Dark Forces: The Truth About What Happened in Benghazi (12 page)

Where there were private military contractors, there was big money to be made—the type of money people were willing to kill for.

Pierre Marziali retired from the French Army in 2007, after twenty-five years of service as a parachutist with an airborne unit. Wounded in Beirut in 1983, he had deployed to Bosnia and Rwanda. His company, SECOPEX, made headlines in 2008 when Marziali revealed they had won a large contract to train the Somali coast guard to operate against pirates. He once claimed his network of contacts within the mercenary community was so vast that he could raise a private army of 2,000 men, if a client were willing to pay.

Marziali sent a team to Benghazi to scout for work shortly after the UN no-fly zone went into effect in late March, just as Jamie Smith had done. On May 10, he left his home in Carcassonne, in south-central France, to join them in Benghazi. Just three days later, he turned up dead in a local hospital. According to the official version, he had been trying to stop an altercation between armed rebels and police at a checkpoint during the night of May 12–13 and was shot in the melee. His wife wasn’t buying it. “My husband was known for his nerves of steel,” said Dominique Marziali. “I don’t see him throwing himself in between policemen and Libyan rebels armed to the teeth.”

Further adding to the intrigue was the fact that the four colleagues in the car with him escaped unharmed, and were later taken into custody by the police where they were supposedly vigorously interrogated. “I’ve been told that French intelligence is conducting two separate investigations in Benghazi into my husband’s death,” his widow said. “The confusion about the shooting contributed to a growing feeling that a shadow war is simmering in Benghazi between the many militias under the rebel umbrella and former Qaddafi loyalists or other groups with unknown allegiances,” the
New York Times
reported. “No one seemed able to say who had attacked the Secopex team, and no one seemed to know, or was willing to say, exactly why the security contractors were in Libya.”
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The Iranians were also keeping close tabs on the Libyan rebels, and in early March 2011 had dispatched to Benghazi Lebanese Hezbollah operatives who were blending in with the local scene, according to an American defense contractor I had known for some time who was on the ground in Benghazi. “They came in through Egypt, with the help of the Muslim Brotherhood. They spread money and guns all over the ground, helping anybody who would take them. They figured they’d settle scores later on,” the contractor told me.

Terrified of dissent at home, the Iranian regime was trying to claim that its anti-Western example had sparked the Arab Spring revolts in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya. Few were buying it, which is why the early arrival of the Hezbollah teams was noticed by the TNC and by their Western advisors. Farsi-speaking Iranian intelligence officers were also observed in Benghazi, and later in Tripoli. Their presence in Libya spelled trouble.
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Everyone seemed to know that Stevens was the go-to man if they wanted to reach the rebel council. In many ways, he became the Libyan ambassador to the murky underworld of arms dealers, mercenaries, private military contractors, journalists, and adventurers, all seeking a profit from the war.

One of these was an American named Marc Turi, a registered arms broker who divided his time between Arizona and the United Arab Emirates. Smelling opportunity, he applied to the State Department for a license in March 2011 to ship former Soviet Bloc weapons to the rebels. He also brought Stevens into the loop, emailing him his
proposal
. Stevens wrote back saying that he would share Turi’s information with the appropriate people back at the State Department.

Despite the extra push, State turned him down. By statute, commercial military sales are notified to Congress, and approved licenses regularly wind up in public databases on the arms trade compiled by organizations such as the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). Having a data trail back to the State Department on arms shipments to the Libyan rebels was not exactly a covert operation. Turi reapplied in May 2011, this time saying that he planned to sell $200 million worth of weaponry to Qatar. That license was approved. Turi later told the
New York Times
that once the weapons reached Qatar “what the U.S. government and Qatar allowed from there was between them.”

Turi Defense Group, Inc., was a U.S. government–licensed arms supplier that claimed to have “the international presence, personnel networks and procurement infrastructure to deliver wide-ranging support for any mission, anywhere.” That may be hype, but Turi was for real. He was also competing on contracts to supply weapons, armored SUVs, and protection services with some of the biggest-known PMCs worldwide.

Two months after the State Department approved his weapons deal with Qatar, agents from the Department of Homeland Security raided his home near Phoenix, Arizona. Turi believes his operation was shut down because the Qatari arms pipeline to the Libyan rebels was out of control. “They just handed them out like candy,” he remarked.
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QATAR ARMS THE ISLAMISTS

There was growing alarm within the administration that the Qataris were arming the wrong people. “Within weeks of endorsing Qatar’s plan to send weapons there in spring 2011, the White House began receiving reports that they were going to Islamic militant groups,” the
New York Times
reported. President Obama complained to the emir in person about the arms shipments, asking for “transparency about what Qatar was doing in Libya.”
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But the Qatari arms shipments just kept on coming. And it was the type of thing that was hard to keep quiet. Even TNC president Mustapha Abdul-Jalil, who had helped free LIFG members when he was Qaddafi’s justice minister, was complaining that the jihadis were getting all the money and arms, while the TNC itself was left begging.

“The Qataris are not to be sneered at when it comes to arms smuggling,” says Simon Henderson of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “In Benghazi, they were making sure the weapons got through to the best fighters. They were working alongside the CIA, but not necessarily with them. And the CIA often didn’t know what they were up to.”

From their base at the Tibesti Hotel, where Chris Stevens had initially set up shop, the Qatari Special Forces officers donned blue jeans and T-shirts and blended in with the rebels. “The only thing that made them stand out was their military haircuts,” a contractor who was on the ground at the time told me.

As the Qataris ramped up the deliveries, they no longer took the risk of land convoys through the desert. “They just flew them into Benghazi on Qatari aircraft,” Henderson says. To do so required that they notify NATO to allow their aircraft to land in Libya despite the UN-authorized no-fly restrictions. That was definitely not discreet.

The Qataris, of course, were also participating in the NATO no-fly zone, but that appears to have involved a bit of military overreach. “They had decided to fly four Mirage 2000 fighter jets along with a C-17 full of support gear and possibly weapons into Benghazi,” Henderson recalls. “Someone forget to get landing rights or to calculate the flight path and they wound up making an emergency unplanned fuel stop at the Royal Air Force base on Cyprus. Otherwise, they would have landed in the Med.”
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Emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani wasn’t being shy about his support for the rebels in Libya. By late June 2011, rebel troops began strutting around in Qatari-supplied desert camo in Benghazi, and erected a giant billboard of the Qatari emir outside TNC headquarters. Souvenir stands were selling Qatari white and maroon flags outside the Tibesti Hotel and on the streets. In Misrata, the Qataris had set up a field hospital to treat wounded rebels and their family members. The director of Misrata airport told Western reporters in mid-July that he was awaiting NATO clearance so the Qataris could fly in “humanitarian” aid and evacuate severely wounded rebels.
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On August 6, 2011, a Qatar Emiri Air Force Boeing Globemaster III C-17 made a corkscrew landing into Misrata, a military tactic the aircrew had learned from their American trainers and used just in case Qaddafi loyalists were lurking in the vicinity with Russian surface-to-air missiles. “The plane offloaded six pick-up trucks which were packed with ammunition and minutes later it flew off again,” Reuters reported. As it took off, a local photographer captured the grey, maroon, and white aircraft with “Qatar” written in large letters on the underbelly.
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The commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, Admiral Eric Olson, had vigorously promoted the sale of these aircraft to Qatar in 2008 as a way for the U.S. to develop greater transparency into the small but secretive world of Qatari Special Forces. When the aircraft were first delivered, they were flown by mixed American and Qatari aircrews. The State Department saw the Special Forces relationship with Qatar as a convenient way to “gather intelligence . . . to learn more about Qatari intentions and actions or inactions on counterterrorism efforts, relations with and perceptions of Iran, and internal [Qatari government] decision-making.”
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The Qataris wanted U.S. protection from their powerful northern neighbor, Iran, and U.S. expertise to expand their influence in Jihadiland. After one meeting with Admiral Olson in March 2009, the commander of the Internal Security Forces, Sheikh Abdullah bin Nasser al-Thani, “expressed his desire to see the Qatar Armed Forces engage in more special operations activity” with the United States Libya would put those desires to the test.
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The aircraft that landed in Misrata, with tail number A7-MAB, had rolled off the Boeing assembly line in Long Beach, California, on September 10, 2009. The commander of the Qatar Emiri Air Force airlift selection committee, Brigadier General Ahmed Al-Malki, pointed out that the unusual paint scheme—similar to that used by Qatar Airlines at the time—was “intended to build awareness of Qatar’s participation in operations around the world.”
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That turned out to be an understatement.

In the weeks after that initial Auguat 6, 2011, flight bringing ammo into Misrata, both Qatari C-17s would fly into rebel-held airports on regular rotations, carrying severely wounded rebels in U.S.-supplied palletized hospital trauma pods to Malta for further treatment, and returning to Libya chock full of supposed humanitarian supplies. The Qatar Air Force became so fully identified with Qatar’s commercial airline that two years after the civil war an angry mob stormed the tarmac at Benghazi airport to prevent non-Libyans arriving on a Qatar Air flight from Doha from disembarking. They also prevented Libyans from boarding it for the return flight. “According to a Benghazi Local Council member at the time, the militiamen accused Qatar of interfering in Libya’s internal affairs,” the local
Libya Herald
reported. Anti-Qatar sentiments reached such a boiling point that Qatar Air suspended all flights to Benghazi for two months. When they tried to resume them, gunmen occupied the Qatar Air office at Tripoli Airport and prevented the commercial airliners from landing.
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JIHADIS ON THE MARCH

The United Nations Panel of Experts investigating violations of the arms embargo on Libya and arms smuggling to the rebels traveled to Benghazi in July 2011 as the civil war continued to rage. Sources within the rebel Ministry of Defense told the panel that since the beginning of the uprising, “Twenty flights had delivered military materiel from Qatar to the revolutionaries in Libya, including French anti-tank weapons launchers (MILANs).” Additional supplies of arms and ammunition were coming in by road across the Tunisian border. In a letter sent to the Qatari authorities on August 10, 2011, the panel asked about a Qatari aircraft “that had allegedly landed in Misrata on 6 March 2011 transporting weapons and ammunition,” and about the “reported presence of Qatari military personnel on the ground.” The Qataris denied sending arms, saying that they were only providing humanitarian assistance.
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The Qataris did acknowledge sending “a limited number of military personnel” into rebel-held areas to “provide military consultation to the revolutionaries, defend Libyan civilians, [and for the] protection of aid convoys to the civilian population whether coming through the sea, air, or land.” It was a pretty open admission that the Qataris were training the rebels and helping secure the rebel supply lines to the outside world, and those supply lines weren’t just bringing in food, tents, and blankets. The Qatari rebuttal also contains this passage:

The State of Qatar notes in this regard that it supplied those Qatari military personnel with limited arms and ammunition for the purpose of self-defence and to enable them to carry out the above-mentioned tasks, especially since they were directly targeted by Qadhafi’s troops.
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The UN panel contacted the Swiss government after a news report by the Swiss TV channel SF1 showed the rebels using ammunition manufactured by the Swiss company RUAG Ammotec. “The box of ammunition clearly stated that the ammunition had been exported to the Qatar armed forces in 2009 by a Swiss company, FGS Frex,” the UN Panel wrote. The Swiss government confirmed that they had issued an export license to Qatar for one million rounds of 7.62 x 51mm NATO Ball ammunition, used primarily in sniper rifles and light machine guns, on condition the ammo not be re-exported with prior authorization. When they asked the Qatari ambassador to Switzerland in late November 2011 what had happened, he replied that “the transfer of the aforementioned ammunition to the Libyan opposition was a misadventure in the course of his country’s support of the NATO engagement in Libya,” and reassured the Swiss that his government “took appropriate measures to prevent similar errors in the future.”
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Of course, by then the war was well over.