Dark Forces: The Truth About What Happened in Benghazi (35 page)

Did Panetta suggest to the president that they watch the live video feed, as Obama claimed he did during the takedown of Osama bin Laden?

According to Panetta’s own testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee on February 7, 2013, he and Dempsey discussed Benghazi with the president for, at most, twenty minutes, and left the White House ten minutes after that.

“We had just picked up the information that something was happening, that there was an apparent attack going on in Benghazi. And I informed the president of that fact, and he at that point directed both myself and General Dempsey to do everything we needed to do to try to protect lives there,” Panetta said. “[Obama] basically said, ‘Do whatever you need to do to be able to protect our people there.’ ”

He made no mention of the drone footage.

When Panetta returned to the Pentagon, the Pentagon timeline shows that he convened “a series of meetings” over the next two hours and gave “verbal authorizations” to regional commanders to start preparing to move assets closer to Libya. They also discussed “the potential outbreak of further violence throughout the region, particularly in Tunis, Tripoli, Cairo, and Sana’a”—something you would think they should have been anticipating well before the 9/11 anniversary. In other words, they were more worried about
other
events than responding to the immediate crisis in Benghazi.

As Dempsey later testified, the military response that night was a big lumbering machine, wrapped in layers of bureaucracy. Each emergency response unit required N[otification]+6 hours or N+8 hours before it could move. And even then, most of the units put on alert were told to move to temporary staging areas in other countries, rather than move directly into Libya.

Ever since the attacks, Americans have been asking, why couldn’t they scramble F-18 fighter jets from Naval Air Station Sigonella in Sicily? After all, that’s where French Rafale fighter jets had based during the NATO air war against Qaddafi. If the French could fly the 430 nautical miles to Libya, hit their targets, and return without incident, couldn’t American pilots do the same?

Or why not mobilize F-16s from the 555th Fighter Squadron of the 31st Operation Group at Aviano Air Base in northern Italy and hot-refuel them at Sigonella in the south? They could have made supersonic passes over Benghazi that would have scared the lice off a rat. But, as Dempsey and, later, Admiral Mike Mullen testified, no jets were on strip alert, nor was there single aerial tanker anywhere within a thousand miles of Libya to refuel the jets. And military commanders believed that a supersonic flyover not followed up with actual bombs hitting targets would actually embolden the terrorists.
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And why didn’t the European Command (EUCOM) Commander’s In-Extremis Force (CIF), a specially trained unit of around fifty Special Operations troops, then on counterterrorism training exercises in nearby Croatia, get the go-ahead to gear up and jump into C-130s, and head to Benghazi, just a two-to-three-hour flight away? The fifty heavily armed JSOC operators, known as C-110, would have made mincemeat of the attackers and were itching to go.

The Pentagon timeline shows that Panetta authorized all of these units—and more—to begin preparations to deploy. He also put a Special Forces response team at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, on alert, with orders to stage in Sigonella the next day.

But there was no sense of a command authority telling the men in charge of the operators on the ground to do it now, make it happen, without fail.

Someone was missing from the fight. It was the commander-in-chief.

Panetta and Dempsey both testified that they never spoke to President Obama again until late the next day. He never once called them, never once followed up, never once sent an underling to see if they needed anything more. President Obama never once inquired as to the welfare of the Americans caught in the jihadis’ gunsights. The White House has released no record of him ever visiting the Situation Room and refused to answer my direct question as to whether he did so.

Obama’s schedule for that day shows no more meetings after the hasty five o’clock one with Panetta and Dempsey. According to the White House logs, he received no visitors. Nor did he go out. At around 6:30 PM, he spoke with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu
, apparently on unrelated issues, and then retired to prepare for his megamillion fund-raiser in Las Vegas the next afternoon, in all likelihood dialing for dollars. That is why the White House Press Office has deflected all questions about the president’s actions during the crisis. Whether it was a sense of fatalism, or a cynical disregard for the lives of the men and women serving their country in hot zones around the world, the president of the United States couldn’t be bothered to stay on watch that night.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton never spoke to Panetta or Dempsey, either, although she later told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in her only congressional appearance to answer questions about Benghazi that she had been on the phone with CIA Director David Petraeus and his deputy, Mike Morell, several times.

AFRICOM Commander General Carter Ham provided different stories at different times to members of Congress, according to Representative Jason Chaffetz. In an early meeting with Chaffetz three and a half weeks after the attacks, General Ham said the main reason he didn’t go “balls to the wall” and get forces to Benghazi was simple: “We were never asked.”
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Pathetic. But true.

HILLARY’S STAND-DOWN ORDERS

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has never released a timeline of her own actions that night. But we do know that she played a key role in actually
delaying
the arrival of rescue troops. Clinton insisted that a fifty-man team of U.S. Marines who were part of a FAST (Fleet Antiterrorism Security Team) based at Rota Naval Station in Spain “deplane, change out of their U.S. military uniforms, and put on civilian clothes before flying to Tripoli—a decision that delayed them from launching for approximately 90 minutes.”
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She didn’t want to upset the sensitivities of the Libyans by making it look like the U.S. military was invading their country. There would be no Marines landing “on the shores of Tripoli” on her watch. Just as she had insisted earlier with Lieutenant Colonel Wood’s Site Security Team of Special Operators, no military uniforms, insignia, or even boots would be tolerated in her State Department facilities in Libya. “People high up at State resented like hell us being there and doing what we did,” Wood said.

House Democrats went to great lengths to get senior military leaders to assert that the ninety-minute delay had no material impact on the fighting in Benghazi, since the FAST arrived anyway in Tripoli well after the fighting was over, at nine the
next night
. Nevertheless, Clinton’s order contributed to the overall sense that Washington was in no hurry to send the cavalry to Benghazi.

My investigation has found that this sentiment was felt on the ground and all the way up the command structure. Hillary Clinton despised the military and wanted nothing to do with them. It was an extraordinary attitude for someone who aspired to be Commander in Chief; and the military essentially responded in kind. As the commander of AFRICOM Special Forces, RADM Brian Losey, told Representative Jason Chaffetz when asked if AFRICOM had any sort of contingency plan if something “went awry” at a U.S. embassy, “That would be a State Department question—what goes awry in the embassies.”
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Hillary Clinton and John Brennan made two additional decisions that night that amounted to an across-the-board stand-down order of key rescue units.

•  They refused to convene the Counterterrorism Security Group (CSG), the only structured, experienced, interagency reaction team that could have decided which resources of the government were available for deployment immediately.

•  They refused to activate the State Department–led Foreign Emergency Support Team (FEST), an extraordinary operational unit whose sole purpose was to rescue U.S. diplomats under attack and to stand up emergency services within hours using dedicated military, law enforcement, security, medical, and secure communications personnel. They practiced a full-scale exercise twice every year at an overseas location.

Both decisions were clearly based on political opportunity, not operational concerns.

The Counterterrorism Security Group was “the one group that’s supposed to know what resources every agency has. They know of multiple options and have the ability to coordinate counterterrorism assets across all the agencies,” a high-ranking U.S. government official explained. CBS News investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson first exposed this extraordinary political decision in November 2012.
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Why was the refusal to convene the CSG so important?

“Convening the CSG would have meant there was a terrorist strike under way,” said Larry Johnson, a former CIA officer who supported Hillary Clinton in her 2008 presidential bid. “Clearly, they didn’t want to make that kind of admission.” That decision was made at the White House by John Brennan and by National Security Advisor Tom Donilon, who preferred to handle the crisis in a way that wouldn’t sound all sorts of alarm bells.
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The refusal to activate the Foreign Emergency Support Team (FEST) also indicated the administration’s unwillingness to face facts.

Mark Thompson spent twenty years as a U.S. Marine before joining the State Department to lead their counterterrorism response efforts. In 1998, he was the lead operations officer for the FEST in Nairobi, Kenya, after the al Qaeda bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa. In 2000, he performed a similar duty with the FEST in Yemen, after al Qaeda attacked the USS
Cole
. He helped rescue hostages in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, and in 2004 set up a special unit in Baghdad to free hostages.

When bad things happened at U.S. diplomatic missions around the world, Mark Thompson was the man to call. But nobody called him on the night of September 11, 2012.

Thompson didn’t spend twenty years in the Marines to become a wallflower. He saw what was happening in Benghazi and immediately knew what to do and what resources he had available. Once he learned from the 10:05 PM alert from the State Department Operations Center that Ambassador Stevens had been taken to the safe haven, he alerted his leadership, and recommended that they deploy the FEST. He described what happened next in dramatic congressional testimony:

I notified the White House of my idea. They indicated that meetings had already taken place that evening that had taken FEST out of the menu of options. I called the office within the State Department that had been represented there, asking them why it had been taken off the table, and was told that it was not the right time and it was not the team that needed to go right then.

He added that Undersecretary Patrick Kennedy’s office was the one who told him it was “not the right time” to deploy the FEST. There is no way Kennedy would have made such a decision without consulting with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

The FEST included Special Operations troops, FBI agents, DoD pilots and communications officers, and more. It was not run by bureaucrats or subject to the normal Pentagon process of layers and layers of approvals and signoffs. “It’s [a process] that can go from a cold start to wheels-up, so to speak, within hours,” Thompson said. And they were standing by. Team members were “shocked and amazed that they were not being called on their cell phones, beepers, et cetera, to go,” Thompson said.

Not only was the FEST never called, but Hillary Clinton’s hand-picked Accountability Review Board never interviewed Mark Thompson, despite his repeated requests to be questioned on the events of that night.
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No surprise there.

BREAKOUT

While Obama was meeting with Panetta and Dempsey at the White House, the fighting raged on in Benghazi. Through it all, the DS agents and GRS operators continued to go back into the burning villa to search for the ambassador.

After fifteen minutes of constant shooting, Ty Woods and the other GRS shooters said it was time to go. They were running low on ammo, and the attackers just kept coming, despite the bodies beginning to pile up on the manicured lawn and in the orchard. Soon, they would be completely overrun.

They decided to pull back to the Annex in two stages: first, the DS agents who were in dire need of medical attention, then Ty and the GRS shooters, along with Sean Smith.

So, while they provided cover, the DS agents piled into the armored Land Cruiser that Ubben had parked by the pool. The DS agents weren’t familiar with the location of the Annex, so Woods gave them detailed instructions. They were supposed to turn
left
at the front gate and head west toward 17th February Martyrs Brigade territory. Whatever they did, they shouldn’t turn
right
out of the main gate. That was jihadiland.

It was 11:15 PM in Benghazi when David Ubben turned on the ignition and gunned the engine and started heading toward the armed mob at the front gate. He was physically exhausted, and could barely speak because of the smoke inhalation. His face was blackened and his eyes were tearing with soot. The GRS shooters laid down supporting fire as he reached the gate, forcing the mob to back off. But for some reason, Ubben turned
right
and headed east on the gravel road, directly into a mass of bodies, all armed.

He slammed the heavy SUV into reverse, then made an emergency U-turn by turning the wheel sharply, throwing the car into gear and standing on the gas. That got him back heading west. But when he got past the main gate a militiaman he believed to be with 17th February signaled him urgently to turn around and head back east. So, he turned around again, slowly this time. It was a mess.

As they roared back into the mob, bullets pinged into the armor plate of the Land Cruiser and impacted in the inch-thick bullet-resistant glass. Spiderweb cracks began to spread in the windshield and side windows. Up ahead, a man eagerly motioned the DS agents to enter his compound but Ubben suspected it was a trap and sped up. He was right. No sooner had he passed the compound than they took sustained bursts of AK-47 fire that nearly penetrated the armored glass and blew out two of their tires. Luckily, the Land Cruiser was equipped with run-flat tires—and they performed. The ARB report noted that “a roadblock was present outside this compound and groups of attackers were seen entering it at about the time this vehicle movement was taking place.” That is what the decision makers in Washington could see on the video feed from the Predator drone still overhead.