13 Hours: The Inside Account of What Really Happened in Benghazi Read online

  Jack, Rone, and scores of other former special operators balanced the risk and rewards, then chose to join the GRS. Among them was another of Jack’s close friends in the SEALs, a high-spirited, fun-loving operator named Glen “Bub” Doherty. Jack and Glen had become SEALs the same year, and now Glen also was a contractor for the GRS in Libya, working in Tripoli. Not surprisingly in the tight-knit world of former SEALs, Glen and Rone had also become friends.

  More than fifteen years after Jack became a SEAL, he remembered a warning from one of their instructors: “Look around the room. In twenty years, half of you guys will be gone. Guys sitting next to you are going to be killed in training accidents or in combat or whatever.” The longer he remained an operator for hire, Jack knew, the more likely that prediction would come true. Maybe for himself, maybe for Glen or Rone, or maybe for them all.

  At the dawn of the Libyan revolution, Benghazans expressed thanks to the Americans in their midst for the United States’ help in the fight against Gaddafi. In May 2011, The New York Times published a story that described how cab drivers, translators, and cafés refused payment from Americans. Benghazi youths waved the American flag alongside rebel banners. Some parents of newborn girls reportedly named their children Susan, in honor of Susan Rice, the Obama administration’s ambassador to the United Nations, for her support of a no-fly zone that grounded Gaddafi’s warplanes.

  “Americans and, for that matter, all Westerners are treated hereabouts with a warmth and gratitude rarely seen in any Muslim country… in probably half a century or more,” the Times story gushed. “People smile and go out of their way to say hello to them, and are almost shockingly courteous.”

  But the cheerful story ended on a discordant note. The last paragraph described a bullet whizzing over the head of a foreign jogger, presumably the reporter: “The sound of the rifle’s report came a second later, as it would with a high-velocity round. Whoever fired it was not about to show himself, at least not yet.” It foreshadowed what lay ahead.

  Little more than a year later, the Benghazi through which Rone and Jack drove in the pickup wasn’t waving American flags or offering them free meals.

  After Gaddafi was dragged from a drainage ditch, sodomized, and killed by rebel fighters in October 2011, heavily armed militias that toppled the regime sought to expand their roles in a postrevolutionary Libya. With the approval of Libya’s weak transitional government, and in the absence of a strong military or police force, local militias shifted from revolutionary fighters to national guardsmen, ostensibly to prevent Benghazi from spiraling into chaos.

  Some militias remained outwardly grateful to America. Members of one militia, the large and well-armed 17 February Martyrs Brigade, were hired to provide security and act as a Libyan “Quick Reaction Force” to protect the US State Department’s Special Mission Compound in Benghazi. Financed by the Libyan Defense Ministry, the 17 February militia had established bases and training facilities, assembled an arsenal of light and heavy weapons, and enrolled as many as thirty-five hundred members organized into battalions.

  The United States’ relationship with and reliance on the 17 February militia was a classic example of how the quirks of Benghazi led to strange bedfellows. The militia took its name from an incident on February 17, 2006, during which Libyan security forces killed roughly a dozen people during a violent protest at the Italian consulate in Benghazi. The protesters, who set fire to the consulate building and several cars, were enraged by an Italian government minister who wore a T-shirt displaying controversial cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad. The militia’s name also referenced February 17, 2011, the start of the revolution to overthrow Gaddafi.

  Questions lingered about how much the United States’ diplomatic corps could trust the 17 February militia, at least some of whose members were suspected of fierce anti-American sentiments. No such questions existed when it came to several other Benghazi militias, which were outright enemies of the United States.

  The city harbored at least two hard-line Islamist militias, aligned ideologically with al-Qaeda, that openly despised America and the West. One virulent anti-American militia was called the Ansar al-Sharia Brigade, whose name meant “Partisans of Islamic Law” and whose members believed that democracy is un-Islamic and that all authority is derived from the Prophet Muhammad.

  Some members of Benghazi’s radical Islamist militias had fought against American troops in Iraq after the US invasion in 2003. Not only were these jihadis-turned-militiamen highly motivated to kill Americans, they had the means to do so: After Gaddafi fell, Benghazi was awash in weapons left over from the revolution.

  Personal ownership of firearms had been outlawed since Libya gained independence. But when Gaddafi’s soldiers were driven from the city, rebel fighters raided the armories where the regime had stockpiled thousands of AK-47s and more powerful weapons. After the revolution, anyone who didn’t already have a gun could simply shop for one at a large outdoor market called al-Funduq. Beyond flea market fare, past food stalls with eggs, spices, and poultry, arms merchants threw open their car trunks to display pistols, assault rifles, grenades, mortars, rocket launchers, and heavy machine guns ready to be mounted on pickup trucks. The result of the free flow of guns could be seen on the blood-soaked gurneys of Benghazi’s only hospital equipped for major surgery: 1,761 gunshot wounds in 2011, up from an average of 41 during the previous two years.

  The abundance of weapons, the absence of a working Libyan government, and lingering anti-Western sentiments among certain militias led to increasingly brazen incidents during the spring and summer of 2012. On April 2, a British armored diplomatic vehicle was attacked after driving into a local protest. On April 6, a homemade bomb was thrown over a wall of the US Special Mission Compound. Four days later, another homemade bomb was lobbed at the motorcade of Ian Martin, the UN Special Envoy to Libya. In May, a rocket-propelled grenade struck the Benghazi offices of the International Committee of the Red Cross. A previously unknown organization, the Omar Abdul Rahman group, claimed responsibility and issued a threat against the United States on social media sites.

  The attacks escalated on June 6, when an improvised explosive device blew a hole in the wall around the US diplomatic Compound. No one was injured, but the vulnerability of the Compound property was evident. A pro-al-Qaeda group took credit, calling it retaliation for the death of al-Qaeda commander Abu Yahya al-Libi, a native of eastern Libya killed in a drone strike in Pakistan. Five days later, on June 11, 2012, attackers fired a rocket-propelled grenade at a car carrying Sir Dominic Asquith, the British ambassador to Libya, as it drove through Benghazi. Asquith was unhurt, but two members of his security team were injured. The attack took place a half mile from the US diplomatic Compound. American operators responded and brought their injured British cohorts to the hospital. The next day, the UK closed its Benghazi consulate and evacuated its staffers.

  A US government review of events in Benghazi during the spring and summer of 2012 found “a general backdrop of political violence, assassinations targeting former regime officials, lawlessness, and an overarching absence of central government authority in eastern Libya.”

  On June 25, America’s ambassador to Libya, J. Christopher Stevens, sent a cable to Washington quoting local sources who said “Islamic extremism” appeared to be rising in eastern Libya, and that al-Qaeda’s black-and-white flag “has been spotted several times flying over government buildings and training facilities.”

  On August 2, even as Jack was en route to join the GRS team in Benghazi, Stevens sent another cable to Washington seeking more bodyguards. The ambassador warned that “the security condition in Libya… [is] unpredictable, volatile and violent.”

  Two years before meeting at the Benghazi airport, Jack and Rone unexpectedly ran into each other in the lobby of an East Coast hotel. Both had signed up to undergo screening and training to become GRS operators. By coincidence, their friend and fellow former SEAL Glen “Bub” Doherty was there, too.r />
  Several times since entering the GRS, Rone and Jack had been assigned to the same hazardous places. Rone usually landed first, then cryptically told Jack via e-mail what to bring and what to expect. That was the case in Benghazi, where Rone had arrived a month earlier on his second trip to the city. Jack felt like a new kid in school with a savvy older buddy waiting to show him around. But that would soon change. Rone told Jack that the summer in Benghazi would be his last job for the GRS. His contract was set to expire in early September, and he wanted to spend more time with his wife and to help raise their infant son.

  As Rone drove from the airport and Jack scanned their surroundings, they steeled themselves for what lay ahead. The airport was outside the city, thirteen miles east of downtown Benghazi. Rone plotted an indirect course with twists and turns to make sure they weren’t being followed.

  Before flying to Benghazi, Jack had used Google Earth maps to learn the basic layout. His map study showed a city roughly the size of Atlanta, designed like one half of a target, with the port as its bull’s-eye. Radiating outward from the port were five curved, half-moon-shaped ring roads, named First Ring Road through Fifth Ring Road. Straight roads that moved traffic closer or farther from the port intersected the ring roads. From the air, Benghazi looked like a spider’s web.

  Minutes into the drive, Rone and Jack came upon a checkpoint, little more than a bullet-pocked cement building that straddled the road’s median. Rone slowed to a stop as two young men approached the pickup carrying AK-47s and dressed in a mix of ragged military uniforms and civilian clothes. Off to one side, another young Libyan man stood in the bed of an improvised military vehicle known as a “Technical”: a pickup truck with a mounted heavy machine gun in back.

  Rone had good reason to be cautious. Several weeks earlier, he and another GRS operator were driving from the airport with a truckload of supplies when members of a radical Islamist militia stopped them at gunpoint. Rone and the other operator believed that their antagonists were from the extremist Ansar al-Sharia Brigade. The heavily armed militiamen told Rone that the supplies now belonged to them.

  Rone and the other GRS operator raised their assault rifles and declined the offer to be robbed. Rone radioed for backup from his fellow GRS operators still at the Annex. But the CIA’s top officer in Benghazi, a man known publicly only as “Bob,” instead promised that he’d alert the 17 February Martyrs Brigade and have the ostensibly friendly militia serve as a Quick Reaction Force.

  Hearing Rone’s call for help, other GRS operators at the Annex had grabbed guns and gear and rushed to an armored car. But Bob, the CIA base chief, ordered them to stay put. After fifteen tense minutes, during which several GRS operators argued with Bob, Rone radioed that he’d talked his way out of the standoff without firing a shot. Had it escalated, the outnumbered and outgunned Americans would have stood little chance. No “friendly” 17 February militiamen ever arrived to help.

  Weeks later, the GRS operators were still fuming. Festering tensions with the CIA’s Benghazi chief became an ongoing issue. Some of the more vocal operators wrote Bob off as spineless, or as one put it, “a chickenshit careerist” focused on retirement and a cushy government pension. Another possibility was that Bob’s primary concern was not blowing the CIA’s cover, even if it meant leaving the operators to fend for themselves.

  When Rone and Jack were stopped on the drive from the airport, Rone knew that they’d encountered a relatively benign, quasi-official checkpoint. Rone calmly held up a document that identified him as a US government employee. The young men scanned it and waved them on. Rone told Jack about the gunpoint confrontation the previous month, warning him about makeshift roadblocks that militia groups threw up unexpectedly. Some GRS operators called the rogue militias “gangs with guns,” filled with twitchy young men amped up from chewing leaves of khat. If Rone and Jack crossed paths with those militiamen, they’d likely need to fight, flee, or both.

  Driving west along barren stretches of the highway that Rone called “Airport Road,” Jack saw undernourished horses scrounging for garbage, scraggly sheep, and walls marked with Arabic graffiti. As they approached more densely populated areas, the landscape shifted to ramshackle strip malls with Internet cafés, hookah shops, and fabric stores, flanked by roadside stands where vendors hawked tomatoes and melons. No rain falls in Benghazi from June through August, so desert dust covered everything from the cars to the stores to the people in the streets.

  Most of the men Jack and Rone passed wore Western clothing, though some dressed in loose-fitting cotton clothes the operators called “man jammies.” Women were scarce in the streets, and the few Jack spotted wore black abayas and hijabs, the traditional Muslim cloaks and veils. Children and feral cats roamed unpaved alleys off the main streets, and Jack saw boys five to seven years old playing with a discarded tire. Jack and Rone talked about bringing their sons to a Third World country, to show them how fortunate they were.

  As Rone continued his circuitous drive, Jack noticed Benghazi’s most common architectural style: the unfinished, scaffold-wrapped concrete building. He smelled diesel fuel, roasting meat, rotting fruit, and cutting through it all, urine and feces. The city of more than seven hundred thousand residents had one badly outmatched sewage treatment plant. Waste flowed into the streets, the ground, and the 23 July Lake, a lagoon between downtown and the port where families picnicked.

  As Jack’s tour continued, he learned that the city’s infrastructure was broken or nonexistent. Electricity went on and off at random. Dry fields featured bumper crops of plastic bags. If motor vehicle laws existed, no one seemed to know or care. Every other car seemed to have broken brake lights. Traffic routinely choked up at even minor intersections. Technicals were more common than police cars. Jack saw a burning car on a side street but not a person in sight, only a pack of wild dogs foraging for food.

  Yet beyond the filth and chaos were touches of natural beauty, from green mountains beyond the city limits, to soaring palm trees at the edge of white sand beaches, to the sparkling blue Mediterranean. If the breeze was right, fresh salt air cut through the city’s stink. Grapevines and guava trees graced stately old homes. Impressive ruins from past civilizations dotted the region. Dreamers who squinted and held their noses imagined that Benghazi had the raw makings of a beach resort.

  Rone drove along the Fifth Ring Road at the outer reaches of the city to avoid temporary barricades and checkpoints. He cut across to the Fourth Ring Road, then wended his way to the Western Fwayhat neighborhood. The area was Benghazi’s best address, home to decent restaurants and pricey stores, where the remaining foreign envoys clustered in estates surrounded by walls of cinderblock, mud, and stone topped with razor wire and broken glass. Although the neighborhood was better than most, it was still Benghazi.

  As they approached the CIA Annex, Rone taught Jack the names that the GRS operators used for the local streets, like Racetrack, Gunfighter, and Adidas. Not far from their destination, Rone radioed the front gate so he and Jack wouldn’t be vulnerable while waiting for someone to let them in. Soon Jack would meet the other contract operators at the Annex, men he’d come to know as Tanto, Tig, D.B., and Oz, along with a CIA staffer who was the GRS Team Leader.

  In his radio call, Rone reported that he had minimal control of the pickup, meaning that he had left the vehicle for a period of time while at the airport. An agency staffer who oversaw Annex security would need to inspect under the hood, around the wheels, and everywhere else someone who hated Americans might have planted a bomb.

  Rone and Jack pulled up to a steel gate in a ten-foot-high concrete-and-brick wall. Security cameras looked down on them. Although it was supposed to be a secret location, or at least a discreet one, Jack immediately realized that they weren’t fooling anyone. Even a casual observer would have noticed the tight security, not to mention the carloads of Americans driving in and out, day and night.

  The gate to the CIA’s Benghazi Annex compound swung open. A guard raise
d a steel traffic arm and waved Rone and Jack inside.

  TWO

  The Annex

  RONE AND JACK PULLED INTO THE CIA ANNEX, A LUSH, walled oasis in the rough desert of Benghazi. Originally built by a wealthy Libyan hotel owner as a multifamily compound, the property was nearly square and covered more than two acres of land. Its generous size, perimeter walls, and multiple houses, but most of all its proximity to the State Department’s Special Mission Compound, made it an ideal base of operations for the US covert intelligence service. For a price, the hotel owner was happy to rent it to the Americans and move his family elsewhere.

  The Annex’s main features were a guard post, a gardener’s shack, and four comfortable one-story houses, each with about three thousand square feet of living space. Large, well-tended lawns stretched behind each house to the surrounding walls. The houses were repurposed as combination work and residential quarters for roughly twenty Americans on-site, including the Benghazi CIA base chief, Bob; his deputy; male and female case officers; analysts; translators; specialists; and GRS operators. A wide driveway cut diagonally through the Annex property. At its center was a small triangular courtyard where four turtles wandered in the shade of a picnic table.

  After the pickup was checked for explosives, Rone drove Jack to the farthest house from the gate, which the Americans called “Building C.” The Annex’s command center, Building C contained the most secure intelligence area, the Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF (pronounced skiff), accessible only through a heavy steel door with a cipher lock.

  Building C also housed a kitchen that had been transformed into a medical area, two bedrooms, and a room where Annex security staffers watched monitors from the video cameras mounted on the perimeter walls and throughout the property. As Jack and Rone walked through the building, Rone introduced Jack to the security team, an interpreter, several case officers, and CIA chief Bob.