Dark Forces: The Truth About What Happened in Benghazi (34 page)

Ty Woods didn’t ask a fourth time. He just said, screw it, and took off. By the time they rolled out of the Annex gate, it was 10:07 PM.

The CIA later issued a formal statement denying that anyone at the agency had ever given a “stand down” order. The chief of base was merely trying to assemble a more potent response team, especially the gun trucks. He was also worried that once Ty and the other GRS operators departed, there would be no one left to defend the Annex except the four case officers and ten analysts left behind.
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But if Ty Woods and his teammates had been allowed to depart when they were initially ready to roll, the odds are good that they could have saved the ambassador and Sean Smith. He knew it then. We know it now.

FIRE!

The brief calm that ensued once the intruders gave up their attempt to break through the steel grille protecting the safe haven soon gave way to a sense of dread and foreboding. The lights went off, then Scott Wickland, Ambassador Stevens, and Sean Smith heard the ominous
whoosh!
as someone set a match or a lighter to the diesel-fuel-soaked furniture in the residence.

It was around 10:05 PM.

Within minutes, thick noxious fumes began pouring through the bars of the security grille, and Wickland said they had to move. He led the ambassador and Sean Smith on all fours in the darkness into the bathroom, since it had an exterior window. Once they got inside, they tried to seal off the door with wet towels to keep out the thick smoke. As it became more difficult to breathe, Wickland mistakenly decided to open the window, thinking he could ventilate the noxious fumes. Instead, the open window created a vacuum effect that drew more smoke inside.

Wickland “determined they could no longer stay in the safe area and yelled to the others, whom he could no longer see, to follow him to an adjacent bedroom, where there was an egress window,” the ARB report states.

The smoke by this point was so thick that Wickland resorted to “banging on the floor” to guide the ambassador and Sean Smith to his position. He eventually reached the specially designed emergency exit window, which was protected by an exterior grille to forestall intruders but had a latch on the inside that released both the window glass and the steel grille. When he forced himself through the open window, he collapsed on a small patio that was shielded from the attackers by a wall of sandbags, thankfully erected during an earlier visit by one of the MSD teams. The intruders were firing their AK-47s in wild bursts in all directions. Bullets were impacting all around him, and cement chips were flying. But he couldn’t tell for sure if they were actually aiming at him.

Then he realized that neither the ambassador nor Sean Smith had followed him out the window.

Wickland could hardly breathe, let alone talk. His face was blackened, and he was gagging from the smoke. As Greg Hicks later testified, petroleum-based fires give off large amounts of hydrogen cyanide gas, especially in the initial stages, so he was lucky to be alive. But he went back inside several times trying to find his protectees, until the heat and the smoke forced him to exit again.
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Finally, after several attempts, he realized he was too weak to go back in. The villa had become a death trap, so he climbed a ladder positioned near the emergency exit window and climbed to the roof, where he radioed to Henderson in the TOC for assistance. With all the smoke and noxious fumes he had inhaled, his voice was unrecognizable. It took several attempts to croak out his status before Henderson and Ubben understood what he was saying.

The ambassador and Sean Smith were missing.

THE POSSE ARRIVES

David Ubben decided to make a move. Grabbing smoke grenades from the armory in the TOC, he cracked open the metal reinforced door, tossed a grenade outside to obscure his position, and then made a run for the DS barracks just across the way. He had radioed ahead of time, so the two agents who had accompanied Stevens from Tripoli were waiting to let him in.

The ARB report claims that the three of them jumped into one of the armored Toyota Land Cruisers parked outside, crossed the north-south alleyway, and drove the hundred feet or so of the lateral driveway to the residential villa, where they joined Wickland. But when the surviving GRS agents were finally allowed to talk to members of the House Intelligence Committee in November 2013—more than a year after the attacks—they insisted they had found the two agents from Tripoli barricaded in their barracks, barefoot and unarmed.

Ubben was shocked to find Scott Wickland in such a state on the roof. He was vomiting and gasping for breath. Nevertheless, he pointed to the window down below that led to the safe haven, so Ubben climbed down the ladder and himself entered the burning villa five, six, seven times, or more in search of the ambassador and Sean Smith.

By this point, the first wave of attackers began to leave the compound, having accomplished their goal. There was no way that the ambassador could have survived the fire.

Ty Woods and his men were driving lights out, at breakneck speed along the Fourth Ring Road along the south side of the compound, and turned right onto the main road heading north. As they tried to turn right again, hoping to reach the front gates, they were stopped by militiamen from the 17th February Martyrs Brigade—the same unit that was supposed to be protecting the compound and providing a quick reaction force in case of attack.

Instead of protecting the Americans inside the compound, they blocked the Americans who had come to rescue them. The ARB report tried to paper over the interference, saying that Woods and the GRS team had voluntarily stopped in an attempt “to convince militia members there to assist.”

Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Charlene Lamb introduced the fiction in her sworn testimony before the House Oversight and Governmental Affairs Committee on October 10, 2012, just one day after her colleagues had briefed the press (but not Congress) on background. She claimed the Annex fighters “arrived [at the diplomatic compound] with approximately 40 members of the Libyan 17th February Brigade.” In other words, the State Department security procedures that relied on the local militia were working.

That simply was not true. After extended palavers, reportedly including glasses of tea, all Ty Woods and his men could scare up were three Libyan militiamen who were willing to join them—as volunteers. On the excuse that Ambassador Stevens had not yet finalized their new contract, the militiamen weren’t budging.
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The delay had stretched out the five-minute drive from the Annex to the diplomatic compound to nearly twenty minutes. When they finally roared onto the gravel road along the front side of the compound at 10:25 PM, they nearly drove into a crowd of men milling around outside. As soon as the militiamen realized who they were, they opened fire. According to the timeline provided by the CIA, it took nearly fifteen minutes for three of the GRS men to fight their way into the compound from the front. At the same time, three others entered on foot from the gates at the rear of the compound to reconnoiter the situation.

By the time Ty Woods and his team reached Villa C and found Wickland and Ubben on the roof, it was 10:40 PM. The fire had died down, but smoke was continuing to pour out of the smoldering building. In addition to his twenty years as a sniper with the Navy SEALs, Woods was trained as an 18-Delta combat medic, and began immediate emergency treatment on the two DS agents for smoke inhalation.

The GRS operators decided to split up into three teams, two men each. Ty’s teammate made repeated trips back into the safe haven, and eventually found Sean Smith and brought him out. Most accounts, including the ARB report, say he was already dead. However, an early rendering by former Special Forces operators Jack Murphy and Brandon Webb says that Smith “was unconscious and would later be declared dead.”

A second two-man team set up a sniper’s position on the roof, protected by sandbags; one shooter, one spotter. Two others went to evacuate Alec Henderson from the TOC and the other two DS agents from the barracks. According to former DS agent Fred Burton, this gave Henderson enough time “to secure weapons and equipment, including the firearms of the British specialists, and make sure that the laptops were destroyed and any sensitive material on them would be impossible to retrieve.” Much of the destruction was done “old-school,” using a hammer to smash the hard drives.

There was no question anymore but that they were evacuating Benghazi. Leaving for good, shutting down.

At around 10:45 PM, fresh crowds of jihadis began gathering at the rear gate, Charlie-3, along the Fourth Ring Road. They now started to advance on Villa C. From the roof, the spotter pointed them out and the shooter picked them off with two-tap shots to the head. After a number of the attackers went down, they fell back to regroup. The brief respite was enough for the two men who had gone to retrieve the DS agents to rejoin the GRS team and the three 17th February militiamen at the main villa. They all took turns crawling back into the smoldering villa to find the ambassador.

Henderson tried to go in through the front door of the villa, but no sooner had he reached the main room than the ceiling collapsed. Above, the roof was getting hotter beneath the GRS snipers. It was only a matter of time before it burned through or melted. They could see crowds of jihadis moving through the vineyard and the guava trees near the rear of the compound, and more of them milling near the front gates. They knew they had to evacuate. But they still hadn’t found the ambassador.

By around 11 PM, the jihadis had regrouped and launched a second wave of attacks. This time, all the Americans were in one location—Villa C—and made for a formidable force: six GRS shooters, five DS agents, plus the three Libyan militiamen. They had better training and more discipline than the attackers, who had been joined by wannabes and adventure seekers from around town. The attackers approached through the orchard to the south, where the GRS snipers picked them off one by one at a distance of around four hundred feet. Others tried to reach the villa from the main gate to the north, fewer than two hundred feet away. They were well within range of the DS agents and their M-4 carbines and the GRS shooters with their HK 416s and the M-249 Minimi light machine gun. The Americans had the advantage of shooting from behind sandbags. Those sandbags saved their lives.

THE WHITE HOUSE MEETING

Rear Admiral Richard Landolt, the AFRICOM J-3 (director of operations), was the man on duty station that night at Kelley Barracks in the Stuttgart, Germany, headquarters of U.S. Africa Command. “I took the call at 9:42 PM and ran down to my man cave with all the classified equipment,” he told me. “After I spoke to our Ops Center, I immediately Tandberged with General Ham in the Pentagon.” The Tandberg was a secure video-teleconference (VTC) system widely used by the military and by the national command structure. “I spoke to him again about three times over the next thirty minutes.”

Stuttgart was on the same time as Benghazi in mid-September, and both were six hours ahead of Washington, D.C.

RADM Landolt’s next call was to his immediate boss, AFRICOM deputy commander for military operations Vice Admiral Charles J. “Joe” Leidig. “He decided we needed to set up a command center right now, so we did.”

The problem was that AFRICOM had no assigned forces. “We were due to get our own [Commander’s In-Extremis Force] on October 1, but without any enablers,” Landolt said. That was the same CIF that was in Croatia on September 11, 2012, on an exercise. Before requesting that the CIF deploy, they needed more information. So, at 9:59 PM, as soon as he got off the Tandberg with General Ham, Landolt gave orders to the Predator drone then loitering over suspected terrorist camps in Derna, redirecting it to Benghazi.
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At the Pentagon, visiting AFRICOM commander General Carter Ham sprang into action. “My first call was to General Dempsey—General Dempsey’s office to say, hey, I am headed down the hall. I need to see him right away.”

General Ham briefed the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—the highest military leader in the nation, and the president’s top military advisor—on what he knew. “We immediately walked upstairs to meet with Secretary Panetta,” Ham recalled.
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In that initial briefing with Panetta, Ham said, there was no discussion of a demonstration. “It became pretty apparent to me, and I think to most at Africa Command pretty shortly after this attack began, that this was an attack,” Ham recalled. As reports began to stream in through intelligence channels and the National Military Command Center, “we started very quickly to think about, you know, the possibility of a U.S. Ambassador being held hostage in a foreign land and what does that mean,” Ham said.
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It was now approximately 4:40 PM in Washington, D.C. Equipped with that knowledge, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and General Dempsey rushed downstairs to a waiting convoy of armored SUVs, waiting to take them to a previously scheduled five o’clock meeting with President Obama.

While they were briefing the president in the Oval Office on what they knew about the attacks, they received word that the unarmed Predator drone that RADM Landolt had diverted from its original mission over Derna had arrived on station over the Special Mission Compound in Benghazi. It was equipped with a complete surveillance package, including a night vision optical suite.

It was now 5:10 PM in Washington, 11:10 PM in Benghazi. From that moment on, Washington had eyes on the compound. The video uplink went to the Pentagon and to numerous operational headquarters in the United States and around the globe, and was immediately accessible to the White House Situation Room.

Nobody at senior echelons of the U.S. government could pretend from that moment on that they were unaware of the extreme violence of the events taking place on the ground.

Although the drone launched from Sigonella Naval Air Station in Sicily, fewer than five hundred miles (and a one-hour flight) from Benghazi, it was being piloted by remote operators at a base in the United States. A man claiming to be the camera operator on the drone called into the
Sean Hannity Show
in May 2013 and gave listeners a glimpse of what the decision makers were seeing. “There were dozens if not hundreds of people surrounding the [compound],” he said. He said the buildings were “already on fire” when the drone came on line. Although the fire partially blinded the cameras, which were in infrared mode, he could see people and cars constantly stopping, apparently bringing up reinforcements. And he could see muzzle flashes just about everywhere. “It was already under attack,” he said.
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