Dark Forces: The Truth About What Happened in Benghazi (40 page)

One month after Morsi was ousted and placed under arrest, the Egyptian police arrested the Muslim Brotherhood’s top strategist, Khaiat El-Shater. While raiding his home, the police found the passport of Mohsen al-Azazi, who had been identified as one of those present at the Special Mission Compound on the night of the attacks. Clearly, El-Shater had been sheltering Azazi, perhaps helping him to lie low.

A prominent Egyptian television personality explained to his audience on July 30 why Azazi was so important:

Ambassador Stevens was killed in Benghazi, and you know who killed him, the U.S. administration knows who killed him. . . . The assassin is now present at Rabia Al-Adawiya [mosque protest]. His name is, do you know it or you would like me to inform you? He’s affiliated with Al Qaeda in Libya, his name is Mohsen Al-Azazi. His passport was found in the house of Khairat El-Shater.
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Azazi provides a hard link between the Benghazi attackers and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. TV commentator Ahmed Moussa went on to berate the Obama administration and Ambassador Anne Patterson for supporting Ambassador Stevens’ killer and the heads of the clandestine apparatus of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. He concluded: “Your administration aids terrorism.”

The Obama White House “declined to comment” when I asked whether they had been in communication with the new Egyptian government over Azazi.

THE MISSING MANPADS (CONTINUED)

Admiral Mullen made an extraordinary admission in his sworn deposition with the House Oversight Committee staff that has gotten little attention. Asked about the lack of a military response, Mullen acknowledged that military readiness under Obama was so degraded they had no “on-call” assets available anywhere. Then he gave up the story:

And frankly I’ve heard, quote, “Well, why didn’t you just fly a fighter jet over and try and scare them with the noise or something?” end quote. Well, given the number of surface-to-air missiles that have disappeared from Qadhafi’s arsenal, I would not have approved sending an aircraft, a single aircraft over Benghazi under those circumstances.
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General Carter Ham expressed the same concern.

And as I look back on the events of that night and say—and think in my own mind would air have made a difference? And in my military judgment, I believe the answer is no. It was a very uncertain situation in an environment which we know we had an unknown surface-to-air threat with the proliferation particularly of shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles, many of which remain unaccounted for.
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Libya’s missing MANPADS had a nasty way of turning up all over the region in the hands of dedicated terrorists, including in Benghazi, where prominent jihadis, such as Abdel-Basit Haroun, were calling on former militia leaders to supposedly donate them to the cause of the anti-Assad rebels in Syria.

America’s allies were thrust in the unpleasant position of having to mop up.

On October 24, 2012, Israeli F-16s swooped low over the Yarmouk military complex outside Khartoum, Sudan, and destroyed a warehouse where forty shipping containers containing surface-to-air missiles and other munitions had recently arrived from Iran. Sudan was a well-known hub for al Qaeda arms shipments as well as Iranian shipments to Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, both in Gaza. Israel neither confirmed nor denied hitting the facility. Satellite imagery analyzed by the Satellite Sentinel Project in the United States showed six fifty-two-foot-wide craters in the spot where the shipping containers had been just days earlier.
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That same day, a top Russian military commander said Russia had “reliable evidence” that the rebels in Syria had acquired surface-to-air missiles, “including U.S.-made Stingers.” The statement by Army Headquarters General Nikolai Makarov caused a stir, given his rank and the extent of the Russian military and intelligence presence on the ground in Syria. In Washington, Hillary Clinton’s spokesperson, Victoria Nuland, had been trying for weeks to tamp down rumors that MANPADS from Libya had reached Syria. “We have already made it clear how much we are concerned about the treatment of this type of weapons around the world. We work with governments trying to withdraw MANPADS from circulation,” she said on October 16.
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In early November, Israel launched eight days of air strikes against targets in Gaza. Initial reporting suggested this was to prepare a ground incursion, but my sources told me that, from the start, Israel was going after weapons depots where they believed Hamas had stockpiled
surface
-to-air missiles acquired from arms brokers in Libya and from Iran.

Later that month, an Egyptian border patrol intercepted two more weapons shipment from Libya bound for Gaza. One convoy carried 108 Grad rockets, apparently bound for Hamas. The second was much larger, and include 185 crates with RPGs, antitank rockets, explosives, land mines—and 150 surface-to-air missiles.
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As President Morsi asserted greater authority over the military and border patrol, interdictions slowed. But the arms smuggling did not.
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Once Morsi was removed from power in July 2013, the Egyptian military stepped up its efforts to patrol the Sinai, where Morsi’s friends, Mohammad Zawahiri and Mohammad Jamal, had established training camps for al Qaeda guerillas.

Egyptian leader General Abdul Fattah al-Sisi told a delegation of retired U.S. military officers, led by Major General Paul Vallely, that his military desperately needed spare parts for its AH-64 Apache helicopters so it could continue to monitor the vast Sinai Desert and track the estimated 10,000 guerilla fighters who were training there. “The Apache is the best surveillance platform they own,” General Vallely said. But President Obama had blocked military supplies to Egypt to protest Morsi’s removal from office, including parts for the Apaches. Despite the limited availability of the helicopters, al-Sisi’s men managed to intercept several weapons convoys from Libya heading into the Sinai carrying “sophisticated weapons, including missiles” that autumn.
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The vast Sinai Desert borders Israel in the south at the famous Red Sea resort towns of Sharm el-Sheikh (in Egypt) and Eilat (in Israel). The threat of al Qaeda teams in the Sinai armed with Russian or U.S.-made surface-to-air missiles became so acute in August 2013 that Israeli Army Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Benny Gantz ordered the Eilat airport closed on August 8, 2013, and all flights diverted to a nearby military airport. The Israelis had intelligence suggesting an imminent terrorist attack using one of Libya’s missing MANPADS.
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The U.S. media establishment has downplayed the arms smuggling out of Libya, just as they tried to pooh-pooh a slew of YouTube videos posted by Syrian jihadis to show off the surface-to-air missiles they were getting from their “brothers” in Libya.

An early video shows Syrian rebels with Russian-made SA-16 and SA-24 missiles, some of them training versions. It includes footage of a Syrian MI-8 military helicopter shot down by rebels on November 16, 2012.
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The
New York Times
claimed it had confirmed the “first” Syrian rebel shoot-down of a Syrian military aircraft using a surface-to-air missile on November 27, 2012—ten weeks after the Benghazi attacks.
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The U.S. strategic forecasting group STRATFOR cited Russian television footage showing Syrian rebels shooting down a government aircraft again on February 5, 2013.
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In May, a Syrian rebel group called Alasala Watanmia uploaded more expansive footage where they showed off a whole arsenal of Russian-origin MANPADS, including a fully operational 9K338 SA-24 IGLA-S, a 9K32M Strela-2M (SA-7b Grail), a Chinese FN-6, and an 9K310 Igla-1 (SA-16 Gimlet).
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More of the Libyan MANPADS, fitted with the Egyptian gripstocks and CIA-supplied batteries, turned up in the hands of jihadi fighters in Mali.
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The Israeli government told United Nations investigators in November 2013 that MANPADS from Libya had been smuggled to terrorists in Gaza, who attempted to down an Israeli military helicopter. Just two months later, terrorists opposed to the interim government of General al-Sisi in Egypt successfully shot down an Egyptian military helicopter patrolling the Sinai.
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The latest United Nations report, released in March 2014, was even more stark than the first two. Noting that “the vast majority of Libyan [weapons] stockpiles are under the control of non-state actors,” the UN panel determined that Libya had become “a primary international source of illicit weapons trafficking.” Libyan weapons were “likely to enhance the capacity of terrorist groups in areas such as Egypt, Mali, Nigeria, the Syrian Arab Republic, Tunisia and the Gaza Strip,” the report concluded.
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One day, without fail, an al Qaeda team armed with missiles the CIA saw leaving Libya but failed to interdict will shoot down a U.S. passenger aircraft. Or perhaps the Taliban will shoot down a U.S. military C-5 aircraft with hundreds of U.S. troops on board, using a Stinger delivered by Qatar. Is that what it will take for a full-blown congressional and media investigation into what the CIA knew was going on in Libya?

OCTOBER SURPRISE

On October 1, 2012, President Obama dispatched Valerie Jarrett to Doha, Qatar, on an ultimate mission to meet with Ali Akbar Velayati, the former Iranian foreign minister who was now the chief foreign policy advisor to the Supreme Leader. The hope was that Jarrett could leverage her family ties to Velayati to convince the Iranians to make a public announcement before the U.S. presidential election that they were prepared to negotiate a nuclear deal with the Western powers.

Reza Kahlili, who spied for the United States for over a decade inside Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps, maintains top-level sources inside the Iranian regime and broke the story the next day. His sources told him that “one Obama representative, the woman, who had met Velayati before, urged Velayati to announce a halt, even if it is only for a week or two, to uranium enrichment prior to the U.S. election.”
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The
New York Times
put their own reporters on it and confirmed the basic outlines of the story. “The United States and Iran have agreed in principle for the first time to one-on-one negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program, according to Obama administration officials, setting the stage for what could be a last-ditch diplomatic effort to avert a military strike on Iran.”

The White House issued a nondenial denial that no “final agreement” had been reached, which the story had never claimed. “It’s not true that the United States and Iran have agreed to one-on-one talks or any meeting after the American elections,” White House spokesman Tommy Vietor said. But they were “open to such talks” and “had said from the outset that we would be prepared to meet bilaterally.”
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Israeli reporters and government officials also confirmed the story, providing the flight number of the Lufthansa flight Jarrett traveled on after connecting in Frankfurt, Germany, to Tehran.

The English-language website of the Tel Aviv daily
Yediot Aharonot
reported that the U.S.-Iran “talks are not only planned but have been going on for months and are being led by presidential advisor Valerie Jarrett.”

Jarrett’s involvement caught people’s attention, and the leaks from Tehran caused panic in the White House—even today.
Commentary
magazine noted that “by putting someone with no background on security issues in charge of this track, Obama may be signaling that the president’s goal here is not an Iranian surrender of nuclear capability, but rather a political compromise that may not eliminate the threat of an Islamist bomb sometime down the road.”
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I asked the White House press office for comment on many questions for this book, but the only one they responded to—repeatedly—was the Valerie Jarrett back channel. They denied the story, said it was false, “lies,” then came back with more denials when I sent emails on completely different subjects that they refused to address, such as the president’s schedule on the night of September 11.

This attempt at pulling off an “October surprise” turned out to be a flop, because the Obama White House put an amateur in charge of the operation.

However, it may have contributed to opening the door for the official back-channel talks the administration later admitted intensified over the summer of 2013, despite repeated State Department denials to Congress that any such talks were under way. The administration ultimately made sweeping concessions to Iran’s nuclear program in Geneva in November 2013.
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STONEWALLING CONGRESS

In Washington, the lying and the cover-up intensified.

Congress held multiple hearings, and the administration stonewalled every one, withholding documents, preventing witnesses from testifying, and providing inaccurate and sometimes false information.

Whistle-blowers still in government jobs—such as Greg Hicks, the State Department diplomat who so ably leapt into the breach when his ambassador was under attack—were threatened, demoted, and publicly tarnished.

CIA Director David Petraeus precipitously lost his job on November 8, 2012—just two days after Obama was reelected. In his letter to CIA staff, he blamed his lack of judgment for conducting an extramarital affair.

But the timing of his resignation raised many eyebrows, especially once it became clear that Petraeus had been so unhappy with the editing of the talking points by Hillary Clinton’s staff that he considered not releasing them. Further questions were raised when it became apparent that the FBI—and possibly the White House—had known about Petraeus’s affair with biographer Paula Broadwell months earlier, and Petraeus knew it, because the FBI had told him about their investigation. This prompted conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer to speculate that Petraeus soft-pedaled what he knew about Benghazi in his initial closed-door briefing to Congress on September 13 in exchange for keeping his job. “[H]e understood that his job, his reputation, his legacy, his whole celebrated life was in the hands of the administration. And he expected they would protect him by keeping it quiet,” Krauthammer said. Petraeus himself has refused to comment.
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