Dark Forces: The Truth About What Happened in Benghazi (37 page)

The government in Tripoli was telling Hicks that the ambassador was “in a safe place.” However, it soon became clear that the Libyans thought Stevens had evacuated with the others to the Annex. “[W]e keep telling them, no, he is not with us, we do not have him—we do not have him,” Hicks said. The GRS team, still stuck at the airport, was morphing into a hostage rescue team. “It looks like . . . we are going to need to send them to try to save the ambassador, who was in a hospital that is, as far as we know, under enemy control,” Hicks recalled.

In the end, it was Abdul Basit Haroun—the 17th February Martyrs Brigade commander who had organized the shipments of weapons, including MANPADS, to the Syrian rebels—who formally identified Stevens’ body at the hospital early the next morning. That piece of news was contained in an otherwise matter-of-fact obituary written by the Associated Press, which identified Haroun as the “Benghazi security chief.”

That closed the circle on the relationship between Ambassador Stevens and the gun-running networks.
54

INCOMING

Glen Doherty and his team finally left the airport at four-thirty in the morning, after concluding an agreement with Fathi al-Obeidi to provide men and gun trucks to escort them to the Annex. Obeidi personally led the convoy, and later told the Libyan media he had been asked to provide transportation for ten people at the Annex, but was surprised to discover a total of thirty-seven Americans at the compound. (The official U.S. count, including Sean Smith and Stevens, was thirty-five.) The gates slammed shut behind the armored SUVs bringing the fresh team from Tripoli at five in the morning. The 17th February gun trucks and militiamen waited outside.

By this point, the Annex was in clean-out mode. CIA personnel were smashing computers and destroying files. They had been under attack all night long, and the weariness of constant battle showed on their faces. Doherty began searching for his friend Ty Woods. They had been in battle together before. They would die together tonight.

According to the account by fellow special operators Brandon Webb and Jack Murphy, Doherty was told that Woods was on the roof “manning a MK46 machine gun.” So, after getting the lay of the land, he climbed the ladder and found Woods along with two other agents. “[T]hey quickly embraced, filled each other in, and retook defensive firing positions.”

According to Burton’s account, the two former Navy SEALs were reunited inside, just before they heard a fresh round of automatic weapons fire from somewhere just beyond the perimeter wall. Woods “rolled his eyes in an expression of absolute frustration over the audacity of the Libyan terrorists and said, ‘I am going to rain down hate among them.’ ” Together they climbed up onto the roof, along with DS agent David Ubben, to do battle with the jihadis, as a couple of RPGs from nearby positions slammed into the compound’s outer walls.

There is no disagreement as to what happened next.

“Incoming!” one of them shouted when they heard the
pop
of the first mortar.

The first round whistled: It was long, sailing over their heads, and exploded out in the street where the 17th February Martyrs Brigade militiamen were lounging. At least one of them was killed on the spot from the blast. The second round was silent until it exploded inside the northwest wall, in between the first two villas. Short.

The jihadis were bracketing their position. It was standard practice among professional mortarmen. One round long, one round short, third round on target. The military referred to the first round as the “registration” round.

Some reports claimed Doherty had spotted the launch site in a vacant lot around eight hundred meters to the northwest, and was lighting it up with a laser targeting device as he had done so often in Afghanistan and Iraq. When the SEALs went into battle with the full power of the United States behind them, a C-130 Spectre gunship circling overhead could then annihilate the attacker with a buzz-saw burst from its 20mm Gatling gun.

But there was no Spectre gunship in the sky over Benghazi, only an unarmed MQ-1 Predator drone, relaying the scene back to the Pentagon and to the White House Situation Room in real time. If Doherty was indeed lighting up the mortar crew, it was more in an attempt to intimidate them, throw them off their game, than to target them. And it didn’t work. The mortar men kept dialing in the tubes.

The third round landed on the roof where Ty Woods was firing his MK46 machine gun at the attackers, as they tried to close in on the Annex. Before Glen Doherty could reach his mortally wounded comrade, two more rounds hit the roof, killing him as well. Shrapnel from the round that killed Doherty ripped into David Ubben as he was getting off the ladder to join them on the roof, nearly severing one of his legs. Mark G—, the GRS shooter who had been ordered to remain at the Annex by the chief of base, was also critically wounded in the mortar attacks.

One of the GRS reinforcements from Tripoli saw Ubben go down and scrambled up the ladder. In full combat gear, he strapped the DS agent onto his shoulders and carried him back down to safety, undoubtedly saving his life. (Ubben remained in Walter Reed Army Medical Center recovering from his injuries for over a year.)

And then, just as abruptly as it started, the firing ceased. In the distance, trucks and heavy vehicles of a quasi-government militia called into action by Libyan president Magariaf could be heard approaching. Help—real help—was finally on the way. While it was too late to save any of the four Americans who died that night, the arrival of a large, heavily armed force of pro-government troops saved the remaining thirty-one Americans from certain slaughter, just as spectacular dawn colors were beginning to replace the black sky over Benghazi.

The mortar attack had taken everyone by surprise. “That was a well-coordinated attack,” Lieutenant Colonel Andy Wood told me. “It takes a crew of three to five people to man a mortar. That definitely was outside talent. I don’t know of anybody in the revolution who shot a mortar.”

Lieutenant Colonel Wood explained just how difficult the mortar attack must have been. “They couldn’t use a spotter, because there was no high point, no height advantage, and there were walls all round. That’s why [the CIA] picked that compound the way they did. It was the highest thing around.

“I’ve shot mortars, and they’re hard,” he went on. “It’s a perishable skill. I bet they took that mortar out, paced it out from where they were going to fire it, and went out in the desert to practice at the exact same angle, exact same distance. They probably fired it a number of times, then moved it into town to fire that night. Those guys were experienced mortarmen.”

Qaddafi’s army, such as it was, was not known for its mortar or artillery skills. But the men of the Quds Force had cut their teeth during the eight horrible years of the Iran-Iraq War, where fierce artillery and mortar battles alternated with human-wave assaults.

Former CIA operations officer John Maguire agreed. “I am convinced the mortar team were not some bunch of Libyans we used to call ‘the Flintstones.’ That’s a mortarman who’s been firing mortars for a long time. That’s the way the Quds Force fired on us from across the river in Baghdad. When they fired from that side of the river, people were hauling ass for cover because the Quds Force mortarmen knew how to shoot.”

Maguire believed the attackers were intending to assault the Annex, but had been prevented from getting close by the GRS shooters on the roof. “They needed a standoff position. And they succeeded in silencing the Annex with just three (fatal) rounds.”

The Quds Force tradecraft was evident to another Baghdad veteran as well, Blackwater founder Erik Prince. The final attack was carried out by “a very, very professional mortar team, which I believe to be Iranian Quds Force, an Iranian special operations team. To get on target with three or four mortar rounds in an area . . . you don’t do that. That takes some skill.”
55

Accounts differ of how many jihadis died that night. Estimates range from sixty to over one hundred, versus four dead Americans. Those results are a tribute to the training, professionalism, and discipline of the U.S. Special Forces.

15

THE COVER-UP

The cover-up, the lying, and the dissembling began even before Woods and Doherty were dead.

It was 10 PM in Washington—4 AM in Benghazi—when Hillary Clinton phoned the White House. She had been speaking off and on during the afternoon and early evening with National Security Advisor Tom Donilon, but this was her first call to the president. She wanted to make sure that they had their story straight. She read him a draft of the statement she was about to release, which blamed the attacks on an Internet video no one in Benghazi had seen.

Here is the complete statement, which she released that evening:

I condemn in the strongest terms the attack on our mission in Benghazi today. As we work to secure our personnel and facilities, we have confirmed that one 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.

This evening, I called Libyan President Magariaf to coordinate additional support to protect Americans in Libya. President Magariaf expressed his condemnation and condolences and pledged his government’s full cooperation.

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.

In light of the events of today, the United States government is working with partner countries around the world to protect our personnel, our missions, and American citizens worldwide.
1

If you read that statement carefully, you can see that Hillary was hedging her bets. She didn’t yet mention the Internet video by name, but the allusion was clear. If the story floated with the media, they could go with it.

Obama also carefully hedged his bets when he broke into his schedule the next morning at 10:43 to deliver remarks to the press in the Rose Garden. He used the word “attack” and “attackers” repeatedly, but he never identified the attackers as “terrorists.” In fact, as Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee pointed out, “the President passed up at least ten opportunities to clearly identify the Benghazi attacks as terrorist attacks.” Instead, he used weasel words like “killed in an attack, “outrageous and shocking attack,” “killers who attacked,” “this type of senseless violence,” and more.
2

Like Hillary, he attempted from the get-go to pin the blame on religious bigotry
emanating from the United States
. “Since our founding, the United States has been a nation that respects all faiths,” Obama said in his first public statement on the attacks. “We reject all efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others.”
3

ORIGINAL SIN

It was clear from the beginning that the administration was refusing to label the events in Benghazi a terrorist attack, since that would call into question their policy in Libya and throughout the Muslim world. So, they fell back on a well-worn tactic of the liberal intelligentsia: blame America first. Both Hillary Clinton and President Obama were betting that liberal reporters would go along with the fiction that an Internet video, made with $5 million raised by a “right-wing” pastor in Florida, was the real cause of the Benghazi attacks.

Hillary had already identified Pastor Terry Jones as a great campaign prop. When he first announced he would burn Korans two years earlier, during the 2010 midterm elections, she blasted him in a speech before the Council on Foreign Relations. “It’s regrettable that a pastor in Gainesville, Florida, with a church of no more than fifty people can make this outrageous and distressful, disgraceful plan and get, you know, the world’s attention,” she said.
4

For Hillary, it was a twofer. Not only would the story take the heat off the administration for what had been going on in Benghazi, but if Republicans didn’t condemn the video as self-righteously as she did, she would tar them as bigots as well. Heck, she’d even accuse them of being responsible for Chris Stevens’ death, since they had the temerity to “slash” the State Department budget. This, in fact, became a much-repeated Democrat talking point in the dozens of public hearings Congress eventually held.

That’s just the way Hillary and Obama worked. It wasn’t a conspiracy. It wasn’t planned. For them, it was standard operating procedure for the blood sport of politics.

But there was a problem: The story just wasn’t true.

At 12:07 am, the State Department Operations Center put out a cable stating that Ansar al-Sharia had claimed responsibility for the Benghazi attack, based on the reporting they had been receiving from Libya that night. In addition, the Islamist group was now threatening to strike the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli, as well. The cable made no mention of an Internet video or a protest and was widely distributed throughout the government, including the White House, the CIA, the Pentagon, the FBI, as well as to top executives at the Department of State.

The next day, September 12, Acting Assistant Secretary of State Beth Jones, the top career diplomat for the region, sent an email to Hillary Clinton’s spokesperson, Victoria Nuland, and to the top leadership at the State Department, to relay what she had learned about the perpetrators.

“I spoke to the Libyan Ambassador and emphasized the importance of Libyan leaders continuing to make strong statements. When he said his government suspected that former Qadhafi regime elements carried out the attacks, I told him that the group that conducted the attacks, Ansar al-Sharia, is affiliated with Islamic terrorists.” This was one of many documents the State Department refused to release. The only reason it has come to light is thanks to Representative James Lankford, who read excerpts from the still-classified cable in an exchange with Greg Hicks during the May 8, 2013, House Oversight Committee hearing.

The CIA was warning in the days just before the attacks that they were picking up “a lot of chatter” among known al Qaeda operatives in Benghazi that suggested they were getting ready to attack the Special Mission Compound. “We learned that the CIA informed their folks at the Annex, hey, there’s been a lot of chatter, we want you on high alert,” said Representative Lynn Westmoreland, who interviewed the five surviving GRS operators based at the Annex. “They even invited the RSOs to spend the night [of 9/11] with them at the Annex.”

Fox News intelligence correspondent Catherine Herridge added that the CIA had actually “posted a notice” at the Annex telling everyone to be on high alert on the 9/11 anniversary, because of the likelihood of attacks on Western targets. “So when [the GRS operator] saw Ambassador Stevens show up in Benghazi on September 10 with essentially no additional security, they testified that they figured there must have been some reason, something important that brought him to Benghazi at that time.”
5

The day after the attacks, the CIA chief of base in Benghazi reported to Washington that they had intercepted communications during the attacks showing that the attack was carried out by known terrorist elements. That, too, was swept aside in crafting the talking points.
6

The evidence showing that Benghazi was a coordinated, well-planned terrorist attack was extensive, multisourced, and undisputed at the State Department and within the intelligence community. That made fabricating the story of the protest-turned-violent all the more brazen. It was a complete and utter invention that Hillary and Obama concocted during their ten o’clock phone call on the night of the attack.

Because it was a lie, it needed to be covered up.

SPIN DOCTOR

Jay Carney was a former
Time
reporter who got promoted for bashing George W. Bush. I met him briefly while working out of the
Time
Washington, D.C., bureau at the beginning of the Clinton administration. He was a political animal already, working the White House press beat. I can’t remember a word of criticism for the Clinton White House ever passing his lips at the weekly editorial meetings I attended. He was a creature of Washington, loyal to his masters, whether he was wearing his media hat, or later, his hat as spokesman for President Obama.

The record shows that Carney played a key role in putting out the cover story that the Benghazi attack had begun as a demonstration over an Internet video, which got out of hand and degenerated into a riot.

In fact, Carney put out that story several times before the much-scrutinized CIA talking points eventually provided to then–U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations, Susan Rice, for use in the Sunday TV talk shows the first weekend after the attack.

On September 12, 2012, just as the bodies evacuated from Benghazi were arriving at a U.S. air base in Germany, Carney held his “gaggle” with reporters on board Air Force One en route to Las Vegas. The death of four Americans serving their country overseas in a terrorist attack clearly was not a sufficient reason to cancel the president’s long-scheduled fund-raiser.

He revealed that Obama had sat down earlier in the day with CBS
60 Minutes
reporter Steve Kroft and talked at length about the Internet video as it related to the attack on the embassy in Cairo. In a highly unusual move, Carney read from a White House transcript of the interview, which wouldn’t air for several weeks. In it, Obama lashed out at his political opponent. “There are times when we set politics aside, and one of those is when we’ve got a direct threat to American personnel who are overseas.” He went on to accuse Romney of getting his facts wrong. “Governor Romney seems to have a tendency to shoot first and aim later,” Obama said.
7

But Obama was talking about the attack on the U.S. Embassy
in Cairo
, not the Benghazi attacks. He blasted Romney’s condemnation of the statement put out by the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, which apologized for “the ongoing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims,” a reference to the Internet video. Romney thought that was a bit rich. “It’s disgraceful that the Obama administration’s first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks,” Romney said.
8

The White House was carefully baiting the trap, and Romney fell right in.

The
Washington Post
awarded the Republican nominee “three Pinocchios” for “misplaced” comments about the attacks, and the rest of the media piled on.
9

At his briefing on September 14, Carney felt the wind at his back. Asked what happened in Benghazi, he said unequivocally, “We have no information to suggest that it was a preplanned attack. The unrest we’ve seen around the region has been in reaction to a video that Muslims, many Muslims find offensive. And while the violence is reprehensible and unjustified, it is not a reaction to the 9/11 anniversary that we know of, or to U.S. policy.”

ABC News reporter Jake Tapper wasn’t buying it.

TAPPER:
But the group around the Benghazi post was well armed. It was a well-coordinated attack. Do you think it was a spontaneous protest against a movie?

MR. CARNEY:
Look, this is obviously under investigation, and I don’t have—

TAPPER:
But your operating assumption is that that was in response to the video, in Benghazi? I just want to clear that up. That’s the framework? That’s the operating assumption?

MR. CARNEY:
Look, it’s not an assumption—

TAPPER:
Because there are administration officials who don’t—who dispute that, who say that it looks like this was something other than a protest.

MR. CARNEY:
I think there has been news reports on this, Jake, even in the press, which some of it has been speculative. What I’m telling you is this is under investigation.
The unrest around the region has been in response to this video
. [Author’s emphasis added.] We do not, at this moment, have information to suggest or to tell you that would indicate that any of this unrest was preplanned.
10

THE TALKING POINTS

Carney began his White House press briefing that morning at 11:42, as the CIA was still drafting the talking points. The whole idea of releasing unclassified talking points on the attacks came out of a coffee that morning between CIA Director David H. Petraeus and Representative Dutch Ruppersberger, the ranking Democrat on the House Permanent Select Intelligence Committee.

The CIA’s Near East Division and the Office of Terrorism Analysis (OTA) conducted a “FLASH coordination” of the talking points over lunch. One concern, of course, was that information they released could impact future prosecutions, so they gave the talking points a legal read and found that only the first point posed a potential problem, because CIA reporting showed that it simply wasn’t true. Here’s how it read in this early version:

We believe based on currently available information that the attacks in Benghazi were spontaneously inspired by the protests at the US Embassy in Cairo and evolved into a direct assault against the US Consulate and subsequently its annex. This assessment may change as additional information is collected and analyzed. . . .

The CIA felt they should add a line on the warning they had sent to the U.S. Embassy in Cairo about the call for protests by a Salafist group, to provide “some insulation” to the lie about Benghazi. Other bullet points mentioned that Ansar al-Sharia initially had claimed responsibility for the attacks, and that the agency had been reporting regularly on “the threat of extremists linked to al-Qaeda in Benghazi and eastern Libya.” They also noted that the “wide availability of weapons and experienced fighters in Libya almost certainly contributed to the lethality of the attacks.”