Dark Forces: The Truth About What Happened in Benghazi (27 page)

The authors identified Sufian Ben Qumu, one of several former Guantánamo detainees befriended by Chris Stevens during his earlier tour in Tripoli as DCM under Qaddafi, as the founder and principal leader of the group. They noted that the Ansar al-Sharia name “is also being used by al-Qaeda in the Lands of the Arabian Peninsula in so-called liberated areas of Yemen and by Salafist groups in Tunisia . . . suggesting coordination between the groups.”

But the Pentagon intelligence report did not mention the Iran connection.

For a generation, the U.S. intelligence community had swallowed the fiction that Shiite Iran was locked into a deadly conflict with Sunni Islam and therefore was fundamentally incapable of cooperating with al Qaeda and other Sunni terrorist groups. That mind-set, expressed most powerfully by the CIA’s top analyst in the 1990s, Paul Pillar, blinded the United States to the long-standing ties between Iran’s Islamic Revolutionaries and the Palestine Liberation Organization, and later to Hamas, the Taliban, and al Qaeda. It also contributed to the CIA missing all the warning signs of Iranian involvement in the 9/11 plot. I first exposed those ties in my 2005 book,
Countdown to Crisis: The Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran
. Based in part on my information, U.S. District Court judge George B. Daniels found that the Islamic Republic of Iran provided “essential material support, indeed, direct support [to al Qaeda], for the 9/11 attacks” on America, and awarded a $6 billion judgment to families of the victims.
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The Department of the Treasury has repeatedly exposed Iran for harboring top al Qaeda leaders, including Saad bin Laden, the oldest son (and titular heir) of Osama bin Laden, and members of the al Qaeda Shura (or governing) council. Treasury has also identified Iran as the center of al Qaeda’s terrorist finance network. In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2010, Army General David H. Petraeus, who was then in charge of the war in Afghanistan, said that al Qaeda was using Iran as a “key facilitation hub, where facilitators connect al-Qaeda’s senior leadership to regional affiliates.” Already in 2008, Treasury noted that Iran was providing “logistical, financial, and material support” to the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group through these al Qaeda networks.
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The Saudi government also understood that Shiite Iran was entirely capable of financing, training, and arming Sunni terrorist groups. They accused Iran of backing Ansar al-Sharia as a false-flag operation. “Iran supports Ansar al-Sharia financially, but secretly, because they don’t want the militants of Ansar al-Sharia to break from their own leaders because of the differing views between Shiite Iran and the Sunni Ansar al-Sharia,” Saudi researcher Ibraheem al-Nahas said.
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My Iranian sources told me the same thing. The Quds Force was using operatives recruited in Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen, Turkey, and Egypt to finance, train, and equip Ansar al-Sharia and related
katiba
in Libya, careful to show their hand only to a select few. To anyone on the ground, these Iranian operatives would look and speak just like Arabs or Turks. They helped to create a series of small, radical militias—Ansar al-Sharia was not the only one, as the June 7–8 gathering of jihadis in Benghazi showed—to block any progress toward democracy. My sources estimate that the Iranians recruited more than one thousand Libyan fighters for these militias who were “in direct contact with Quds Force officers.”

What was
their
goal? “Iran wants chaos. They want to generate anti-American anger, radicalize the rebels, and maintain a climate of war,” the former Iranian intelligence chief for Western Europe told me. “They are very serious about this. They want to damage the reputation of the United States as a freedom-loving country in the eyes of the Arabs. In Libya, Iran wanted to block U.S. influence, which they saw as a threat. They saw the uprising against Qaddafi—and the Arab Spring more generally—as an opportunity to accomplish this.”

In other words, Ansar al-Sharia and Iran’s Quds Force shared the same goals in Libya. It would soon become apparent that they shared much more as well.

THE WIZARD OF OZ OF IRANIAN TERROR

By mid-August 2012, planning for the attacks on the U.S. diplomatic compound and the CIA intelligence base in Benghazi had been in the works for two months.

My sources say the head of the Iranian team in Benghazi was a senior Quds Force officer named Ibrahim Mohammed Joudaki. Born in April 1973, he was a veteran terrorist with a long pedigree. He was the one who staged the kidnapping of his boss, General Rabbani. It was a stroke of genius.

Joudaki joined the Revolutionary Guards in 1994 at age twenty- one. He got his spurs killing Kurds as a subunit commander in northwestern Iran from 1995 to 1998. Some sources believe he was involved early in his career in liquidating Iranian dissidents in Europe.

In 2000, he was sent to Lebanon for three years to train Hezbollah fighters. He was so successful that his bosses selected him for recruitment into the Quds Force, the elite expeditionary arm of the Revolutionary Guards. They were professional terrorists in the service of the Iranian regime. At the Quds Force training academy, based in the former U.S. Embassy in Tehran, he took theoretical courses in insurgency, and political party indoctrination. He enhanced his operational skills with a course in tactical driving, where he learned to drive a chase car and to shoot from a rapidly maneuvering vehicle. At the end of the training, he was promoted to major.
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In 2005, Ibrahim Joudaki was sent back to Lebanon, where he helped structure the Hezbollah forces on the ground to operate against the Israeli military, and was actively involved in their successful resistance of Israel’s effort to drive them out of southern Lebanon during the 2006 war. In 2007, he was rewarded for his success with a stint at the advanced officers training academy—“the equivalent of our Fort Leavenworth,” a senior U.S. intelligence officer told me—and promoted to lieutenant colonel. In 2010, this Otto Skorzeny of Iran was sent to Lebanon for a third tour, this time to prepare the Iranian military mission to Syria to retrain the Syrian Army to fight a domestic insurgency. He was then promoted to deputy commander of Quds Force operations for the Levant, a theater that included Libya and Egypt.

Ibrahim Joudaki was the man in charge of Libya throughout the anti-Qaddafi uprising. He had overall control of the September 11, 2012, attacks and handled the finances and operational planning.

His deputy, Khalil Harb, was someone he had known and worked with for years in Lebanon. Harb was a top Hezbollah operative and a deputy to Quds Force chieftain Qassem Suleymani. As an Arab, it was easier for him to interface directly with the local militias and handle the logistics of the operation itself. Over those first two months, Joudaki spread money like butter on bread, while Harb and his team of hardened killers gathered intelligence, recruited militiamen, and refined the operational plan. My sources say Harb had a total of some fifty Quds Force operatives on the ground to manage the attacks. “Khalil Harb was the Quds Force chief of station for Libya,” the former Western European intelligence chief said.
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Their initial orders were to kidnap the U.S. ambassador while he was visiting Benghazi, and to destroy the CIA Annex. They wanted to drive the United States out of Benghazi, where they believed the CIA was supervising weapons transfers to the Syrian rebels. “Iran saw the CIA presence on the ground in Benghazi as a direct threat,” the former Western European intelligence chief said. The kidnapping plan was dropped after General Rabbani and the Red Crescent team arrived and were outed by the CIA. Harb and Joudaki replaced it with a straight kill order.

My sources say that a courier arrived carrying $8 million to $10 million in five-hundred-euro notes around three weeks before the attack. Joudaki distributed the money through Khalil Harb to Ansar al-Sharia leaders. The money was brought in through Tunisia, then south through the Algerian desert, and into Libya by road. It came from Quds Force accounts in Malaysia.

Andy Wood had known for months that his security team was up against trained and well-funded adversaries. But my sources say it was much worse. His real adversary was Qassem Suleymani, the Wizard of Oz of Iranian terror, the most dreaded and most effective terrorist alive.

FROM BENGHAZI WITH LOVE

Libya’s jihadists saw their victory against Qaddafi as the first step in imposing Sharia law across the Muslim world and ultimately reestablishing the Islamic caliphate. Just as the Americans in the Annex were doing, they next turned their sights to Syria.

In August 2012, Abdelhakim Belhaj sent his deputy, Mahdi al-Harati, into Syria along with a contingent of Libya jihadis to join the Syrian rebels fighting Assad. A charismatic figure who had lived in Ireland for twenty years, married an Irish woman, and acquired Irish citizenship, al-Harati was famous for being wounded while fighting an Israeli boarding party on the
Mavi Marmara
in May 2010. That was the Turkish ferry, purchased by an Islamist charity with close ties to the ruling AKP party of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdog˘an in Turkey, which became the flagship of the Islamist flotilla trying to break Israel’s naval blockade of Gaza. Erdog˘an personally visited al-Harati in a Turkish hospital where he was recovering. He told the Libyan, “We are very proud of you,” and kissed him on the forehead.
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At forty years old, al-Harati was dedicated to global jihad. And he had punched all the right tickets. After working with the Turks, who would return the favor shortly, he was spotted by the Qatari Special Forces unit that came to help the anti-Qaddafi rebels at the start of the uprising in 2011. The Qataris gave him proper military training. Some sources say he received additional tactical training from U.S. Special Forces contractors stationed at the Benghazi Annex. His connections and skills helped him to rise quickly to become the operational commander of the Tripoli Brigade of Abdelhakim Belhaj. By the end of the civil war, he led the assault on Qaddafi’s compound.

This wasn’t Harati’s first trip into Syria. Belhaj had sent him to liaise with the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood a first time in September 2011, just after the fall of Tripoli. He returned a second time one month later along with six hundred fighters and established an international Islamist battalion in Syria called Liwaa al-Umma (Islamic People’s Brigade, sometimes translated as Banner of the Islamic Nation). Hacked emails from Stratfor, the private intelligence firm, suggest that he was in contact with former CIA officer and Stratfor source, Jamie Smith, who claimed to have recruited him as a U.S. asset. If there is any truth to Smith’s claim, that might explain how this die-hard jihadi acquired the assets to grow his operation in Syria so dramatically. It might also provide a clue as to how the CIA got around the legal restrictions against unreported covert actions.
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The media-friendly al-Harati happily met with a Reuters reporter inside Syria in August 2012 at the head of his new military unit, which he boasted had swollen to nearly six thousand fighters. The reporter helpfully told his audience that most of al-Harati’s unit were Syrians, but that foreign fighters were also welcome, “including 20 senior members of his own Libyan rebel unit.” Which unit that would be remained unclear. The Tripoli Military Council, which subsumed the Islamist Tripoli Brigade, had been folded into the Supreme Security Council (SSC), ostensibly the main national security force of the new Libyan government. As Reuters explained, “the Libyans aiding the Syrian rebels include specialists in communications, logistics, humanitarian issues and heavy weapons,” and they “operate training bases, teaching fitness and battlefield tactics.” All the skills they had learned from the Qatari and U.S. Special Forces they were now passing on to a new crop of jihadi fighters, this time in Syria.
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Critics of the Islamist war against Assad called al-Harati and his fighters a “foreign invasion,” waging war against a sovereign state.

On August 12, 2012, just as al-Harati was taking the Reuters reporter for the rounds, the Syrian rebels shot down a Syrian Air Force MiG-23. A senior U.S. Special Operations commander told me that the shootdown occurred just weeks after major arms shipments began reaching the Syrian rebels, including from Libya.

In one YouTube video of the shootdown, labeled as a missile strike, the only apparent sounds are those of conventional anti-aircraft artillery. In a second video, however, the whooshing of a missile can be heard in the background. This video ends with footage of a Dutch military exercise using Stinger missiles purchased from Rocketstan in Turkey, which was licensed to assembly Stingers in the 1990s by Raytheon.
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Just days before the shootdown, a Syrian rebel posted a picture to his Facebook page of a young fighter with a SA-7 missile, claiming it was from the “first batch” of missiles to reach the rebels, with the “second batch on the way.” The delivery of the missiles showed that “the international community decided to abandon the [Syrian] regime,” he commented.
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The
New York Times
reported that the photo was the first hard evidence of a complete missile system in the hands of the Syrian rebels, and gave credence to a report two weeks earlier from NBC News reporter Richard Engel of the transfer of some two dozen shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles through Turkey.
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Were the weapons now winding up in the hands of the Syrian rebels the result of a U.S. covert operation? One thing is clear: Jihadi leaders in Libya were collecting arms and supplies for their brothers in Syria. They held public events, ran ads in local newspapers, and posted billboards on the streets calling for Libyans to help the Syrian jihadis. The leaders of the weapons transfer networks were Belhaj, al-Marati, and a former 17th February Martyrs Brigade commander named Abdul Basut Haroun.

“It is just the enthusiasm of the Libyan people helping the Syrians,” said Fawzi Bukatef, another former 17th February Brigade commander. “They collect the weapons, and when they have enough they send it,” he said. “The Libyan government is not involved, but it does not really matter.”
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