Dark Forces: The Truth About What Happened in Benghazi (17 page)

Just one month after Secretary Clinton’s victory lap in Tripoli, Belhaj went to southern Turkey at the behest of Mustapha Abdul-Jalil, now interim Libyan president, to meet with radical elements among the Syrian rebels. Belhaj shared their Salafist worldview: First defeat the renegades and apostates among the Muslims, then crush the infidels. He traveled with them clandestinely to tour their bases along the border with Turkey, and pledged to deliver weapons to enable them to shoot down Syrian government aircraft. He also discussed sending Libyan fighters to train the Syrians. “Having ousted one dictator, triumphant young men, still filled with revolutionary fervor, are keen to topple the next,” the
Daily Telegraph
reported.

It was supposed to be a secret mission, but word of his trip leaked out when he was detained by a rival militia at the Tripoli airport. They claimed Belhaj was carrying a passport and a suitcase of cash after traveling to Qatar. Only President Abdul-Jalil’s personal intervention got him released.
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Did Belhaj tell Chris Stevens of his intention to meet with the Syrian rebels? Did Stevens ask him to scout out the rebels to determine which ones would be worthy of U.S. support? For now, the record of their conversations, though reported by Stevens to Washington, remains under the wraps of classification.

But one thing was sure: Everyone wanted a piece of Qaddafi’s arsenal, and Abdelhakim Belhaj held the keys to the warehouse.

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THE THREAT MATRIX

When Special Envoy Christopher Stevens returned home from Benghazi on November 17, 2011, he could legitimately claim, “Mission accomplished.” Qaddafi’s forces had been defeated, and the rebels that he and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had so ardently supported were now in control of the government. Aid from the United States and its allies was shifting from arms and security-related assistance to civilian projects and democracy training. As the U.S. diplomatic missions in Tripoli and Benghazi reduced their security footprint, Washington placed a bet that the central Libyan government would tame the postrevolutionary chaos and that the hundreds of armed militias who had fought Qaddafi would melt away.

Documents that have come to light as a result of congressional investigations led by Representatives Darrell Issa, Jason Chaffetz, and Ed Royce reveal an almost constant tug-of-war between State Department managers in Washington, D.C., who were trying to reduce the number of Diplomatic Security and other support personnel in Libya, and the diplomats on the ground who were experiencing the threats firsthand. “The administration made a policy decision to place Libya into a ‘normalized’ country status as quickly as possible,” Representatives Issa and Chaffetz wrote to President Obama as they began their investigation. The policy makers were intent on “conveying the impression that the situation in Libya was getting better, not worse.”
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They were wrong.

THE FELTMAN MEMO

On December 27, 2011, Assistant Secretary of State Jeffrey Feltman, whom I knew from Beirut as a straight-shooter, submitted a detailed request to Undersecretary of State for Management Patrick Kennedy, outlining future operations in a downsized U.S. mission in Benghazi in the same villa compound Stevens and his team first rented earlier that year.

With government operations back in Tripoli, they didn’t need to have a full-scale operation in Benghazi with seventeen diplomats and security personnel, as before. Eight was plenty, along with two additional slots for temporary duty officers. Given the deteriorating security situation in Benghazi, Feltman insisted that half of them be permanent Diplomatic Service security officers, one for each diplomat assigned to the post.
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That never happened.

Why maintain a presence in Benghazi in the first place? “Many Libyans have said the U.S. presence in Benghazi has a salutary, calming effect on easterners who are fearful that the new focus on Tripoli could once again lead to their neglect and exclusion from reconstruction and wealth distribution,” Feltman argued. Beyond that, the TNC was telling U.S. diplomats that it planned to shift the headquarters of the National Oil Company to Benghazi, making the eastern city once again the commercial capital of Libya.

Feltman also recommended that State maintain its presence in Benghazi separate from the CIA-run Annex, where an additional twenty-four U.S. personnel were based. “Although all the groups have come to the conclusion that co-location is the best and most economical option for continued presence, the State presence cannot be accommodated at the Annex, and the current State facility is not large enough to permit co-location,” he wrote.

But co-location was the only legal option under the provisions of the Omnibus Diplomatic Security and Antiterrorism Act of 1986 and the Secure Embassy Construction and Counter Terrorism Act of 1999 (SECCA). Both laws were written in response to catastrophic terrorist attacks on U.S. embassies: Beirut, in April 1983, and the simultaneous attacks in Kenya and Tanzania in July 1998. The law mandated rigorous security standards that had to be incorporated in all new U.S. diplomatic facilities overseas (the Inman standards), and a set of slightly lower standards for existing buildings, known as the Overseas Security Policy Board (OSPB) exceptions. The SECCA explicitly stated that the secretary of state “may not delegate the waiver authority with respect to the collocation” requirement, and must notify Congress whenever he or she exercises such a waiver. In writing this requirement into law, Congress expected that “waivers used by the Secretary would be infrequent, and therefore, considered more seriously in the instances such a waiver is exercised.”
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And yet the State Department never submitted a waiver to Congress for Benghazi. Admiral Michael Mullen, the co-chairman of the State Department’s Accountability Review Board, later claimed that “temporary facilities [such as Benghazi] fell through the cracks” and did not require waivers or congressional notification.
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That is simply not true. The ARB report tried to create an ingenious loophole: The Special Mission Compound “was never a consulate and never formally notified to the Libyan government,” and was therefore exempt from the SECCA and OSPD requirements. That also was not true.

This was just one of many aspects of the Benghazi debacle that directly engaged the responsibility of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. But the ARB never interviewed Clinton, and Mullen later told congressional investigators that the board found no evidence that would have given them reason to interview her.
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It was a stunning whitewash.

STAY-AT-HOME DIPLOMATS

Meanwhile, on the ground in Libya the collapse of the old regime and the constant jockeying for power among rival militias, many of them backed by foreign powers, had created a “security vacuum,” according to multiple emails and cables sent to Washington by U.S. diplomats and security personnel. Major cities such as Tripoli, Benghazi, and Derna had become free-fire zones, rife with carjackings, phony checkpoints, kidnappings, and firebombings. The release of sixteen thousand convicted criminals in the waning days of the Qaddafi regime further complicated matters, as they formed roving criminal gangs that preyed on the weak or unprotected.

The chief regional security officer at the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli, Eric A. Nordstrom, penned a series of alarming reports on the security situation for his superiors in Washington, in the hope of getting Washington to send the full complement of security officers they had promised. The lack of Diplomatic Security (DS) agents in Benghazi frequently meant the diplomats who were supposed to be meeting with locals and reporting on political and economic developments were confined to quarters. “It is my understanding from my UK colleagues that they have a five person team assigned to just their head of mission,” Nordstrom wrote in one February 2012 email. The U.S. team in Benghazi was lucky to have “two DS agents . . . guarding a compound with two other [Department of State] personnel.”
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Shawn Crowley was on the ground in Benghazi and was frustrated at the lack of response from Washington. “Apologies for being a broken record,” he wrote, “but beginning tomorrow Benghazi will be down to two [DS] agents. . . . Since one agent needs to remain on compound to protect the other USG employees, this leaves just one DS agent to travel off compound. RSO procedure at present calls for two agents to do so. We have no drivers and new local guard contract employees have no experience driving armored vehicles. What this means is that we will be all but restricted to compound for the vital February 12–18 timeframe,” when the Libyans planned to celebrate the first anniversary of their revolution.
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The problem was aggravated by the anticipated loss of two of the three Mobile Security Detachments (MSD), who had been ordered home by the State Department. (The first left in March, the second in early May.) These were special units of six Diplomatic Security officers, composed mostly of former Special Forces personnel, who provided heavily armed close protection for U.S. diplomats and visiting VIPs such as senators and congressional delegations in high-threat environments. They moved about at high speed in armored SUVs with tinted windows, wore body armor and ballistic shades, and carried assault rifles. Most of them also had Heckler & Koch machine pistols visibly strapped to their thighs. These were the men who were normally sent to secure diplomats and visitors in a war zone. State didn’t want them staying in Libya because they made Libya look like another Blackwater operation, just like Iraq. And that didn’t fit the narrative the politicians had decided to push.

In a follow-up email to colleagues in Washington, Nordstrom explained that he had been forced to confine diplomats to quarters in Benghazi for “upwards of ten days” because of the lack of security. “I’ve been placed in a very difficult spot when the Ambassador tells me that I need to support Benghazi but can’t direct [DS agents] there and been advised that DS isn’t going to provide more than 3 DS agents over the long term.”
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When it came to ordinary Americans, however, the State Department showed far greater caution, maintaining its advisory against all but essential travel to Libya. “The Embassy’s ability to assist U.S. citizens in the event of a crisis remains extremely limited,” a note from the embassy warned.
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Back in Washington, Chris Stevens backed up the requests for more security from his temporary desk at the State Department. So did the deputy chief of mission in Tripoli, Joan Polaschik, who flew to Washington to make the case directly with the person directly in charge of allocating Diplomatic Security assets at overseas posts, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for International Programs Charlene Lamb.

Polaschik knew from their email exchanges prior to her visit that Lamb was reluctant to send more DS agents, whose salaries came out of her budget. So she came with a workaround: Why not reauthorize the sixteen-member Special Forces team that was already on the ground in Tripoli on loan from the Pentagon? Called a Site Security Team, or SST, this heavily armed group of special operations warfighters had been assigned to the embassy in Tripoli once it was reopened in late 2011 by the Pentagon’s African Command (AFRICOM), to provide a visible deterrent against attacks. Since the Pentagon paid their salaries, they were essentially cost-free. They were scheduled to wind down operations by April 5. Why not reauthorize them so they could protect the Benghazi operation as well as Tripoli? Polaschik asked.

Lamb was adamant. Libya was going to “normal” status, and the “building,” that is, the State Department political leadership, didn’t want to make it appear as a war zone by having heavily armed troops guarding U.S. diplomats.

But Libya
was
a war zone, Polaschik insisted. The sound of gunfire was constant, with “armed militias beyond control of the central government” shooting up the towns in broad daylight. “Until the militias were off the streets and a strong national police force is established, we will not have a reliable, host government partner that is capable of responding to the embassy’s security needs. It is likely that we will need to maintain a heightened security posture for the foreseeable future,” she added.
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Ambassador Cretz was “taken aback by Lamb’s position,” and emailed Elizabeth L. Dibble, the principal deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, to complain. “I fail to see the logic as to why DS would not support an extension of SST, unless DoD is against it which we have no inkling of.” (The SST commander, Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Wood of the Utah National Guard, testified that his Defense Department superior, Lieutenant General Carter Ham, repeatedly told him
and
the State Department that the SST could remain as long as it was needed.) Cretz’s email went on, “The bottom line is we will be severely impacted without them and no one here is arguing that there has been any improvement in the security situation which would argue that they are no longer needed.”
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There is nothing ambiguous about that exchange. Our diplomats on the ground were begging for more security, but Washington turned them down.

When she was hauled over the coals during a congressional hearing just one month after the attacks, Charlene Lamb claimed the SST was no longer needed because the embassy had gone on a lower threat posture and was using locally trained militia to provide security, a solution that had worked in Yemen. That was too much for Nordstrom, who corrected her in public. “There was an emergency action cable dated in March [2012] that specifically references” why they went to a lower threat posture, he reminded her. “[T]he tone of that was that
since we had no choice
[emphasis mine], because we did not have the assets, we had no other option but to move to a model, not unlike in basketball, moving from man to man defense to a zone defense.”
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In other words, the State Department wanted no reminder of the need for an armed military presence to protect our diplomats. As one of Lamb’s deputies told Nordstrom at the time, “this is a political game,” a
policy
decision that came from the very top. Hillary’s war had been a shining success. That was the message they wanted to convey. And the secretary made clear to all her underlings that inconvenient facts would not be allowed to get in the way.

In the end, Lamb allowed the SST to remain until early August 2012, then pulled the plug—with fatal results.

After learning of Lamb’s stonewalling in Washington, Nordstrom wrote ominously: “I hope that nobody is injured as a result of an incident in Benghazi, since it would be particularly embarrassing to both DS and [Lamb] if it was the result of some sort of game they are playing.”
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DESCENT INTO CHAOS

By February 2012, the jihadi groups who controlled Benghazi began harassment and terrorist attacks on Western diplomats, NGOs, and international organizations, determined to drive Westerners out of the country. Royal Dutch Shell and other international oil companies took notice and started pulling out their expats.

On February 19, 2012, armed militiamen intercepted two female CIA analysts as they were returning home from Benghazi’s Benina airport. After a chase through the dark streets at one in the morning, the militiamen forced them to pull over and demanded to see their passports and inspect the vehicle and its cargo. Within minutes, the car was surrounded, with no hope of escape, as additional militiamen flocked to the scene. One of the women managed to make a few phone calls, and eventually the chief of base at the CIA Annex got the 17th February Martyrs Brigade, the militia provided by the Libyan government to serve as a “quick reaction force” in case of trouble, to send a team to the checkpoint to negotiate the women’s release. In reporting back to the embassy, the women noted there had been twelve separate checkpoints on the road back from the airport. They told Nordstrom the checkpoints were “aggressive, with armed personnel who attempted to open the doors of their vehicles.” But they insisted that they did not allow the militiamen to see their cargo. Ordinary diplomats would not have been driving themselves back from the airport, but would have had a Diplomatic Security officer with them. And CIA operations officers would have had a protection detail from the heavily armed Global Response Staff (GRS) guarding the Annex. The analysts fell through the cracks.
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