by Fred Burton
Those in the Annex tended to the agents’ wounds; some of the lacerations were serious. The DS agents were given bottles of mineral water to drink. Some of the Annex staffers who came outside didn’t know what to say to them, but words would have been superfluous. The agents were in a state of shock. They were heartbroken, and they were full of rage. The burden of survivors’ guilt was evident on their faces and in their body language.
A few of the agents sat on the steps of the main building with their legs spread wide and hands clasped over the napes of their necks. As they sat on a stoop inside the CIA’s fortified compound, their faces were sullen, their shoulders dropped in grief. The agents closed their eyes to alleviate the pain from the burns and piercing gut kick of self-imposed guilt. These young men, whose thoughts were racing wildly, were having a terrible time digesting the fact that those they were charged to protect were now dead and missing.
Libya was an assignment of great risk and great promise; ultimately, service in such a post was considered a badge of honor—especially for younger agents—and requirement for advancement. Many young agents thought that having a Libya or a Yemen on one’s résumé was a privilege; after all, so many of these agents joined the DS as a result of the 9/11 attacks. Yet even the best of intentions, for those young agents who volunteered and for those for whom Libya was the luck of the draw, could have a cruel outcome.
It would soon be dusk in New York and Washington, D.C. How many of their classmates at field offices throughout the United States were working criminal cases, putting individuals behind bars for passport and visa fraud, punching out and heading to the local tavern for a few beers? How many in Brussels were serving in the comfortable parlors of NATO headquarters, augmenting security? How many were stuck in traffic on I-95 listening to WTOP radio? How many were in Pakistan or Iraq as nameless faces added temporarily to an understaffed post? Which unlucky classmate was doing a ninety-day tour in Conakry, in Guinea?
In the field of expeditionary diplomacy, the lines separating security duty and combat were blurred. DS special agents, after all, are law enforcement officers, not combatants. And, had the five DS agents been involved in a shooting while working a passport-fraud case out of the NYFO, the New York Field Office, or had they taken fire while on a dignitary protection detail in California, they would have been pulled off the street immediately and evaluated for shock and trauma. What happened in Benghazi was war, but the DS agents were not soldiers. “We are college kids doing grunt work,” a retired DS agent commented. “We go to college, we are put in charge of huge operations, we are given this great authority, yet there we are, roping ourselves together and moving into a den of death. Soldiers and elite warriors like the SEALs and Delta are bred and trained to be warriors. We are bred and trained to be mostly managers and suits, and yet we are still drawn to the most dangerous of missions in the most dangerous parts of the world.”1
And the night’s combat was far from over. The Annex was under attack. The initial barrage of AK-47 and PKM fire was furious; the sounds of 7.62 mm fire punctured the darkness. Dozens of rounds were ricocheting off the northern, eastern, and western walls. The unmistakable swoosh of an RPG being fired was heard in the distance. The rocket-propelled grenades exploded in fiery bursts of light and the splintering glow of fragments spraying wildly into the night.
A fusillade of heavy small arms and machine gun fire followed the GRS rescuers as they burst through the unhinged Charlie-1 gate in the mad rush out of the Special Mission Compound. Several of the attackers, grasping at their PKM light machine guns by their carrying handles, fell to their knees and then squeezed the triggers forcefully, going through a hundred-round belt of 7.62 mm ammunition in a matter of seconds. The tactic looked good on those video moments shot on mobile telephones to be uploaded later to the jihadist Web sites, but the tactical accuracy of such bursts was more Hollywood than heroics. The machine gun fire was sprayed wildly in the darkened distance; the incandescent rounds bounced all around, spiraling like a kaleidoscope of crisscrossing beams, but they were ineffective against the speeding G-Wagons. The GRS team exited the kill zone quickly and without suffering serious damage.
The GRS team retraced its path back to the Annex. It drove by the February 17 barracks and then east on the Fourth Ring Road past the Venezia Café and the Italian diplomatic attaché south to the Annex. As the vehicles passed the café, though, the operators noticed what appeared to be the fuzzy silhouettes of suspicious-looking characters walking on the north and south banks of the roadway heading east. As the G-Wagons sped ahead, the silhouettes became the outlines of armed men, who glanced curiously at the vehicles zooming by. The men tried to engage the G-Wagons, but by the time they could take aim and fire, the G-Wagons were a mere fast-moving blip in the distance. The GRS drivers, whose skills could make a Formula 1 race car champion blush with envy, were flying across the major thoroughfare, near 110 miles per hour.
As the two G-Wagons banked a sharp right turn off the Fourth Ring Road and headed south, the vehicles sustained heavy terrorist fire from the direction of a patch of land with fruit groves and trees. The gauntlet of weapons fire was heavy and dedicated; the mesmerizing muzzle bursts flashed like fireworks and provided the impression of thousands of gunmen lurking in the darkness. The GRS operators, along with their bosses in Tripoli, were convinced that the attack against the Special Mission Compound had been an attempt to assassinate or kidnap Ambassador Stevens; how symbolic it would be for members of one group or another to dispatch the video clip of President Obama’s personal representative to Libya begging for his life—or worse. But as events that night unfolded, and the magnitude of the assault grew with scores of armed attackers rushing to the scene, the GRS operators wondered if the CIA post was the ultimate target and if the attack against the diplomatic compound was a clever tactic designed to split the CIA’s defenders in half. When the flashing warning came over the CIA frequency that incoming rounds were impacting the Annex’s outer defenses, the team leader’s concerns were reaffirmed. The night was far from over.
The DS agents were relieved to see the GRS rescue team return to the Annex. The agents heard the sounds of gunfire in the distance, and as the sounds grew louder—and closer—they realized that the CIA operators had had to fight their way back from the Special Mission Compound. The scene at the Annex resembled what nighttime must have been like at an isolated American outpost somewhere in Vietnam that was under siege. Heavy bursts of machine gun fire were sprayed above the walls, racing like lethal fireflies on a summer night into the darkened sky. Explosions rocked the outer walls, and shrapnel and debris showered the grounds. DS and CIA personnel raced to find defensive positions from where they could engage the invisible enemy that was slowly but surely advancing inside night’s shadows.
The GRS operators who returned from the Special Mission Compound were highly experienced tactical professionals and would have always wanted to be ready for the next fight. The first thing they would have wanted to do upon returning to the Annex was to head to the armory and grab a fresh supply of thirty-round magazines for their HK416s; most of the shooters had also depleted the six or seven fifteen-round magazines for their SIG P226 MK25s and their custom-crafted Kimber 9 mm semiautomatics in the battle for the compound, and they needed to reload. Rounds were also readied for the garrison’s Mk 46 5.56 mm light machine guns. Reinforcements were en route, but this was Libya after all: a one-hour flight and a ten-minute ride from the airport could be a journey that lasted a day or more. Seventy minutes, as was witnessed at the Special Mission Compound, was, simply stated, “a very long time.” There was also concern that the rescue force could be ambushed at the airport. The night was full of doubt and threat. The events were quickly spiraling out of control and out of reason. The Annex was on its own. It was truly an Alamo, or Pork Chop Hill, moment.
* * *
Noncombatants at the Annex—the analysts, case agents, supervisors, and translators—prepared the classified materials for
destruction. Computers, files, phones, and classified communications gear, such as satellite phones and other devices that enabled secret communications with Langley and the NSA, were all moved into piles—in case they had to be destroyed. Even if the Tripoli rescue force arrived, what would the next morning bring? There was little doubt in anyone’s mind—let alone Washington, D.C., and Langley—that the Annex had been forever compromised. The not-so-secret secret base in Benghazi would have to be abandoned.
Top-secret equipment and files were all backed up and replaceable; the human assets weren’t. The chief of base checked in with his boss in Tripoli. Where was the rescue team? The CIA communications officer maintained constant radio communications with the station in Tripoli. Just like Sean Smith, he facilitated all contact of a routine, sensitive, secret, and top secret manner between the Annex and points beyond. A quick glance at the clock indicated that it was after midnight and therefore September 12. In reality, the battle was not yet over, and with any event that starts on one day and ends the next, history will attribute the events that occurred and will occur to the date it started: September 11.
* * *
The midnight shift working at Tripoli International Airport didn’t pay much attention to the C-130H taxiing slowly out of one of the military hangars. The aircraft had the markings of the Libyan Air Force. In the new Libya, after all, armed men usually ventured by private jet. It was common for the occupants of these aircraft to remain anonymous. The Libyan revolution shattered forty-two years of nepotistic wealth distribution into a free-for-all of oil-rich opportunity. Private jets were more common than commercial airliners in the skies over Libya. Sheikhs from the Gulf emirates and kingdoms, princes from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, oligarchs from Africa’s mineral-rich dictatorships, and CEOs from European-based multinational corporations crisscrossed Libyan airspace determined to stake a claim in the untapped wealth of an oil-rich nation in, as some have called it, “opportunistic transition.” These men all traveled with armed entourages. The Tripoli Task Force that the U.S. embassy had mustered was nothing out of the ordinary on the Tripoli tarmac.
The C-130H moved out of its hangar on its slow roll to takeoff position. Air traffic controllers at Tripoli International worked slowly. The Hercules pushed past several Toyota pickups and the armed men who garrisoned the tarmac. None of them wore ear protection, even though the engines of the military transport produced an eardrum-pounding roar. The militiamen seemed bored watching the plane move by; they clutched their weapons, smoked cigarettes, and sat inside their truck awaiting the next chance to grab some tea or a bite to eat. Some of the militiamen wore the long beards usually associated with the jihadists.
Months earlier, Tripoli International Airport was the center of the war to topple Qaddafi; the smoldering tail fin of an Afriqiyah Airways Airbus A300, an aircraft caught in the cross fire as rebel fighters descended on the airport, became a symbolic image of the revolution. Now the C-130H passed rows of Afriqiyah Airways Airbus A320s and CRJs as it moved toward takeoff. The men in the aircraft fastened themselves in and waited. The jump-off from the runway was smooth and brief. Benghazi’s Benina International Airport was an hour away—a blip in time for those who travel by aircraft; an eternity for those in Benghazi anxiously awaiting reinforcements.
* * *
The attack on the Annex was an odd sort of battle. Heavy and sustained automatic weapons and RPG fire subsided as easily as it erupted. The terrorists, the militiamen, or whoever they were had experienced the lethal skill of the GRS operators at the Special Mission Compound, and they seemed wary of mounting a full-scale swarm assault against defenders who were very skilled at hitting what they were aiming at. The Libyan fighters could not have seen or heard the small propeller-driven drone flying thousands of feet above Western Fwayhat, but the operators at the Annex had the luxury of maintaining a computerized link with the unmanned aircraft through ROVER.2 ROVER, or Remotely Operated Video-Enhanced Receiver, was a high-powered laptop inside a hardened shell of a case that enabled soldiers on the ground to see, in real time, the video feed off what an aircraft or drone was seeing. ROVER was an invaluable tool in the Global War on Terror, and it allowed forces, especially special operations units, to acquire real-time ground intelligence on targets they were operating against. ROVER allowed spec ops commanders to call in air strikes, and it enabled small teams of operators (with the twenty-thousand-feet-aboveground vantage point) to avoid ambushes and other threats. In Benghazi, ROVER enabled the GRS and DS agents to pinpoint their shots and to lay down effective fire against attempts by the terrorists to rush the Annex’s outer defenses. On the night of September 12, the drone became the Annex’s perimeter eyes from the sky.
Several GRS operators stood at the ready at the main entrance of the Annex with their Mk 46 light machine guns. Because they feared that the terrorists might attempt to drive a vehicle laden with explosives through the main gate of the facility in order to breach its formidable defenses, the GRS’s personnel were positioned at the main entrance, facing south, along the main road, and the east, at a side gate, and the dirt road that led to the industrial area adjacent to the CIA compound. The rest of the shooters—DS and GRS—were on one of the three rooftops facing a 270-degree field of fire. The terrorists and the Annex defenders played a deadly cat-and-mouse game of attempting to pick each other off in the darkness. A half-moon illuminated part of the night, though much of its glow was already negated by the fires from the Special Mission Compound a mile away. The smell of burning furniture and other unnatural materials crept through on the gentle night breeze.
The attackers had the luxury of cover. The area around the Annex was for the most part shrubs, fields, and abandoned buildings. The north side of the compound faced an industrial complex with some 850,000 square feet of warehouse area; the prefabricated warehouses, with their narrow and concealing alleyways, created a labyrinth of cover for snipers and machine gunners. A small house and an empty field lay directly to the west of the Annex, and behind the dirt path was a row of hedges and trees and a dirt embankment. The area surrounding the Annex was not the open terrain suitable for fluid and open warfare. It was, though, ideal for a nerve-racking urban quagmire. Without some sort of decisive move from either side, the battle of sniping, rapid-fire bursts, and RPG fire could go on for hours or even days.
Well concealed and enjoying—for the most part—the advantage of the high ground, the Americans waited until one of the terrorists exposed his position or fired a burst of AK-47 fire. The muzzle flash compromised the terrorist’s position, and the GRS and DS shooters tried to pinpoint the light with bursts of their own. It was a game of patience and correcting one’s hunch. Often, American weapons fire would result in some dirt or debris being kicked as the 5.56 mm volleys hit the dirt embankment or the side wall of a concrete home. Other times, though, the fire would result in silence or the moan of a man cut down by gunfire. Cries of the wounded cut through the surrounding darkness. Whenever an RPG was fired, or there was a burst of 23 mm or 14.5 mm fire from one of the militia trucks, the operators and special agents defending the Annex put their hands over their heads and sought cover. In some cases, the exchange of gunfire was furious.
And then, just as quickly as it began, the terrorist gunfire ceased. Shouts were heard in the distance, all unintelligible, even to the Annex translator. Some engines rumbled nearby. But the attacking elements, the mysterious and faceless muzzle flashes in the night, had simply had enough and appeared to have headed home.
The defenders didn’t know what to make of the sudden cessation of hostilities. Nothing about the night made sense. Those working for the CIA and the State Department looked at one another with a sense of confusion and relief. The shooters propped themselves up from lying flat on their chests and stomachs and righted themselves to a resting position on one knee; the GRS operators wore knee pads to protect their limbs, while the DS agents were simply sore from the searches inside the safe haven for Sean Smith and Ambassado
r Stevens. The men looked on the ground and saw hundreds of spent shell casings. The respite was welcome, of course. The quiet gave the shooters a chance to reload and the intelligence folk time to prepare for being overrun. It also bought time for the reinforcements to arrive from Tripoli.
So much about the night just didn’t make sense, but one question everyone was asking was, where were the good guys? Two and a half hours of war had been waged in the city of Benghazi, and everyone in the know—and many who weren’t—were aware that the U.S. presence in the city was under full-scale attack. There was no cavalry charge of men in white hats eager to save the day and rescue the besieged American positions. None of the militias—not even the one on the State Department payroll—had mobilized their forces to mount a large-scale and deterring show of force to Western Fwayhat. Militia commanders who had worked with Chris Stevens and called him their friend disappeared that night, as did their soldiers. There was no police response at all. This absence of the most basic pillars of law enforcement was illustrated in an interview with Salah Doghman, Benghazi’s latest police chief, when he told Reuters, “This is a mess … When you go to the police headquarters, you will find there [are] no police. The people in charge are not at their desks.”3
News of the attack against the Special Mission Compound and the Annex had spread like wildfire throughout Benghazi, though the security staffers who worked at the friendly consulates didn’t bother calling or sending aid. The diplomatic staffs in besieged cities were kindred spirits, and they all looked out for one another, but these representatives abandoned the United States that night in Benghazi. The Turks, who had been at the Special Mission Compound an hour before the attack, did not send any assistance, not even an agent with a walkie-talkie and a mobile phone to call someone for assistance. The Moroccans didn’t offer any help, neither did the small German liaison office; the Egyptians, recipients of hundreds of millions of dollars of U.S. aid, sent nothing. The other countries represented in Benghazi offered nothing—not even a slight display of concern, not even an armored car.