Under Fire

by Fred Burton

  American embassies are also intelligence stations. Some embassies field CIA stations, as well as various representatives from the other intelligence agencies and departments that make up the espionage and intelligence-gathering community; it was probably safe to say that there were more spooks at the U.S. embassy in London than in Wellington, New Zealand, or Santiago, Chile, for example. Reportedly, there were numerous American assets represented at the embassy in Libya.

  Embassies also field military attachés: the men representing the army, navy, air force, and even sometimes the Marine Corps. There are top secret areas of embassies where few can venture. These Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities, or SCIFs (pronounced “Skiffs”), are “for your eyes only” areas where the spies and the soldiers converge to convene court.* Sometimes, entire buildings or compounds at an embassy are SCIFs. Embassies are mini-extensions of Washington, D.C.—mini-extensions of the global power that the United States can wield.

  As a result of this projection source of American power, American embassies around the world are inherently prepared to deal with disasters. The U.S. embassy in Tripoli was ideally prepared to deal with the news of the September 11 attack on its mission in Benghazi.

  The embassy began formulating its emergency response the moment the TOC relayed news of the attack to the RSO’s office. The RSO grabbed the CIA station chief and the senior defense official and met in the DCM’s office to get everyone on one sheet of music. The reporting from B. and R. was steady and calmly crafted; they never overreacted, and given the circumstances the remarkably professional manner in which they provided detailed and precise information helped to paint a thorough, though foreboding, portrait of what was transpiring in Benghazi at the Special Mission Compound. This was a worst-case scenario for RSO Tripoli—his worst dreams realized. The young agents in Benghazi were his responsibility; the well-being of the ambassador and the communicator was his responsibility. But RSO Tripoli was 640 miles away. His men under fire were a thirteen-hour drive (no gas or bathroom breaks, no flat tires, no jihadist checkpoints, no Qaddafi-loyalist highway carjackers, and no warlord robbery attempts) away. Benghazi could have been on the moon for all it mattered. He could not provide them with an immediate tactical response and rescue. When things went bad for SY and DS in some far outpost of the world, things usually went very bad, with missions littered with body bags. Some lived for this environment, but others were better off behind desks. RSO Tripoli silently hoped and prayed D.C. would get off their asses quickly.

  By the time the DCM took the call from the unidentified number on the Libyan mobile phone network and heard Ambassador Stevens’s voice, the notifications were already being disseminated to the men and women who would be facilitating the response. The DCM had prayed, when he heard Stevens’s voice, that word of the attack was some sort of unannounced drill or tabletop exercise, but no surprise drill ever contained a voice fraught with so much terror and fear. And then the line went silent.

  Notifications followed immediately as the embassy’s emergency response triage went into full gear. Even in an age when everyone carried an embassy-provided BlackBerry and was reachable 24/7, it still took an effort to get everyone out of bed, out of the gym, and away from the dinner table to return to the embassy. An emergency action committee, or EAC, was convened immediately; the DCM, now in charge, chaired the fastidiously paced contingency planning.* There was little time to spare.

  The DCM, the RSO, the defense attaché, the political officer, the public affairs officer, and the IMO would have all been present, along with note takers and various members of the administration staff. Secure laptop computers, capable of facilitating classified information, were open on the large faux-wood conference table; the cups of coffee filled the room with the aroma of an early morning board meeting. The red light outside the door meant serious business was being discussed inside.

  The EAC was convened to provide the besieged DS contingent with support and rescue. The DCM briefed the gathered and explained, word by word, the message he received from Stevens; RSO Tripoli briefed the gathered on the reports from the TOC, and the chief of station briefed everyone as to reports that he had received from the Annex, as well as from assets—who would remain nameless forever—on the ground in Benghazi and even in Tripoli who might have a handle on what might, from the CIA perspective, really be happening at the Special Mission Compound. The DCM might have, on paper at least, been in charge, but in a post like Tripoli the chief of station, in times like this, was the man who ran the show and called the shots. Libya was different, and some would whisper after the fact the true reason they were there in the first place was to support the CIA.

  As the men whose decisions mattered planned the next move, the assistants worked the phones. The bosses looked at maps and at options, while terse, urgent, and sometimes pissed-as-hell calls were made to members of the fledgling Libyan government and members of the underground Libyan militia movement (friend and not so friend), as well as to friends—murky friends from dubious backgrounds or from other nations’ intelligence services who served secretly or not so secretly in Libya—and mere contacts. They called anyone and everyone who just might be able to lend a hand.

  Outside the confines of the protected “U.S. ears only” area of the embassy, a “helper” was working the phones at a furious pace. Every embassy and consulate had local helpers. He or she was someone with exceptional networking skills and a vast Rolodex, who had the magical gift of knowing just about everyone and anyone who mattered in the host nation; if the helper didn’t know the right person, the right person didn’t exist. Helpers were experts in clearing items through customs, locating guesthouses and residences, and, most important, dealing with the maddening bureaucracy that could often be found in foreign lands. The helper greased the wheels and enabled people to move about without having to deal with the dirty little tidbits of graft that third-world nations called the currency of day-to-day life. The helpers knew whom to visit and whom not to visit; they knew which police chief could get anything done if somehow, miraculously, a bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue ended up in the backseat of his car and which customs agent was taking his family to Disney World and wanted tickets to the Magic Kingdom. More often than not, no one at the embassy wanted to know just how the helper got things done as long as he got them done; this was especially the case at isolated and critical-threat posts.

  And in a crisis, if the embassy needed to charter transport, the helper was the one person who could locate a reliable provider and make sure the pilot had all his certifications and that fees and protocols would not delay or disrupt any critical mission. Private transport wasn’t hired unless something critical was going on. It had been done before, after all. In May 2012, the State Department had denied a request by the U.S. embassy in Tripoli to have the SST continue using an official DC-3 aircraft to shuttle personnel to and from Benghazi. According to declassified cables, the State Department suggested that the embassy charter an aircraft instead; the e-mail stated that Undersecretary of State for Management Patrick Kennedy “has determined that support for Embassy Tripoli using the DC-3 will be terminated immediately.”1

  Inside the bureaucracy that was Foggy Bottom, DS worked for, and reported to, M. Some of the DS agents hated that the Diplomatic Security Service was not a stand-alone agency like the FBI, but the old-timers knew this would never happen. M. controlled the Bureau of Diplomatic Security purse strings, and money drove missions; whoever controlled the purse strings controlled the outcome. Some inside DS, especially the top-tier management, viewed him as an ally; others viewed him as the problem; the truth, of course, rests somewhere in between. At minimum, Kennedy had been a survivor. The key players in Washington—the cabinet-level roster—were all kept abreast of the developments courtesy of their personal representatives stationed in Tripoli. The response from Washington was monolithically unified: get our people out. A private jet, or some sort of aerial transport, would definitely be needed. And, in the
chaos of a crisis, when the local political and military representatives of the embassy could get the local government to supply a C-130H aircraft and a supporting crew for the quick flight to Benghazi, the helper was ready to serve to make sure that all military protocol at the airport, as well as any other Byzantine protocol, was properly attended to.

  The U.S. embassy in Tripoli was well staffed to execute a dynamically tactical response to the attack. The Joint Special Operations Command happened to have a covert top-tier counterterrorist presence in country. Its mission was classified, but reports have hinted that it was in Libya trying to prevent terrorist elements from acquiring remnants of Colonel Qaddafi’s WMD (primarily nuclear) program. The agency was also hunting down loose MANPADs that had possibly fallen into the hands of al-Qaeda or its affiliates in North Africa.2

  There was also deep speculation—unconfirmed, of course—that the CIA (or other elements of the U.S. intelligence community in country) was training Libyan mercenaries to topple the Syrian regime. But there is no doubt that Benghazi’s intelligence mission was driving the show. According to one former DS veteran with a wealth of service in the Middle East, “Libya was the agency’s circus.”3

  The CIA, reportedly, also had a sizable GRS support element in Tripoli. These men, like those at the Annex in Benghazi, were veteran operators who had years of combat experience in the top tier of the JSOC and USSOCOM order of battle. These men were experienced professionals whose dedication to mission was unrivaled.

  A muster was called in the RSO’s office to find a volunteer rescue force to send to Benghazi. Virtually all available—the precise number is classified—volunteered. Two JSOC shooters volunteered to fly to Benghazi, as did five GRS operators. One of them was Glen Doherty.

  * * *

  Glen Anthony Doherty was born on July 10, 1970, in Winchester, Massachusetts; he was the second of three children born to Ben and Barbara Doherty. He grew up in a Norman Rockwell landscape of outdoors, trees, and winter wonderland adventures. His parents raised their children to appreciate nature and to develop themselves athletically. Rugged, handsome, and blessed with an inherent sense of success, Glen could accomplish just about everything—from the academic to the hard charging—that he put his mind to. He was one of those people who didn’t have the word “failure” in his molecular structure.

  Glen Doherty attended the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Arizona. He did more in his formative years between being a teenager and being a man than most people do in their entire lives. Doherty flew airplanes, he motorcycled, he skied, and he excelled at white-water rafting. And, just for an added test to his stamina, he became a triathlete. In 1995, Doherty joined the U.S. Navy and volunteered for the SEALs. He wanted to push himself even further than most humans could imagine, and he wanted to change the world.4 “Glen was pretty much a hippie,” said Clint Bruce, a former NFL player with both the Baltimore Ravens and the New Orleans Saints who left a very lucrative professional football career to join the Navy SEALs and who worked with Doherty. “He was carefree without a worry in the world. Some men stressed at work inside the teams; they had to work very hard at their cardio strength or their shooting skills. Not Glen. He looked at something, heard someone talking about it, and without as much as breaking a sweat, he would master it. One day he could be at the range, making us all look bad with his M4 or an AK, and then the next day you would find Glen by himself strumming a guitar.”5 Bruce—who served as a SEAL officer in the Pacific and Middle East in multiple leadership positions prior to, and during, the Global War on Terror and is the founder and president of Trident Response Group, a risk and threat management firm headquartered in Dallas, Texas—said that he was one of the many commanders who was taken aback by Doherty’s unique and unrivaled style. “He was the kind of SEAL everyone wanted to be around,” Bruce added. “He always provided a sense of confidence that even we in this confident setting always wanted to be near.” Doherty was, like many SEALs and members of the special operations community, a recruitment poster for all that was grand about the American spirit. But he was also an enigma. When he wasn’t working for the CIA, he worked security for the Grateful Dead.

  Glen Doherty served as a paramedic and a sniper in SEAL Team THREE; the unit’s responsibility was the Middle East. He was in a force that was no stranger to terrorism, having responded to Aden, Yemen, in 2000, following the suicide bombing of the USS Cole. Knee issues almost forced Doherty out of the military, but after he re-upped following the September 11, 2001, attacks, he served two grueling tours in Iraq and believed that the sacrifice of serving in the war-torn nation was worth it if the action of the SEALs and the coalition could help rescue a nation from the grips of a tyrant.

  Doherty left the SEALs in 2005 and entered the world of military contracting, working for the U.S. intelligence community in hot spots around the world, including Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen. The work was lucrative—especially considering that he was deployed for only three months out of the year. His work in Tripoli for the CIA was one such assignment.

  17.

  Linkup

  Once inside the compound, a two-man team of GRS operators ran up to the villa from their access point at Charlie-3. They had point. The rest of the rescue squad followed immediately behind in their G-Wagons and set up a defensive perimeter once they reached the ambassador’s residence. Looking north, the operators saw the fires at the February 17 Brigade command post burning wildly. The villa was also aflame. Bloodstains were noticed on the pavement leading to the building’s entrance, and one of the pickup truck weapon carriers was completely engulfed by flames; the vehicles that the attackers had torched burned ferociously, almost to a white fire. It was Detroit or Newark on a hot summer night in the 1960s during the height of ballistic anarchy. The six operators and the translator moved cautiously but swiftly into the grounds. They hoped that they could conclude their business at the Special Mission Compound in a matter of minutes and pull everyone out.

  Several operators took up rear security in case any of the attackers were lying in wait with an RPG or RPK in hand looking to pick off the rescuers. It was classic terrorist modus operandi that was reenacted time and time again in Mogadishu, southern Lebanon, the Gaza Strip, Iraq, and Afghanistan: enemy elements launched an attack that exacted heavy casualties and then waited for the rescue forces to arrive so that they, too, could be drawn into a larger and more involved kill zone. The GRS operators wanted to be in and out. They didn’t want to be there fighting until dawn requesting backup. They were the last line of defense in Benghazi. There were no other good guys to call.

  The team of operators moved forward in the choreographed silhouette of engaging threats; their eyes never moved off their weapon sights. Their weapons forward and their backs curved downward, the former SEALs and marines reduced their target profiles and silhouettes and flowed as they positioned themselves. Their motion was a precisely choreographed advance. Quick movements jotted up and down, right and left, seeking targets to engage. Peering through their Trijicon ACOG sights, they moved cautiously toward the villa to the agents at the egress window outside the safe haven. The heat emanating from the burning buildings and vehicles was severe. The red sky looked absolutely hellish.

  Radio communications enabled the CIA security staffers and the DS agents to link up without any possibility of a blue-on-blue engagement. R., in the TOC, identified the location where the agents were hunkered down, and he updated the DS staff that relief was close by.

  The GRS force did not know what to expect when they linked up the DS agents. They thought the DS personnel would be deployed in tactically defensive positions but instead found the four men covered in blackened burns, coming in and out of the safe haven, searching for the ambassador and Sean Smith. The men were in a dreadful state. Their eyes were swollen and awash in cleansing tears. Their clothing was singed and blackened. Their mouths and noses were painted with a black sheen from inhaling through the heat and smoke; the DS agents h
ad crawled to the swimming pool and soaked their T-shirts and wrapped them around their faces in order to be able to endure the flowing thick of the cream-like poison smoke. The agents remained undaunted, however. They were not leaving until they found the ambassador and the IMO. The GRS team leader shouted a predetermined code name before moving in closer. The DS agents didn’t say much, though the sense of relief was etched on their blackened faces. There was no time for niceties of “glad to see you.” Once the required situation reports were exchanged—and updated through the TOC—the agents resumed their search for Stevens and Smith.

  The GRS operators immediately split their forces in three. One team remained behind with the DS contingent to search for the two missing diplomats, and Ty Woods used a trauma kit and administered emergency first aid to A., who was in respiratory distress and badly burned. Two GRS operators—a sniper and his spotter—climbed the roof of the villa and from behind the concealing veil of flames and smoke set up a perch overlooking a 360-degree field of fire to detect and terminate any encroaching threats. The GRS snipers were good—very good—and they were determined to keep any hostile elements from getting near the search-and-rescue operation going on for the two missing Americans. The third two-man element rushed over to the TOC to rescue R. and bring him back to the villa. R. had time to secure weapons and equipment, including the firearms of the British specialists, and make sure that the laptops were destroyed and any sensitive material on them would be impossible to retrieve; it was all very old-school and a “back in the day” sort of thing, but smashing hard drives with a hammer was quite effective.