Under Fire

by Fred Burton

  Back at the American embassy in Cairo, P. did not want to have to retreat to an inner sanctum with sidearm at hand. He remembered the stories of how an angry mob materialized in a flash in front of the U.S. embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan, on November 21, 1979, after local radio stations broadcast completely erroneous reports that American soldiers had attacked the Masjid al-Haram, Islam’s holiest site in Mecca.* Shouting “Kill the American dogs,”3 the protesters broke through the main gate of the sprawling compound and proceeded to set the chancery ablaze. More than a hundred members of the embassy staff hunkered down inside a protected safe haven and cooked in suffocating smoke as flames engulfed the majestic structure; a Marine Security guard, Corporal Steven Crowley from Long Island, New York, was shot in the head as he gauged the situation from the embassy rooftop. The embassy staffers were eventually saved by Pakistani forces, but not before six were killed in the attack.

  Applying tactics and protocols learned after Islamabad and embassy bombings and attacks in Beirut and East Africa, the RSO and the gunnery sergeant, the commander of the MSG contingent, set in motion the emergency tactics to safeguard the embassy. At Post One, the primary checkpoint in the lobby of an embassy, the MSGs behind the blast-resistant transparent armor donned helmets and body armor—the proverbial “battle rattle”—over their service uniforms; access controls for the entire compound were checked for any intrusion; the scene was repeated at Post Two and Post Three. Reportedly, a REACT alert was ordered for the rest of the Marine Security Guard contingent and their RSO supervisors as well. This force would assemble in the embassy’s REACT room and don battle rattle and weapons (an M4 5.56 mm carbine rifle or the ever-trustworthy Remington 870 12-gauge pump-action shotgun) to respond to any intrusion into the chancery. The MSGs also raced to the roof to secure the high ground and to provide countersniper cover, as well as to monitor the growing crowds.

  There was an absolute need for the tactical concern. The protest outside the embassy wasn’t solely a spontaneous expression of Islamic rage. It was a highly organized eruption orchestrated by the next generation of jihad leaders. Sheikh Abu-Yahya al-Masri, the spokesman for the Voice of Wisdom Coalition, a Salafist group with links to alleged fundamentalist elements, and Sheikh Gamal Saber, coordinator of the Hazimoun movement and cofounder of the radical Egyptian Umma Party, orchestrated the demonstrations. Mohammed al-Zawahiri, the al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri’s brother, and several sons of the jailed cleric Omar Abdel Rahman were honored guests at the event; they were filmed chanting “Death to America” outside the embassy gates.

  By midday, as dawn was breaking over Washington, D.C., and the midnight tour was ending its shift at the DS Command Center, the Middle East was ablaze. The situation in Cairo was critical. The DS/CC would have spent the night sending NIACT (Night Action) precedence situational reports, or SITREPs, of the events in Cairo to embassies and consulates across the globe, in an effort to keep the agents in the field in the loop with the most accurate and timely intelligence available.4 In a giant game of Twister, the agents multitasked with open and secure lines crisscrossing the command center, stopping to watch and listen to breaking-news media updates on the television and radio. Egyptian security forces were impotently allowing the protesters to run amok in a furious frenzy. State Department officials, especially those in the Near Eastern Affairs Bureau, closely monitored events from Foggy Bottom as they attempted to reach out to their political liaisons in Egypt and plead for police—even military—intervention. Egypt, even in the post-Mubarak abyss, maintained a strong security infrastructure, and embassy officials were cautiously confident that the rule of law would prevail and a repeat of an Islamabad-like horror would be prevented.

  Libya, Egypt’s neighbor to the west, was another story altogether.

  4.

  Libya

  The United States has had a violent history with the North African nation of Libya—a history of conflict, warfare, and bloodshed that has dated back to the campaign against the Barbary pirates and the deployment of the fledgling U.S. Marine Corps against Yousef, the pasha of Tripoli. In June 1967, the U.S. embassy in Benghazi was attacked by a violent mob that destroyed much of the facility; at the onset of the June 1967 war, Libyan radio had reported that American warplanes, flying with Israeli aircraft, had bombed Cairo. Benghazi was the launching pad of Muammar Qaddafi’s overthrow of King Idris and his monarchy. The United States had not had a formal embassy in Libya since 1972; the abandoned embassy building was torched and burned to the ground on December 2, 1979, during protests that charged U.S. involvement in the Grand Mosque seizure in Mecca.

  Libya under Colonel Muammar Qaddafi had provided the United States with what appeared to be an endless list of reasons why diplomatic relations could not exist between the two nations. The flamboyant and unpredictable Qaddafi had led a Champions League of international terrorist movements, ranging from the Provisional IRA to most of the Palestinian liberation movements; in June 1976, when Palestinian terrorists hijacked an Air France aircraft in Athens, their first stop was Benghazi and a welcome from Qaddafi’s forces (that incident would end in Entebbe, Uganda, days later when Israeli commandos rescued the hostages in an awe-inspiring raid). Qaddafi had dispatched his army to take over neighboring Chad, and he was believed to have ordered hit teams to the United States to assassinate President Ronald Reagan. Libyan-backed terrorists and agents were also responsible for attacks on U.S. diplomats in Khartoum and Sana’a in 1986. The Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi had branded himself as the most dangerous terrorist in the world.1 President Reagan ordered the U.S. military to carry out Operation El Dorado Canyon, the April 15, 1986, bombing of targets (including Qaddafi’s lair in Tripoli) in response to the Libyan bombing of the La Belle discotheque in Berlin frequented by U.S. servicemen; two American soldiers had been killed in the attack. Libyan agents were responsible for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, on December 21, 1988, that resulted in the deaths of 270 people, including the two DS agents on board the aircraft.2

  Qaddafi’s Libya was a pariah: an insane (though oil-blessed) state led by a crazy megalomaniac who traveled the world in flamboyant costumes with an entourage of AK-47-toting beauties. Following the 9/11 attacks, Qaddafi was determined to distance himself from the President Bush–dubbed axis of evil. He came clean on an extensively advanced nuclear weapons program—one that had embarrassingly evaded both the CIA and Israel’s Mossad—and provided the U.S. intelligence community with invaluable assistance in the Global War on Terror; Qaddafi’s intelligence services prevented al-Qaeda operatives from establishing nodes inside Libya and provided information on known cells and operatives plotting attacks in North Africa.

  Relations between Libya and the United States were restored on February 8, 2004, with the arrival of diplomatic and security personnel at the U.S. Interests Section in Tripoli; the mission was upgraded to a liaison office on June 24, 2004. After Qaddafi paid reparations for his past sins in order to return to the fold of friendly nations, the United States reestablished formal diplomatic ties with Libya. On May 31, 2006, the United States and Libya exchanged diplomatic notes confirming the upgrade of the U.S. Liaison Office in Tripoli to an embassy.

  The DS special agent Dan Meehan was the first official RSO to serve in Libya in twenty-five years and responsible for making sure the liaison office was safe for the mission at hand. His two years in Tripoli would be rife with the typical challenges that would haunt an RSO opening up a mission inside new, uncharted territory in a nation where spies outnumbered civilians. When Meehan arrived in Tripoli, the Interests Section was opened at the same time that embassy operations in Kabul and, ultimately, Baghdad would occupy much of the already limited DS human and financial capital. The diplomatic post was nestled inside four floors of the Corinthia Bab Africa Hotel located near the seafront; the hotel, the only five-star facility in town at the time, was woefully inadequate by the comprehensive Inman security requirements. There was no physical setback,
no defensive hard line, and no marines. There was no secure area for reviewing classified materials, and there were no methods to receive classified documents.

  In the normal world, and Libya was anything but normal, the outgoing RSO would hand the baton to his replacement: the transition would include introducing the new DS agent in charge to the local police and counterterrorist commanders and acclimating him to the lay of the land. The personal relationship that would—have to—develop between the embassy security chief and his local counterparts was a critical component in securing the American presence; in case of terrorist attack, the RSO could always call on a favor and request additional host-government resources. Some RSOs would call upon their local counterparts when they didn’t need anything at all. They would provide gifts and American staples such as M&M’s and scotch to grease the wheels and cement long-standing working relationships. When they did have to call the locals for help, the local security counterpart knew it was dire.

  Meehan’s counterpart was the notorious Mousa Kousa, a Michigan State University alumnus and confidant of Colonel Qaddafi’s who commanded the Mukhabarat al-Jamahiriya, Libya’s external security organization that spied on political thought at home, political dissidents overseas, and operations against the West; the service was responsible for the Berlin disco bombing, Pan Am Flight 103, and the September 19, 1989, bombing of French UTA Airlines Flight 772. But, Libya being Libya and the Interests Section embroiled in its territorial struggles, Meehan never met Mousa alone—they always met together with the embassy’s principal officer (the de facto ambassador). Arranging a meeting with Kousa was never easy, and embassy personnel—with diplomatic, security, and intelligence requirements—had to maximize the opportunities when meeting with this close Qaddafi aide. Even later, when Meehan met with Kousa’s executive officer, he did not meet him alone. This difficult situation was only exacerbated by the fact that Meehan was alone for much of his time in country; he only received an assistant agent six months into his two-year tour. After all, as it was always said, DS agents always do more with less—especially so considering that the local police that protected the hotel were unarmed and wore torn sandals, even though the terrorist threat to the hotel, from the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, or LIGF, was very real.

  Undeterred by the challenges and the turf wars so common among the different agencies who work together at U.S. embassies overseas, Dan Meehan and the DS agents who followed him to the shores of Tripoli made sure that American diplomacy proceeded unimpaired by violence and threat; the United States, after all, has shared a long and tumultuous security relationship with Libya. John Christopher Stevens was the Foreign Service officer who made sure that American diplomacy in Libya flourished. Chris, as he was known, was a true Arabist; he was known to sign his name on personal e-mails as Krees to mimic the way Arabs articulated his name.3 Born in Grass Valley, California, in 1960, Chris Stevens had developed a passionate love for the Arab world while working for the Peace Corps in Morocco in the early 1980s; ironically, and perhaps fittingly, he learned the intricacies and magic of the Arabic language and of the Arabic people while teaching them English. Stevens was ideally equipped for work at the State Department and a career with the Foreign Service. A graduate of Berkeley, he earned his law degree and practiced trade law before joining the Foreign Service in 1991. Virtually all of Stevens’s posts were in the Middle East and in locations that can best be described as dicey. Early assignments included serving as a junior political officer at the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem, where he dealt with the Palestinian populations in the West Bank and Gaza; he later worked in Damascus, as well as in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, at the U.S. embassy in Riyadh. He was ideally prepped in crisis management and conflict response, having been posted in D.C. on the Iran desk.

  It would, however, be North Africa where Stevens would excel as a diplomat and as a reliable face of American reach. When the United States reemerged as a political player in Libya, Stevens jumped at the opportunity to work in an emerging new arena for American diplomacy.

  Stevens served as the Deputy Chief of Mission in Qaddafi’s Libya from 2007 to 2009. In that position he helped advance Washington’s visions for the region while seeking opportunities for American multinational corporations and other interests in the über-rich oil state. The American political push, which coincided with a concerted effort to sanitize Libya’s inescapable past and leadership peculiarities, was determined to advance the needs of the United States to field allies in the Arab world in the War on Terror. In that role, Stevens met and developed relationships with key figures in the Qaddafi regime, and he served as a conduit for visiting politicians—ranging from junior members of Congress to powerful members of the House and Senate such as Peter Hoekstra, a Republican congressman from Michigan, and the Republican congressman John Boehner, at the time of this book’s writing the Speaker of the House.

  Stevens was a greatly admired diplomat—respected by men and women on both sides of the political divide. Personable and self-effacing, he was described, in absolutely complimentary terms, as a relic: a practitioner of diplomacy from days past. He displayed street smarts and an affinity for what has been categorized as low-key negotiations. He achieved agreements and cooperation courtesy of interpersonal relationships;4 he was known to have achieved more over cups of rocket-fuel coffee in a market gathering spot than could ever have been achieved in reams of paperwork or gigabytes’ worth of e-mails.

  Stevens was considered the State Department’s subject matter expert (SME) on Libya; as the most respected and energetic SME in its ranks, in March 2011 he was dispatched to Libya for a second tour by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to be America’s man on the ground in the Arab Spring conflict to oust Qaddafi. Stevens was a natural for this sensitive assignment. His fluency in Arabic and his fluency in spreading the American message of freedom to people who have never known liberty were reported as infectiously convincing; his experience, in Libya, of working closely with the CIA made him an essential and highly effective bridge builder. Establishing a rapport with the many militias that battled Qaddafi loyalists required a deft hand and a talent for breaking bread with men in camouflage fatigues who talked about long-standing relationships while a walkie-talkie stood on the table next to their plate of hummus and an AK-47 was nestled by their feet. The uprising erupted in Benghazi, and that’s where Stevens needed to be.

  He arrived in country on April 5, 2011. There were no commercial air connections into Benghazi, so Ambassador Stevens and a gutsy crew of support diplomatic and security staff arrived in the port city by boat, a Greek freighter, the SS Maria Dolores, which made a run from the ancient harbor in Valletta, Malta, to Benghazi. Stevens’s DS entourage was small, though the agents packed a powerful punch. The Maria Dolores carried, in its cargo hold, several armored bullet-resistant SUVs and numerous pallets of communications gear, computers, and, of course, weapons and ammunition. “My mandate was to go out and meet as many members of the leadership as I could in the Transitional National Council,” Stevens said. “I’ve gone around with our small team and tried to get to know other people in the society there.”5 The Libyans were so grateful upon Stevens’s arrival—and America’s role in the liberation of the country from the yoke of dictatorship—that they hoisted British, Qatari, French, and American flags in Freedom Square, in front of the central hall of justice.

  When the fighting stopped and Qaddafi’s humiliating end had been completed, Chris Stevens was an obvious choice to be President Barack Obama’s personal representative to the new Libya. In May 2012 he presented his credentials to Ashour Bin Khayal, the Libyan National Transitional Council’s foreign minister, as the American ambassador.

  Stevens’s office in the U.S. embassy in Tripoli was one of the newest facilities to emerge out of the chaos, fury, and joyous hope of the Arab Spring. Situated on a sprawling patch of sunbaked acreage in the posh Sidi Slim neighborhood, along the Walie al-Ahed Road, in Tripoli, the embassy was a heavily fort
ified facility.

  Tripoli wasn’t the sole U.S. diplomatic outpost in Libya. Special Mission Benghazi, an ad hoc consulate not meeting the security requirements of the Inman standards, had been hastily set up in the eastern city of Benghazi in the fluid reality of the Libyan civil war. The city, a hub in the murky waters of the Arab Spring and transition in Egypt and conflict in the Horn of Africa, was a dangerous and despicably lawless place and, as a result, vital to American interests. The consulate wasn’t really a consulate but a temporary facility bypassing security standards; “expeditionary diplomacy” dictated that DS do the best it could without the protections afforded official consulates.

  5.

  Special Mission Benghazi

  Ambassador Stevens’s first night in Benghazi was spent sleeping on the ship that brought him to Libya; there was no other safe haven for him in the city. He bunked with his DS contingent, consisting of Special Agents Brian Haggerty, Kent Anderson, Josh Vincent, Chris Deedy, James Mcanelly, Jason Bierly, Ken Davis, and Keith Carter, the SAC, or special agent in charge of the detail. The DS agents were wearing U.S. government desert mufti: 5.11 trousers and a one-size-too-large button-down 5.11 tactical shirt; the larger than necessary blouse not only enabled the agents to conceal their holstered SIGs but also provided them with easy-to-reach access in case they found themselves in a firefight. It was hard to mistake Ambassador Stevens’s detail for anything other than a group of American agents. Their khaki-green U.S. State Department baseball caps and shiny new armored SUVs were typical Uncle Sam calling cards in the Sandbox. The DS agents, armed with a street map of Benghazi and the service of a few reliable local Libyans, were tasked with one very important mission: locate a safe venue where Ambassador Stevens could set up shop.