Benghazi (8 page)

 

Appendix I: Bios of the Four American Heroes

CHRIS STEVENS was born and raised in Northern California. He earned his undergraduate degree at the University of California at Berkeley in 1982, a J.D. from the University of California's Hastings College of Law in 1989, and an M.S. from the National War College in 2010. He spoke Arabic and French. Prior to joining the Foreign Service in 1991, Ambassador Stevens was an international trade lawyer in Washington, DC. From 1983 to 1985, he taught English as a Peace Corps volunteer in Morocco. Stevens was a career member of the Senior Foreign Service. He arrived in Tripoli in May 2012 as the US Ambassador to Libya. Ambassador Stevens had served twice previously in the country—as Special Representative to the Libyan Transitional National Council from March 2011 to November 2011 during the Libyan revolution and as the Deputy Chief of Mission from 2007 to 2009.

SEAN SMITH grew up in San Diego, California. He graduated from Mission Bay High School in 1995, enlisted in the Air Force in July 1995, and served for six years, becoming a ground radio maintenance (2E) specialist. He was promoted to staff sergeant in August 2000. He completed his military service in 2002. As a Foreign Service employee, he lived in The Hague, Netherlands, with his wife, Heather, and children, Samantha and Nathan.

TYRONE (TY) WOODS led a distinguished Navy SEAL career for over 20 years. After retiring from the military, Ty continued to serve his country as an independent security contractor for the CIA. His work included multiple deployments to some of the most hostile parts of the world to protect US national interests.

GLEN DOHERTY served as a US Navy SEAL for nine years. He worked extensively as an independent security specialist throughout some of the most dangerous places on the planet, all in support of the freedoms we enjoy as Americans. Glen believed in working hard and playing harder; before giving up his life, he was frequently found skiing in Utah or surfing with friends at his home break in Encinitas, California.

 

Appendix II: A Brief History of Libya

T
HE HISTORY OF
Libya is a history of conflict with foreign invaders, from the ancient Greeks and conquering Islamic Ottomans to the first generation of American sailors and naval warfighters who battled the Barbary pirates. Libya also rests on a geographical plane where both trans-Saharan trade routes and various maritime endeavors intersect with each other, making the country a center of commerce and cross-cultural exchange throughout the centuries.

There was a time in Libya, perhaps witnessed by the Greeks upon their arrival, before desertification, when the country was largely green and flush with a complex system of irrigation canals. Giraffes and other exotic animals thrived in a Libya very different from the one we know today. As the Sahara desert began to dry out and expand, it acted as something of a filter for trade between North and Sub-Saharan Africa. In these early years of trans-Saharan commerce, caravans of camels traveling across the desert were known to number in the tens of thousands.

The Garamantes were the indigenous peoples who occupied present-day Libya as far back as 1,000
BCE
. An agrarian society, the Garamantes also worked as merchants and engaged in the salt trade with the ancient West African empires. Later, the Phoenicians extended their commercial trade network across North Africa, absorbing the three-city region called Tripolis on the Libyan coast from which the modern capital, Tripoli, draws its name. The ancient Greeks then created a colony in Libya, welcoming Alexander the Great in 331
BCE
.

As the Roman Empire was coming into the picture, multiple trade routes were emerging that crisscrossed the desert. Libya was thus linked to Sudan, and Algeria linked to the Niger River bend, via a Mauritanian corridor suitable for grazing in the months of October through May. A third major route came into existence, connecting Sudan with Egypt. A complex series of oases acted as waypoints through the desert as the caravans could go as long as eight to ten days without water. By 74
BCE
, Libya had voluntarily become a Roman province.

Tripoli continued to grow into a commercial hub under Roman protection until the empire declined and the Vandal barbarian hordes swept through North Africa in the 5th century
BCE
. The Romans attempted to reassert themselves in the region, but their empire was overextended, causing Roman infrastructure and culture to wither away until the spread of Islam came to fill the power vacuum.

For centuries, control of Libya was up for grabs among the Berber tribes, the Byzantines, and various Arab invaders, including the Caliphate of Ummayad of Syria. The burgeoning trade in gold brought the precious metal to the Mediterranean coast from the Wangara clan of modern-day Mali and Ghana. Heavy caravans of several thousand camels flowed across the desert once a year, while light caravans consisting of a hundred camels were more frequent.

By the 16th century, Libya had fallen under Ottoman control, while favorable political conditions in Mali had allowed for extensive trade networks to develop (mostly) unhindered by bandits and thieves. The spread of Islam had a profound effect on North Africa, developing a civil society connected by religious ties that stretched across nations and empires. Literacy, promoted by the Muslim faith to allow followers to read the Koran, led Muslim caravanners to create a system of credit and other legal documents, such as contracts.

While the trans-Atlantic slave trade picked up pace, Arab slavers also began engaging in the practice of raiding European coastal cities to procure Christian slaves. Arabs also captured black African slaves from sub-Saharan Africa, but even combining these two slave networks, the number of people sold into slavery by Arabs was perhaps 1.5 million on the outside, a mere drop in the bucket compared to the European trade in black slaves. However, the Barbary slavers were prolific enough to cause entire stretches of Mediterranean coastline to be abandoned in Spain, France, Italy, and elsewhere, while the pirates raided as far as Iceland and Ireland.

Previously, historians believed that, with the increase in maritime trade, the trans-Saharan routes fell into disuse, however, recent analysis shows that quite the opposite happened. The Ottoman Empire's presence in Libya opened up new markets for goods flowing across the north-south trade routes from places like Bornu and Timbuktu, according to a French doctor held in Libya during the 1680s.

The 1700s found Libya sliding into a chaotic time of coups and counter-coups. European nations paid tributes to the Barbary pirates to prevent them from seizing their merchant ships and enslaving their sailors. Ships originating in colonial America were protected as British-flagged ships, but, after the Revolutionary War, Thomas Jefferson stayed true to his principled ideals and refused to engage in paying tributes and becoming entangled in complicated foreign affairs. With American ships now under siege by North African pirates, the first of the Barbary wars kicked off.

In 1784, the first American merchant ship was seized by pirates from the Barbary Coast, which included the shores of Morocco, Algeria, and Libya. Acting as the American Ambassador to France at the time, Jefferson negotiated a treaty with the Moroccans but was much less successful in dealing with the two other Barbary states. Pirates from Algeria and Libya continued to capture American ships, motivating the US government to establish a Navy in the year of 1798 as a response to the Barbary threat. All the while, American sailors were sold into slavery and a life of hard labor while the pirate states attempted to ransom them back to the US government along with their impounded vessels.

Throughout this ordeal, Jefferson stuck to his guns in regard to not paying ransoms and tributes, using the rationale that paying off the pirates would only incentivize them to capture more ships and ransom off more American sailors. This, unfortunately, was a lesson that had to be relearned in the 1980s by Oliver North and his crew as they traded missiles to Iran in exchange for the release of American hostages in Lebanon.

The US government did compromise by paying some ransoms in order to stall for time until an adequate naval force could be stood up, but Jefferson remained adamant about ceasing the payments altogether, believing that America's future lay in westward expansion rather than in cramping future Americans in cities like Boston and New York, which could very well come to be filled with the urban poor and resemble the destitute slums of London and Paris. Old Word entanglements did not sit well with him.

Sworn in as President in 1801, Jefferson ceased paying any form of ransom, leading the Barbary pirates to declare war on the United States. In an episode frighteningly similar to current events, the Turkish Ottoman pirates cut down the flag pole in front of the US consulate in Tripoli. At the same time, administrators in Algiers were upset that the previous Adams presidency had been paying Tripoli more in tribute than they received, while the governors in Tunis grew angry at not having received a payoff in several years.

By now, the President had a naval force at his disposal to protect American merchant ships and enforce US foreign policy. He soon dispatched a small naval force under orders to “protect our commerce and chastise their insolence-by sinking, burning or destroying their ships & Vessels wherever you shall find them.” The USS Enterprise chalked up its first defeat of a Barbary ship in August of 1801. More US naval ships arrived on the Barbary coast and established a blockade around Barbary port cities in 1803.

The First Barbary War continued until 1805, when the US Marines led a daring raid along with Greek and indigenous mercenaries in the Battle of Derna. The action resulted in a decisive American victory, immortalized in the Marine hymn with the words, “From the Halls of Montezuma, to the shores of Tripoli; we fight our country's battles in the air, on land, and sea.” It was America's first war and the country's first successful overseas military campaign.

Though America was distracted by the War of 1812 and Europe similarly preoccupied by the Napoleonic Wars, governments on both sides of the Atlantic resolved to destroy the Barbary pirates once and for all. The Berlin Conference of 1884 formalized European imperialism on the African continent. While France secured Algeria using the pretext of preventing further Barbary piracy, Italy staked its claim to Libya in 1912, calling it Italian North Africa. After fighting a bitter war against Libyan Bedouin resistance, Italy eventually had to abandon the country as North Africa was plunged into World War Two.

It was during the North African Campaign against the Nazi forces of Erwin Rommel, perhaps Germany's most capable general, that the British Special Air Service was first used for commando actions behind enemy lines. Conducting parachute drops and working alongside the Long Range Desert Group, the SAS strode into history, becoming the preeminent Special Operations force, which the rest of the Western world sought to emulate decades later.

As a result of the Allied victory in the Second World War, Libya was allowed to become an independent state. In 1951, it was declared an independent monarchy ruled by King Idris. With the discovery of Libya's massive oil reserves, the country became rich seemingly overnight. With wealth concentrated around King Idris, resistance to the monarchy and foreign interference continued to build during the post-colonial Arab and African nationalist movements of the 1960s.

Under the aegis of Marxist revolutionary rhetoric, Omar Gaddafi staged a coup against the king in 1969. The Libyan revolution had brought into power a dictator who would antagonize America, and Africa, for decades to come.

Born to a Bedouin family of little consequence, Gaddafi rose through the ranks as a young Libyan military officer, receiving specialized radio training in England along the way. When he launched his coup, he used his charisma to build popular support and align himself against the Italian colonizers and Western powers. Although he came out of a post-colonial background, Gaddafi can in some ways be seen as a precursor to over-the-top populist figures such as Hugo Chavez of Venezuela in terms of his strong anti-Western stances and attempts to nationalize industry in an effort to free his citizens from the “scourge of the private sector.”

Gaddafi proposed his own unique political doctrine, one that embraced socialism but rejected the atheism of the Soviet Union, instead implementing Sharia Law in Libya. This course of action was well advised as communism had been quickly rejected in Iraq during its first go-around in the Muslim world during the 1950s, when Soviet envoys insisted that the Arabs abandon their Muslim faith.

Promoting himself to colonel, and later general, Gaddafi installed himself as the figurehead of his revolutionary movement while giving the illusion that the reins of power had been handed over to a series of councils and committees. Seeking to become a pan-Arab leader at the center of a single Muslim state that encompassed North Africa and the Middle East, Gaddafi cultivated relationships with Arab leaders such as Anwar Al-Sadat of Egypt and Hefiz Al-Assad of Syria. However, these leaders never fully trusted Gaddafi or his ambitions. Even though he was strongly anti-Israeli and promoted the Palestinian cause, Egypt and Syria left him out of the planning process as they prepared for war against Israel.

Israel's defensive preemptive action, now known as the Six-Day War, struck a humiliating defeat to the Arab nations that resonates to this day. When Israeli fighter jets screamed over Egyptian airfields and destroyed their aircraft before they could even get off the ground, it left a feeling of impotence among the Arabs. Finger-pointing and shifting of blame happened between Assad, Sadat, and Gaddafi, resulting in the Arab leaders' completely rejecting Gaddafi as a political player.

Since the Arabs wanted nothing to do with the Libyan leader, Gaddafi instead turned his attentions to Africa, now hoping for a pan-African movement that would unite the continent under his leadership. Delusions of grandeur appeared to be a habitual character flaw of his. In addition to assassinating overseas dissidents, Gaddafi financially supported anti-Western terrorist groups as wide-ranging as the IRA, the Red Army Faction, Filipino Muslim militants, the Black Panthers, the ANC in South Africa, and many others.

Meanwhile, covert operations were in the works against the Libyan colonel, operations hatched by former CIA operative Ed Wilson. Ted Shackley was the original CIA officer who set the conditions for covert operations that utilized non-official cover, that is to say, front companies. Wilson also came to specialize in the establishment of front companies that housed various CIA projects and programs. One of his more successful endeavors was setting up Consultants International, which was used as a front to provide logistical support for CIA operations. However, it all came to an end when Wilson and approximately 800 other CIA operatives were fired in 1977. This had the unforeseen outcome of making many of these operatives turn to freelance work.

Ed Wilson began cutting deals with the Libyan government, including sending training teams into the country to instruct Libyan soldiers in infantry and commando tactics. One of those teams was led by legendary Special Forces Sergeant Major Billy Waugh. Waugh, a Vietnam veteran who conducted cross-border operations with MACV-SOG, led a team consisting of three other Special Forces veterans to Benghazi in 1977.

The four men were called in for a briefing by someone acting as a lawyer and representing Ed Wilson in the Washington, DC area. It was at this briefing that they learned that the mission they had been recruited for was not actually a CIA-sponsored operation but rather a commercial endeavor undertaken on Wilson's own initiative.

“My bullshit antennae went on high alert upon hearing this news,” Waugh recalls about the meeting in his memoirs. He was never completely convinced that the mission was not being conducted under the auspices of the CIA.

While the team waited for their visas to be approved through the Libyan embassy, Waugh received a call to his hotel room. The man on the other end of the line dropped some names, the names of Special Forces men Waugh had served with in Vietnam, in order to establish his
bona fides
. Waugh agreed to meet the man, named Pat, in a restaurant in Arlington. Pat produced a CIA identification card and informed Waugh that Ed Wilson's training mission in Libya had not been authorized by the Agency. However, he was still encouraged to go to Libya with the training team and take a 35mm camera with him and snap any pictures of Libyan military installations or equipment that could prove useful to the CIA down the line.