The Great War of Our Time: The CIA's Fight Against Terrorism--From Al Qa'ida to ISIS (29 page)

The initial intelligence reporting on what had transpired in Benghazi was understandably limited. The analysts’ job was to tell the president and his national security team what they thought based on the information they had at that moment. Intelligence analysts do not have the luxury of waiting for all-knowing clarity. That is just not how the process works.

While I was flying home from Amman (I was on a trip to see our partners in the Middle East and not involved in any way with the initial production of the Benghazi analysis), the analysts were completing their first full report on what had happened, a piece that would be published and shown to senior policy-makers and to Congress on the morning of September 13.

A short item was published in the early-morning hours of September 12, but it was largely a summary of the few facts we had in
the immediate aftermath of the attacks. That update contained a crucial error that would come back to haunt us. In a single sentence, the September 12 item characterized the attack as an organized military assault. When this characterization was not included in the piece the next day (the thirteenth), many critics saw the change as evidence that the intelligence community was politicizing the analysis. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The real story behind the September 12 report involves nothing nearly as nefarious as changing analysis for political purposes. What really happened is that the critical sentence was not written by the analysts. It was added after the analysts had finished their work and gone home for the night. It was written by a senior CIA editor with expertise in military matters but no expertise in Libya or what had just happened in Benghazi. This editor added the sentence because she thought the early-morning update on the twelfth needed a bottom line. She never showed the sentence to the analysts; had she done so, they would have removed it. When the analysts came in the next morning, they complained vehemently about the edit. This is how a simple bureaucratic screw-up became fodder for allegations of a political cover-up.

The September 13 piece—the first piece to go beyond a simple factual update—said four things. First, that the assault on the TMF had been a spontaneous event that evolved from a protest outside the TMF. Second, that the protest and subsequent attack had been motivated by what had happened in Cairo earlier in the day (there was no mention in the piece of the YouTube video defaming the Prophet Muhammad). Third, that there was evidence of extremist involvement in the attack, and by “extremists” the analysts absolutely meant terrorist involvement, because
extremist
and
terrorist
are synonyms to terrorism analysts. Indeed, the piece reported that people with ties to al Qa‘ida had been involved in the attack. The bottom line here is important: the analysts thought Benghazi
was terrorism from the beginning. And whether or not the assault evolved from a protest, it was still very much a terrorist attack. Fourth and finally, the September 13 piece said that there was no evidence of significant planning on the part of those responsible—not days, weeks, or months ahead of time. Hours perhaps—but no longer than that.

The analysts came to these conclusions on their own—with no interference from the White House, the State Department, or the CIA leadership, including me. In fact, all of these judgments were coordinated across the intelligence community, making them IC judgments, not just CIA ones (so if there was a conspiracy, it was a big one, involving multiple analysts and agencies). Contrary to statements by the media and a few senators, I played no role in the judgment that there had been a protest.

It is important to note that the analysts’ view was fully supported by my boss, Director Petraeus. At an NSC principals meeting the day after the attack, Petraeus outlined the analysts’ view that the attack had evolved spontaneously from a protest. Some of the principals, including Defense Secretary Panetta, pushed back, arguing that demonstrators do not show up at a protest with weapons. Petraeus defended the analysts’ work, arguing that there were so many weapons in Libya that the analysts’ judgment was indeed quite plausible.

It is true that, after all the relevant information became available, the protest judgment turned out to be inaccurate. It turned out that there had been no protest immediately outside the TMF—although some in the intelligence community believe that there was a protest nearby, and others believe that the gathering of the attackers outside the TMF just before the assault could have been interpreted by some on the scene as a protest. But the other initial judgments of the analysts have held up over time.

And the analysts did not just make up the judgment about the
protest. Two things led them to that conclusion. First, a dozen or so reports—both intelligence reporting and press reporting—said there had been a protest ongoing at the time of the attack. And second, not a single piece of information in the analysts’
possession
at the time they wrote the piece that was published on September 13 said there had
not
been a protest.

CIA’s analysts have been criticized for not reaching out to the officers who were on the ground that night at the TMF and asking them what happened, asking them if there had been a protest. But that is simply not how intelligence analysts operate. They are analysts, not investigators. They wait for information to come to them; they do not go out and gather it. Additionally, the FBI had just opened an investigation into the deaths of the four Americans, and the Bureau would have been extremely concerned if CIA officers had interviewed the witnesses to a crime before the Bureau did.

I do think that the analysts can be criticized—and therefore the Agency and I can be criticized—for not pushing those in the field harder for more and better information faster. For example, it took the FBI a number of days to write and disseminate intelligence reports from its interviews of the eyewitnesses. We should have pushed hard to get those reports much earlier.

On Friday morning, September 14, my boss David Petraeus led a team to Capitol Hill to brief the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI). He had done a similar briefing the day before at the Senate Intelligence Committee. The talking points that had been prepared for him for these two briefings paralleled what the analysts had written on the thirteenth.

I didn’t accompany the director to the HPSCI, and learned what had transpired only late that afternoon. As I was standing in the director’s conference room between two regular but important meetings—the director’s thrice-weekly update on counterterrorism
and his weekly update on Syria—Director Petraeus’s chief of staff handed me a copy of talking points on Benghazi.

He said he was concerned that I was not yet aware of an important issue and that I needed to be brought into the loop—that at the morning HPSCI briefing, the ranking member of the committee, Representative C. A. “Dutch” Ruppersberger, had asked for unclassified talking points that he and others might use that coming weekend should they be asked by the media about the attacks in Benghazi. He added that Director Petraeus had agreed to the request and that a draft of the points was already circulating both inside and outside CIA. He said, “These are the talking points as they now stand.”

I learned later that the talking points had been drafted by the head of the Counterterrorism Center’s Office of Terrorism Analysis (D/OTA), who had been with Petraeus on the Hill. She had produced a draft quickly after returning to headquarters. She had coordinated this draft with substantive experts on both the analytic and operational sides of the Agency and, because of the issues associated with speaking publicly about an ongoing FBI investigation, with attorneys from our Office of General Counsel.

After she made changes that were suggested by substantive experts and by the Office of General Counsel, the D/OTA sent the draft of the talking points to CIA’s Office of Congressional Affairs (OCA), which then took the unusual step of holding a coordination session with officers from CIA’s Office of Public Affairs (OPA). No substantive experts were involved in this process.

This was a significant mistake. The OCA and OPA staffers went well beyond their expertise and responsibilities in editing the points. The officers in these two staffs made a number of changes to the draft, including changing
attacks
to
demonstrations
in the first sentence of the D/OTA draft, which had originally read “The attacks
in Benghazi were spontaneously inspired by the protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and evolved into a direct assault against the U.S. Consulate.…” Participants in the editing session say they do not have a clear recollection as to why they made this change, but some have said that they believed the sentence to be illogical as written: saying that “attacks” evolved into an “assault” does not make sense, because
attack
and
assault
are synonymous. In my view, the most important point here is that the concept of an attack/assault still existed in the first sentence even after this change. Again, contrary to some media and Congressional allegations, I did not make this change. In fact, it occurred before I was even aware that the talking points had been requested.

The group of Public Affairs and Congressional Affairs officials also deleted the phrase “with ties to al Qa‘ida.” They say they did so to ensure that they would not compromise the FBI investigation by prematurely attributing responsibility for the attacks to any one person or group. They had reason to be concerned about this. One of the internal CIA e-mails sent that day came from our general counsel, Stephen Preston. It said, “Folks, I know there is a hurry to get this out but we need to hold it long enough to ascertain whether providing it conflicts with express instructions from NSS/DOJ/FBI that, in light of the criminal investigation, we are not to generate statements as to who did this etc., even internally not to mention for public release.” Again, this change took place before I was aware that the talking points had been requested, which, of course, undercuts yet another of the claims about me—that I was the one to remove the reference to al Qa‘ida from the talking points. I did not do so.

I do believe that the removal of the “with ties to al Qa‘ida” language was a mistake. It did not attribute responsibility to a particular group or particular individuals in a way that would have put the FBI investigation at risk. Those words would have made the talking points better.

The OCA/OPA version was then shown to Director Petraeus, who asked for a significant addition. The director asked that language be added regarding CIA’s assessments starting months earlier regarding the deteriorating security situation in eastern Libya, as well as the warnings sent out just days before the 9/11 anniversary. Having made these changes, the Office of Public Affairs circulated the draft talking points to its counterparts around government—the State Department, NSC, FBI, National Counterterrorism Center, and others. More changes were suggested.

This was another mistake on the part of the OCA and OPA. They had no business taking the lead in coordinating the points with the rest of the government. The substantive experts in the Office of Terrorism Analysis should have been the lead. Those experts did not even realize their points were circulating among the other national security agencies.

One of the most significant changes suggested at this point was proposed by the FBI, which requested that the phrase “We do know Islamic extremists participated in the violent demonstrations” be amended to “there are indications that Islamic extremists participated in the violent demonstrations.” The FBI did not want the talking points to be so definitive in describing the perpetrators, since the investigation was just getting under way. Finally, the State Department wanted to remove an entire sentence that linked the Islamic extremist group Ansar al-Sharia to the attack—because, it reasoned, the only unclassified evidence we had that they were involved was an initial public claim by Ansar al-Sharia taking credit for the attack that had been quickly retracted by the group. All our other evidence indicating the group’s involvement was still classified at that time.

All of this occurred before I first learned of and read a draft of the talking points on that Friday afternoon standing in the director’s conference room. As I skimmed the talking points, with the director’s
chief of staff standing there, one thing leaped out at me—the inclusion of the prior-warning language. While they were factually accurate, I thought that including those sentences was ill-advised and I made my views clear to the chief of staff. To begin with, the request had been to give members of Congress language they could use to describe what had happened on September 11, 2012. What CIA had done in the months, weeks, and days leading up to the attack was simply not relevant to the request. More important, I saw the language as an attempt by the Agency to thump its chest, to say, “We did our job,” and to deflect any blame from CIA to elsewhere. I thought we would pay a price for this in the relationships that make up the interagency process in Washington. Contrary to what some of the critics have said, I did not take this position to protect the State Department. I did so to protect the Central Intelligence Agency. And I made this decision well before I even knew that the State Department did not like the warning language—in direct contradiction to what several members of the House Intelligence Committee have implied in questioning my integrity in an “Additional Views” section of its report, released in late 2014.

While he never said a word as I vented about the warning language, the chief of staff’s body language suggested to me that he agreed. In fact, I believe that this is why he’d brought the talking points to my attention in the first place. I believe he thought that I would react exactly the way I did.

In addition to protecting the Agency, I also believed it was unfair to the State Department for us to say that we had warned them, without giving the department an opportunity to say what it had or had not done with those warnings. There would be plenty of time for that discussion to take place. Months later it would become clear that the State Department had not taken adequate steps to protect itself in light of our warnings in the months and weeks leading up to the 9/11 anniversary, but during that second week of September
CIA had no way to know that, and I believed it would be unfair to suggest it simply to protect ourselves.