullet shooting past my left ear. Just because I'm not recounting those moments doesn't mean they're not jangling around in my head at any given moment. I prefer to keep everything to do with them at a comfortable distance.
Until this writing, Corsair was a government secret. Over the years I've had many opportunities to both reveal that secret and get my full story out. In 2002 I rejected a movie deal. I've had three book deals come my way since then, and I've always rejected them. Just last month I was contacted by a British film maker via email. I never wrote her back.
We're approaching the 25 year anniversary of Waco and the beginning of my personal journey, however. If my story was limited to personal events, maybe I would let such tired dogs lie, but I've played a role in many important historical events over the last quarter of a century. I feel that it's time to completely 'out' myself and, by so doing, put that volume of my life to rest once and for all. I know that my experiences have served a valuable purpose in the interests of peace, and that I have every reason to feel proud of my past - in spite of my mistakes. I have nothing to hide now, so I've decided to tell my whole story.
In the near future all will be able to read of every last detail of it.
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| Ron Cole, 2017 |
