Dark Forces: The Truth About What Happened in Benghazi (32 page)

And yet, for some reason the briefer apparently got the hour of Akin’s visit wrong. He had him arriving at the compound at seven-thirty, and departing at around eight-thirty with Stevens and a DS agent accompanying him to his car, which was parked in the street just beyond the front gate. The State Department Accountability Review Board corrected this, and had Akin arriving at six-thirty and leaving at around seven-thirty. Akin repeated the earlier times in an email exchange with columnist Diana West.

The State Department briefing gave rise to speculation that Akin left
after
Ansar al-Sharia had set up the first roadblocks, and accusations that he had failed to warn Stevens. I have found no credible evidence to support those claims. I believe the State Department initially was hoping to cover up the arrival of a British security team, who dropped off an armored vehicle and weaponry at around eight-thirty after supporting a VIP visit for the day. Ever since the assassination attempt on the ambassador in June when they pulled out of Benghazi, they had arranged with the RSOs to stow their gear at the American compound, because Benghazi was too dangerous for them to stay.

Changing the hour of Akin’s departure to mask the arrival of the Brits may sound petty, even stupid, but it fits with the overall strategy of Hillary Clinton and the Obama administration in the run-up to the U.S. elections to pretend that the United States faced no security threat from al Qaeda because they had killed bin Laden. There were several other details they changed in the chronology.

Akin’s visit was critical for a very different reason that I can reveal here for the first time: It gave Khalil Harb and his Quds Force team the “eyes on” confirmation they needed in order to pull the trigger on the attack. As is standard in any high-risk intelligence operation, they wanted direct, physical proof that their target was indeed still in place. My sources say that someone on Akin’s staff—a driver, a bodyguard, or a personal assistant—had been co-opted by a Quds Force operative and made a cell phone call to tell them Akin had indeed met with Stevens.

“The Iranians used the Turkish consul for their own hidden purpose,” the former Iranian intelligence chief told me. “They wouldn’t have attacked without confirmation that the ambassador was inside.”

In addition, of course, Harb had watchers surrounding the compound. But he hadn’t expected Stevens’ willingness to expose himself by escorting the Turkish diplomat all the way to his car, where they could see him with their own eyes.

It was a gift.

THE CAIRO DEMONSTRATION

Stevens used the extra time between Akin’s departure and the arrival of a friend he was expecting later that evening to catch up on paperwork and the day’s events. He retired to his work area inside the residence, which the State Department refers to as Villa C, and began emailing back and forth with embassy staff in Tripoli. He still had the matter of the new contract with the 17th February Martyrs Brigade to resolve, which was especially troubling, given the latest reports from David McFarland and Eric Henderson. That’s one reason he had accompanied Akin out onto the street: He wanted to take the opportunity to say a few words to the guards outside, let them feel a little love.
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Greg Hicks had been sending him text messages during the day about the alarming turn of events in Cairo. Ambassador Anne Paterson had pulled the trigger on the REACT plan by midday and evacuated all embassy personnel. The embassy also put out a warning to Americans in Egypt not to visit the embassy that day.

By midafternoon, the Egyptian police had abandoned their posts. Out in the street, protesters were shredding and stomping on the American flag. Then a bit after five o’clock, the organized jihadis came onto the streets. They brought up a ladder and started to scale the perimeter walls around the embassy grounds. Soon, they were tearing down the American flags flying at half-mast inside the compound itself and replacing them with the black flag of al Qaeda. Video footage showed them chanting, “Obama, Obama! We are all Osama!”
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Because Cairo was the largest U.S. embassy in the Middle East after Baghdad, with hundreds of employees, it had both a Marines Corps detachment and a State Department Mobile Security Guard contingent. They responded as they had been trained, donning helmets and body armor and withdrawing to defensive positions to protect the sensitive areas of the embassy containing classified files and communications gear, protectees behind them, ready to shoot the next person who came through the door. It was a full-blown crisis, and as Stevens skimmed the cable and email traffic of the afternoon, it just kept on getting worse and worse. They would be having a sleepless night in the State Department Operations Center.

Despite the chaos in Cairo, which at one point seemed “just minutes away from a hostage situation,” no senior official in the Obama administration thought to put military forces in the region on alert.
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There was no call from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton asking for help, no secure video-teleconference with regional commanders called by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, no panicked phone call from the president’s counterterrorism advisor, John Brennan, that their worst 9/11 nightmares appeared to be coming true.

Later, varying accounts of what happened in Cairo began to emerge and it became evident that even
that
attack was a planned jihadi operation, not a spontaneous protest over an Internet movie.

However, the important thing for Chris Stevens that evening was the knowledge that both Tripoli and Benghazi remained calm. As Greg Hicks told Congress, there was not a hint of a protest in either Libyan city, just the constant grinding knowledge that they were being watched and that the jihadis were on the rise.

The last words in Stevens’ diary were ominous. “Never ending security threats . . .”

THE GAMER

Sean Smith was looking forward to returning to his wife, Heather, and their two children, in The Hague. After the bad days in Baghdad, where he had been posted in 2007–2008, he was sent to Montreal and was now on a three-year posting to boring Holland. And it was great. He had come to Benghazi on temporary duty (TDY) on September 3 for a four-week assignment as the communications specialist and building manager, but vowed it was his last hazardous duty assignment. It just wasn’t fair to his family, he said.
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The thirty-four-year-old former Air Force sergeant was gregarious and easygoing. He was also a computer freak. His mother, Patricia Smith, later told their hometown paper, the
San Diego Union Tribune
, that it was hard to imagine him away from a keyboard. “Computers were a part of him. You couldn’t have one without the other,” she said.
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Sean Smith led a double life: diplomat by day, computer gamer by night. In the EVE Online community, he was known as Vile Rat, or VR for short. EVE was a gigantic, ever-evolving space warfare game world that Vile Rat had helped to shape. “Vile Rat was a spy for the Goonfleet Intelligence Agency,” said his online “boss,” Alex “The Mittani” Gianturco. “If you were an alliance leader of any consequence, you spoke to Vile Rat.”
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The gamers knew that Vile Rat was in Benghazi. “He commented on how they use guns to celebrate weddings and how there was a constant susurrus of weaponry in the background,” the Mittani wrote. Because Sean Smith’s job was to provide IT services for the Special Mission Compound he was online all the time, “hanging out with us on Jabber as usual and talking about Internet spaceship games.” He also moderated a blog for online gamers and computer nerds called Something Awful, to which many fellow State Department employees belonged.

After Stevens had retired to his room, Smith remained at his workstation out in the commons area of Villa C, where he had rigged up a CCTV video feed of the security cameras, in addition to his personal laptop, where he could play EVE.

Earlier that evening, he had sent out a message to Gianturco with typical gallows humor. “Assuming we don’t die tonight. We saw one of our ‘police’ that guard the compound taking pictures.”

He was online with the Mittani at 9:42 PM local time when sudden movement on the CCTV cameras caught his attention. “He was on Jabber when it happened, that’s the most f—ked up thing,” Gianturco wrote. “In Baghdad the same kind of thing happened—incoming sirens, he’d vanish, we’d freak out and he’d come back ok after a bit. This time he said ‘F—K’ and ‘GUNFIRE’ and then disconnected and never returned.”
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A State Department gaming colleague speculated on the blog site Smith moderated that given his dedication and cool-headedness, “it is likely that he spent his last moments completing the destruction of cryptographic technology and classified materials that he was responsible for.”
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The assault happened so quickly and with such extreme violence there was no time to go through the complex REACT drill. Whatever classified equipment was there fell into the hands of the enemy.

But there was still time to die.

INSIDE THE TOC

Alec Henderson was monitoring the CCTV cameras inside the Tactical Operations Center, the TOC. This was a heavily fortified one-story cement building in a separate part of the compound, about seventy-five feet to the east of Villa C, where the ambassador and Sean Smith were headquartered. The DS half of the compound had its own entrance, known as Bravo-1, a bit farther down from the main gate. A driveway led directly to the DS barracks and the TOC behind it.

The DS half of the compound was actually a separate property, set off from the residence by a north-south alleyway enclosed in nine-foot masonry walls that spanned the entire 300-yard length of the property.
*
When Stevens first rented the property the year before, they had opened a lateral drive through the wall that gave access to the pool at the back of Villa C. This is where Scott Wickland, David Ubben, and one of the ambassador’s personal security detail from Tripoli now were lounging and talking, enjoying the Mediterranean summer evening.
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At approximately 9:02 PM, a tan Toyota Hilux gun truck with markings from the local SSC drove up and parked on the gravel road in front of the main gate and turned off its lights. This was a welcome addition, given Henderson’s repeated demands to the SSC for round-the-clock police protection. All that could be seen of the two men inside the darkened vehicle was the glowing embers of their cigarettes.

None of the working security cameras showed any other activity out on the street or along the perimeter wall. The Blue Mountain security guards out front were smoking and chatting. All was calm—or so Henderson thought.

If the security cameras at the rear of the compound had been working, Henderson would have noticed gun trucks pulling up along the Fourth Ring Road, also known as Venice Road, at around 9:30 PM. About a dozen armed men jumped out and began milling around outside the rear gate of the compound, according to diners at the nearby Venezia Café, who were interviewed by a reporter from the
Guardian
.

“One of the militia jeeps bore the black banner of a local Islamist militia, Ansar al-Sharia. The militiamen made no attempt to hide. . . . Neighbors saw militia 4X4s blocking streets leading to the compound. All were surprised there was no reaction from the compound,” the
Guardian
reported.
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At 9:40 PM, Henderson noticed the lights on the police car go back on, then it drove off. Then all was dark once again in the CCTV monitors.

Two minutes later, all havoc broke loose.

A swarm of heavily armed assailants stormed the guard booth. Two of the Blue Mountain guards ran off. The other two were trapped by the lead assailant, who demanded that they open the main gate and the steel drop bar. When they hesitated, he forced the first one to his knees and shot him in the leg. The other one opened the gates and the attackers let the two men go. “We’re here to kill Americans, not Libyans,” they reportedly said. The two men, both wounded, were later taken to the hospital.

As soon as the gates opened, armed men emerged from the darkness and rushed into the compound in a rapid, disciplined, military assault. Some of them were wore long beards and Afghan-style
shalwar kameez
, the long baggy tunic with loose-fitting pants beneath.

Henderson heard the shots and turned back to the monitors, where he now saw upwards of fifty armed men starting to rush through the main gate into the compound. He hit the duck-and-cover alarm and, for good measure, activated the public address system. “Attack! Attack!” he shouted. Then he picked up the separate VHF radio he and the other DS agents used to communicate directly with the Annex and told them they were under attack.

The main gates were on the north side of the compound. One group of attackers jumped the low hedge and ran off to the left through the olive orchard to the Bravo-1 gate along the front wall. After a bit, they were able to open it and four vehicles screeched in, two Nissan Pajeros without license plates and two gun trucks. Another dozen or so fighters jumped out of the vehicles and headed directly to the Villa C to find the ambassador. The gun trucks “took up strategic firing positions on the east and west portions of the road to fend off any unwelcome interference. Each vehicle flew the black flag of jihad.”
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Pajeros were the favorite vehicle of Hezbollah, the main proxy of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Quds Force. Hezbollah military commander Imad Mugniyeh was assassinated in February 2008 when the headrest of his Pajero blew up just after he got into the vehicle following a meeting at the Syrian intelligence headquarters in downtown Damascus.

Another group moved to the bungalow on the other side of the main gate that served as a dormitory and rec room for the 17th February Martyrs Brigade guards. They found the diesel jerry cans exactly where they expected them, stockpiled by the new generator that was due to be installed in the near future. They poured diesel fuel over the cars parked nearby and set them alight. Two of the three militiamen on post barricaded themselves in a closet and later told the FBI they fired their weapons at the intruders. The third ran for his life toward the DS barracks, where he knew more weapons were stockpiled.
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