Dark Forces: The Truth About What Happened in Benghazi (6 page)

Pseudo-secret mosques, radical imams, closed-door family dinners with jihad on the menu: It was a romantic brew for the Arabist in Chris Stevens. And he sensed that it spelled trouble for Qaddafi. He ended his cable with a carefully worded warning: “[C]laims by senior GOL officials that the east is under control may be overstated.” Perhaps he would go down in the annals of the State Department as the clear-eyed diplomat who convinced his government to pull back its support from a dictator before he fell?

Chris Stevens didn’t see Qaddafi’s Islamist opponents as the enemy: he saw them as an opportunity. The fact that the Qaddafi regime was already seeking an accommodation with the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group didn’t matter. Stevens and his embassy were getting high marks back in Washington for their extensive and groundbreaking reports on the Libyan Islamists.
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In a follow-up cable filed on June 2, 2008, Stevens reported on the extraordinary visit to eastern Libya by his chief political/economics officer, John Godfrey, who took advantage of a personal trip to Roman ruins in Benghazi to elude Qaddafi’s minders, then rented a car and driver to visit contacts in nearby Derna. His adventure was all the more remarkable because of its serendipity: While asking directions to the city’s old fort, Godfrey encountered a local resident named Nouri al-Mansuri, who happened to hail from the same tribe as his driver/guide. “In typical fashion, Mansuri promptly dropped what he was doing and spent the next several hours accompanying us around Derna,” Stevens wrote, taking advantage of “what appeared to be a rare gap in surveillance by security organizations.”

During an impromptu lunch at a local restaurant, Mansuri filled them in on the young jihadis who were fighting the Americans in Iraq. They were motivated by what they perceived was the determined U.S. support for Qaddafi in the wake of his renunciation of terrorism and WMD programs. “Fighting against U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq represented a way for frustrated young radicals to strike a blow against both Qadhafi and against his perceived American backers,” Mansuri explained.

Derna was not “uniformly extremist,” he added. Many people were not happy about the increasingly conservative religious atmosphere that had prevailed since returning jihadis introduced “ ‘unnatural foreign influences’ on religious practices in Derna.” But the Islamists were winning, and the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group was laying the groundwork to overthrow Qaddafi by whipping up “a heady mixture of violence, religious conservatism and hatred of U.S. policy in Iraq and Palestine.”

Derna’s reputation as a historical locus of resistance to occupation, and its increasingly conservative Islamist bent, were the main factors driving so many young men to leave Derna for Iraq to fight coalition forces. “It’s jihad—it’s our duty,” Mansuri said. Then Stevens threw in the punch line. “Referring to actor Bruce Willis’ character in the action picture
Die Hard
, [Mansuri] said many young men in Derna viewed resistance against Qadhafi’s regime and against coalition forces in Iraq as an important last act of defiance.”
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It’s okay, Washington; Libya is just another Hollywood action film. If you don’t like it, you can change the channel. Later, as ambassador, Chris Stevens would himself face the ire of the
Die Hard in Derna
types he had romanticized just four years earlier

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“A NEW BEGINNING”

While the United States was preoccupied with the surge in Iraq to beat back al Qaeda, another war was simmering in Afghanistan. This was the “right war” that many in Congress, including then-Senator Barack Obama, thought the United States should be fighting, as opposed to what fellow Democrats called the unwinnable war in Iraq.

But, on the battlefields of Afghanistan, unsettling things were happening that received little attention in the press or in Congress. Taliban fighters were getting hold of man-portable air defense systems (MANPADS) and shooting down U.S. helicopters.

The Pentagon knew just how deadly these shoulder-fired, surface-to-air missiles could be. After all, it was the CIA supply of Stinger missiles to the Afghan mujahideen starting in 1986 that turned the tide against the Soviet occupation. The deadly strikes against Soviet attack helicopters and jets devastated the morale of the Russian troops and ultimately convinced Gorbachev to begin evacuating Afghanistan in 1988. The mujahideen reportedly succeeded in bringing down 269 Soviet helicopters and aircraft with the U.S. missiles.
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THE DOWNING OF FLIPPER 75

The wake-up call came on May 30, 2007, when a U.S. CH-47D Chinook helicopter, call sign Flipper 75, was hit by a surface-to-air missile in the upper Sangin Valley, killing a British combat photographer, a Canadian, and the five-man American flight crew. The helicopter had just landed and deployed ground troops when it came under fire. The pilot tried to clear the landing zone, quickly gaining altitude, when Flipper 75 was hit at about two hundred feet above the ground and went down. At the time of the shoot-down, a NATO spokesman denied that a heat-seeking missile had downed the aircraft, suggesting instead that the helicopter had been hit by a lucky strike from small arms fire or a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG). “It’s not impossible for small arms fire to bring down a helicopter,” spokesman Major John Thomas said.
2

The initial incident report read quite differently. “The missile struck the aircraft in the left engine. The impact of the missile projected the aft end of the aircraft up as it burst into flames followed immediately by a nose dive into the crash site with no survivors.”
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For nearly three years, the Pentagon denied that report.

Flipper 75 was part of a much larger operation that had been going on for several days, code-named Kulang Hellion, aimed at clearing out a known Taliban stronghold in Helmand province. It has been called the largest air assault since the beginning of the Afghan war. The still-classified after-action reports reveal that the Taliban were well prepared. After downing the Chinook, they fired two more MANPADS against a pair of Apache AH-64 attack helicopters, Arrow 22 and Arrow 25, which were providing fire support for NATO troops into the Kajaki area. “Clearly, the Taliban were attempting to down an Apache after downing the CH-47,” an intelligence officer assigned to Task Force Corsair commented.
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The Afghan war logs show forty separate incidents involving MANPADS from 2005 to 2009, including an attack on a C-130 refueling at 11,000 feet, requiring it to launch flares and engage in evasive maneuvers. Many of these were Chinese-made HN-5 missiles or their Soviet-era equivalent, the SA-7. Some theorized that they had been looted from Iraqi stockpiles after the fall of Saddam and transferred to the Taliban via Iran.
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However, Flipper 75 was the first known downing of a NATO air-craft in Afghanistan by a surface-to-air missile and the first helicopter lost to ground fire since June 28, 2005, when a rescue mission to save four Navy SEALs, whose dramatic story was told in the
Lone Survivor
memoir by Marcus Luttrell, was hit by an RPG. It would not be the last.

Former U.S. flag officers and intelligence officials involved in the Stinger supply effort to the Afghan mujahideen in the 1980s tell me that they are 100 percent certain that the Stingers they delivered were no longer operational. “For one, their batteries give out after about four or five years, and these aren’t off-the-shelf items, but specially designed units that shoot an argon gas coolant into the system in addition to powering it up,” one source said. In addition, the propellant of the actual missile decomposes after about fifteen years, making the missiles not only inoperable but dangerous to handle.

The Afghan war logs show twenty-two separate incidents that specifically mention Stingers. Some of these were inoperable 1980s-
generation
missiles found in Taliban weapons caches. But others wer
e
new.

Some of the new missiles came from an unusual supplier: Iran. According to one U.S. intelligence report, “The MANPADS delivered to the Taliban elements were made in Iran and very closely resemble U.S.-made Stinger MANPADS, so much so that the MANPADS appear to be direct Stinger replicas.”
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More Stingers would soon be on the way.

MUSLIM OUTREACH

Candidate Obama promised to make dramatic changes to U.S. policy in the Middle East if elected. He pledged to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and to launch a new era of cooperation with the Muslim world. In effect, he was returning to a 1970s vision of the world, which failed to recognize the dangers of political Islam. Just like Jimmy Carter, who welcomed the advent of Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran and showered the Islamist mujahideen in Afghanistan with weapons and cash, President Obama seemed to believe there was an ironclad barrier that separated Islam the religion from Islam the terror-drenched ideology.

Emphasizing the importance he placed on these changes, he gave his first television interview as president to al-Arabiya, an Arabic network in Dubai, on January 26, 2009. “My job to the Muslim world is to communicate that the Americans are not your enemy,” he said. Former Assistant United States Attorney Andrew C. McCarthy slammed Obama’s comment as “implicitly slanderous, claiming that, until his arrival, America, despite freeing tens of millions of Muslims from tyranny in Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Iraq, had positioned itself as Islam’s enemy.”
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President Barack Obama embarked in April 2009 on his first overseas trip, a whirlwind tour aimed at presenting another side of the United States to friends and allies. At the G-20 summit in Britain, he bowed deeply to Saudi monarch King Abdullah Abd al-Aziz. The
Washington Times
called the video clip of Obama’s greeting a “shocking display of fealty to a foreign potentate.”
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In Prague, he announced his goal of eliminating all nuclear weapons and spoke of the dark side of America’s past. In Iraq, he staged photo ops with cheering troops and the combatant commander.
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At his final stop in Istanbul, he got down to more serious business. After saluting Prime Minister Tayyip Recep Erdog˘an, a man who openly called for the restoration of the Islamic caliphate, he announced his plan to embark on a dramatically different Middle East policy than his predecessors. Behind closed doors, Obama then test-marketed his ideas on Erdog˘an, the foreign leader who soon became his closest confidant.

He also previewed his shift of America’s alliances to a group of Islamic scholars, who paid a secret visit to the White House later that April. As it turned out, they included top leaders of Egypt’s shadowy Muslim Brotherhood, who came to Washington on a mission that mixed curiosity with seduction. They reassured Obama and his advisors that they “favored democracy and would support the U.S.-led war on terror.”
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Several of these same men were invited by the White House to stand just behind the president on June 4, 2009, at Cairo University and nodded approvingly when he unveiled his new approach for the first time in public. Asked specifically about the presence of known Muslim Brotherhood leaders at the speech, White House Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications Denis McDonough said Obama wanted to address the “full range of political representation in Egypt,” and so tasked the embassy in Cairo to send invitations to Muslim organizations. White House advisors portrayed the president as working over the final drafts by hand, stamping the speech like a craftsman with his personal insignia.
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No one could claim Obama was merely reciting some speechwriter’s words.

“A NEW BEGINNING” IN CAIRO

The Cairo speech was an extraordinary mixture of apology and concession to Muslim Sharia law. Obama painted a picture of America that most Americans would find unfamiliar, if not alarming. The first part of the speech read like Forrest Gump in Arabia, with unnamed Muslims popping up to play key roles at every stage of America’s history. He went on to describe an America with “a mosque in every state in our union,” where women’s rights meant “the right of women and girls to wear the hijab [Islamic head scarves] and to punish those who would deny it.”

He extolled the “Holy Koran” (five times), claiming that Islam was “not part of the problem in combating violent extremism [but] part of promoting peace.” Then he made an extraordinary concession to America’s sworn enemies in coded language meant to deceive Americans listening back home, by promising to change U.S. laws that had “made it harder for Muslims to fulfill their religious obligation.” He was referring to a massive FBI and Department of Justice prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation that had revealed how Muslim charities were raising millions of dollars in the United States to finance terrorist groups such as Hamas and al Qaeda. In addition to exposing the vast network of Muslim Brotherhood organizations operating in the United States—many of which Obama invited to send top officials to join his administration—the 2008 trial had disrupted the Brotherhood’s fund-raising apparatus by shutting down their “zakat committees,” ostensibly devoted to social works. Obama pledged in Cairo to fix that, so Muslims could once again fulfill “zakat.”

Obama also claimed that America had overreacted to the 9/11 attacks and pledged to fix that, too. No more Gitmo, and no more supposed torture of terrorist suspects, even though the interrogation techniques used by the United States paled in comparison to those commonly used in the Muslim world, both by government intelligence agencies and Muslim extremist groups.

If Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak wasn’t worried by this point of the speech, he should have been. Egypt had been a staunch ally in the war on terror during the Bush administration. Mubarak’s intelligence services had helped the CIA to identify top al Qaeda operatives and render them to their home countries. They interrogated them in ways off-limits to U.S. officials—much as Qaddafi had done. Mubarak had also kept the Muslim Brotherhood under wraps since they assassinated his predecessor in 1981, and here their leaders were seated right behind the president of the United States!

Just in case Mubarak (and other pro-U.S. “tyrants” in the region) didn’t take the hint, Obama made his intentions explicit. “You must maintain your power through consent, not coercion,” he said.

Not once in the whole speech did Obama mention Mubarak by name, or thank him for his hospitality. Neither did his top advisors mention Mubarak when they briefed the White House press corps on the upcoming trip. The oversight was purposefully rude, and a warning: In Obama’s eyes, and the eyes of the Muslim brothers, Mubarak was on probation.

Obama was turning long-standing U.S. policies on their head, but Mubarak just couldn’t let himself believe it. Eighteen months later, he would become yet another Obama victim.