13 Hours The Inside Account of What Really Happened In Benghazi (36 page)

A short time later, Tanto looked over the south wall and saw a car with several young men inside pull up to the Annex’s front gate.
God, here it comes
, Tanto thought.
Car bomb. And I’m the closest to it.
He made himself as small as he could behind the Building A parapet, keeping his eyes open even as he felt his butt cheeks clench. But as quickly as the driver had turned toward the closed gate, he put the car in reverse and drove away. Tanto exhaled but didn’t relax.

He puzzled over who the men were and what they were doing there in the early morning hours.
Could they have been part of the militia?
he wondered.
A bunch of college kids?
Tanto learned that around the same time, D.B. saw a man walking outside the Annex with a phone.
Phones have GPS readings. Was he getting GPS coordinates of our compound?
Latitude and longitude coordinates could be used for targeting, but Tanto didn’t want to get caught up in speculation, and he couldn’t do anything about it anyway.

Soon after, D.B. radioed Tanto to say that he was heading to their room. His black polo shirt was drenched with
sweat, so he stripped it off and put on a black button-down. When D.B. returned, Tanto asked if he’d heard any news. “Sounds like the guys from Tripoli, our guys, are on their way,” D.B. said.

At around 4:00 a.m. Benghazi time on September 12, 2012, or 10:00 p.m. the previous night in Washington, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton issued a statement condemning the attack and confirming Sean Smith’s death, although he wasn’t yet identified publicly. The statement said: “[O]ne of our State Department officers was killed. We are heartbroken by this terrible loss. Our thoughts and prayers are with his family and those who have suffered in this attack.”

Clinton’s brief statement also suggested a possible motive, or at least a tentative explanation: “Some have sought to justify this vicious behavior as a response to inflammatory material posted on the Internet. The United States deplores any intentional effort to denigrate the religious beliefs of others. Our commitment to religious tolerance goes back to the very beginning of our nation. But let me be clear: There is never any justification for violent acts of this kind.”

Later, as controversy erupted over the Obama administration’s actions before, during, and after the attack, critics called Clinton’s statement a smoking gun. They said it marked the start of a politically motivated conspiracy to mislead the public by falsely implying that the attackers were outraged by the
Innocence of Muslims
video, and that the video had caused Benghazi residents to spontaneously set upon the Compound in protest. The theory behind the Obama critics’ allegation was that, in the midst of a reelection
campaign, the president didn’t want to admit that his administration had failed to anticipate or adequately respond to a terrorist attack timed to coincide with the 9/11 anniversary.

Administration officials rejected those claims as false and politically motivated. They said Clinton’s statement reflected the incomplete understanding they had about the attack as it unfolded. They also said that their top priority through the night wasn’t untangling claims and counterclaims about the attackers’ possible motives, it was finding Chris Stevens and organizing the rescue of Americans under siege. They also pointed out that embassies in Cairo and elsewhere did experience spontaneous attacks sparked by the YouTube clips, and that there continued to be mixed signals about whether the videos played a role in Benghazi, as well. Later reporting by several news organizations, notably
The New York Times
, suggested that the
Innocence of Muslims
video fueled the Compound attacks. But that, too, was hotly disputed, as was the
Times
’s conclusion that al-Qaeda played no direct role in the attack. As one media critic put it, more than a year after the attacks, the events in Benghazi remained shrouded in shades of gray and mired in a “political and ideological maelstrom.”

Within an hour of Clinton’s statement, the Libyan man sent to the hospital by the US Embassy in Tripoli released American officials from one of their two most pressing tasks. He confirmed that the Arabic caller using Scott Wickland’s cell phone had told the truth. The white man pronounced dead at the Benghazi Medical Center at roughly 2:00 a.m. on September 12, 2012, was indeed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens.

The operators’ early speculation that Stevens had been
kidnapped was mistaken. He’d been inside the villa since the start of the attack, hidden somewhere deep within the safe haven where the DS agents and operators couldn’t locate him through the fire and smoke. The bloody handprint Rone and Jack saw must have come from someone else, possibly Dave Ubben after he injured his forearm during one of his searches. The discovery of Stevens inside the safe-haven area also made it unlikely that the BlackBerry that Tanto gave to Bob belonged to the ambassador.

When they learned that Stevens was inside the villa the entire time, the operators doubted Libyan claims that the ambassador had been alive when found, even if only briefly. Considering the smoky inferno they’d experienced during their searches, the lack of any response when they’d repeatedly called Stevens’s name, and how quickly Sean Smith had succumbed, the operators felt certain that Stevens had died of smoke inhalation before they’d left the Compound. None of the video or still images of Stevens that have surfaced since he was found contradict that conclusion.

At his death, Chris Stevens was a fifty-two-year-old career diplomat who had dedicated his life to improving relations between the United States and the Arab world. President Obama eulogized Stevens as having died “in the city he helped to save.” Obama would tell the United Nations General Assembly: “He acted with humility, but he also stood up for a set of principles—a belief that individuals should be free to determine their own destiny, and live with liberty, dignity, justice, and opportunity.”

With Stevens confirmed dead, the team of Tripoli operators had no reason to venture into potentially hostile territory
around the Benghazi Medical Center. Arrangements would need to be made to retrieve Stevens’s remains, but only if that could be accomplished without putting anyone else in danger. With transportation and a security escort finally arranged by the Libyan government, the seven-member Tripoli squad headed from the airport directly toward the Annex. Roughly five hours had passed since they’d left the embassy.

When they reached the Annex, one of the Tripoli operators, Glen “Bub” Doherty, might yet have a chance to enjoy an impromptu reunion with his former SEAL friends Jack and Rone, and his newer friend, Tanto.

Glen was forty-two but looked a decade younger, a divorced, charismatic mix of free spirit and fierce self-discipline, a man who approached hard work and hard partying with equal vigor. A gifted athlete and a voracious reader, Glen was as comfortable among his fellow surf and ski bums as he was alongside elite special operators. In fact, “comfortable” was a word that defined how Glen fit into the world and into his own skin.

Raised in the affluent Boston suburb of Winchester, Massachusetts, Glen was the middle child of a stockbroker/boxing-enthusiast father and a candy-store-owning mother. He learned to fly at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Arizona, but didn’t stick around long enough to graduate. For several years he bounced around as a ski instructor and white-water rafting guide. Glen was a ripe twenty-four years old when he met a group of Navy SEALs and found his purpose. With Glen as a paramedic and a sniper, his SEAL team responded to the USS
Cole
attack in Yemen in 2000, among other missions. His plan to leave the service changed with 9/11, after which Glen served two tours during the
war in Iraq. His team led some of the first Marine contingents moving north to Baghdad and took control of Saddam Hussein’s former palaces.

Glen began working as a contract operator after leaving the SEALs in 2005, traveling from his home in California for trips to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and most recently Tripoli, where he’d worked alongside Tanto. In between, he alternated between working out and drinking beer, kicking back and coauthoring an authoritative book on being a sniper. Along the way he collected an astonishing number of people who considered him their best friend. The nickname “Bub” fit a self-assured man who believed that every job was worth doing right and no party should end the same day it began.

To Jack, Glen was a natural, good at everything he did, a guy who drew people to him with magnetic warmth and a megawatt smile. Jack knew plenty of former SEALs who were macho and abrasive. Bub was neither. As Jack kept watch atop Building D, he didn’t know if his old SEAL buddy was among the operators en route from the airport. But he hoped so. In a tight spot, Jack could think of few people he’d rather have on his team.

Regardless of what occurred the night before, whether revolutionary or routine, murderous or mundane, a new day in Benghazi always began the same way. As daylight drew near on September 12, 2012, the muezzins switched on the loudspeakers in the minaret crowns of the city’s mosques and beckoned the faithful to the
Fajr
prayer. Listening to the amplified chants from atop Building D, Jack grew edgy.

A casual Roman Catholic, Jack considered himself
respectful of all cultures and religions.
Everybody has their own idea of who and what God is
, he thought.
Nobody is right, nobody is wrong. The simple truth is, nobody knows, so you have faith. If you grew up in China, your idea of how things happened and how they are is different than if you grew up in South America or in the Middle East. For someone to say that my religion is the right one and everybody else is wrong or naïve, is completely ignorant.

But it had been a long night. Jack didn’t feel tolerant toward the people who’d been trying to kill him, and he wasn’t in the mood to hear chanting in Arabic. His muscles ached, his eyes stung, his skin and clothes were caked with sweat and dirt. Two good men were dead, and the ordeal wasn’t over. Certain that their attackers were Islamic radicals, Jack blamed all that he and his fellow Americans had endured on terrorists who tried to mask their hunger for power by claiming to be defenders of their religious beliefs.