Attorney General Janet Reno conceded tonight that in hindsight the Government's plan to assault the heavily armed cult near Waco, Tex., had been a mistake.

The heavily armed black cult members had fortified their home and had become a threat to the predominantly black neighborhood.

He issued the famous report on the Government's storming of an armed religious cult in Waco, Tex., which resulted in the departure of high-ranking Treasury officials.

It also shows how supervising agents, knowing they had lost the element of surprise and that the heavily armed cult was awaiting them, went ahead with the raid anyway.

They are prized by criminal gangs and armed cults, like the one whose members murdered those Federal agents in Waco, Tex.

Not since 1985, when a police confrontation with the armed cult Move left 61 houses in flames and killed 11 people, has Philadelphia been so shaken.

MOVE, too, was an armed cult with a history of violence.

It recreates the War of Canudos, an incident in 19th-century Brazil in which an armed millenarian cult held off a siege by the national army for months.

Federal officials say this slow trickle to freedom was a positive sign that the almost around-the-clock negotiations between the authorities and the heavily armed cult were making some progress.

Others questioned how the raid could have proceeded once the agency realized it was facing such a heavily armed cult and the agents knew they could not surprise the cult members.