13 Hours The Inside Account of What Really Happened In Benghazi (13 page)

Back at the Annex, at around 9:00 p.m., Tig left Rone and the GRS Team Leader in the Building C Team Room. He walked next door to the room he shared with Jack in Building D.

When Tig arrived, Jack was getting ready to hit the rack. They said goodnight then retreated to their separate sides of the heavy curtain they’d hung for privacy. Jack undressed and took out his contact lenses, placing them on a shelf for easy access. He carefully arranged clean clothes on a chair next to his bed and stuck his wallet, empty except for cash and a government ID, in a pocket of the pants he’d laid out. As always, he left his boxed wedding ring in a dresser, along with a mesh bag containing his credit cards, driver’s license, and other personal items. The valuables would remain tucked away for the duration of the trip. Jack placed his holstered pistol at the head of his bed, so he’d be armed for a fight at a moment’s notice.

Jack glanced over to an open gear locker. Like the other GRS operators, he’d arranged his assault rifle, body armor, and other gear close by in response to the intel cable about a possible attack on an American target. Jack slid his two-way radio into a charger on a nightstand next to his bed. All the operators kept the handheld radios within reach around the clock, so they’d be instantly available in case of emergency. His setup complete, Jack was living up to the title of “commando”: He sat naked on his bed, reading
e-mail on his laptop computer. He began to mentally compose a message to his wife.

Tanto had spent part of the day working on the computer mapping software, alerting Annex case officers to known terrorist locations in Benghazi and the city of Derna, some 150 miles to the east. As night fell, Tanto and D.B. were on call as the Quick Reaction Force. They relaxed with coffee as they watched the mythological action movie
Wrath of the Titans
. During a break, D.B. called home to his family. They returned to the movie as they waited for Oz and the case officer to return from dinner.

As the protests continued at the US Embassy in Cairo, media reports described turmoil spreading to other Muslim countries throughout the region. The GRS operators had been told about the events in Egypt, but they neither saw nor heard anything to suggest that anyone in Benghazi was upset about an offensive YouTube video clip from an anti-Muslim movie. From all appearances in the quiet neighborhood around the Compound and the Annex, September 11, 2012, would soon pass into history as an unremarkable day in Benghazi.

Over at the Compound, at 7:40 p.m., Stevens and one of the DS agents escorted Turkish Consul General Ali Akin outside the main gate. The sun had set nearly an hour earlier, so it was dark as they stepped into the empty gravel road. Stevens said goodbye to Akin, then returned to Villa C.

A half hour later, a British security team dropped off vehicles and communications equipment at the Compound, a routine arrangement following the closure of the British consulate three months earlier. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary when the ambassador went outside the gate with Akin, or when the British team left at around 8:30 p.m.

By 9:00 p.m., the seven Americans at the Compound were settling down for the night. Communications specialist Sean Smith was in his room in Villa C, where he’d been chatting online with a friend from EVE. Earlier in the evening, when the friend said that they’d be in contact again soon, Smith answered ruefully: “assuming we don’t die tonight. We saw one of our ‘police’ that guard the Compound taking pictures.”

Three DS agents sat together outside the villa, talking under the stars near the swimming pool. One was Scott Wickland, Stevens’s personal security escort. Also outside was Wickland’s fellow cheesy-mustache competitor, David Ubben. Relaxing with Wickland and Ubben was one of the two DS agents who’d accompanied Stevens from Tripoli. The other DS agent who’d traveled with Stevens sat on sentry duty inside Villa C, watching a video on the flat-screen television in the living room.

The fifth and highest-ranking DS agent in Benghazi, Alec Henderson, was in the building known as the Tactical Operations Center, the TOC. His shift was over, so normally the video security monitors inside the TOC would be unmanned, an established practice under which the Compound relied on the local guards to keep watch over the perimeter when no agents were on duty. The idea was that those unarmed Libyan guards would radio the DS agents if
trouble arose. But Henderson wanted to finish some paperwork, so he’d gone to the TOC before turning in.

All five DS agents carried only their pistols, as usual when they were within the Compound walls. Their “kits” of body armor, helmet, radio, M4 assault rifle, other weapons, and ammunition were stashed in their individual bedrooms. Wickland’s and Henderson’s kits were in Villa C, Ubben’s was in the TOC, and the kits belonging to the two Tripoli agents were in the Cantina building, across from the TOC.

After bidding goodnight to the Turkish diplomat, Stevens retired to his room in the villa to unwind. A recent issue of
The New Yorker
magazine awaited him, but first he recorded his thoughts. “It is so nice to be back in Benghazi,” Stevens wrote in his diary on a page dated September 11, according to SOFREP.com. “Much stronger emotional connection to this place—the people but also the smaller-town feel & the moist air & green & spacious compound.”

Stevens briefly recounted the day’s meetings, then wrote a final, uneasy diary line for the day: “Never ending security threats…” The three dots of the ellipsis tailed off toward the edge of the page.

At 9:02 p.m., an unexpected vehicle drove down the gravel road outside the Compound: a Toyota pickup truck with SSC police insignia. The pickup parked outside the main C1 gate, but the men inside remained in their seats, never engaging with the Libyan guards or anyone else from the Compound. The SSC vehicle pulled away forty minutes after it arrived.

It’s possible that the vehicle’s brief presence came in response to the Americans’ request for around-the-clock SSC protection during the ambassador’s visit. Another possibility was more nefarious: Its movements were somehow connected to the mysterious photographer who’d arrived that morning in a vehicle with similar markings. Perhaps it had nothing to do with either. Or perhaps it was a signal. Almost the moment the SSC pickup pulled away from the Compound, shots and an explosion rang out.

Several dozen men, chanting in Arabic and firing AK-47s into the air, swarmed through the pedestrian entrance at the Compound’s main gate. Eventually their numbers swelled to more than sixty. Some were bearded, some were clean-shaven. Some wore black T-shirts and camouflage pants, some wore jeans and white or brightly colored shirts. Some wore tactical military-style vests. Some wore flowing “man jammies.” Some carried walkie-talkies. Some were young and lean, others were portly and middle-aged. A few hid their faces with scarves, but most didn’t. The attackers didn’t wear insignia, and none of the Americans saw where they’d assembled or knew exactly when they’d arrived outside the gate. One thing was certain: They displayed a common desire to terrorize Americans at the Special Mission Compound. Or worse.

Who opened the gate wasn’t clear, but responsibility for the entrance rested with the Blue Mountain Libya guards. By some accounts the armed invaders threatened the unarmed guards, who immediately acquiesced. A US government review raised the possibility that the “poorly skilled” local guards left the pedestrian gate open “after initially seeing the attackers and fleeing the vicinity.” No evidence has shown
that the Blue Mountain guards were in league with the attackers, but maybe they were incompetent. As the report noted, “They had left the gate unlatched before.” Further complicating matters, the camera monitor in the guard booth at the front gate was broken, and new surveillance cameras shipped to the Compound had yet to be installed.

When the attackers rushed in, the three armed 17 February militiamen and the five unarmed Blue Mountain Libya guards fled to points south and east inside the Compound. Relying on the Libyan guards to sound the alarm, alert the DS agents, and serve as a first line of defense had been a mistake, as they did none of those things before abandoning their posts. They scurried through the darkness in the direction of the Cantina and the TOC, where they knew they’d find the better trained and better armed DS agents. Some of the Libyans employed at the Compound apparently kept going, all the way to the back gate that led out to the Fourth Ring Road.

With the main gate open and the guards gone, the attackers met no resistance. They surged unchecked onto the manicured grounds. Almost immediately upon storming the Compound, the attackers had the property under their complete control without a single shot being fired in their direction.

From that point forward, their actions suggested a blend of tactical planning, perhaps based on reconnaissance, and opportunistic rampage. The attackers grabbed five-gallon fuel cans that were stored alongside new, uninstalled generators next to the 17 February barracks, just inside the main gate. They sloshed diesel fuel around the barracks building and on two vehicles parked nearby, then set them
ablaze. As orange flames and acrid black smoke shot into the night sky, the invaders rushed toward the heart of the Compound: Villa C.