Dark Forces: The Truth About What Happened in Benghazi (26 page)

Journalist Ed Klein devotes two chapters to Jarrett in his 2012 critical biography of Obama,
The Amateur
. She was “ground zero in the Obama operation, the first couple’s first friend and consigliere. Once asked by a reporter if he ran
every
decision by Jarrett, Obama answered without hesitation, ‘Yep. Absolutely,’ ” Klein wrote.

Jarrett has “an all-access pass to meetings she chooses to attend: one day she’ll show up at a National Security meeting; the next day, she’ll sit in on a briefing on the federal budget,” Klein wrote. “When Oval Office meetings break up, Jarrett is often the one who stays behind to talk privately with the president.”
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Her father, James Bowman, was an African-American physician who moved to Shiraz, Iran, in the 1950s to help establish the Nemazee hospital. He fell in love with a childhood development specialist from Chicago and the two had their only child, Valerie, in November 1956. She was just the second child born in the new private hospital in Shiraz. Jarrett spent her first five years in Iran and claims that she still speaks some Farsi. She apparently also tells the White House staff she is Iranian-American (which she is not), since that’s what I was told by an otherwise unresponsive National Security Staff spokesperson, Bernadette Meehan, when I asked her about Jarrett’s involvement in the secret back-channel negotiations with Iran.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, candidate Obama pledged to conduct “negotiations without preconditions” with the Islamic Republic of Iran. It was one campaign promise he kept. The first Iranian government emissary traveled to Washington to meet with an Obama advisor in December 2008. Once he took office, the contacts multiplied.

Valerie Jarrett began meeting secretly with Iranian government representatives in Bahrain, Qatar, and Dubai in early 2009, trying to lay the groundwork for a “grand bargain” with the Islamic Republic of Iran that would resolve thirty-four years of conflict. The fact that after five years nothing came of these efforts is a testament to the deep distrust the Islamic leadership in Iran feels toward America. Many offers have been put on the table that a purportedly rational regime would have taken long ago. Jarrett was as stymied by the Iranians as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was in 2006, when she offered trade, aid, and even nuclear power technology to Iran, in exchange for coming clean on their nuclear research programs.
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A few days after the Red Crescent team was “abducted” in Benghazi, Valerie Jarrett jetted off with her Secret Service detail to Dubai, where she met with Ali Akbar Velayati, a former foreign minister and the Supreme Leader’s top foreign policy advisor. For Jarrett, it was something of a homecoming, since her family had been close to the Velayatis back in Shiraz in the 1950s. Although Ali was eleven years her senior, and probably had few memories of Valerie as a child, it was a connection that Jarrett had cultivated over the years and used to insinuate herself as a player in the back-channel talks. According to Reza Kahlili, a former CIA spy inside Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps, Jarrett met “more than ten times” with Velayati over the past twenty years.
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Jarrett was hoping to convince the Iranians to cooperate with Obama so they could announce a big diplomatic breakthrough—an October surprise—in time for the 2012 presidential election. Having played this game already during the 1979–81 hostage crisis, the Iranians were attuned to the needs of U.S. politicians and our peculiar once-every-four-years timetable, which bore a faint resemblance to their own.

Several friendly foreign intelligence services reported similar accounts of the August meeting in Dubai. My sources say that Velayati told Jarrett there were elements inside Iran (such as the Quds Force) who were “out of control” and were planning to kidnap an American diplomat to show their displeasure with U.S. sanctions on Iran. Some claim that Jarrett then proposed that they transform the kidnapping into a hostage exchange, with the United States freeing the Blind Sheikh in exchange for the kidnapped U.S. ambassador. That would make Obama look like a diplomatic genius.

I have found no evidence to substantiate the allegations of a hostage exchange. Indeed, my Iranian sources believe that Velayati’s goal was to reinforce the impression in the U.S. intelligence community that Iran was very concerned by the kidnapping of its Red Crescent team in Benghazi. He told Jarrett that Iran was also a victim of terrorism, and so had a lot in common with the United States. See, a team of our own doctors—doctors!—has been taken hostage in Benghazi. (Velayati, of course, had been a pediatrician himself.)

If the CIA kept hearing that the Red Crescent team had been kidnapped, from multiple sources, sooner or later they would take it to the bank and no one would be able to convince them otherwise. That was exactly what the Iranians wanted. They wanted to lull the Annex chief of base into believing that the Red Crescent/Quds Force team had been taken off the streets, and that the danger of an attack was over.

This was how the Iranians played the game of political chess. They rarely attacked directly but used indirection, feints, gambits, and complex maneuvers to distract their adversary and to hide their real strategy.

“Look at Rafsanjani and Iran-Contra,” the former Iranian intelligence chief for West Europe explained. “He lied to everybody. He lied to me. He never wanted an agreement with the Americans. He wanted to negotiate a deal so he could make a big show refusing it. All the while Rafsanjani was meeting with Bud McFarlane and Ollie North in Tehran over the U.S. hostages in Lebanon, his real goal was to get U.S. HAWK missiles so he could retake the Fao Peninsula from Saddam Hussein.”

National Security Staff spokesperson Bernadette Meehan insisted that Jarrett “was not involved in Iran policy, even though she is an Iranian-American.” She called the story of the meetings with Velayati “unequivocally false.”

“The White House people are lying on this,” a senior official in a major American NGO that deals with Middle East policy on a daily basis told me. “I told them what Iranian sources told me happened at those meetings and they still denied they took place. The Iranians said, here’s who sat on [Jarrett’s] left, here’s who sat on her right. Here’s the Lufthansa flight she took out of Frankfurt. So I am absolutely certain the meetings took place. She had a relationship with Velayati. They were childhood friends. The Iranians saw these meetings as a backdoor channel to the Obama administration, so their message would reach the very top.
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“UNPREDICTABLE, VOLATILE, VIOLENT”

Ambassador Stevens was growing increasingly worried about his own security and the security of his employees. The more he heard from his security team about the Iranian presence in Benghazi, their support for Ansar al-Sharia, and the inability of the new government to field reliable security forces, the more worried he became. So he tasked his new regional security officer, John Martinec, and an assistant, Jairo Saravia, to draft an action request cabled on August 2.

When an ambassador sends in an action request to increase his personal security detail, you know there’s trouble.

“The security condition in Libya remains unpredictable, volatile, and violent,” the cable reads. “Though certain goals have been successfully met, such as the national election for a representative Parliament who will draft the new Libyan Constitution, violent security incidents continue to take place due to the lack of a coherent national Libyan security force and the strength of local militias and large numbers of armed groups.”
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The RSO estimated that they needed eleven more locally hired bodyguards for the Ambassador’s Protection Detail (APD), in addition to the twenty-four they already had. “The augmented roster will fill the vacuum of security personnel currently at post on TDY status who will be leaving within the next month and will not be replaced,” Stevens wrote. The security personnel who were leaving were those he had asked the State Department previously to keep in Libya.

Just as previous cables with similar requests, this one was stamped “Routine” by the State Department and ignored.

So, Stevens took another whack at it six days later in a cable titled, “The Guns of August,” on the security situation in Benghazi. It was drafted by the young political officer, Eric Gaudiosi, who was the latest of a string of diplomats to brave the Benghazi gauntlet for a short-term assignment (TDY). This time, Stevens was careful to send it with the SIPDIS caption, which meant it would be distributed through the Pentagon’s Secret Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRnet), a governmentwide clearinghouse meant to reach all U.S. security agencies. This would give it a much wider readership than otherwise available through the normal State Department channels.

Since the elections, he wrote, “Benghazi has moved from trepidation to euphoria and back as a series of violent incidents has dominated the political landscape.” Kidnappings and assassinations had become rampant, as militias jockeyed for power and real estate. The Supreme Security Council (SSC), an umbrella group aimed to unite the most prominent militias to impose order on the lawless city, was an abject failure. “[E]ven in the assessment of its own commander, Fawzi Younis, SSC Benghazi has not coalesced into an effective, stable security force.” The absence of any significant deterrent had “contributed to a security vacuum.”

Worse still, the violence was organized and determined. “What we have seen are not random crimes of opportunity, but rather targeted and discriminate attacks” by an assortment of groups, from organized crime to former regime elements and Islamic extremists. “Attackers are unlikely to be deterred until authorities are at least as capable,” Stevens concluded.
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Stevens knew he would be heading for Benghazi in the near future, and an inescapable dread had begun to fill him as the city where the anti-Qaddafi rebellion first took root spiraled downward into chaos. Sending a SIPDIS cable was the diplomatic equivalent of a cry of desperation. Clearly, he was hoping that
someone
would understand how dire the situation had become, perhaps the CIA or General Carter Ham at AFRICOM, and weigh in with the White House or the secretary of state personally.

This cable was also stamped “Routine” by the State Department routing officer. Help was not on the way.

INTELLIGENCE WARNINGS

On August 6, two members of the SST team were stopped at a checkpoint in Tripoli and ordered out of their armored SUV by militia members. When they refused, the situation turned confrontational, as more militiamen arrived and roughly demanded that the two Americans get out of the vehicle and leave the keys in the ignition.

The SpecOps guys were dressed in civilian clothes, and bore no militia insignia—not even boots—under the standing orders from the Department of State to downplay their presence. But they were well armed. When the militiamen refused to move away from the vehicle, the Americans fired warning shots in the air with their 9mm Glock 22s. Instead of backing off, the militiamen loosed off several bursts of Kalashnikov fire in their direction, pinging against the armor plating in the doors. This time the Americans used their weapons with purpose, and saw several militiamen go down. In the confusion, they were able to break away and speed off to the embassy compound. “We had to shut everything down after that and didn’t leave the compound for over a week,” said Lieutenant Colonel Andy Wood. “We felt it was probably a criminal element, but it could have been an organized al Qaeda attack.”
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That same day, the International Committee of the Red Cross pulled out of Benghazi because of the attacks on their compound and the ongoing security threats.

Back in the United States, Ansar al-Sharia was starting to attract attention. An August 8, 2012, report from the Pentagon’s Irregular Warfare Support Program of the Pentagon’s Combating Terrorism Technical Support Office, published under the auspices of the Library of Congress, sounded the alarm: al Qaeda was on the move in Libya.

The report found that Ansar al-Sharia “has increasingly embodied al-Qaeda’s presence in Libya, as indicated by its active social-media propaganda, extremist discourse, and hatred of the West, especially the United States.”
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The very idea that al Qaeda was operating in Libya—far from Afghanistan—directly contradicted the Obama administration’s narrative that the al Qaeda menace had been reduced to insignificance because Obama ordered SEAL Team 6 to take out bin Laden in May 2011. On the contrary, the report found that the Al-Qaeda Senior Leadership (AQSL) in Afghanistan and Pakistan were “seeking to create an al-Qaeda clandestine network in Libya that could be activated in the future to destabilize the government and/or to offer logistical support to al Qaeda’s activities in North Africa and the Sahel.”

Their goals in Libya were to “gather weapons, establish training camps, build a network in secret, establish an Islamic state, and institute sharia,” the report stated. “In the process, al-Qaeda will seek to undermine the current process of rebuilding Libyan state institutions as a way of preventing the establishment of strong state counterterrorism capabilities that could hinder its ability to grow in Libya.” Al Qaeda’s clandestine networks in Libya were “currently in an expansion phase.”

The Pentagon report was widely read, according to a U.S. government intelligence analyst asked to comment on its impact and reach. “We all read the same stuff,” he told the American Media Institute. “It gets circular, going through all the relevant government agencies. That report for the Irregular Warfare Office got passed around a lot.”
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Nobody can credibly pretend that the State Department, the Pentagon, the CIA, and the White House weren’t warned of the gathering threat in Benghazi. And yet, the president’s reelection campaign continued to call Libya and the takedown of bin Laden a great success story.

Ansar al-Sharia gained street cred by organizing the June 7–8
gathering
of pro-Sharia
katiba
in Benghazi (see chapter 11). Thirty separate brigades, commanded by fifteen different militias, participated in the show of force “and probably make up the bulk of al-
Qaeda’s
network in Libya,” the authors of the report wrote. “The al-Qaeda clandestine network has certainly stocked enough arms and ammunitions to allow it to operate independently,” they added.