Dark Forces: The Truth About What Happened in Benghazi (19 page)

That sounds like a tremendous success story; and for the most part, it was—except for the fact that the CIA estimated that Qaddafi had upwards of 20,000 MANPADS. In other words, the United States could only account for one out of four. Asked if he had changed his assessment of the security of that vast arsenal since December 2011, when news reports began to surface of weapons being shifted to Syria, Shapiro was sanguine. “We believe the majority of these weapons are still in Libya, and do not have evidence to change that impression.”

That was simply not true.

In addition to the incidents I mentioned in the previous chapter, there was a steady stream of intelligence reporting of Russian, French, and, possibly, American surface-to-air missiles moving from Libya to neighboring countries. Shapiro hinted that leakage across Libya’s porous borders was a problem that State understood and had under control. His team had “prepared little pamphlets to let a border security guard identify what a MANPADS is,” he said. “Thus far, we have had some success in working with the neighboring countries in the region. . . .”

The director of national intelligence, Lieutenant General James Clapper, contradicted Shapiro’s happy talk in congressional testimony just two weeks later. Noting the State Department’s “active and aggressive program” to round up the missing missiles, Clapper acknowledged that State only had “recovered about a quarter of them, about 5,000 MANPADS.”

Some of the missing 15,000 missiles had probably been destroyed in the course of the NATO bombing campaign. “But the truth is that the MANPADS and other weapons are distributed all over the place, in homes, in factories, in schoolhouses,” Clapper said. “[I]t’s all over. So there is—there is a concern, obviously about recovery of these—of these weapons.”
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And while the Obama White House was still claiming they had eliminated the al Qaeda threat by having SEAL Team 6 take out Osama bin Laden—an operation vetoed three times by Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett as too risky—nonpolitical national security professionals provided a more sober assessment of al Qaeda’s resilience. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) Director Lieutenant General Ron Burgess told Congress that the United States “remain[ed] in a race against their ability to evolve, regenerate leadership and launch attacks.” While al Qaeda losses in 2011 had forced the group and its affiliates to focus on “self-preservation and reconstitution,” they still possessed the ability to carry out transnational attacks in Europe and against the United States. “Al Qaida in the lands of the Maghreb, or AQIM, acquired weapons from Libya this year, kidnapped Westerners and continues its support to Nigeria-based Boko Haram,” Burgess said.
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There were also reports that MANPADS were turning up in battlefields as far afield as the Horn of Africa and Afghanistan, where they were being used to kill Americans.

On February 18, 2012, an American U-28A spy plane disappeared on approach to Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, six miles out from the Djibouti international airport, killing all four Special Operations airmen on board. They had been on an ISR mission (Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance] against al Qaeda targets in the region when they went down. The four men—Captain Ryan Hall, 30; Captain Nicholas Whitlock, 29; First Lieutenant Justin Wilkins, 26; and senior airman Julian Scholten, 26, were assigned to special operations and intelligence squadrons based at Hurlburt Field, Florida, under the command of Colonel Jim Slife, commander of the 1st Special Operations Wing. The Pentagon reported they had observed “no hostile fire” in the vicinity of the downed aircraft.
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But the classified military intelligence SIPRNet (Secure Internet Protocol Router Network) was jammed with reports of a claim by al-Shabaab, the al Qaida affiliate in neighboring Somalia, that they had downed the modified Pilatus-12 turboprop with a surface-to-air missile.
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Lieutenant Colonel Andy Wood heard about it as far away as his base in Tripoli. “They were hyperventilating” about the Djibouti incident, he told me. The intelligence analysts “thought it was one of these SA-7s” that went missing in Libya. Was this like the unexplained helo crashes in Afghanistan that the Pentagon was covering up to keep the public from learning about the missing MANPADS?

Sources within the Air Force Special Operations community tell me that the crash investigation eventually attributed the crash to pilot error caused by spatial disorientation. Both the shape of the debris field and the black box recordings showed that the pilot had flown the aircraft into the ground, apparently unaware of his position. The lack of moonlight that night, added to lights on the ground, “produced what aircrews call a ‘black hole’ where it is difficult to gauge the plane’s attitude and position,” according to the crash investigation. “All of us who have flown Special Operations missions know that night missions, especially those flown when using night vision goggles, are inherently risky,” former Air Force Special Operations Master navigator Dick Brauer,
Colonel
, USAF, told me.
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Brauer is a founder of Special Operations Speaks, a group that has relentlessly pushed Congress and the administration to reveal the truth about what happened in Benghazi.

A few days after the U-28A went down, al-Shabaab fighters fired what appeared to be surface-to-air missiles at two Somali helicopters outside of Mogadishu. According to eyewitnesses, the missiles were “chasing” the helicopters, a clear sign that they were heat-seeking MANPADS, not unguided rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs). “It really gave us a surprise, because what they shot was chasing the helicopter with every angle it turned, but the helicopter only just managed to escape,” one witness told a regional newsletter.
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Israel had also begun to see more advanced SA-24 Igla-S missiles turn up in Gaza. They believed as many as 480 of these missiles, purchased by Iran from looted Libyan government stockpiles, wound up in the hands of Hamas.
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While Israel’s Apache AH-64 attack helicopters and most of their combat aircraft were equipped with flares aimed at spoofing the infrared heat-seeking sensor that spotted aircraft engines, commercial airliners had no such protection.

Everyone dealing with the missing MANPADS knew how deadly they were. “We realized we were walking on eggs,” a former U.S. Air Force pilot detailed to the State Department on the MANPADS mission told me. “All it took was one of these fired at a civilian airliner and hundreds of people could die.”
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It was a zero-sum game. And our side was down by five thousand.

THE NATIONAL SECURITY STAFF

The tragic irony is that counterterrorism professionals knew removing Qaddafi had opened a Pandora’s box that the United States could not close with the wave of a magic wand.

The fall of Qaddafi had created a “new and worrisome set of openings for terrorist organizations,” the State Department’s coordinator for counterterrorism, Daniel Benjamin, told Congress. “Loose Libyan weapons and the return of refugees and mercenaries to their countries of origin across the Sahel has greatly increased the internal pressures faced by these countries.”
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Al Qaeda in the Islamic Magreb (AQIM), historically the “weakest of Al Qaeda affiliates,” probably had benefited the most, Ambassador Benjamin added. The intelligence community subsequently concluded that AQIM participated in the attack on U.S. facilities in Benghazi on September 11, 2012, in conjunction with the Iranian-backed Ansar al-Sharia group.
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A top Defense Department official who specialized in Africa seconded Ambassador Benjamin’s comments: “Based on proliferation concerns following the regime change in Libya, DoD has also incorporated Man Portable Air Defense System, or MANPADS awareness and mitigation training in our mil-to-mil engagements” throughout Africa.
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A third official, who provided written answers to questions for the record submitted at the same congressional hearing, acknowledged that the increased flow of arms to terrorist groups caused by the Libyan revolution had “profoundly affected the region.”
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Even the Obama White House was worried that its support for the Libyan rebels and the ouster of Qaddafi had benefited al Qaeda and was creating new threats across Africa and beyond. Under counterterrorism advisor John Brennan’s authority, the White House established a special task force, led by National Security Staff, to conduct “assessments and training, and [offer] assistance throughout the region.” This previously undisclosed White House unit “has provided funds for fuel and spare parts to border security forces” to countries neighboring Libya, to help them stanch the flow of weapons from Qaddafi’s stockpiles.
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A source who was posted to a U.S. government facility in Libya in 2012 told me that two “arms negotiators who reported directly to the National Security Staff at the White House” came to Tripoli and Benghazi while he was there to “manage contractors” engaged in the hunt for the missing MANPADS.

“We watched missiles in small numbers leave through Algeria for Mali,” this source told me. “We could see it happen. We had drone feeds. And I kept wondering, can’t we put a bomb on that thing to stop this? We know it was sold here, it crossed the border over there. What the hell! But we were told to just let it go.” The military chain of command, which ran up through AFRICOM headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany, refused to arm the drones without approval from the president, and the White House appeared content to sit back and watch the missiles disappear into the hands of al Qaeda.

What was this mysterious National Security Staff, and what was its legal authority? The Obama administration quietly announced its creation in May 2009 as a means of “ending the artificial divide between White House staff who have been dealing with national security and homeland security issues.”
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Every president has sought to put his stamp on the National Security Council, the only agency in government tasked with coordinating operations across multiple cabinet departments. Created by Congress under the National Security Act of 1947, for more than four decades its activities were restricted to coordinating U.S. responses to foreign security threats to the nation. President Clinton expanded its responsibilities by creating the National Economic Council. After the September 11, 2001, attacks on America, President George W. Bush created the Homeland Security Advisory Council in an effort to facilitate communication between overseas intelligence-gathering agencies and domestic law enforcement.

But nowhere is the NSC authorized to carry out
operations
under its own name or to obligate money or conduct military-style training, as State Department official Donald Yamamoto revealed that the National Security Staff was doing. Indeed, that’s what made the Iran-Contra affair under President Ronald Reagan a scandal and, for some, an impeachable offense. Under White House authority, National Security Council employees engaged in the actual conduct of U.S. foreign policy by raising money for the Contras, meeting with intelligence operatives overseas, and selling U.S. weapons to Iran, all without congressional oversight. It was a clear violation of the National Security Act.

So, what were negotiators from the National Security Staff doing in Libya? Why would they be conducting training and committing U.S. taxpayer dollars? And why would they be managing contractors who ostensibly were working under State Department authority to buy up MANPADS?

My sources say that
all
the contractors engaged in the MANPADS buyback were foreign nationals, “mainly North Africans and Africans, not white guys who would stand out in Libya.” One advantage to hiring non-U.S. citizens was the lack of oversight and accountability, especially if they were hired directly by the White House, not by a statutory federal agency. That put them beyond the reach of Congress. The whole operation was off the books.

They also weren’t that effective; at least, that’s what the military was told. “The guys in the East, close to Egypt, were having no luck,” a source who was posted to a U.S. government facility in Libya in 2012, who was following these activities, told me. “They were getting nothing, so they closed down the contract due to lack of performance.” That happened not long after the South African street operators were kidnapped and released by the jihadis in late April.

A second group of contractors was more successful. With the assistance of U.S. military advisors from Tripoli, they found a few smaller depots in the Tripoli area, and one in the southern desert, which they blew up in the spring of 2012. “The Qaddafi people who knew where that stuff was at were not very open. They didn’t know how they would be treated, so they used [information on MANPADS] to barter their position,” my source said.

The State Department tried to disguise the role of the contractors in its public statements. In written replies to questions from Senator Lindsey Graham in February 2012 on the MANPADS collection effort, it said that the $40 million spent in Libya had “underwritten surveys of more than 1,500 bunkers at 134 Ammunition Storage Areas (ASAs) by Libyan-led inspection teams. Thus far these teams have helped to identify, recover, and secure approximately 5,000 MANPADS and components.”
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However, not all of the weapons were being destroyed. Both the Saudi government and the Qatari government had leased enormous warehouses down by the port of Benghazi, where they had stockpiled weapons during the civil war to distribute to rebel groups. Those same warehouses were now being used to store weapons for the Syrian rebels. Since it wasn’t a U.S. government operation, it was never reported to Congress, even though the White House, the CIA, and the State Department all knew what was going on.

The MANPADS collection effort screeched to a halt in Benghazi in late April or early May 2012 for a simple reason: The White House wanted to give the Qataris time to purchase the weapons and send them to the Syrian rebels. United Nations arms inspectors subsequently identified no fewer than twenty-eight rotations of Qatari Air Force C-17 military transport aircraft between Qatar and Turkey in a single four-month period, which they believed carried weapons for the Syrian rebels the aircraft had picked up in Libya.
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