Dark Forces: The Truth About What Happened in Benghazi (2 page)

Once it became clear that those weapons were making their way to al Qaeda–related groups in Libya, the Obama White House desperately sought to clean up the mess and keep it from becoming public.

To do so, they sent members of the National Security Staff (formerly known as the National Security Council) to Libya on operational missions to negotiate arms buybacks from Libyan rebel leaders, in direct violation of the National Security Act of 1947. (Congress threatened to impeach President Ronald Reagan for similar abuse of his authority during the Iran-Contra scandal twenty-five years earlier.)

Dark Forces
will examine in detail the Obama administration’s covert operation to supply weapons to the Libyan rebels during the civil war, knowing full well that many of the rebel leaders had ties to al Qaeda.

It will show how White House counterterrorism advisor John Brennan (now CIA director) was personally in charge of U.S. covert operations in Libya, including a Fast and Furious–style gun-walking operation that allowed 800 Russian-made surface-to-air missiles from Qaddafi’s arsenal to reach al Qaeda groups in Africa and beyond.

Some of these missiles were used to shoot down U.S. combat helicopters in Afghanistan. Others made their way into the Sudan and Gaza, prompting Israel to launch air strikes to take them out. Still others were walked into the Sinai Peninsula under the control of al Qaeda groups close to deposed Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi. Photographic evidence I will present in this book shows that some wound up in the hands of Syrian rebels.

I believe Congress needs to investigate these missile-walking operations before more American lives are lost.

THE IRANIAN GAMBIT

The United States and Iran have been at war since 1979. Americans often are lulled in believing that the war is over, or that some cease-fire has been reached when the bodies stop piling up. That happened for a few years in the early 1990s, once Iran released U.S. hostages in Lebanon and stopped attacking our embassies and our military.

However, the Iranians take a longer view, especially the Quds Force, the overseas terror battalions of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps. They wait until the next opportunity to strike a deadly blow, preferably in such a way as to leave no trail back to Tehran. I detailed many of these covert Iranian terror attacks in an earlier book,
Countdown to Crisis: The Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran
.

So, I was not surprised when I began hearing anecdotal evidence of an Iranian involvement in Libya.

Americans on the ground in Benghazi during the early days of th
e
anti-Qaddafi rebellion were already reporting on the Iranian presence at that time (see chapter 6). Once Benghazi became the hotbed for arming the Syrian rebels—Iran’s deadly enemies—they expanded their activity dramatically.

By June 2012, the CIA was briefing the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli on Iran’s efforts to fund, train, and equip jihadi militias in Benghazi, including Ansar al-Sharia, the group most frequently blamed for carrying out the attacks. Those briefings—with redacted headers—were incorporated into a damning report released by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in January 2014.

But the CIA fatally underestimated Iranian resolve. In chapter 12, I reveal the details of the ingenious ploy the Iranians devised to lull the CIA chief of base into believing the danger they posed was over, along with the names of the Iranian operatives in charge of the attacks and the mechanism they used to finance them.

Put simply, the CIA got played. The story of how the Iranians outsmarted them will not be remembered as one of the agency’s finest hours.

Benghazi will “go down in history as the greatest cover-up. And I’m talking about the Pentagon Papers, Iran-Contra, Watergate and the rest of them,” predicted the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe.
1

A bipartisan report from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence concluded in January 2014 that the Benghazi attacks “were likely preventable.” The intelligence community “produced hundreds of analytic reports in the months preceding the September 11–12, 2012, attacks, providing strategic warning that militias and terrorist and affiliated groups had the capability and intent to strike U.S. and Western facilities and personnel in Libya,” the senators concluded.
2

The real scandal of Benghazi did not begin on September 11, 2012, but years earlier. This book will tell that story.

1

FROM TERRORIST TO FRIEND

It’s hard to believe that a U.S. president could once look to Libya as a success story. To most Americans, Libya has become synonymous with chaos, a wild and dangerous place where, as in Iraq, American dreams of democracy went to die. President Obama’s hesitation to use U.S. military might against Qaddafi in early 2011 prompted his political opponents to accuse him of leading from behind, even though U.S. aircraft, U.S. airmen, and U.S. taxpayers bore the brunt of the NATO-led no-fly zone over Libya during the first few months of the conflict, at a cost to taxpayers of $550 million for the first two weeks alone.

The debacle in Benghazi and the image of U.S. weakness it projected to the world only heightened this sense of futility. It prompted at least one prospective Republican presidential hopeful, Senator Rand Paul, to argue in favor of a broad American pullback from around the world and a major military downsizing. It also will undoubtedly become a campaign issue should former secretary of state Hillary Clinton enter the 2016 race.

As they contemplated a similar U.S. military involvement in Syria’s bloody civil war over the summer of 2013, politicians of both parties became increasingly worried that U.S. military aid could fall into the hands of jihadi terrorist groups, such as the ones who benefited from the U.S.-Qatari arms pipeline to the Libyan rebels who ousted Qaddafi.

But one U.S. president
could
look to Qaddafi’s Libya as a success story. And it’s a story that has never been fully told.

THE MAD DOG OF TRIPOLI

For several weeks in March 1986, U.S. and Libyan warships and combat jets had been dancing toward war in the Gulf of Sidra, the giant bay stretching from Misrata, just outside of Tripoli, all the way to Benghazi. Qaddafi drew a straight line across the Mediterranean between those two points and claimed everything south of it as Libyan territorial waters. He dared anyone—meaning the United States—to cross this “line of death.”

Qaddafi’s exclusion zone included waters seventy miles from the nearest Libyan coastline, far beyond the twelve-nautical-mile limit recognized as the international standard. President Ronald Reagan asserted the right of the United States and its NATO allies to conduct naval operations in international waters and on March 23, 1986, ordered three U.S. carrier battle groups—USS
America,
USS
Coral Sea
, and USS
Saratoga
—with 225 aircraft and some thirty warships, to cross Qaddafi’s double-dare line. It was a formidable armada only a madman would try to oppose.

U.S. warships crossed the line of death twice that year without incident. However, on March 24, 1986, the Libyans responded, sending missile boats and MiG-23 Flogger and MiG-25 Foxbat fighters jets to counter the Americans. In every engagement, the Americans blew away their Libyan counterparts or forced them to flee before the shooting began. The Americans sunk two of Qaddafi’s French-built Combattante II missile boats, a Soviet-built corvette, and killed thirty-five Libyan sailors. Qaddafi was humiliated and vowed revenge, publicly calling on Arabs everywhere to kill Americans.
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Operation Prairie Fire appeared to be a resounding success, projecting precisely the image of a strong America that President Reagan had worked so hard to build after the “malaise” of the Carter years.

Just one week later, Qaddafi took his revenge. America was still vulnerable, and he proved it with cowardly skill.

On April 2, 1986, a member of the Abu Nidal terrorist group, which was then based in Libya and armed by Qaddafi, placed a bomb made with Semtex H plastic explosive under the seat of TWA flight 840 as it was on approach to the Athens airport on the short flight from Rome. Because of the relatively low altitude at the time of the explosion, the plane did not explode. But four passengers—all Americans—were sucked out of the hole in the fuselage. Pilot Pete Peterson was welcomed as a hero for his skill in safely landing his badly damaged aircraft at the Athens airport. While Qaddafi quickly announced he had nothing to do with the attack, it was well known that the Abu Nidal organization were his protégés.

Just three days after TWA 840, a bomb exploded in the early morning hours at La Belle discotheque in West Berlin, Germany, a favorite haunt of American soldiers. Sergeant Kenneth T. Ford, twenty-one, and a twenty-nine-year-old Turkish woman, Nermin Hannay, were sitting near the disc jockey’s booth and died instantly. Sergeant James E. Goins, twenty-five, died two months later of his injuries. Another 230 people were wounded, including seventy-nine American servicemen, many of whom lost limbs or were permanently disabled. The terrorist had placed a bomb filled with shrapnel and two kilograms of Semtex beneath a table by the dance floor, then left the scene before it went off. That was ten times the amount of the deadly plastic explosive used on TWA 840.

President Ronald Reagan pointed the finger at Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, the outlandish Libyan dictator who portrayed himself as a one-man army out to defeat American and Zionist “imperialism.” This was the same Qaddafi who often elicited smiles—even smirks—because of his flair for the exotic, dressing alternately in designer capes and Bedouin hats, or in outlandish military uniforms that bore a greater resemblance to Sergeant Pepper than to Sergeant Shaft.

Reagan wasn’t amused when he took the podium at a White House press conference on April 9, 1986. Notorious left-wing reporter Helen Thomas, who was born in Lebanon and later in life revealed herself to be a rabid anti-Semite, asked Reagan if U.S. policies weren’t to blame for the attacks on America.

“Well, we know that this mad dog of the Middle East has a goal of a world revolution,” Reagan said. “And where we figure in that, I don’t know. Maybe we’re just the enemy because—it’s a little like climbing Mount Everest—because we’re here. But there’s no question but that he has singled us out more and more for attack, and we’re aware of that.”
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What Reagan couldn’t say was that the NSA had intercepted communications between Qaddafi himself and intelligence officers working out of the Libyan embassy in East Berlin, ordering them to carry out the disco attack in a manner “to cause maximum and indiscriminate casualties.”
3

Less than one week later, Reagan ordered air strikes on Libya, code-named Operation El Dorado Canyon, widely seen as an attempt to assassinate Qaddafi. In addition to Libyan military barracks, air defense sites and air bases in Tripoli and Benghazi, U.S. jets hit a residential compound used by Qaddafi and his family, killing his three-year-old adopted daughter, Hana, and wounding his youngest son, Khamis. The boy grew up to command the notorious Khamis Brigade, the best-trained and best-equipped unit in the Libyan armed forces, responsible for several military victories and atrocities against rebel forces in the 2011 civil war.
4

Contrary to Reagan’s expectation, the air strikes didn’t put the “mad dog of the Middle East” out of the terrorism business. Just four days before Christmas 1988, as Reagan was preparing to hand over the White House to President-elect George H. W. Bush, Pan Am Flight 103 departed Heathrow Airport headed for New York. Thirty-eight minutes after takeoff, a block of Semtex plastic explosive hidden in a suitcase ripped a giant hole out of the Boeing 747, splitting the plane into pieces. The cockpit of the
Maid of the Seas
landed virtually intact near a churchyard in Lockerbie, Scotland, and became an iconic image. One wing of the aircraft, filled with jet fuel, burst into flames on impact, killing eleven people on the ground. With the 259 passengers and crew, 189 of them American, it was the deadliest terrorist attack on America since Iran hit the U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon in October 1983.

While the CIA and other U.S. government agencies initially suspected Iran of carrying out the Lockerbie attack, the discovery of a fragment of the detonator used in the bomb ultimately allowed prosecutors to trace it through the Swiss manufacturer to a batch sold to a Libyan intelligence operative.

With the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Empire, a new pro-Western government led by playwright Václav Havel came to power in Czechoslovakia. Havel startled the world in March 1990 by announcing that his communist predecessors had exported one thousand tons of Semtex plastic explosive to Libya. Here was an opportunity to unlock some of the Soviet Bloc’s best-kept secrets, so I traveled to Prague to find out more. I wasn’t disappointed.

Although the actual amount turned out to be closer to seven hundred tons, it was still enough to keep terrorists busy for the next one hundred fifty years, as Havel said. Officials at Omnipol, the arms export emporium of the former communist regime, told me that Libya accounted for 98 percent of all their Semtex sales. Qaddafi may have used some of the explosives to blast huge tunnels for his Great Man-Made River project, the ostensible end use for the sales. But he also re-exported the deadly plastic explosive to every terrorist group imaginable, including the Irish Republican Army (IRA), Ahmed Jibril’s PFLP-GC (a prime suspect in Pan Am 103), the Lebanese Armed Revolutionary Faction (LARF) of George Ibrahim Abdallah, the Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (ASALA), the Organization of 15 May-Abu Ibrahim (based in Iraq), and Yasser Arafat’s praetorian guard, Force 17.
5

Crippling international sanctions and a travel ban imposed by the United Nations in reprisal for the Pan Am 103 attack kept ordinary Libyans in a box throughout the 1990s, but they did little to keep Colonel Qaddafi at bay. He continued to provide arms, plastic explosives, money, and training to terrorist groups around the world and, in the late 1990s, turned his sights to acquiring a nuclear weapon.

For three successive American presidents—Reagan, Bush 41, and Clinton—Qaddafi remained a deadly pariah, who seemed to revel in his “mad dog” image.

After the September 11, 2001, attacks on America, all that began to change.

THE FALCONER

In a way, it was Osama bin Laden who first pushed Qaddafi toward the West. But it took a fellow falconer to close the deal.

Libyans who had gone to Afghanistan to fight the great jihad against the Soviet Union came home to wage jihad against Qaddafi in the 1990s. In 1994, they stormed a prison in Benghazi to liberate fellow Islamists and declared their allegiance to bin Laden. After nearly eighteen months of running gun battles with regime forces, they announced the formation of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) in September 1995. Their initial communiqué, issued by Libyan exiles granted political asylum in London, called Qaddafi’s rule “an apostate regime that has blasphemed against the faith of God Almighty” and declared its overthrow to be “the foremost duty after faith in God.”
6

In February 1996, an LIFG member threw a bomb beneath Qad-dafi’s motorcade that killed several of his bodyguards. A former MI5 officer, David Shayler, later told Britain’s
Observer
newspaper that British intelligence financed the assassination attempt “to the tune of $160,000.”
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In November, another LIFG operative tossed a grenade at Qaddafi while he was visiting the desert town of Brak.

Qaddafi the terrorist had become a target of bin Laden’s terrorist gang. So when the 9/11 attacks hit America, Qaddafi condemned bin Laden publicly, asked Libyans to donate blood, and said the United States was justified to retaliate.

In his account of Qaddafi’s turnaround, former CIA director George Tenet called Qaddafi’s 9/11 statement “an interesting sign,” and felt it was a good time to revive an intelligence back channel established two years earlier by the second in command of the CIA’s counterterrorism center, Ben Bonk.
8

To get the ball rolling, the White House quietly designated the LIFG as an international terrorist organization on September 25, 2001, and froze their assets in the United States. In mid-October, Tenet dispatched Bonk to London for a face-to-face meeting with Qaddafi’s intelligence chief, Musa Kusa, at the home of Saudi ambassador Bandar bin Sultan. The Libyan handed over information on LIFG members that helped the United States identify several top deputies to Osama bin Laden when they were picked up in counterterrorism raids in Pakistan and Egypt later that year.
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However, when Bonk moved on to another CIA job a few months later, the back channel languished. It fell to a lifelong British spy named Mark Allen to revive it.

Allen was head of the counterterrorism division of MI6 (formally known as the Special Intelligence Service), putting him a notch higher in the bureaucracy than Bonk. Allen had learned Arabic at Oxford decades earlier and spent a summer as a young man crisscrossing the Jordanian desert on a camel he had purchased at a local souk. Sitting on his haunches sipping bitter coffee with Bedouins, he fell in love with their simple lifestyle. At twenty-eight, he published a book on falconry with a preface by Wilfred Thesiger, a modern-day Lawrence of Arabia. He later went to hone his language skills at Britain’s fabled spy school in the mountains above Beirut, the Middle East Centre for Arabic Studies. How many American spies could boast of such training?
10

On what he claimed was a personal initiative, Allen began talking to Musa Kusa separately after that initial meeting at Prince Bandar’s London mansion.

Allen knew that Qaddafi was seeking an exit from sanctions, which had been suspended, but not removed, two years earlier when Libya handed over two intelligence agents found guilty in a Scottish court for their role in the Pan Am 103 attack. And he knew that Musa Kusa had Qaddafi’s ear. So, he invited him one afternoon in late 2001 to the Travellers Club, a posh London watering hole frequented by diplomats, millionaires, and spies.

The 9/11 attacks have changed the world, Allen began. That’s why my American colleague sought you out. It’s no longer possible to conduct murder and mayhem and think you can retreat back home and no one will find you. Look what’s happening to the Taliban in Afghanistan.