Dark Forces: The Truth About What Happened in Benghazi (39 page)

Those who remained embedded with the “kidnapped” Red Crescent workers—got the last laugh. They were miraculously released on October 6 in Benghazi and appeared for a group photo with the Libyan Red Crescent, then were put on a plane to Tripoli and flown back immediately from there to Tehran.

Home free. Mission accomplished. Americans gone.

16

AFTERMATH

The Benghazi attacks sent ripple effects all across the region.

Dedicated adversaries, such as the Islamic Republic of Iran, took their victory to the bank. They understood that America was weak and that they could confront us just about wherever and whenever they pleased, with nothing to fear. As I argued in a commentary the day after Benghazi, weakness invites attack. “The evil ones must understand that they cannot torture or murder Americans with impunity,” I wrote. “As long as they continue to perceive America as weak, you can be sure they will attack us again when it suits their interest.”
1

Supposed friends, such as the Muslim Brotherhood president of Egypt Mohamed Morsi, took advantage of the administration’s misguided support for Islamist regimes by assuming dictatorial powers and attempting to rapidly dismantle Egypt’s secular institutions. He, too, thought he could get away with murder.

Al Qaeda, fresh for another victory against America, was on the march and well-armed with weapons from Qaddafi’s stockpiles that the Americans had been unable or unwilling to prevent them from acquiring. One of the al Qaeda lieutenants who reportedly took part in the Benghazi attacks, Mokhtar bel Mokhtar, launched a sophisticated assault on the Amenas natural gas plant in Algeria four months later, taking Westerners hostage and blowing up parts of the facility. He was so well armed and well organized that it took several days for Algerian Special Forces troops to dislodge him. And, even then, he managed to escape.

In neighboring Mali, al Qaeda seized control of the northern half of the country and was threatening the capital, prompting a unilateral French military intervention that began on January 17, 2013. Later that week, the British government issued a warning to British citizens in Benghazi “to leave immediately” because of a “specific and imminent threat to Westerners.” Britain’s new ambassador to Libya, Michael Aron, told the
Daily Telegraph
that there was a “security vacuum” in Libya that al Qaeda was exploiting, especially in Benghazi and Derna, where they had set up training camps and operational cells.
2

Despite this evidence, which was well-known to U.S. officials at virtually all levels of the national security and policy establishment, the Obama administration continued to claim that it had defeated al Qaeda.

THE SUSPECTS

When this book goes to press, I intend to turn over to the FBI the information that I have gathered on the instrumental role played in the attacks by Quds Force officers and Khalil Harb, the top Hezbollah commander. I will describe to them the communications equipment used by the Quds Force, and how they intercepted VHF radios used by the CIA and by the Diplomatic Security personnel in Benghazi. And I will lay out what I have learned about the money trail from IRGC-controlled accounts, especially in Malaysia. A source involved in the investigation tells me that the FBI has none of this information at this point.

Information has come out, however, on several Libyan and Egyptian suspects who allegedly took part in the attacks. Some of these individuals were part of the core group recruited and paid by the Quds Force. Others were simply part of the pickup team that joined in during subsequent waves of the attack.

Hamouda Sufian bin Qumu, the former Guantánamo detainee befriended by Chris Stevens once he was transferred to a Libyan jail, was prime among the suspected organizers. He was the founder and commander of Ansar al-Sharia, the group that publicly claimed responsibility for the attacks. Fox News intelligence correspondent Catherine Herridge reported that her sources confirmed that bin Qumu was in Benghazi on the night of the attacks along with Mohammad Jamal al-Kashif. Both men were believed to have trained terrorists involved in the attack, and to have been in direct connect with al Qaeda senior leadership in Pakistan.
3

When Representative Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) asked Ambassador Tom Pickering at a House Oversight Committee hearing whether “a former GITMO detainee who knew Stevens claimed responsibility” for the attacks, he demurred. “I believe you’re getting into classified intelligence.” He was corrected by committee chair Darrell Issa. “That is not true. That is not classified. . . . They made a very public claim.” They were referring, of course, to Sufian bin Qumu of Ansar al-Sharia.
4

Mohammad Jamal was briefly detained by Egyptian authorities when Morsi was still president, but was eventually released. One year after the Benghazi attacks, the State Department designated Jamal and his network as an international terrorist organization, “citing letters he exchanged with al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri, where Jamal asked for money and explained the scope of his training camps, which included Libya and the Sinai.”
5

Mohammad Jamal al-Kashif and his henchman, a U.S.-trained former Egyptian army officer named Tarek Taha Abu al-Azm, would appear to be the linchpins connecting the pickup team involved in the second wave of attacks on the diplomatic compound, and the al Qaeda central leadership. The FBI certainly needs to be interrogating them, if they haven’t already.
6

Abdelhakim Belhaj, the LIFG founder and former commander of the Tripoli Military Council, was key in Islamizing the anti-Qaddafi insurrection. He was a founder of the 17th February Martyrs Brigade, which was supposed to be guarding the U.S. diplomatic compound. His statement about expelling the West from Libya, which I cited in the last chapter, speaks volumes.
7

One of his fellow LIFG members was arrested in Pakistan in March 2013 and deported to Libya. Faraj al-Shalabi (full name Faraj Husayn Hasan al-Shalabi al-Urfi) claimed he had been injured during the Benghazi attacks, but told his FBI interrogators he had nothing to do with the attacks.

“They said that I was a resident of the eastern region [of Libya] and the attack on the U.S. Consulate was carried out there,” he said in a published interview. “Moreover, because I was in Abu-Selim Prison, they thought that I knew some of them [people in photos], as some of the photos were of people that were believed to be prisoners in Abu-Selim Prison. I told them that I do not know any of them, because they were young, while the people who were with me in the prison were older.”

Shalabi was one of six people whose photograph was posted to the FBI website as a suspect in the attacks. Despite his strong al Qaeda pedigree—he fled to Tora Bora with Osama bin Laden in October 2001—he was released by the Libyan authorities on June 13, 2013, for lack of evidence.

Shalabi said that the FBI was confused in its questioning. “At times they say that it happened against the backdrop of a popular attack over the film that offends the prophet, peace be upon him, and at other times they say it was planned. If it was planned, they do not know who did it.”
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Another key suspect was Ahmed Abu Khattala, a top Ansar al-Sharia leader. A Libyan Interior Ministry official told Reuters in October 2012 that “a photograph was taken of Abu Khattala at the consulate at the time of the September attacks, but there was not enough evidence to arrest him.”

His name continued to appear in the Libyan and international media in connection with the attacks, and the FBI was seeking to interview him, but apparently couldn’t find him. The irony was that Abu Khattala was not hard to get: he spoke to just about every journalist in town, denying any involvement in the attacks. “I am in Benghazi, have a job and live my life normally. I have not been accused by any party with any allegations . . . I am not a fugitive or in hiding,” he told an Associated Press reporter.
9

Just one week before President Obama leaked that the Justice Department had identified suspects in a sealed indictment—including, apparently, Abu Khattala—CNN correspondent Arwa Damon met with the supposed fugitive Libyan for two hours at a Benghazi hotel. Abu Khattala’s involvement in the jihadi movement and his willingness to use brutal force were so notorious during the revolution that he became a thinly veiled character in French thriller writer Gerard de Villiers’s spy novel
Les Fous de Benghazi
.
10

U.S. influence in the region had fallen to such a low point that the government of Tunisia, which the Obama White House had helped come to power after Islamists ousted President Ben Ali from power, kept a team of FBI investigators on ice for five weeks waiting to interview a suspect. Ali Ani al-Harzi came to the attention of the FBI after he had posted a live update on the attacks on a social media site, and was seen as the first big break in the case. He initially fled to Turkey, was arrested, then was sent home to Tunisia, where officials shielded him from the FBI.
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“Keep in mind Tunisia is what they call a ‘Millennium Challenge country.’ Last year, we gave them $320 million in foreign aid,” said Representative Frank Wolf. It took reminders of that aid from Senator Lindsey Graham and others to the government of Tunisia to convince the Tunisians to invite the FBI team back in to interview the suspect in December 2012. “They had him for three hours, three hours,” then the Tunisians released him. “We can’t find him and you saw on YouTube them celebrating with him. Here was somebody that was directly involved,” Representative Wolf said.
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The same thing happened in Egypt. The authorities had arrested Mohammad Jamal, but they wouldn’t make him available to the FBI. Representative Wolf traveled to Cairo in February 2013 with a letter for then-president Morsi, asking him to make Jamal available. U.S. Ambassador Anne Patterson insisted that Wolf not give the letter to Morsi when the two were scheduled to meet. “She said she would get it to him. Whether it got to him or not, I’m not sure,” Wolf said.

Ambassador Patterson was so tight with President Morsi that in the massive popular demonstrations demanding his ouster in June 2013, Egyptians in Tahrir Square carried giant banners in English with the slogans: “Obama and Patterson support terrorism in Egypt,” and “Obama Supports Terrorism.” Others, using obscenities, called for her to be recalled by the United States.
13

“DR. MORSI SENT US”

There is an extensive body of evidence suggesting that Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood operatives close to President Morsi also took part in the Benghazi attacks.

A cellphone video from the night of the attacks captures two individuals, speaking a distinctly Egyptian dialect of Arabic, calling out urgently to militiamen attacking the diplomatic compound who have trained their guns on them. “Don’t shoot!” they shout. “Dr. Morsi sent us.”
14

My Iranian sources believed that Iranian intelligence may have engineered that cellphone video to frame Morsi and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood for the attack. This seemed possible after the public falling-out between Morsi and the Iranian leadership at the Non-Aligned Summit in Tehran on August 30, fewer than two weeks before the attacks. Morsi angrily denounced Iran’s chief ally in the region, President Assad, and said it was his “ethical duty” to support the Syrian opposition. That prompted a walkout by the Syrian delegation and much public indigestion in Tehran. Whether that flare-up was just a public display meant to mislead analysts is another possibility.
15

But there is much more.

An official letter purporting to summarize the early phase of the Libyan government investigation into the Benghazi attacks was leaked in late June 2013 to the Kuwaiti paper
Al Ra’i
. In a letter to Libya’s interior minister dated September 15, 2012, Mahmoud Ibrahim Sharif, director of national security in Libya, reported that his services had unearthed “an Egyptian [terror] cell” that had been involved in the planning and execution of the attack. “[C]onfessions derived from some of those arrested at the scene” led them to a neighborhood in Tripoli where they were able to arrest six members of Ansar al-Sharia, “all of them Egyptians.” Some of those arrested mentioned a direct connection to Egyptian president Morsi and to senior Muslim Brotherhood figures in Egypt.
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The Libyan authorities announced the first arrests just two days after the attack. But so far, the Libyan government has declined to confirm the authenticity of this document. One glaring contradiction leaps out: No one was arrested “at the scene” of the attacks, since the government in Tripoli had limited influence in Benghazi. Given that the document appeared just as a popular revolution, backed by the military, was brewing against Morsi in Egypt, could it have been produced by Egyptian intelligence? Raymond Ibrahim, Cynthia Farhat, and Walid Shoebat—all of whom are native Arabic speakers who focus on translating and analyzing public-source documents that have appeared in the Arabic media—all believe that it is authentic. The video and the intelligence document, taken together, “may just constitute a ‘smoking gun’ ” of Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood involvement, Shoebat wrote. Just days after it was leaked, two of the Egyptian Islamists mentioned in the purported Libyan document—Sheikh Hazim Abu Ismail and Safwat Hegazy—were arrested by the new government in Egypt.
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Ambassador Tom Pickering provided direct confirmation of the Muslim Brotherhood role in the Benghazi attacks during his congressional testimony, when prodded by Representative Cynthia Lummis. “Our report indicates that one Egyptian organization which is named in the report was possibly involved. I think that’s in the unclassified—I hope it is,” he said.

The only Egyptian group mentioned in the unclassified version of the ARB report was the Imprisoned Sheikh Omar Abdul-Rahman Brigades. Their alleged involvement in the attack has given rise to suggestions that they were hoping to kidnap Ambassador Stevens and exchange him for the Blind Sheikh. Walid Shoebat believes it more likely that Pickering was referring to the Mohammad Jamal network.
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(As I explain in the afterword, no hard evidence of a kidnapping plot has as yet come to light.)