by Fred Burton
The FSN’s friend made it to the morgue and to where several doctors were conversing with one another. Some were on their mobile phones; others wept silently. The friend glanced inside the room marked mashrahah, or morgue, and saw Stevens’s body on a gurney. The friend had met Stevens before, and he immediately recognized the man on the slab as the U.S. ambassador. The friend, startled by what he saw, covered his mouth with his hand. He walked out of the hospital to give the news to the FSN in person.
The death of Ambassador Christopher Stevens was a moment of stolen innocence to many in Benghazi. It was hard for a city that had survived forty-two years of Qaddafi and the bloody mess of a brutal civil war to claim innocence, but the Arab Spring brought hope to many who had suffered for years. Libya’s petro-wealth, it was thought, could remedy many ills that other Arab nations, like Syria, were suffering through with plague-like lethality. Ambassador Stevens, because he looked at the Arab Spring through that eternally American ailment of passionate optimism, had been Libya’s most ambitious advocate in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere around the world. His murder was a fatal sign, perhaps, that Libya was destined to suffer through many more years in hell.
The friend emerged from the hospital with his head held low and his shoulders slumped in anguished defeat. He broke the news to the FSN, who then had to notify the RSO in Tripoli. The FSN hesitated for a few moments before calling the RSO. This was not the sort of news that was transmitted with nonchalance. The FSN took a breath and then dialed the number. It was 0400 hours.
26.
Incoming
0430 hours, September 12, 2012: Benina International Airport. After three hours of intensive negotiations on the tarmac at Benghazi’s Benina International Airport, men skilled in the art of Middle Eastern deal making brought an end to the stalemate by achieving points of reason and mutual satisfaction—and paying a king’s ransom. It is unknown how many crisp new Benjamin Franklins were promised in order to reengage the services—and guns—of the February 17 Brigade. The amount generously transferred to the militia that was supposed to have protected the Special Mission Compound and the Annex is unknown, but the group assembled a formidable force to escort the seven men and their equipment to the Annex. After all, this was the time for the Middle Eastern absolution that follows a sulcha, or agreement on forgiveness; this would be how the February 17 Brigade, realizing it was on the precipice of a “you-are-with-us-or-against-us moment,” tardily laid claim to the American partnership.
Nearly a dozen February 17 Brigade vehicles transported the seven Americans who remained stoically silent in several armored SUVs; the seven men were in their battle kit, hands on their weapons. The convoy was considerable in size and in firepower. Half a dozen pickups, each sporting a heavy-caliber machine gun or a large cannon, raced west along one of the airport roads south of the city at speeds that exceeded a hundred miles per hour. There were very few vehicles on the roadways at that hour; even the Mediterranean lifestyle of living at night required a few hours of sleep. And any vehicle unfortunate enough to be near the motorcade would have been run off the road. Once the initial ten-kilometer run from the airport was complete, though, the motorcade had to slow down as it entered the southeast outskirts of the city, but not by much. The closer the armored convoy made it to the Annex, entering the Fwayhat section of the city, the more cautious the Libyan militiamen became. There were several sharp turns that they had to negotiate before they reached the Fourth Ring Road, and each presented its own set of potential choke points that offered a sniper or an RPG team advantageous cover. There were countless spots along the route from the airport where terrorists could have planted a powerful IED. Even with fifty militiamen on their side, and an unarmed Predator drone hovering silently in the dark skies above, the motorcade was never truly safe.
The Tripoli Task Force arrived at the Annex at just after 0500 hours. The gate was lowered seconds before the vehicle darted inside, in a scene of precision that resembled a James Bond film; the February 17 Brigade members positioned their vehicles just outside the main gate on the east-west crossroad. The militiamen stayed in their trucks and on the outside roadway, making sure that no suicide bombers approached, though in the darkness there was little for the men to do and nothing for them to see. Some checked their cell phones. Others grabbed a smoke. Several of the men placed their prayer rugs on the backs of the vehicles, near the cases of 12.7 mm ammunition, awaiting dawn’s first light and morning prayers.
The men from Tripoli were there to ensure that the Annex was evacuated quickly, efficiently, and with extra triggermen along to provide security. There was little time for niceties when the seven operators arrived. They exchanged a few greetings with the GRS staffers, and one of the JSOC operators looked over A., who was slowly recovering from his wounds and smoke inhalation. They went to the building on the compound where Sean Smith’s remains had been respectfully covered up. The seven men from Tripoli wanted to make certain that no more Americans would die in Benghazi.
The Tripoli team smelled the remnants of the burned villa in the air; the smell off to the distance was unmistakable. The signs of a fierce fight were also evident in the Annex. Spent shell casings were everywhere, as were small craters where RPGs fired from adjacent high ground had impacted. The men defending the Annex looked as if they had been through an ordeal; they looked tired, and their clothes smelled as if they had been burned. The arrival of the seven men had brought a sense of relief and closure to the Annex defenders. The reinforcements were fresh and energetic. Their weapons hadn’t been fired all night.
The base chief was busy coordinating the trip to the airport. News of Ambassador Stevens’s death had caused a whirlwind of activity in Tripoli, and American officials urged NTC leaders to commit military assets to safeguard the departure of the mini CIA station, the DS agents, and the bodies of IMO Smith and Ambassador Stevens back to Tripoli. The NTC, perhaps realizing that its inaction during the previous seven hours might ultimately place negligent culpability on its doorstep, now committed the most reliable force it had in Benghazi—the Istikhbarat Askaria, the soldier-spies of the Military Intelligence Service. As the first blue hint of daylight emerged far in the distance over the eastern horizon, a convoy of trucks and a company of heavily armed and politically reliable Libyan Special Forces soldiers were en route to the Annex. They were expected before sunrise.
The Annex detail was hard at work readying the Annex for a “broom clean” departure when a brief crackle of automatic weapons fire was heard approximately a hundred meters away. The Annex, once again, was under attack. Tyrone Woods, according to the words of one of the CIA staffers at the Annex, rolled his eyes in an expression of absolute frustration over the audacity of the Libyan terrorists and said, “I am going to rain down hate among them.”1 It was 0515 hours.
Woods, along with the rest of the GRS team and the Tripoli operators, ran toward his defensive position. The DS agents grabbed their kit and rushed to assist. The two former SEALs Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods were relieved to see each other in the wrong place at the wrong time in an upscale neighborhood in Benghazi. Doherty reportedly looked at Woods and said, “Let’s go, two is one, one is none.”2 Woods grabbed his Mk 46 light machine gun, while Doherty grabbed his HK416. The two men climbed a ladder to the roof and prepared for battle.
Terrorist fire was coming in from all directions. Heavy bursts of machine gun fire were bounding in from the sky. Each trigger pull propelled a tight group of fire toward the Annex and toward the men on the roofs returning fire; green lines of tracer fire crisscrossed the receding night’s sky. The Annex’s defenders responded in kind. Return fire was lethal. The ten-man GRS contingent, the five DS agents, and the seven men from Tripoli gave as good as they got from their rooftop positions, unleashing walls of fire at targets they could identify from the muzzle flashes of the terrorist weapons being fired. This was the terrorists’ big push, and they weren’t pulling their punches. Several RPGs swooshed in toward the rooftops fr
om approximately fifty meters away. The cone-shaped warheads closed in like glowing fists before punching through chunks of the Annex’s outer wall.
The battle also widened. Most of the terrorist focus was initially against the western side of the compound, but it soon spread to the northern tier. The defenders had to dilute their positions against the western approach and shift their sights to a 180-degree field of fire. The terrorists moved fluidly and proficiently from cover to cover in their assault; there were no doubts in the minds of the post’s defenders that these men had had advanced military training and extensive combat experience. The attackers were not a ragtag assembly of militants looking to throw a few rounds down range. Their advance and assault were methodical.
The chief of base once again relayed back to the chief of station in Tripoli that they were under fire when suddenly the mortar barrage began.
There were tens of thousands of Soviet-produced 82-PM 82 mm mortars throughout the third world; thousands were supplied to Qaddafi’s military. The mortar, which saw service with the Red Army during World War II, was a robust and reliable infantry-support weapon that could be transported to a firing position by several men. Although the system consisted of nothing more than a metal tube, a firing plate, and a sight, it did require advanced training in order to operate. A mortar was not an ideal third-world weapon, like the RPG, where if you aimed it in the general direction of a target, odds were likely for a direct hit. Mortar crews required weeks of training and endless hours on the range in order to hone their skills. Unlike the RPG, a mortar also required a crew. The system had to be broken down into pieces and carried into battle. The tube alone weighed 120 pounds; each 82 mm round weighed nearly 7 pounds. Between four and six men were required to operate one mortar. The mortar’s maximum range was three thousand yards, though it was incredibly lethal and effective at a range of one thousand yards or less. A good mortar crew could launch twenty rounds in a minute. A good crew could, firing three or four 82 mm rounds to gauge distance and wind, correct itself along the way to drop a round square into the center of the crosshairs.
What made the mortar so feared on the battlefield was its ability to rain fire down on a target, and afterward the crew could pack itself up and move toward a new position. The mortar could be fired just far enough from its destination that it couldn’t be engaged and close enough that it could decimate a target with uncanny accuracy.
The first mortar round hit a grassy patch of nothing in the northwestern corner of the compound. However, those at the Annex knew that the introduction of mortars to the battle was a game changer. An 82 mm mortar round could spread neat pockets of devastation to a battlefield, and the next round would more likely strike at or closer to its target. The Annex defenders were trapped inside a square kill zone with nowhere to run and nowhere protected enough to hide.
The second and third mortar rounds hit the northernmost complex in the compound, causing serious damage and a few minor shrapnel wounds. The Annex defenders were no strangers to mortars—they had used them, and come up against them, in Afghanistan—and they tried to gauge the battery’s location after each round was launched in order to direct fire against its crew; the terrorist mortar crew relied on a spotter, possibly hiding in the trees, who reported the point of impact of each round fired. Even with the Predator drone flying overhead, its images coming in crystal clear on the ROVER computer terminal that was being monitored by one of the JSOC operators who had come in from Tripoli, pinpointing the exact coordinates of the terrorist mortar crew was difficult. It was assessed that the mortar rounds were fired from between eight hundred and a thousand yards away. The operators also believed that the crew had done this before. The crew members must have been Libyan military veterans or veterans of the jihadist campaigns in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, or Derna.
Without air support, and without artillery of their own, the Annex shooters were limited in what they could do against the mortar team itself; the mortar crew, it was gauged, had nestled itself behind a building south of the Fourth Ring Road, southeast of a large mosque at the roadway’s junction, and out of view. The crew’s spotter, though, would have to be in a high-ground position and would be easier to pinpoint and terminate. Without the spotter, the mortar crew would be blind, and its effectiveness would be seriously diminished.
Many of the February 17 personnel fled once the shooting started. Those who stayed simply hid under their vehicles, hoping not to become part of the collateral damage of the exchange of gun, rocket, and mortar fire. This should have been their battle. They received U.S. assistance and U.S. money. But when their mettle was tested and their loyalty needed, their true colors were exposed. “It should have come as no surprise to anyone concerning the February 17 Brigade,” a Libyan senior intelligence official* commented in confidence. “The militia commander didn’t send any reinforcements, because this would have hindered his interests. He [the commander] is widely despised in Libya.”3
* * *
An orange glow began to appear in the east as daylight neared and Benghazi was awakening to the sounds of war. Inside the city’s mosques—some quite large, and others spartan and small—muezzins were readying themselves to call the faithful to prayer. The terrorists required darkness to retain their tactical advantage, but the black cover of night was quickly evaporating.
The third mortar round landed approximately a hundred feet in front of the main building, which Doherty and Woods were using as their firing perch. Seconds later, a fourth round was fired, landing squarely on the roof where Woods was firing his Mk 46. The blast was lethal. Woods was killed instantly by the explosion. His body lay over his weapon, the barrel still red-hot from the course of fire he was throwing to the west. Glen Doherty rushed to reposition himself and tend to his mortally wounded friend, but then the fifth mortar round came crashing to the rooftop. The impact of the explosion shook the building and sent shrapnel into a wide field of destruction. When the smoke cleared, Glen Doherty was dead. He was killed instantly by the direct hit.
One of the agents* was climbing the ladder to the building’s rooftop to support Woods and Doherty when the last two rounds hit. The round that killed Glen Doherty showered the DS agent with razor chunks and slivers of flesh-slicing shrapnel. One of the Annex’s medics immediately stopped the bleeding from a gaping hole in the agent’s thigh and quickly patched up gushing lacerations across his arms and chest. He had multiple fractures as well.
And then, once again, the terrorist fire ended as abruptly as it began. The deafening explosions of mortar fire and full-auto machine gun bursts were muted into a befuddling silence. The defenders looked around and scanned for targets. They looked at the damage, and from their vantage point above the ground they could see a blurred maze of lights marking the outline of a city skyline. The reality of their plight during the night that was surrendering to day was daunting. They should have all been killed. There was trepidation that more would die.
The shooters remained in their positions ready to absorb yet another attack. Images transmitted to ROVER from the Predator flying its invisible patrol indicated that the area around the Annex was still inundated with armed threats. But the sounds of trucks and heavy vehicles barreling toward the Annex were faintly heard coming in from the northeast; the rumbling engines became louder with each passing second. The terrorists sensed who the new reinforcements were, and they wanted nothing to do with the soldiers from Libyan Military Intelligence. The battle for Benghazi had come to an end.
The Libyan intelligence officer ordered to secure the American departure from the city wore neatly pressed camouflage fatigues and carried a sidearm in a leather holster worn on his hip. He didn’t wear any rank; the spies never did. The officer saluted the base chief and then spoke to him and the interpreter in order to coordinate the evacuation. The language used was polite, and very respectful, but also very rushed. The Libyan was given explicit orders to safeguard the expeditious and immediate disappearance of the CIA presence from the An
nex and to safeguard its passage straight to the tarmac and the awaiting private jet. There were to be no detours and no delays. It was in everyone’s national interests to get the Americans out of the city as quickly as possible.
The Annex staff loaded their crates, Pelican cases, cardboard file holders, and technical equipment into the cargo holds and trunks of their vehicles. The Americans could not allow the Libyan personnel to touch the CIA material.
Thirty-two survivors boarded the vehicles for the ride to the airport. Three bodies were very respectfully loaded onto the rear of an SUV, in an emotionally charged moment for the agents involved. As the convoy readied itself to depart for the airport, the new day erupted with the first promises of glowing sunshine as a rhythmic cadence flowed from the distance rather than the rat-a-tat of gunfire that predominated for the past two and a half hours. These were sounds of peace; it was morning call to prayers.
27.
Aftermath
Hoda Abdel-Hamid did not think twice when her mobile phone rang after 2100 hours on September 11. The best calls in the Middle East always happened after dark. She had been sitting at a café in Istanbul, enjoying a dinner of famed Turkish kebabs, when the home office called. Specifically, the Qatari-based Al Jazeera news giant, the 24/7 news source for much of the Arab and, yes, Western worlds; even right-wing stalwarts like Fox TV routinely used Al Jazeera clips in their broadcasts to show their grasp of the Middle East. Though Al Jazeera has grown in recent years to become a global supplier of worldwide news, its strength has remained in its roots: the Middle East. The Egyptian-born Abdel-Hamid was something of an anomaly in the Arab world—a female war correspondent who, more often than not, was in front of a camera wearing body armor and a Fritz helmet while ducking artillery shells, snipers, and RPGs. She had covered conflicts throughout the Middle East and the Global War on Terror (in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kurdistan, Yemen, and the South Sudan, just to name a few) over the last few years, and her travels had taken her from the fighting between the Israel Defense Forces and Hamas, to revolutionary chaos in her native Egypt, and, of course, to the civil war in Libya. She was an award-winning journalist recognized for her reporting, as well as her courage under fire.