Dark Forces: The Truth About What Happened in Benghazi (41 page)

CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson, who knew Petraeus fairly well, also believed he had been fired over Benghazi. “You’d have to be brain dead not to wonder,” she said.
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If the White House knew about the FBI investigation and felt it was so damaging, why didn’t they force Petraeus to resign earlier? The answer is obvious: because then the press would have begun to dig, and the whole Benghazi cover story, which the president felt was critical to his reelection campaign, would have started unraveling.

When Congress did begin digging deeper, they sought access to Petraeus’s after-action report, based on the secret trip he made to Libya to debrief the chief of station and the chief of base in Benghazi, but the CIA “flatly refused” to make it available. Senator Richard Burr (
R-NC
) asked former White House counterterrorism chief John Brennan in February 2013 if he would pledge to provide all relevant documents to the intelligence committee as the new CIA director. Brennan said he would try to “reach an accommodation” with the committee, but would not commit to full cooperation. “[O
]ur
Founding Fathers did sort of separate the branches of government: judicial, legislative, and executive. And so I want to be mindful of that separation, but at the same time, meet your legitimate interests,” he said.
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With Brennan now at CIA, in charge of the cover-up, Congress became increasingly frustrated and sought to interview the CIA case officers, analysts, and GRS operators at the Annex. Several congressional committees were involved in this effort. Some wanted to get a more complete picture of the attack itself. But others started to investigate what the Annex was actually tasked to do.

Almost immediately, they ran into another brick wall. The CIA officers told them they were being required to take repeated polygraphs to determine if they were speaking to the press or to Congress. Some accounts said they were getting polygraphed monthly. The contractors said they were forced to sign a special nondisclosure agreement (NDA) in addition to the blanket form they had signed earlier when accepting employment with the Global Response Staff.

“A CIA polygraph in itself is a daunting experience,” former CIA polygrapher Kevin Shipp told me. “If it’s given once a month, that is intimidation. I never saw that frequency given to CIA employees ever, not once. If the polygraph is used for intimidation, it’s illegal.”

The same goes for the nondisclosure agreements. “I’ve issued thousands of them,” Shipp said. “They are a very powerful tool because they stipulate criminal penalties for unauthorized disclosures. So the people who sign them are not just afraid for their careers, but afraid of going to jail.” He added that it was highly unusual to make contractors sign a second one, regardless of whether they were leaving CIA employment. “It just never happens.” The fact that some of the GRS contractors are still with the agency made it even more unusual.
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John Brennan asserted publicly there were no polygraphs, no pressure, no NDAs, and that he was actually encouraging CIA employees to tell their stories. But Congress wasn’t buying it. Representative Trey Gowdy (R-SC), an active member of Issa’s investigative committee, told Fox News host Greta Van Susteren that the CIA had gone to great lengths to hide the survivors, “including changing names, creating aliases.” He explained:

Stop and think what things are most calculated to get at the truth? Talk to people with first-hand knowledge. What creates the appearance and perhaps the reality of a cover-up? Not letting us talk with people who have the most amount of information, dispersing them around the country and changing their names.
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Washington, D.C., attorney Mark Zaid, who represented three members of the elite security team based at the Annex, said he had been unable to confirm that the CIA had ordered extra polygraphs for anyone involved in Benghazi. “None of my clients was polygraphed,” he told me. “But they were asked by the government to sign new secrecy agreements, which is completely unusual and out of the norm.”
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It wasn’t just Republicans who felt that they were being stonewalled and lied to. Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who chaired the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, “rolled her eyes” at the CIA flacks sent to brief the committee behind closed doors on the Annex mission statement and its activities. “Is that it? This doesn’t do anything for U.S. interests,” she said, according to a government official who was present at the briefing.

“The CIA and the State people who were briefing her were telling lies, bullsh–t lies,” the official told me. “Later, out in the hallway, they were high-fiving each other like they had put something over on her.” In the end, Senator Feinstein circled the wagons and said it was “nonsense” that Benghazi should keep Hillary from the presidency.
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However, Feinstein wouldn’t paper over the damage Benghazi and the administration’s policy of promoting the Muslim Brotherhood had done to our nation’s security. Ironically, she made that admission to Candy Crowley, the CNN anchor who so conveniently helped Obama in his foreign policy debate with Mitt Romney by “reminding” him that he had called Benghazi a “terrorist attack” the very next day, which, of course, wasn’t true.

Here is a remarkable passage from Crowley’s interview with Senator Feinstein and her Republican counterpart in the House, Representative Mike Rogers, from CNN’s
State of the Union
on December 1, 2013. Once again, it shows Crowley’s true colors.

CROWLEY:
The big question that’s always asked, are we safer now than we were a year ago, two years ago? In general?

FEINSTEIN:
I don’t think so. I think terror is up worldwide, the statistics indicate that, the fatalities are way up. The numbers are way up. There are new bombs, very big bombs, trucks being reinforced for those bombs. There are bombs that go through magnetometers. The bomb maker is still alive. There are more groups that ever and there’s huge malevolence out there.

CROWLEY:
So Congressman Rogers,
I have to say, that is not the answer I expected
[emphasis mine]. I expected to hear, oh, we’re safer. Do you agree?

ROGERS:
Oh, I absolutely agree that we’re not safer today for the same very reasons.
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NO ACCOUNTABILITY FOR HILLARY

Hillary Clinton gave several closed-door briefings to members of Congress in the days immediately following the attacks, but refused to appear at public hearings. She said she first wanted to see the results of the Accountability Review Board she had appointed to investigate what went wrong in Benghazi, who was responsible, and what needed to change to make sure it “never happened again.”

She appointed two old friends to co-chair the board, Ambassador Thomas Pickering and Admiral Mike Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Undersecretary of State for Management Patrick Kennedy chose the staff from among State Department loyalists. According to Kevin Maxwell, one of the four State Department employees who were recommended for sanctions by the ARB, “Admiral Mullen stated, said on three separate occasions, ‘This has to stop at the assistant secretary level.’ He said it on three separate
occasions. . . . The
‘this’ is the accountability, the process, the blame.”
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Mullen told committee staff he couldn’t remember having made that remark.

Both Mullen and Pickering acknowledged publicly that they never interviewed the one person who had statutory responsibility for the diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. In an astonishing revelation buried deep in his interview with congressional staff, Mullen stated: “We never found any evidence whatsoever that she was involved in the day-to-day security decisions with respect to Benghazi. . . .” They also exempted from blame Undersecretary Kennedy, even though he personally signed off on renting the Benghazi complex knowing that it fell far short of the department’s security requirements.
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Kennedy told the ARB that his decision was to “occupy the real estate,” and that all security decisions were the responsibility of underlings at the Bureau of Diplomatic Security. And yet, in testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Kennedy said, “We review the threat level every day.” In the case of threats against another embassy in the region (Damascus, Syria), he testified that he personally made the determination to keep the post open. But when it came to Benghazi, the ARB gave him a pass. “We did not ask him what conversations he had with the Secretary of State on Benghazi,” Ambassador Pickering said.
49

Before releasing the report to Congress and the public in early December 2012, Mullen gave it to Hillary Clinton and Cheryl Mills, her chief enforcer. Asked why he gave her a heads-up, he said, “It was her report, we were working for her.” So much for impartiality and accountability.

When Hillary’s supporters tout her record as secretary of state, they point to the number of miles she traveled (“956,733 to be exact”). They say she advanced “women’s rights” around the world (in particular, th
e
right to government-paid abortion) and knew how to party with the best of them. Photographs of Hillary knocking back a beer fro
m
the bottle in Cartagena, Colombia, or dancing in South Africa with Nelson Mandela have made headlines.

But in the end, even her supporters fret that she was a lightweight and point to “a dilemma for Mrs. Clinton in the effort to define her tenure as Secretary of State,” according to the
New York Times.
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The book you are now reading will be appearing at about the same time as a memoir Hillary will be co-authoring with two former assistants from the State Department that will portray her as a world-class diplomat and statesman. If Benghazi gets mentioned at all, she will state that she “assumed full responsibility” for the attacks, and then blame the hired help for having let her down. Fifty-one percent of Americans polled in March 2014 weren’t buying it, and said they didn’t believe her story that she “never saw requests for more security” from her own diplomats in Libya before the Benghazi attacks.
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“What difference in the end does it make?” as she famously exclaimed during her one day of testimony on the Benghazi debacle on January 23, 2013.

She sacrificed diplomats and special warriors to cover up the illegal arms walking in Benghazi, put out a fake cover story about an Internet video, then pretended indignantly that her underlings were at fault.

Benghazi revealed Hillary Clinton’s true character and showed precisely why she does not have the qualities required to become commander-in-chief.

Appendix I: Questions & Answers

It is important to dispel myths and conspiracy theories, because the facts themselves, as I have tried to demonstrate, are troubling enough.

Here are some of the main questions about Benghazi that I believe have now been answered through multiple congressional investigations, as well as my own.

ASKED AND ANSWERED

Q:
Was there a demonstration in front of the Benghazi diplomatic mission caused by an Internet video?

A:
No, there is no evidence there was a demonstration. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was informed at 6:02 PM that it was a terrorist attack, but put out an invented story about an Internet video four hours later, possibly confusing what was
happening
in Benghazi with reports from Cairo. Former Deputy CIA
Director
Mike Morell, who was instrumental in “sanitizing” the talking points to eliminate all mention of a terror attack, absurdly claimed in his public testimony before Congress on
April 2,
2014, that he and CIA analysts in Washington, D.C., gave more credence to after-the-fact press reports of a protest turned violent than to cables and emails from CIA officers on the ground in Libya. After leaving the CIA, Morell went to work for a consulting group founded and owned by Hillary Clinton protégés. His testimony was widely viewed as an unprofessional attempt at currying favor with his former political bosses.

Q:
Why did Chris Stevens go to Benghazi in the first place?

A:
According to Greg Hicks, his second in command in Tripoli, he went on orders from his principals in Washington. The ostensible reason was to allow Hillary Clinton to stage a photo op later that year when officially opening the Benghazi consulate, to showcase her success as secretary of state.

Q:
Was Stevens involved in weapons smuggling from Benghazi to the Syrian rebels?

A:
Only on the periphery. He was aware of the weapons smuggling, and may even have tried to shut down unauthorized arms shipments. My sources say that he was supporting the administration effort to buy back missing surface-to-air missiles. The State Department has refused to release Stevens’ classified cables or to make all of them available to Congress, so we don’t yet know the full extent of his involvement with weapons being smuggled from Libya to Islamist rebels in Syria.

Q:
What was the CIA Annex actually doing?

A:
During the revolution, the CIA Annex was running guns to the Libyan rebels, with authorization from the Obama White House and notification to Congress. As of June 2012, most of the clandestine staff involved in that operation left for southern Turkey and Syria. From then on, the main mission of the CIA/NSA team at the Annex was to collect intelligence on suspected terrorists, monitor their communications, and assist the MANPADS collection effort.

Q:
Did the United States ship Stingers to the Libya rebels?

A:
Not directly. The CIA used the Qatari Special Forces as a cut-out for these shipments, and later tried to buy back the missing missiles, with limited success.

Q:
Did the United States ship MANPADS from Qaddafi’s arsenal to the Syrian rebels?

A:
Unclear. But CIA officers certainly observed those shipments and were aware of them. They were informed of the “ant trade” by the UN Experts Panel on Libya and by their own sources. In some cases, they had Predator drone coverage of smugglers in the desert and did nothing to interdict them. CIA Director David Petraeus was personally informed of the MANPADS smuggling effort through Agadez (Niger) by former CIA officers. While he was still at the White House, John Brennan intervened with Petraeus’s staff to make sure that the CIA took no action against the MANPADS deliveries to jihadi groups. Why he did so is a key question that the administration has refused to address.

Q:
Were MANPADS being stockpiled at the diplomatic compound or the Annex?

A:
I have found no evidence at this point to suggest MANPADS were being stockpiled at either facility.

Q:
Was the attack a hostage-taking gone wrong?

A:
Egyptian opponents of ousted president Mohamed Morsi have alleged that Muslim Brotherhood operatives close to Morsi wanted to kidnap Ambassador Stevens and exchange him for the Blind Sheikh, serving a life prison sentence in the United States. While that may have motivated some of the individuals who took part in the attack—especially the pickup crowd, once the Quds Force team had torched the buildings—I have seen no evidence there was any serious attempt to reach Ambassador Stevens in the safe haven let alone kidnap him by
any
of the terrorists.

Q:
Who actually carried out the attacks?

A:
My investigation determined that the attacks were a military operation planned, financed, and orchestrated by the Quds Force of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps. The Iranians and a Hezbollah associate recruited and paid local terrorist brigade commanders from Ansar al-Sharia and other groups to take part in the attacks. Quds Force specialists supervised and may have personally carried out the deadly mortar attack that killed Ty Woods and Glen Doherty at the Annex.

In other words, Benghazi was a state-sponsored terrorist attack by the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Q:
Was Ambassador Stevens raped and dragged through the streets?

A:
No. Initial reports suggested that he had been sexually molested, and they were further fueled by Hillary Clinton’s false ten o’clock statement that the attack was a “demonstration” that had gotten out of hand. But a careful examination of the video of him being pulled out of the charred building, and eyewitness reports from the doctor who examined him and from others who saw the body in Libya, give no suggestion that he was sexually assaulted or otherwise abused.

Q:
Did someone in the White House issue a “stand-down” order that prevented a military response?

A:
Not in those terms. The White House did worse: The president of the United States never issued a
stand-up
order, which would have started by convening the Counterterrorism Security Group (CSG). The president never told his advisors that he was 100 percent engaged, that he was personally following the crisis, let alone leading the response. That lack of leadership accounts for most of the foot-dragging that night.

There are three notable exceptions.

•  AFRICOM turned down a request from Colonel Gibson in Tripoli to send four remaining SST special operations troops in the early morning hours of September 12 to Benghazi, judging that they were desperately needed in Tripoli as the Tripoli embassy was forced to evacuate because of terrorist threats. Military commanders interviewed by the House Armed Services Committee all concurred—as did Gibson himself—that the order was justified.

•  Hillary Clinton never gave the order to mobilize the State Department’s Foreign Emergency Support Team (FEST), which could have secured the compound and the Annex and prevented the loss of classified data.

•  The Pentagon refused to allow C-110, a fifty-man team of Special Operations troops on a training mission in Croatia, to gear up and fly immediately to Benghazi, just a few hours away, where they could have provided substantial reinforcements to the Annex before the final attack. Who ordered them to stand down remains classified information.

Q:
Could anything have been done that would have prevented the murder of Ambassador Stevens and Sean Smith?

A:
Yes. As I describe in chapter 14, if the CIA chief of base at the Annex had allowed Ty Woods and the GRS shooters to depart immediately for the compound, as they tried to do, there’s a strong likelihood they could have saved the ambassador and Sean Smith.

QUESTIONS LEFT UNANSWERED

Representative Frank Wolf represents the suburban Virginia congressional district that includes CIA headquarters. He has said publicly that he has met with CIA officers in local supermarkets who have given him information about Benghazi that conflicts with the administration’s narrative, and has lined up, at last count, 190 co-sponsors of a bill, H. Res. 36, calling on House Speaker Boehner to empanel a select committee with broad subpoena powers to definitively answer all the ambiguities of the events surrounding the Benghazi attacks.

Representative Wolf has asked a series of twelve questions, many of them political, he believes the administration needs to answer and that require a select committee. They include:

•  Why did the administration order Benghazi survivors not to talk to Congress for months on end?

•  Who in the White House knew what was going on in the CIA Annex?

•  What happened in Washington on the night of the attack and in the days to follow?

•  Which foreign consulates did Chris Stevens call for help, and how did they respond?

•  Why were Ty Woods and the GRS contractors told to “stand down” by the CIA chief of base?
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Representative Devin Nunes (R-CA), who chairs the House Permanent Select Intelligence Committee subcommittee investigating Benghazi, identified nine questions he believes need to be answered, including:

•  Why was the FEST not deployed?

•  Did the GRS operators at the Annex call for air support? If so, why was it not provided?

•  Which terrorist group “had the access and training needed to carry out” the mortar attack on the Annex?

•  A full accounting of CIA and State Department operations in Benghazi, including what foreigners they met with over the year preceding the attacks.

•  Why has the United States failed to capture or kill any of the perpetrators?

•  Were any U.S. government officials engaged in intimidating potential witnesses to prevent them from testifying to Congress?
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