Dark Forces: The Truth About What Happened in Benghazi (18 page)

On March 8, neighborhood residents sent everyone at the Special Mission Compound into high alert when they set off a series of explosions just outside the gates. A subsequent investigation determined that the explosions were “fish bombs” made of gelatin plastic explosive detonated at a wedding ceremony.

The next day, one hundred carloads of armed Salafis stormed a famous Sufi Muslim shrine in Zliten, where they clashed with large crowds of local residents and gun-waving militiamen. Had they succeeded in destroying the shrine, which contained the tomb of revered Sufi scholar Sidi Abul-Salam al-Asmar al-Fituri, they would have ignited a sectarian war.

On March 12, an American and a Ukrainian journalist were detained by the Kufra military council and held for several hours of questioning.

On March 16, armed demonstrators in Benghazi favoring autonomy from Tripoli clashed with supporters of the TNC. Gunfights erupted after Friday night prayers on Freedom Square and spilled over into the surrounding streets. At least one person was killed and five others injured.

On March 18, armed intruders dressed in military fatigues and wearing balaclavas broke into the British school in Benghazi and robbed the staff of valuables.

On March 22, a small convoy of Toyota Hilux vehicles screeched to a halt at the rear gate of the U.S. mission compound in Benghazi, firing AK47s and demanding that they be let in. The local guard on duty at the gate fled at the sound of gunfire, but managed to activate the internal defense alarm, which alerted the two DS agents at the compound and the 17th February Martyrs Brigade unit responsible for security in the neighborhood. The Martyrs Brigade eventually determined that the would-be intruders were from the al-Awfea
katiba
, under the control of the Libyan Ministry of Defense, and were patrolling the area after a firefight in search of a missing suspect.

Four separate incidents occurred the next day, March 23. Members of the Zintan Militia smashed through the front door of the five-star Rixos al-Nasr hotel in Tripoli and opened fire with automatic weapons in the lobby. They abducted the hotel’s general manager, a Turkish citizen named Sukru Kocak, and took him to the Fallah neighborhood of Tripoli, where he was beaten in the head until his right eardrum burst. He was eventually released after the Turkish embassy and other officials intervened with the TNC. The militiamen were upset because Kocak had asked one of their men to pay up or leave the hotel after staying there for six months without paying.

Former rebels upset with the growing chaos stormed the Imsa’ed border crossing with Egypt, closing it until further notice to protest the corruption of the Ministry of Interior officials who had been put in charge of the border. The former rebels accused the officials of smuggling. The border post was reopened two days later.

Meanwhile, soldiers and police officers held a protest march through the streets of Benghazi, calling for the full reactivation of the army and state security services as the only means of restoring law and order. In a separate incident, armed militiamen blocked the Sidi Khribish coastal road, demanding that the Tripoli government pay them their promised government salaries.

Celebratory gunfire was so frequent that the embassy now referred to it as “CSAF”—celebratory small arms fire. The RSO and his team reported several incidents each week when CSAF impacted in various diplomatic compounds in Tripoli and Benghazi. In one such incident, a senior enlisted man from Colonel Wood’s SST was hit in the forearm by a falling bullet while taking out the garbage. “It was just raining bullets,” Wood told me.

On March 26, a gunfight erupted at high noon in front of the Dutch embassy in downtown Tripoli involving automatic weapons and heavy weapons fire. That evening, a separate gun battle erupted outside the Polish embassy, involving unknown individuals and Libyan Military Police.

Western countries had launched a number of programs to educate Libyan women, and these were also targeted. On March 28, for example, someone tossed a hand grenade into the courtyard of the Women’s Higher Vocational Center in Derna.

All of this was just a warm-up act. On April 2, 2012, a mob attacked two armored cars carrying British diplomats in Benghazi, a serious wake-up call to the British government of the deteriorating security situation. The British convoy had apparently strayed into a demonstration pitting rival militias, one of which served as the local Traffic Police. When the shooting got hot, the Interior Ministry deployed a third security force known as “Al-Nayda” or the “Al-Shorta Police” to restore order. The demonstrators may have mistaken the British armored cars for rival militia vehicles.

When Lieutenant Colonel Andy Wood arrived in Libya that February to assume command of the SST, the scene on the ground was absolute chaos. “Think of it like waking up one day and all forms of government just stopped. You woke up in the morning and there was no federal government, no state government, and no county government. In fact, there were no policemen at any intersections. The lights are all off. So it’s just, do whatever you want. It doesn’t take long for the best and worst of people to come out, especially in a post-Qaddafi era society, where there was a lot of revenge killing going on and local militias,” he told me.
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Wood and his men never knew, when they ventured beyond the embassy compound to escort the ambassador, what they would encounter. “The same checkpoint you’d go through in the morning would be manned by somebody the exact opposite in the afternoon,” he said. This led to frequent stand-offs, with militiamen at the checkpoint leveling their guns at the U.S. diplomatic motorcade. “Some militias didn’t understand the whole diplomatic immunity thing,” Wood said with a wry laugh.

Libyans who worked for the embassy were also harassed. One local-hire employee was abducted at a checkpoint on his way home from work. Luckily, he had a tracker on him, so Wood and his men were able to follow his abductors to a warehouse they were using as a base for their
katiba
. Wood got his contacts at the TNC security apparatus to hire another militia to attack the warehouse. “It was a matter of playing one militia off another,” he said. “And then, the very next day that same militia you were fighting, now you are supporting them to do something else.”

Benghazi was even worse than Tripoli. Wood remembers his first trip to Benghazi, along with the RSO, Eric Nordstrom that spring. “The guys in Benghazi had been telling us, ‘It’s crazy here, it’s crazy here.’ When I got there I took a look round and said, holy sh-t, this place
is
bad,” Wood recalled. They had just one ordinary DS agent at the compound and no one from the MSD teams. “The compound was huge and open, with walls you could jump over,” he told me. Some of the security cameras weren’t working, and there were spots where the new security fencing that had been installed suddenly stopped. It was the type of place that would be impossible to defend if attacked, Wood thought.

That’s the picture as Colonel Wood, Eric Nordstrom, and all the security people on the ground could see it. But that’s not what the State Department was saying—then, or now.

“SIR, ANSAR AL-SHARIA GOT THEIR FUNDING”

In the midst of all the chaos, Ansar al-Sharia was moving in and ramping up their operation. They were the big dog, and they had a plan. They were using their association with the Libyan
government
-backed 17th February Martyrs Brigade, which provided the armed guards who patrolled the perimeter fence of the Special Mission Compound in Benghazi, to gather intelligence on U.S. personnel movements and operations.

The more Colonel Wood watched them expand and train and plot their attacks, the more worried he became. Every night, as he went to bed, he tried to picture his counterpart in Ansar al-Sharia. What was
he
planning to do tomorrow? How was
he
training his forces? What weak points had
he
identified in the Americans’ security? Where would
he
attack next? When?

Over that fateful spring, he watched the ranks of Ansar al-Sharia swell as battle-hardened foreign jihadis and trainers began flowing in from places like Iran to mentor their Libyan recruits. Wood felt that he and his men were being out paced. Ansar al-Sharia was nimble.
They
were quick. Whereas the Americans and their Libyan counterparts were just hunkering down, waiting for disaster to strike.

Lieutenant Colonel Wood had spent his entire military career on the white side of Special Operations. At heart, he was a teacher, a trainer. In previous deployments to places like the Philippines, Yemen, and Kosovo, he had helped the local military train elite squadrons of Special Operations fighters who knew how to hunt terrorists, and how to do it without terrorizing the local population. Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) had programs and the expertise to do this. It was one reason they sent senior commanders around the world to schmooze with their military brethren in countries like Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the Philippines, Yemen, or Nigeria. Wood knew he wouldn’t be staying in Libya indefinitely and, that sooner or later, the Libyans would have to get control of the situation on the ground by themselves if the embassy was ever to be secure. The solution was to stand up a counterterrorism proxy force in Libya that could rout out groups like Ansar al-Sharia on their own. But he was having problems getting the paperwork approved.

The vehicle for such training was Section 1208 of the Defense Authorization Act. Since 2005, the Pentagon has used Section 1208 “to support proxy forces,” according to a November 30, 2011, West Point study. “Until recently, such proxy forces would principally have been paid for with CIA funds under the authority of a presidential finding for covert action . . . [and] will seldom be acknowledged openly.” Separate from the host nation’s armed forces—and, at any rate, Libya didn’t have any central government-controlled security force at that point—the proxy force “works principally (though perhaps not exclusively) for the United States.” These proxy forces can be “irregular forces, groups, or individuals who work with [U.S.] Special Operations Forces for counter-terrorism purposes.”
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“That’s my program,” Wood told me.

Wood had already identified Libyan candidates for the new counterterrorism force, and had begun basic training, which didn’t require formal approval. They had a training camp up on the coast outside of Tripoli where they put them through the equivalent of the Rangers’ Special Operations Preparations Course, four weeks of intensive physical training and basic soldiering skills, such as tying knots and learning how to use a GPS for land navigation. But now they needed to move on to lethal things, and for that he needed a piece of paper.

At one point, Wood learned through intelligence channels that the Iranians who had deployed to Libya to train Ansar al-Sharia had gotten authorization to bring their dependents to Benghazi. When Wood saw that, it all clicked.

At the time, Rear Admiral Brian Losey was in charge of all Special Operations troops in Africa. (His official title was commander, Combined Joint Task Force—Horn of Africa.) He was getting hundreds of emails from officers spread across dozens of countries every day. How was Wood’s email going to stand out?

“Sir,” Wood began. “Ansar al-Sharia has had their funding approved. Their training is approved. They now have approval to bring dependents in country. So we need to be doing the same thing here, or they’re going to be ahead of us, and they’ll win.”

It worked. Admiral Losey blasted off an email back to Special Operations Command at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida, asking them to green light the funding. Colonel Wood and his JSOC troops could now teach their Libyan protégés how to kill al Qaeda. The Libyans were eager. They were fast learners. And they were really proud, Wood saw. They understood that their enemy was all outsiders, not Libyans. “They wanted to become the premier CT unit in Libya,” he told me.
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Lieutenant Colonel Wood had another motive, he confided. He felt genuine affection for Ambassador Stevens, and wanted to do everything he could to keep his team in place until the security situation sorted itself out. He understood that the State Department higher-ups wanted the military out of the way, so by getting the SST transferred back to DoD authority (Title 10), he was hoping to get around the political objections to having them remain in Tripoli.

But Washington stood firm. They wanted Libya back to normal, and so Lieutenant Colonel Wood and his special warriors were sent home by mid-August, a month before the Benghazi attacks.

With their protection stripped away, Ambassador Stevens and Sean Smith never had a chance.

THE MISSILE POSSE

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her top political cadres eagerly sought opportunities to tout their “success” in Libya. They dispatched an assistant secretary to a Washington think tank to peddle the story that quick thinking and smart action had nipped in the bud the threat of proliferation from Qaddafi’s vast arms stockpiles.

In hindsight, the presentation by Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs Andrew J. Shapiro at the Stimson Center was remarkable for its candor. “Currently in Libya, we are engaged in the most extensive effort to combat the proliferation of MANPADS in U.S. history,” he said. Shapiro explained that Qaddafi’s Libya had “accumulated the largest stockpile of MANPADS of any non-MANPADS producing country in the world.” The United States was determined to prevent the shoulder-fired missiles from getting into the hands of terrorist groups.

Shapiro revealed that he had sent to Benghazi one of his deputies, Colonel Mark Adams, in August 2011, three months
before
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced the missile collection effort. Working out of the CIA Annex, Adams and his men teamed with British intelligence and Special Forces officers and scoured the country inspecting ammo dumps and bunkers. “Thus far these teams have helped to identify, recover, and secure approximately 5,000 MANPADS and components,” Shapiro said. “We the United States acted quite quickly because of the threat posed by MANPADS to get people on the ground as quickly as we could. And these teams have been partnered with TNC personnel at every step of the way. . . . We have used our technical expertise to assist their efforts to secure weapons. And we plan to continue to train the Libyans to take care of their stockpiles on their own.”
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