Dark Forces: The Truth About What Happened in Benghazi (21 page)

JOHN BRENNAN’S IRON CLAW

Qaddafi’s missing missiles were also moving south through the desert into Niger and Algeria, along smuggling routes established by Qaddafi years ago to fuel revolts up and down the African continent. With the victory of the revolution, control over the lucrative arms trade routes was up for grabs.

“We’d been watching those smuggling routes for decades,” says John Maguire, who retired from the CIA after serving as deputy chief of station in the sprawling CIA base in Baghdad in 2004, at the peak of the insurrection against the U.S. occupation.

Once Abdelhakim Belhaj was appointed head of the Tripoli Military Council, the former emir of the al Qaeda–affiliated Libyan Islamic Fighting Group seized control of the southern smuggling routes. “We began to see those routes fill up with weapons that Belhaj controlled, especially IGLA missiles,” Maguire told me. This was a family of improved Russian MANPADS that included the SA-16, the SA-18, and the Stinger-equivalent SA-24, also known as the IGLA-S.

So-called ant traders (individual smugglers) and Belhaj lieutenants brought the weapons through the desert of southern Libya and handed them off to Abdulwahhab Hassan Qayed, the new head of Border Control and Strategic Institutions in the Interior Ministry. Qayed, who co-authored a book with Belhaj and other senior Libyan Islamic Fighting Group members, was the brother of Abu Yayha al-Libi, al Qaeda’s second in command. Al-Libi was also a former colleague of Belhaj’s from the early days when they cofounded the LIFG. Captured in Afghanistan and held by U.S. forces at the Bagram interim detention facility, he escaped along with several high-profile al Qaeda terrorists on July 10, 2005, and rejoined the senior al Qaeda leadership. “So, Belhaj was essentially delivering these missiles into the hands of al Qaeda central,” Maguire told me.
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From southern Libya, Maguire said Qayed’s network took them to Agadez, a well-known smuggler’s paradise in the north of Niger, which boasted an open-air arms market in the desert on the outskirts of town, where you could regularly hear sellers demonstrating their wares to suspicious buyers. “We used to call it the Peshawar of Africa,” Maguire said. It was a wild town that for generations had linked north to south, where traffickers in all forms of illicit merchandise—human slaves, refugees, weapons, and drugs—made and lost fortunes in a day.

In late 2011, a source who worked as a security advisor to President Mahamadou Issoufou of Niger came to him with troubling information: They had spotted SA-7s from Qaddafi’s arsenal in Mali. At first, Maguire kind of ho-hummed the tip-off. After all, the missiles were old, and they had been roughly stored in un-air-conditioned bunkers in the desert, so the batteries were all dead. Then the source got his attention: He described a new type of battery that Maguire instantly recognized, because of its distinct features as a CIA-designed replacement first used in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

In the summer of 2012, the source provided him with a photo and told him that Belhaj had moved 800 IGLA missiles to Agadez and set up a repair shop where they could be reconditioned using the CIA batteries. Four hundred of the missiles had already been refurbished and were gone. Gone. Another 400 were still in the pipeline. The work was being done by Egyptian military technicians.

“We knew they were Egyptians because they have a unique military ordnance color that nobody else uses,” Maguire said. “The Libyan missiles are green. The Egyptian ordnance has this unique shade of brown. Brown Egyptian gripstocks, installed by the Egyptian military technicians, were being fitted onto the green Libyan missiles. Then they were reboxed and moved out onto the market.” Maguire provided me with a photo, available in the Online Reader’s Guide, which clearly shows the Egyptian retrofit. While glaringly obvious to anyone in the know, none of the people involved in the refurbishing operation paid any attention to the telltale military color schemes.
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Maguire’s big worry was that al Qaeda would use the missiles in a coordinated assault on U.S. civilian airliners, in a replay of the Bojinka plot al Qaeda had developed in 1995 but was never able to carry out. “All the airports coming into North Africa are located near the coast, so it would be relatively easy to have a dozen guys on beaches in different countries attack a dozen airliners all at once. We know that al Qaeda revisits operational concepts they think are viable. The U.S. airline industry cannot sustain another major event like that.”

The stakes were high, so Maguire and his colleague, another former CIA operations officer, decided to take the information to the agency. Maguire had gotten to know CIA Director General David Petraeus in Iraq, so he emailed him a general outline of what he had uncovered. Petraeus thanked him and said he would get his guys on it immediately. They’d probably want to send someone to meet with the source in Niger, he wrote. Maguire gave him the information they would need to contact him. Petraeus said they should get together ten days later to go over the case in more detail.

And then all hell broke loose.

Maguire’s source called him not long afterward in a panic. President Issoufou was about to throw him out of the country, even though he had a diplomatic passport. Someone in the agency had obviously gotten to the Niger president. “They told him, ‘you’re not going to get the drones or anything else we’ve promised you until you toss this guy,’ ” Maguire’s colleague told me. “And then they went to the French, and had the source taken off an airplane in Madrid and told him that if tried to go back to Niger he was going to get whacked.”

The source then tried twice to come to the United States, but he was turned back at European airports because he had been put on the U.S. no-fly list. “Someone was ripping into him with an iron claw,” Maguire said.

Maguire’s colleague had working relationships with senior officers at Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) and at the FBI, so he thought he would appeal to them for help. He proposed bringing Issoufou’s intelligence advisor to the United States to brief JSOC and the FBI on weapons leaking out of Libya. “The agency came down on both of them, with the president’s approval, with an iron claw. They said to bugger off; they were in control. They were handling it,” he told me.

Except that they weren’t handling it; or at least, they weren’t stopping the weapons from moving back into the black market arms pipeline, where they were snatched up by al Qaeda.

What was really going on? Neither Maguire nor his colleague ever learned what the White House had in mind when they shut down the operation to take those missiles out of the hands of al Qaeda. But they did learn one thing: The man who gave the orders to go after their source and to make life difficult for them with their other U.S. government contracts was President Obama’s counterterrorism advisor, John Brennan.

“Something really sensitive was going on,” Maguire’s colleague said. “John Brennan fancies himself as an operator. When you look at all the JSOC operations in Libya, in Yemen, in Afghanistan and Pakistan, it’s Brennan. My guess is, it was an operation that went out of control that they were desperately trying to put back in the box.”

As Ty Woods’ father, Charles Woods–who is also a lawyer– pointed out to me, it is illegal under U.S. Code 18, Section 2339, to provide material assistance to a terrorist group, whether you are a private citizen or an official of the U.S. government.

SECRET WAR?

Former JSOC operators Jack Murphy and Brandon Webb believe that Brennan was running a “secret war across North Africa’’ out of his White House office, with little or no coordination with the CIA.

With JSOC, Brennan waged his own unilateral operations in North Africa outside of the traditional command structure. These Direct Action operations . . . were “off the books” in the sense that they were not coordinated through the Pentagon or other governmental agencies, including the CIA. With Obama more than likely providing a rubber stamp, the chain of command went from Brennan to (JSOC commander Admiral William) McRaven, who would then mobilize the men of ISA (Intelligence Support Activity), SEAL Team Six, or Delta Force to conduct these missions.

Sometime prior to Sept 2012, this JSOC element was directed by John Brennan to conduct combat operations in Libya. These operations targeted a high-level al Qaeda operative. . . .
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The target most frequently mentioned was Ezedin Abdel Aziz Khalil, aka Yasin al-Suri. He was one of the last senior al Qaeda leaders still on the loose. The Treasury Department identified him in July 2011 as the man now responsible for the al Qaeda fund-raising and logistics network, putting him at the heart of every major terrorist operation conducted by the core al Qaeda organization.

Most significant was the Treasury Department’s assertion that al-Suri was operating from a base in Iran, under an agreement with the Iranian government. “Iran is the leading state sponsor of terrorism in the world today. By exposing Iran’s secret deal with al-Qa’ida allowing it to funnel funds and operatives through its territory, we are illuminating yet another aspect of Iran’s unmatched support for terrorism,” Undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Davi
d
S.
Cohen
announced.
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Al-Suri’s importance to al Qaeda was further highlighted when the State Department offered a $10 million bounty for information leading to locating him. This put him on a par with the Taliban leader Mullah Omar and the head of al Qaeda in Iraq. Only al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri had a greater price on his head, $25 million. In announcing the inclusion of Yasin al-Suri in the Rewards for Justice Program on December 22, 2011, a Treasury Department official pointed out that it was “the first such reward offered for a terrorist financier.”
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Murphy and Webb believe the Benghazi attacks came in retaliation for “late summer [2012] JSOC operations that were threatening the al Qaeda–aligned militant groups (including Ansar al-Sharia) in Libya and North Africa,” operations that most likely included the targeted assassination of “a known associate of al-Suri.”

John Brennan, JSOC. Yasin al-Suri, al Qaeda, Iran. They were lethal combinations.

“The global network of espionage is a dark underworld, full of ruthless individuals, a moral vacuum where ego and self-gratification generally rule,” wrote former CIA polygrapher Kevin Shipp in his memoir,
Company of Shadows
. “Billions of dollars flow invisibly across continents to fund operations pitting countries against each other, and fund undercover individuals working against their own government. Even on the good side, there are individuals who are career-hungry for the next catch, even a small one, to further their reputation. Fortunately, there are a few who do it purely out of patriotism, especially in America.”

But those white knights didn’t always survive the dark forces working against them.

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OBAMA’S AMBASSADOR

On May 26, 2012, Chris Stevens returned to Tripoli in glory. After helping to mold the disparate rebel factions into an effective coalition that unseated Qaddafi, he was coming back as President Obama’s ambassador to the new Libya. It was not just a promotion, but a vindication. Like Lawrence of Arabia a century earlier, Stevens showed that an intellectual who had never served in the military could broker his passion for Arabs and Islamic culture into a military victory on the battlefield through the force of his will. Now, as ambassador, he could continue to guide his Libyan protégés as they sought to rebuild their country.

The only problem was that Libya was crumbling; the country was disintegrating in front of the international news cameras. Instead of a major success story for Obama’s reelection campaign and for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s future, Libya was spinning wildly out of control. There were no Jeffersonian democrats waiting in the wings to steer the new Libya into a new era of peace and freedom. Worse, the central government didn’t even control security in Tripoli. Bands of heavily armed street thugs staked claims to neighborhoods, intersections, former Qaddafi barracks, and highways. They bombed prisons and police stations, and kidnapped businessmen and foreigners for sport and sometimes ransom. It was “a volatile situation in which militias previously united in opposition to Qaddafi were now jockeying for position in the new Libya,” the State Department’s Accountability Review Board found. “Frequent clashes, including assassinations, took place between contesting militias. Fundamentalist influence with Salafi and al Qaeda connections was also growing.”

And yet, as security got worse, the State Department in Washington
decreased
the protection of U.S. diplomats and facilities in Libya, rather than increase it to meet the needs and the requests of the personnel on the ground. As a result, the United States wound up hiring groups affiliated with the very same militia that later would attack the Special Mission Compound in Benghazi.

PROBING ATTACKS

In the spring and summer of 2012, the jihadi militias launched a series of probing attacks against U.S. and foreign missions in Libya, trying to learn more about the secret activities of the United States and its partners and to find points of weakness in their defenses.

Just one month before Stevens returned to Libya, two South African contractors were kidnapped in Benghazi as they were walking down the street for early morning coffee in a residential area of the city. The State Department’s Regional Security Officer Eric Nordstrom dutifully reported the incident back to Washington. Why? Because the two South Africans were working out of the supposedly secret CIA Annex in Benghazi under light State Department cover.

In Nordstrom’s bureaucratese, they were staffing a “U.S. funded weapons abatement, UXO (unexploded ordnance) removal, and demining project.” But I can reveal that they were street operators working on the MANPADS collection effort.

Their kidnappers initially passed by them, did a double take, then rammed their Ford sedan into reverse and bundled them into the car at gunpoint. The kidnappers drove at high speed to a walled villa, so excited by their catch that they crashed the gate open with their vehicle. A militia member wearing a balaclava interrogated the two South Africans to find out what they were doing in Benghazi. Once he learned that they were working for the Americans at the Annex, he ordered them to be blindfolded, then transferred to another militia headquarters for more intensive interrogation. In the end, they were taken back to the street where they had been abducted, and released.
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Media accounts in the wake of the Benghazi attacks have tried to paint the CIA Annex as a supersecret facility that successfully eluded the curiosity of its Libyan neighbors. With input from the CIA, the
Wall Street Journal
wrote that the very existence of the Annex was a “well-kept secret” in Benghazi. “A neighbor said that he never saw Libyan security guards at the Annex compound and that the street never had any extra police presence or security cordon. ‘If the CIA was living there, we never knew it,’ the neighbor said.”
2

That was patently false. The CIA Annex had high-tech security barriers, surveillance cameras, and a higher perimeter wall than the diplomatic compound. Armored SUVs of the type used by diplomats and spies regularly entered and exited the compound at high speed, using arranged security codes to open the solid metal gates. The Annex was so well known among spooks and diplomats that French espionage writer Gerard de Villiers used it as the backdrop for his eerily prescient thriller,
Les Fous de Benghazi
(The Wild Men of Benghazi), which was published in France in December 2011. Some of the neighbors might not have known (or wanted to know) that the Annex was the CIA’s base of operations, but the jihadis certainly did.

Just one week before Stevens returned as ambassador, Lieutenant General Carter Ham, commander in chief of United States Africa Command, made his second trip to Libya since the fall of Qaddafi. General Ham met with Deputy Chief of Mission Joan Polaschik and the top security official at the embassy, Lieutenant Colonel Andy Wood.

Also in town for the meetings was Ben Fishman, director for Libya on the National Security Staff, who was visiting Libya to conduct a gut check for the White House as Libya geared up for its first postrevolution elections. He wanted to get ground truth of the security situation, and a feel for whether the losers would accept the outcome of the elections or behave as they did in many African countries and resort to arms. For their most sensitive discussions, they traveled outside the embassy to another CIA Annex—this one in Tripoli—where they could discuss frankly without any fear of enemy eavesdropping in a specially constructed bubble known as a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF.

“General Ham’s purpose in visiting Libya was to advance the bilateral relationship between the U.S. and Libyan militaries,” the embassy claimed. But Lieutenant Colonel Wood told a very different story.

“General Ham came primarily to meet with the Americans,” he told me. “He came under the radar for the Libyans, because if a general officer shows up, that’s a big deal.”
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What was so important for a combatant commander, who reports directly to the president, to make his second trip to Libya in less than two months?

According to Wood, General Ham was worried about the spiraling insecurity in Libya, and wanted to make sure that U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) was doing everything it could to keep the diplomats safe.

Lieutenant Colonel Wood had sixteen Special Operations troops under his command. They had been detailed by General Ham to the State Department as a Site Security Team (SST) in February 2012 to beef up security at the embassy, an arrangement that Fishman at the White House had helped set up. Their job was to provide additional firepower to the Diplomatic Security and Mobile Security Deployment teams already in Tripoli.
*
As a secondary mission, they were training an elite counterterrorism force to hunt al Qaeda. The embassy protection mission put Lieutenant Colonel Wood and his men under State Department control. In bureaucratese, that meant they were under Title 22 of U.S. Code, which governs foreign relations, and reported to the ambassador. He could task them, and, more importantly, he could wrap them in the mantle of diplomatic immunity in case bad things happened when they were out on the streets.

If they were to continue training Libyan proxy forces, however, that would return them to Pentagon control, under Title 10. “I was explaining to General Ham that we were starting to do more of one, and less of the other, when he stopped me cold. He said, ‘you are here [for the embassy] for as long as they need you.’ He made that very clear to me and to the deputy chief of mission at the time,” Wood told me.
4

But back in Washington, the building didn’t want Special Operations troops guarding the ambassador since it gave the impression that the embassy was under siege in a country at war. “We were there really incognito,” Wood told me. “We were not allowed to wear uniforms. We were told specifically not even to wear [military] boots.”

That pretense of normality from the Washington politicos frustrated Wood and Regional Security Officer Eric Nordstrom. They knew the militias were probing. It was only a matter of time before they found a weak spot.

JOGGING IN THE STREETS

Ambassador Stevens initially thought he could contribute to the atmosphere of normality by jogging outside the compound. Wood says he was okay with that. In fact, he welcomed the challenge.

“Stevens was more of a distance runner, and a really good runner. I had no problem keeping up with [Ambassador Gene] Cretz. But Stevens, damn it; that guy could
run
,” Wood told me.

Cretz used to run downtown at the soccer stadium or at the horse track. “But Stevens liked to run the streets, run the neighborhoods. He’d get up early in the morning, six or seven in the morning, when [the locals] are still sleeping. The streets are
dead
. So that’s the time Stevens liked to run.”

Wood says he and his team would plot out different jogging routes for Stevens ahead of time, scout them out, and make sure that they understood potential security threats and had an exit plan if things went bad.

“Things went well for a while, until one of the groups posted a picture of Stevens on their Facebook page, saying this is the American ambassador and he likes to run in this and this neighborhood, so we’re going to get him.” That put the kibosh on Stevens’ early morning jogs for about two weeks.

The June 6, 2012, posting, on the page of the al-Moqawama (Libyan Resistance) movement, showed a smiling Stevens strolling down a Tripoli street full of shuttered shops, as two Libyan men looked on. Wood said it sent a chilling message.

The threat to Stevens in Tripoli came as the tempo of anti-Western attacks accelerated in Benghazi.

During the early morning hours of May 22, 2012, a group calling itself the Imprisoned Sheikh Omar Abdul-Rahman Brigade fired two RPG rounds at the Benghazi office of the International Committee of the Red Cross. The ICRC headquarters was located on Shara al-Andalus at the Third Ring Road traffic circle, just one kilometer from the U.S. mission compound. In a Facebook post claiming responsibility for the attack, the group accused the ICRC of trying to convert Muslims to Christianity. They also declared Libya an Islamic state. “Now we are preparing a message for the Americans for disturbing the skies over Derna,” they warned.

Jihadi groups in Libya were worried that the United States was flying drones over Benghazi, Derna, and points east, and would arm them just as they were doing in Afghanistan. On June 4, their suspicions hit the roof when the deputy commander of al Qaeda, Abu Yahya al-Libi, was killed in a drone strike in northern Waziristan in the rugged badlands along Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan. This was the same Mohammad Hassan Qayed whose brother now controlled Libya’s southern border. Not only was he a founding member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, well-known in Libya because of his origins. He also was a well-known propagandist, who featured in numerous al Qaeda videos. Many of his former comrades-in-arms were now in senior positions in the post-Qaddafi government, starting with Abdelhakim Belhaj.

At 3:45 in the morning on June 6, the local security guard at the Special Mission Compound in Benghazi awakened with a fright as his video monitor came alive with movement. A pickup had stopped along the perimeter wall and an individual wearing “Islamic dress” got out and was placing a suspicious package along the perimeter wall. The guard sounded the “emergency, imminent danger” alarm, which automatically alerted the Quick Reaction Force located at the CIA Annex. Six minutes later the bomb went off, blowing a thirty-foot hole in the compound wall. The CIA security team, along with backup from the 17th February Martyrs Brigade, “responded quickly” to the alarm, according to the official after-action report. Later that day, the Imprisoned Sheikh Omar Abdul-Rahman Brigade claimed credit for the attack, saying it was in retaliation for the drone strike against al-Libi, the al Qaeda leader in Pakistan. They even released a video of the attack and left leaflets behind promising more attacks on Americans.
5

Despite this, the State Department’s Accountability Review Board tried to dismiss the Imprisoned Sheikh Omar Abdul-Rahman Brigade as a “previously unknown group,” and called their claim of responsibility for the attack against the Special Mission Compound “unsubstantiated.” Those are the only references the ARB made to the Blind Sheikh and his supporters in Egypt and Libya, despite the very public involvement of the group in the events of September 11, 2012.

Regional Security officer David Oliveira later told congressional investigators that the IED attack on the Mission Compound in Benghazi made him realize that a larger attack loomed. The local guards told him they were afraid to work. “[T]hey felt that the U.S. was a target and they felt that they didn’t want to work overnight. What we heard from the [Blue Mountain] representative on the ground was that some of their families might have put some pressure on them to not want to work for the U.S. mission.”
6

The State Department contract with the British-registered Blue Mountain group, who provided the local guards for the Benghazi compound, specified that they be unarmed, since Libyan law prevented private security guards from carrying weapons. A similar arrangement with local guards at the Tripoli embassy prompted several State Department diplomats to ask the SST men to train them to shoot handguns and to issue them firearms, so they could at least defend themselves. “They told us that if something like the Benghazi attacks had happened in Tripoli, it would have been much worse,” Representative James Lankford, a member of the House Oversight investigating panel, told me. “When the ambassador traveled outside the embassy, he took
all
the security with him, so you had something like fifty people left behind at the embassy with no security at all.”
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