Dark Forces: The Truth About What Happened in Benghazi (23 page)

NEAR MISS ON THE BRITISH AMBASSADOR

It was June 11, 2012, another sun-drenched day in Benghazi, where the clean blue sky belied the dangers lurking in the shadow just around the corner. Sir Dominic Asquith, the British ambassador to Libya, was visiting town and had gone for a leisurely lunch at the Venezia Café, one of a handful of Western eateries in Benghazi.

The Venezia was a local landmark; so much so, that taxi drivers referred to that section of the Fourth Ring Road in the posh West Fwayhat district of Benghazi as Venice Street. The avenue was studded with the occasional palm tree, towering like a lone sentinel far above the pockmarked asphalt and the low-slung residential compounds. Sometimes you could see the silvery leaves of an olive tree catching a welcome breeze in the distance, promising watered dirt and cool shrubbery beyond a dust-covered wall. The Venezia also happened to be just across the street from the rear gate of the U.S. Special Mission Compound. Asquith and other diners could watch the Libyan guards making the rounds along the perimeter wall. The record does not show who the ambassador lunched with that day, but the Venezia was well-known as a haven for militia leaders, spies, diplomats, and arms dealers, all seeking to ply their trades.

The British ambassador traveled with a security detail of five heavily armed men, many of them veterans of British Special Forces. When he was ready to leave, the drivers pulled up in a convoy of three armored SUVs, and his guards bustled Sir Dominic into their vehicle for the short drive back to the British consulate. They hadn’t gone more than a thousand meters when the lead vehicle developed engine trouble and had to fall back, changing the position of the ambassador’s vehicle in the small convoy. They were just five hundred meters away from the consulate when Sir Dominic’s bodyguards heard the hollow sucking sound of a rocket in flight. They had no time to turn away when an RPG antitank projectile slammed into the rear of the SUV behind them, the one where the ambassador would have been.

The car swerved from the impact and the scene quickly turned chaotic. Luckily the armor plate held, but the rear window exploded and large pieces of white-hot metal ripped into the car and hit the two passengers in the rear seat, where the ambassador was supposed to be. The driver in the front car, where the ambassador now was, floored his vehicle and sped off to the relatively safety of the consulate just down the road, leaving the other two to fend for themselves.

Lieutenant Colonel Andy Wood happened to be in Benghazi that day, attending a conference on military law in place of the defense attaché back in Tripoli. When the call came that the British ambassador’s convoy had been hit, he rushed back to the Special Mission Compound, donned body armor, strapped on his 9mm Glock 22 and grabbed an M4 carbine and extra magazines. “Up until the moment I made it back to the SMC, I had been a civilian protectee,” he told me, cocooned by a DS agent and members of his own SST. “Once I strapped on my gear, I became a security guy once again.” He and a DS guard jumped into one of the seven Toyota Land Cruiser FAVs (Fully Armored Vehicles) parked on the compound, and roared up to the 17th February Martyrs Brigade barracks near the front gate to pick up an extra man. They were like firemen, Wood thought, suiting up whenever the alarm went off.

After what seemed like an interminable wait, a backup vehicle from the Annex finally showed up with two GRS shooters and an 18 Delta Force combat medic, and together they raced the two miles through traffic to the British compound, careful to enter through the rear gate so not to attract attention. Wood groaned when he saw the scene. “One of the British guards had been hit in the shoulder with a large fragment of steel and was bleeding out,” he told me. The former Delta Force medic immediately went to work while the rest of them pulled security until the Brits could figure out what to do.

The Libyan police found leaflets at the scene from the Imprisoned Sheikh Omar Abdul-Rahman Brigade, claiming responsibility for the attack. They wanted to drive the Westerners out of Libya. They were beginning to show some success.

The near miss on the British ambassador caused the Brits to close their consulate for good. There was no way they could protect their guys from organized criminal gangs, let alone the jihadis. They were out of there.

A few days went by and Lieutenant Colonel Wood began to wonder why no one from the Annex had filed an after-action report. He began to raise Cain with the chief of base that it was a big deal, but got only shrugs in response. Eventually he called the Brits and went back to the scene of the attack so he could reconstitute exactly how it happened. He put the whole thing back together, like a crime scene, to figure out where the shooter must have stood, who must have helped them, how many they had to be, and more. And then he realized just how sophisticated the attack had been.

“They had to have had two teams in place. The guys doing the shooting had to have communications with the spotters up the road,” he told me. The more he looked at it, the more he knew that his nemesis—the man he went to bed dreaming about every night—was getting outside talent. With the speed of the convoy and the confines of the street, the shooter had just a split second to take his shot. He needed to have nerves of steel, which was not something you learned your first night out. They also had a great getaway plan, Wood learned, hopping on the main ring road and blending into traffic.

Wood wrote an after-action report and shared it with the chief of base at the Annex, along with some of the pictures he had taken. He was shocked that the CIA hadn’t investigated on their own, and were still under the misconception that the shooter had hit the vehicle from the front, not the rear. Later, back in Tripoli, he saw that the chief of base essentially had taken his report, put his name on it, and filed it as his own, along with a cockamamie theory about small arms being used when Wood clearly saw that there were none—no holes in the wall, nothing. (The small arms story was picked up by numerous Western press reports in the beginning, showing where they got that information.)

The chief of base’s laziness made Wood angry, so he filed a more detailed version, explaining exactly how it had happened, and included the same photos he had left with the agency guys. That got people talking. They saw the photos, then compared the sparse and inaccurate CIA account against Wood’s far more detailed one, and realized that the agency boys had cribbed his report.

“It was like they didn’t really take it seriously, like they didn’t care,” Wood said. “They didn’t even bother to get out and look at the site.”

The CIA initially set up the Annex in Benghazi as an intelligence-and-training center during the Libyan revolution, so it included a mix of CIA case officers, analysts, NSA signals intelligence specialists, and Special Operations officers. Now that the revolution was over, the SpecOps guys had no more mission beyond providing protection to the case officers when they went beyond the wire to meet a source. So they sat around playing video games, cleaning their weapons, drinking alcohol-free beer, throwing knives with the Libyan guards. They were just waiting for the next mission, because the one they had was over.

By the end of June 2012, all that had changed.

THE SHIFT TO SYRIA

Not long after the near miss on the British ambassador, the word came from Washington that the president, urged on by Secretary of State Clinton and CIA Director David Petraeus, had made a determination that the United States was going to provide covert aid to the Syrian rebels.

The news spread like wildfire and within days the adrenaline junkies—the soldiers of fortune types, the arms dealers, and wannabes who hung around the Annex—packed their bags and headed off for southern Turkey, where the staging grounds for the war against Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad had been established. The battlefield had moved on and they were moving with it, in search of fame, fortune, and kicks.

“The president caved on something, because all of a sudden, you had all these guys in Benghazi saying, yahoo, I’m out of here. We’re going to Syria,” a U.S. official who was in Benghazi at the time told me.

They went to join a small number of CIA operations officers who had been sent into southern Turkey earlier as part of a “clandestine intelligence gathering” operation, to assess the various factions of the Syrian opposition. A secondary goal was to “help keep weapons out of the hands of fighters allied with Al Qaeda or other terrorist groups,” a senior U.S. official said.
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The State Department had already authorized $15 million in nonlethal aid for the Syrian rebels, which was being distributed through conduits in southern Turkey, but sophisticated weapons were reaching the most radical rebel groups without any apparent help from the United States. “The rebels are starting to crack the code on how to take out tanks,” said Joseph Halliday, a former U.S. Army intelligence officer in Afghanistan who now worked for the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington, D.C., think tank.
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The CIA operators came from the agency’s top-secret Special Activities Division, which was responsible for covert operations, political influence operations, and paramilitary activities. If the setup at the Benghazi Annex was any indicator, they most likely rented and fortified a compound in one of the towns along the Syrian border, where they could vet rebel leaders and dispense cash, communications gear, and other goodies.

There is a fine line between secret intelligence activities and covert operations that gets drummed into every CIA operator by the agency lawyers. “Secret intelligence activities” covers a broad spectrum of tasks that the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies perform every day, from communications intercepts, to monitoring the secret activities of foreign governments, to liaising with foreign intelligence organizations. By statute, the president (through the director of national intelligence or the various agency chiefs) must keep the congressional intelligence committees “fully and currently informed” on all secret intelligence activities. These briefings flow through the Cardinals of Capitol Hill, sometimes known as the Gang of Eight: the Senate majority leader (Harry Reid), minority leader (Mitch McConnell), the Speaker of the House of Representatives (John Boehner), the House minority leader (Nancy Pelosi), and the chairmen and ranking member of the Senate and House intelligence committees. They in turn make the decision whether to brief the other members of the intelligence committees.

In very rare circumstances, such as the classified evidence presented by the Bush administration in October 2002 in support of going to war against Saddam, the Cardinals agreed to allow the full membership of the House or the Senate to access the evidence by personally signing into special high secure document rooms in the U.S. Capitol complex. But, in no case, are individual members allowed to take notes of what they read in the classified holdings.

Sometimes these briefings occur so frequently that Gang of Eight members stop paying attention. That was the case when the CIA briefed Nancy Pelosi in September 2002 on the enhanced interrogation techniques—including waterboarding—that the agency was using on high-value al Qaeda detainees. At the time, Pelosi was the ranking member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and a member of the Gang of Eight, as she is today. She later claimed she had never been told about waterboarding—or else she would have objected. So the CIA produced a ten-page log with the dates, times, and subjects of these briefings, as well as the members who were present. Pelosi had to eat her words.
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But, even here, the government is allowed a great deal of leeway, and can delay reporting on some ongoing intelligence activities if it deems the limitation “necessary to protect intelligence sources and methods.”
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That’s a loophole big enough to establish a CIA intelligence-gathering post in southern Turkey without more than passing notice to Congress.

Covert action (CA)—including the supply of lethal military equipment—is a different beast entirely and requires a formal presidential finding. “Nobody at the agency is stupid enough to engage in CA without a presidential finding,” a former senior CIA covert operations officer told me. “It gets drummed into you. You wouldn’t spend two minutes on it. So, if they were actually moving weapons from Libya to the Syrian rebels, the agency would demand a finding.”
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Presidential findings are briefed in elaborate ceremonies that are hard to forget. A senior presidential emissary meets the Cardinals of each chamber separately in their own Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF. (The House Intelligence Committee had its bubble specially built inside the Capitol Building; the Senate committee had its SCIF incorporated into the design specifications of the Hart Senate Office Building, which opened in 1982.) After the principals are seated, without staff, the president’s emissary opens a folder with a thick cover embossed with bright red diagonal stripes, indicating the classification or code word of the operation involved, and reads the words of the finding. During the Bush administration, Vice President Dick Cheney sometimes conducted these briefings in person. The members present are allowed to look at the document and ask questions about the operation. Then they are reminded of their obligations as keepers of the nation’s secrets and warned of the damage revealing this information could do to the national interest—and to their own career.

If the Gang of Eight was briefed on a finding that authorized covert arms shipments to the Syrian rebels and they didn’t oppose it at the time—which members would have made known one way or another—then they have as much interest in covering up such a finding as the president and his advisors do because they signed off on it.

A Republican member of Congress tells me he confronted Speaker Boehner about this at a closed-door meeting of the Republican conference in March 2013. This member and others were pushing Boehner to approve the creation of a select committee to investigate Benghazi, which they believed would be more aggressive in using subpoena power to elicit testimony from survivors and other sources. Boehner tried to brush off the allegation that he had been briefed on the covert arms shipments, in a manner the member found suspicious. “It was the biggest nondenial denial I have ever heard,” the member who confronted Boehner told me.