13 Hours: The Inside Account of What Really Happened in Benghazi Page 7

  In addition to the seven Americans, also on the Special Mission Compound were three members of the 17 February militia who lived in the guesthouse/barracks near the front gate. A fourth militiaman who normally lived among them had been absent for several days, citing a family illness. The guards’ trustworthiness was suspect, at best. During the months prior to the ambassador’s visit, a US government review revealed, the Compound “had been vandalized and attacked… by some of the same guards who were there to protect it.”

  In addition, on-site was a rotating cast of unarmed Libyan guards supplied under the contract with Blue Mountain. Five were on hand at any given time, working on-and-off eight-hour, around-the-clock shifts. They opened and closed the gates, operated the metal detector, and checked bags at the entrance gate. Their most important role was to patrol the grounds, to provide early warning in the event of an attack.

  Upon Stevens’s arrival at the Compound, the resident DS agents showed him the improvements and security enhancements at Villa C since he’d last been there nine months earlier as Special Envoy. The tour by Stevens’s personal security escort, DS agent Scott Wickland, also gave the ambassador a chance to reacquaint himself with the layout of his temporary home in Benghazi.

  The main area of the spacious villa had an open floor plan of perhaps two thousand square feet. Beyond the entrance foyer were a modern kitchen and formal dining room to the left, a large entertaining or living room in the center, and a breakfast nook area toward the right. The well-appointed residence was decorated in a modern, if stodgy, Middle Eastern style, with cushy upholstered chairs and couches, and thick Persian rugs spread out on sparkling beige-and-black marble floors. Oil paintings and ornate sconces graced the walls, and fancy crystal chandeliers hung from the ceiling. Heavy, walnut-colored drapes framed the windows, complementing polished dark-wood tables and other expensive furnishings. Out back was a swimming pool and a cabana, remnants of the Compound’s former incarnation as an upscale home.

  Ultimately Wickland led Stevens to the most important part of the villa: the safe-haven area. While there, the DS agent instructed the ambassador how to unlock and open the emergency escape windows in his bedroom.

  Afterward, the DS agents drove Stevens the short distance to the CIA Annex, where everyone on the property crowded into Building D’s living room to meet the ambassador. Stevens launched into a standard talk about the political and security status in Libya, the progress being made, and the challenges ahead. Jack and several other GRS operators said hello to the ambassador then zoned out. They found him affable and approachable, friendlier than many of the stiff diplomats and government officials they’d encountered. But they didn’t need to be told how unstable Benghazi was or to be reassured that the situation would eventually improve. When the meeting ended, Stevens and the DS agents returned to the diplomatic Compound.

  At that moment, Benghazi was home to nearly thirty Americans in official capacities: seven at the Special Mission Compound and the rest at the CIA Annex.

  That night, Stevens was scheduled to meet with Benghazi’s mayor and city council at the El Fadeel Hotel. The meeting was supposed to be private, but council members were so excited by Stevens’s presence that they alerted local reporters. That multiplied the security threat exponentially. One of the DS agents protecting Stevens called the Annex for backup, telling the operators that the DS didn’t have enough agents on hand to protect Stevens at such a high-profile public event.

  The need for added security from the Annex operators was especially acute. At the time of Stevens’s visit, the 17 February militiamen at the Compound were staging a partial work stoppage. The disgruntled militiamen had refused to accompany the American diplomats’ vehicle movements through the city, to protest low pay and long working hours. Nevertheless, US officials still officially considered the 17 February Martyrs Brigade to be a Quick Reaction Force in the event of an attack on the Compound. A memo dated one day before the ambassador arrived in Benghazi outlined the understanding between the US diplomatic post and the militia. “In the event of an attack on the US Mission,” according to the document, obtained later by The Washington Post, the Americans “will request additional support from the 17th February Martyrs Brigade.” The document said the militiamen would be paid the Libyan equivalent of about twenty-eight dollars per day, and militia fighters would provide their own weapons and ammunition.

  With the militiamen refusing to protect the ambassador as he moved through Benghazi, Rone and Jack volunteered to accompany Stevens to the September 10 hotel meeting. Their only condition was that they’d act as a shadow security detail, out of sight of reporters and cameramen. Even if they weren’t publicly identified as CIA contract operators, a photo of them in a local newspaper would potentially make them targets afterward.

  It occurred to Jack that if al-Qaeda sympathizers or a radical Islamist militia wanted to kill the ambassador, neither he nor Rone would make much difference. It wouldn’t be a gunfight, Jack thought, but a massive explosion that would take out the El Fadeel Hotel and everything else within a half-block radius. But Jack’s fears proved unwarranted, and the event went smoothly.

  Afterward, Stevens ate dinner with a prominent hotelier and caterer named Adel Jalu. Then the ambassador and his protectors returned safely to their respective lodgings in the Compound and the Annex.

  Before turning in, Stevens jotted a few notes in his diary, excerpts of which were later published by the special-operator website SOFREP.com. In his lefty scrawl, Stevens wrote: “Back in Benghazi after 9 months. It’s a grand feeling, given all the memories.” Of the officials he met at the El Fadeel, Stevens wrote: “They’re an impressive and sincere group of professionals—proud of their service on committees, all working as volunteers.… There was a little sourness about why it had taken so long to get to Benghazi, and about ambassadors who came to talk but didn’t do anything to follow up. But overall it was a positive meeting.”

  Stevens also noted an exchange of “heated words” between his dinner companion Adel Jalu and the ambassador’s friend and translator, Bubaker Habib, director of the English Language Skills Center in Benghazi. The subject of the dispute was the Muslim Brotherhood, the political organization determined to see Arab states ruled by strict Islamic law, or Sharia. Stevens didn’t tell his diary where he stood on the matter during the dinner debate.

  Late that same night, September 10, 2012, Jack and Rone sat together in the living room of the Annex’s Building D, watching the spears-and-sandals movie 300 on a big-screen TV. The GRS operators enjoyed repeated showings of the blood-soaked story of fearless King Leonidas and his tiny force of Spartan soldiers, outnumbered ten thousand to one by the Persian army at Thermopylae in 480 BC.

  Jack noticed the sculpted beard sported by the actor Gerard Butler, who played the warrior king: closely cropped on the sides, long and full at the chin. He looked at Rone, then at the screen, then back at Rone.

  “You’re trying to grow the 300 beard, aren’t you?” Jack asked.

  Rone kept his eyes on the screen but smiled broadly: “Yup.”

  FOUR

  September 11, 2012

  IN THE FIRST HOURS OF TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2012, Benghazi stirred from sleep as the muezzins’ call to the Fajr prayer echoed across the ancient city. “Allahu Akbar! [God is Supreme!],” they proclaimed. “Ashadu anna Muhammadan Rasool Allah!… Hayya ‘ala-s-Salah! [I bear witness that Muhammad is the messenger of God!… Come to prayer!]” The first of five daily devotions by pious Muslims resounded then faded. Soon after, the sun edged over the horizon. Minutes later, at 6:43 a.m., three men in a car with Libyan police markings slowed to a stop on the gravel street on the north side of the US diplomatic Compound.

  One man, dressed in a police uniform, climbed to the second floor of a half-finished building next door to the Venezia restaurant that overlooked the Compound. His uniform bore the insignia of the Libyan Supreme Security Council, known as the SSC, a coalition of militias that organized a r
udimentary police force for the rough city. The other two men waited inside the idling car. The car displayed SSC emblems, in the red, black, and green colors of the Libyan rebel movement.

  The elevated vantage point of the construction site gave the uniformed man a clear view over the wall and into the Compound. He could see the buildings and fortifications, including Château Christophe, the villa where Ambassador Chris Stevens slept. The man also could see a flagpole where the American flag would fly throughout the day at half-staff, to honor the eleventh anniversary of 9/11. The man recorded what he saw with a cell phone camera.

  In the days before the ambassador’s visit, DS agents had asked that a marked SSC car be posted outside the Compound around the clock when Stevens was on the property. Normally, when they arrived at the Compound, SSC officers would check in with the locally hired guards. Yet neither the Libyan guards nor the American DS agents had been told that anyone from the SSC would be visiting the Compound that morning, much less surreptitiously taking photographs of the layout.

  Operators have two words to describe unknown persons photographing secure locations without warning or permission: “surveillance,” to gain information, and “reconnaissance,” to gain tactical advantage. Surveillance of an American diplomatic site was worrisome, to be answered at a minimum by countersurveillance to determine the observer’s identity and intent. Reconnaissance was worse, as it anticipated offensive military or militant action.

  A Blue Mountain Libya guard working the early shift spotted the photographer and went outside the Compound gate to speak with him. Confronted by the unarmed guard, the man in the SSC uniform denied wrongdoing, returned to the car, and left with his two companions and his photographs.

  Even before the suspicious photographer showed up, Stevens had intended to spend the day inside the Compound walls, to avoid making himself a tempting target to anyone with al-Qaeda sympathies or other anti-American sentiments on the anniversary of 9/11. The ambassador’s agenda included discussions at Villa C with a local appellate court judge; the owner of a shipping company whose brother had political aspirations; and a political analyst. His final scheduled meeting of the day would be with the Turkish consul general, Ali Akin, who had helped the Americans when Stevens first landed in Benghazi in April 2011.

  The Blue Mountain guard’s report about the photographer sent the American DS agents into high alert. Two agents asked the guard to show them where he saw the uniformed man, to determine what the photographer had been able to observe. A DS agent also informed officials at the CIA Annex of the suspicious incident, as part of their longstanding arrangement to share security information in the event that the GRS operators needed to be called in as a Quick Reaction Force.

  In addition, a DS agent spread word about the photographer among 17 February militia commanders presumed to be friendly to the Americans. The 17 February militia leaders told the DS agents that they would complain on the Americans’ behalf to the local office of the SSC.

  Separately, Stevens reviewed a draft of a complaint about the incident that he wanted delivered to local police authorities. “Early this morning,” read the draft, as reported by Foreign Policy magazine, “one of our diligent guards made a troubling report. Near our main gate, a member of the police force was seen in the upper level of a building across from our compound. It is reported that this person was photographing the inside of the US Special Mission.” Another complaint, intended for the Benghazi office of the Libyan Ministry of Foreign Affairs, began with a protest that requests for police protection at the Compound during Stevens’s visit had been ignored. “We were given assurances from the highest authorities in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that all due support would be provided for Ambassador Stevens’ visit to Benghazi. However, we are saddened to report that we have only received an occasional police presence at our main gate,” it read. “Many hours pass when we have no police support at all.”

  September 11 was a typical half day of work at Libyan government offices, where bureaucrats had perfected the art of late arrivals, long lunches, and early departures. By the time Stevens approved the final drafts, no Libyan officials were around to receive them. The complaints would have to wait at least another day.

  In late morning, Stevens sent cables to Washington that included a weekly report of security incidents. He described Libyans’ “growing frustration with police and security forces.” Previously, a local SSC official had acknowledged to Stevens that they were too weak to keep the country secure.

  Also on September 11, Stevens approved a cable, later reviewed by The Daily Beast, that raised the disturbing possibility that two leaders of ostensibly friendly Libyan militias in Benghazi had soured on the United States. The cable said the militia leaders believed that the United States was supporting one of their rivals in his bid to become the country’s first elected prime minister. If the rival leader won a vote scheduled for the following day, September 12, 2012, in the Libyan Parliament, Stevens wrote, the two disgruntled militia leaders warned that they “would not continue to guarantee security in Benghazi, a critical function they asserted they were currently providing.”

  Between sending cables, attending meetings, and doing paperwork, Stevens received an unsettling text message from Gregory Hicks, the Deputy Chief of Mission at the embassy in Tripoli, which made him Stevens’s second-in-command among US diplomats in Libya.

  “Chris,” Hicks wrote, “are you aware of what’s going on in Cairo?”

  Stevens responded that he wasn’t, so Hicks explained that protesters had stormed the US Embassy in the Egyptian capital. Stevens shared the news with a member of his security team and went on with his day.

  Separately, one of the DS agents in Benghazi, Alec Henderson, heard about the Cairo protests from a counterpart in Tripoli. From his post in the Compound, Henderson called the Annex to be sure that all the Americans in Benghazi were aware of the escalating unrest seven hundred miles away in Egypt.

  By all accounts, the Cairo demonstration was sparked by Egyptian media reports about an amateurish movie trailer posted on YouTube for an anti-Islamic film called Innocence of Muslims. The video, made by a Christian Egyptian-American with a history of bank fraud and multiple aliases, defamed the Prophet Muhammad by depicting him as a bloodthirsty, womanizing buffoon, a homosexual, and a child molester.

  Fueling the anger among Egyptian Muslims, erroneous reports suggested that the US government was somehow involved in producing the film. The US Embassy in Cairo might have unwittingly contributed to that impression by issuing a noontime statement awkwardly disavowing the video. As Gregory Hicks told Ambassador Stevens, the Egyptian protesters had scaled the embassy wall and burned the American flag. They replaced it with a black jihadist flag with white lettering in Arabic that read: “There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is His messenger.”

  September 11, 2012, began as a typical day for the GRS operators at the Annex. For the first move of the day, Tig accompanied Bob the base chief, his deputy, and a case officer to a 9:00 a.m. meeting with Libyan contacts at an office on the Fourth Ring Road, almost directly across from the back gate of the diplomatic Compound. While there, Tig heard Bob and the other staffers discussing how Libyan officials had asked about the location of the Annex. Afterward, Tig provided security as the CIA officers went to the Compound to inform the ambassador and the DS agents that the Libyans they’d met with had warned them about a threat to local government buildings that day. Tig listened as Stevens said he wasn’t concerned because he intended to remain inside the walls of the Compound, and because the threat apparently was made by one group of Libyans against another.

  After a breakfast of oatmeal and eggs, Oz ran into Rone outside Building A. They sat together enjoying coffee, conversation, and the warm morning breeze. Oz had been reading No Easy Day, a memoir by a former SEAL Team Six member about the raid to kill Osama bin Laden. For days he’d been needling Rone—“Hey, is writing books part of SEAL training?”—knowing that Rone had mixed f
eelings about a SEAL discussing his work.

  “I finished that book,” Oz said. “You can have it now—I know you’re wanting to read it.”

  “Yeah, fuck you,” Rone answered, returning to his coffee.

  Oz had a light daytime schedule of Call of Duty games, a workout, a nap, an afternoon snack, and a shower. At night he was scheduled to escort a female case officer to a dinner with a prosperous Libyan businessman and his wife. Oz and the case officer, who had grown friendly with the Libyan couple through work contacts, left the Annex around 6:00 p.m. They stopped at an Internet café for coffee, then drove by the beach on their way to their hosts’ upscale home. During the drive, the case officer idly wondered whether the Annex needed quite so many security officers and GRS operators. Oz assured her that they needed every last one. As sunset approached shortly before 7:00 p.m., nothing seemed out of the ordinary. The evening was clear and Benghazi was its usual bustling, boisterous self.

  Oz, the case officer, and the Libyan couple sat down over a traditional North African meal of lamb kebab, dates, and dessert pastries made from delicate layers of phyllo dough with pistachios and honey. They talked about politics and life in their respective countries. After dinner, the hosts poured tea and brought out a hookah pipe, but it was missing the upper bowl that holds the tobacco. Using his combat knife, Oz hollowed out a pear and fashioned it into an improvised hookah bowl. Their host admired his skill and his knife, so Oz surprised him by making it a gift.

  During late afternoon, Tig and Rone began looking ahead to the next morning, when they were scheduled to protect the ambassador during a planned visit to the offices of the Benghazi-based Arabian Gulf Oil Company. The DS agents at the Compound were unfamiliar with the oil company’s neighborhood, as they normally relied on a local driver to get them around. But Tig and Rone knew the area well, so they agreed to serve as the advance team.