by Dan Bongino
Eric Nordstrom, the DSS regional security officer with supervisory oversight over the detail assigned to Ambassador Stevens, testified to lawmakers following the Benghazi attack that he requested five DSS agents be stationed at the mission. The response he received from Deputy Assistant Secretary Charlene Lamb was that “[she] believed the Benghazi post did not need any Diplomatic Security special agents because there was a residential safe haven to fall back to in an emergency, but that she thought the best course of action was to assign three agents.”
Three DSS agents in an active conflict zone, with no MSD tactical support, dictated by a bureaucrat with no security experience is a stunning act of either incompetence or malfeasance. Unfortunately, it is completely consistent with what I saw from insulated career bureaucrats who overestimated their own skills at the expense of the analysis of trained professionals.
What makes Lamb’s denial of the security request even more perplexing is that, based on my experience, the request for even five DSS agents (the actual number present on the night of the attack due to temporarily assigned duty personnel being present in country) was grossly insufficient and was probably driven by a frustration with the bureaucratic process. It means that the DSS and/or the ambassador were willing to accept an increased security threat because they knew it wasn’t worth trying to fight the State Department for adequate assets.
Mr. Nordstrom further testified before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that Lamb “wanted to keep the number of US security personnel in Benghazi artificially low.” He also commented to the regional director of the agency’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs that “for me, the Taliban is on the inside of the building.”
Nordstrom’s statements are disturbing because they point to political decision making rather than decision making based on proven protection methodologies and experience-driven threat assessments from a security professional. I share his frustration.
The inadequate security footprint did not go unnoticed by military officials in the region looking to assist. Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Wood noted the discrepancy between the security the bureaucrats at the State Department were considering and what was actually required after a number of foreign governments and NGOs withdrew from the area. According to a congressional report, he testified, “It was apparent to me that we were the last flag flying in Benghazi. We were the last thing on their target list to remove from Benghazi.”
To provide some perspective, when I planned President Obama’s security operation in Afghanistan, there were thousands of people integrated into the security plan from both federal law enforcement and the US military. This operation was conducted on a secure US military base, and even with the incredible level of participation from all of those mentioned, I still had very serious security concerns.
Now, compare this to the security footprint surrounding Ambassador Stevens on the night of the attack. He had only five DSS agents with no Mobile Security Deployment tactical team and no assigned military special forces support. Does this appear logical to you? It does not require advanced US Secret Service training to determine that the bureaucrats who inserted themselves into the security decision-making chain were motivated by politics, not a legitimate concern for security. They cared more about advancing the president’s narrative that “al-Qaeda is on the run” than protecting our diplomats and military who serve this country. If only Ambassador Stevens, Sean Smith, Glen Doherty, and Ty Woods could have known earlier that their lives were the payoff in a series of bad bets that bureaucrats made to preserve their political futures, maybe they would be alive today.
Of course, politics getting in the way of security is nothing new. I was involved in a number of security operations where staff at the senior level of the White House and other departments attempted to manipulate the security plan for political reasons, but I never allowed it to impact our operation. I always felt that the PPD managers would defend my decisions, and whenever there was a conflict between staff and Secret Service, we had to “kick it up the chain” to a senior member of the agency who would support us. Once a conflict was elevated to PPD management, security frequently won out over politics. So why was Eric Nordstrom ignored?
I suspect it was for political reasons, not only within the State Department but larger electoral politics as well. The president’s reelection campaign was in full swing at the time of the attack, and political victories supersede nearly everything for a staff member. If Lamb and others within the State Department acknowledged, less than two months before the election, that the situation in Libya had deteriorated significantly, there would be a severe price to pay. It would be proof that the president’s signature foreign policy initiatives in the Middle East were on the verge of collapse. It would show that terrorists were still a very real threat to Americans, and that wouldn’t get President Obama more votes. Future promotion or a prestigious new assignment would be in jeopardy for any staff member who was part of the decision to formally acknowledge a deteriorating security situation.
But what Lamb and her cadre of State Department bureaucrats failed to take into account was that by assigning DSS protection to Ambassador Stevens, they would be forced to deal with agents and supervisors who refused to play politics. The nonpolitical nature of Nordstrom’s position enabled him to honestly assess the situation and request support commensurate with the threat level. The situation became muddled only when those with political rather than security interests became intertwined in the decision chain. Lamb and others likely assumed that nothing would happen to our personnel in Benghazi, and even when offered military resources at no cost to the State Department, her staff responded that Lamb was reluctant to accept this support because it would be “embarrassing to continue to have to rely on DOD [Department of Defense] assets to protect our mission.”
Her apparent concern with political embarrassment rather than the safety of American personnel is indicative of the pervasive feeling among our bureaucratic elite that they can hide among the diffuse responsibility of their enormous organizations. After all, in a bureaucracy as large and notorious as that of the State Department, surely there would be an underling to blame or a memo they could claim they failed to see in the unlikely event that something tragic were to happen. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, an outspoken advocate for expansive government, failed to see the hypocrisy of her own ideology when she testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee that cables addressed specifically to her requesting an increased security footprint in Benghazi did not in fact come to her. Clinton said, “They [the cables] do not all come to me. They are reported through the bureaucracy.”
What saddens me most is that the bureaucratic class likely views this tragedy as “the price of doing business,” and the security teams, despite their willingness to serve in Benghazi, were just following orders, despite what I consider a criminally inadequate security plan.
Not only was the security decision-making process prior to the attack politicized, but decisions made while the attack was underway were also severely lacking and did not follow what I remember to be procedure for such a serious event.
In the aftermath of the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis and the subsequent analysis of how to prevent events like that from occurring again, the military refined a global response plan for attacks on American embassies overseas. As such, we had military forces willing and able to launch a rescue attempt of our personnel during the Benghazi attack, but a number of still hazy factors prevented them from receiving orders to deploy until nearly five hours after the initial assault began. After a military unit relocated from a training mission in Croatia to Southern Europe and was activated to provide assistance to the Benghazi mission, nothing happened. This is where their story ends.
We must ask the question: who gave the order to stand down, and why?
More disturbing is the lack of action by a multiagency unit known as FEST. FEST stands for Foreign Emergency Support Team and it consists of highly traine
d personnel from a number of federal agencies who are specifically tasked with providing timely support to US personnel in crisis overseas. That this team was not activated is beyond suspicious, because their mandate is to respond to exactly the sort of emergency that occurred in Benghazi. It is the equivalent of the Secret Service being told to stand down during an attack on the president.
Another striking example of how the Benghazi attack was mishandled is the clearly misleading information stream emanating from the administration after the attack. Based on my experiences embedded in two presidential administrations, there are controls in place to ensure information is disseminated only after being vigorously vetted through specific individuals who are responsible for the administration’s communications. I have never been involved in any presidential visit, domestic or foreign, where message control was not the highest priority. Yet the stream of information relayed by the president and the State Department after the Benghazi attack was obviously false and clearly politically motivated.
The timing of the Benghazi attack being so close to the presidential election likely set off a flurry of activity and panic in and around the White House. The White House hums with activity when it is conducting the normal business of governing, and when that hum is interrupted, everything changes. Staffers begin to move from their standard pace to a hurried walk, facial expressions of concern are obvious, motorcades begin to line up on West Executive Avenue, and high-ranking government officials usually not seen at the White House begin to show up in the cramped hallways of the West Wing.
When the attack occurred at 9:40 p.m. local time in Benghazi, it was 3:40 in the afternoon at the White House. This is the very heart of the presidential workday, and it is highly unlikely that the first piece of information the president received was about a group of protesters angry over the now-infamous Internet video disrespecting Muhammad. This is important, because although we now know the protest story to be untrue, if there is not a shred of evidence that a protest was even mentioned by any of the personnel on the ground and who were actively communicating with Washington, then one must ask why the administration completely fabricated such a story. Lying about the events that night is a disgrace to the memories of the men who sacrificed their lives during that attack. I witnessed crisis management in action at the White House, and there are priorities for each administration and a plan for handling breaking news. Clearly the priority for this administration was political spin first, and safety and security second. The facts about the incident laid bare by the State Department’s Accountability Review Board make it clear that there was a deliberate attempt to cover up the truth of what occurred at the diplomatic mission in Benghazi on September 11, 2012.
The ARB report describes how within minutes of the attack, an agent from the Diplomatic Security Service (identified in the report as ARSO 1), in the process of evacuating and securing Ambassador Stevens, gave Stevens his cell phone. At that point Stevens began making calls for assistance. The report states that Stevens called “local contacts” and the embassy in Tripoli for assistance. Also, the report makes mention of a 9:50 p.m. local time call between Stevens and the deputy chief of mission, Gregory Hicks, regarding the attack. According to Hicks’s account, which he relayed to Utah Representative Jason Chaffetz during congressional hearings, Ambassador Stevens shouted to Hicks through the cell phone, “We’re under attack. We’re under attack.” Hicks also recounted how he “immediately called into Washington to trigger all the mechanisms.”
The embassy in Tripoli, notified of the attack at approximately 9:45 p.m. local time, set up a command center and contacted Washington. Pursuant to the embassy’s notification of the attack, Department of Defense personnel relocated an unarmed surveillance drone that arrived at 11:10 p.m. local time, “shortly before the DS [Diplomatic Security] team departed.”
According to the report, there was no mention of a protest in the communication with Tripoli, only an attack. In addition, in an “Ops Alert” issued shortly after the attack began, the State Department Operations Center notified senior department officials, the White House Situation Room, and others that the Benghazi compound was under attack and that “approximately twenty armed people fired shots; explosions have been heard as well.” Two hours later, the Operations Center issued an alert that al-Qaeda linked Ansar al-Sharia (AAS) claimed responsibility for the attack and had called for a second assault on the embassy in Tripoli. Neither alert mentioned that there had been a protest at the location of the attacks.
Several hours later the report notes that, “In Washington, at 10:32 p.m., an officer in the National Military Command Center at the Pentagon, after receiving initial reports of the incident from the State Department, notified the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Staff. The information was quickly passed to Secretary of Defense, Mr. Leon E. Panetta, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin E. Dempsey. Secretary Panetta and General Dempsey attended a previously scheduled meeting with the president at the White House at 11:00 p.m., approximately eighty minutes after the attack began. The Defense Department reported that principals discussed potential responses to the ongoing situation.”
Our involvement in the Libyan conflict in the months prior to the Benghazi attack provided an extensive intelligence, military, and DSS footprint in the region and on the ground, especially in the aftermath of the death of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. It is highly improbable that all of these trained, dedicated individuals relayed inaccurate information to their Washington, DC, chain of command. Furthermore, with the ubiquitous presence of smartphones, Internet-based radio transmissions, satellite phones, e-mail, classified computer networks, and airborne surveillance technology, it is nearly impossible to have a complete communication breakdown with senior officials in Washington. It is clear from reports on the incident that communication was immediate and ongoing, and status updates originating from both the ground in Benghazi and the embassy in Tripoli were frequent—and none made mention of any protest. It borders on the absurd to believe that the administration and its surrogates actually thought that the Benghazi attack was due to a protest about an anti-Muslim Internet video.
All of this evidence, however, did not stop the administration from shifting into damage-control mode. Just one day after the attack the White House made a statement: “Since our founding, the United States has been a nation that respects all faiths. We reject all efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others.”
Notice the careful use of the language in the administration’s attempt to craft a theme about the attack. The choice of words intentionally diverts any blame from the president’s foreign policy choices and focuses instead on religious persecution. They were also careful to avoid saying that the offensive video caused the attack, but they were clearly laying the groundwork for a theme by simply correlating the attack with religion, even though they had absolutely no evidence that the video and the attack were related. They were testing the message here without committing to it, which is a common tactic in political circles. “Trial balloon” messaging is a standard practice where a message is floated and the staff watches closely to see how the public and media respond.
Initially, when it seemed that the press was buying into the Internet video explanation, the White House hallways were likely buzzing with glee. More infuriating is the fact that their arrogance regarding the lies they were spewing even led them to spend taxpayer dollars to promote the administration’s story. Our government spent $70,000 on an advertising initiative in Pakistan directly after the attack in order to distance the United States from the Internet video they knew had nothing to do with the events in Benghazi.
As the days in early September passed, the administration continued to move its message forward. On September 14, Secretary of State Clinton stated, “We’ve seen the heavy assault on our post in Benghazi that took the lives of those brave men. We’ve seen rage and violence directed at American embassies over an awful Internet video
that we had nothing to do with.” Again, the mention of the video in connection with the attack further solidifies the message, and again the administration waited for the serious media inquiries to begin. It did not happen.
The administration’s bogus account of the cause of the Benghazi attack hit a crescendo on September 16 when US ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice went on all the Sunday morning political talk shows promoting this message. She made the now-infamous comments, “There was a hateful video that was disseminated on the Internet. It had nothing to do with the United States government and it’s one that we find disgusting and reprehensible. It’s been offensive to many, many people around the world. That sparked violence in various parts of the world, including violence directed at Western facilities including our embassies and consulates. That violence is unacceptable. It’s not a response that one can ever condone when it comes to such a video. And we have been working very closely and, indeed, effectively with the governments in the region and around the world to secure our personnel, secure our embassy, and condemn the violent response to this video.”
Ambassador Rice’s statements demonstrate the arrogance in the administration’s deceit. Her appearances on the closely watched Sunday talk show circuit shows the full commitment to the Internet video story at this point. The levels of government bureaucracy involved in vetting the talking points for a high-level official going on the Sunday political talk show circuit are numerous, thorough, and designed to insulate decision makers from blame when bad decisions are made. In a perfect world, if Susan Rice made a mistake, then surely someone would be eager to correct it, but that is not how the bureaucracy is designed to function. Principled public servants are silenced and threatened if they attempt to deviate from the political agenda. The “I was just following orders” mentality and diffuse responsibilities ensured that no one person had to shoulder the guilt of the tangled web of lies and deceit the administration spun.