Under Fire

by Fred Burton

  Though this experience might have caused others to shy away from future missions, Bray went on to become an SY agent; that is the kind of person attracted to SY.

  The last civilians evacuated by helicopter from the rooftop of the American embassy in Vietnam in 1975 were SY agents.3

  The State Department’s system of diplomatic security remained a small and fairly under-resourced, undervalued entity until terrorist attacks in Lebanon and other locations in the Middle and Near East. Attacks against American diplomats and diplomatic facilities during this period were widespread. On March 2, 1973, the U.S. ambassador to Sudan, Cleo A. Noel Jr., and the deputy chief of mission, George Curtis Moore, were killed in cold blood by Palestinian terrorists belonging to the Black September Organization. On February 14, 1979, Adolph Dubs, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, was killed during a failed kidnapping attempt. On November 4, 1979, Iranian “students” seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran, Iran; in the subsequent crisis fifty-two Americans were held captive for 444 days. On November 22, 1979, a mob set fire to the U.S. embassy in Islamabad, resulting in the death of a Marine Security guard. On April 18, 1983, Hezbollah terrorists launched a suicide truck bomber against the U.S. embassy in Beirut, Lebanon; the attack, believed to have targeted the U.S. intelligence community in country, resulted in the deaths of sixty-three people (fourteen Americans were killed, including the Near East Intelligence Officer, Robert Ames, and most of the CIA’s assets in country) and the wounding of scores more (a year later, on September 20, 1984, twenty-three would be killed when the U.S. embassy annex across town in the Christian eastern half of the city was bombed). On December 3, 1983, a Hezbollah suicide truck bomber attempted to destroy the U.S. embassy in Kuwait City, Kuwait, killing five.

  In 1985, Secretary of State George P. Shultz ordered the convening of the Advisory Panel on Overseas Security to respond to critical threats American diplomats and diplomatic facilities encountered around the world. The panel, chaired by the retired admiral Bobby Ray Inman, a former deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, reviewed the litany of tactics and tools that terrorists had employed in the past decade’s attacks and what measures could be conceived to mitigate future threats. One of the primary findings of the Inman panel was the need for an expanded security force to protect American diplomatic posts overseas. On August 27, 1986, a new State Department security force and law enforcement agency, the Diplomatic Security Service, was formed to replace SY; DS was part of the Bureau of Diplomatic Security. According to the panel’s findings, “the new Diplomatic Security Service must incorporate the best features and attributes of professional law enforcement in order that it will become capable of providing the level of competence that will be required in United States diplomatic and consular missions around the world in the face of the expected terrorist threat environment.”

  Another important finding to emerge from the Inman panel was its focus on physical security enhancements for embassies and consulates. As a result, the U.S. State Department was one of the first—and remains one of the few—foreign diplomatic services to implement physical security protocols to prevent catastrophic attacks. These force protection specifications, unique in the world of diplomatic security, included blast-proofing breakthroughs in architecture to mitigate the devastating yield of an explosion or other methods of attack, including rocket and grenade fire. New embassies would be built with a minimum of a hundred feet of setback to prevent suicide truck bombers from ramming their explosive-laden vehicles into the actual buildings, as had been perpetrated in the West Beirut bombing. These new embassies, known as Inman buildings, incorporated anti-ram walls and fences, gates, vehicle barriers, and ballistic window film and supervised local guard forces to create impregnable fortresses that withstand massive explosions and coordinated attempts to breach an embassy’s defenses.

  Long before the term “global war on terror” entered the vernacular, DS was one of the sole U.S. law enforcement agencies fighting terrorists overseas in the effort to safeguard American embassies and consulates. Special Agents Daniel Emmett O’Connor and Ronald Albert Lariviere were killed on December 21, 1988, on board Pan Am Flight 103, bombed by Libyan intelligence agents and Palestinian terrorists; two special agents assigned to the U.S. embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan, captured Ramzi Yousef, mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing; and DS agents brought back the perpetrators of the August 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Dar es Salaam so that they could stand trial in a federal courthouse in Manhattan.

  The September 11, 2001, attacks against the United States forever changed DS. The service, whose ranks had been understaffed in its domestic and global mission for years, nearly doubled its manpower after the 2001 terrorist attacks; today, the agency boasts two thousand special agents. DS personnel suddenly found themselves frontline warriors and counterterrorist operators; overseas, they found themselves outside their traditional comfort box of supervising the Marine Security Guard contingent and security programs and were now assisting and protecting covert aspirations of the intelligence community, fielding large contractor forces, and harnessing military support in nation-building endeavors. In the AfPak (Afghanistan and Pakistan) theater the Diplomatic Security Service fielded more agents than it did in most of its domestic U.S. field offices. There were more than *** ******* special agents assigned to the behemoth fortress that became the U.S. embassy in Baghdad. Traditional protection tasks were dramatically redefined in the wake of Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom. DS special agents hung up their Ralph Lauren suits and Rockport lace-ups for desert khakis, battle rattle, and an M4 **** ** carbine close at hand. The Diplomatic Security Service went to war after 9/11. Two special agents, Edward J. Seitz and Stephen Eric Sullivan, were killed in separate rocket attacks in Iraq, in 2004 and 2005.

  For a decade, DS found itself with a broad global responsibility that was harnessed by a laser-sharp Near Eastern focus. The Global War on Terror meant that embassies already buttressed to above and beyond the Inman standards of security had to be reinforced and prepped for suicide truck bomb attacks and swarm assaults. Lessons were taken from al-Qaeda assaults in Kabul and Karachi and attacks against diplomatic facilities throughout the Arab world. DS special agents found themselves on the front lines of this borderless conflict and in the crosshairs of the terrorists’ sights. Several DS agents, in fact, received top honors for their valor in the face of terrorist threats. Throughout the decade that immediately followed the 9/11 attacks, teams of operators from the hundred-man force known as MSD, or Mobile Security Deployment, the elite DS special operations and counterterrorist, counterassault unit, crisscrossed the globe, rushing to embassies where imminent threats were the currency of day-to-day life. U.S. embassies and consulates in Sana’a, Khartoum, Basra, Damascus, Beirut, and dozens more cities were reinforced by Kevlar-clad counterassault teams who took up positions inside America’s most threatened diplomatic posts to augment the regional security officers, or RSOs (the DS agents assigned to an embassy), and Marine Security Guards. Unlike the U.S. Secret Service Counter Assault Teams, known as CATs, the DS Mobile Security Deployments do not have the luxury of operating on streets frozen by hordes of American police officers. As was so ominously observed by a former special agent, “In many locations abroad, especially in ‘the Sandbox,’ the cops are the enemy.”4

  Many MSDs were intelligence generated, and these tactical specialists were often flown to hot spots and targeted locations on emergency military flights, in order to provide vulnerable embassies with additional firepower support if needed.

  When MSD wasn’t hunkered down in preparation for some sort of terror strike, it assisted indigenous host-country security services with training. DS has always viewed capable host-country law enforcement as an invaluable tool to protect American embassies and diplomats. Embassy security was always layer based, and having a competently trained and counterterrorist-capable local law enforcement presence provided Diplomatic Security
Service efforts inside the embassy grounds with an indispensable buffer. This policy was so important that DS trained thousands of international police officers and security service agents at locations throughout the United States in protecting national borders; protecting critical infrastructure; protecting national leadership; responding to and resolving terrorist incidents; and managing critical terrorist incidents having national-level implications. The program, known as Antiterrorism Assistance, or ATA, trained classes of police officers in the art of bomb disposal, SWAT tactics, countersurveillance, explosive detection dogs, K-9 equipment and awareness instruction, handlers, and even community policing. Over hundred thousand foreign police officers have been trained as a result of ATA courses: these men and women serve across the world in 164 countries.5

  For over a decade following the 9/11 attacks, DS managed to contain the chaos of a world where fundamentalist fervor had the potential to inflict catastrophic damage on America’s diplomatic interests around the world—especially in the Middle East. But the wave of civilian unrest that swept through the Arab world in the storm known as the Arab Spring took the region—and the United States—by surprise. Governments that had been traditional allies of the United States in the Global War on Terror and that had sent police officers to ATA training were overthrown in instantaneous and unexpected popular revolutions. In Tunisia, in Egypt, and in Yemen, traditionally reliably pro-American regimes were overthrown and replaced with new governments—some Islamic centered; in Bahrain the protests led to a brutal crackdown, while in Syria a popular demand for freedom resulted in one of the most violent civil wars ever seen in the region.

  And then there was Libya, a nation emerging from the civil war that led to the death of Colonel Qaddafi and the dismantling of years of secret police rule. Militias, Islamists, and weapons proliferated throughout the country. As the special agents in the midnight tour settled into their shift and drank their lattes and Red Bulls in the Diplomatic Security Command Center, the focus of the employees on duty that night centered on America’s embassies in the eye of the Arab Spring storm. When the clock on the wall hit 0000 hours, it marked the eleventh anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

  3.

  9.11.12: A Fiery Morning in the Arab Spring

  On the night separating September 10 from the eleventh anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, DS agents working the midnight tour at the Diplomatic Security Command Center watched the world from the “Big Blue Board,” along with streaming live television feeds of CNN, Fox, Al Jazeera, and WTOP radio. The DS/CC was its usual organized chaos: a multiscreen command nerve center camouflaged inside the DS “world headquarters.” On the eleventh anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, and over three months after the smoldering remnants of a terrorist safe house—and fifteen terrorists—were extinguished in Waziristan, the al-Qaeda leader Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri released a forty-two-minute Web video eulogizing his deputy, the Libyan-born ambassador for the global jihad, Abu Yahya al-Libi. While CIA analysts and psychologists rushed to assess the video ramblings of Dr. Zawahiri, the tens of thousands of Arab protesters who had gathered for violent demonstrations outside American embassies throughout the Arab world had answered the call to arms over a different video.

  On July 1, 2012, a fourteen-minute video titled “Innocence of Muslims” was first posted on YouTube. The amateurish film was produced by an Egyptian-born Coptic and U.S. resident known by the alias of Sam Bacile who financed the short movie that, according to a BBC review, “depicted Islam as a religion of violence and hate, and its Prophet Muhammad as a foolish and power-hungry man.” Other reviews claimed that “‘Innocence of Muslims’ depicts Muhammad as a feckless philanderer who approved of child sexual abuse … and [who] is made to look like a murderer and adulterer as well.”1 The purposely insulting film was largely ignored until months later when, on September 8, it was picked up by various Arab television networks, and Islamic networks and video sites in particular. Realizing how combustible the video was, multiple Middle Eastern and Islamic nations blocked it from the airwaves and the Web; Indonesia, India, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan did all they could to prevent their citizens from viewing the inflammatory film. In Egypt, Sheikh Khalad Abdalla, a presenter on the religiously themed Al-Nas television station, began broadcasting scenes from the movie that were dubbed into Arabic. The following day, throughout the Arabian Peninsula and North Africa, American embassies became lightning rods of violent protests.

  The largest protests—and certainly the most violently symbolic—were in Egypt. The sprawling U.S. embassy in Cairo at 5 Tawfik Diab Street in the Garden City section of the thriving metropolis—until the Iraqi war, the largest American diplomatic post overseas—found itself surrounded by thousands of violent protesters chanting, “Death to America” and “Death to Israel.” The wrath emanating from the Egyptian street was expected. As the noted Middle East scholar Professor Fouad Ajami stated in a forum for the Hoover Institution, “The Egyptians, who viewed themselves as the center of the Arab world, provided the Arab Spring with a theater worthy of its ambitions. Cairo, after all,” he noted, “was long considered the center of the Arab world. It was known as Um al-Dunya in Arabic, the Mother of the World.”

  With former president Mubarak in prison and the newly elected Muslim Brotherhood president flexing muscle for his base, Egyptian security forces, once positioned in front of the fortresslike embassy as an integral part of the landscape, had neither the mandate nor the desire to disperse the riots. Many police officers left their stations for an elongated falafel break or simply watched as the crowds burned flags, declared their support for a jihad, and demanded that the United States release Omar Abdel Rahman; known as “the Blind Sheikh” (or “Santa Claus,” as per the not so affectionate NYPD vernacular), Rahman was the inspiration behind the first World Trade Center attack in 1993. Convicted for his role in that attack, as well as a planned “Day of Terror” in New York City to destroy the United Nations and several federal buildings and assassinate ambassadors and government officials, Rahman is serving a life sentence in North Carolina, at the Federal Medical Center at Butner Federal Correctional Complex.

  Years earlier, at the slightest suggestion of a demonstration in front of the U.S. embassy, Mubarak would have dispatched his riot squads to blind the mob with tear gas and to break their bones with truncheons; secret agents in plain clothes from the hated Mukhabarat would snatch those worthy of snatching for some specialized attention in the dungeons beneath their headquarters.

  For P.,* the RSO in Cairo, the protests and lack of host-nation intervention were troubling, especially when protesters scaled the walls surrounding the grounds and began to penetrate the embassy perimeter. The protesters spray painted anti-American and fundamentalist Islamic slogans along the embassy walls and even tore down the large American flag that was flown pronouncedly at the entrance to the sprawling facility, replacing it with an ominous black jihadist one.

  The fear, of course, was that the U.S. embassy would be overrun and set ablaze. The protests in front of the U.S. embassy were eerily foreboding. Nearly a year to the day earlier, on September 9, 2011, hundreds of Egyptian protesters had descended upon the Israeli embassy in Giza, on the outskirts of Cairo, armed with battering rams and sledgehammers. Within hours, the mob had grown to several thousand men. They burned American and Israeli flags, scribbled on bedsheets with red and blue markers, and chanted “God is great” and “Death to the Jews.” By midnight the mob had broken through a wall that Egyptian security forces had hastily erected and it infiltrated the skyscraper that was home to the Israeli post; the actual Israeli embassy consisted of only two floors in the sprawling building. Egyptian riot police did little to stop the rabble. As the night’s chaos attracted more rioters and a swelling army of opportunistic looters who by now were coming in from all over the city, the security situation became dire. The mob had broken through the main lobby and rushed to the twentieth and twenty-first floors toward the chancery. It ransacked much of the embassy and
tossed sensitive documents out the windows; many of these documents were seized and scanned and quickly found themselves translated and featured on jihadist Web sites. Fires were ignited. The embassy staffers retreated behind an armored steel door inside a safe haven. They hurriedly destroyed classified material and waited for the mob to break through and rip them to shreds. As the cadence of the outer security doors being pounded by fists and hammers reached a deafening crescendo, security agents from Bat’Mah, the Hebrew acronym for Bitachon Misrad Ha’Hutz, or Foreign Ministry Security, unholstered their specially modified Glock 17 9 mm semiautomatic pistols and prepared to take out as many of the mob as they could before ultimately and fatally being overrun. The agents feared that they would be burned alive or beaten to death.* They thought of the images of the American helicopter pilots shot down in Mogadishu and dragged naked through the streets after a mob had beaten them. They thought of the Blackwater contractors in Fallujah whose torched bodies were strung up for the world to see. They wondered if their wives, children, and parents would be spared seeing the images of the fate that would soon befall them.

  In Jerusalem, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, and other high-ranking members of Israel’s security echelon watched the events unfold in real time, on news reports on Al Jazeera and Egyptian state-run television; this was a story that the Arab media outlets enjoyed covering. It was unthinkable for Israel to dispatch troops to Egypt; it could not send additional security agents. Reportedly, Minister of Defense Barak personally requested that President Barack Obama call the newly elected Egyptian president and demand intervention. Egyptian commandos ultimately intervened, but the incident could have become a true spark to the eruption of a Middle Eastern war. The incident was so severe that the foreign minister of Bahrain, Sheikh Khalid bin Ahmad bin Muhammad al-Khalifa, stated on his Twitter page, “The failure to defend the embassy building is a blatant violation of the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations.”2