Under Fire

by Fred Burton

  Benina International Airport was really two airports—a military airfield and a commercial international port. The military side consisted of a few transport aircraft and logistic supplies. Smuggling was rampant at the military side of the field, and even though the national army was in charge of security, arms, explosives, uniforms, and other tools of war changed hands often and for rock-bottom bribery fees. The volume of ordnance transiting the military field was extraordinary, which in part led to the profound black market, and it was always a buyer’s market. The civilian side of the airport supported domestic and international flights from all over North Africa and the Middle East. Libyan-based carriers, such as Libyan Airlines, Buraq Air, and Afriqiyah Airways, called Benina International home, and the airport also handled international flights to Cairo, Alexandria, Amman, Khartoum, Tunis, Dubai, Istanbul, Jeddah, Athens, and Doha.

  Four separate militias and security entities controlled the airport, each mapping out its piece of the pie and determined not to surrender one inch: not to the NTC, not to a rival militia, and certainly not to the CIA. The Libyan Preventive Security Services controlled overall security at the airport, but many of the postrevolutionary leaders inside Libya likened this group to nothing more than a “gang of thugs.”1 The Libya Shield Force, too, owned part of the airport grounds and controlled some of its operations, but the brigade’s loyalties to law and order were always suspect, as were the worst-kept-secret rumors that it was linked to al-Qaeda. The National Police, the al-Amn al-Watani, were also responsible for policing duties and security operations at the airport; the Libyan immigration services handled all matters of border control.

  Many of the militia subunits, especially those that controlled a slice of the lucrative airport, were family-run affairs and, as a result, often fought among themselves. And, of course, the four heavily armed forces that shared jurisdiction—and ongoing criminal enterprises—made it so nothing got done unless all sides were appeased. “There were times that the airport ran very smooth, just like a European airport,” a journalist commented. “But if one clerk was bribed and another from a different faction wasn’t, the entire infrastructure went into North African shutdown, and it didn’t matter who was left stuck in an aircraft or shackled to a bench inside one of the immigration department’s holding cells.”2

  One of the local militias operating at the airport should have been attended to in a byzantine sort of way before the unscheduled C-130 touched down at Benghazi at approximately 0115 hours. Tripoli station and the RSO’s office at the embassy had arranged a quick turnaround for the Tripoli Task Force to be met at the plane and then rushed to the Annex to rescue the American intelligence and diplomatic staff. But they were stuck in Benghazi purgatory, not allowed to leave the airport.

  Suddenly there were logistic details that had to be worked out. Which militia would provide the armored vehicles for the Annex and Special Mission Compound personnel? Which militia would escort the Americans and to where? Which militia would drive lead? Which would take the follow position? How much money would be charged for these services? It was all so very surreal, but it was how things got done and how they didn’t get done. The negotiations to solve the inertia on the tarmac were equally surreal. Commanders wearing different uniforms argued vehemently with one another, and they argued with the Tripoli Task Force leader. There is a remarkable and culturally driven pantomime to the art of arguing—hands waving, voices lowered and raised, and the obligatory turning of one’s back and the returning to the heated discussions—that Middle Easterners have mastered to a level of expertise that, according to one Lebanese-born journalist, “has become a form of foreplay. The deal will always get done,” she remarked, “but unless there is wrangling, insults, apologies, someone walking away, and at the end a reluctant compromise, the deal simply isn’t worth making.”

  This was the case at Benina International Airport. The back-and-forth involving men wearing half a dozen different uniforms representing the same number of divergent interests, all with their hands out, went on for hours. The Task Force leader called the Annex in addition to the embassy in Tripoli. Men desperately pleaded for help on the tarmac, and bosses, inside SCIFs at the embassy, frantically worked their mobile phones to try to resolve the issue. The foreplay and the coordination would last more than three and a half hours. A journey of approximately twelve miles, from the airport gates to the wedge barrier at the Annex, appeared as though it would not begin before it was too late.

  * * *

  The Annex was quiet as 0200 hours approached. Inside the walls of the fortified compound, agency personnel worked feverishly to prepare the facility for departure. A secret intelligence station was not built overnight, nor was it easy to disassemble it in a matter of hours. Records of sources and assets had to be destroyed. Hard drives on laptops were smashed with hammers and paper files shredded in crosscut shredders. The CIA had great resources and efforts invested in the network it had established inside eastern Libya and did not want it compromised or eliminated. Leak of an asset’s name could mean certain death for him and his family; the CIA’s failure to safeguard the identity of one of its resources in country would make it virtually impossible to convince others to knowingly and willingly assist the United States ever again.

  The Annex maintained constant communications with its station in Tripoli, and its personnel were on the phone with the Tripoli team leader stuck in the middle of the byzantine bureaucracy on the tarmac. There was no ETA given.

  The GRS operators and DS agents maintained a constant vigilance at their defensive positions, and they continued to scan the outer perimeter of the Annex in search of the expected next wave of the attack. There was little doubt that the position would be hit again, and it was the proverbial question of when rather than if.

  As the seconds dragged on, there was true concern that the attacks had been well coordinated and executed in concert with the Islamic militias who ruled the city. There was, in the minds of the Annex defenders, no other explanation behind the delays at Benghazi airport. Benghazi bureaucracy was ball-bearing-in-the-machinery slow, but by now elements throughout the country were aware of the attacks against the American presence in the city. If there was a will to expedite an end to the bloodshed, then certainly there had to be a way.

  The attacks so far had been puzzling. There were no IEDs or VBIEDs used. The terrorists had not introduced suicide bombers into the equation yet, nor had they attempted to use the heavy firepower at their disposal, the concrete-chewing cannons mounted on their trucks, in any coordinated manner. Terrorists in Libya fielded impressive combat credentials and enough ordnance and delivery systems to take over any target in the city. The attacks so far had been comparatively small-scale.

  A blanket of beguiling silence had overtaken Western Fwayhat. The darkness revealed no signs of movement. The shooters on the rooftops looked at their G-Shock watches and depressed the button revealing the time in a muted greenish light. It was 0215 hours. The quiet gave the CIA staffers and the DS agents time to reflect. The quiet also gave the terrorists time to clean their weapons and reload.

  Back in Washington, there would have been a distinct feeling that the worst was over. There was no adverse intelligence to indicate anything more was planned. The drone had also seen nothing of concern on the perimeter. Daylight brought hope and a new beginning to end a night under fire. Those inside the Annex hoped to be out of the kill zone by dawn. The DS agents needed medical treatment.

  25.

  Benghazi Medical Center

  Doctors working the midnight shift at Benghazi Medical Center (BMC) in the early morning hours of September 12 were used to chaos. The resident physicians were primarily junior, and although they had become experts in combat emergency care treating the casualties from the civil war, they were rookies to the routines of hospital administration and emergency room management. The hospital, in fact, was never supposed to have an ER; Muammar Qaddafi wanted the proposed thousand-bed hospital to be a beac
on for medical excellence for the entire eastern half of the country, not a trauma care center. Qaddafi ordered the facility built in 1979, but it only opened for business thirty years later, toward the end of his tenure—a typical reality of life in Qaddafi’s Libya, where grandiose ambition was often thwarted by the shackles of dystopia. But a city that had suffered enormous violence and collateral damage in the campaign to oust the Libyan dictator had an acute need for a hospital where gunshot wounds and angina attacks could be treated at the same sophisticated location. Twenty minutes after the civil war began in Benghazi, the hospital’s emergency room was open for business.

  A visit to the ER was just as much a medical emergency as it was a family affair. If a Benghazi resident needed the ER, he usually ventured to the hospital with his family—spouse, children, cousins, and more. The ER was always crowded with children wandering the halls, women crying, and men in need of care. It was a 24/7 sea of pain and healing.

  Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital had partnered with BMC to help bring its advanced know-how and experiences to postrevolutionary Benghazi. In September 2012, Dr. Thomas F. Burke, the chief of Massachusetts General’s Division of Global Health and Human Rights, at the time of the attack found himself in Benghazi for the second time since the revolution. Dr. Burke was no stranger to conflict and tactics: he spent seven years in the U.S. Army with several overseas deployments, and he served as the doctor for the FBI Hostage Rescue Team, or HRT, at the sieges at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and Waco, Texas. With many years of medical support work in conflict and post-conflict nations, Dr. Burke found Benghazi an ambitious yet familiar project.

  Beyond the covert and the diplomatic American presence in the city, there were American businessmen and even tourists—primarily backpackers—who walked around openly and freely. But the American presence was nomadic—lone souls looking for a business opportunity or the chance to visit rare ruins before they were discovered by scores of tour buses ferrying Euro-pinching holidaymakers from the Continent. “I have traveled to war zones and zones reeling from war all over the world,” Dr. Burke would comment, “and the lack of an official American presence, government and corporate, in Benghazi was truly stark.”1

  The Americans—and indeed all foreigners—resided in the Tibesty Hotel, the last functioning hotel in the city accepting foreigners. In the afternoon of September 11, Dr. Burke left his hotel room to take a walk with some colleagues in downtown Benghazi and along the corniche. All along his journey, he encountered pedestrians and motorists who, seeing that he was a Westerner, embraced him, wanting to know if he was an American. “It was something like a U.S. soldier walking through Europe after World War II ended,” Dr. Burke remembered fondly. “We were almost celebrities. The people in the city were grateful for helping them rid Libya of Qaddafi.”2

  But Dr. Burke was under no illusions that Benghazi was a normal city at a normal time in its history. His counterpart at Benghazi Medical Center, Dr. Fathi al-Jehani, had been shot in the chest in May 2012 after he refused to sign the hospital over to one of the many militias in the city; Dr. Jehani was back at work two days later, walking the halls of the hospital with a tube in his chest. There was no law and order at all in Benghazi. It was a very dangerous place to be, especially because, as Dr. Burke said, “some of the thirty-five militias that ran Benghazi promoting Sharia law ruled by the gun.”

  Dr. Burke had, in fact, spoken to Ambassador Stevens at 2030 hours on September 11. The ambassador was slated to visit Benghazi Medical Center to express his appreciation and enthusiastic support for six programs that Dr. Burke and Massachusetts General were coordinating with the hospital; the programs covered executive health-care development; health-care management; ER development; ambulatory care management; advanced radiology (the training was being conducted in Boston); and the establishment of a Libyan national poison control center. Ambassador Stevens considered his trip to Benghazi Medical Center an affirmation that engaging the Libyan people with dedication and kindness would produce priceless political and cultural dividends. He considered his visit to Benghazi Medical Center one of the most important stops of his brief visit to the city.

  At 2140 hours, Dr. Burke and a colleague were on the phone with one of the DS agents when he heard an explosion in the background, and then gunfire, and then the words “We’ve got a fucking problem here.”3 The line then went dead. Over the course of the next few hours, while hunkered down in his room at the Tibesty Hotel, Dr. Burke heard gunfire and explosions. Ambassador Stevens would be arriving at the hospital much earlier—and under very different circumstances—than originally planned.

  At 0215 hours a phalanx of young men burst through the back door near the emergency room entrance at BMC. They rushed quickly through the corridors and shouted that they needed a doctor. The men took turns carrying Stevens, hauling his body over a shoulder as they negotiated the crowded triage and admitting area. News of the attack had become public knowledge by midnight, and the emergency room physician, Dr. Ziad Abu Zeid, was able to surmise that the man now on his gurney was the missing American ambassador.

  Dr. Abu Zeid worked feverishly to resuscitate Ambassador Stevens. He and other doctors worked on Stevens’s body for nearly ninety minutes. CPR was applied without letup; Stevens was injected with epinephrine to get his heart going, and a tube was inserted down his throat toward his lungs to generate breathing. According to Dr. T, an emergency room doctor with extensive battlefield experience, “A forty-five-minute code [the EMS/emergency room vernacular for cardiac arrest], much less ninety-minute, feels like hours. It is a literal time warp as you act and react in a code.”4 But Libya’s greatest champion for freedom was already dead. Many of the young doctors attending to the U.S. ambassador were Libyans who returned to their native country from lucrative careers in Europe and the United States. They had hoped to become the pillars on which a new and free Libya could be built. At approximately 0200 hours on September 12, 2012, they would declare the death of John Christopher Stevens. He was fifty-two years old.

  Knowing what the loss would mean for Libya, some of the doctors wept over Stevens’s body. In an adjacent room, approximately twelve men were lying unconscious on gurneys being prepped for surgery. The armed men who had brought them into the hospital an hour earlier would not leave their names at the desk.

  * * *

  As the night dragged on, the mood at the U.S. embassy in Tripoli was “wall punching” frustration. The Annex had just held off a serious attack, the seven JSOC and GRS operators were still stuck in an endless struggle of Middle Eastern “show me yours and I’ll show you mine” at the airport, all this while the whereabouts of Ambassador Stevens remained a mystery. At this moment, the President’s representative to Libya was presumed a hostage. The embassy even prepared for an evacuation, not knowing if it would be hit next. Cable traffic between Tripoli and Washington was frenetic. It was 1900 hours in the U.S. capital, and dinners and drinks were being missed at Foggy Bottom, at the Pentagon, and at the Libya desk at CIA headquarters in Langley.

  * * *

  At approximately 0215 hours, the RSO received a call from A.’s mobile number. Yet instead of talking to the DS agent to receive a situation report from the Annex, the RSO found himself talking to a young Arab male saying that he was with the ambassador at the hospital; the phone had been taken from Stevens’s pocket as he lay on the gurney being resuscitated and was the same cell phone Stevens had used to ring the DCM in Tripoli earlier in the night.* The caller was long on emotion and very short on fact and detail. His description of Stevens was skewed by his wounds.

  The fear had been that Stevens had been kidnapped and that an image of him would appear shortly on a jihadist chat room confessing to crimes against the Islamic world, shortly before a dagger was to be raised to his throat. American hostages had, after all, been beheaded before for the horrific shock value. A YouTube broadcast of an American ambassador being executed, like the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who was brutally b
eheaded in Karachi, would have been a horrific event. But the RSO and the chief of station had another concern. Was the call from the hospital indeed genuine? Was it a ruse? Were the terrorists intent on starting the light of a new day with a tandem strike against the Annex and against rescue attempts to come to the hospital to retrieve the ambassador’s body? Nothing made sense. Expanding the attack to three locations would have been nightmarish and would require the absolute intervention of the U.S. military, which, as had been seen in Somalia, was a Pandora’s box with limitless disaster possibilities.

  RSO Tripoli summoned a recently hired Foreign Service National, known as an FSN, a local brought on to help out with logistic in-town tasks at the Special Mission Compound, to venture to Benghazi Medical Center and see for himself if the man was indeed Ambassador Stevens. The FSN* was new to this game, and he had been hard at work trying to gather local intelligence on what was actually happening in the city, and was attempting to appeal to all the fractious elements at the airport so that the Tripoli team could get on their way. But, reportedly, the hospital was full of Ansar al-Sharia gunmen, who were wandering about the hallways and who had their vehicles parked outside the main entrance. The FSN was quick-witted and feared that he would be recognized as working for the U.S. government and be abducted immediately; when it came to the men with the black flags, it was also likely that his family would have been massacred just to make a point that the penalty for working with the crusaders was death. So the FSN mustered an unidentified friend who also knew Stevens to wander into the hospital and see what he could find out. The identity of the FSN’s friend is unknown.

  The friend was scared and intimidated by the men in camouflage fatigues and black outfits patrolling the grounds as if they were the rule of law (which in fact was mostly true). Their AK-47s dangled carelessly off shoulder slings. Some barked orders into mobile phones or walkie talkie–like radios that the Gulf states had distributed en masse to the ragtag fighters during the revolution. The friend, however, displayed great courage. He walked past the men with the guns, past unsavory souls who wandered the hallways looking for trouble and opportunity, and past the nurses and doctors rushing to and from the ER triage. There was no notion of hospital security; anybody could walk right in.