13 Hours The Inside Account of What Really Happened In Benghazi (6 page)

BOOK: 13 Hours The Inside Account of What Really Happened In Benghazi
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The gate to the CIA’s Benghazi Annex compound swung open. A guard raised a steel traffic arm and waved Rone and Jack inside.

TWO

The Annex

R
ONE AND
J
ACK PULLED INTO THE
CIA A
NNEX, 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.

Also in Building C was the GRS Team Room, the operators’ Command Post, with a broken-in couch and a wall of wooden cubbies that looked like high school lockers without doors. The cubbies overflowed with the operators’ assault rifles, night-vision goggles, helmets, body armor, ammunition, and everything else they needed to keep other Americans safe. Some operators personalized their cubbies, hanging photos of their wives and children. Along another wall were desks with computers and a whiteboard that recorded the operators’ schedules for the week. A second whiteboard contained notices and classified intelligence updates.

Whenever a CIA case officer planned a meeting with a source to gather intelligence, he or she ideally gave the GRS operators at least a couple days’ warning, to plan for their safety. If they didn’t know the area well, the operators headed to their computers and used special mapping software developed for the military. Then, if time allowed, they’d get a feel for the place and familiarize themselves with the people who frequented it. But Rone told Jack that scenario was rare; the case officers in Benghazi seldom gave them much time, so he’d need to be ready to scramble at a moment’s notice. Everything in Benghazi was on a short fuse, Rone explained, making it difficult for the operators to feel comfortable about providing adequate security.

On the east side of Building C were generators and a swimming pool shaped like a shark’s tooth, with swampy,
greenish-brown water and a half dozen or so goldfish named for several of the operators. The operators built a filtration system, partly covered the pool with a wooden deck, and called it “the pond.”

At the back of Building C were glass doors that faced the Annex compound’s north wall. Beyond that wall was
an enormous stockyard with more than a dozen large, rectangular, tin-roofed sheds. Annex residents could hear sheep heading for slaughter bleating and whining inside. Rone told Jack that the operators called the area north and east of the Annex walls “Zombieland,” because it looked like the set of a movie about the undead. On the far side of the Annex’s east wall was an acre of scrub and trees, and beyond that stood a compound with a single-story home. To the south, across Annex Road, were other homes and a four-story concrete building under construction. Farther south, about a half mile away, was a dirt oval horse track. Every Thursday night was race night, featuring high-spirited Arabian stallions. To the west of the Annex was another walled compound, with a single large concrete home.

The diplomatic Special Mission Compound was located to the northwest of the Annex, across the Fourth Ring Road, only a half mile away as the crow flies and within ten minutes on foot.

The operators had embedded broken glass atop the Annex walls for added security, but the walls were no protection from the thick smell of manure and the swarms of flies drawn to the neighborhood by the stockyard, the racetrack, and the pond. Buzzing veils of insects made life miserable for the GRS operators. Flies landed on their sweaty faces and rattled in their ears when they lifted weights at a makeshift workout area they called their “prison gym,” located under a carport roof to the east of Building C.

Rone continued showing Jack around the property. Building A, closest to the front gate, housed four bedrooms and the main dining area, where an American chef prepared meals with the freshest local ingredients he could muster.
Chicken and rice were staples, but they sometimes feasted on thick steaks. The chef earned the GRS operators’ affection by keeping the refrigerator stocked with leftovers for nights when they returned late to the Annex. Building B, on the east side of the Annex, provided housing and work space, as did Building D, on the west side, where Rone led Jack with his bags.

Jack had three basic standards for a GRS workplace: good food, a good workout area, and his own room. Rone assured him that the food would be fine, but otherwise Benghazi was a bust. The workout area was a flyspecked mess, and Jack would be sharing a room. A heavy curtain strung down the middle provided a fig leaf of privacy. At least Jack would get along with his roommate, a GRS operator named John “Tig” Tiegen.

Tig was a laid-back thirty-six-year-old former Marine. He had brown hair, a close-cropped goatee, and a wary expression that he’d occasionally relax into a smile. He stood five foot eleven, weighed two hundred rock-solid pounds, wore wire-rimmed glasses, and sported a pair of dragon tattoos, one on each side of his chest. Tig grew up in Colorado in the sort of situation that typically leads nowhere or worse: a fractured family that included a father who disappeared before Tig’s third birthday. He developed an attitude toward school that ranged from clownish to bored, making it easy for teachers to ignore him, which was fine with Tig.

When Tig was an aimless high school freshman, he stopped by the home of a friend’s girlfriend one night when steaks were on the grill. “You want one?” the girl’s father asked. When Tig answered yes, the man said: “Go
mow the lawn.” The connection between hard work and reward, discipline and order, had never been part of his life. Earning the steak satisfied Tig in a way he couldn’t quite describe. He barely knew his friend’s girlfriend, but within a month he moved into a bedroom that her father built for him in the basement. With help from his surrogate father, Tig set himself on a new path. He enlisted in the Marines before his eighteenth birthday because it was the toughest place he could find to prove himself.

Tig left the Marines as a sergeant but didn’t want to stop doing military work, so in 2003 he signed up as a contract operator. After a year at the Army’s Camp Doha in Kuwait and some time back home, Tig joined the private military company Blackwater. Security stints followed in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq, where avoiding mortar fire became part of his daily routine. On paper Tig didn’t meet certain GRS operator qualifications, but his experience and persistence won him a shot at the screening program. He earned his way in. On his first trip to Benghazi, in February 2012, Tig returned home early when his wife, a former diesel mechanic in the US Army, gave birth two months prematurely to twins, a boy and a girl.

When Jack arrived, Tig was on his third stay in the Annex, which made him the most experienced GRS operator in Benghazi. Tig had a hard edge, and he wasn’t a big talker, but his fellow operators learned to appreciate his sardonic wit and his dark humor. One day he found a disabled flamethrower in Benghazi and used it to create a series of staged photos in which he looked like an action movie hero setting fires as he marched alone down an abandoned street. None of the other operators doubted that they could count on Tig if the action became real. Tig
considered loyalty to be his greatest strength but also his main weakness: “I’m loyal to people who’ve tried to screw me over.”

The operators were slaves to the assignments posted on the Team Room whiteboard, which was usually maintained by Rone, who was the highest-ranking contractor and the Assistant Team Leader. Endless tasks awaited Benghazi’s CIA case officers, from gathering intelligence throughout the restive city to developing local sources. Generally, they were engaged in highly classified activities typical of Western spies in unstable countries. Like all case officers in Muslim countries, one of their tasks was to constantly plumb the depths of al-Qaeda sympathy and affiliation.

BOOK: 13 Hours The Inside Account of What Really Happened In Benghazi
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