Around midnight in Benghazi, the CIA team arrived back at their annex just as a group of attackers began shooting there. They took cover and returned fire. Over the next hour, they intermittently exchanged fire with unknown parties. The shooting stopped around 1:00 A.M. on Wednesday, September 12.
Soon after that a CIA security team from Tripoli, composed of six former Special Operations troops, including former Navy SEALs Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods, landed in Benghazi. Heavily armed and on foot, they had no way to get to the CIA annex from the airport. Over the next several hours, they tried to cajole or bribe local militias to take them there. Finally, they persuaded someone with a few trucks to give them a ride, and they reached the annex about 5:00 A.M. Doherty and Woods took up sniper positions on the roof just as a mortar attack commenced. The first two shells missed the building, but the final three hit the roof, killing both of them. With the Americans pinned down, the attackers simply left. We don’t know precisely why they did so, although I agree with the theory former CIA acting director Michael Morell offered in his account of the Benghazi attack: the attackers probably just happened to have only five mortar shells and left after firing them all.
That morning the Americans left Benghazi for Tripoli, and the four deceased Americans, along with several wounded, were flown out of Libya later in the day. The response teams Secretary Panetta had ordered to prepare couldn’t reach Libya before the fighting was over, although a Marine Corps counterterrorism unit did make it to Tripoli later that day.
This narrative describes essentially what took place in Benghazi on September 11 and 12. Others have published much more detailed accounts of that night, notably David Kirkpatrick in his series “A Deadly Mix in Benghazi,” in the New York Times, and Michael Morell in his book The Great War of Our Time. What I’ve outlined is the consensus intelligence view of the events of that night, which we have compelling physical evidence to back up, including video from the Predator, from security cameras, and from the cell phones of looters and vandals, including a recording of Chris Stevens being pulled from the burning building and the efforts to save him. While we have a great deal of information about the incident now, it’s very important to me to note that we knew very little immediately after the attack.
On Wednesday I saw a trickle of information reporting that there had been a series of firefights at the State Department facility and at the CIA annex, identifying who had been injured and who had died, and the security implications of what had been left behind in Benghazi. The first real intelligence analysis attempting to assemble a coherent narrative indicated that there had been a protest outside the State Department facility, similar to the one that had overrun the Cairo embassy, and that extremist elements within the group had, with little or no planning, used the event as an opportunity to attack the facility. As it turned out, there had been no protest in Benghazi. In the years since then, many have asked how we could have gotten that point wrong. Avoiding citing classified sources, I would direct them to Kirkpatrick’s series, in which he notes that some of the people who’d actually been doing the looting and vandalizing that night had believed the whole incident started as a protest outside the gate.
Two decades before all of this took place, when General Colin Powell was JCS chairman, he famously advised his intelligence briefers, “Tell me what you know. Tell me what you don’t know. Then tell me what you think. Always distinguish which is which.” If we fell short in briefing the White House and our oversight committees in Congress on what had occurred, it was as a result of failing to heed that advice, particularly when it came to our analysis that the attack had begun as a protest. That was definitely something we thought, not something we knew. Also, in my interactions with senators and representatives in the days after the attack, I reported that our analysis was based on the first reports, and first reports are never entirely accurate.
On Thursday, David Petraeus, who’d succeeded Leon Panetta as CIA director, briefed the Senate Intelligence Committee in a closed-door, classified session, and on Friday morning, September 14, he briefed the House Intelligence Committee. The House committee asked him if CIA could put together a set of unclassified “talking points” that they could use for the Sunday news shows over the weekend, which he agreed to have the agency prepare. Washington is a strange place. I can’t help but wonder how it would have changed the course of US history if Dave had counteroffered, “We won’t write talking points, but if your staff writes something, we’ll check it for facts and classification.”
I didn’t become aware of the talking points until Saturday, when the CIA sent them around for interagency coordination with State Department, DOD, my office, and others. My gut feeling was that the IC’s offering any talking points for politicians was a mistake. For us to tell them what they should say about the attack—and how they should say it—was crossing the line of intelligence’s leaving the business of policy making to the policy makers. But I judged that by Saturday afternoon, when congressional and public affairs offices in different Cabinet departments and the White House were already squabbling over nuances like whether the State Department facility was a “consulate” or a “diplomatic post,” it was too late to gracefully retract Dave’s promise to provide something to Congress. That was a mistake on my part. In the end, the IC consensus for the talking points was short and simple:
The currently available information suggests that the demonstrations in Benghazi were spontaneously inspired by the protests at the US Embassy in Cairo and evolved into a direct assault against the US diplomatic post and subsequently its annex. There are indications that extremists participated in the violent demonstrations.
This assessment may change as additional information is collected and analyzed and currently available information continues to be evaluated.
The investigation is ongoing, and the US Government is working w/ Libyan authorities to help bring to justice those responsible for the deaths of US citizens.
The following morning I turned the TV on and found that it wasn’t just the House Intelligence Committee members who were using the talking points on Sunday morning shows. Susan Rice, the US ambassador to the United Nations, who everyone presumed was going to replace Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, was also relying on them. I wasn’t even aware that Susan had received an intelligence briefing on what had occurred. (She hadn’t.) On each of the shows, she discussed how “opportunistic extremist elements” had taken over a protest at the Benghazi facility gate, in what was “initially a spontaneous reaction to what had just transpired hours before in Cairo.” She spoke of protests throughout the Middle East, saying, “This is a response to a hateful and offensive video that was widely disseminated throughout the Arab and Muslim world.” I watched Susan’s appearances with growing unease. It was true that everything she said reflected what we believed at the time. While the talking points from the CIA didn’t mention the YouTube video, they did say that the demonstration in Benghazi was a spontaneous reaction to the Cairo protest, which was undisputedly a response to the detestable video. Susan’s grasp of what the CIA had provided was fine. In fact, her presentation didn’t bother me at all.
What did bother me was the context. It was less than two months before Election Day, and President Obama’s campaign had been pushing very hard to argue that his policy decisions had led to significant progress against al-Qaida, while his opponent was claiming that the president was “soft on terrorism.” Within hours of the attack, Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee for president, had accused President Obama of responding to the Benghazi attack by apologizing for the video, mistakenly referencing a statement from the Cairo embassy condemning it, hours before protests had occurred there. His facts were incorrect, but they fit the narrative, and so the accusation was effective politically.
Wearing my DNI hat, I would observe that the truth regarding the global terrorism threat in 2012 was complicated. Years of drone stri
kes and commando raids had decimated al-Qaida in Afghanistan, and the bin Laden raid had provided us with valuable intelligence that the CIA and Defense Department had exploited to put the network that remained on the decline. But the ideology that al-Qaida exemplified didn’t need bin Laden or even al-Qaida itself to spread. The same unrest and instability that had led to the Arab Spring had provided al-Qaida “franchises,” many other al-Qaida “affiliates,” and even more militant groups “inspired by al-Qaida” plenty of impressionable potential recruits. Worse, the Arab Spring had deposed many of the fascist dictators who’d kept the terrorist groups in check. Notably, Muammar Gaddafi had never permitted al-Qaida to get a foothold in Libya, and of course, Saddam Hussein had largely kept it out of Iraq, though it wasn’t the Arab Spring that removed him. The autocracies were in many ways like chemotherapy—they poisoned their countries and caused pain to their people, but at the same time kept the cancer of terrorism at bay. I think a reasonable discussion could be had about whether the affliction or the cure was worse. Either way, when the Middle East stopped its chemo, al-Qaida metastasized.
Taking off my DNI hat briefly to address the big question of the 2012 presidential campaign, I believe that calling President Obama soft on terrorism was ludicrous, but it was very legitimate to ask if terrorist ideologies were on the rise. In fact, with my worldwide threat assessment testimony that spring, I’d indicated that the latter was indeed the case. Did this represent an Obama policy failure? I think it’s about as fair to hold the Intelligence Community to the standard of omniscience—knowing a fruit vendor’s suicide would lead to the overthrow of long-standing governments throughout the Middle East—as it is to hold the president to the standard of omnipotence—having the ability to stop it. While both are completely unfair and unreasonable expectations, Congress, and to a lesser degree the public, demanded both of the administration in 2012.
So here’s what bothered me. Dave Petraeus had agreed to write talking points for the House Intelligence Committee, and the CIA properly coordinated them through the interagency process. As that happened, the White House political team saw the talking points, added a political spin, and then sent out Susan Rice to five Sunday shows. Rather than merely sharing the intelligence perspective, Susan was using the talking points to defend the policy of the sitting US president against his opponent in the final stretch of an election. The Intelligence Community had effectively and unwittingly written campaign materials.
We suddenly found ourselves open to attack and to having our motives questioned. On the same day that Ambassador Rice appeared on TV, Senator John McCain was out rebutting her, claiming that the attack had been planned months in advance. He found a pithy line and repeated variants of it several times: “It was either willful ignorance or abysmal intelligence to think that people come to spontaneous demonstrations with heavy weapons, mortars, and the attack goes on for hours.” There are two factual errors with his statement. One: There were three short attacks, one on the State Department facility, another on the CIA annex a couple of hours later, and a third on the annex after four hours or more of silence, not one sustained attack lasting all night. And two: No one brought heavy arms to the first attack. Rocket-propelled grenades came into play hours later, and the attackers didn’t bring mortars into play at the CIA annex until seven hours after someone had first stormed the gate at the State Department facility. So he was wrong.
Unfortunately, we discovered we’d gotten a critical fact wrong in our initial assessment: There had been no protest outside the gate in Benghazi. It was a reasonable mistake, given that a crowd had gathered at the gate before rushing inside. But because the original talking point fit the narrative from President Obama’s campaign, when we updated our assessment, we were accused of initially lying for the political benefit of the president. I grumbled to my staff that if we were going to be held to the standard of perfection in our initial assessments, then Congress would simply have to wait until investigations were complete before receiving any information from us from then on.
On Thursday, September 20, just nine days after the attack, Secretary Clinton, Deputy Secretary of Defense Ash Carter, JCS vice chairman Admiral Sandy Winnefeld, FBI special agent Mark Giuliano—who had just become the special agent in charge of the FBI Atlanta Field Office after serving as the head of the FBI’s National Security Branch—and I briefed all the House members and then all the senators on what we had learned. By that point, we had seen the security camera video from the State Department facility and could say for certain that the incident lacked all the hallmarks of a carefully orchestrated terrorist assault. It was very hard to tell initially who were the actual attackers and who had then walked onto the compound to join in. The attackers had wandered around haphazardly and didn’t seem to know the ambassador was on the compound. We laid out in great detail what we knew, what we thought, and what we didn’t know. I stressed that, while there were many things we didn’t know, we could say with certainty that the Benghazi incident was not a carefully orchestrated terrorist attack, planned months in advance.
Even after our briefing, though, some Republican lawmakers continued to insist that it had been a coordinated terrorist assault, similar to the 2008 attack in Mumbai, in preparation for which the gunmen had trained and coordinated for months to execute a precise, lethal mission. Their narrative was that the Americans in Benghazi had been under siege from heavy artillery and mortars for hours as al-Qaida–led terrorists assassinated the ambassador. Senator Saxby Chambliss told me afterward that it was the worst intelligence briefing he’d ever attended. Senator Bob Corker said that he’d spoken to witnesses who’d been on the ground, and that we’d gotten it wrong.
That day Secretary Clinton announced that she was appointing an Accountability Review Board, led by Ambassador Thomas Pickering and Admiral Mike Mullen, both recently retired, to investigate what led to the September 11, 2012, tragedy. I designated a recently retired senior career CIA officer who had led the Directorate of Operations—the HUMINT collection service—as the IC’s representative on the board. I knew from my experiences investigating the attacks on Khobar Towers and at Fort Hood that determining the precise conditions that led to the attack was impossible. I also knew the board would have an even more difficult task than we’d had in 1996, because it could obviously not interview Chris Stevens, who’d made all the decisions that had placed him and his team on the ground in Benghazi that night. Still, I felt we had assembled a board of public servants with rich experience and whose integrity was beyond question. We just needed to give them room to investigate.
I spent the final week of September in Australia, meeting with my counterparts from the Commonwealth nations—the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand—and being honored with a rare award from the Australian government for my more than two decades of promoting the intelligence relationship between our two nations, recognition that was both touching and humbling. On the plane back to Washington, I caught up with what was happening in the States, reading media clips about the hapless, hopeless, helpless, inept, incompetent DNI who’d acknowledged publicly that the Intelligence Community didn’t instantly have a “God’s eye, God’s ear” certitude about the events in Benghazi. I considered turning the plane around and going back to Australia.
On October 9, I spoke to the 2012 GEOINT Symposium in Orlando. I had no desire to insert myself even further into the politics of the situation, but I felt I couldn’t avoid saying something about Benghazi. Instead of sharing my own thoughts, I referenced an article Paul Pillar had just published on NationalInterest.org. Paul had been the deputy chief of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, and we’d taught together at Georgetown. As I told the symposium in Orlando, “Paul’s article so resonated with me, and so succinctly captured the balance and perspective, that I believe all three institutions of our system—the executive, the legislative, and the Fourth Estate, the media—need to bear in mind.” I went on to quote his article at length, not
ing first and foremost, “The seemingly endless public rehashing of the attack in Benghazi that killed the US ambassador and three other Americans is not taking a form that serves any useful purpose. . . . The loss of the four public servants was a tragedy. The rehashing does not alleviate that tragedy.”
I highlighted the four main points he’d stressed. The first was “Diplomacy—parenthetically, like military and intelligence service—is a dangerous line of work. . . . There is an inherent tension for diplomats between doing their duties well, with everything it entails regarding contact and exposure in faraway places, and living (and working) securely.”
Second: “Hindsight is cheap. . . . One always can construct an after-the-fact case that any one such incident was preventable. This is not the same as saying that such incidents in the aggregate are preventable.”
Third: “Resources are limited; threats are not. Even if US diplomats consistently opted for living securely over doing their jobs well, total security cannot be bought. Second-guessing about how more security should have been provided at any one facility rather than any of dozens of others elsewhere that did not happen to get attacked this time is just another example of hindsight.”
Paul’s fourth and crucial point: “Information about lethal incidents is not total and immediate. The normal pattern after such events is for explanations to evolve, as more and better information becomes available. We would and should criticize any investigators who settled on a particular explanation early amidst sketchy information and refuse to amend that explanation even when more and better information came in. A demand for an explanation that is quick, definite, and unchanging reflects a naïve expectation or in the present case, irresponsible politicking.”
Facts and Fears Page 23