Dark Forces: The Truth About What Happened in Benghazi (10 page)

Similarly, the British government was publicly embarrassed when a secret deal to release convicted Lockerbie bomber Abdulbasset Megrahi from a Scottish jail leaked to the press. The government initially claimed it had agreed to Megrahi’s release on humanitarian grounds, because he had terminal cancer and doctors said he had just months to live. As it turned out, the doctors never made such a claim and Megrahi was released following extensive Libyan pressure, in order to secure a major new oil concession for British Petroleum. Making the scandal worse was the hero’s welcome Qaddafi gave Megrahi when he returned to Libya on August 21, 2009, and the fact that the deal was reportedly arranged by Mark Allen, the former MI6 officer who brokered Qaddafi’s return to the fold in 2003 and was now serving as a highly paid consultant to BP.
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Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi bore a grudge against Qaddafi ever since his flamboyant—and insulting—trip to Rome in June 2009. When Qaddafi emerged from one of the four aircraft ferrying the 446-member delegation to Rome, he had pinned on his favorite Sergeant Pepper uniform a picture of Libyan resistance leader Omar al-Mukhtar in chains during the Italian occupation of 1911–42. The gesture set Italian heads spinning, according to Italy’s ambassador to Tripoli, Francesco Trupiano. Then, strutting before Berlusconi, who was writhing in pain from a recent back injury, Qaddafi went on to introduce “all of the individuals who also wore pictures around their necks of relatives who had suffered Italian cruelty or of themselves. Each told a brief story to the PM,” Trupiano added. It was a day Berlusconi would not forget.
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Qaddafi’s former Arab allies, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, bore him similar grudges. The Saudis despised him since his attempt to sponsor the assassination of Crown Prince Abdullah in 2003 through U.S.-based Muslim Brotherhood operative Abdulrahman Alamoudi. The Qatari emir nurtured a deep personal hatred for Qaddafi because he felt slighted by disparaging comments Qaddafi had made about him at an Arab summit. Through Ali al-Tarhouni, an economics professor at the University of Washington until he was named finance minister for the provisional government in Benghazi in February 2011, the Qataris arranged to finance the rebellion by agreeing to buy and market billions of dollars’ worth of Libyan crude oil from ports controlled by the rebels.
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Qaddafi’s biggest mistake may have been to alienate the British and the French by refusing their demands for lucrative oil concessions and big-ticket arms purchases. “If only Qaddafi had spent a few billion dollars buying French Rafale fighter jets,” the French publisher of
Intelligence Online
told me, “President Sarkozy would have supported him all the way.” As it was, Sarkozy pounded a never-ending drumbeat for war and was widely seen as leading the NATO charge to remove Qaddafi.

For President Obama, it was not about the money. It was about principle. Qaddafi the secularist, who like Mubarak had crossed swords with the jihadis, was a relic of the past, while political Islam was America’s friend.

ARMING THE ENEMY

Warning signs appeared almost immediately that aiding the rebels seeking to overthrow Qaddafi would empower jihadi groups. Al Qaeda in the Islamic Magreb (AQIM), the local franchise, had issued a call to jihad against Qaddafi just one week after the fighting began, calling his overthrow “the first stage” of imposing Islamic law in the country. More warning signs soon followed.

The real story of Benghazi involved the same sort of blowback that journalists castigated Ronald Reagan for creating in the 1980s in Afghanistan, when U.S. weapons went to radical Islamist groups that ultimately spawned al Qaeda. The big difference was the response of the American media. When U.S. weapons started flowing to al Qaeda–affiliated groups on Obama’s watch in Libya, and later, in Syria, few in the national media seemed to care.

As the battle for Ajdabiyah continued to rage, rebel leader Abdel-Hakim al-Hasidi boasted to the Italian newspaper
Il Sole 24 Ore
that he and his men had cut their teeth fighting Americans. After the September 11, 2001, attacks on America, al-Hasidi had gone to Afghanistan to join the resistance against the “foreign invasion,” where he fought side by side with the Taliban and al Qaeda. Captured in 2002 near the Afghan border in Peshawar, Pakistan, he was handed over to the Americans, who interrogated him then rendered him to the Libyan authorities. He remained in a Libyan jail until 2008, when he benefited from the terrorist rehab program championed by Qaddafi’s son, Saif al-Islam.

Al-Hasidi was one of the
Die Hard in Derna
crew. As he told the Italian reporter, after his release from jail he personally recruited “around twenty-five men” from Derna, just east of Benghazi, to fight the Americans in Iraq. Some of them, he said, are “today on the front lines in Ajdabiyah,” the battle whose outcome so preoccupied President Obama that it compelled him to seek a much broader UN mandate to topple Qaddafi.

His fighters were “patriots and good Muslims, not terrorists,” he insisted. He added, “Members of al-Qaeda are also good Muslims and are fighting against the invader.” Al-Hasidi was a member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, which formally joined forces with al Qaeda in 2007, as Chris Stevens reported to Washington at the time.
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Al-Hasidi was not the only al Qaeda member or former terrorist detainee who joined the Libyan rebels and received arms and assistance from the U.S.-led coalition. Abu Sufian Ibrahim Ahmed Hamuda Bin Qumu, known in Guantánamo as detainee 557, had an extensive terrorist pedigree. Another
Die Hard in Derna
former LIFG member, he cut his teeth with Osama bin Laden and his Arab Afghans fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. After escaping from a Libyan jail in 1993, where he was serving a sentence on drug charges, he reconnected with bin Laden in Sudan. At one point, he drove a truck for Wadi al-Aqiq, one of bin Laden’s front companies.

In 1998, Bin Qumu returned to Afghanistan and joined the Taliban. Thanks to a tip-off from informants assisting the Qaddafi Foundation to locate Libyan jihadis who were fleeing Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks, the Pakistani police arrested him at the Plaza Hotel in Peshawar in late 2001. After an initial round of interrogations, they turned him over to the Americans, who sent him to Gitmo, where he enjoyed three square meals a day, luxury soccer fields, and a prayer mat for five and a half years, thanks to the U.S. taxpayer.
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In August 2007, Bin Qumu was voluntarily repatriated to a Libyan jail through the intervention of the Qaddafi Foundation, following the successful return of al-Rimi the year before. As noted previously, Chris Stevens took up the cause of the returnees with the Libyan authorities, making sure they weren’t tortured and could receive family visits. He even devoted Christmas Day 2007 to meet with the detainees in a Libyan jail. In the State Department’s bureaucratese, they called Stevens’ visit with the man whose group later claimed responsibility for killing him, a “whereabouts and welfare visit.”
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Former federal prosecutor turned author Andrew C. McCarthy could see what was coming. “The rebels are not rebels—they are the Libyan mujahedeen,” he wrote in
National Review
at the very start of the civil war. “Like the Afghan mujahedeen, including those that became al-Qaeda and the Taliban, the Libyan mujahedeen comprise different groups. What overwhelmingly unites them, besides opposition to Qaddafi, is sharia,” the supremacist doctrine of Islamic law. “The Libyan mujahedeen will exploit us but never befriend us . . . [[I]f we empower them, we will eventually rue the day.”

After his release by Saif al-Islam in 2010, Bin Qumu formed the Ansar al-Sharia
katiba
(brigade) with funding and weapons from Iran and Qatar, and played a key role in radicalizing the anti-Qaddafi rebels. In a Facebook interview, he “discoursed at length about his resentment of the United States, which he accused of torturing him during his Guantánamo detention, an experience that he said will not go away.”
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So deep was his hatred of Westerners that, when a Human Rights Watch team interviewed former detainees after the fall of the Qaddafi regime to promote their cause, Bin Qumu was the only one they located who refused to meet with them.

In the end, he got revenge, but on the one person who had actually tried to help him.

ELUSIVE STINGERS

Al Qaeda in the Islamic Magreb and its affiliates were already looking beyond Libya; indeed, they felt a softer target than Qaddafi could be found in neighboring Mali, and thus they began to pillage abandoned Libyan government arms depots, carting away everything they could find into the vast Libyan desert to the south for use another day. According to Chadian President Idriss Deby, a Qaddafi ally, they had even acquired SAM-7 surface-to-air missiles. “AQIM is becoming the best equipped army in the region,” Deby told the French-language weekly
Jeune Afrique
.
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Fears that al Qaeda would acquire surface-to-air missiles, or MANPADS, in Libya were very real. The country was awash with weapons. During his forty-two-year reign, Qaddafi had purchased more than 20,000 MANPADS from the Soviet Union and China, and no one really knew where they were. While most modern military aircraft had electronic countermeasures to detect and divert heat-seeking missiles, civilian airliners were ripe targets. Indeed, sheer luck foiled an al Qaeda attack on an El Al plane filled with Israeli tourists in Mombasa, Kenya, in November 2002. The pilots watched in horror as two missiles streaked past them while they were climbing after takeoff. A single hit would have brought the plane down and caused several hundred deaths.

Photographs and YouTube videos during the first weeks of the fighting showed rebel fighters posing with SAM-7 and more modern SAM-24 missiles plundered from Qaddafi’s arsenals. An Australian TV reporter, Ben Knight, reported in early March 2011 that rebel fighters had shown him a U.S.-built Stinger missile, far more sophisticated and deadly than the Soviet-era SA-7. “In fact, they are claiming to have shot down another jet fighter today as well as another helicopter,” Knight reported.
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When I asked him about this incident, Knight told me that the rebels were eager to show off their weaponry. “I have a vague memory of being shown the missile in the back of a pickup truck before they drove off. I would have been using the term
Stinger
as a generic term for missiles with that capability, after discussion with other correspondents on the road who are more experienced in military hardware than I am.”
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But other, military, experts did see Stingers.

THE QATARI CONVOY

The French have maintained a military force in Chad, known as Operation Épervier (“Sparrowhawk”), ever since Libya occupied the uranium-rich Aouzou Strip along their common border in the Sahara in 1986. In February 2008, the French helped Chadian President Idriss Deby fend off a deadly challenge to his power after Sudanese-backed rebels seized control of the capital, N’Djamena. By this point, Deby and Qaddafi had become allies, and the French made emergency arms shipments of Milan anti-tank missiles and other equipment through Libya to Chad to bolster Deby’s forces.
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As part of Operation Épervier, the French regularly sent armored patrols from their northern base at Faya Largeau, to listen, watch, and roam the vast reaches of the Sahara along the Libyan and Sudanese borders. So it was on April 4, 2011, that an Arabic-speaking communications specialist picked up a suspicious military transmission not far ahead of their position.

They’re having problems with a truck that got stuck in the sand, he told his commanding officer. They’re not locals. They have an accent from the Gulf.

The commander gave the orders to intercept the unidentified convoy and politely inquire why they were heading toward the Libyan border from Sudan in the midst of a civil war. When the French patrol caught up with them, they were stunned.

“It was a large convoy of military trucks and pickups,” a senior U.S. Special Forces commander familiar with the incident told me. “The people in charge were Qatari special forces. They were carrying Stinger missiles and French-made Milan anti-tank rockets for the Libyan rebels.”

The French commander radioed back to Faya, which in turn alerted Paris via Épervier headquarters at the Sergent-chef Adji Kosseï Airbase in N’Djamena. His men had surrounded the Qatari convoy. With their ERC-90 Sagaie wheeled tanks they had them outgunned, but the commanding officer gave orders to keep the atmosphere relaxed. After all, Qatar was a huge weapons client of France, and the Qatari officer in charge quickly made known that he had gone to school at the French military academy at St. Cyr. He ordered his Pakistani orderlies to set up a hexagonal white tent with a portable generator hooked up to an air-conditioning unit, and invited the French commander inside to take tea while they waited for a response from Paris.

Several hours later, after much back-and-forth by radio and the intentional use of an easy-to-intercept satellite phone, the answer came in. “They were told to stand down and to shut up,” the Special Forces officer said.

A senior advisor to French President Sarkozy explained to me exactly where that order came from. “It went all the way up to the Chef d’Etat Major,” the French equivalent of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “Since these were American weapons, and this was clearly an intelligence operation, he would have referred it to the CIA Station Chief in Paris. If the agency wasn’t okay with it, we would have stopped it.”
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The French weren’t the only ones to learn about the Qatari arms convoys to the Libyan rebels. In September 2011, once Qaddafi and his lieutenants had fled Tripoli, a reporter from the
Wall Street Journal
stumbled upon documents relating to this and related incidents in the bombed-out office of Abdallah Senoussi, Qaddafi’s brother-in-law and chief of his internal security apparatus. “One memo contained intercepted phone calls between military commanders in Chad who reported Qatari weapons convoys approaching Libya’s southern border with Sudan, apparently intended for anti-[Qaddafi] forces,” the
Journal
reported. “Another intelligence memo, dated April 4, warned that French weapons, including Stinger antiaircraft missiles and Milan antitank rockets, were making their way to Libyan rebels via Sudan.”
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