Dark Forces: The Truth About What Happened in Benghazi (11 page)

The game was on.

My sources believe that the Qataris delivered a total of four hundred Stinger missiles and fifty launchers, known as gripstocks, to jihadi groups in Libya in those early months of the civil war. They acquired some of these missiles from U.S. Army depots located at Camp Virginia and Camp Arifjan in Kuwait. My sources say the missiles were initially sold to Saudi Arabia as part of a massive $60 billion arms deal in 2010, and then retransferred quietly by the CIA to Qatar with the assistance of Saudi Intelligence Chief Prince Bandar bin Sultan, at the beginning of the insurrection. “Nobody in the administration wanted U.S. fingerprints on this deal, so the actual transfer was done between the Saudis and the Qataris,” a knowledgeable source who was involved in previous covert Stinger transfers told me.

I was skeptical that the Saudis would work so closely with the Qataris, whom they despised. I pointed out that one of Osama bin Laden’s front men in London boasted to me in early 1998, when I did the first-ever detailed profile of bin Laden to appear in any major U.S. publication, that a limousine bearing Qatari diplomatic plates was bringing them $50,000 in cash every month to support their propaganda efforts against the Saudi royal family, and that the Saudis were well aware of the Qatari support for their enemies.
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“The Saudis didn’t have the special forces personnel trained to the level of the Qataris, so they held their noses and used the Qataris as proxies,” a special operations officer with decades of experience told me. “This was done with the full knowledge and approval of the administration, which did not want an American military footprint in Libya. Brennan and Panetta thought they had a foolproof plan that laid the groundwork for the later gun-running to Syria,” he added.

Former CIA operations officers, knowledgeable about covert Stinger transfers to the Afghan mujahideen in the 1980s, told me they did not believe the CIA had the appetite for such risky transfers today. Afghanistan continued to haunt the agency, making them reluctant to do it again. If such an operation were ever exposed, they knew they would have to lawyer up, and that it would probably bankrupt them. Beyond that, the State Department had engaged since 2002 in a worldwide effort to collect missing MANPADS, sending out diplomats and spies to buy them back from black-market vendors, militias, and governments. Some of these programs have been very successful and have taken thousands of these missiles off the streets. Others have become giant slush funds for Arab intelligence agencies, eager to get U.S. walking-around money to buy off political rivals, tribal enemies, and jihadi groups. “The CIA was taking these weapons off the street, not distributing them,” a former senior CIA operations officer told me.

“There’s not a single operations officer anywhere in the world who is stupid enough to do this kind of thing without a presidential finding,” another former CIA operations officer who had been involved in covert weapons transfers and the arming of proxy forces told me.

The CIA declined to comment on this story.

A great deal of hype surrounds Stingers. As mentioned in the incident with the Australian journalist earlier, journalists and commentators have a tendency to call any shoulder-fired surface-to-air missile a Stinger, with images of bearded Afghan mujahideen in mind. Accounts of how many Stingers the CIA actually provided to the Afghan muj also vary wildly, from five hundred to two thousand. So do accounts of how many of these missiles went missing. The most famous incident occurred in 1987, when Iran acquired a truckload of Stingers from a muj leader named Younis Khalis—either confiscating them from him when he strayed across the Afghan border into Iran in May 1987, or buying them. They acquired an estimated twelve missiles from Khalis and used some of them to fire unsuccessfully at U.S. aircraft in the Gulf.
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In March 1988, Qatar put Stingers on display during a military parade in Doha that attracted the frenzied attention of U.S. diplomats and the CIA. The State Department dispatched Assistant Secretary of State Richard Murphy to visit the island kingdom that June, demanding to get the serial numbers of the missiles so that the United States could track their origin. The Qataris acknowledged buying twelve missiles on the black market, but refused to provide their serial numbers or reveal their supplier. The Reagan administration made their recalcitrance public, prompting Congress to ban U.S. arms sales to Qatar until they returned the missiles, which they never did. Since the United States wasn’t selling any weapons at the time to Qatar, the arms ban was lifted two years later without fanfare. Qatari rival Mohammed bin Zayed of Dubai later told U.S. officials that the Qataris had purchased the missiles from the “Taliban,” a shortcut meaning one of the more radical Afghan jihadi groups.
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But, at the same time, the agency might be trying to cover its own tracks. With more than 70,000 Stingers produced to date, the United States has been selling these deadly missiles all across the Middle East, including countries such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, all of whom supported the anti-Qaddafi fight. While Raytheon Missile Systems has signed a consent agreement with the State Department after admitting to violating seventy-six of the 480 export licenses it reviewed, it does not appear that these violations involved unauthorized Stinger sales by Raytheon’s foreign clients.
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“If there was a Stinger sale to Qatar, it most likely would have been done by the intelligence community,” a U.S. official knowledgeable about the licensing process told me. Going through the licensing process, with all its notifications to Congress and the public, would have been too risky.

Attorney Joseph diGenova, who represented U.S government employees who were being prevented from meeting with members of Congress because they were involved in or knowledgeable about the Benghazi attacks, told Fox News that his clients believed as many as four hundred Stingers were delivered to the Libyan rebels. For such deliveries to be legal required a presidential finding, a classified document authorizing the U.S. intelligence community to conduct a specified covert operation.

Whether Obama actually signed such a finding is one of the key questions of the Benghazi investigation. Failure to have done so could be an impeachable offense.

Just days before the French patrol stumbled upon that Qatari arms convoy in the Sahara, an Obama administration official made an authorized leak to Reuters reporter Mark Hosenball, stating that the president had indeed signed such a finding “within the last two or three weeks.” The secret order “authoriz[ed] covert U.S. government support for rebel forces seeking to oust Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi.”

When asked to comment on the story, White House spokesman Jay Carney issued a nondenial denial. “As is common practice for this and all administrations, I am not going to comment on intelligence matters,” he said.

Hosenball went on to explain:

In order for specific operations to be carried out under the provisions of such a broad authorization—for example the delivery of cash or weapons to anti-Qaddafi forces—the White House also would have to give additional “permission” allowing such activities to proceed.

Former officials say these follow-up authorizations are known in the intelligence world as “Mother may I” findings.
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President Obama and other top members of his administration made a series of statements in the weeks before this report came out, suggesting that they were contemplating shipping arms to the Libyan rebels. “It’s fair to say that if we wanted to get weapons into Libya, we probably could,” Obama told ABC News anchor Diane Sawyer. “We’re looking at all our options at this point.”

But for the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, such a venture was fraught with danger. Recalling the blowback from Saudi-sponsored arm sales to the Afghan mujahideen in the 1980s, Republican Congressman Mike Rogers said he opposed arms deliveries to the Libyan rebels “at this time. . . . We need to understand more about the opposition before I would support passing out guns and advanced weapons to them.”

The leak about a supposed presidential finding came out just as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and the director of national intelligence were conducting classified briefings with congressional committees on the ongoing U.S. military strikes against the Qaddafi regime. By statute, the administration is required to brief presidential findings to the top Republican and Democrat of the House and Senate intelligence committees, as well as the majority and minority leaders of both houses of Congress, before any operations take place.

Surprised by reporters in the corridor, Clinton “refused to say why the order was not discussed in the briefing.” But the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Maryland Representative Dutch Ruppersberger, was categorical: “I have no knowledge of what [the president] signed.”
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So, did Obama actually sign a presidential finding authorizing the CIA to arm the Libyan rebels? Michigan Republican Pete Hoekstra, who had been the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee until he retired from Congress just two months before the Libyan Civil War began, thinks not. “It wouldn’t necessarily have been needed, even later, to arm the Syrian rebels,” he told me. “They might have been able to do it under existing authority and, knowing Obama, they probably did.”

Despite the incessant, even vindictive criticism of the previous administration by President Obama and his top aides, the Obama White House never revoked the Bush-era presidential findings that authorized a broad range of intelligence operations, including covert arms deliveries. “That is absolutely astonishing,” Hoekstra said. “If you go into the classified holdings room in Congress and ask to see the binder of presidential findings, you’ll see that it is pretty small,” he added, holding up his thumb and forefinger less than an inch apart. “When one of them comes in, you notice.”

“Given what I have seen over the past four years, I am not surprised that we gave MANPADS to the Libyan rebels, and that they leaked to our enemies and eventually showed up in Afghanistan, where they were used against U.S. forces,” Hoekstra said. “The real scandal in Benghazi was finding out that we had trained and armed the same guys who later attacked us.”
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Senator James Inhofe, the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, told me that arming the Libyan rebels was legal: “The president has tremendous powers. I think he exercised those powers.” But what happened later, when weapons from Libya ended up in the hands of rebels in Syria, was a different story. “Arming the rebels in Syria—they can do that and nobody has to know,” Inhofe said. “We wouldn’t know it, probably not even today, unless somebody had leaked it out of the White House. You would never know about it.”
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Ali Aujali was the Libyan ambassador to Washington for Qaddafi, but joined many of his colleagues in defecting to the rebel cause early on during the civil war. He retired on June 30, 2013, after representing the Transitional National Council and eventually the newly elected Libyan government in Washington after the war. He is still appreciative of the help the Qataris gave the rebel cause.

“When we were desperate and had no weapons and no money to buy them, Qatar came forward to help the Libyan people,” Aujali told me. “They provided all our needs, with as much as they can, and were one of the first countries to come forward. Qatar helped us in a very tough time.”
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By having the CIA encourage the Qataris to deliver weapons to the Libyan rebels while not getting involved in the logistics of the operation, the Obama administration was trying to have it both ways: make sure that the rebels got the weapons, while assuming no responsibility, and paying no political price if things went wrong.

Obama was finally joining Hillary’s war, and virtually dared Congress to stop him.

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INTO THE DANGER ZONE

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appointed Chris Stevens her special envoy to the Libyan rebels in early March 2011, sending him to Valetta, Malta, to join Ambassador Gene Cretz and other U.S. diplomats who had been evacuated from Tripoli when the U.S Embassy was shut down a few weeks earlier.

As the civil war turned increasingly bloody and the U.S. military involvement intensified, Hillary sent Stevens into Libya to become her eyes and ears regarding the Libyan rebel council. Such a move was unprecedented in recent history. In Iraq and Afghanistan—and in other cases before them—the CIA handled such tasks. Stevens booked passage on a Greek high-speed ferry, the
Maria Dolores
, and arrived in Benghazi on April 5, 2011, along with a retinue of heavily armed guards and several armored cars. This unusual step by the State Department later gave rise to breathless claims that Chris Stevens was a CIA officer operating under State Department cover. As I have mentioned earlier, I found no evidence to support those claims.

“WE CAME, WE SAW, HE DIED”

Now that the NATO air strikes were starting to erode Qaddafi’s forces, Hillary wanted to put her stamp on the Libyan rebellion. She could smell success, and wanted to own it. “We came, we saw, he died,” she joked with a reporter when she finally visited Libya, the day after Qaddafi was killed.
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A State Department account of these unusual days, published the year before Stevens’ murder, called it “expeditionary diplomacy.” Stevens said the Libyans were “genuinely grateful to the United States for supporting their aspirations for freedom, as demonstrated by the greeting the team received.” As he told the department’s official chronicler, when they got off the ferry in Benghazi they were warmly welcomed with “British, French, Qatari and American flags at Freedom Square, the vast open area in front of the Benghazi courthouse.” They were also greeted with nearly constant automatic weapons fire. This prompted Chief of Security Keith Carter to keep Stevens on board ship that first night, as eight Diplomatic Security Service agents and a young political officer, Nathan Tek, scoured the town in armored cars in search of secure lodgings. They eventually settled on a suite of rooms at the formerly government-run Tibesti Hotel on an inlet just behind Benghazi’s Mediterranean Sea coast, a luxury palace that had been taken over by international news organizations and diplomats, and moved in the next day.

With his love of the Arab world and his romantic attraction to Sufi Islam, Chris Stevens was the perfect expression of the worldview shared by Hillary and Obama, which saw political Islam as a positive force for change. He already knew many of the Libyan rebel leaders from his previous posting to Tripoli, including some of the most radical among them. From his new outpost at the Tibesti Hotel, he expanded his contacts and put a very public face on the U.S. effort to forge the Transitional National Council (TNC) into a coalition capable of ruling the country. “My mandate was to go out and meet as many members of the leadership as I could,” Stevens said. Traveling in a heavily armored convoy, Stevens went out to meet the commanders of the various
katibas
, or rebel battalions, as well as “members of the emerging civil society and newly free news media,” wrote Mario Montoyo, one of the Diplomatic Security Service agents guarding Stevens. He was the American viceroy, the personal representative of the most powerful leader on earth. Everyone wanted to be seen with him.
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The TNC leaders came from a wide variety of backgrounds: “former Qadhafi-era officials who had defected, academics, lawyers, doctors, military officers and volunteer fighters—who were united in a desire to overthrow Qadhafi.” Stevens’ job was to evaluate these leaders, each of whom had his personal
katiba
, and determine who should get what. The official story, of course, was that the United States was only providing “nonlethal military assistance” to the Libyan rebels “for the protection of civilians and civilian-populated areas.” How you can “protect” civilians from enemy artillery and ground attacks with “nonlethal” equipment is anyone’s guess. The notion that the United States left the arming of the rebels to others was a convenient fiction.

DS Agent Montoyo revealed two other aspects of Stevens’ mission to Benghazi that were not well known at the time. First was Stevens’ responsibility for “launch[ing] the U.S. government’s cooperative program with the council to collect dangerous weapons such as shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles.” The MANPADS program began during the Bush administration as an outgrowth of international counterterrorism cooperation. Although diplomats were in charge, the actual groundwork was done by former Special Operations troops, such as Glen Doherty, who hired on as contractors. Stevens’ job was to use his skills as a diplomat to convince rebel leaders to turn over their weapons (for the right price), so U.S. military personnel then could collect them, disarm them, or destroy them. Before anyone realized that all but two dozen of the 300 or 400 Stingers shipped to the rebels by Qatar had disappeared, the State Department was touting its MANPADS collection effort as a big success story. After the attack on the Special Mission Complex, the program dropped off a cliff. Indeed, the United Nations concluded in March 2014 that “thousands of MANPADS were still available” in Libya.
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The U.S. program appeared to have actually
aided
the proliferation of these weapons, not staunched it. And Chris Stevens was right in the middle of it.

The second little-known task handed to Stevens was to perform “the unseen and sometimes underappreciated management tasks that make an outpost run—paying bills, buying provisions, negotiating leases with the landlords,” Montoyo wrote. When a car bomb exploded outside the Tibesti Hotel on June 1, 2011, those more mundane tasks took over. Security Chief Keith Carter ordered the team to move in with the CIA spooks and special operators at a walled compound in Western Fwayhat beyond the Fourth Ring Road, known as the Annex. At the time, eight intelligence officers were based in the immense four-villa compound with its sculpted lawns, high walls, and state-of-the-art security, guarded by six U.S. Marines. At its peak, the CIA Annex housed another thirty-five U.S. intelligence officers, contractors, and former Special Forces personnel running the covert side of the Obama policy to arm and train the Libyan rebels. My sources tell me that the Annex also included a sophisticated NSA listening post to keep track of the opposition, especially the Iranian intelligence officers and Quds Force operations teams who started flocking to Benghazi in growing numbers.

The agency types were not comfortable with the ambassador so close, even if he was hunkering down behind their solid steel gates. Their presence in Benghazi was supposed to be a closely guarded secret and, besides, they were going to need the extra space as they ramped up their operations. So, over the next three weeks, Stevens’ team looked around for new digs, eventually negotiating to lease a walled compound that included three comfortable villas, a swimming pool, and thirteen acres of grounds, just a few minutes’ drive to the northwest of the Annex that would become the Special Mission Benghazi Compound (SMC). Stevens, Tek, and their security detail moved into that compound on June 21, 2011, and stayed there until the fall of the Qaddafi regime. Stevens signed three separate leases for the three villas, two of which had their own smaller walled-in area. This greatly facilitated the attacks, since most of the security upgrades were carried out on the portion of the compound containing the ambassador’s residence. The exorbitant bill sent to the U.S. taxpayer for the facility—$70,000 per month—suggests that Stevens was in a hurry to put some distance between his diplomatic mission and the spooks.
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The Special Mission Compound was never hardened against attack to the Inman standards—named after Admiral Bobby Inman, who led a commission to examine embassy security after the 1983 Beirut embassy bombing. Despite that shortcoming, the State Department point person in charge of security at overseas facilities, Charlene Lamb, told Congress that they had made expensive security upgrades before Stevens and his team could move in. Among them:

•  extending the height of the outer perimeter wall with masonry concrete

•  adding barbed wire and concertina wire on top of that, bringing the total height to 12 feet

•  installing powerful external lighting around the perimeter

•  installing Jersey barriers (large concrete blocks) outside the perimeter to provide anti-ram protection against truck bombs

•  installing steel drop bars to control traffic inside each of the three steel entry gates

•  installing guard booths and sandbag emplacements “to create defensive positions inside the compound.”

Inside the perimeter, they installed explosives detection equipment and an Imminent Danger Notification System, and reinforced all wooden doors with steel plate. All ground-accessible windows got heavy steel security grilles, while escape windows leading from the safe haven to the roof were equipped with emergency releases.
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The problem was that many of these security features, such as the concertina wire, were never installed. Others, including the security cameras, functioned sporadically. U.S. officials told me that in places the outside walls were in such poor repair that an intruder could simply climb over them. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Lamb, whose office within the Diplomatic Security Service was responsible for these upgrades, was honest enough to tell Congress that money was not a problem.

It was focus, and outlook.

Libya wasn’t Iraq. The United States hadn’t fought its way to victory; we led from behind. President Obama wasn’t Bush.

Charlene Lamb took her cues from her bosses, and ultimately lost her Diplomatic Security job as a result of the Accountability Review Board report, written by Hillary Clinton supporters.

THE TIPPING POINT

The tipping point in the civil war occurred not long after Stevens’ arrival. Captured Libyan documents, discovered after Qaddafi fled Tripoli, showed that Qaddafi’s own commanders knew the end was near way before the rebels or their foreign backers understood how close they were to victory.

On April 17, government troops launched a major offensive to clear the rebels from the western mountains and reassert control over the border with Tunisia. For four days straight they shelled the border town of Nalut, where the rebels had set up a powerful clandestine radio transmitter to reach nearby Berber tribesmen. Then, the rebels counterattacked powerfully, breaking the offensive and scattering the government troops. Hundreds fled the battle for their lives.

In a blistering eight-page memo, penned on April 26, Lieutenant General Mohammed al-Issawi blamed a “lack of intelligence” for his defeat. Before launching his attack, General Issawi said he had no reliable information on the numbers of rebels he should expect to encounter, their weapons, and their level of military training. However, the high command had sent him the wrong type of units for a counterinsurgency ground attack. Instead of experienced ground troops, the high command sent him three hundred air force and navy troops. “Only later did we realize . . . the rebels were more numerous than we were and they had good weapons and vehicles,” he wrote. “They were not weaker than us qualitatively or quantitatively, as we had been told in our orders.”
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On May 23, Stevens’ immediate boss, Assistant Secretary of State Jeff Feltman, arrived in Benghazi for two days of unannounced talks with the rebel leadership. Already France, Italy, and Qatar had formally recognized the TNC, casting their lots with the rebels over Qaddafi. The U.S. wasn’t far behind, with the State Department calling the TNC “a legitimate and credible interlocutor for the Libyan people.” But, for TNC president Mustapha Abdul-Jalil, that wasn’t enough. “We have tried very hard to explain to [Feltman] that we need the arms, we need funding, to be able to bring this to a successful conclusion at the earliest possible time and with the fewest humanitarian costs possible,” a spokesman told the Associated Press.
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The rebels wanted more of everything. And they were about to get it.

ARMS DEALERS AND SPIES

As weapons and money began to flow to the Libyan rebels in the late spring and early summer of 2011, Benghazi became a hotbed of intrigue. Everyone from foreign governments to oil companies and wealthy members of the TNC seemed to have their own security detail, many of them former Special Forces troops from Western countries. Among the private military contractors (PMC) on the ground in Benghazi were SECOPEX and Gallice Security of France; the British-owned Blue Mountain Group (which later subcontracted security for the Special Mission Compound to a local militia); Garda Security Group of Canada; and Control Risk, HIS, and the Olive Group, all British. “The possible involvement of other American PMCs with known Agency links—such as Blackwater/Xe (Select), Triple Canopy, and SOCMG—is something that needs further investigation,” write former special operators Jack Murphy and Brandon Webb in their early account of the Benghazi attacks.
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The contractors were a colorful lot. They included former U.S. military officers such as James F. Smith, a onetime Blackwater executive who emailed friends back in the States that he’d been on the ground in Benghazi “since no-fly.” His Virginia Beach company, SCG International, was beating the pavement for work with the TNC and anyone else they could find. Claiming to have a CIA background, he eventually became source “LY700” for Stratfor, the U.S.-based private intelligence broker whose computer systems were hacked by Anonymous and posted online. In one of his emails, he claimed to have information about “missing SAMs” his men were tracking. Jamie Smith’s intelligence impressed Stratfor Vice President Fred Burton. “Good skinny. This is what is defined as a credible source. Not some windbag Paki academic belching and passing gas,” Burton wrote in one evaluation.
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