Dark Forces: The Truth About What Happened in Benghazi (5 page)

The minister of bad things, Ma’atouq Ma’atouq, took DeSutter’s people to warehouses and factories, machine shops and ammo dumps, where they loaded up thousands of tons of equipment to produce ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons. They set up a chemical weapons disposal facility, similar to what the United Nations did in Iraq, and rapidly eliminated Qaddafi’s stockpiles and the leftover chemicals he had imported to make more of the deadly brew.

Before I left Libya later that week, DeSutter’s teams loaded a thousand tons of uranium centrifuge enrichment gear onto a U.S. ship in Tripoli harbor, and sailed for the United States. Also on the ship were five complete SCUD-C missiles and their bug-eyed launch vehicles, which Qaddafi had imported from North Korea. DeSutter proudly hung an access panel from one of them in her State Department office as a reminder of what they had accomplished. The centrifuges went to America’s first bomb plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where U.S. experts are later believed to have reassembled them to test the Stuxnet computer virus they introduced into Iran’s centrifuge plant.

Before I left, I paid a visit to the two American diplomats who had recently arrived in Tripoli to pave the way for reopening a U.S. embassy there. I was curious as to why they hadn’t bothered to join the rest of the diplomatic corps in Sirte to witness the Qaddafi speech.

“Frankly, we didn’t even think about it,” the woman who was chief of mission told me. “We’re stuck in day-to-day logistics. We don’t have an embassy. We’re operating out of a room in this hotel while we look for property. Look, it took two of our employees three days just to receive a DHL package.”

In other words, because of security concerns, these diplomats were instructed not to venture outside the wire, even though the Qaddafi regime clearly was friendly and effusively cooperating with the United States, which was not the case when Chris Stevens went to Benghazi on September 10, 2012.

Although they had just arrived in Tripoli, they had used their first meetings with Libyan officials to make clear that “human rights concerns” would affect the tenor of U.S.–Libyan relations going forward. But they also gave Qaddafi high marks for following through on his promised disarmament. “When they’ve made a commitment, they’ve followed through. We’ve done the same,” they told me.

I was curious how they saw the anarchic Libyan system, where Qaddafi seemed to rule by fits and starts—and sometimes with great theatrics—as when he personally took to the controls of a bulldozer to demolish the Tripoli office of his prime minister, who had refused to move to the new capital in Sirte.

“The more we look at it, the less we understand,” the chief of mission said.

“They do seem to have a budget process,” her deputy added. “We just don’t know what it is.”

At the time, I wasn’t sure whether their candor was refreshing or pathetic.

MR. SUSPENDERS OF THE CIA

The CIA’s deputy director of operations, Steve Kappes, regaled members of the Senate and House intelligence committees in closed-door briefings about his one-on-one meetings with Qaddafi. Known as “Mr. Suspenders” to many DO officers because of the effete dress habits that made him look more like a banker than a clandestine operator, Kappes was a smooth talker who knew when to put forward his tough-guy persona as a former U.S. Marine and when to play the cosmopolitan spy.
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But, in fact, despite all his boasting that he spoke fluent Arabic, Kappes was accompanied by a translator in his rare meetings with Qaddafi and top Libyan officials.
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And the timeline I have presented above shows clearly that it was Mark Allen—not Kappes—who opened the door to Qaddafi.

“Kappes’s philosophy was that liaison is the most important part of intelligence,” said Dewey Clarridge, a CIA legend who founded the counterterrorism center in the mid-1980s and has remained in the intelligence game as a private contractor to United States Special Operations Command (SOCOM). “Kappes believed the U.S. shouldn’t do unilateral operations. That is pure lunacy! That’s how we get fed lies by other services for their own reasons,” Clarridge told me.
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Kappes put his liaison skills to good use in Libya, turning to Qaddafi and his subordinates for key assistance in the global war on terror.

“Dear Musa,” he wrote on March 17, 2004. “I am glad to propose that our services take an additional step in cooperation with the establishment of a permanent CIA presence in Libya. We have talked about this move for quite some time, and Libya’s cooperation on WMD and other issues, as well as our nascent intelligence cooperation mean that now is the right moment to move ahead.”
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Formalizing the CIA presence in Tripoli, more than two years before the United States would open a full-fledged embassy there, showed just how important an ally Qaddafi had become. With Qaddafi’s nuclear program now shipped off to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Kappes felt it was time to press on to more urgent matters.

TRIPOLI STATION

The first order of business for the CIA in Tripoli was to secure the rendition to Libya of a top al Qaeda operative, Abdullah al-Sadiq, the head of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group. After fighting alongside the Taliban for several years, he fled Afghanistan and eventually surfaced in Malaysia in early March 2004 with his wife, Fatima Bouchar, who was four and a half months pregnant.

The Libyans wanted him, and the CIA was only too happy to oblige. They knew that Qaddafi’s intelligence services could elicit much more information from their prisoners than the CIA could ever hope to obtain. A series of faxes discovered after the revolution by Human Rights Watch shows the almost hour-by-hour communications between Kappes, Mark Allen, and Musa Kusa over this critical terrorist rendition.

Once al-Sadiq surfaced, the British and U.S. governments moved rapidly with the Malaysian government to detain the couple, who were seeking political asylum in Britain. Five days later, the CIA sent an aircraft to Kuala Lumpur and flew them to Tripoli, separated from each other and bound head to toe in duct tape. Husband and wife later claimed that they had been tortured by the Americans and ultimately filed a lawsuit in 2012 against the British government for complicity in their rendition to Libya.

Qaddafi kept al-Sadiq in the infamous Abu Salim prison for the next six years, where he was repeatedly interrogated by “foreigners.” Sadiq claims in his lawsuit that his torturers were CIA and MI6 officers. He was finally released in March 2010 along with thirty-three other Islamist operatives in a “deradicalization” program put in place by Qaddafi’s son, Saif al-Islam.
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Al-Sadiq never forgave the Americans and the Brits for his rendition, and was not grateful to the Qaddafis for his release. He went underground almost immediately, only to surface less than one year later during the Libya civil war under the real name, Abdelhakim Belhaj.

In May 2011, Belhaj, now a powerful military leader of the anti-Qaddafi rebels in Benghazi, found himself working with the same Americans who had committed the original sin of handing him over to torture and imprisonment. Chief among them was the U.S. special envoy to the Transitional National Council, J. Christopher Stevens.

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THE MAKING OF AN AMBASSADOR

I got to know Chris Stevens in 1997, when he served an eighteen-month stint as the State Department’s Iran desk officer in Washington. As the president of the nonprofit Foundation for Democracy in Iran, I spoke with him regularly about political developments inside Iran, U.S. policy, and about the needs of Iranian “refugees with special knowledge”—a euphemism for defectors. In our initial discussions, he professed his lack of area expertise in Iran, but was a quick study. By the time he left that position in 1999, he probably knew as much about Iran as anyone in the State Department.

As a twenty-three-year-old Peace Corps volunteer in Morocco in 1983, Chris Stevens learned Arabic and polished his college French. For this young history graduate from Berkeley, it was easy to fall in love with the softer side of the Middle East that Morocco presented. After two years teaching English to young Moroccans, he returned to his native California and got a law degree in 1989, eventually passing the Foreign Service Officer Test (FSOT) and entering the State Department two years later at the age of thirty-one. Reporters and bloggers have speculated that, in the meantime, he had been recruited by the CIA and was assigned to the State Department in a cover position. One reason for that speculation was his subsequent posting to Benghazi as special representative to the National Transitional Council in late April 2011, at a time when there was zero security, al Qaeda groups and Islamist militias ruled the streets, and the place was awash with hostile intelligence services running guns. “You would never send an ordinary diplomat into such a situation,” a retired two-star general told me.

And, yet, that seems to be what happened. I have seen no evidence to suggest that Chris Stevens was a clandestine CIA officer. Indeed, his State Department career followed a pretty standard trajectory, alternating two-year postings in Damascus, Riyadh, Tunis, and Cairo, where he honed his Arabic, and stints back in Washington, D.C.

In 2006, Stevens was posted the deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Consulate in East Jerusalem, putting him in daily contact with senior Palestinian Authority officials and NGOs. His reporting back to the State Department showed him regularly backing up Palestinian requests for additional U.S. aid, and detailing the negative impact on the Palestinian population of U.S. aid restrictions put in place by the Bush administration as a result of the Hamas takeover of Gaza.
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While most Americans agreed with the aid restrictions, Stevens painted them as harmful to Palestinian children, going out of his way to find a United Nations study that showed a rising rate of infection among newborn babies because of contaminated tap water, supposedly caused by decreased U.S. aid to sewage treatment projects. This bleeding-heart approach toward the Palestinians and, later, toward Islamist groups, was the norm, not the exception, among State Department Arabists.

MISSION: TRIPOLI

The United States resumed full diplomatic relations with Qaddafi’s Libya in 2006, after taking Libya off the State Department’s list of governments supporting international terrorist organizations. Chris Stevens arrived in Tripoli the following year as the deputy chief of mission (DCM), a significant promotion, and clearly did not take well to Qaddafi or to his regime. In one of his earliest cables, reporting on the state visit of French President Nicolas Sarkozy to Tripoli in July 2007, Stevens went out of his way to point out—twice—that Qaddafi had never repaired damage from the 1986 U.S. bombing of his residence in Tripoli and had erected a statue “displaying a fist crushing a US fighter plane” in front of it.
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I have read through scores of cables Stevens sent back to Washington from this period and they reveal an engaging diplomat, who regularly went outside the embassy to meet with sources and who enjoyed traveling around Libya without a security escort. However, they also reveal an activist who clearly was not happy with his government’s rapprochement with the Qaddafi regime and constantly sought to undermine it.

Early in his tenure as DCM, Stevens became enmeshed in the top-secret negotiations over U.S. access to Guantánamo detainees who had been returned to Libya. It was clear that he suspected the Libyan government of torturing many of these terrorist detainees. His reporting betrayed a remarkable sympathy for the detainees and for the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), to which most of them belonged.

In one cable dated November 7, 2007, Stevens reported on the recently announced merger between the LIFG and al Qaeda. This was a significant event, since the two groups were now united in calling for the overthrow of the Qaddafi regime. While regime insiders were worried that political violence might hurt their personal economic interests, many average Libyans showed enthusiasm for the merger, he wrote.
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In another, dated December 13, 2007, Stevens intervened with the Libyan authorities to convey the State Department’s concern over the welfare of two former Guantánamo detainees, Muhammad Mansur al-Rimi (ISN 194), and bin Qumu Abu Sufian Ibrahim Ahmed Hamuda (ISN 557).
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Bin Qumu later founded the group known as Ansar al-Sharia, which initially claimed responsibility for the attack on Benghazi in which Stevens perished. In repeated meetings with the Libyans, the embassy insisted that the Libyan government treat terrorist detainees “humanely,” and provide medical care and “timely access” so the State Department could visit them in jail to monitor potential abuse. Humane treatment of detainees transferred back to Libya became a condition for Libyan intelligence officers to interrogate other Libyan terrorist detainees still held in Guantánamo, so it gave Stevens and his colleagues real leverage with the Libyan government.
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In a December 18, 2007, cable, Stevens reported that a pair of U.S. companies had just won civilian construction contracts worth between $2 billion and $3 billion, a windfall by any measure, especially as the U.S. recession began to kick in. And yet, Stevens remained peevish: “The agreements underscore that the [government of Libya] continues to directly link commercial contracts to political relationships. The potential return to Libya of large numbers of non-official Americans has positive potential for people-to-people and cultural exchange, but could further anger Islamic militants already troubled by U.S.–Libyan reengagement.”
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This type of walk-on-eggshells deference to Islamic militants would later make Stevens the key interlocutor for the Obama administration with the anti-Qaddafi rebels. And it would get him killed.

With the retirement of his predecessor, Charles O. Cecil, Stevens was promoted in December 2007 to chargé d’affaires, the top U.S. diplomat in Tripoli. He was well liked and competent, and was complimented by the State Department’s inspector general for providing “a steady hand at the helm.”
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Stevens encouraged his political officers to seek out unofficial sources of information and opinion, so the embassy’s reporting wouldn’t just mirror what the Qaddafi regime was putting out in its propaganda. This was a lesson the State Department had learned from its own failure to predict the downfall of the Shah of Iran in the late 1970s.

In one cable, for example, they talked to the director of Libya’s newly formed National Security Council, who lifted the veil on inside-regime rivalries among Qaddafi’s sons.
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In another, they picked up gossip at a dinner party attended by Qaddafi’s second wife, Safia Farkash, to report her concern with the economic reforms being promoted by Saif al-Islam, her eldest son, because they exacerbated resentment against the Qaddafi family and their cronies who had profited disproportionately from contracts with the West. Indeed, one of Stevens’ reporting officers wrote, the perception of corruption was widespread: “[T]he level of dissatisfaction with Qadhafi’s family and regime is such that some Libyans are willing to support any alternative perceived to be viable in the hope that the next regime will be less oppressive.”
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In 2008, Stevens worked incessantly to secure the freedom of jailed dissident Fathi El-Jahmi, whose case had attracted international attention. He sent more than a dozen cables back to Washington about El-Jahmi between February and June 2008.

El-Jahmi was a government bureaucrat jailed in 2002 after he called for free speech and democracy. President George W. Bush mentioned his plight in a speech on March 12, 2003, just as the nuclear negotiations with Qaddafi got started. Qaddafi released him as a gesture to Senator Joe Biden, following their meeting in Sirte in March 2004, only to send him back to prison a few weeks later after El-Jahmi gave a television interview reiterating his call for democratic reforms.
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The case became more complicated because of El-Jahmi’s health . . . and his family, who refused offers by the regime to take him back.

A mixture of heart problems and prostate cancer landed El-Jahmi in a state-run medical center, where, apparently, he was receiving exceptional care. Stevens reported in minute detail on El-Jahmi’s medical exams, met repeatedly with his attendant physician, and even tried to get the State Department to retain a U.S. doctor to provide a second opinion on his test results! But as Stevens reported, the problem remained that his family didn’t want him back, apparently daunted by the cost of private medical care.

The Qaddafi Development Foundation, run by Saif al-Islam, and the Libyan government “were now at a loss as to what to do with him, for if they released him now and his family did not accept their responsibility to care for him, he could become destitute,” Stevens wrote. Saif asked Stevens to convey that message to Senator Biden, since he had been involved in El-Jahmi’s initial release, with a request that he weigh in with the family.
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One of Stevens’ reporting officers was “ambushed” by a European television network while visiting El-Jahmi at the hospital in May, leading El-Jahmi’s son to send the embassy a letter of complaint. “Your frequent visits to him in the hospital are causing us problems; I urge you stop visiting our father.” Stevens asked the State Department to check with El-Jahmi’s brother in Boston to see whether the letter was written under duress.
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Stevens believed that the family was being pressed into signing a written agreement guaranteeing that El-Jahmi would not talk about his detention or make any other political statement, as a condition for his release.
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In the end, Stevens’ approach backfired, and the embassy was forced to step back from the case. In early 2009, without U.S. help, the family negotiated a deal by which the Qaddafi Foundation picked up the tab for sending him overseas for medical treatment.
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The ultimate irony of the El-Jahmi case is that the families of the Navy SEALs who tried to rescue Stevens in Benghazi four years later, and those who died in Afghanistan on board
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following leaks by Vice President Joe Biden and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta of their identity, were offered the same kind of deal by the Obama administration that Stevens criticized Qaddafi for offering El-Jahmi: pension benefits in exchange for silence.

DIE HARD IN DERNA

By far the most remarkable aspect of Chris Stevens’ first tour of duty in Tripoli was his reporting on Islamic extremism in eastern Libya. Here, he at times displayed an almost romantic attraction to Qaddafi’s Islamist opponents and their willingness to die in so-called martyrdom operations, despite their open alliance with al Qaeda.

Learning more about the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group and their strongholds in Benghazi and Derna became a top priority for the embassy in Tripoli in September 2007, when the U.S. 3rd Ranger Battalion of the 75th Ranger Regiment hit Objective Massey along the Syria-Iraq border and seized an important cache of documents on th
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foreign fighters flowing into Iraq. In their analysis of the ledgers, the CIA Counterterrorism Center “found that Derna, Libya was nearly tied with Riyadh, Saudi Arabia for second place” as a source of foreign fighters in Iraq. “Third and fourth place belonged to Mecca and Benghazi, respectively.”
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The Qaddafi regime had virtually ignored the Cyrenaica—Libya’s eastern seacoast region—for many years. The Qaddafis came from Tripolitania, from different tribal groups with a different background. They treated Benghazi and Derna a bit like outliers of the empire: nominally part of Libya, source of tribute, but also potential trouble.

According to a U.S.-Libya dual national who regularly reported to embassy officials on his travels to visit family in Benghazi and Derna, the Qaddafi policy had caused widespread resentment. The fruits of Qaddafi’s turn to the West never reached these parts of Libya, where at least half the young men were unemployed. “The situation reflects in part the Qadhafi regime’s belief that if it keeps the east poor enough, it will be unable to mount any serious political opposition to the regime. Explaining the rationale, [the businessman] cited a Libyan proverb: ‘If you treat them like dogs, they will follow you like dogs,’ ” Stevens wrote. He made it clear in the cable he thought that was a dangerous approach.

Family dinner parties were dominated by news of young men who had taken up the jihad against the occupying “Crusader forces in Iraq,” where dinner guests offered the families of the martyrs a mix of condolences and congratulations. News reports about Objective Massey and the role of Benghazi and Derna as a big supplier of young men for the anti-American jihad had given local families a perverse sense of pride, Stevens wrote.
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Fueling the calls to jihad were small mosques outside the main cities, relics of the pseudo-secret Sanussi Brotherhood of the mid-nineteenth century. The fact that they didn’t resemble ordinary mosques “[made] it harder for [government of Libya] security organizations to identify them and easier to hold unobserved meetings and sermons.”