To hear the huffers and puffers on Capitol Hill and TV news, you would think that Janet Reno's raid on the Gonzalez home to reunite Elian with his father was the biggest betrayal since Benedict Arnold. And all those agitated Miami negotiators, piling up outrage upon outrage, made it seem as if Reno had left them in the dark while they were just minutes away from brokering a rosy diplomatic ending.

The congressional Republicans bellowed their rage and cited the shabbily treated negotiators as one of the reasons for calling hearings about the raid. Not since Pearl Harbor had such an attack been perpetrated, they assured the world. The hearings were aborted when it finally dawned on them that they had learned nothing from the impeachment fiasco.

And now, as the true story of the so-called negotiations that took place in the final hours leading up to the raid emerges, it's time to take a closer look and ask the important question: Which was the gang that couldn't shoot straight?

Aaron Podhurst, the chief negotiator for the Miami family, went out to dinner at a crucial point in the exchange -- 10:58 p.m. -- just as Janet Reno was faxing a tough ultimatum that needed to be discussed, pronto.

It must have been the longest dinner since the Last Supper. Podhurst didn't bother to look at the fax, which sat in his machine in his exercise room, until 2:59 a.m. What was he doing for four hours besides eating? Push-ups? When the lawyer finally looked at the page, he mistook it for another that Reno had sent at 2:59 a.m., thinking it was merely a duplicate. By the time Podhurst finally got around to calling Reno, she told him the family had only an hour to meet her offer.

The naiveti of Podhurst, University of Miami president Edward Foote and other civic leaders who came in at the last minute to help the family, was most apparent the day before the raid. At 4:52 p.m. that Friday, the negotiators faxed the Justice Department a six-point face-saving proposal for the Miami relatives, which included a provision for reuniting the Cuban and Miami arms of the Gonzalez family in one cozy hideaway. You can almost picture it: Elian getting yanked apart from his father by Marisleysis, who often gets the vapors, and Lazaro, who has a history of trouble with the bottle. Juan Miguel would, presumably, just sit quietly drinking tea in the kitchen.

Problem is, there was absolutely no agreement for transferring custody of Elian to his father. And again they were dictating demands that a psychiatrist and a spiritual advisor "help decide what is in the best interest of the child." The negotiators, it seemed, were the only people on the planet who had never heard Lazaro's mantra, "They will have to rip Elian from my arms."

When Reno didn't answer promptly, they took it as a good omen, but Reno never wavered in her demand that Elian be immediately turned over to his father. Still, the negotiators didn't seem to get it. Did they actually think they were making progress when they were cutting deals worse than anything the Gonzalez crew had promised to obey and then backed down from before? As one Justice Department official reportedly said, "What the hell is this?"

As for lawyers crossing t's and dotting i's, their vague wording, "We understand that you have transferred temporary custody of Elian to his father," was supposed to mean the Miami family agreed to this. I can just see a lawyer for the family tearing this up and saying, "Gotcha." It would be as binding as one party in a divorce saying, "I understand that you are temporarily taking custody of the Lexus."

Kendall Coffey, a family lawyer who had to resign as South Florida's top federal prosecutor after a scandal involving a $900 bottle of champagne and an erotic dancer, seemed stunned by the raid.

Minutes before the raid, Coffey said he thought "that a good and fair agreement was going to get done."

But some of the other negotiators were expressing a little less resolve and were either already asleep or yearning to sleep -- as we all have in the course of the past five months -- in the lead-up to the fateful INS mission.

"Let's just sleep on it," they kept saying as the deadline came and went. The terms at 4 a.m. were the same as they were at 2:59 a.m. and in the 10:48 p.m. fax that Podhurst never looked at: The family must turn the boy over that morning to his father. In Washington. Or else. Yawning in Miami. Some were sleeping in their expensive and cozy pads far from Little Havana. They didn't want to bother Lazaro, who was also asleep. Where was the concern over Elian? Why wasn't someone taking No-Doz?

"Why can't we go home," whined negotiator Manny Diaz. "Take a shower, shave, change clothes and come back at 9, 10 in the morning?" Take in a movie, bowl a few frames. Be there just when the crowd was big enough to ensure a catastrophe.

Although duplicity allegedly prevailed, Podhurst, Diaz, Coffey and others met at Lazaro's house around 4 a.m. to tell everyone that there was trouble. And everyone inside the Little Havana home managed to get fully clothed before the 5:15 a.m. raid. As for a display of excessive force, think again.

Two days before, according to one source, Lazaro told cheering exile leaders "they would have to come and get him so the cameras can catch it all." So much for passivity. Also, there were not one, but two men with felony records acting as lookouts next door who would alert the family -- and the TV cameras -- that the gringos were coming. The feds managed to take the ex-cons off the premises just before the raid. Still, another neighbor admitted he was "acting as [a] lookout."

It took the feds less than three minutes to complete the raid, which took place even though Reno had given the negotiators more than an hour past the deadline to come up with something reasonable. Moments later, Podhurst led the outrage against his friend Reno.

And then, oops! As we learned last week, the Justice Department released copies of the second fax and the first fax -- the one that was attracting cobwebs in Podhurst's fax machine, which bore an incredible similarity to the final offer faxed four hours later.

No, this is not fiction. The facts all came from a very long article on what went down before the raid in Sunday's Miami Herald.