Blood Feud: The Clintons vs. the Obamas (17 page)

          
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Both MI6 in Britain and the Mossad in Israel alerted Washington that Ansar al-Sharia and other jihadi
terror groups linked to al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) were operating in Benghazi.

          
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Al-Qaeda’s notorious
al-rāya
, or black flag of jihad, was spotted flying in a nearby town.

          
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In August, less than a month before the attack, the American mission in Benghazi sent a cable to the State Department relaying the results of an “emergency meeting” held by the staff. The cable stated: “RSO [Regional Security Officer] expressed concern about the ability to defend Post in the event of a coordinated attack due to limited manpower, security measures, weapons capabilities, host nation support, and the overall size of the compound.”

          
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Ambassador Stevens himself had sent a flurry of diplomatic messages back to the State Department warning that security in Benghazi was practically nonexistent. One of his messages was titled: “Libya’s Fragile Security Deteriorates as Tribal Rivalries, Power Plays and Extremism Intensify.”

          
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On September 10—the day before the attack on the American consulate—al-Qaeda’s Ayman al-Zawahiri, who had taken the place of the dead Osama bin Laden as the mastermind of al-Qaeda, released a video calling for the “sons of Libya” to avenge the CIA’s drone killings.

Despite these alarming events, Hillary failed to follow up on repeated requests for security reinforcements at the American
mission in Benghazi. The reason: she believed (wrongly, as it turned out) that the CIA—the principal U.S. agency running the Benghazi operation—would provide adequate backup security if the diplomatic post came under attack.

In the hours following the initial alert from the State Department’s Operations Center, Cheryl Mills remained at her desk, closely following the battle raging in Benghazi and keeping Hillary updated. She worked the phones, calling people down the chain of command in the State Department, Pentagon, and CIA to find out what was going on.

In addition, Mills asked Tom Donilon, the president’s national security adviser, to give Hillary periodic updates. Donilon told Hillary that the National Security Agency had intercepted electronic communications between Ansar al-Sharia, the main Libyan militia behind the consulate attack, and AQIM. Ansar al-Sharia was claiming on Twitter that it was responsible for the assault.

At 5:41 PM, Hillary called David Petraeus, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. She and Petraeus had forged a close working relationship; the previous summer they had devised a joint plan to arm the Syrian resistance—a proposal that was rejected by risk-adverse political types in the White House, who were gearing up for reelection and didn’t want Obama to get entangled in another foreign war. Hillary asked Petraeus what his agents on the ground were reporting from
Benghazi. More important, she wanted to know why the CIA had failed to send reinforcements from its “annex” in Benghazi to the mission.

At this point, Hillary was operating on the assumption that Petraeus, not she, was the official on the hot seat. She had good reason to believe that, since the American effort in Benghazi was from first to last a CIA operation. Of the forty or so American officials stationed in Benghazi, only seven worked for the State Department. The consulate’s primary purpose was to provide cover for the thirty-plus Americans who worked for the CIA.

Hillary personally ordered the consulate to remain open in order to accommodate the CIA’s mission. As she knew all too well, the CIA was involved in the clandestine—and probably illegal—transfer of weapons out of eastern Libya, through Turkey, and into the hands of rebel groups fighting against the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. Those weapons, including rocket launchers, were purchased from al-Qaeda-affiliated militias in Libya. And many of those arms found their way into the hands of al-Qaeda fighters in Syria and terrorists in other parts of the Middle East.

All this was being done without the knowledge or consent of the United States Congress, whose intelligence committees were charged with exercising oversight of the CIA. What’s more, the secret arms shipments were taking place at the same time that President Obama was falsely claiming that he was reluctant to arm the Syrian opposition for fear that the weapons would fall into the wrong hands.

“The Obama administration has never publicly admitted to its role in creating what the CIA calls a ‘rat line,’ a back channel highway into Syria,” investigative reporter Seymour M. Hersh wrote in the
London Review of Books
. “The rat line…was used to funnel weapons and ammunition from Libya via southern Turkey and across the Syrian border to the opposition. Many of those in Syria who ultimately received the weapons were jihadists, some of them affiliated with al-Qaida.”

In short, the Obama administration was secretly arming its chief global enemy, al-Qaeda, in an operation that had many of the earmarks of the Iran-Contra scandal, which had rocked the foundations of the Reagan administration twenty-six years before.

Several foreign policy experts with whom I spoke wondered why Ambassador Stevens was in Benghazi on the fateful day of the attack on the American mission.

“If Stevens had felt the situation was dire, why the hell did he go to Benghazi?” said Leslie Gelb, a former high-ranking State Department official and president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations. “There was no State Department operation there. Was he going to talk to some bad actor Islamist leaders there? He knew them, because they were part of the fight against Gaddafi. We’re not talking about a fool here: Stevens was an experienced and capable guy, who knew these jihadi fuckers in Benghazi personally.”

Ambassador Stevens spoke fluent Arabic and had cultivated close ties with leaders of the Libyan militia groups, including al-Qaeda affiliates. According to my source, Stevens traveled to Benghazi to monitor the CIA’s arms-transfer operation there and to make sure that the weapons did not fall into the hands of terrorists. It was a perilous assignment, like traveling unarmed into the Wild West, and an experienced hand like Stevens would not have taken such a risk unless higher-ups in Washington thought it was absolutely necessary.

And it had become necessary because, like so many CIA operations, this one had gone awry. Libyan weapons originally earmarked for pro-Western opposition groups in Syria were ending up in the hands of anti-Western bad actors.

Both the White House and the State Department had grown increasingly alarmed that AQIM had spread its tentacles throughout northern Africa and turned a section of the African state of Mali into an Afghan-like sanctuary. Israeli prime minister Bibi Netanyahu had complained to President Obama that the weapons being transferred by the CIA were ending up in the control of Iranian-backed Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon and Hamas terrorists in the Gaza Strip.

“In the last year,” wrote Dore Gold, an Israeli diplomat who had served under several Israeli governments, “[AQIM] has begun to spread its influence across the Sahara. AQIM’s weaponry came from post-Gaddafi Libya, whose arsenal was boosting the arms trade from Morocco to Sinai. Israeli sources have noted that Libyan weapons, including shoulder-fired SA-7 antiaircraft missiles, were also reaching the Gaza Strip, where one was fired . . . at an Israeli helicopter for the first time.”

At 8:00 that night, Hillary asked Cheryl Mills to arrange a conference call with Gregory Hicks, the State Department’s deputy chief of mission and chargé d’affaires in the Libyan capital of Tripoli. Hillary and her entire senior staff, including A. Elizabeth “Beth” Jones, the acting assistant secretary of state for the Near East, were on the phone when Hicks said that Ambassador Stevens was at a Benghazi hospital and presumed dead. His body could not be recovered, because the hospital was surrounded by the al-Qaeda-linked Ansar al-Sharia militia that had mounted the consular attack.

Hicks said nothing about an anti-Muslim video or a spontaneous protest demonstration. “We saw no demonstrations related to the video anywhere in Libya,” Hicks remarked at a later time. The next day, Assistant Secretary Beth Jones sent out an email saying that Ansar al-Shariah, the notorious al-Qaeda-linked terror group, was behind the attack on the American mission.

Shortly before 10:00, Cheryl Mills told Hillary to expect a call from President Obama. By then, Hillary was one of the most thoroughly briefed officials in Washington on the unfolding disaster in Benghazi. She knew that Ambassador Stevens and a communications operator were dead, and that the attackers had launched a well-coordinated mortar assault on the CIA annex, which would cost the lives of two more Americans. She had no doubt that al-Qaeda had launched a terrorist attack against Americans on the anniversary of 9/11.

However, when Hillary picked up the phone and heard the president’s voice, she learned that Barack Obama had other ideas in mind.

Until Benghazi, Obama had been riding high on his reputation as the man who got Osama bin Laden. Unable to run on his domestic record (the economy was anemic, and the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, was highly unpopular), Obama didn’t miss a chance to remind voters that he had “decimated” al-Qaeda’s leadership and that “the core al-Qaeda is on its heels.”

His campaign team in Chicago was delighted when Joe Biden, Obama’s garrulous running mate, turned the Osama bin Laden assassination into a campaign slogan. “You want to know whether we’re better off?” Biden bragged to crowds of supporters. “I’ve got a little bumper sticker for you: ‘Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive.’”

“The gist of [Obama’s] reelection message was that al Qaeda itself was headed on a fast track for the dustbin of history,” wrote Keith Koffler of
White House Dossier
. “Obama himself was suggesting all of al Qaeda was on the road to extinction.”