Dark Forces: The Truth About What Happened in Benghazi (29 page)

While in Germany, he stopped in Stuttgart, headquarters of AFRICOM, to discuss with General Carter Ham the alarming security situation in Libya. General Ham had read Stevens’ secret August 16 cable and had called him immediately offering to make a new SST available to him. At their sit-down in early September, he again offered to send a Special Forces team to help.

Stevens was in a bind: He needed the security, but he knew that if he fell back on the military, there would be hell to pay with his bosses at the State Department who had been trying to get rid of the SST since April. They made it clear that they didn’t want a U.S. military presence in Libya, since that would detract from the narrative that al Qaeda had been defeated. Besides that, he was worried about their legal status. Now that the SST had transitioned back to Title 10 status, placing them once again under General Ham’s authority—not Stevens’—they were legally subject to whatever Status of Forces Agreement was in place with the Libyan government. And there was none. If something like the August 6 attempted carjacking happened again and they were taken into custody, they would have no more legal protection than a tourist. It just didn’t feel right to him to hang them out to dry.

So, he thanked the general for the offer, but declined. He had put in requests with State for them to send more DS personnel and to hire more Libyans for his personal protection detail, and was still hoping they would come up with an acceptable solution. Fingers crossed.
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After Stevens and his three colleagues were murdered, Admiral Michael Mullen and other administration flacks attempted to shift the blame onto Stevens for not arguing more forcefully for better security. “As the chief of mission, he certainly had a responsibility in that regard,” Mullen said at a news conference when the State Department released the Accountability Review Board report he co-authored with Ambassador Thomas Pickering. “But part of his responsibility is certainly to make that case back here, and he had not gotten to that point where you would, you might get to a point where you would be considering, ‘It’s so dangerous, we might close the mission.’ ”
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The ARB report made the astonishing claim that, under Stevens’ command, the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli “did not demonstrate strong and sustained advocacy with Washington for increased security” for the Benghazi Special Mission, a claim that flies in the face of the steady stream of reporting on the security vacuum and Stevens’ multiple requests for backup, all of which were denied.

Clearly, in the eyes of official Washington, it was easier and less costly to blame the dead for not protecting themselves, than to accuse a secretary of state who wanted to become president of incompetence, callousness, and a criminal disregard for the security deficiencies of diplomatic compounds that legally fell under her personal responsibility.

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BAITING THE TRAP

As U.S. ambassador, Chris Stevens had a full plate: He was encouraging the new government to develop democratic institutions, managing the cleanup of Qaddafi’s weapons, and trying to tame the militia groups in Benghazi so Western oil companies would return. He was also working to ensure that freelancing arms dealers didn’t get in the way of the Turkish, Saudi, and Qatari arms pipeline to the Syrian rebels. It was a high-wire act. And through all of it he performed without a safety net and no backup from Washington.

If that wasn’t enough, things were about to get very messy.

THE FISHING BOAT

On August 25, 2012, a Libyan fishing boat,
Al Entisar
(Victory), docked in the southern Turkish port of Iskenderun, where Libyan Islamists unloaded more than 400 tons of weapons and “humanitarian supplies” that they had brought from Benghazi, ostensibly to help refugees from the Syrian conflict. They had acquired the weapons from stockpiles leftover from the fight against Qaddafi following an appeal by fellow Islamists in Syria to help their struggle. It was the Libyan version of a charity drive.

The arrival of so many weapons and much-needed supplies created havoc between Islamist brigades close to the Muslim Brotherhood, who claimed to have paid for the goods, and representatives of the Free Syrian Army, who tried to commandeer the weapons for their own use. “Everyone wanted a piece of the ship,” said Suleiman Hawari, an Australian-Syrian working with the ship’s captain from Benghazi. “Certain groups wanted to get involved and claim the cargo for themselves. It took a long time to work through the logistics.”

The infighting among rival rebel commanders reached a fever pitch and caught the attention of the Turkish authorities and their allies. As the rebels argued over who would get what, word leaked out and reporters began nosing around.
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The official recipient of the Benghazi aid package was the IHH Humanitarian Relief Foundation, the Turkish Islamist group that sponsored the infamous Gaza flotilla, where Mahdi al-Harati was wounded in 2010. The sender was an unknown organization in Benghazi, according to a UN report. On the surface, the “National Committee for the Support and Relief of Displaced People” seemed a better front than the one the Libyans used for the ill-fated shipment to the Syrian rebels in April. The same person later claimed to have organized both shipments.

“They know we are sending guns to Syria,” Abdul Basit Haroun told a Reuters reporter in Benghazi. “Everyone knows.” To illustrate his point, he had an associate take the reporter to a warehouse at the port where Haroun was stockpiling weapons for future shipments to the Syrian rebels.

Haroun had learned his lesson since the
Letfallah II
had been seized in April. This time he took a longer route and steered clear of Lebanon, where Iran’s proxy militia, Hezbollah, wielded huge influence. Haroun was no fan of the Iranians, and he knew they were nosing around Benghazi, so this time he wasn’t taking any chances.

Haroun had lived in Manchester, England, for twenty years,
before
returning to Libya to join the revolution. A commander with the 17th February Martyrs Brigade during the revolution, Haroun later formed his own brigade, the Abu Selim Martyrs Brigade, to commemorate the slaughter of political prisoners in Abu Selim prison in 1996. After the revolution, he became better known for his weapon- smuggling activities, and set up his charity with Saudi help. “After the end of the war of liberation, he became involved in supporting the Syrian revolution . . . sending aid and weapons to the Syrian people,” said assembly member Tawfiq al-Shehabi. “He does a good job of supporting the Syrian revolution.”

Haroun was also well connected to the most radical and powerful players in the new Libya, who actively supported his arms smuggling activities. Key among them was the al-Salabi brothers.

Ismail al-Salabi had been a member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group who cut his teeth in Abu Selim prison and became a founding member of the 17th February Martyrs Brigade, the militia that ostensibly was providing security to the U.S. Special Mission Compound in Benghazi. His brother, Sheikh Ali al-Salabi, was the spiritual guide of the Libyan branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. Both were seen as
Qatari
protégés. Sheikh al-Salibi joined forces with Abdelhakim Belhaj in late 2011 to form the al-Watan party in hopes of winning election to the future Libyan National Assembly. Belhaj reportedly helped organize Haroun’s weapons transfers to the Syrian rebels.
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Haroun liked to put a positive spin on his gun-running activities. “We are doing two great things,” he told Reuters. “The first is that we are taking guns off the street. The mission is so popular that we get 50 percent discounts on weapons.” The second was helping the Syrian people. “Anyone who saw what I did in Syria would do the same thing,” his unnamed associate added. “The water is so polluted you wouldn’t even wash your hands with it. People have no clothes. I saw three births with no doctors present. People are dying without medication.”

Once his weapons were unloaded in Turkey, Haroun acknowledged that he had “no control over which groups received the weapons.”
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In a separate interview with
Foreign Policy
, the forty-three-year-old unnamed rebel commander in charge of organizing the shipments (undoubtedly Haroun) lamented the lack of international support for the Syrian rebels and boasted that the
Entisar
shipment had included 120 SA-7 MANPADS. “[T]he revolution in Syria seems to have been abandoned by the world. So [in early 2012] we decided to help and send weapons.”
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The United Nations Experts Panel on the Libyan arms embargo was quicker on the uptake than they had been when Haroun’s previous shipment was seized (then mostly disappeared) in Lebanon. They called the Turkish government as soon as they learned about the arrival of the
Al Entisar
in Iskenderun, and were shown an apparently phony cargo manifest. “The Panel . . . was informed that, since the boat was carrying humanitarian cargo, in the absence of any reasonable ground to suspect otherwise, no inspection was conducted by the port authorities.”
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So much for the vast intrusive powers of the UN. Haroun and his associate, who ran the aid organization in Benghazi, happily told Reuters that the “weapons [were] hidden among about 460 metric tons of aid destined for Syrian refugees.”

THE CLEANER

On September 2, CIA Director David Petreaus made an unannounced trip to Ankara to straighten out the mess. The United States was backing the Free Syrian Army but had been stingy with direct weapons shipments, preferring to allow Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the UAE, and, especially, Qatar do the heavy lifting, with help from fellow Islamists in Turkey. These U.S. proxies had chosen to supply the hard-core Islamist brigades, including the infamous Jabhat al-Nusra, which sought to replace Assad with an Islamic state and declare Sharia law as the national constitution.

Petraeus was particularly worried by reports that the shipment on board the
Entisar
included MANPADS looted from Qaddafi’s vast arsenal, which the United States was increasingly desperate to collect. Although President Obama’s counterterrorism advisor John Brennan assured Petraeus they had the situation under control, the CIA director was mindful of the information provided by John Maguire, his old friend from Iraq, about the missile upgrades being done in Agadez by the brother of al Qaeda’s number two. Petraeus trusted Maguire and was taken aback by the vehemence of Brennan’s insistence that he steer clear of the Agadez operation.

In Iskenderun, the Libyans were boasting to journalists that they were going to be the kingmakers in Syria and would use the missiles to shoot down more Syrian Air Force jets and helicopters.

Hillary Clinton was just as worried as Petraeus, since she also had been a big supporter of the secret arms pipeline to the Libyan rebels that helped them get rid of Qaddafi. Among those weapons, as I revealed in chapter 5, were four hundred Stingers and fifty launchers, delivered by a Qatar Special Forces convoy through Chad. These were a more modern version of the deadly missiles the Reagan administration supplied to the Afghan mujahideen that helped them to defeat the Soviet army in the late 1980s.

If word got out that MANPADS were on the loose in Syria and that the United States had done nothing to stop them, it would unleash an international political firestorm. The Turks, for starters, were already hopping mad after one of their F-4 fighter-bombers had been hit by a surface-to-air missile off the Syrian coast in June. They were afraid that if the Syrian rebels got MANPADS, sooner or later the missiles would fall into the hands of the Kurds, who would give them to the PKK, the Kurdish terrorist group that had been locked in a deadly war with the Turkish government for more than twenty-five years.

The Libyans were just too chaotic, too disorganized, and too damn talkative. Someone had to get them back on the reservation. The man who knew the militias and tribal elders in Benghazi best was not a spy, but a diplomat: U.S. Ambassador to Libya J. Christopher Stevens.

Stevens knew Belhaj, the al-Salabi brothers, and most of the 17th February commanders personally. He had broken bread with them as the State Department’s special envoy to Benghazi in the heady days of the anti-Qaddafi uprising in 2011. And, more recently, he had been trying to entice them to turn over their weapons, as the State Department itself acknowledged. Maguire thought of him as an ambassador of the old school. “He was like John Negroponte or Tom Pickering—the type of ambassador who understands what the Agency brings to the table and how to use it to advance the strategic goals of the United States.”
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It is also quite likely that Stevens knew Haroun personally. At the very least, Haroun knew
him
since he was named as one of the three Libyan officials who confirmed Stevens’ death in the initial Associated Press obituary, which appeared on September 12, 2012. The AP identified the arms dealer as “Benghazi security chief, Abdel Basit Haroun.”
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Both CIA and State had a track record of calling on Stevens’ services as a cleaner. In the summer of 2011, as the revolution was still facing tough resistance from Qaddafi’s forces, they called on him in Benghazi to spearhead an effort to secure the MANPADS left behind by the Qaddafi regime. They sent him U.S. Army Colonel Mark Adams from the State Department’s special “MANPADS Task Force” to coordinate the cleanup effort on the ground. Although the State Department touted Colonel Adams’ efforts early on, and even allowed him to appear in public, they have now closeted him away from reporters. When I contacted him in the course of writing this book, he insisted that his remarks be cleared by a State Department flack, who, after multiple emails and phone calls, declined to make Adams available.
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Petraeus and Clinton wanted Stevens to leverage his close relationship with the former rebel military leaders to get the MANPADS back or, at the very least, to prevent any further shipments. They wanted him in Benghazi. As of yesterday.

In his personal diary for September 9, 2012, just before departing for Benghazi, Stevens noted: “Stressful day. Too many things going on, everyone wants to bend my ear. Need to pull above the fray.”
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HILLARY’S PHOTO OP

The official reason Stevens went to Benghazi was to certify that the Special Mission Compound could be opened as an official U.S. Consulate before September 30, the end of the fiscal year.

According to his deputy, Greg Hicks, he went there on direct orders from Secretary of State Clinton. “Chris told me that in his exit interview with the secretary after he was sworn in, the secretary said we need to make Benghazi a permanent post. And Chris said I will make it happen,” Hicks told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
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Clinton planned to travel to Benghazi that autumn, just before the U.S. presidential elections, on a victory tour to tout the achievements of her four years as secretary of state. She wanted to announce the opening of the new consulate in the birthplace of the Libyan revolution during that trip.

However, as the security situation deteriorated, with no reinforcements from State, Stevens put Benghazi on the back burner. “[
T]he
Ambassador had not indicated any sort of desire to travel to Benghazi,” said Eric Nordstrom, his chief security officer until late July. He vaguely mentioned that he might get out there sometime in October, once the security situation had been resolved.

The push to move up the visit to Benghazi was not the ambassador’s decision, as the ARB report tried to suggest. It came from assistant for Near Eastern affairs Beth Jones, who was acting on Clinton’s orders. She sent instructions for Stevens to certify that Benghazi could be converted into a “permanent constituent post” by September 30, because her bureau had funds leftover from Iraq that could be used for Benghazi. The funds “had to be obligated by September thirtieth,” Hicks testified. Jones insisted that Stevens get to Benghazi as soon as possible so that they could fund the new consulate without having to go through the more complicated annual budgetary process, which involved congressional review.
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Given all the “negative” reporting about security in Benghazi, Congress might insist that they build a new facility to the Inman standards, as required by law, rather than just upgrade the existing villa compound. With money scarce, Secretary Clinton preferred spending new funds on other pet projects, such as funding abortion clinics in the Third World. Congressional attention to Benghazi might also reveal the ongoing screw-up of the missing MANPADS, another “success story” touted by the administration that had gone badly wrong.

As they started to start planning the trip in late August, just before Stevens left for Europe, Nordstrom’s replacement tried to slam on the brakes. “Regional Security Officer John Martinec raised serious concerns about his travel. Because of those concerns, the ambassador adjusted his plans for that trip,” Hicks said. “First, he agreed that he would go in a low-profile way, that his trip would not be announced in advance. . . . And second, he eventually decided also to shorten his trip.”
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