Dark Forces: The Truth About What Happened in Benghazi (24 page)

Lieutenant General Jerry Boykin, a former commander of U.S. Special Forces Command in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, told me that he believes Boehner and intelligence committee chairman Mike Rogers were briefed on the covert operations being run out of Benghazi. “They don’t want to admit they knew what was going on,” he said.

After the Benghazi attacks, the White House tried to reel back any suggestion that it had approved a covert arms pipeline to the Syrian rebels. Citing unnamed White House sources,
New York Times
correspondent Michael Gordon wrote that Clinton and Petraeus had pitched the idea to the president in the summer of 2012, with backing from Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. “But with the White House worried about the risks, and with President Obama in the midst of a reelection bid, they were rebuffed,” Gordon concluded.
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I have found no hard evidence that the Obama administration issued a presidential finding to arm the Syrian rebels in the summer of 2012. But I have found extensive evidence that the State Department, the CIA, and other U.S. intelligence agencies had direct knowledge of arms shipments to the Syrian rebels by Libyan government-related militias and organizations, and helped to facilitate them. “To get around the reporting requirements, they tried to call it policy,” one of my sources said.

There was only one man who had the necessary cover and who was knowledgeable enough, courageous enough, and dedicated enough to the cause of the Syrian rebels to coordinate these activities on the ground.

That was U.S. Ambassador to Libya J. Christopher Stevens. After all, he was the president’s personal representative, with the protocol rank of a four-star general. “Ambassador Stevens was the U.S. commander-in-chief in Libya,” said Lieutenant Colonel Andy Wood. The CIA station chief and the National Security Staff arms negotiators kept the ambassador up to speed on their activities. “The ambassador was fully briefed on everything,” Wood told me.

Stevens knew that the agency was moving assets to southern Turkey to aid the Syrian rebels. He knew about the missing MANPADS. He knew that Belhaj and his allies were shipping weapons to Turkey.

And he knew that he was a target.

EMERGENCY SECURITY MEETING

Two weeks after the assassination attempt on the Sir Dominic Asquith in Benghazi, Ambassador Stevens called an emergency security meeting at the CIA Annex in Tripoli. He was alarmed at the dramatic increase in anti-Western attacks. The International Committee of the Red Cross had just pulled out of Benghazi. The Brits had also left. Stevens asked his security team if the United States should do the same.

Except for Lieutenant Colonel Andy Wood, the Army Green Beret who led the Site Security Team, most of the embassy’s security team had just arrived in Libya. They had a new CIA chief of station, who was just settling in. The new regional security officer, John Martinec, had been given the briefing before leaving Washington about Libya returning to normal. Lieutenant Colonel Wood felt like the odd man out, the proverbial turd in the punch bowl. But because he had witnessed many of the attacks personally and had been privy to the intelligence on the buildup of Ansar al-Sharia and the brazenness of their Iranian sponsors, he felt compelled to speak up.

“We’re going to be next,” he said, making a point to look not at Stevens, but directly at the new CIA chief. “Ansar al-Sharia is going through the drill. First they warn you, then they attack. They warned the Red Cross, the Brits, and us. So, we’re next. We’ve got to change our posture in Benghazi. Staff it up. Change the profile. Do something different. Unless we throw them off, the attack is going to come and they will be the ones to pick the day and the time.”

He went through the warnings Ansar al-Sharia had been posting on its Facebook page against the Red Cross, the Brits, and the United States. He detailed the recruitment tactics they used with the local population, pledging to respect Islamic law by giving their adversaries an opportunity to leave or join their cause before they attacked. He knew he was leaning forward by getting into the realm of predictive intelligence. That’s what the agency was supposed to be doing, not the military. But perhaps because the new station chief had been in Tripoli for such a short time, he hadn’t yet picked up on all the signs. “We’ve got to abandon Benghazi, or seriously beef it up,” Wood said. “We are going to be hit.”

Wood half expected Ambassador Stevens to hit the roof and repeat the mantra he’d been hearing from Main State about Libya getting back to normal. Instead, he pulled Wood aside afterward and asked him to lay it all out.

That briefing fed a series of cables from Stevens and the State Department regional security officers back to Main State that warned of the increasing boldness of the jihadis and begged for more security at the Tripoli embassy and the outpost in Benghazi.

In a June 22, 2012, classified cable, Ambassador Stevens wrote that “the consensus of the [emergency action committee] is a continuing presence of extremist groups and individuals in Libya, which warrant ongoing monitoring by the [emergency action committee].” Stevens met with interim Libyan Prime Minister Abdurrahim El Keib two days later, and came away convinced of the government’s fecklessness. On June 25, he sent a detailed account on the precarious security situation penned by Diplomatic Security Officer Patrick Tillou, titled, “Libya’s Fragile Security Deteriorates as Tribal Rivalries, Power Plays and Extremism Intensify.” It stated pointedly that El Keib’s “government remains reluctant to confront extremists, preferring to co-opt them instead.”

That cable was a stark warning of things to come. Attacks on Western interests were on the rise, especially in the east, where the Imprisoned Sheikh Omar Abdul-Rahman Brigade claimed responsibility for the bomb attacks against the International Committee of the Red Cross and the U.S Special Mission compound in Benghazi. The group “accused the [Red Cross] of proselytizing Christianity to Libyans and described the June 6 bombing of the Special Mission Compound in Benghazi as ‘target[ing] the Christians supervising the management of the consulate,’ ” Stevens wrote. These weren’t the signs of garden-variety Islamist activism, he argued. “[T]he Al Qaeda flag has been spotted several times flying over government buildings and training facilities in Derna.”
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Al Qaeda was on the march. And they were getting help from America’s archnemesis, the Islamic Republic of Iran.

But, in Washington, no one seemed to care.

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PRELUDE TO MURDER

Hillary Clinton was riding well above the fray. As she testified before Congress in January 2013, she didn’t bother to read the cables from Ambassador Stevens and his subordinates that spelled out the security problems in Libya. Nor did she consult with Defense Secretary Leon Panetta to continue the loan to the embassy in Tripoli of the U.S. Special Forces Site Security Team led by Lieutenant Colonel Andy Wood. All she cared about was delivering a success story to the media—and to a select few influential members of Congress—in time for the U.S. presidential election in November. After that, she was out of there, to prepare her own coronation as the first female president of the United States in 2016.

“Benghazi is all about Hillary,” one of my sources, who has reviewed much of the classified intelligence on the September 11 attack, said. “This was to be her great success story, the new way America fights wars. We go in from behind, stay for a few months, then get out. No boots on the ground.” If a few Americans do get killed, chances are they would be former SpecOps guys working as hired guns for a private military contractor, not a group that elicited a groundswell of public support.

At least, that’s what Hillary thought.

SENATOR McCAIN COMES TO TRIPOLI

Primary among Hillary Clinton’s congressional allies was Senator John McCain (R-AZ), a big supporter of the administration’s policy of reaching out to the Muslim Brotherhood in the belief it would spawn Arab democracies.

A big test of that policy was coming up with the Libyan elections. They had already been postponed once, because the interim government was incapable of taming rivalries among competing tribes and militias to make sure the voting would be held without a massive outbreak of violence. In Benghazi and Derna, Islamist militias were threatening a boycott and the violence to enforce it. In the oasis towns of the south, frequent clashes between warring tribes had left hundreds dead. Along the western borders with Tunisia and Algeria, a mishmash of tribes and militias battled almost daily to control lucrative smuggling routes, where Qaddafi’s arsenals were seeping out of the country into the hands of al Qaeda–affiliated groups.

None of that seemed to concern the secretary of state. Instead, in a constant flow of messages, Hillary Clinton pressed Ambassador Stevens to make sure that Prime Minster Abdurrahim El Keib and President Mohammed Mugariaf understood they were not to miss the next deadline for the ballot, which was July 7. She knew Senator McCain was planning to travel to Libya to monitor the voting. She wanted the embassy to put on a good show.

Embassy newbie Hannah Draper was psyched. She was a true believer. “I will be out and about on Saturday, visiting polling stations as an accredited elections observer,” she wrote in her blog. “This is the reason I wanted an assignment in Libya over all others—to be here for this historic event, to witness the rebirth of Libya as a democratic state, and to cheer for the brave Libyan people, who have waited so long for this day.”
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She got the assignment to accompany Ambassador Stevens and Senator McCain as they toured polling places in Tripoli. “People recognized him wherever we went. When we’d arrive at a polling station, I could hear people shouting, is that McCain? Is that John McCain?”

The senator from Arizona, of course, lapped it up. “How excited are Libyans to vote? I just saw a man stop traffic and breakdance in street [
sic
] while his friends waved flags and cheered him on!” McCain (or an aide) tweeted from Tripoli. In a more sober statement posted to his Senate website, McCain called the vote “a historic day for the people of Libya.” While the elections were “not flawless,” he judged them to be “free, fair and successful.”
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Just how “democratic,” “free,” or “successful” were the Libyan elections in reality? The 130 parties contending to win seats in the National Conference put forth a dazzling array of candidates: 1,207 for just the first eighty seats in the new assembly. An additional 2,501 candidates were running as individuals for the remaining 120 seats. “Rarely has anyone been confronted with what appears to be so much choice, and yet at the same time so little—and with such paucity of information,” wrote a commentator in the new English-language daily, the
Libya Herald
.

Four major political parties were vying to lead the government that would emerge from the vote count, but all of them had one thing in common: They wanted Islamic Sharia to become the basis of law in the new Libya. “In fact, it is very difficult to find a Libyan, either within the parties or on the street, who would describe himself as secularist, with an overwhelming majority insisting that Islam must play an important role in political life,” the
Libya Herald
analyst wrote. “Certainly, there are radicals on either end of the spectrum, but for the most part it is a matter of degrees.”

The Justice and Construction Party (Hizb al-Adala wa al-Bina) was the Libyan branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. The best organized and the best funded of the four main parties, it had received open backing from the United States. Next in prominence was the Nation Party (Hizb al-Watan), led by the head of the Tripoli Military Council, Abdelhakim Belhaj, the former al Qaeda-affiliated terrorist the United States first rendered to Qaddafi, then helped to get released, and now called a “freedom fighter.” Critics joked that al-Watan’s purple and white banners, which seemed to be on every street corner, resembled the national flag of their purported sponsor, Qatar. They accused the party’s ideological patron, Islamist cleric Ali Salabi, of being a Qatari stooge.
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Eric Nordstrom and his replacement, John Martinec, the new chief Regional Security officer at the embassy, put the kibosh on sending McCain to Benghazi to watch the voting. Security in Tripoli was already dicey, but Benghazi was boiling over and there was no way they could guarantee anyone’s security there with the few assets they had in place. One week before the elections, demonstrators had ransacked the office of the High National Election Commission in Benghazi and burned the ballots. On July 4, a border security officer was assassinated in a drive-by shooting. On the fifth, the main polling station in nearby Ajdabiya was torched and all the ballots destroyed. On the sixth, a Libyan Air Force helicopter bringing replacement ballots to Benghazi was struck by ground fire near the airport, killing an election official on board and wounding an aide. It looked like the al-Qaeda groups were making good on their promise to shut down the elections in the east.
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In the end, voters gave the Muslim Brotherhood seventeen seats and al-Wattan just one, despite heavy spending by both groups during the campaign. Belhaj, the former Taliban ally Chris Stevens had visited in Qaddfafi’s prison on Christmas Day, failed to win a seat in the new assembly. Defeat left him free to pursue politics by other means.

Later, McCain would reflect on that day and the ambassador he had gotten to know personally, visiting him initially in Benghazi in the heat of the revolution, and, most recently, on July 7, 2012, on the day of the Libyan elections. That morning, Stevens made cappuccino for the senator before they set out for the polls, “a task that he carried out with as much pride and proficiency as his diplomatic mission,” McCain recalled.

“What we saw together on that day was the real Libya—the peaceful desire of millions of people to live in freedom and democracy, the immense gratitude they felt for America’s support for them, and their strong desire to build a new partnership between our nations,” McCain said.
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Even then—the day after Stevens’ murder—McCain was incapable of seeing anything but the triumph of freedom in the Libyan elections, after the United States backed Islamist ideologues tied to al Qaeda in their successful bid to overthrow the unpalatable Colonel Qaddafi. Just like Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and George W. Bush before them, McCain had drunk the Muslim democracy Kool-Aid. And it blinded him to the reality of a failed state ruled by Sharia law where al Qaeda–affiliated militias owned the streets.

POSTELECTION VIOLENCE

At the next country team meeting at the embassy, the spiraling violence in Benghazi and the rise of the al Qaeda–affiliated Ansar al-Sharia prompted Ambassador Stevens to launch a formal review of their security posture. By this point, they had lost two of the State Department’s three specialized Mobile Security Detachments and were relying for point protection on the Delta Force operators and Army Green Berets under Andy Wood’s command. Everyone knew that the State Department had refused to extend the SST beyond August 5, and that the last MSD was also on its way out. Stevens asked the outgoing RSO, Eric Nordstrom, to draft an action request cable for the secretary of state. “According to one participant, this ‘fell like a dead fish on the table,’ because everyone, including Ambassador Stevens, knew that the Embassy lacked support from Washington, D.C., and could do little about it.”
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Stevens sent out his action request cable, stamped SENSITIVE, on July 9. It painted a dire picture of a wilderness outpost that Washington completely disregarded. From the current quota of thirty-four U.S. security personnel spread between Tripoli and Benghazi, the State Department was cutting back to twenty-seven by July 13, and down to seven on August 13, when Wood and the SST were scheduled to leave.
*
Rather than treat Tripoli’s request with the urgency it required, the State Department filed the cable along with routine traffic coming in from the 270-odd U.S. diplomatic posts around the world.
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Conditions in Libya “have not met prior benchmarks” established by the embassy, the State Department, and AFRICOM for the security drawdown, Stevens wrote. Their efforts to “normalize” security operations had been “hindered by the lack of host nation security support . . . an increase in violence against foreign targets, and GOL [Government of Libya] delays in issuing firearms permits” for the locally hired guards who controlled access to the diplomatic compounds. Stevens pointedly noted that despite upgrades to physical security at the temporary embassy and residential compounds in Tripoli, “neither compound meets OSPOB standards.” This was a shot across the secretary of state’s bow, since legally she was required to personally issue a waiver to allow diplomatic facilities with substandard security to operate.

On July 13, Undersecretary Kennedy summarily turned down this latest request for additional security. “His rationale was that Libyan guards would be hired to take over this responsibility,” Greg Hicks later wrote.
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But, of course, they never had time to hire new guards, let alone train them and acquire the necessary weapons permits from the chaotic Libyan government.

Stevens sent a flurry of cables to Washington in the final weeks before the September 11 attacks, each more desperate than the last. He had Nordstrom draft a compendium of the 230 major security incidents that had occurred over the previous thirteen months, in the hope it would get someone’s attention. The RSO described the climate of lawlessness, gang violence, and militia rule that had replaced any semblance of central government in Libya in his general assessment at the end. “The risk of U.S. Mission personnel, private U.S. citizens, and businesspersons encountering an isolating event as a result of militia or political violence is HIGH,” he wrote. “The Government of Libya does not yet have the ability to effectively respond to and manage the rising criminal and militia related violence. . . . Neighboring countries fear extremist groups who could take advantage of the political violence and chaos should Libya become a failed state.”
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In an email he sent to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee staff, Nordstrom summed it up. “These incidents paint a clear picture that the environment in Libya was fragile at best and could degrade quickly. Certainly, not an environment where post should be directed to ‘normalize’ operations and reduce security resources in accordance with an artificial time table.”
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Even the State Department’s Accountability Review Board recognized the obvious in its after-action report.

[T]he immediate period after the elections did not see the central government increase its capacity to consolidate control or provide security in eastern Libya, as efforts to form a government floundered and extremist militias in and outside Benghazi continued to work to strengthen their grip.

At the time of the September attacks, Benghazi remained a lawless town nominally controlled by the Supreme Security Council (SSC)—a coalition of militia elements loosely cobbled into a single force to provide interim security—but in reality run by a diverse group of local Islamist militias, each of whose strength ebbed and flowed depending on the ever-shifting alliances and loyalties of various members.

If the elections were supposed to be the crucible of democracy and put an end to the violence, they failed.

Stevens got no traction with Secretary Clinton and her top deputies in his desperate quest to improve security in Tripoli and Benghazi. Instead, the managers increased the danger-pay allowance for employees in Libya from 25 percent to 30 percent on July 1.

As Representative Darrell Issa would comment during the first public hearing on the attacks, “you don’t reduce security at the same time as you are increasing hazardous duty pay.” To do so “sends a message that says we will pay you for the risk, we will not pay to have you made safer.”

It was a cynical recognition of just how bad things had gotten.

STINGER HIT IN AFGHANISTAN

In Afghanistan, the blowback from Hillary Clinton’s secret policy to arm the Libyan rebels hit home with a vengeance when Taliban fighters in Kunar province successfully targeted a U.S. Army CH-47 on July 25, 2012.

They thought they had a surefire kill. After all, their friends from Qatar had supplied them with a new-generation FIM-92 Stinger missile, and everything had worked as planned. They got word from their spotters that a U.S. assault team had boarded the large Chinook helicopter and was moving up through the Pech River Valley in the Chapa Dara district in eastern Afghanistan. When it was still a good two miles out, they could hear the engines, and the weapon commander tapped the gunner’s shoulder. He depressed the aiming trigger and the infrared seeker beeped faster until it blended into a single note indicating it had locked on the target. With a cry of
Allah O-Akbar!
the gunner fired and the Stinger shot into the air, making a corkscrew path toward its target. They saw what they thought was an explosion, and cries of
Allah O-Akbar!
echoed off the mountains in the distance where their Taliban brothers had positioned themselves to fight any Americans who survived the crash.