Dark Forces: The Truth About What Happened in Benghazi (20 page)

It was a neat operation, completely off the books, and there were no U.S. fingerprints. It also appeared to be completely illegal.

HILLARY’S SLUSH FUND

In her annual budget request for Congress, presented just seven months before the Benghazi attacks, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton saw no additional threats to U.S. diplomats and State Department facilities in the region and asked for no additional funds to beef up security, beyond ongoing construction projects, none of which were in Libya. “As President Obama has said, ‘The tide of war is receding,’ ” Clinton reminded members.

That was the narrative the administration wanted Congress and the voters to hear. Obama had ended the war in Iraq and was winding down the war in Afghanistan. The world was a safer place because Obama had supposedly eliminated the causes of terrorism, which were U.S. aggression in Iraq and Afghanistan. Of course, that conveniently ignored the fact that the Iraq conflict had been going on since 1990, and that the eight years of it fought on President Bill Clinton’s watch gave us the infamous United Nations Oil-for-Food scandal, which ultimately led to the 2003 war.

But Secretary Clinton
did
ask Congress to authorize a $770 million slush fund that could be used at her discretion anywhere in North Africa or the Middle East. She called it the “Middle East and North Africa Incentive Fund.” She likened it to money that was spent after the collapse of the Soviet Union for democracy building. She insisted that the fund be “flexible and easily employed,” but offered no specifics for how it should be used except to say that “this budget request also will allow us to help the Syrian people survive a brutal assault and plan for a future without Assad.”
35

How was that money spent? How much of it went to Islamist groups with ties to al Qaeda? Was any of it spent on illegal arms purchases? So far, the State Department has not answered these questions.

10

THE ARMS PIPELINE TO SYRIA

The Obama White House style of government was to move from crisis to crisis, rather than employing a sustained, coherent policy. As the flames of the Arab Spring leapt across the region, they shifted their attention from Egypt to Libya, and now they were ready to move on to Syria, without much care as to the mess they left behind. So it was that U.S. Ambassador Gene Cretz told reporters during one of many events to commemorate the first anniversary of the uprising against Qaddafi that Washington was looking at a new target.

“This past year, Libyans demonstrated courage, bravery, and heroism, overcoming forty years of enforced silence with a deafening roar,” Cretz said. “Libya’s freedom stands in stark contrast to the oppression ongoing in Syria; we join Libyans in standing with the Syrian people in their protest against tyranny.”
1

Whether Cretz’s statement was a slip or an intentional warning, it signaled a noticeable shift in U.S. policy. And it gave all the appearances of a green light to arms smuggling operations that official Washington continued to deny.

THE
LETFALLAH II

Islamist charities were springing up all across Libya, responding to Ambassador Cretz’s call to aid the Syrian rebellion. They began collecting weapons and supplies to send to jihadi groups battling secular dictator Bashar al-Assad. One of these, calling itself Knight Suleiman Israh in Misrata, cobbled together several shipping containers full of weapons, and contracted to load them onto a Syrian-owned cargo ship,
Letfallah II
, in early April 2012.

Registered in Sierra Leone, the
Letfallah II
was owned by Mohammad Khafaji, a Syrian citizen, whose Khafaji Shipping Company was registered in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, but operated out of Tartus, Syria, as Khafaji Maritime Co. Khafaji later told United Nations arms inspectors that he had been contacted by a shipping agent in Libya, who put him in touch with a Lebanese national who wanted to ship twelve containers from Misrata to Tripoli, Lebanon.
2

That’s how the arms smuggling business worked. It was layers upon layers of cutouts and front companies, created in the expectation that the apparent complexity would deter simpler spirits from investigation and provide the participants with plausable deniability.

The
Letfallah II
docked in Khoms, Libya, on March 28 and stayed in port for six days before moving fifty-five nautical miles down the coast to Misrata on April 4. Most shipping companies spend a great deal of time and effort to keep their ships busy, since every day they idle in port is another day they have to pay crew, insurance, and port fees. But apparently Khafaji—or whoever was paying him—didn’t care. The
Letfallah II
spent six more days in Misrata with its Automatic Identification System (AIS) disabled. Since 2002, the International Maritime Organization has required all cargo vessels of three hundred tons or more to carry AIS equipment to reduce the risks of maritime accidents. Turning off the system—and thus, disappearing from the live charts kept by the IMO and its affiliates—is a trick used by smugglers and others (such as Iran) seeking to disguise the movements of their vessels.

Why the additional six-day wait? Perhaps whoever had organized the weapons collection was having problems. When the ship was intercepted in Lebanon, only three containers were seized, not twelve as initially planned. One of the seized containers bore the distinctive green, white, and red logo and two-foot letters of the IRISL, the Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines.
3

Once the ship was loaded in Misrata, it began a deceptive zigzag course across the Mediterranean. The first stop was the commercial port of Gulluk, Turkey, a picturesque fishing and tourist haven in the Aegean Sea on Turkey’s Turquoise Coast, where it stopped from April 14 to 16. Then, it disappeared for five days, with its AIS equipment switched off, surfacing again on April 21 in Alexandria, Egypt, where, according to the UN report, it offloaded construction materials it had picked up in Gulluk. After leaving Alexandria on April 24, it disappeared yet again for several days until a Lebanese navy vessel intercepted it off the coast of the northern Lebanese port of Tripoli on April 27. Official reports suggested that the Lebanese navy was suspicious because the
Letfallah II
was riding high in the water and reasoned it would be easier to contain a potential gunfight and prevent civilian casualties if they diverted the ship to Selaata, a military port just down the coast.

The ship’s manifest showed that it was carrying engine oil. Lebanese customs officials offloaded three containers of smuggled weapons, which had been sealed in Misrata, and loaded them onto trucks with a heavy military escort and drove them down to Beirut. The Lebanese authorities arrested Ahmad Hussein Khafaji, the captain of the ship (and brother of the owner), as well as a local Lebanese agent. They kept Khafaji in jail for over a year. He was pending trial as this book went to press.
4

Many questions about the
Letfallah II
shipment remain unanswered, despite an extensive investigation by the UN Panel of Experts appointed by the secretary general to report on the implementation of UN Security Council resolutions imposing an arms embargo and an assets freeze on Libya.

The Turkish government initially rebuffed UN inquiries about the ship. Turkey’s permanent representative to the UN, Ertug rul Apakan, sent an indignant letter to the secretary general and to the president of the Security Council, rejecting “unfounded allegations” that Turkey was conspiring with Libya to send weapons to the Syrian rebels. The
Letfallah II
“neither docked at any Turkish port nor has any affiliation with Turkey in terms of its registration or operator,” Ambassador Apakan wrote on May 15, 2012. That turned out to be untrue.
5

The Turkish government eventually admitted that the
Letfallah II
had docked in Turkey, and declared it was carrying three containers of “combustible engines” (
sic
) as its cargo, the UN inspectors reported in March 2014.
6

An official inventory provided by the Lebanese government showed that the Libyans had scoured the local arms market for whatever they could find. The impounded containers included SA-7 and SA-24 MANPADS, French-made MILAN antitank missiles, AK-47s,
Belgian
-made FAL assault rifles, Dragunov sniper rifles, Soviet machine guns, RPG-7 launchers, antitank recoilless rifles, mortars, 40 kg of Semtex plastic explosive, and a wide variety of ammunition, grenades, rockets, and mortar rounds. (See appendix II for a full inventory.)

The UN experts report insisted that the containers had been “sealed in Misrata and were still sealed when they were seized by the Lebanese authorities.” However, photographs released by the Lebanese army showed half-empty containers stacked haphazardly with crates of weapons, as if they had been looted.

“I would say certain items were removed by the Lebanese at the request of the U.S. government so we were not more embarrassed than we already were,” a senior U.S. official with access to intelligence reporting on the
Letfallah
seizure told me.

What items might have been removed? According to initial reports that surfaced in Arabic language newspapers in Beirut, the
Letfallah II
was carrying 100 Stinger missiles, and may have been intending to offload them at night onto dinghies on a deserted beach north of Tripoli in the rugged Akkar region of northern Lebanon bordering Syria. The Arabic-language reports estimated the street value of the weapons on board the
Letfallah II
at $60 million.
7

The Akkar region was a well-known source of illegal weapons for smugglers supplying the Free Syrian Army, my sources say. Among the best known of these was a Lebanese man named Yehya Jassem al-Dandashi, aka Abu Maasam, who worked out of the Tripoli neighborhood of Bab al-Tabbaneh.

Abu Maasam was arrested well after this incident and charged with supplying arms to the Free Syrian Army. His arrest made news because Sunni supporters blocked traffic in Tripoli demanding his release. And they won.
8

When the UN experts finally traveled to Lebanon in late December 2012—a full seven months after the
Letfallah II
seizure—they found some of the weapons were “damaged or missing components,” making them inoperable. They found SA-7s without batteries, open weapons crates, broken weapons, and ammunition for weapons that were apparently missing. “The Panel concludes that this materiel was not prepared and shipped by experienced or qualified personnel, or that it was done in haste,” their March 2013 report states.
9

“The Qataris paid for that shipment,” a U.S. official who was on the ground in Libya at the time the
Letfallah II
set sail for Lebanon and had access to the intelligence, told me. “The Qataris were there with a lot of money. They were throwing money around like crazy. You’d see signs up everywhere in Tripoli seeking help for ‘our brothers’ in Syria. They were doing weapons collection to send over there, separate from the U.S. effort.”
10

The coordinator of the UN Panel of Experts insisted that the Lebanese authorities showed them no Stingers as part of the confiscated
Letfallah II
shipment, only ten SA-7b rounds with one gripstock and six batteries, and two SA-24 rounds, the most advanced MANPADS currently made by Russia. (The gripstock is the guts of a shoulder-fired missile. It attaches beneath the missile container and includes the targeting electronics package, the trigger, and the thermal battery.)

“I am sure we saw everything,” said Salim Raad, describing the panel’s inspection of the cargo in December 2012. “There were no Stingers on board the
Letfallah
,” he told me. Raad left the panel not long after we spoke.
11

Was this just one more story where nonexpert journalists and excitable locals called every shoulder-fired surface-to-air missile a Stinger?

My sources say that Egyptian customs broke the seal on “one of the
twelve
containers containing arms” during the ship’s stopover in Alexandria, and tipped off colleagues in Lebanon who called on the navy for assistance.

So was it twelve containers, as the ship’s owner, Mohammad Khafaji, told the UN panel? Or was it just the three partially filled containers the Lebanese authorities said they confiscated? And what happened to the Stingers and other weapons, if they indeed had been on board and subsequently looted? “It is fifty-fifty as to whether the Stingers were removed by the Lebanese military or they found their way into the hands of Hezbollah,” a U.S. military source who followed the case told me.

The
Letfallah II
was just the beginning. The arms pipeline to the Syrian rebels from Libya was just getting started.

INTO THE SINAI

Weapons from Qaddafi’s arsenals were also moving via smuggling routes in the Sudan to Muslim Brotherhood networks into the Sinai Peninsula, and from there to Hamas into Gaza. Hamas was the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, as U.S. court documents in the epic 2007–2008 Department of Justice prosecution of Muslim Brotherhood front organizations in the United States showed.

One consequence of Obama’s successful effort to remove pro–U.S. Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak was the collapse of Egyptian government control over the vast Sinai Peninsula. In principle, a United Nations Observer Force, headed by U.S. diplomat David Satterfield, was responsible for monitoring the security situation in the Sinai to ensure that the Egyptian government lived up to its commitment to keep the area calm. Ever since the Camp David accords in 1979, the Sinai had been Israel’s most secure border. But, with Mubarak gone, the UN observers were overwhelmed. Terrorist groups allied with al Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Hamas had reopened long-dormant smuggling routes and desert hideaways, and were using them to bring vast quantities of weapons looted from Qaddafi’s to the front lines with Israel.

The Egyptian security services were worried that the goal of the terrorist groups was to provoke an Israeli incursion into the Sinai, which would exacerbate Egyptian-Israeli tensions and play into the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood, who were poised to take over the country. So, they negotiated a quiet deal with Israel so the Egyptian Air Force and army aviation could fly its own combat patrols into the Sinai, which was technically a violation of the Camp David accords.

In October 2011, as Qaddafi’s regime was collapsing, Egyptian security officers seized two separate shipments of weapons from Libya in trucks crossing the Sinai bound for the Gaza Strip. One of the shipments included a small number of surface-to-air missiles.

Despite the stepped-up interdiction effort, the shipments just got larger. Six months later, in May 2012, the Egyptian border patrol intercepted a convoy of three trucks arriving from Libya carrying fifty Russian-built MANPADS, assorted ammunition, and hashish. The Egyptians believed the weapons were bound for Gaza or for al Qaeda training camps in the Sinai. Subsequent reports said the shipment had included 120 MANPADS.
12

The Egyptians were also worried by reports that Iran was involved in the arms smuggling from Benghazi. An Egyptian security source told the Saudi daily
Asharq al-Awsat
they had “observed Iranian businessmen and nationals, carrying Western passports, entering the country following the collapse of the Mubarak regime.”
13

The Egyptians had known for years that the Iranian regime had no compunctions about dealing with radical Sunni terrorist groups, as security officials in Cairo told me when I first investigated Osama bin Laden’s networks in February 1998 for
Reader’s Digest
, well before he became a household name. So it was no surprise for them to discover the Iranians working with the Muslim Brotherhood now.