Under Fire

by Fred Burton

  When the bullets began flying in Benghazi and the first SMS hints of an attack against the U.S. diplomatic post hit the Al Jazeera news desk in Doha, there was only one person whom producers wanted to send to Libya. Abdel-Hamid had a valid visa for Libya, after all, and having spent too many hours to count under fire in Benghazi alongside rebel forces during the civil war, she knew the lay of the land. As the GRS team began its battle at the Special Mission Compound, Abdel-Hamid was in her hotel room getting her got-to-catch-a-flight bag ready. As the battle came to an end at the Annex, Abdel-Hamid was fast-tracking a path through check-in at Istanbul’s Atatürk International Airport so that she could prepare her notes in the business-class lounge. As the Istikhbarat Askaria motorcade rushed to Benghazi airport using both lanes of the airport highway, Abdel-Hamid was heading west from the airport on a secondary road, rushing to Western Fwayhat. She was going to be the first correspondent to see the destruction at the Special Mission Compound.

  The initial feeds that Abdel-Hamid received from her sources concerning the attack were of murder, assassination, and absolute destruction. As day broke in Western Fwayhat, Abdel-Hamid approached the Special Mission Compound with her film crew. She found an abandoned outpost and an absolutely contaminated crime scene. She expected to find Libyan police swarming all over the location and the entire area cordoned off by militias aligned with the NTC and even military units. But she found local residents wandering curiously through the burned-out shells of the villa and the February 17 command center. She found dismay. Charlie-1 gate was wide open, and no yellow crime scene tape warned people to step back.

  “What I found was really strange,” Abdel-Hamid recalled. “The grounds, the lawn, the flowers, everything was neat and pristine, and there was only havoc around the four buildings. There wasn’t any evidence of a lot of people having been there.”1 The grounds remained an oasis of sorts—a killing ground that did not reveal the signs of bloodshed it had witnessed. The stench of fires that had burned themselves out stifled the sweet perfume from the rows of guava fruit trees behind the villa. The shattered masonry, the bullet holes that punctured the walls around the complex, burned-out vehicles, and the deadly ambience of silence signaled that something quite awful had transpired here.

  Considering that an hour-long exchange of gunfire had been waged on the grounds, there were very few shell casings to be found, leaving one to wonder if the perpetrators had tried to collect any evidence that one day could bring them to a federal courtroom inside the Southern District of New York (SDNY). The murder of an American official overseas is a violation of U.S. law, which gives the Department of Justice and the FBI extraterritorial investigative jurisdiction in crimes overseas. FBI New York is the office of origin, called “OO” in the FBI vernacular, for most international terrorism cases, and the SDNY becomes the federal court for prosecution. The FBI works hand in glove with DS and RSOs in most international terrorism cases. Ironically, DS agents or security protective specialists working for DS protect the FBI agents sent to hostile areas to investigate crimes. In most cases, the teams work well together, because DS agents open doors with the foreign police and security services.

  One had to search for blood splatters in order to find where someone had been hit. The dead had been removed hours earlier. The looters had left a few hours before daybreak, eager to catch an hour or two of sleep before the sun’s heat hit the city. They had taken much of what was of value and not nailed down. They spray-painted innocuous graffiti throughout the yellowish sand walls on all the buildings. Slogans such as “Unity in Numbers” were scrawled over walls pockmarked with 7.62 mm bullet holes and bloodied handprints. Cushions and what were once end tables floated in the pool.

  The neighbors came out once morning arrived. They had stayed indoors for much of the night, terrified to be caught in the crossfire and wary of a militia or terrorist group using their homes for cover. Human shields often found themselves killed during the civil war, and hostage taking was common in the city, especially in a neighborhood where ransoms could be paid. Some of the neighborhood residents stood in silence, frozen by what had happened. There was promise in having the Americans in the neighborhood; they provided a sense of hope in a city where hope was becoming a commodity in short supply. And then some treated the attack with absolute insouciance; this was Benghazi after all. The women were out of sight, of course. It was still too dangerous for them to venture out.

  Jamal al-Bishari,* who had leased his property to the U.S. State Department, was in a fit of rage. His property had been destroyed, the best tenant in the world—one who always paid on time and didn’t make many demands—was gone, no doubt forever, and he—as well as Benghazi—had lost a dear friend.

  As Abdel-Hamid and her crew walked the grounds, trying to re-create the night’s terror, the absolute devastation to the site became shockingly apparent. The villa looked like the inside of a furnace. It was completely blackened by the fire, and shreds of burned paper, burned fabric, and burned furniture littered the floor. The marble floor was covered by a thick dusting of black. Desk drawers had been ransacked and tossed about. A copy of New York magazine, the August edition, was found on the floor, as were books and other personal effects; the dust jacket of Simon Sebag Montefiore’s book on the history of Jerusalem was found trashed on the floor.2 Suits, shirts, and ties were strewn about everywhere. The looters weren’t interested in fine men’s haberdashery. The destruction was complete and absolute.

  Shockingly, and perhaps most tellingly, the attackers—or the looters—left behind a chilling memento in the bathroom of the safe haven where Chris Stevens’s body was found. Someone had used his finger to scrawl the words “I AM Chris from The dead.”3

  The smaller villa was spared a fiery destruction, but it had been ransacked. MREs were thrown about everywhere, as were utensils from the kitchen, and drawers from the bedrooms. Official-looking documents were everywhere. Business cards, with golden embossed eagles, were tossed about as well. “I didn’t touch anything,” Abdel-Hamid remembered. “I didn’t want to disrupt anything, even though I knew that there had been a lot of people there before me and there were probably going to be a lot of people after me there as well.”4

  Hoda Abdel-Hamid remained in Benghazi for more than a week, attempting to piece together the true story of what happened on the night of September 11. Libyan militiamen were not eager to share their accounts. The Americans weren’t returning.

  28.

  Home

  Dr. Thomas Burke and his colleague from Massachusetts General arrived at Benghazi Medical Center in the morning. It wasn’t safe for them to travel at night, and there was little that they could have done in any event. When they arrived, they found the midnight shift at the ER shattered by grief. Intelligence agents had already come and commandeered an ambulance.

  It was deemed too dangerous for the Military Intelligence convoy to stop at Benghazi Medical Center to retrieve Ambassador Stevens’s body. The officer in charge arranged for an ambulance to transport the remains to the military side of Benghazi airport. The Libyan NTC had urged the one military asset that it could trust to make sure the departure from Benghazi was without incident and with the utmost dignity and respect. The gunfire that followed the American presence throughout the night could not follow it to the tarmac.

  Select personnel, and the severely wounded, were loaded onto the C-130. The aircraft took off at 0730 hours. The remaining CIA staffers, the DS agents, and the GRS personnel would head back to Tripoli on board another Libyan Air Force transport that the NTC had made available to the American government. R. was one of those who took the second Libyan Air Force flight; he needed to remain behind in order to positively identify the body of Ambassador Stevens. R. unzipped the black heavy plastic body bag and identified Stevens, silently weeping, overcome by emotions. The sense of failure for losing his principal was overwhelming. In the world of dignitary protection, the greatest sin, you are taught, is to lose a principal.

&n
bsp; At 0845, air traffic around Benghazi came to a halt as the aircraft taxied for takeoff. A dozen or so Americans were on board watching over the bodies of Chris Stevens, Sean Smith, Tyrone Woods, and Glen Doherty. The DS agents on board were numbed by the loss and silent in their sorrow. Their vacant stares were all that was needed to understand the hell they had just been through. The flight to Tripoli took all of an hour. For the men on board with the bodies of the fallen, it seemed to last forever. In addition to their loss, they were now in nothing less than retreat, not a desired end state for any warrior.

  The flights from Benghazi were met by many of the staffers—DOD, DS, and CIA—from the Tripoli embassy. The U.S. embassy nurse triaged the arrival and tended to the agent who was blown off the ladder. In a perfect world, he would have been at the Shock Trauma Center at University of Maryland Medical Center. In Tripoli, the nurse was the shock trauma center. The injured were rushed to the hospital for emergency care, while the remainder were cared for, fed, and issued new clothes and documentation; many had had to leave their passports behind. It was imperative that the survivors from Benghazi be brought out of the country as soon as possible. Not only did all the personnel need to be debriefed, but there was always the concern that the Libyan government, bowing perhaps to internal pressure, would want to debrief or, possibly, prosecute the DS and CIA contractors for shooting Libyan citizens on Libyan soil. State Department agents involved in shootings are often urged to leave the country immediately after an event in order for the host government not to PNG, or deem them persona non grata, and declare their diplomatic status null and void.

  The U.S. Air Force dispatched a behemoth C-17 Globemaster III transport jet to Tripoli to bring the Benghazi survivors, and much of the gear and material from the Annex, out of the country. Material from the U.S. embassy in Tripoli was also boxed and transported out. Nonessential staffers were ordered to leave as well. No one knew if the attack in Benghazi was but a first round in what would become open warfare on American diplomats, soldiers, and spies.

  To augment security at the embassy, a fifty-man contingent of Fleet Antiterrorism Security Team (FAST) marines arrived in Tripoli on the morning of September 12. The marines were greeted by a shell-shocked embassy staff on the shores of Tripoli, bringing to full circle the Marine Corps hymn and the words “to the shores of Tripoli.” Some cried, and others hugged the nineteen-year-old grunts; help had arrived, in the form of America’s finest. Loaded for bear, the marines did what they do best: setting up sandbag emplacements, stringing concertina wire, and tactically positioning .50-caliber machine guns and squad-support M249s on the perimeter of the mission. There would be no Benghazi-like attack on Tripoli. The visual footprint echoed intent and projected American power.

  AFRICOM also dispatched a special hospital transport, a modified C-130, to fly the wounded to Ramstein Air Base in Germany for recuperation and debriefing. A small army of specialists would await their arrival. CIA debriefing agents, DS special agents, and various other nameless faces from the intelligence community were eager to pick the brains of men who had fought the battle of their lives in a city and country that were all too familiar with no-holds-barred combat.

  For the dead, for the DS agents, and for the CIA staffers, the actual battle for Benghazi was finally and truly over. The real battle about Benghazi, though, had only just begun.

  Epilogue

  0622 hours, September 14, 2012: Benghazi, Libya.

  As daylight broke and the city of over one million inhabitants awoke to the morning calls to prayer, the American presence in their city, both official and otherwise, was gone. Though many Islamists cheered, the vacuum of diplomacy was an ominous sign to the majority of Benghazi’s residents, who felt that the attack of September 11 was a shameful indication of the direction where the Arab Spring, for Libya at least, was heading. Christopher Stevens had urged that the United States invest its diplomacy in the eastern portion of the country. The return on the investment had been a bloody one. And on this day, it threatened to be bloodier still.

  The citizens of Benghazi were already on edge, and they fully appreciated the bloody implications to their future. Salafist militias, proudly waving their black flags, patrolled portions of Benghazi in their cannon-carrying Toyota Hilux pickups in search of the rumored American Special Forces commandos who the mullahs promised were in the city in order to avenge the attacks. The militants prayed for American intervention. Martyrs and battles fed the jihadist call to arms, as did the idea that North Africa might become a new graveyard for the best of American intentions.

  Later that morning, as a harbinger, Libyan authorities were forced to close the airspace over the Benghazi airport. Islamic militias, believing that CIA drones were flying over the city, haphazardly unleashed a furious antiaircraft barrage into the skies above. Tens of thousands of heavy machine gun and cannon rounds were launched at the mere thought that somewhere up above, the CIA had come calling; it is not known how many civilians were wounded or killed when what went up came crashing down to earth. “Two American drones flew over Benghazi last night with knowledge of the Libyan authorities,” the deputy interior minister, Wanis al-Sharif, explained to the Reuters news agency.1 Libyan authorities, of course, did not control Benghazi. They had no control of the city the night that Ambassador Stevens was murdered, and they had no control of Benghazi two days after the attack.

  * * *

  Virtually the entire northern half of the African continent was spiraling out of control. The sophisticated attack in Benghazi was a malignant symptom, following a brief period of remission, of a weakened and crippled al-Qaeda seeking new battlefields, new combatants, and new causes in the hope of remaining relevant at a point in history, eleven years after the September 11 attacks, when the world had grown weary of being at war. Al-Qaeda was reinventing itself. It was moving its base of operations from Afghanistan and Pakistan, and even from Arabia, to the new and fertile grounds of North Africa. All this coincided with the regional power vacuum that opened up as a result of the Arab Spring. It was a perfect storm of rage, violence, and Islamic fervor. With an endless supply of weapons, ammunition, armed militias, fatwas, and hungry stomachs and souls, Benghazi promised to be an opening salvo of a new jihad on the African continent. Two days after the attacks in Libya, another American embassy found itself in the crosshairs.

  At noon on September 14, as antiaircraft cannons blasted away at pigeons and other unidentified flying objects in Benghazi, more than two thousand miles away in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, riot police assembled outside the U.S. embassy bracing for a fiery storm. For days, from the pulpits of the city’s mosques, clerics had called for a massive show of force to attack the American devil for the Internet film that had caused such outage and furor. The attack in Benghazi emboldened the furious, and it was a call to arms for the militantly opportunistic. The clerics, and the al-Qaeda emissaries, promised bloodshed.

  The U.S. embassy in the Sudanese capital was a large compound that housed five separate buildings, including the chancery. The embassy, reportedly built to the Inman-recommended standards of force protection and setback distance, was in a remote southeast corner of town, west of the East Nile River. Unlike in Benghazi, in Khartoum the local police deployed outside the embassy in a show of force. The riot squad arrived in trucks, grotesquely camouflaged in specks of gray and blue, and police formed a human shield around the embassy’s perimeter. By 1500 hours hundreds of protesters had gathered, to the northeast and northwest of the diplomatic compound, and they then converged at the main entrance. Some of the protesters carried placards and signs demanding “death to America”; others carried signs and bedsheet billboards lauding the success of the Benghazi operations. Some of the protesters wore black robes, covered themselves from head to toe, and carried the black flag of al-Qaeda. Others, inexplicably, stripped themselves naked in front of the bemused riot policemen.

  Some of the protesters fell to their knees and positioned themselves toward Mecca for a
fternoon prayers. The riot police feared that this was like the blowing of a trumpet to signal a cavalry charge. They braced for a full-scale assault.

  S.,* the RSO, and his staff of ARSOs and Marine Security Guards watched cautiously on surveillance cameras. They had already contacted the DS Command Center to provide it with a tense yet steady stream of situation reports. Incident response teams in Washington were preparing contingency plans just in case. The mood on the Beltway and inside the command center was already somber and very tense: this was the day that the remains of Ambassador Stevens, Sean Smith, Tyrone Woods, and Glen Doherty would be returned to the United States. A mournful event was being readied for later in the day at Andrews Air Force Base. President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would all be in attendance. The command center agents, many old Middle Eastern hands who had seen the violence before, monitored the intelligence from Khartoum; they hoped that the protests would not escalate into another Benghazi. It was 0900 hours. Marine One, the helicopters flown by the HMX-1 Nighthawk Squadron for use by the president, would soon be en route to Andrews. The VP would arrive in a separate motorcade, for security reasons, under the watchful eyes of the U.S. Secret Service’s Vice Presidential Protection Detail. Secretary of State Clinton would motorcade it to Andrews AFB in an armored convoy protected by DS agents from the SD, the Secretary’s Detail.