Dark Forces: The Truth About What Happened in Benghazi (22 page)

Ambassador Stevens stepped into the breach and sent multiple emails to John Moretti at the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security, requesting additional security. With elections coming up in July and August, the Mission “would feel much safer if we could keep two MSD teams with us through this period [to support] our staff and [personal security detail] for me and the DCM and our VIP visitors.” The State Department replied that due to other commitments and limited resources, “unfortunately, MSD cannot support the request.”
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“After we departed Libya in early August, they were left stripped naked,” Lieutenant Colonel Wood said. “We didn’t feel good about leaving them like that. If I were to meet Greg Hicks today, I’d be ashamed. I’m sorry, you got let down.”

THE BLIND SHEIKH

So who was the Blind Sheikh, and why was an al Qaeda–affiliated militia in Libya invoking his name?

The Egyptian imam was the leader of Gama’a al-Islamiya, which has been classified as a terrorist group by the Egyptian and U.S. governments since the 1980s. He issued the fatwa, or religious edict, that supposedly justified the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in 1981, because Sadat had made peace with Israel. Jailed for several years in Egypt in the 1980s, he was granted a tourist visa to enter the United States in 1986. After that error was discovered, he was put on a terrorism watch list. Despite that, CIA officers working under light cover at U.S. consular offices in Cairo and Khartoum gave him six more visas to enter the United States between that time and 1990, according to a classified State Department inspector general report.
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Once in the United States, he began recruiting terrorist candidates to join Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan and Sudan. He was arrested in June 1993 after an undercover investigation following the first World Trade Center attack discovered that he was plotting new terrorist attacks against the Holland Tunnel and other New York landmarks. In 1996, he was sentenced to life in prison. At the time of the Libya attacks in the summer of 2012 he was seventy-four years old and still confined to the high-security federal lockup in Butner, North Carolina.

Sheikh Omar Abdul-Rahman had become a cult figure to a whole generation of jihadis. He was the man who punished Sadat for making peace with the Jews. He was the visionary who helped recruit young Muslims in the United States and send them to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. And he was the tireless advocate of Sharia and global Islamic jihad who fearlessly turned his sights on the Americans.

His followers wanted him set free. And, now, with Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Morsi favored to win election as president of Egypt, they had the weight of the most powerful Muslim state behind them.

Morsi sent a delegation of Muslim Brotherhood officials to Washington just days before his election, to demand that the United States release the Blind Sheikh. Among them was a man named Hani Nour Eldin, a self-avowed member of Gama’a al-Islamiya, a group that still figured on the State Department’s list of international terrorist organizations. By law, members of terrorist organizations are denied entry to the United States. That is why we have a terrorist watch list: to prevent people like Hani Nour Eldin from entering the country, where they could meet up with clandestine terror support or operations cells.

Reached by a reporter for the
Daily Beast
, Nour Eldin confirmed that not only had he been granted a U.S. visa, but that the Obama administration had invited him to the White House, where he met with Deputy National Security Advisor Denis McDonough. He also met with Deputy Secretary of State William Burns and others at the State Department.

Party spokesman Tarek el-Zomor told CNN that Nour Eldin “pressed American officials for a transfer into Egyptian custody of Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman,” and that the request “mirrors the demands of Gamaa Islamiya members in Cairo who have protested in Tahrir Square, seeking the sheikh’s release.” State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland squirmed when asked how someone who is a self-avowed member of a terrorist organization could gain entry to the United States, let alone visit the White House. “We are reviewing the case of the visa issuance,” she said.

It wasn’t as if Nour Eldin was hiding his identity or his role in the Egyptian terrorist group. All a consular officer in Cairo had to do was visit his personal Facebook page and a bio popped up “where he very clearly says he is a member of Gamaa Islamiya, and that he was arrested in Egypt, and spent eleven years of his life in prison,” said Samuel Tadros, a Egyptian researcher at the Hudson Institute.
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The answer is simple: The State Department, on orders from Hillary Clinton or her office director, Huma Abedin, gave instructions to the U.S. Embassy in Cairo to issue a special waiver to Nour Eldin so he could get a visa. Abedin’s parents and her brother were all top officials in the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood or related organizations.

Denis McDonough, a former Obama campaign communications director who had never held a security clearance in his life, was now sitting in on meetings with David Axelrod, Valerie Jarrett, and other political hacks, at which the most sensitive and highly classified national security information was discussed.

It was a dangerous mix. It’s one thing for political leaders to rely on sound and very sensitive intelligence to make political judgments. That’s the reason that the United States spends more than $50 billion per year to collect secret information on our enemies, potential adversaries, and even our friends. It’s something entirely different for the politicians and their hacks to drive the intelligence, as has been the rule in the Obama White House from the get-go. If a politician such as Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama simply determines that the Muslim Brotherhood is our friend and jihad is not a threat, how can security professionals at the State Department take action to defend our embassies in the Muslim world? No wonder all the warnings from Eric Nordstrom and other RSO in Tripoli and Benghazi were simply swept under the rug. They were warning about a threat the politicians had convinced themselves did not exist.

The meeting with the Muslim Brotherhood envoy from Egypt raised the same issue as sending National Security Staff members to Tripoli and Benghazi to allegedly negotiate arms purchases on behalf of the White House. Was McDonough now running a secret political operation, totally beyond congressional oversight, to free the Blind Sheikh?

JIHAD ON PARADE

After a spate of shadowy attacks against Western interests in Benghazi, the Islamists came out in the open on June 7, 2012, putting on a show of force that immobilized the streets of Benghazi for hours.

Down near the sun-swept port, thousands of jihadis staged a sit-in on the broad esplanade in front of the local Council building, spreading a half acre of prayer rugs on the pavement.

They were a motley crew. Some were dressed in the long white
thawb
of the Arabian Peninsula and wore their beards in the style of the Saudis. Many wore white skullcaps designating them as
hajjis
, venerated for having made the pilgrimage to Mecca. Others were dressed in expensive jeans and Western T-shirts. Still others wore Afghan-style tunics and baggy pants and the
pakol
, the pancake hat made famous by the mujahideen. It was an all-male crowd, and they were demanding that the Transitional National Council adopt Islamic Sharia law in the upcoming national elections.

“It is time to clean the homelands of Islam from filth and positivist laws that have been inherited from the West and have ruined the Islamic nation for ages,” said Hani al-Mansouri, a spokesman for Ansar al-Sharia, the main sponsor of the parade. A representative of the brigade’s propaganda oufit, Al Raya Media Productions Foundation, told Iran’s state-run PressTV they would “continue the struggle until the country is totally liberated from non-Islamic values.”
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Local press reports identified fifteen jihadi groups who participated in the event and vied with each other to put their military hardware on parade that day. They brought out an assortment of SUVs and “technicals,” mostly Toyota Hilux pickups, with various sorts of weaponry mounted on the bed: single or twin-tubed 23mm anti-aircraft guns, heavy machine guns, 50mm turret-mounted guns. Just as on the Fourth of July here in America, they lined up ahead of time and posed for photographers before joining the parade. Each brigade, or
katiba
, had its own flag. Many of them sported the black flag of al Qaeda.

The fighters themselves were not just Libyans but came from Sudan, Mali, Egypt, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan. As they drove along the corniche, honking their horns and shouting, many of them swiveled the turrets of their anti-aircraft guns in mimicry of bravura. Eight- and ten-year-old children brandishing Kalashnikovs leaned out of car windows, pretending to let off bursts of celebratory gunfire.

Initially, they had planned to occupy Benghazi for three days, but pushback from crowds of secular Benghazi residents forced them to call it quits after a few hours. Still, given the recent attacks on the ICRC building, the UN, and the U.S. Special Mission Compound, the presence of so many jihadi fighters and so much military gear “generated concern among U.S. officials in Libya,” as Representative Darrell Issa reminded President Obama.

Where was Ansar al-Sharia getting its funding and training? Clearly they were getting support from the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. But in one PowerPoint on the group that was shared with Ambassador Stevens and the U.S. Embassy security team shortly after the parade, slides showed arrows moving people and money from Iran to Libya via Syria and Egypt.
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It was this combination that ultimately fueled the September 11, 2012, attack on Benghazi.

PRETENDING NORMAL

As part of the return to normal operations, the State Department changed the status of the Tripoli embassy and Benghazi outpost in June 2012, putting an end to temporary duty postings (TDY) and bringing in a permanent embassy staff. They brought in new political officers, new reporting officers, a new deputy chief of mission (Greg Hicks); even a new CIA chief of station. John Martinec had just arrived as the full-time regional security officer, and was immediately brought up to speed on the disastrous state of security by Eric Nordstrom.

Hannah Draper was a junior Arabic-speaking officer who arrived in Tripoli on June 9, 2012. Although she was just twenty-seven, Tripoli was her third overseas posting in just five years of joining the State Department. She began as a consular officer in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, and more recently was a desk officer at the U.S. Consulate in Istanbul, Turkey. An avid blogger, she was ecstatic at arriving with the “first wave” of permanent staff at the newly normal U.S. Embassy in Tripoli, and toured the town briefly on her way to her first assignment the day after she arrived. She drove past Martyrs Square, Bab al-Aziziyah (Qaddafi’s former compound), and the Rixos Hotel, where journalists were held hostage during the early days of the insurrection. “It’s incredibly moving to see these sites and to realize how recent the scars are from the Revolution,” she wrote on her blog, which she called “the slow move east.”

Unable to meet many Libyans because of security restrictions, she sought indices to political reality through graffiti glimpsed hastily as the embassy car sped by. “The one phrase you can see over and over is ‘February 17th, Free Libya.’ That’s the day the uprising started, and it’s the date by which this revolution is hashtagged on Twitter,” she wrote. If the insight wasn’t exactly brilliant, at least she was looking.
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The following weeks passed much in the same closeted fashion, inside embassy vehicles, traveling in convoys to meetings with TNC officials, pining for the new husband she had left behind in Istanbul, complaining about the boring embassy food. A colleague showed her some of the local currency, which still bore Qaddafi’s image. “Apparently, in many shops the cashiers will methodically take a Sharpie to Gadhafi’s face on every single bill before handing back a customer’s change,” she wrote.

The main perk to being permanently posted to Tripoli as opposed to a TDY assignment might seem minor, but to Hannah and many others it was significant. “Permanent staff have bedrooms to themselves [in the embassy residential compound] and share bathrooms with their neighbors; temporary staff have roommates. Our movements off compound are limited both because of logistics and security.”

Although the State Department was calling Tripoli a “normal” diplomatic outpost, Hannah Draper and other junior diplomats were essentially assigned to quarters, only allowed to venture outside the compound accompanied by diplomatic security guards and other diplomats on official visits.

It was a make-believe world, which she filled by surfing the Internet for “Hardship Homemaking” recipes and Skyping her husband. And yet, even in this fairy tale of normality, Hannah Draper saw her own instincts change. After a while, she wrote, “I no longer flinch when I hear gunfire in the distance.”

Would Hillary Clinton, Patrick Kennedy, and Charlene Lamb have changed their determination to paint Libya as a normal diplomatic outpost and assigned more security to the ambassador and his top officers if they had been hearing the daily sound of gunfire in the distance?

One thing Hannah Draper did discover, without apparently realizing the significance of it, was that the White House was tracking events in Libya—not from Washington, D.C., but from the ground. “I’ve not worked so closely with other branches of the US government, such as the Commercial service or the National Security Council,” she wrote. “It’s an interesting lesson in how the whole government works together (not always harmoniously) to inform, to determine, and to implement policy in a given country.”
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The National Security Council? (Actually, the National Security
Staff
?) What were
they
doing involved in the day-to-day activities of the embassy in Tripoli?