by Susan Rice
Except, I miscalculated. I had picked up steam heading downhill and overestimated how far removed I was from the bushes. When I landed, I was facedown in a large, vicious cactus plant still holding the football. The needles were triangular-shaped spears, the size of a fingernail, and they were embedded in every part of me. My scalp, face, arms, legs, bottom. Everywhere.
Teo rushed over to pull me up out of the bushes, and when I was upright, blood started streaming from the scores of holes where the cactus spikes were embedded. I looked like something out of a Halloween horror movie. To his enormous credit, Teo remained calm and started pulling needles out of me. My lead DS agent rushed over to join in the uncomfortable extraction, while other agents sent for a doctor. I was bloodied and in pain but apparently not too badly hurt, as we were able to ascertain once I got the needles out of my head and face. Thankfully, the sunglasses had protected my eyes, and my legs and arms suffered the worst damage, including some scars that lingered for a couple years.
Of all the risky ventures I took while U.N. ambassador—from traveling to war zones in Iraq, Afghanistan, and South Sudan to being mobbed in Libya and trudging through the slums of Delhi, the closest DS got to having to save me was when my lead agent kindly and carefully removed cactus needles from my booty in Mexico.
16 Benghazi
By the time I arrived at my mother’s town house near Washington’s Dupont Circle, I was spent from an emotionally exhausting day. It was Friday evening, September 14, 2012—several years before my mom passed away. I walked down the dark, narrow outside steps into her modern basement kitchen and kissed her, as she sat in her normal place at the head of her small, polished wooden kitchen table watching CNN.
“How are you feeling?” I asked, mindful of Mom’s fragility just three months after she had suffered a stroke following yet another cancer surgery. While my mother had recovered significantly, she was not at her full strength. Mom said she felt okay and asked how I was faring, fully appreciating that this had been an especially tough week for me and my colleagues.
I told her, “Today, I had my weekly conference with Secretary Clinton and attended a Principals Committee meeting at the White House.” But, much more painfully, I continued, I had just accompanied President Obama, Vice President Biden, Secretary Clinton, and other cabinet officials at a ceremony where we met the grieving families and paid respects to the four Americans killed three days earlier in the September 11, 2012, terrorist attack on the U.S. diplomatic facilities in Benghazi, Libya.
In the hangar at Joint Base Andrews, we sat facing four flag-draped coffins bearing the bodies of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, foreign service officer Sean Smith, and CIA contractors Tyrone S. Woods and Glen Doherty. These brave men had made the ultimate sacrifice in service to our nation on a mission to build peace and protect American interests. The painful and powerful image of their four coffins each being loaded into four separate hearses is one I will never forget. We were all mourning. The event had left me drained and fighting flashbacks to the caskets I accompanied back to Andrews fourteen years before, following the 1998 East Africa embassy bombings.
Weakened but indomitable, Mom asked next, “What are your plans for the weekend?” I reminded her that on Saturday I had long-standing arrangements to take the kids to the Ohio State University, where I had delivered the commencement address in June, for a tailgate and football game against U.C. Berkeley. Then I added, “And on Sunday, I will be appearing on all five Sunday shows.”
Mom gave me a skeptical look.
This was only three days after the Benghazi attack, as my mother knew from following the news closely. It was a week that began with the swarming of the U.S. embassy in Cairo, and a wave of anti-American protests directed at U.S. outposts across the globe. I reminded her that it was nine days before the annual opening of the U.N. General Assembly when President Obama and scores of world leaders would gather on my turf to discuss such issues as Iran’s nuclear program, the Palestinians’ bid for statehood status, and Syria. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was ramping up his U.S. public relations campaign to pressure the Obama administration into a military confrontation with Iran. These were issues that I addressed publicly with frequency. And, I added, as she well knew, the presidential election campaign was heating up. For all these reasons, I explained, the administration had to put out a senior foreign policy official on television.
Mom immediately pressed me, “Why do you have to go on the shows? Where is Hillary?”
“I think that Hillary is wiped after a brutal week,” I said. “The White House asked me to appear in her stead and, even though this isn’t how I wanted to spend my weekend, I’m willing to do my part.”
She was unrelenting, “I smell a rat. This is not a good idea. Can’t you get out of it?” Dismissively, I replied, “Mom, don’t be ridiculous. I’ve done the shows many times before. It will be fine.”
It wasn’t.
Even as the attack in Benghazi was still ongoing, Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney had already politicized the tragedy in a statement issued on September 11. Romney blasted, “It’s disgraceful that the Obama administration’s first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks.” This cheap and misleading hit referred to a tweet issued from the U.S. embassy in Cairo about the violent demonstrations in Egypt’s capital city, not about Benghazi. But it was a leading indicator of how crazy this all would get, and it may partially explain why my mother smelled a rat.
I appeared on the September 16, 2012, Sunday shows, all five of them—ABC’s This Week, CBS’s Face the Nation, NBC’s Meet the Press, Fox News Sunday, and CNN’s State of the Union. I was asked what had happened in Benghazi on September 11, when four U.S. government officials, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, were killed in a terrorist attack on our diplomatic facilities. To explain, I shared the latest available unclassified assessment produced by the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC). These were the so-called “talking points” written by the CIA at the request of members of Congress who asked for information they could use publicly:
The currently available information suggests that the demonstrations 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. diplomatic post and subsequently its annex. There are indications that extremists participated in the violent demonstrations.
This assessment may change as additional information is collected and analyzed and currently available information continues to be evaluated.
The investigation is ongoing, and the U.S. Government is working with Libyan authorities to help bring to justice those responsible for the deaths of U.S. citizens.
Though I had no role in crafting the CIA’s talking points, I did not blindly parrot their contents. As U.N. ambassador, on a daily basis—six days a week (except Sunday)—I received and thoroughly read a classified briefing provided to me and other top officials by the Intelligence Community. The CIA plus sixteen other agencies and parts of agencies comprise the U.S. Intelligence Community, which is led and coordinated by the director of national intelligence (DNI). The personnel of the Intelligence Community consist predominantly of apolitical, career professionals who do their utmost to keep our country and the American people safe.
My daily intelligence briefing, provided to me on Saturday, the day before the shows, had been fully consistent with the talking points that I was given. Therefore, I was comfortable that what I would say on Sunday morning reflected an up-to-date assessment.
In each television appearance, I drew squarely from the unclassified talking points provided by the Intelligence Community and made clear that I was providing our government’s best current understanding of what had transpired. However, I repeatedly noted that our assessment could evolve as we gathered more information, particularly from the FBI investigation. As of early Sunday morning, September 16, when I taped the shows
, the IC’s latest assessment was that the attack on our compounds in Benghazi had evolved from demonstrations “spontaneously inspired” by the protests in Cairo into a direct assault on our Benghazi diplomatic compound. The Cairo protests were among the many instances of anti-U.S. demonstrations and violence that had erupted at several U.S. embassies across Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia that week following the widespread circulation on social media of Innocence of Muslims, a video that sparked anger in the Muslim world because it denigrated Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam.
Following the shows, I went home to change and join Ian at Maris’s soccer game, and the rest of the day unfolded uneventfully. Over the coming week, however, controversy began to brew about what I said on the Sunday shows. At first, it was an isolated trickle stoked by partisan talking heads on Fox News, which I almost never watch and always pay little heed.
Fox started pushing the narrative on September 20 that the Obama administration, in Sean Hannity’s words, was engaged in “a widespread cover-up based on flat-out lies, all aimed to protect a president who happens to be running for reelection.” Hannity pointed to my comments on Sunday as Exhibit A. The next day Fox aired an exchange that began with co-host Dana Perino saying, “She [Ambassador Rice] goes out, and she is the one who says this is all just the video, the information we have at the time. Three days later, we find out that is completely wrong. How does that happen?” Co-host Eric Bolling replied, “Honestly, Dana, looks and smells and probably is a cover-up.… Politically, it looks bad for President Obama. So they had to blame it on a movie. Anything but what it was. A terrorist attack.”
On September 25, Republican senators John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Ron Johnson, and Kelly Ayotte wrote a letter to me taking issue with my comments, alleging, “You made several troubling statements that are inconsistent with the facts and require explanation.” Following a selective and misleading parsing of my Sunday show statements, their letter concluded, “We look forward to a timely response that explains how the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations could characterize an attack on a U.S. consulate so inaccurately five days after a terrorist attack that killed four Americans.”
On September 28, Representative Peter King (R-NY) was the first to call for my scalp, telling CNN, “I believe she should resign.” He elaborated, “This was such a failure of foreign policy message and leadership, such a misstatement of facts as were known at the time.… To me somebody has to pay the price for this.” King’s bald demand shocked me. I also understood it likely foreshadowed that the hits on me would continue and intensify.
Over the coming weeks and months, my Sunday show appearances were harshly criticized by Republicans who sought to discredit President Obama’s strong record on fighting terrorism, including killing Osama bin Laden. As the senators’ letter presaged, I was attacked primarily for four reasons.
First, the president’s opponents claimed that I (and other administration officials) had tried to deny or downplay that the tragedy in Benghazi was a terrorist attack. In fact, I never suggested that the perpetrators were not terrorists or that the attack was not a terrorist attack, though I used the CIA-approved term “extremists,” which in the IC’s parlance (and mine) meant the same thing in the context of an attack. To the contrary, on CBS’s Face the Nation I made plain that we understood the perpetrators to be extremists, of a variety to be determined, as my exchange with Bob Schieffer showed:
BOB SCHIEFFER: Do you agree or disagree with him [the Libyan president] that al Qaeda had some part in this?
SUSAN RICE: Well, we’ll have to find… that out. I mean I think it’s clear that there were extremist elements that joined in and escalated the violence. Whether they were al Qaeda affiliates, whether they were Libyan-based extremists or al Qaeda itself I think is one of the things we’ll have to determine.
We later learned—once the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence investigation was complete—that the perpetrators included individuals affiliated with terrorist groups, including a Libyan-based Salafist extremist group called Ansar al-Sharia in Benghazi, and Al Qaeda branches in Africa and Yemen. The investigation did not confirm that the terrorist attack was ordered, directed, or orchestrated by Al Qaeda, as many Republicans had maintained (without firm evidence), despite the fact that it occurred on the anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Rather, the Senate Intelligence Committee found, “It remains unclear if any group or person exercised overall command and control of the attacks or whether extremist group leaders directed their members to participate.”
Second, I was harshly criticized for saying that the attack was “spontaneous” and “not premeditated,” as opposed to carefully planned well in advance. My statements were fully consistent in this regard with the CIA-drafted talking points approved by the Intelligence Community. Again, an excerpt from my discussion on Face the Nation:
BOB SCHIEFFER: Madam Ambassador, he [the Libyan president] says this is something that has been in the planning stages for months. I understand you have been saying that you think it was spontaneous? Are we not on the same page here?
SUSAN RICE: Bob, let me tell you what we understand to be the assessment at present. First of all, very importantly, as you discussed with the [Libyan] President, there is an investigation that the United States government will launch led by the FBI, that has begun and—
BOB SCHIEFFER (overlapping): But they are not there.
SUSAN RICE: They are not on the ground yet, but they have already begun looking at all sorts of evidence of—of various sorts already available to them and to us. And they will get on the ground and continue the investigation. So we’ll want to see the results of that investigation to draw any definitive conclusions. But based on the best information we have to date, what our assessment is as of the present is in fact what began spontaneously in Benghazi as a reaction to what had transpired some hours earlier in Cairo where, of course, as you know, there was a violent protest outside of our embassy—
BOB SCHIEFFER: Mm-hm.
SUSAN RICE: —sparked by this hateful video. But soon after that spontaneous protest began outside of our consulate in Benghazi, we believe that it looks like extremist elements, individuals, joined in that—in that effort with heavy weapons of the sort that are, unfortunately, readily now available in Libya postrevolution. And that it spun from there into something much, much more violent.
BOB SCHIEFFER: But you do not agree with him that this was something that had been plotted out several months ago?
SUSAN RICE: We do not—we do not have information at present that leads us to conclude that this was premeditated or preplanned.
On September 16, and for days thereafter, the U.S. Intelligence Community continued to assess that the attack was “spontaneous” and not preplanned. However, on September 28, twelve days after my Sunday show appearances, the spokesman for the director of national intelligence issued an updated assessment of the Benghazi attack that offered their latest determination that the terrorist attack had been “deliberate and organized” and that the initial assessment that I utilized had been revised:
As the Intelligence Community collects and analyzes more information related to the attack, our understanding of the event continues to evolve. In the immediate aftermath, there was information that led us to assess that the attack began spontaneously following protests earlier that day at our embassy in Cairo. We provided that initial assessment to Executive Branch officials and members of Congress, who used that information to discuss the attack publicly and provide updates as they became available. Throughout our investigation we continued to emphasize that information gathered was preliminary and evolving.
As we learned more about the attack, we revised our initial assessment to reflect new information indicating that it was a deliberate and organized terrorist attack carried out by extremists. It remains unclear if any group or person exercised overall command and control of the attack, and if extremist group leaders directed their members to parti
cipate. However, we do assess that some of those involved were linked to groups affiliated with, or sympathetic to al-Qa’ida.… As more information becomes available our analysis will continue to evolve and we will obtain a more complete understanding of the circumstances surrounding the terrorist attack.
Some weeks later, the Intelligence Community again adjusted its position, reverting back to its original conclusion, as reflected in the talking points, that the attack was “opportunistic” and did not involve any significant advance planning. The Senate Intelligence Committee investigation completed in 2014 reached the same conclusion, that the attack was “not a highly coordinated plot, but was opportunistic.”
Third, I was accused of blaming the incendiary video for the Benghazi attack rather than terrorists. That charge was widely repeated in the mainstream media and became urban legend. For instance, Reuters reported on September 16 that “The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, said on Sunday talk shows that the preliminary information indicated the [Benghazi] attack was a spontaneous reaction to the video.” On October 15, The New York Times wrote, “But in the days after the [Benghazi] attack the Obama administration’s surrogates said it grew out of a peaceful protest against the video.”
What I repeatedly said, consistent with the best information available at the time, was that we believed that what happened in Benghazi had been inspired spontaneously by events in Cairo, where the anti-Muslim video had prompted violent protests against our embassy. In other words, the video was the precipitating factor in Cairo, and events in Cairo inspired Benghazi. I did not mean that the Intelligence Community had said that the video itself was the proximate spark in Benghazi. That was not the IC assessment. My comments on ABC, where I was interrupted in midsentence, unfortunately were imprecise. But I made the point clearly on CBS with Bob Schieffer and again on NBC’s Meet the Press with David Gregory: