by Fred Burton
But there was also a therapeutic quality to downtime. Downtime was also known as “smokin’ and jokin’” among the working humps—the semi-affectionate and completely accurate term for agents in the field. The DS slang originated from the New York Field Office, known as NYFO. Inside their temporary command posts in New York hotels, inside their rooms or sometimes in the lobby, agents read, played cards, watched TV, or rested their eyes while on the couch. In Benghazi, agents sat around at night waiting and watching, never in a truly restful state. Protection TDYs placed agents on constant edge, like coiled snakes. Some agents on critical-threat details exercised until their brains reveled in endorphin overload. Others, in posts where there were women, applied the “five thousand miles from home rule” and found comfort in the sexual pleasures of convenience that they hoped would remain secret forever. Some agents simply immersed themselves in music or books; iPods and Kindles made a library full of tunes and learning available for agents crisscrossing time zones, and they fit neatly in the Maxpedition hard-use gear bags that many carried their extra necessities in. For the ARSOs in Benghazi downtime meant cards.
With the day done and the night still young, A., B., and C. retreated to the pool deck behind the villa. They hadn’t had the time on the job to truly get into the game of “I remember when” and talk about the wild and crazy experiences that older agents usually played when in the company of their contemporaries—each side trying to outdo the other with stories, extravagance, and laughs. Most had not been through RSO training, which prepared agents for one- to three-year tours in embassies and consulates, due to the endless demands of protection work around the world or assignments to task forces and overworked domestic field offices inside the United States. The agents had, though, all been through the cutting-edge high-threat tactical course that prepared them for places like Libya, including the intense tactical medicine instruction. The agents in Benghazi were a new breed of DS agent—one rushed into the fire to stand guard for an American world that was spread thin.
The blue light from the pool glistened in the floodlights of the compound. From inside the walls, the special agents could have been at a resort in the Bahamas or enjoying some free time in the Caribbean on the secretary of state’s detail. Of course, paradise was nowhere near the reality that existed outside the walls, and State Department agents were still on 24/7 duty. The agents never went anywhere without their SIG ***** SIG ****, or Glock ** * mm semiautomatics and two additional magazines. Still, the night was blissful. On the eleventh anniversary of the September 11 attacks against the United States, under a North African sky, three State Department agents enjoyed the relaxing pleasures of a Montecristo and played a hand of cards. Aces were high.
* * *
D. had put Ambassador Stevens and Sean Smith to bed and checked the residence one last time before turning in. Tomorrow, after all, was going to be another hectic day. Following breakfast, the ambassador had a meeting scheduled with executives from the Arabian Gulf Oil Company, AGOCO, at their corporate headquarters in the Dar al Kish area of downtown Benghazi; such moves, inside the twisting and narrow streets of the city, warranted advance trips and route suggestions. Even with the assistance of the February 17 militia and their Toyota pickup and the 14.5 mm heavy machine gun it towed, motorcades inside town were fast-moving targets, but targets nonetheless. And that was just getting to the meeting.
AGOCO’s corporate headquarters consisted of several multistory office buildings spread throughout a complex of smaller buildings. There was a common area near the two main parking lots with trees and heavy underbrush. There were at least a dozen ideal sniper positions available to anyone interested in taking out the American ambassador, as well as choke points where suicide bombers or VBIEDs could deploy. There were militia checkpoints all along the route; some belonged to gangs of armed thugs who sought a toll in order to enter and whose sole goal was money and watching the neighborhood, while other checkpoints were manned by militias espousing fundamentalist militancy.
To safeguard Ambassador Stevens during his meeting at AGOCO, the DS agents conducted advance route checks, as well as a thorough review of the building where the meeting would be held. The agents had to examine all emergency exits, stairwells, and other physical features of the blueprints in order to prepare evacuation plans should someone make an attempt on the ambassador’s life during his time at the location and they had to get Stevens out in a hurry. The agents would also coordinate their movements—arrival and departure—with the corporate security force. In most countries large corporations fielded suit-wearing retired secret service agents or police officers to protect their premises. But in Libya, these security officers, whose backgrounds could be very suspect, carried AK-47s and would be close to the ambassador. The resulting security challenge was daunting.
D. shut the lights around the lavish mansion and then retreated to his bedroom to unwind with a video and then, shortly thereafter, some well-deserved shut-eye. He took off his shoes and his pants and then went to lie down. He was exhausted. He closed his eyes and saw flashbacks of the route the detail had taken earlier in the day into town. He saw the faces, the hundreds of nameless faces that he passed as the motorcade raced across junctions toward the ambassador’s destinations. As D. closed his eyes, he could hear the small talk and laughter of the agents near his window as they relaxed at poolside.
R. monitored the cameras from his fortified command-and-control center inside the TOC. He was the senior man on post, and his mind was wandering and thinking about the surveillance report earlier in the day on the perimeter. “Why was the so-called cop taking a picture? Why was the threat level severe? What in the hell does that mean?” He knew that previous TDY agents had identified vulnerabilities, but those were always there. Risk can never be eliminated, only mitigated. There was no countersurveillance support, or “watchers,” on the perimeter. In a perfect high-threat world, MSD operators lurked as shadows on the outside, watching for surveillance indicators, fixated on a mental matrix of time and distance variables. These highly experienced hunters, eyes searching for the same car, truck, vendor, or person seen earlier in the day or last week, were able to provide invaluable proactively tactical and defensive eyes-outside-target intelligence. The Special Mission Compound had no observation perch, or safe house, across from the main gate manned by agents, with eyes and cameras trained 24/7 on the main gate, looking for assassins or suicide bombers. The agents were inside behind protective walls, much like prisoners, on foreign soil.
In many ways, without the outside eyes and ears, the Special Mission Compound was blind and deaf. The computer monitors showed no activity outside the gate, but of course the camera monitor in the local guard force booth for Charlie-1 gate was inoperable; additional surveillance cameras that were supposed to be set up throughout the compound were still in their boxes, unopened and uninstalled.
Still, those cameras that were up and running enabled DVR surveillance coverage of much of the inner perimeter. The radio on the Blue Mountain Libya frequency was silent. There was no chatter on the February 17 frequency, either.
There was, for the most part, silence. And then, like a wind from the east, there were the sounds of slow-moving tires rolling on a road strewn with sand and gravel. It was 2130 hours in Benghazi—1500 hours in Washington, D.C.
10.
Attack! Attack!
2140 hours: Benghazi, Libya.
The Blue Mountain Libya security guard at Charlie-1 sat inside his booth happily earning his 40 Libyan dinars for the shift. It wasn’t great money, clearly not as much as could be earned in the gun markets catering to the Egyptians and Malians hoping to start a revolution with coins in their pockets, but it was a salary, and it was a good job to keep in a city where unemployment was plague-like. The guards working for the Special Mission Compound tried to stay alert throughout the night, but it was easier said than done. Some of the guards chain-smoked the cheap counterfeit cigarettes from China that made their way to North
Africa via Ghana, Benin, and Togo in order to stay awake; the smuggled cigarettes are a billion-dollar industry in the northern Arab rim of the continent and have become a major revenue source for al-Qaeda.1 The nicotine helped, but it was so easy to occasionally doze off and sleep inside their booths and posts. Sleeping on duty was risky. The DS agents routinely made spot checks on the guard force in the middle of the night. In a perfect world, concentric rings of security are used to protect a diplomatic post. Special Mission Benghazi had Blue Mountain Libya. This unarmed force was the compound’s first line of defense; the Blue Mountain force was a trip wire.
All appeared quiet, though, as well as safe. The feeling of security—or complacent foreboding—was enhanced a half hour or so earlier, at 2104 hours, when an SSC patrol vehicle arrived. Pulling off the side of the road and onto the gravel curb, the tan Toyota Hilux pickup with an extended cargo hold, decorated in the colors and emblem of the SSC, stopped in front of Charlie-1. The driver then shut the engine. He wasn’t alone; the darkened silhouette of a man was seen to his right. The pickup sported twin Soviet-produced 23 mm antiaircraft guns; the twin-barreled cannons were lethal against Mach 2.0 fighter aircraft and devastating beyond belief against buildings, vehicles, or humans. The Blue Mountain Libya guards watched curiously as the darkened cab of the truck situated itself directly across the street. The two men inside didn’t come out in an attempt to engage the militiamen in obligatory small talk; they didn’t get out of their vehicle to bum some cigarettes from the guards or even to rob them. The Blue Mountain Libya guards, after all, were not armed. They were equipped with a Taser and a pair of handcuffs and would never be able to persevere in a fight with men towing rapid-fire artillery. The RSO in Tripoli already had efforts under way to properly train the Blue Mountain Libya force, but there were critical performance issues with the local Libyans who had been hired for the security work. The two SSC militiamen just sat quietly inside their vehicle; the flickering light from cigarettes being lit and chain-smoked was seen behind the glass of the cab’s darkened windows.
Then, in a departure as sudden as his arrival, the SSC militiaman behind the steering wheel of the mobile heavy-artillery piece simply fired up his engine and then headed west, crunching the gravel with the weight of his vehicle’s tires.* It was 2140 hours.
There was no trip wire pulled to provide the guard at Bravo-1 with the time needed to sound an alarm. There was no loud rumble to forewarn the guards at Charlie-1 that danger was slinking its way onto the street in front of the Special Mission Compound. There was no loud roar of chants or gunfire. There was no demonstration. The attack was announced suddenly, with a rifle-butt knock on the guard booth glass.
“Iftah el bawwaba, ya sharmout,” the gunman ordered with his AK-47 pointed straight at the forehead of the Blue Mountain Libya guard at Charlie-1. “Open the gate, you fucker!” The hapless guard, working the thankless job that was clearly not worth losing his life over, acquiesced and did exactly as he was told. Once the gate was unhinged from its locking mechanism, armed men appeared out of nowhere and began to filter into what, if there had been a formal agreement with the Libyan government, would have been official U.S. territory. The silence of the night had been shattered by the thumping cadence of shoes and leather sandals rushing onto the ground and the clanking sound of slung AK-47s and RPG-7s banging against the backs of the men swarming into the compound.
The armed invaders first punched their way through the perimeter at Charlie-1. Once inside, they raced across the compound, to open Bravo-1 and enable others to stream in. Once Bravo-1 was open, four vehicles screeched in front of the Special Mission Compound and unloaded more than a dozen fighters. Some of the vehicles were Mitsubishi Pajeros—fast, rugged, and ever so reliable, even when shot at. They were a warlord’s dream mode of transportation, the favorite of Benghazi’s criminal underworld and militia commanders. The Pajeros that pulled up to the target were completely anonymous; there were no license plates or any other identifying emblems adorning them, and they appeared to blend invisibly into the darkened landscape, especially when the attackers disabled the light in front of Bravo-1.
Other vehicles were Toyota and Nissan pickups, each sporting single- and even quad-barreled 12.7 mm and 14.5 mm heavy machine guns. They took up strategic firing positions on the east and west portions of the road to fend off any unwelcomed interference.
Each vehicle flew the black flag of the jihad.
Some of the attackers removed mobile phones from their pockets and ammunition pouches and began to videotape and photograph the choreography of the assault. One of the leaders, motioning his men forward with his AK-47, stopped to chide his fighters. “We have no time for that now,” he ordered, careful not to speak in anything louder than a coarse whisper. “There’ll be time for that later.”
* * *
Sean Smith was in his room at the residence, interfacing with members of his gaming community, when Charlie-1 was breached. The small reading light on his desk provided some illumination for his gaming laptop. Earlier in the day, Smith had ended a message to the director of his online gaming guild with the words “Assuming we don’t die tonight. We saw one of our ‘police’ that guard the compound taking pictures.” He was online when the enemy was at the gate, chatting with his partners and his opponents. Then, suddenly he typed, “Fuck” and “Gunfire.” The connection ended abruptly.
One of the gunmen had removed his AK-47 assault rifle from his shoulder and raised the weapon into the air to fire a round. Another had tossed a grenade; others fired rounds into the air from their AK-47 assault rifles. The Special Mission Compound was officially under attack.
11.
The Annex
Street names are rare in many cities in the Arab world. While main thoroughfares are usually named after some king or warrior, it is quite common in Benghazi, and indeed in many cities throughout the Arab Middle East, to have nameless roads that are simply known by nearby landmarks. A mosque, a market, a roundabout, a geographic landmark, are all pins on a mental map that direct people to where they want to go. There is no need for house numbers, either. The compound southeast of the Fourth Ring Road was such a landmark in Benghazi.
Neighborhood residents called the complex the CIA base. That the Annex was, in fact, a secret CIA outpost was, perhaps, the worst-kept secret in Benghazi. This was common wherever the CIA or intelligence community pitched its tent. “At the onset of Operation Iraqi Freedom,” a former RSO in the Persian Gulf recalled, “the U.S. military’s Central Command, or CENTCOM, had opened a ‘forward’ intelligence outpost in the desert. I was brought in to investigate a ‘security leak’ because a TDY soldier had landed at the international airport and had lost his travel orders. He was trying to explain to his cabdriver where to go when the driver said, ‘Oh, the secret base…” [And he took him where he needed to go.] Needless to say, I was not seen at the taxi stand the next day interviewing the drivers.”1
In a neighborhood of abandoned villas and the odd shop here and there, a sprawling complex kept behind closed gates that saw a constant coming and going of armored Mercedes G-Wagon SUVs with very tinted windows was bound to spark suspicion. “Americans don’t do subtle very well,” a retired Middle Eastern intelligence colonel stated quite bluntly. “They tend to leave a loud footprint.”2 Throughout the Arab world’s frontline cities in the Global War on Terror, such not-so-secret secret locations were plentiful. They were walled-off mini forts meant to fit benignly inside neighborhoods where the residents knew the comings and goings of all their neighbors. In Libya it was even harder to maintain a covert cover to the Annex. The country had been a secret police state for forty-two years; if for nothing other than their personal survival, Libyans under Qaddafi had been schooled in surveillance and countersurveillance skills. “Everyone knew about the existence of the secret CIA base,” a resident of Western Fwayhat commented. “Even the baker down the road knew what this place was all about.”3 It was, after all, hard to hide lily-white men w
ith warrior physiques who sported tattoos and Wild West beards.
The Annex was, indeed, the secret satellite CIA Benghazi station; the base was subordinate to the agency’s main station in country, at the U.S. embassy in Tripoli. The Annex was located on a nameless side road running east to west inside a vast three-hundred-by-four-hundred-foot plot of land near a slew of homes and businesses; it was southwest of the Al-Misrati farm and adjacent to several large and often neglected plots of land. A thick wall surrounded the complex; much of the wall was covered by growing clumps of flora that helped to obscure details of what went on behind the foreboding walls. The complex consisted of four large warehouse-like buildings that cornered a green roundabout traffic circle in the center; several smaller buildings dotted the grounds. Money did not appear to be an issue of any sort at the Annex: a small fleet of brand-new armored Mercedes G-Wagon SUVs, all of which had local license plates, dotted the parking spots. These vehicles were mini mobile fortresses and armories; they were equipped with navigation gear, extra ballistic vests, smoke, flares, trauma kits, an ax, a crowbar, and extra ammo rounds and magazines. The Global Response Staff, or GRS, teams used the M4-family assault rifle as their primary weapon of choice; each operator, depending on what branch of the military special operations community he grew up in, favored one manufacturer or another and was given the latitude to carry into battle the precise weapon he felt comfortable with. Most—members of the SEAL teams, operators inside the CIA’s elite and covert special operations forces—considered the Heckler and Koch 416 5.56 mm carbine to be the Rolls-Royce of the assault rifle options. Conceived as an improvement to the Colt M4 base, the HK416 was viewed as an incredibly accurate and rock-solidly robust weapon. Reportedly, the weapon was inspired and partly designed as a result of an initiative from the U.S. Army’s elite counterterrorist and hostage-rescue force, the First Special Forces Operational Detachment–Delta, or SFOD-D, or its more colloquial designation, “Delta Force.” The HK416 was considered the “operator’s weapon.”