Under Fire

by Fred Burton

  The growing jihadist base in Benghazi was sparking both interest and fear. The British left the city after the attempt on the ambassador’s life. The International Committee of the Red Cross, the ICRC, suspended operations in Benghazi and Misrata on August 5, 2012, after a series of terror strikes on its offices in both cities; the first attack, on May 22, was perpetrated by the Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman Brigade, Red Cross officials stated, “because the group claimed that the ICRC was distributing Bibles and trying to convert Libyans to Christianity.”7

  The fundamentalist militias were growing more brazen in their attacks and in their assault on the new Libyan security apparatus. The public security directorate headquarters in Benghazi, the epicenter of all counterterrorism efforts in the city, was attacked in a dedicated strike by Salafist gunmen. The Libyan Military Intelligence headquarters was blown up in the city. Senior police and government security commanders were assassinated; some were killed as they left their homes, while others were shot in the back of the head as they prayed in city mosques.

  Libya had become an al-Qaeda-inspired, if not al-Qaeda-led, training base and battleground. One of the terrorists, a Saudi national who was killed in a large-scale jihadist raid in Sinai on June 18, 2012, that resulted in the deaths of twenty Egyptian policemen, had trained with al-Qaeda in Libya. On June 21 the Tunisian Air Force engaged and destroyed three suspected al-Qaeda vehicles believed to be transferring arms from Libya to Algeria. Al-Qaeda had obtained advanced weapons—including MANPADs, antitank rockets, and heavy cannons—that the militias had pilfered from Qaddafi’s military; more weapons and ammunition, some brand-new, had been supplied to all the anti-Qaddafi militias fighting for a new Libya by the intelligence services of the State of Qatar and the United Arab Emirates; these weapons were distributed generously, and with tacit U.S. approval; a good percentage of the hardware, though, ended up in jihadist hands.8 Many of these advanced systems were finding their ways into the hands of Islamic extremists fighting in northern Mali.

  Weapons, similar to those being used in the Syrian civil war, were being sold and traded openly. To the men of the intelligence agencies—Western and other—with an interest in toppling the Assad regime, Libya was a wholesale market for military surplus that the revolutionary fighters desperately needed, and Benghazi became a battlefield of those who were sellers, those who were buyers, and those determined to thwart both sides of the arms trade equation.

  Wherever there were terrorists, there were bound to be spies, and Benghazi had become a den of spies. By the summer of 2012, those nations with the stomach to remain behind in Benghazi were represented by operatives, assets, and sources. Egyptians, Jordanians, Palestinians, possibly even the Israelis, all had an interest in what was transpiring inside the Benghazi arms bazaars, as did the secret police agencies of a dozen or so African states worried that the malignancy growing inside Libya would metastasize inside their own volatile countries. And, of course, wherever al-Qaeda ventured, especially an al-Qaeda thought to be in tatters and an al-Qaeda situating itself in a city with enough ordnance to start a large-scale African war, the Western and Arab intelligence agencies were never far behind. It would be safe to assume that there were spies loyal to several dozen nations wandering about Benghazi, meeting with sources and paying assets. Men in blazers and dark glasses wandered about the narrow streets of the medina, the old city, with briefcases full of cash and 9 mm semiautomatics—the classic killing tool of the European spy. Rent-a-guns, militiamen with AK-47s and no qualms about killing, stood outside the cafés and restaurants where men with cash and those with missiles exchanged business terms. Benghazi was a cross between Chicago in the days of Prohibition and Sicily at the height of the Cosa Nostra’s reign of crime and terror. The confluence of intelligence operatives, swindlers, and opportunists inside the Libyan city was akin to Humphrey Bogart’s Casablanca.

  Benghazi was a le Carré urban landscape where loyalties changed sides with every sunset; there were murders, betrayals, and triple-crossing profits to be made in the post-revolution reality. The police were only as honest as their next bribe. The floors of cafés in the notorious Assabri area near the old city were littered with disposable SIM cards that were destructively snapped in half—the telltale sign of a city populated by secrets and men with prices on their heads.

  Most governments were eager to abandon the danger and intrigue of Benghazi. By September 2012 much of the international community had pulled chalks and escaped the inevitable cauldron of the city’s violence. Other nations left Libya altogether. Even the Iranians, one of the world’s most prominent state sponsors of global terror, who had seven members of its Red Crescent relief agency kidnapped in Benghazi by one of the government’s primary militias, escaped the city.

  Some countries remained. The Bulgarians, Egyptians, Moroccans, and Italians maintained consulates in the city. The European Union maintained a full-fledged consulate; the Germans staffed a small liaison office. The Turks and the Qataris stood fast, as well. Benghazi was very much a hub for their geopolitical interests and objectives.

  Libya was a target-rich environment for American political, economic, and military interests, and the United States was determined to retain its diplomatic and intelligence presence in the country—including an embassy in Tripoli and a mission in Benghazi. Benghazi, rife with peril, was a linchpin of American concerns and opportunities in the summer following the Arab Spring. Tunisia had been swept by revolution, and so had Egypt. A Libya run by Qaddafi would have been a malignant growth inside the aspirations of both newly democratic nations. Qaddafi’s time had come. “The United States was typically optimistic in its hope for Libya,” an insider with boots on the ground commented, smiling. “The hope was that all would work out, even though the reality of an Islamic force in the strong revolutionary winds hinted otherwise.”

  Hope was fueling many fires. The United States no longer had the resources or the national will to commit massive military manpower to its outposts in the quagmire-strewn remnants of what was once defined as the new world order. This wasn’t a political question but a boots-on-the-ground statement of reality. The fight against terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism, as well as the desire to quench the thirst of democracy in this part of the world, was a brand of warfare that would not be fought with brigades and Bradley armored fighting vehicles. This kinder and friendlier Global War on Terror would be fought by diplomats and spies and watched from above by drones and satellites. The footprint of the United States in this unsettled country and its ever-important but dangerous city would have to be small and agile.

  Benghazi would be a test—one of many—for this new type of warfare on this new and untested battlefield. Washington knew of the dangers that existed in Benghazi; American diplomatic and intelligence representatives on the ground in Libya had sent precise reports detailing the threats in country. They had requested additional assets and protection to mitigate the uncertainty and violence that were rampant in the country.

  Benghazi was considered too valuable a seismic sensor in the Middle East—and Arab Spring—for the United States to abandon, even though the security situation in the city was considered critical. The United States was staying put, even though the landscape was pure lawlessness.

  “Benghazi was the kind of city,” reflected a veteran Middle East war correspondent, “that once you left you never wanted to return to.”9 It was the city where American diplomats and the men sworn to protect them would wage the small-footprint, covert chess match of expeditionary diplomacy in the uncertain double-barreled fusillade of an angry Arab Spring.

  Part One

  THE DAWN BEFORE BENGHAZI

  1.

  The Libyan

  I proudly announce to the Muslim umma and to the mujahideen … the news of the martyrdom of the lion of Libya Sheikh Hassan Mohammed Qaed.

  —al-Qaeda emir Ayman al-Zawahiri, in a videotape released on September 11, 2012, confirming the U.S. drone strike that killed the Libyan-born al-Qaed
a deputy commander and commander of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, Abu Yahya al-Libi

  The Hellfire missile arrived without warning and with little preamble. They always did. At just after dawn’s first glow on the morning of June 4, 2012, in Pakistan’s tribal Waziristan, a CIA Predator drone hovering near its target at twenty thousand feet above the impassable mountain terrain launched four AGM-114P Hellfire II antitank missiles at the turbid hovel where Abu Yahya al-Libi, the al-Qaeda deputy commander, and another fourteen low- and mid-level terrorists were sleeping. The missiles, designed to punch a molten hole through layers of armored steel, turned the mud-and-stone hut into a flaming hole of destruction. The devastation was absolute. Even if the goat farmers who had wandered toward the flaming ruins had years of forensic training among them, scraping what was left of the terrorist leader and his minions off the mud and scorched earth would have required a deft touch. There was no doubt that the primary target had been terminated. The eighteen-pound shaped metal-augmented charge was a sure thing.1

  Abu Yahya al-Libi was considered a CIA high-value target. There was a ghostlike mystique to him—especially after he had escaped from U.S. extrajudicial detention at Bagram Air Base in northeastern Afghanistan in July 2005, one of the most secured U.S.-run counterterrorism facilities in the world; he was one of the U.S. Department of Defense’s most wanted men. Although he was often videotaped in camouflage fatigues, firing his Russian-made AK-74 5.45 mm assault rifle as if he were a gangster with a tommy gun on Chicago’s South Side, he was more a politician than a military field commander. Abu Yahya al-Libi was viewed as a visionary policy maker and, in his firebrand sermons, al-Qaeda’s most capable salesman. When adorned in sparkling white robes that accentuated his dark eyes and North African features, he resembled a fierce warrior fighting his way across a desert battlefield. In an interview with The New York Times, Jarret Brachman, a former analyst for the CIA, claimed about al-Libi, “He’s a warrior. He’s a poet. He’s a scholar. He’s a pundit. He’s a military commander. And he’s a very charismatic, young, brash, rising star within A.Q., and I think he has become the heir apparent to Osama bin Laden in terms of taking over the entire global jihadist movement.”2

  The self-professed al-Qaeda global ambassador had been an instrumental player in the spreading of the jihadist network to new venues and battlefields. He had achieved considerable success in his native North Africa in the Global War on Terror vacuum of the Arab Spring. In posting a $1 million reward for information leading to al-Libi’s capture, the Web site of the U.S. State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service Rewards for Justice Program claimed that “al-Libi was a key motivator in the global jihadist movement and his messages convey a clear threat to U.S. persons or property worldwide.” When the CIA finally caught up with al-Libi, financially speaking the targeted killing was a frugal investment of taxpayer dollars: the four Hellfire missiles cost under $280,000.

  There was always blowback when such a senior terrorist commander was targeted, and the question of retaliation wasn’t as much an “if,” as it was a “when” and a “where.” Al-Libi’s name, the translation meaning “the Libyan,” should have provided intelligence specialists throughout the Beltway with some sort of inkling.

  On the morning of September 11, 2012, the eleventh anniversary of the most destructive terrorist attack in history, the al-Qaeda commander Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri formally confirmed the martyrdom of his Libyan-border deputy. The terrorist leader’s footage was released early in the morning in Pakistan, just as Washington, D.C., was going to bed.

  2.

  The Global Protectors in a World at War

  Midnight September 10–11, 2012, arrived with an exhausted dread at the Diplomatic Security Service Command Center, or DS/CC, on the ********** floor in a nondescript building in the Virginia suburbs. As the agents in the evening tour packed up their gear and prepared to head out for the traffic-free drive back to their homes in northern Virginia, a few words were exchanged with the special agents coming in the late tour. For many years, the DS/CC was staffed 24/7 by ***** agents. Now the day shift alone had grown to ***** to meet the demands of an ever-changing, ever more violent world. The midnight shift was always a harsh one, as the garbage cans, filled to capacity with empty Starbucks coffee cups, would attest. Eyes were sometimes groggy, tempers short. Although the nation’s capital was asleep, with the halls of power silent in a town never quite known for quiet, the world beyond was abuzz with activity. Midnight along the Beltway was midday in Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur; as CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC were winding down their nightly outgoing, exchanging distant views on the presidential election, a new workday was well under way in Kabul, Islamabad, and Doha. As American flags waved proudly in front of the White House and the Capitol under a dark autumn sky, they also flew stoically in front of the U.S. embassy in Cairo, Egypt.

  The fluid and rapidly deteriorating situation in Libya was also monitored by the Diplomatic Security Service and State Department officials at the Operations Center, known as State Ops, located on the seventh floor inside Main State at Foggy Bottom. The center was purely antiseptic and looked like a thousand other government offices inside anonymous buildings that were either owned by or rented to the federal government. It was painted in a yellowish-taupe scheme and decorated with television monitors that covered major 24/7 news networks from around the world. A narrow rectangular digital clock spanned across a part of the room, pinpointing the times in capitals around the globe. Cubicles, with computer stations, provided special agents from the U.S. Department of State’s Diplomatic Security Service and other Foreign Service professionals the means to react to any developing global crisis.

  All over the world, and supported from Washington, D.C., the Diplomatic Security Service (DS) was at work protecting the 252 embassies and consulates. For the most part, even in a world at war, the command centers monitored day-to-day events without the need for a remarkable response. Certain days, however, always brought the staffers at these command centers to realize the importance and volatility of the world at large. The anniversary of the September 11 attacks was always one such day.

  Ever since that horrific morning eleven years earlier, September 11 was a day of remembrance and foreboding for members of federal law enforcement. Agencies like the FBI geared up—with state and local law enforcement—to prevent an anniversary strike against the United States. Members of the intelligence community, the Department of Defense, and DS went on full alert to prevent terrorists hoping to seize on the anniversary to symbolically strike at U.S. interests overseas.

  DS was not the most widely known of federal law enforcement agencies; few were familiar with its existence, and even fewer—including many in the State Department—understood what it did. It traces its roots to World War I, when the Office of Security for the State Department was established in 1916 as a federal counterintelligence agency to deal with the activity of foreign espionage agents on American soil, but it soon expanded to become the security arm of the Department of State.

  For many years, the Office of Security was known simply as SY. Agents began traveling overseas to safeguard embassies and coordinate their efforts with marine security contingents at diplomatic posts around the world. In Vietnam, SY faced enormous challenges as the beleaguered force of diplomatic security hunkered down inside a war zone. On January 30, 1968, the North Vietnamese launched the Tet Offensive, surprising the Americans and the People’s Army of Vietnam with a massive multipronged invasion. The mission was to destroy the will of the South Vietnamese and American people, and diplomatic signals had hoodwinked the Americans into believing the North Vietnamese wanted peace. The Communists used the New Year’s celebration as cover for action and mingled Vietcong (VC) operatives among the crowds. The size and scope of the Tet offensive was overwhelming. The city of Saigon was attacked along with thirty-six of the forty-four provincial capitals. Altogether, an estimated eighty-four thousand North Vietname Army (NVA) and VC guerrillas were used. In Saigon
, the targets were the Presidential Palace, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) Joint Staff Command building, and the National Broadcasting Station, along with one more very special target.1

  At 0245 hours, the U.S. embassy wall on Thong Nhat Boulevard was breached in an explosive charge by nineteen Vietcong commandos and sappers, dressed in civilian clothing. Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker was inside his residence at the time and secretly evacuated by SY agents and Marine Security guards (who worked under the command of SY agents); he was hidden in the SY regional security officer’s house. Steve Bray, a U.S. Marine assigned to SY for protection duties on the ambassador, recalled the chaos of the night and the actions by SY to save the U.S. ambassador’s life:

  The VC placed a satchel charge against the exterior perimeter wall and blew a hole in it which they used to penetrate the Embassy compound. They killed the American MP’s located on the inner perimeter execution style. Intel sharing among U.S. Agencies was even worse than it is today. The VC Sapper Team went to the Deputy Ambassador’s Residence by mistake. The Deputy Ambassador was Samuel D. Berger at that time. LBJ had called him (Berger) back to Texas for consultation and no one was at residence when the VC Sapper Team arrived at the wrong address. They had the wrong location but thought it was Ambassador Bunker’s residence. SY Agent Bob Furey went through the hole blown in the Embassy perimeter wall by the VC with his Thompson submachine gun to help Leo Crampsey. Leo, Bob, along with a few MSGs on the Embassy grounds and some 716th BN MPs on the outer perimeter defended the Embassy, preventing the VC takeover of the Chancery. General Westmoreland did not send in supporting U.S. Military assistance until first light.* By that time, Leo, Bob and MSGs had secured the compound.2