Dark Forces: The Truth About What Happened in Benghazi (25 page)

But instead of bursting into flames, the Chinook just disappeared into the darkness as the American pilot recovered control of the aircraft and brought it to the ground in a hard landing. The assault team jumped out the open doors and ran clear in case it exploded. Less than thirty seconds later, the Taliban gunner and his comrade erupted into flames as an American gunship overhead locked onto their position and opened fire.

The next day an Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) team arrived to pick through the wreckage and found unexploded pieces of a missile casing that could only belong to a Stinger. Lodged in the right engine nacelle was one fragment that contained an entire serial number. The investigation took time; arms were twisted, noses put out of joint. But when the results came in, they were stunning: The Stinger tracked back to a lot that had been signed out to the CIA
recently
, not during the anti-Soviet jihad.

Reports of the Stinger hit reached the highest echelons of the U.S. command in Afghanistan and became the source of intense speculation, but no action. Everyone knew the war was winding down. Revealing that the Taliban had MANPADS—even worse, U.S.-made Stingers—risked demoralizing coalition troops. Because there were no coalition casualties, ISAF made no public announcement of the attack.

The Taliban had been boasting since May that they had received a new shipment of surface-to-air missiles, but U.S. commanders apparently weren’t taking it seriously. My sources in the U.S. Special Operations community believe that the Stinger fired unsuccessfully on July 25, 2012, against that Chinook was part of the same lot the CIA turned over to the Qataris in early 2011, initially intended for anti-Qaddafi forces in Libya. They believe the Qataris delivered between fifty and sixty of those same Stingers to the Taliban in early 2012, and an additional two hundred SA-24 “Igla-S” MANPADS.

This was the first time they had actually used them. But it would not be the last.

THE IRANIAN GAMBIT

The CIA Annex in Benghazi may have spun down its training and support operations by June 2012 and ordered the adrenaline monkeys to move on to southern Turkey to help the Syrian rebels, but they still maintained four or five operations officers, another eight to ten analysts, and seven (some sources say as many as ten) heavily armed GRS guards to protect the operators when they ventured outside the wire. They were also supposed to defend the Annex in case it came under attack, and in an informal arrangement with the State Department, flow forces along with the mercurial 17th February Martyrs Brigade to protect the diplomatic compound in the event of trouble there. “Those guys had it all,” a source who worked closely with the Annex team in Benghazi told me. “They were armed to the friggin’ teeth. Here’s the best stuff on the market, so buy it.”
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Each GRS operator chose his own kit. While they all carried a NATO standard 5.56mm assault weapon, most of them preferred the Heckler & Koch 416, which the manufacturer developed in collaboration with Delta Force as the special operator’s weapon of choice. In addition, some picked up Soviet-era PKMs, a lightweight machine-gun version of the venerable AK-47, from local stockpiles. Others preferred the M240, the rifleman’s favorite belt-fed machine gun. For real firepower, the GRS operators relied on the M249 Minimi (French for
mini-mitrailleuse
, or light machine gun), which like the M240 was made by Belgian arms maker FN-Herstal. The Minimi used a large, boxlike magazine that held two hundred rounds. In full automatic mode, an operator could empty the entire magazine on a wave of attackers in fewer than twenty seconds, reload, and have at it again. The GRS operators packed a lot of punch.

The Annex also housed an NSA listening post that secretly monitored communications of the jihadi groups and their supporters using a dazzling array of sophisticated electronics gear, dissimulated on the roof. In some NSA facilities, these were built to look like water tanks; in others, small shacks or air-conditioning units. The outer skin of the structures was actually paper thin, so that the sensors inside could capture radio and other electronic signals. Their mission was to pick up indicators and warnings of attacks being planned against U.S. facilities in Libya or elsewhere. They also tried to keep tabs on the high-value al Qaeda targets who continued to roam the streets of Benghazi. One of these was Ezzedin Abdel Aziz Khalil, aka Yasin al-Suri, the top al Qaeda financier based in Iran.

Late in the afternoon on Monday, July 30, 2012, the Annex ears picked up chatter in Persian between a pair of Quds Force operators they were shadowing in town who were using high-end Racal VHF radios on a dedicated frequency. The NSA translator brought an English transcript of their conversation to the chief of base. He laughed when he read through it. It looks like our boys are on time, he said.

The chief of base had tasked several agents in his employ who worked for the Zintan militia that ran the Benghazi airport to track the seven Iranians scheduled to arrive that day from Tripoli. They were operating undercover as part of a Red Crescent medical team—a doctor, male nurses, medics, and administrator—and undoubtedly thought the Americans didn’t have a clue as to who they really were. At least, that’s what the chief of base had surmised from the intercepted coms.

But
he
knew that the Red Crescent team included operations officers the Iranians had dispatched to Benghazi to carry out an attack on the diplomatic compound. This was the big one they were all waiting for. This was the hit that Lieutenant Colonel Andy Wood had accurately warned about at the last country meeting in Tripoli with Ambassador Stevens. These officers were the “Iranian brains” who would command, fund, and perhaps actually carry out the attack.

My sources have identified the commander of the operational team as IRGC Major General Mehdi Rabbani. According to American Enterprise Institute Iran analysts Ali Alfoneh and Will Fulton, Rabbani is a member of the commanding heights of the IRGC, the inner circle of top loyalists. (My Iranian sources called this the Command Staff.) His official title at the time he went to Benghazi was deputy chief of operations for the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. Alfoneh and Fulton believed he had very little, if any, combat experience from the formative Iran-Iraq War.
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My sources tell me he was intelligence chief (equivalent to the U.S. J-2) for the southern front during the war, responsible for identifying and targeting strategic Iraqi assets. After rising to his present position in 2008, he played a major role in commanding the Bassij forces who brutally suppressed the 2009 postelection protests inside Iran.

General Rabbani was Mr. Chops, whose approval was needed to bless the operational plan to murder the ambassador and drive the Americans out of Benghazi. Among the others were Quds Force operators and civilian intelligence officers from the Ministry of Information and Security (MOIS) who specialized in terrorist operations.

The CIA chief of base knew none of this. He didn’t know whether their plan was to kidnap the ambassador, kill him, hire locals to drive car bombs through the perimeter wall, or what. All he knew was, they were the bad guys and they had come to fulfill his worst nightmares.

Over the next hour or so, the chief’s deputy received a steady stream of reports over the tactical radio from the Zintan militia guys on the progress of the hit team. The plane had landed at Benina International Airport. They were unloading their gear. The local Red Crescent director welcomed them. They packed into a convoy of Red Crescent vehicles (each painted white, with a large, bright red Islamic crescent painted on the doors and the roof—the Muslim version of the Red Cross). They were en route to the Tibesti Hotel. The chief had a second team waiting in separate vehicles outside to track them once they left the airport. Everything was going like clockwork.

After the Iranians freshened up at the hotel, they went out again for an Iftar dinner with the local Red Crescent guys. It was a protocol event. Because they were in the middle of Ramadan, the Muslim month of daytime fasting, they didn’t actually sit down to dinner until late.

Then at one in the morning, it happened.

All of a sudden, the deputy chief jumped up from where he had been dozing off. His guys were going nuts.

The ruckus got the chief’s attention. What’s going on? What are they saying? he asked.

The deputy translated the excited shrieks from the trackers. It seemed the Red Crescent team had been headed back to the Tibesti Hotel when they were ambushed by a half dozen Toyota pickups with .50-caliber machine guns mounted on the beds. The militia guys forced the Iranians to get out, cuffed them, then bundled them into a pair of Jeep Cherokees and sped off.

Our guys decided it was more prudent not to follow them, he said.

So they’re gone, the chief said. That’s it. Kidnapped.

For the next twenty-four hours or so, the chief’s network of agents in Benghazi was unable to find out where the Iranians had been taken or who was holding them. Then, according to Dylan Davies, the former British Special Operations grunt who managed the unarmed security detail at the U.S. diplomatic compound, a local fixer learned they were being held in a former Libyan army camp outside of town on the Tripoli road. “They are getting fed; they have their own beds even. They are fine,” he told Davies. The fixer claimed it was a Shia-Sunni thing. “There are some who think those Iranian Shias are not welcome here,” he said. “But they are perfectly okay.”

Complacent (or complicit) officials in Benghazi reinforced the fixer’s story. “Members of the brigade holding the Iranians are questioning them to determine whether their activities and intentions aimed to spread the doctrine of Shiite Islam,” a local security official told the Benghazi stringer for Agence France-Presse. “They will be released after the investigation is concluded,” he added.
13

Davies says he learned a few days later that the CIA chief of base had tasked his former Special Forces security team to launch a hostage rescue, perhaps with the goal of interrogating the Iranians in the privacy of their armored Mercedes G wagons. At the last minute, Davies’ fixer told him the Iranians had already been set free and put on a plane for Tripoli, en route to Tehran. “Mate, cancel the cavalry,” he told the chief diplomatic security officer at the compound. “They left yesterday on a flight to Tehran.” When the Americans expressed surprise at how he got this information, he said that his fixer’s cousin worked at the airport. “He saw all seven of ’em fly out of here.”
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But Davies—and the CIA chief of base—got played.

I learned what actually happened from two former Iranian intelligence officers, one of them a very senior operative who at the peak of his career was the chief action officer for all of Western Europe. The other was a counterintelligence officer and interrogator, who at one point worked on the protection detail of the Supreme Leader. Both of these individuals have defected to the West and now live undercover in Europe. Each has his own active network of contacts inside Iran, some of whom continue to work in senior positions in the Iranian regime. I corroborated their initial information with multiple Western intelligence sources that are not in contact with them.

The CIA chief of base was correct that the Red Crescent team included undercover Quds Force and MOIS officers who had been sent to carry out a terrorist attack against the United States. In fact, my Iranian sources said, their orders were to kidnap or kill the U.S. ambassador to Libya, to send a message to the United States that they could act against them at will anywhere and at any time in the Middle East.

But, as they were getting ready to set the plan in motion, the resident Quds Force team in Benghazi learned from its own intercepts of the Annex tactical coms that the Red Crescent cover had been blown and the CIA was onto them. So they decided to take the entire group off the streets—stage a kidnapping—in order to convince the chief of base that the danger was over.

“The team in operational command in Benghazi were Qassem Suleymani’s people,” the former Baghdad deputy chief of station, John Maguire, told me. “They were a mature, experienced, operational element from Iran. These guys are the first-string varsity squad.” And they were playing for keeps.

Maguire had matched wits with Suleymani, the Quds Force commander, for two years in Iraq and came away with a healthy respect for his capabilities. “He is talented, charismatic. His people are competent and well trained. They have all the operational traits we used to value. And they are committed to this fight for the long haul.”

Suleymani and his Quds Force operators were so successful at killing Americans in Iraq because they had penetrated U.S. operations. They didn’t just randomly place an IED on a roadside, Maguire said. They placed the IED where and when they knew an American convoy was going to pass.

“They were into our coms. They were into our operational planning. That’s how they were able to kill so many Americans,” Maguire said. “The Iranians are a determined global service.”

The faked kidnapping in Benghazi was a typical Quds Force op. They used a local militia that on the surface detested Shias, just as they used the Taliban in Afghanistan and manipulated al Qaeda. “They are very good at deception operations,” Maguire told me.

And our side didn’t have a clue. The CIA chief of base and his deputy fell for it hook, line, and sinker.
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THE CONSIGLIERE

Valerie Jarrett was President Obama’s closest confidante. She was the only advisor allowed to roam the White House family quarters at night, and was so well known for her late-night sit-downs with the president that the Secret Service detail dubbed her the “night stalker.”

Her official title, senior advisor and assistant to the president for intergovernmental affairs and public engagement, did not reflect her actual job, which was to conduct sensitive political negotiations on the president’s behalf in Washington and overseas. Her task was to help Obama see how to maximize the damage to his political adversaries, and the gain to himself.