by Fred Burton
In considering the similarities—the warning signs—between attacks against America’s diplomatic posts in Beirut, Tehran, and Benghazi and Washington’s tendency to turn a blind eye to the inconvenient realities on the ground, Golacinski simply quoted the French author Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr: “Plus Ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” The more things change, the more they stay the same.4
To the State Department, Beirut and Tehran were ancient history. The perils of abiding by Dr. Kissinger’s “higher purpose” in spite of all warnings and at the likely expense of U.S. personnel were quite clearly ignored. In an action memo for Undersecretary of State for Management Patrick Kennedy from the Near Eastern Division head, Jeffrey Feltman, titled “Future of Operations in Benghazi, Libya,” the importance of a continued U.S. presence is requested and defined as a small State-run presence. “A continued presence in Benghazi will emphasize U.S. interests in the eastern part of Libya,” the memo states. “Many Libyans have said the U.S. presence in Benghazi has a salutary, calming effort on the easterners who are fearful that the new focus on Tripoli could once again lead to their neglect and exclusion from reconstruction and wealth distribution.”5
As a result of the higher purpose even in light of the security threats, the Benghazi protection model—as insufficient as it was—was accepted; after all, it had become the norm in this new world disorder.
Headquarters assembled temporary duty lists like a jigsaw puzzle, juggling global personnel needs. The agents all began their journeys to the hot spots of America’s pressure points around the world in the business-class lounges at Dulles International Airport. The younger agents gravitated to the hot spots; it had always been that way. Danger pay, especially for newlyweds and those with newborns, helped cover the bills, and doing your time in the barrel of some hellhole was viewed favorably by the star chamber that etched permanent assignments into stone. Even the old-timers felt compelled to sign up for the endless list of hardship posts that came up for consideration. Men with twenty years on who had already served in places like Beirut and Monrovia now found themselves competing for assignments in Baghdad, Peshawar, and Khartoum. The agents would sometimes laugh about this twist of fate at a point in their careers when they were thinking more about retirement than high-threat tactical training and looking forward to some quiet time at home, in the northern Virginia enclaves, now that their children were in college. “I am getting too old for this shit,” these graying men in their late forties would joke to one another, paraphrasing the Danny Glover character’s famous expression from the film Lethal Weapon, as they crossed paths in the business-class lounges at Dulles, Dubai, or Amman’s Queen Alia International Airport, heading to Iraq, Pakistan, or Yemen.
Special agents serving in DS, even those who had migrated to federal work from municipal, county, and state law enforcement agencies, knew that it was pointless to complain about their lack of support from the Foreign Service lifers at Main State, or “Bow Ties,” as they were known. DS agents, by the fibers of their DNA, were stoic. After all, the legacy of the agency was that the DS special agent was a jack-of-all-trades and a master of doing a great many things with few resources. But in this particular case, stoicism made way for a reality check: in 2012, in the upside-down world of endless threats, the intelligence indicated the security posture was spiraling out of control.
Five agents found themselves in Benghazi during Ambassador Chris Stevens’s week in the city. They became a team, and like many details that DS has thrown together for protective assignments, the agents at the Special Mission Compound represented different backgrounds and experiences—both in their lives before DS and while carrying the badge.
They were, as coined so aptly in the field office, known as “hump agents.” These were bodies, inexperienced yet willing to do what they were told and to work the worst shifts, who were the nuts and bolts of the protection backbone. Protective details couldn’t function without them. To headquarters and management, these men and women were names and numbers on assignment boards.
The five men in Benghazi were the new DS, a mixed bag of overachievers: former street cops, U.S. Marines, a U.S. Army Iraqi war veteran, and academics; one was a class valedictorian at his small, faith-based college in the Southwest. Some were battle trained and had seen war. All had ten years or less on the job; most had carried a DS badge for less than five years. All joined the service after 9/11.
They will be identified as: R.,* the TDY RSO who was the senior man among the group and the person who was on long-term post in Libya, borrowed from the RSO’s office in Tripoli. A. and B. were the two junior agents assigned TDY to serve in Benghazi. C. and D. were the two young agents who constituted Ambassador Stevens’s ad hoc protective detail and had flown with him from Tripoli.
The detail assigned to Benghazi, especially the younger agents, reflected an ethos that was always viewed as one of the most valuable aspects of the job—learning by doing. DS had always thrown young agents with little or no experience into the mix of multidimensional protection assignments; agents based in the United States who had not previously served abroad did not have the opportunity to receive overseas RSO training before serving in Benghazi.6 At a UN General Assembly in New York City, DS was responsible for over 150 protective details, a seemingly impossible feat to pull off considering that before 9/11 the agency fielded only twelve hundred agents. Some of the details were small and routine: a European foreign minister, or the secretary of state from some South American nation that had few enemies. But other details, like the Iranian or Cuban foreign minister, or for Yasir Arafat during his time as head of the Palestinian Authority, were monstrous and high-threat endeavors. Veteran agents, some with years of experience overseas, would head these details, and junior agents would be thrown unmercifully into the mix conducting advances and preventive intelligence gathering and countersurveillance and negotiating traffic in midtown Manhattan in a shiny Suburban full of Uzi-wielding agents. It was here, learning by doing and dealing with different agencies and personalities, that young agents would learn that on a detail a smile always won friends and an upbeat attitude always enlisted the help of others. But these learning-by-doing assignments were domestic details—not international TDYs and not to locations like Benghazi.
The dichotomy of life inside this new DS was that new men and women on the job no longer learned by doing by being hump agents in a field office and flying from one city to another inside the United States to help out protecting the Dalai Lama on a Monday and a NATO foreign minister taking his family to Disneyland on a Friday. The new DS sent its newest agents into the eye of the storm, in Afghanistan and Kurdistan, where they could learn under fire. As remarkable as this trial-by-fire reality was, the retention rate for agents remained high; the selection process, which picks approximately two hundred candidates from a sea of ten thousand hopefuls, has been remarkably successful. These new agents are evaluated and judged by their ability to sink or swim inside the war zones of the world. The same standards don’t hold true for the top tier of management. While new agents are judged and advance onward and upward based on flying by the seat of their pants, this new phenomenon has rewarded bosses who play it safe politically. Safe decisions, safe choices, and safe outcomes are what have guaranteed careers. Most of the DS directors who have been appointed to their posts over the past twenty-five years have not served in critical-threat posts. A director must be able to navigate through high-level bureaucracy and to deal with and negotiate with the “suits” and “dresses” at the highest levels of government. Those traits are best honed in Washington, D.C., and in places like London and Paris. “These skill sets aren’t perfected in Baghdad or Beirut,” said one retired RSO.
* * *
In DS, even in the old SY days, there were always those special characters, the thrill seekers, who volunteered to venture where others were unwilling. They traveled to places the FBI would never dream of sending an agent to. There was Jack Herse, murdered in 1974 under
suspicious circumstances in Rosslyn, Virginia, steps away from the current DS headquarters; Herse, old-school SY and a decorated U.S. Marine at Inchon, had single-handedly arrested Dr. Timothy Leary in Kabul after Leary was broken out of jail by the Weather Underground. Known as the “Troubleshooter,” Jack was sent to hot spots—alone!—whenever embassies were attacked or ambassadors kidnapped in the 1970s. His backup was a five-shot Smith & Wesson Model 60 revolver and a Beretta submachine gun.
Herse’s legacy continued with the creation of DS. In the years preceding the 9/11 attacks—indeed, in the beginning of America’s war against fundamentalist terror—a good many Benghazi-like assignments fell to MSD and especially a small cadre within the special response force who were known as the “gunslingers” or the “go-to guys.” Many were military veterans, some with combat experience, who brought with them specialized skills—and a specialized psychological package—that made them uniquely qualified for the most dangerous of assignments. This cadre was made up of some of the agency’s most experienced operatives and, in many cases, the most undisciplined. They were able to thrive because, as the retired DS agent Scot Folensbee, one of the go-to guys, would reflect, “DS at the time gave agents in the field, especially in dangerous locations, a lot of latitude.”7
Folensbee, a highly decorated paratrooper and medic in Vietnam, and men like Tony Deibler, a decorated marine, were all type G personalities—thrill seekers! These guys rode BMW motorcycles, scuba dived, skydived, and drove fast cars. The workload during their tenure—they traveled the world to hot spots and under-threat embassies 250 days a year—still enabled them to attend top-tier training courses with the best of the best of America’s spec ops and intelligence communities. From “Wally World,” the Delta Force compound in Fort Bragg, to explosive and explosive-ordnance-disposal instruction with elements of America’s covert community, these State Department agents broadened their horizons and prepared themselves for what no other federal agent ever has to contend with—the madness of this world’s regional and tribal conflicts.
Folensbee and his fellow Dirty Harrys (“every rotten assignment in the book”) found themselves in shoot-outs in Bosnia, in El Salvador, in Lebanon, and in Africa. In one TDY to a Liberia covered in the blood of a civil war, a deployment that both Folensbee and Deibler volunteered for, the two State Department agents found themselves at an embassy surrounded by a city of madness and slaughter. Guerrillas and gang members slaughtered one another in front of the embassy gates, sometimes cutting out the hearts of the men they had killed and eating the still-pumping organs for the embassy staffers to see. Folensbee and Deibler didn’t drive through checkpoints; they shot their way through. And in acts of great courage, they rescued trapped American civilians and journalists with weapons ablaze. “Many people back home, on the Hill or at headquarters, couldn’t understand what happened in places where violence was out of control,” Folensbee said. “There were no right decisions or wrong decisions in such places; only individual decisions.”8
Benghazi, too, was an assignment where there were no wrong and right decisions—only issues of reaction and survival. The ancient town was simmering with passions and preclusions of peace and in the power vacuum of a civil war had become a nerve center for the North African jihad. DS, even with two thousand agents, was stretched thin; a significant percentage of the agents overseas were in Baghdad or Kabul; Pakistan and the Arabian Peninsula required vast human capital. MSD teams were crisscrossing the globe on emergency tactical assignments. With the Global War on Terror placing virtually every U.S. embassy and consulate inside the crosshairs, the tactical specialists of MSD had, in many ways, become the new DS.
RSOs at embassies often have a hundred tasks and responsibilities in the course of their day-to-day duties. Benghazi was about safety and survival. It was an assignment that would require each man assigned to the post to utilize the resourcefulness and think-on-your-feet instincts that DS was so good, during “normal times,” at fostering in its young agents.
The five men hunkered down in Benghazi were modern-day Crocketts, Bowies, and Travises at an Alamo outpost very far from home. Although trained for every worst-case scenario imaginable, no agent ever expects it to happen, but knows that when things start to go bad, they go bad very quickly. Time stands still for those engaged in the fight, but how quickly things go south is only known to those who have been there and done that. Who lives and dies depends a great deal on training, teamwork, and fate.
The agents at the compound knew that they were on their own.
7.
Life in Critical Threat
From 1998 to 2008—in fact, from the true emergence of al-Qaeda as a potent global terrorist force to the height of the bitter battles waged against Osama bin Laden’s army around the world—there were thirty-nine attacks against U.S. embassies and consulates, as well as against U.S. diplomatic personnel, excluding regular attacks against the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, Iraq.1 Many of the posts that were attacked were locations that are defined as under “critical threat.” According to its protocols and mandate, DS, along with other federal law enforcement and intelligence communities, classifies the threat level at a particular embassy or consulate in order to determine what resources are needed to adequately provide security support. Six threat categories are reviewed, including terrorist activity (from both international groups and domestic organizations) in the host country, political violence, crime, ***** ************, and ********* ******. A rating is then assigned for each category on a four-level scale: critical threat; high threat; medium threat; and low threat.
Libya was just another of the many critical-threat posts that dotted the world map at DS headquarters. But the violence and uncertainty of a Libya in a post–Arab Spring vacuum, with Islamic militants looking to establish new global outposts, made the country uniquely dangerous for American diplomacy.
September 2012 promised to be bloody in Libya. A “state of maximum alert” had been declared for Benghazi and other parts of the country on August 29, 2012. There was an intense fear among Libyan officials that pro-Qaddafi loyalists would use the September 1 anniversary of Qaddafi’s rise to power as a springboard for a bloody attempt to retake control of the country. September also had started on a troubling note for Ambassador Stevens and the security staff at the U.S. embassy in Tripoli. On September 4, a local guard, one of the 125 local bodyguards hired by the RSO’s office, had been killed in a tragic accident when he was crushed to death by a roll steel gate controlling the entrance of the compound. The gate was mechanically operated, but because it had been battered and abused in the course of day-to-day operations, it had to be manually slid open and shut; the Libyan guard was killed when the gate dislodged and fell off its frame.2 The tragic incident happened in front of several embassy employees as well as Ambassador Stevens.*
Diplomats do operate from the safety of bunkers and fortresses, and the systems required to create a secure environment are cumbersome and heavy; mass and might are required to absorb the destructive shock and awe of modern terrorism’s VBIEDs. The gates, and the guard force, were one of the many security enhancements made to the sprawling embassy facility to cement a long-standing and safe American presence inside Libya.3 Security, of course, was a primary concern and difficult to provide in the fluid reality of a nation that had just been through the hell of civil war and the onset of sectarian and Islamic scores being settled. Ambassador Stevens’s work in Tripoli was the iconic emblem of America’s mission to maintain influence and support for the democratic aspirations of the Libyan people inside the tumult of the Arab Spring. Benghazi was the out-of-sight and out-of-mind meat grinder where that influence would be challenged. As special envoy, Stevens visited Benghazi frequently; he would do so less often after he became ambassador. He had scheduled a trip to the city for the week of September 10–14. It would be his first trip to Benghazi in nearly a year.
An ambassador’s movements in a city like Paris, let alone a war zone like Libya, do not
occur in a vacuum. There were itineraries to be prepared, commercial flights to book, liaisons to forewarn, security provisions to put in play, and contingency planning to envision and execute. That was the big-picture end of the equation. On the ground, in Benghazi, the five DS agents assigned to the Special Mission Compound were no strangers to such requirements of the protective security world; it was, after all, a significant part of the special agent’s job description. The art of protective work was something learned at the basic agent level and bequeathed by senior agents to rookies in the field. Much of the work required doggedness and instinct, as well as luck and the knowledge that if and when a threat materialized, reaction time would be preventively instantaneous.
Part of the DS special agents’ job description is preparing for the worst and reviewing a mental checklist to make sure they are ready to respond to any and all eventualities. “An agent on a detail always goes through a lengthy mental checklist to make sure he’s ready for anything,” reflected Special Agent T.,* a former DS agent with tours in Jerusalem, Sana’a, and Karachi, to name but a few. “This list is very introspective and personal. How will I respond to the first sight of the man in the crowd who could be an assassin or a suicide bomber? Will I trust the hairs that stand up on the back of my neck when I see what I think are the telltale signs of an IED? Will the sun be in my eyes when we are under attack and I have to respond with my SIG and M4? Will I ever see my wife and kids again? And that’s on an assignment inside the real world. Your senses and your concerns sharpen significantly when you find yourself on a hardship tour to some far-flung outpost somewhere in between hell and a firefight.”4
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan blurred the lines between what had traditionally been the domain of DS and that belonging to the military. DS found itself in the crosshairs of two major international conflicts, and RSOs and their staffs pivoted from traditional diplomatic security tasks to such endeavors as nation building, hostage affairs, and long-range convoy security. The embassy in Baghdad had, at any given point, nearly two hundred special agents. Their tasks were endless, their numbers relatively small, and the risks enormous. Agents summoned to deploy to these high-threat zones lacked high-threat training; not all the agents were young and veterans of the armed forces (though many were); some of the men and women on short lists for posts in Iraq and Afghanistan were salty veterans and had had careers in academics and business before joining the ranks of DS and did not have combat pedigrees. Preparing these men and women for the realities of warfare was an absolute necessity.