Dark Forces: The Truth About What Happened in Benghazi (36 page)

Ubben accelerated past the crowd, swerving to avoid another group of men. He bypassed a jihadi gun truck parked across the road a bit farther down by jumping up onto the center median. As things got worse, he slipped down into the oncoming lane of traffic, with two cars of shooters in hot pursuit. The pursuers eventually broke off, turning into a warehouse just north of the Annex. One of his colleagues radioed ahead when they were one minute out so the gates would be open when they arrived.

It was 11:30 PM when the Annex gate slammed shut behind them. According to one account the “underside of the vehicle was ablaze.”
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Ty Woods and the GRS operators made their hot exfil through the front gate at about the time the others arrived at the Annex. They turned left out the front gate, then left again on the north-south road by the 17th February barracks. They made it back in about five minutes. With all U.S. personnel now evacuated from the diplomatic compound, the Predator operator back in the United States was ordered to park his drone over the Annex.

THE “SECRET” BASE

The CIA Annex was supposed to be a secret base—so secret, in fact, that when Congressman Jason Chaffetz, the Utah Republican who chaired the House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee that was leading the Benghazi investigation, visited Libya shortly after the attacks he was told to never, ever mention its existence.

Top secret, the CIA station chief in Tripoli told him. Classified. Sources and methods. You talk about this and it will end your career.

So, when Charlene Lamb, the deputy assistant secretary of state who became the designated scapegoat for all that went wrong in Benghazi, mentioned the Annex in her testimony at the first public hearing on the debacle, Representative Chaffetz went nuts. Not only did she make reference to it: She displayed a satellite photograph on an easel behind her showing details of the four-villa compound, as well as its location relative to the diplomatic mission compound.

Anyone with minimal map-reading skills could figure out in a jiffy how to find the Annex on the ground.
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Chaffetz stopped the hearing on a point of order. He questioned not just the propriety of showing the photo, but said that Charlene Lamb’s description of how the Annex team came to the rescue of the entrapped DS officers at the diplomatic compound was “getting into classified issues that deal with sources and methods that would be totally inappropriate in an open forum such as this.”

He was eventually overruled when Undersecretary of State Patrick Kennedy, who was also testifying at the hearing, declared that the commercial satellite image, available on Google, was unclassified.
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Nevertheless, Chaffetz tried twice more to stop the hearing when he believed classified material was being discussed.

The kerfuffle over the photograph and the very existence of the Annex was just one of many ways that Hillary Clinton’s minions were attempting to manipulate Republicans in Congress, prevent them from acquiring accurate information, and when that failed, intimidate them.

It later emerged that Clinton had sent a State Department lawyer to Tripoli to keep tabs on Representative Chaffetz during his fact-
finding
trip. His primary mission was to ensure that no embassy officials spoke to Representative Chaffetz alone, to give him ground truth of what had actually happened on the night of September 11, 2012, and all the security warnings before. Indeed, instructions to that effect were sent to Gregory Hicks, now the acting chief of mission, before Chaffetz arrived. “Those instructions were to arrange the visit in such a way that Representative Chaffetz and his staff would not have the opportunity to interview myself, John Martinec, and David McFarland alone,” Hicks told the committee.
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That in itself was unprecedented, as Representative Issa pointed out. “Over the years that you’ve watched great ambassadors, have you ever failed to see the head of a [congressional] delegation come and get a one-on-one? Isn’t that part sort of the ceremony of that relationship and how you treat the head of a congressional delegation [CODEL]?” he asked.

“In every CODEL that I have been involved in, that has been standard,” Hicks replied.

Hillary’s chief of staff and top lawyer, Cheryl Mills, got a frantic email from the minder she had sent to Tripoli that the CIA chief of station had excluded him from a classified briefing given to Chaffetz because he lacked the necessary security clearances. That gave Chaffetz an opportunity to speak with Hicks, Martinec, and McFarland without the minder’s presence. Mills came down on Greg Hicks like a ton of bricks, calling him personally from Washington to learn exactly what he had told Chaffetz and to express her displeasure.

Cheryl Mills was Hillary’s enforcer, her one-woman cleanup crew. And she had just begun to go to work. She was going to bury Benghazi so deep that no one would uncover the truth—at least, not until after the November elections. At which point, as her boss famously said, “What difference at this point does it make?”

EVACUATE!

The decision makers in Washington could see the CIA officers on the rooftops of the Annex buildings, as they stared anxiously toward the fires at the diplomatic compound to the northwest.

Those were the first images from the MQ-1 Predator drone once it reached the Annex. The chief of base had ordered a generalized distribution of weapons from the armory, so each of them was carrying an HK 416 assault rifle. Although the images may have been confusing to an untrained eye—the infrared camera the Predator used at night delivered black-and-white imagery, rife with shadows and harsh light—a skilled analyst would be able to interpret them.

Just before midnight—less than a half an hour since the DS agents arrived in their burning Land Cruiser at the Annex—Khalil Harb’s men launched their first rocket-propelled grenades against the perimeter wall of the Annex. For the next hour, Ty Woods and the GRS operators took up positions behind sandbags on the roofs, locating the attackers firing RPGs and automatic weapons at them and taking them out one by one. That phase of the attack on the Annex stopped just after one in the morning, although sporadic automatic weapons fire against the Annex continued all night long.

There has been speculation that the attackers only learned the location of the Annex by following the DS agents on their meandering trip back from the diplomatic compound. My Iranian sources tell me that this is simply not true. The Quds Force team had the Annex under surveillance for several weeks at least. They knew how many vehicles were there, how the GRS operators moved, what type of weapons they favored. They knew the layout of the four villas from Google Maps, and could calculate the distance between the villas and the perimeter walls. This became critically important when they moved into the final phase of their plan just before dawn.

In Tripoli, RSO John Martinec alerted the deputy chief of mission, Greg Hicks, that Ansar al-Sharia was claiming responsibility for the attack and was now threatening to attack the embassy in Tripoli. So, Hicks, who was acting chief in Stevens’ absence, gave the general evacuation order. In the ensuing cover-up by the administration, the fact that the remaining fifty-five diplomats and intelligence staff in Tripoli were evacuated to the CIA Annex there because of a public threat from Ansar al-Sharia has gone virtually unreported and unnoticed. They moved out at five in the morning in a convoy of armored Suburbans, and hunkered down at the CIA facility for two full days.

Hicks described the chaos of the emergency evacuation in his first public testimony on May 8, 2013:

Our team responded with amazing discipline and courage in Tripoli in organizing our withdrawal. I have vivid memories of that. I think the most telling, though, was of our communications staff dismantling our communications equipment to take with us to the annex and destroying the classified communications capability.

Our office manager, Amber Pickens, was everywhere that night, just throwing herself into some task that had to be done. First, she was taking a log of what we were doing. Then she was loading magazines, carrying ammunition to the—carrying our ammunition supply to our vehicles. Then she was smashing hard drives with an axe.

At the same moment Hicks gave the evacuation order—12:30 AM, Libya time—Glen Doherty and his seven-man team were finally wheels up out of Tripoli airport. It had taken time to negotiate the emergency charter of a private jet, plus around $30,000 in cash.

In addition to Doherty and four GRS shooters, the cavalry included two Delta Force operators who were working out of the CIA Annex in Tripoli. They reported to Joint Special Operations Command in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, as opposed to the four remaining members of the SST, now under the command of Lieutenant Colonel S. E. Gibson at the embassy, who reported to AFRICOM Commander General Carter Ham in Stuttgart, Germany.

The very presence of the Delta Force operators in Libya was a closely guarded secret. According to one report, they were part of an eight-man team “on a counterterrorism mission that involved capturing weapons and wanted terrorists from the streets and helping train Libyan forces.”
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My sources say that they were drawn from the C-110 counterterrorism team based in Europe that was scheduled to be assigned to AFRICOM on October 1, 2012, as a dedicated Commander’s In-Extremis Force (CIF). They had been dispatched to Libya shortly before the September 11 attacks to prepare for a hostage-rescue simulation in October as part of the Section 1208 Defense Department training of Libyan Special Forces. As this book goes to press, Congress has been unable to determine whether these operators went to Benghazi on their own initiative, following the warrior’s ethos of running to the gun, or if they sought to clear their departure with their command.
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Doherty and his men came fully armed with weapons and bags of cash. Now help—real help—was on the way.

Their chartered jet touched down at Benghazi’s Benina Airport at around one-thirty in the morning. As they started unloading their gear, they were immediately detained by 17th February Martyrs Brigade militiamen under the command of Fathi al-Obeidi. Instead of transporting the team to the Annex, they started a three-hour negotiation over the terms of their assistance.
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At two o’clock, Hicks received a call from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, asking for an update on the search for the ambassador. At that point, no one knew what had happened to him. Hicks remembers telling her that he had just ordered the evacuation of the embassy in Tripoli, so there could be no doubt in her mind that the threats to U.S. diplomatic personnel were ongoing. She said that U.S. Marines were on their way. Two FAST platoons were deploying, one to Tripoli, one to Benghazi.

That’s great, Hicks said. When would they arrive?

Tomorrow afternoon, Clinton replied.

“I find it very ironic that when she called Greg Hicks at two AM, she basically said, ‘There’s nothing we can do, you’re on your own.’ That to me was a bit chilling,” Representative James Lankford told me.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta later admitted that he had slow-rolled the military response to the attacks. “The basic principle is that you don’t deploy forces into harm’s way without knowing what’s going on, without having some real-time information about what’s taking place,” he said. “It was really over before, you know, we had the opportunity to really know what was happening.”
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The chief of base was on an encrypted line with the CIA Operations Center and with his immediate boss in Tripoli, giving minute-by-minute updates throughout the night. Hicks and Martinec were reporting constantly to the State Department Operations Center and to their immediate superiors, Assistant Secretary of State Beth Jones and Charlene Lamb, as Admiral Mullen told the House Oversight Committee in his deposition. The Pentagon was getting situaton reports from the military attaché and the SST commander, LTC Gibson, and had eyes on from the MQ-1 Predator drone that circled over the Annex all during that night.

Exactly what additional intelligence Panetta said he was missing remains unclear.

What is clear, however, was the line of authority. No outside military forces could respond to an attack on a U.S. diplomatic facility without the express authorization of the secretary of state. And Hillary Clinton never gave that authorization. As General Ham and others said, “She never asked” for help.

FIND THE AMBASSADOR

Shortly after Hicks learned from Secretary Clinton at two in the morning that they were on their own, an Arabic-speaking male called from Benghazi using the cell phone Scott Wickland had given Ambassador Stevens in the safe haven. He said he was with “an unresponsive male who matched the physical description of the ambassador” at a local hospital.

At first, they weren’t sure what hospital he meant. Once it became clear he was talking about the Benghazi Medical Center, which the Americans now believed was under control of Ansar al-Sharia, they were on their guard. “There was some concern that the call might be a ruse to lure American personnel into a trap,” the ARB report stated.

The cellphone video of the U.S. ambassador being dragged out of the diplomatic compound by looters with his shirt and belt unbuttoned shocked Americans when it was posted to YouTube the next day. The sudden shouts of
Allah-o Akbar!
that rang out when someone shined a light on his face and realized he was an American gave rise to speculation that he was raped and dragged through the streets.

But a careful examination of the cellphone video, and subsequent evidence from the doctor who examined Stevens at the Benghazi hospital, suggests otherwise. The young Libyans who discovered the ambassador were not militiamen. They were dressed for the most part in designer jeans and T-shirts and carried no weapons. They clearly stumbled upon him by accident, not as part of the organized attack.

Dr. Ziad Abu Zeid was working the night shift at the Benghazi Medical Center that night. He was used to militiamen dropping off unknown persons during the frequent violence in Benghazi, so at first he didn’t pay much attention to the identity of the white male brought in on a gurney shortly past 1:15 AM. He worked on him for nearly forty-five minutes, trying every EMS protocol he knew. He later told a BBC reporter Stevens “might have survived” if he had been pulled out of the building earlier, “because there was no injury to the body, only suffocating from carbon monoxide.”
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