Dark Forces: The Truth About What Happened in Benghazi (16 page)

“My son went to Afghanistan to fight the enemy,” Billy Vaughn said. “Now the brass are saying, we’re there to win hearts and minds.” As the funeral service at Bagram showed, that wasn’t working so well.

In Benghazi, our Muslim allies would turn against us directly.

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WEAPONS, WEAPONS, EVERYWHERE

For the Libyan rebels, the war was going their way. As the NATO bombing campaign intensified, Qaddafi’s forces steadily weakened. On August 23, 2011, the rebels stormed Qaddafi’s Bab al-Azizia compound in Tripoli, only to find that Qaddafi himself had already fled. They consolidated their hold over the capital the next day.

The United Nations recognized the TNC as the official government of Libya in mid-September, and the United States sent Ambassador Gene Cretz back to Tripoli to reopen the embassy shortly afterward. Chris Stevens remained in Benghazi as the special envoy to the TNC for another two months. Abdelhakim Belhaj, the former LIFG chief whom Stevens had befriended in Qaddafi’s jail, moved to Tripoli. As head of the Tripoli Military Council, Belhaj now was in charge of TNC military operations as the rebels mopped up the remaining pockets of resistance from Qaddafi loyalists.

With the rebel victory, the emphasis of the CIA outpost in Benghazi quickly shifted. Instead of distributing weapons they now tried to gather them, especially the four hundred Stingers and thousands of Russian-made shoulder-fired portable air defense systems (MANPADS) that were floating around.

But there was a problem: The missiles were nowhere to be found. At least not in Libya.

LEAKING MANPADS

One place the missing MANPADS turned up almost immediately was the Sinai, where terrorist cells, supported by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and working closely with their Hamas brethren in Gaza, opened fire on Israeli Cobra helicopters in August 2011 during a series of running gun battles that killed eight Israelis. In September, authorities in Egypt intercepted eight SA-24s being brought by smugglers, most likely from Libya, into the Sinai. Libyan SAMs turned up in Algeria as well, where the authorities near the vast natural gas facility at Amenas seized fifteen SA-24 and twenty-eight older SA-7 missiles in mid-February.
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This is the same facility that was subsequently attacked by an al Qaeda affiliate led by Mokhtar Belmokhtar, who boasted of mobilizing Algerian al Qaeda members to fight Qaddafi.

Hillary Clinton made an unannounced trip to Libya on October 18, 2011, to congratulate the Libyan people on their victory. She smelled a photo op for a future presidential campaign.

ABC News called it a “dangerous diplomatic mission,” noting that her security team had required her to leave the comfort of her specially outfitted Boeing 757 in Malta and switch to a U.S. military C-17 with canvas seats for the remainder of the journey, since the military jet was “equipped with defenses against surface-to-air missiles.” It showed that the State Department was capable of laying on security when it really mattered to the boss. It also showed that the Diplomatic Security people soberly viewed the threat of the leaking MANPADS.

While in Libya, Secretary Clinton announced that the State Department planned to spend $40 million to help the new Libyan government to collect weapons left over from the civil war and would hire additional personnel to complement the fourteen State Department contractors already working the project.
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Who were those contractors? The ARB report mentions two South Africans. My sources tell me they also hired local fixers, former militiamen, and Special Forces troops from Arab North Africa and Africa as well. In some countries, the State Department Bureau of Political Military Affairs hired companies such as the Danish Demining Group and the HALO Trust to carry out Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) work. They also hired DynCorps, which considered its work on MANPADS collection so sensitive that it referred my questions on the subject to the State Department.
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Some of these contractors worked out of the CIA Annex in Benghazi. Others, such as Glen Doherty, worked out of another CIA Annex in Tripoli. As this book goes to press, the State Department still has not answered how many of these former Special Forces operators had been training the Libya rebels in military tactics and weapons handling on the U.S. taxpayer’s dime.

There was certainly cause for concern. There had been widespread looting all across the country of Qaddafi’s armories since the start of the insurrection, and the CIA and the State Department contractors had quietly been trying to track the missing MANPADS and, where possible, gather them up for use another day. Heightening those concerns was the discovery by Western reporters just two weeks after Qaddafi abandoned Tripoli of a gigantic weapons storehouse in Tripoli.

The sign outside said “Schoolbook Printing and Storage Warehouse.” But behind the double steel doors, which had been ripped off their hinges by looters, the only books to be found were weapons manuals. It was the Arms R Us of how-to guides: how to operate Soviet Bloc multiple rocket launchers, how to assemble and operate surface-to-air missiles, how to use French-built wire-guided antitank missiles. The warehouse was split into several buildings, filled with mortar shells, artillery rounds, antitank missiles: thousands of pieces of military ordnance that were completely unguarded more than two weeks after the fall of the capital.

Reporters found empty crates that once had contained SA-7b Grail MANPADS, a somewhat modernized version of the original Soviet shoulder-fired heat-seeking missile, the type that could be used by terrorists to shoot down civilian airliners.

Human Rights Watch researcher Peter Bouckaert was there and stumbled upon nine empty crates labeled “9M342,” the Russian designation of the more modern SA-24 Strella. “These are some of the most advanced weaponry the Russians made,” Bouckaert said. “They need to get somebody here to secure some of this.” Weapons researchers subsequently found that Russia had exported only the twin-tube vehicle-mounted version of the SA-24, and not the gripstocks needed to fire them from the shoulder. The Strella is the Russian equivalent of the U.S.-made Stinger.

Each crate once held two missiles. Paperwork found at the site showed that they had come from nine different consignments, which in all totaled “2,445 crates containing 4,890 missiles.”
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A military official in the new government gave almost direct corroboration of what the reporters and the Human Rights Watch weapons analyst believed they had found, saying that
five thousand
SA-7s from Qaddafi’s stockpiles had gone missing. “Qaddafi’s Libya bought about 20,000 SAM-7 missiles, Soviet- or Bulgarian-manufactured,” said General Mohammed Adia, who was in charge of armaments at the TNC’s newly formed defense ministry. He was speaking at a Qaddafi-era arms depot in Benghazi, where the rebels were ceremoniously destroying missiles the folks at the CIA Annex had found.

“More than fourteen thousand of these missiles were used, destroyed or are now out of commission. Most of them were stockpiled in Zintan,” General Adia said, shortly before Clinton arrived in Tripoli. (Zintan is in southwest Libya.) “About 5,000 of the SAM-7s are still missing. . . . Unfortunately, some of these missiles could have fallen into the wrong hands . . . abroad.”
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A Western security official based in Benghazi chimed in. “Libya has become an arms bazaar for all the world’s leading terrorists. Everyone is here trying to do a deal and get their hands on Qaddafi’s weapons. We are in a desperate race against time to prevent them falling into the wrong hands.”

Al Qaeda supporters in Tunisia and Algeria were among those who were actively seeking to acquire the missiles, another intelligence official told British reporter Con Coughlin. Some of the missiles had been smuggled into Gaza, where the Israelis would track them down relentlessly for over a year. Not to be left out, the Iranians had sent a team of Revolutionary Guards intelligence officers to Benghazi “to buy dozens of missiles which can then be passed on to the numerous terrorist groups it supports throughout the region, including the Taliban in Afghanistan,” Coughlin wrote.
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We will hear more about the Iranian agents in subsequent chapters.

In Washington, John Brennan told a security conference that the news of the missing MANPADS raised “lots of concerns,” and that the United States had pressed the rebel government to secure the weapons. “Obviously, there are a lot of parts of that country right now that are ungoverned,” Brennan observed.

A rebel spokesman said that the military police were aware of the schoolbook warehouse in Tripoli, since it was only a quarter mile from a well-known barracks once used by the Khamis Brigade, the crack commando unit led by Qaddafi’s son of the same name. “The military police were aware of this and they took charge of it; they’re the ones who secured it,” said Abdulrahman Busin.
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In a supreme irony, I can reveal that the man who controlled the looted missiles and what became of them was Abdelhakim Belhaj, the former head of the al Qaeda–affiliated Libyan Islamic Fighting Group. Belhaj was now the top military official in the new regime. And he was a dedicated Islamist who hated America and was devoted to the global jihad.

Senator John McCain met Belhaj in Benghazi at the start of the revolution along with Special Envoy Chris Stevens and naïvely hailed him and his
katiba
as freedom fighters. “They are my heroes,” he told National Public Radio. “I have met with these brave fighters, and they are not al Qaeda,” McCain said. He dismissed questions about their background, absurdly claiming that none of them had any record of supporting radical Islam. “To the contrary: They are Libyan patriots who want to liberate their nation. We should help them do it,” he said.
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The United States did help them. And Belhaj repaid the favor by handing out these deadly missiles to every jihadi group in the region, many of them controlling territory well within range of major civilian airports.

ISLAMIST VICTORY

Two days after Hillary Clinton’s surprise visit to Libya, NATO repeatedly bombed a large convoy of military vehicles in Sirte that they suspected was harboring top Qaddafi loyalists and perhaps Qaddafi himself. YouTube video soon surfaced of a dazed and bloodied Qaddafi being pulled off the back of a pickup truck by rebels and dragged along a dusty road, where they beat him repeatedly in the head. Some analysts analyzing the footage believe a rebel sodomized him with a knife. The dictator was dead.
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Moderates in the Arab world were already bemoaning the marriage of convenience between NATO and radical Islamist groups, and accused the West of hijacking the Arab Spring. As a result, Libya “has become a hub of extremism and lawlessness, with a plethora of military aid being collected by an assortment of armed Islamists who aim to exclude others from power.” While the United Arab Emirates, another key arms supplier to the rebels, was attempting to play a moderating role by helping to arm and train the national police force, Qatar continued to support the Islamists, “which undermines the ability of non-Islamists to compete for power.”
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The Obama administration crowed that its low-profile approach of leading from behind had won the day. National Security Council deputy for strategic communications Ben Rhodes made sure journalists compared Obama’s recipe for regime change in Libya with that of George W. Bush, and noted that under Obama, not a single U.S. soldier had died (at least, not in Libya). One administration official slipped a quote into the media slipstream that would get replayed repeatedly in the 2012 election campaign. “Reagan targeted Qaddafi; Bush targeted bin Laden. Obama has done both.” Of course, with such obvious spiking the football, he (or she) spoke anonymously.
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It was too much even for London’s liberal
Guardian
newspaper, which ripped into the sycophantic U.S. media, chickenhawk Republicans, and the “narcissistic myopia of the American political establishment.”

The administration’s “ ‘strategy’ in Libya—if indeed it merits the term—has been incoherent and contradictory,” wrote commentator Michael Boyle. “If this is a victory, it is one produced by circumstance and a fair amount of luck, rather than any ingenious plan from Washington.”

The new government made its intentions clear from the start. TNC chairman Mustapha Abdul-Jalil announced that the government’s first official decree authorized polygamy, banned interest, and proclaimed that Islamic Sharia law was now the “basic source” of all Libyan law. The Islamization of Libya began in earnest. Abdul-Jalil began appearing in public with a
Zabibah
mark on his forehead, a dark bruise ostensibly caused by repeated prostration during the five-times-daily Muslim prayers that was worn as a mark of piety by devout Muslims. In Benghazi, the black flag of al Qaeda was now flying over the courthouse, and gangs of Islamist militiamen in brand-new SUVs drove through the streets at night, shouting “Islamiya, Islamiya! No East, nor West,” a clear intimidation to secular Libyans. There is no record that Obama, Hillary Clinton, or any other senior administration official uttered a word in protest.
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David Gerbi, a Libyan Jew whose family had fled to Italy during the wave of anti-Jewish riots in 1967, felt the sting of Sharia firsthand. Buoyed by reports in the Western media about the secular nature of the insurgents, he returned to Libya at the peak of the civil war in the spring of 2011 and joined the rebel ranks to liberate his country. Once Qaddafi fled and the TNC took charge, he went to Tripoli in hopes of reopening the main synagogue in Tripoli, a city that had been 25 percent Jewish as recently as 1941.

After weeks of administrative labors, he got a permit from the TNC and set to work. He hired a crew of neighborhood residents to help him clear the garbage piled around the synagogue complex in the Hara Kabira, a sand-choked slum that was once the heart of Tripoli’s thriving Jewish quarter. Gerbi was photographed with a sledgehammer, ecstatically breaking through the cinder-block barrier the rebels had erected to block the magnificent main doors of the old synagogue. But, the very next day, a massive anti-Jewish protest in nearby Martyrs Square (known as Green Square during the Qaddafi era) forced him to abandon his dreams. He spoke to reporters, tears in his eyes, as he learned that the TNC had rescinded his permit and was now planning to deport him, bowing to the Islamist mob. The TNC dismissed his case as a “matter of no importance.”
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