Under Fire

by Fred Burton

  And then there was silence.

  Silence on the radio means one or two things: either all is good, or things are very bad. There are no in-betweens. The TOC went silent on air after R. indicated that help was on the way. The silence initiated grave concern.

  Thick plumes of acrid gray and black smoke billowed upward to cloud the clear night’s sky. The terror-strewn landscape was painted eerily hellish as the grounds of the Special Mission Compound were lit up in an orange glow. For some added fury, some of the gunmen broke the windshields of several of the February 17 Brigade vehicles parked near the command post and doused the interior of the vehicles with gasoline. A lit cigarette, smoked almost to the filter, was tossed in to ignite another blaze. The crackling of flames introduced a wickedly violent cadence to the shouting in Arabic. Every few minutes or so, the sounds of shattering glass punctuated the terror.

  The men carrying the fuel-filled jerry cans toward the residence moved slowly as they struggled to slice a path toward the ambassador’s villa. The twenty liters of fuel contained in each plastic jerry can weighed forty-four pounds, and the gunmen found it difficult to manage the lofty weight with the gasoline sloshing around and spilling on their boots and sandals. Their grasps on the can handles were tenuous at best; the perspiration that turned their trigger fingers clammy made carrying a heavy load all but impossible. The men were forced to stop every ten or twenty feet to right themselves and to correct the slings for their AK-47s back across their shoulders. Several of the men in charge barked insults and orders to the jerry can–carrying crews, but intimidation was pointless. The jihad never turned away a martyr-to-be because he lacked upper-body strength.

  The survival equation at the Special Mission Compound was growing dim. R. summoned C. and D. over the radio.

  “Guys, TOC here, several tangos outside your door. Stay put. Do not move.”

  “Copy,” replied one of the agents.

  “Backup on the way.”

  In the background, the TOC agent could hear the sound of the angry mob in the hallways, over the agent’s keyed microphone. R. communicated his situation to the Annex, the RSO Tripoli, and the DS/CC via his cell phone. Well over a dozen terrorists were trying to break through the cantina at the residence. The agents had heard a crowd of men outside the building and then retreated inside once they heard the tumult and the AK rounds fired all around them. The layout of the Special Mission had betrayed the response capabilities of the armed agents. The sprawl had turned into a defensive handicap; being spread out enabled hostile forces to split and weaken any truly cohesive counterattack. C. and D. had shut the main door and had moved the refrigerator from its emplacement inside the kitchen and barricaded the door with it. They hunkered down low, with their M4s in hand, and prepared for the breach and the ballistic showdown. The agents’ short-term objective was to remove the ambassador from his location, a mission they had trained and prepared for ad infinitum. However, in the backs of their minds the nagging question remained: Would they see the light of the next morning? This didn’t matter. What did matter, however, was the knowledge that their colleague was alone in the safe haven and needed backup. They were, however, trapped.

  In reality, so, too, was the TOC. But as long as some of the many cameras that were supposed to be functional still worked—and the terrorists didn’t have the forethought to remove them from their rotating anchors—the TOC would be the Special Mission Compound’s sole means by which to coordinate any and all rescue attempts of Ambassador Stevens and Sean Smith. The TOC’s cameras gave them a chance.

  A. leaned upward, glancing out the murky transparency of his egress window, peering across the bars toward the violence before him. He watched as the fuel bearers inched their way forward, and he limbered the fingers of his right shooter’s hand as he laid a line of sight onto the multiple targets closing the distance to the villa. His breathing was controlled as he inhaled and exhaled in preparation for having to take that first and fatal shot. He found himself relying on his thoughts, his instincts, his experiences, and the responsibility for keeping Stevens and Smith safe. The very essence of those oh-shit moments in dignitary protection work was whisking a principal far from the kill zone—far from harm. The point of the training that an agent received was to instill the importance of using dynamic skill and pragmatic thought to buy time and space. It was, perhaps, a remarkable testimony to the means and measures that the Diplomatic Security Service took in recruiting its men and women that inexperienced agents who were thrown into the crosshairs of the new world disorder were able to assess threats analytically, with their minds and gut instincts, and not solely with their trigger fingers.

  A. faced a life-changing or life-ending decision from the inside of the darkened bunker of the villa’s safe haven that few of even the most experienced agents in the DS roster ever had to confront: Shoot it out and play Rambo, or remain unseen and buy time? Buying time takes brains, and according to a DS agent with a plethora of experience in counterterrorist investigations, “We hire people for their brains, not necessarily their trigger fingers.”12 Assessing threats and creating distance between a potential assassin and his target takes analytical judgment, and its takes being able to absorb a 180-degree view of the terrain and translate it into a chess master’s plan of attack. “We’re not there [in hostile locations] to engage,” said Special Agent Dale “Chip” McElhattan, the acting DS chief of security and law enforcement training, at a training exercise at the Diplomatic Security Training Center in Summit Point, West Virginia, that was open to local media. “We’re there to get the people we’re protecting away from the threat.”13 McElhattan should know: he has had quite a lot of experience in protecting people from great threat. In 2002, McElhattan, the RSO at the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem, led a DS team that rescued citizens from foreign nations trapped in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem at the onset of full-scale warfare between Israeli and Palestinian forces. Under fire, the DS team rescued nine Americans, five Britons, several Italians, and one Japanese citizen from the church and a nearby hotel. For their courage under fire, McElhattan and his team were awarded the prestigious Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association National Award for Heroism.

  Indeed, DS special agents are taught to cover and evacuate. This philosophy is the diametric opposite of the way that others who find themselves in critical-threat real estate are taught to operate; SEALs, after all, are trained to engage. A. found himself in an unforgiving position of being damned if he did and damned if he didn’t. As the retired DS agent Scot Folensbee reflected concerning these life- and career-altering events while on a critical-threat assignment, “When you are faced with immediate life-and-death decisions, you know that ultimately, if you survive, you will be second-guessed and criticized. So, the only thing to do is realize that in these cases of ‘should I shoot or not shoot,’ you as the agent are the one making the decision and you, the agent, will have to live with that decision. There wasn’t a right decision here, and there wasn’t a wrong one, either. There was only the decision of the agent forced to make such a judgment call.”14 A. scanned the horizon, prioritizing the targets. He understood that depending on what outcome dawn’s first light would bring, he would be either congratulated or criticized; dead or alive was a mere afterthought.

  Had he had to write down the answer to this very pressing quandary, had such a question been on the basic agent test, he clearly would have answered it wrong. The Special Mission Compound in Benghazi on that night was not a textbook case. Benghazi—especially in the context of the Arab Spring and the fight against the new franchises of fundamentalist terror—was a dizzying and uncertain mosaic. It was a multidimensional mess with a border of whites and blacks that was filled with countless shades of confusing gray. No classroom, no training officer, and certainly no armchair general could understand the ballistic nuances of those terrifying, uncertain moments of the attack. The attackers had managed to cut off and isolate two two-man teams of armed support, and the l
ocal militia paid to stand and fight had cut and run. A. listened to the communications going back and forth between all the agents on the compound as best he could on the twisted coil earpiece connected to his Motorola handset radio.

  A.’s decision was indeed his and his alone. And he chose to do whatever was humanly feasible to keep Ambassador Stevens and IMO Smith alive. If the time came to take out a few of the assholes who had invaded that night, then he wouldn’t hesitate. But there was no honor in a suicidal last stand before it was absolutely the time to commit suicide. Every second that the three could hang on was another second of hope that rescue would come.

  He hoped that the TOC had managed to reach someone who could help. He was waiting for the arrival of the operators from the “other government agency” down the road.

  It was 2200 hours.

  13.

  Notifications

  When the TOC first relayed the request for assistance to the U.S. embassy in Tripoli as well as to the Annex, Tyrone Woods knew what was needed. He and several comrades suited up. They checked their M4 carbines and semiautomatic pistols and loaded their tactical gear into several armored CIA Mercedes G-Wagons parked in front of their quarters. Some of the operators moved their heads slightly in the main staging area of the Annex, pointing their ears in the direction of the Special Mission Compound, in an attempt to listen to the events as they were transpiring. The crackle of the odd gunshot in the distance was an inconclusive yet optimism-building sign that the agents were indeed safe and hunkered down awaiting backup. The GRS team knew, from radio transmissions from the TOC, that the agents were still alive, although sudden bursts of AK fire from twenty or so weapons could hint that a massacre was taking place.

  The operators wanted to move out immediately. They didn’t understand what the delay was. As they assembled, some of the GRS members grasped their holsters, making sure one last time that their custom-made Kimbers and SIG **** **** * ** semiautomatic pistols were ready; some removed their SIGs from their holsters to check out the SIGLITE night sights one final time. The men knew they would be using their weapons shortly.

  The GRS team leader quickly briefed the February 17 Brigade commander on scene as to what they were going to do and prepared to depart. The CIA communications officer had been relaying the bursts of radio feed from the TOC to the chief of station in Tripoli. There was a fluid exchange of radio information and electronic messaging; communications between all points were working fine. The orange glow of flames flickered to the north as the radio communications between A. and the TOC became more desperate. Woods calmly reviewed the contents of his medic’s bag and wondered what was next. Yet before the vehicles and armed specialists could traverse the mile or so separating the diplomatic and the intelligence compounds, the Annex commander emerged from his office and ordered the rescue force to stand down for a few minutes pending guidance from Washington.

  The GRS rescue force stood in front of their vehicles with a perplexed mask of anger adorning their faces. The crackle of gunfire was heard to the north. Woods was reportedly unwilling to accept any delays coming from HQ or anyone else. As someone who had been in the center of combat where lives depended on rescue and medical treatment, he knew that seconds were precious. Woods knew that he was the lifeline and that the DS agents were pinned down.

  The GRS operators made sure they had all their equipment and prepared to head out. They knew there wasn’t a damn thing Washington could do at the moment for anybody.

  * * *

  It was 2205 hours in Benghazi, 1605 hours in Washington D.C., when the duty officer at the Ops Center at Main State received the following electronic cable:

  Subject: U.S. Diplomatic Mission in Benghazi Under Attack (SBU)

  SBU: The Regional Security Officer reports that the diplomatic mission is under attack. Embassy Tripoli reports approximately 20 armed people fired shots; explosions have been heard as well. Ambassador Stevens, who is in Benghazi, and four COM personnel are in the compound safe haven. The 17th of February militia is providing security support.

  The Operations Center will provide updates as available.

  By established protocols on message dissemination, the inbound cable had some thirty-five recipients, including those working for the Department of Defense, AFRICOM (in Stuttgart, Germany), the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, secretly hidden inside Fort Bragg, North Carolina, at Pope Army Airfield. The recipients of the message inside Foggy Bottom would have included the office of Intelligence and Research (INR), the Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism (S/CT), and the Near Eastern and African Affairs Bureaus.

  The Department of State handles the notifications process of international incidents, especially attacks against American installations, very well. The DS agent at the Ops Center ensured that copies of the cable went to the SWO, senior watch officer, and the State Staff Secretariat, the staffers assigned to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The DS/CC was also simultaneously notifying the special agent in charge, or SAC, of the secretary’s Personal Protection Detail, known as SD. The SD SAC could always whisper in the secretary’s ear or pass her a note or, as has been the case, interrupt what she was doing to bring her a message. It had been that way forever. Besides the secretary, “positive notifications” were made to the regional bureaus, INR, and S/CT. The agent assigned to the Department of Homeland Security command center was also called. Within minutes, hundreds inside Foggy Bottom alone knew exactly what was unfolding in Benghazi. Word spread like wildfire inside Foggy Bottom as employees tuned in to WTOP and BBC radio for updates; remote controls were pointed at wall-mounted television sets to see what Al Jazeera was reporting. The mission was under a terror attack.

  * * *

  At the J. Edgar Hoover Building at 935 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, the duty officer immediately ensured that the Director’s Office, always referred to as Mr. Mueller, was notified, along with the assorted list of assistant directors, who worked in the firing line at HQ until a more lucrative post, such as the Salt Lake City Field Office, popped up. The FBI’s elite Hostage Rescue Team, or HRT, was also alerted—“just in case”—even though the chances of them getting involved in any operations in Libya would be slim to none. Since the 1986 Omnibus Diplomatic Security and Antiterrorism Act created extraterritorial investigative authority for the FBI, the facility attack was now a U.S. federal crime.

  DS agents had gotten used to working with the FBI, although the relationship was historically challenged. In February 1995, the FBI took credit for the apprehension of Abdul Basit Mahmoud Karim, also known by his pseudonym/nom de guerre of Ramzi Yousef, in Islamabad. A walk-in to the U.S. embassy in Islamabad told the DS special agents Bill Miller and Jeff Riner, the two ARSOs, that he had information on Yousef’s whereabouts; the walk-in had presented the two special agents with a matchbook, distributed by the Diplomatic Security Service’s Rewards for Justice Program, offering $2 million for any information leading to Yousef’s arrest. The RSO, Art Maurel, was a tough-minded investigative veteran who was willing to absorb any bureaucratic punches and allowed his agents to work the case; they avoided informing anyone outside DS, including the DCM, so as not to compromise the mission. Yousef was apprehended at an al-Qaeda guesthouse linked to Osama bin Laden before he could embark on a notorious plot, code-named Operation Bojinka, which targeted the destruction of ten American airliners as they flew over the Pacific Ocean. After being interrogated by Pakistani security services, Yousef was turned over to the FBI HRT, who secured his return to the United States. The bureau took credit for his capture and forbade elements of DS to “claim the collar,” as a DS agent from the New York Field Office put it.

  The Yousef capture was a low point in DS-FBI relations. Subsequent investigations, including the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, as well as the bombing of the USS Cole in Aden, Yemen, in 2000, did little to repair the difficult working relationship between the two agen
cies. After 9/11, a plethora of FBI agents were placed inside embassies overseas, exacerbating what was already a difficult coexistence. When operating overseas, in the eyes of many RSOs, the bureau was known to wield a heavy hand and display poor bedside manner. “Investigating a crime in Hoboken was one thing, but in the third world, where there is no process, the bureau struggled,” said a veteran DS agent who had worked with the bureau. “DS agents were always saddled with either holding the bureau’s hands overseas or smoothing over ruffled feathers. They came and left in most cases,” he reflected. “The RSO still had to live there.”1

  As much infighting as existed, both agencies had no choice but to work together—especially as the definitive lines separating law enforcement, military, and intelligence operations blurred during the evolution of expeditionary counterterrorism. It had become the norm for MSD agents to protect FBI criminal case agents working investigations overseas.

  Buried inside the Hoover Building is the FBI Strategic Information and Operations Center, known as the SIOC. At the SIOC, the supervisory special agent, or SSA, in charge was putting together a team of agents that could be mustered to respond to investigate the crime. In the past, the bulk of the agents came from FBI Washington Field Office or New York Field Office. The Assistant U.S. Attorneys in New York City had plenty of experience in prosecuting terror cases, so the venue was usually the Southern District of New York. In this case, a special agent in charge from the Denver Division was chosen to lead the FBI team. Reportedly, the agent was James Yacone. Yacone had been in Mogadishu, Somalia, as one of the elite 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment–Airborne 9 MH-60 Black Hawk pilots involved in the operation to capture the warlord Mohammed Aidid that resulted in the Black Hawk Down incident; in the battle he was able to land his crippled Pave Low chopper in a protected area after sustaining militant gunfire.*