13 Hours The Inside Account of What Really Happened In Benghazi (16 page)

“No, stand down, you need to wait,” Bob the base chief yelled back.

“We need to come up with a plan,” the Team Leader repeated.

“It’s too fucking late to come up with a plan,” Tig yelled. “We need to get in the fucking area and
then
come up with a plan.”

Tanto got out of the Mercedes and approached the Team Leader and Bob. He asked them to request US military air support, specifically an unmanned ISR drone, named for its ability to provide intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. Tanto also asked them to call in a heavily armed AC-130 Spectre gunship, a four-engine, fixed-wing plane designed for lethal ground assaults. In the meantime, Tanto told the bosses, he and the other operators were overdue to move out.

The CIA chief looked at Tanto, then at the Team Leader, then back to Tanto. Tanto felt as though the chief was looking right through him. “No,” Bob said, “hold up. We’re going to have the local militia handle it.”

Tanto couldn’t believe his ears. He turned to the Team Leader: “Hey, we need to go.”

“No,” the T.L. said, “we need to wait. The chief is trying to coordinate with 17 Feb and let them handle it.”

“What do you mean, ‘Let them handle it?’ ” Tanto demanded. He had little confidence in the 17 February militia, whose members he and several other operators considered as liable to turn on them as to serve alongside them. Tanto especially wouldn’t trust the militia on its word when the objective was to save American lives. “We need to go. We’re not letting 17 Feb handle it.”

Tanto’s memory flashed back to the airport standoff earlier in the summer. He believed that Bob was repeating the go-slow, stand-down, let-the-friendly-militia-handle-it approach he’d taken when hostile militiamen held up Rone and another GRS operator. That incident was resolved
peacefully, without injuries and without exposing the CIA presence in Benghazi, when Rone and his companion demonstrated that they wouldn’t be robbed without a fight. This time, Tanto thought, Bob was taking the same passive tactic even though the fight had already begun and the Americans were losing, possibly dying.

“I’ve been through this before,” Tanto told the T.L., “when the chief didn’t let us go when our own guys were in trouble. Go ask Tyrone. He’s right over there. He was one of the guys out there when the chief said to have 17 Feb handle it and held us back.”

“Tanto, I know,” the T.L. said. “I’m working on it.”

Tanto returned to the Mercedes SUV and told D.B.: “This is a bunch of fucking bullshit.” D.B. was incredulous. His head slumped forward in frustration. Yet both knew that it wasn’t over. Plans were still forming and changing, with input and decisions flying between Benghazi, Tripoli, and Washington. They didn’t know whom Bob was speaking with, but they hoped that the “wait” order would be reversed quickly and they’d be given a green light.

Tanto got on the radio and relayed his conversation to Rone, Jack, and Tig in the BMW. Rone looked over through the car window, his expression trapped between anger and disgust. Tanto held his palms up and shrugged.

Rone got on the radio and called out: “We gotta go, gotta go, gotta go!”

His vision still blurred from his misaligned contact lenses, Jack stared out the window of the BMW, wondering whether whoever was attacking the Compound might try a simultaneous assault on the Annex. He experienced the familiar yin and yang of the moment: disbelief that this was happening, contrasted by a sense that he had expected
it all along. As he considered the situation, Jack remembered that he’d left his laptop on. The e-mail that he’d intended to send his wife remained unwritten.

From the driver’s seat in the Mercedes, Tanto noticed a civilian named Henry, an owlish, balding, olive-skinned man with glasses, walking across the Annex driveway. Tanto bounded out of the SUV. Henry was a US citizen in his sixties working as an interpreter at the Annex. Some translators in hostile areas are designated combat interpreters because they’ve had specialized weapons training. Henry wasn’t among them. He was an office worker who reviewed and translated documents from Arabic and occasionally went out on operations no more dangerous than dinner with locals. Tanto stopped Henry in his tracks.

“I’ve been through this before, and we need you to come with us,” Tanto said. “If we’re linking up with 17 Feb, none of us speaks the language well enough to communicate. We need you in here.”

“Tanto,” Henry replied, “I’m not weapons qualified.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Tanto said. He pulled out a pistol and handed it to Henry. “Here’s your weapon. Go get your helmet and your armor. We need you.”

Without hesitating, Henry said: “Roger. I’ll be right back.”

Barely two minutes later, Henry was seated in the back of the Mercedes, his armor and helmet secured, Tanto’s gun in his hand, and a look of pure fright on his weathered face. Tanto thought he resembled a Middle Eastern version of the comic Bob Newhart. He handed Henry an extra magazine of ammunition.

When Jack saw Henry jocked up and ready, he felt a
flush of admiration.
Here’s a guy
, Jack thought,
who’s an administrative guy, and somebody gave him body armor and a helmet and a pistol
.
He volunteered to come basically on a suicide mission. For us, it’s our job to do stuff like that. His job is to sit behind a desk and interpret Arabic into English. But he’s doing what he thinks is right.

From their idling vehicles, the operators could vaguely see the orange flames rising from the Compound. With their doors flung open, they could hear chanting in the distance. Tanto grabbed his radio, so everyone in the Annex would hear his message. He hoped it also would reach someone on the same frequency at the Compound. Tanto repeated his earlier request as a demand: “Get us an ISR [drone] and a Spectre gunship!”

Tanto didn’t know it, but one part of his demand was already being fulfilled. Within the first half hour of the attack, at 9:59 p.m., the US military’s Africa Command ordered a drone surveillance aircraft to reposition itself over the Special Mission Compound. It would take more than an hour to reach Benghazi, but once there the drone could monitor events and beam live images to Washington.

But a request for close air support wouldn’t be so easy to fulfill. A Pentagon spokesman would say later that none of America’s punishing AC-130 gunships were anywhere within range of Benghazi on the night of September 11, 2012.

As minutes ticked by and the operators waited for clearance to leave, the air in the vehicles grew thick with
tension. The operators imagined bloody scenes of what was happening to their countrymen less than a mile away. And the longer they sat idle, the more likely the same fate awaited them.

As the hour neared 10:00 p.m., with the operators’ radios tuned to the same frequency as those at the Compound, they heard the voice of one of the DS agents in the Compound TOC, Alec Henderson or David Ubben.

“We’re being attacked!” one yelled, his voice tight with stress. “There’s approximately twenty to thirty armed men, with AKs firing. We’re being attacked! We need help! We need help now!”

Adrenaline surged through the operators’ veins, but again they were told to wait. They were used to following orders, and they knew that insubordination could mean their jobs or worse. But a shared thought took hold in both vehicles: If they weren’t given permission to move out soon, they’d take matters into their own hands.

FIVE

Overrun

B
EHIND THE LOCKED STEEL GATE INSIDE THE VILLA’S
safe haven, Ambassador Chris Stevens and communications expert Sean Smith cowered in the dark with DS agent Scott Wickland.

Wickland heard the intruders breaking through the villa’s reinforced wooden front doors, apparently by blowing them open with a rocket-propelled grenade. Staying out of sight, the DS agent peered through the openings between the bars of the security gate. Wickland watched from his protected position as their enemies burst into the building carrying AK-47s.

They plundered the living room, destroying furniture as they swarmed through the villa. Several reached the safe-haven gate and banged on the bars. They tried to look inside but the area beyond the gate was dark, and they couldn’t see Wickland or the two men he was determined
to protect. The attackers attempted to break in, but the bolts and locks held.

Still unseen, Wickland aimed his assault rifle at the intruders when they reached the gate, ready to shoot if they tried to blast or force it open. Until they made that move, Wickland resolved, he’d hold his concealed position and his fire, to avoid revealing his location and the presence of the ambassador and the information officer. Wickland warned Stevens and Smith to brace themselves for an assault.

But instead of trying to blow open the gate and enter the safe haven, the attackers moved back. They hauled in the jerry cans of diesel fuel that they’d found near the Compound’s new generator and had already used to torch the vehicles and the 17 February barracks. Wickland couldn’t know whether the attackers believed that the American ambassador was locked inside the villa’s safe haven, but it stands to reason that they knew the barred gate separated them from Americans that they had hoped to reach. The attackers’ intent was evident: They meant to use the Americans’ own fuel to smoke them out or roast them alive.

The attackers doused diesel on the overstuffed chairs, pillows, and couches, drenched the Persian rugs, and splashed the viscous fuel around the living room. As the intruders left, they set the villa ablaze. Outside, they spread more diesel to set fires against the building’s exterior concrete walls.

Unable to see deep into the living room from his hiding place, at first Wickland couldn’t tell what was happening. Then the light from the villa’s lamps and chandeliers dimmed. The DS agent realized that he, Stevens, and Smith had a new enemy. The villa was on fire and rapidly filling with toxic smoke.

The Villa C safe haven was supposed to provide the ambassador and other Americans short-term protection against physical attack until host-country rescuers or American fighters could drive away the invaders or protesters. It wasn’t designed to keep them safe indefinitely, and it wasn’t built to safeguard them from fire or chemical agents. In that sense, the Benghazi safe haven was analogous to a shark cage used by ocean divers. The longer it remained in use, the greater the likelihood that killers would batter their way in or the air would run out. Time favored the enemy.

Visibility in the villa squeezed down to zero. Breathable air became scarce. The smoke of burning diesel fuel is a lethal black cloud containing dozens of poisons, including benzene, arsenic, and formaldehyde. The trapped Americans felt their breathing become labored. Each time they inhaled, the smoke tortured their lungs with soot, nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide, and razor-like particles of hot ash. The smell of burning diesel can be overpowering by itself, a scrambled sulfur-and-egg mixture sometimes described as the scent of Satan cooking breakfast. Brief exposure triggers painful coughing, nausea, eye pain, and headaches. Loss of consciousness and organ damage come next. Extended contact causes death.