HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton

by Jonathan Allen

  The CIA force at the annex had heard explosions coming from the direction of the compound, and when they got word of the attack, they began preparing a rescue mission. But they waited, hoping local militias could be enlisted to join the fight at the compound with heavy machine guns mounted on vehicles. That didn’t happen, and a little more than twenty minutes after the attack had begun, the annex team set out for the compound.

  The State Department’s Washington operations center, which monitors events around the world and connects the secretary to foreign leaders, sent out an alert to top State Department officials and the White House Situation Room at the same time the CIA team was leaving the annex—4:05 p.m. in Washington. “Approximately 20 armed people fired shots; explosions have been heard as well,” the ops center message read. Stephen Mull, the executive secretariat, went into Hillary’s office to inform her of the attack. Already the nation’s security apparatus was on heightened alert because of threats to other embassies, particularly in Cairo. That was true not only at State but also at the White House.

  “The first thing we were aware of was Egypt, Cairo protests turning violent,” said a White House national security aide. White House staff held impromptu meetings on the Egypt demonstrations in the offices of Jack Lew, who had become Obama’s chief of staff, and national security adviser Tom Donilon. “Everybody was really worried about Cairo because that is a huge embassy. We’ve got potentially hundreds of people [vulnerable]…. An embassy in Cairo is very different from the type of facility that is in Benghazi. We don’t have the same kind of real-time communication.” American officials believed the Egyptian protesters were reacting to the anti-Muslim satirical film produced by Coptic Christians in the United States and promoted by the Florida pastor Terry Jones, who had famously touched off violence in the Muslim world by burning the Koran.

  When she heard Benghazi had come under attack, Hillary gathered several of her staff in her office on the seventh floor to get a full briefing on what was happening in Libya and give orders. Mills, Sullivan, Burns, Boswell, and an aide from the Near Eastern Affairs Bureau were among the group assembled.

  In Benghazi, as the CIA annex team arrived at the diplomatic compound, they split up. Some went to the tactical operations center to retrieve the officer who was still there, and the others joined the search for Stevens and Smith. The security officers finally found Smith in the burning villa but were unable to revive him. He was dead. They still couldn’t find Stevens. The five diplomatic security officers clambered into an armored vehicle and headed for the annex. On the way out of the compound, they took fire from people on the side of the road. The CIA team stayed at the compound to fend off a second-wave attack, a fifteen-minute barrage of gunfire and rocket-propelled grenades.

  Around the same time, one of Pat Kennedy’s subordinates told Hillary that Smith had been killed and that Stevens was still missing. Hillary’s focus—and that of her department—was trained on finding Stevens and ensuring the safety of the Americans both in Benghazi and at the Tripoli embassy, where officials were concerned that they would also come under attack. Hillary called Donilon. We have an issue here, she said. We need you to be on it.

  Bits of information were coming in fast and furious, by e-mail and telephone, and it was hard for officials at the various agencies to get a complete picture of what was happening in Libya in real time. Hillary was reminded that the CIA had an annex, the post from which the rescue mission at the compound had been launched. She called David Petraeus, who was now running the CIA.

  “She essentially just wanted to touch base and ensure that the director was aware of what was going on, which he very much was,” said a former senior government official, “and to get an assurance that everything would be done, with the resources available, to find and rescue the ambassador.”

  She also wanted to know in particular whether Petraeus had a surveillance drone available to provide intelligence on the unfolding attack. “Do you have any assets in the area?” she asked, according to a second source familiar with the call. The Pentagon, not the CIA, controlled the drones that flew over Libya at the time, and one was eventually rerouted to the area. “You let us know if you need anything,” Hillary told Petraeus. “Let’s stay in touch.”

  Leon Panetta, who had been promoted to defense secretary, and Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, discussed the developing crisis with President Obama at a regular five p.m. Tuesday White House meeting. Panetta would later order a Marine antiterrorist unit in Spain to get ready to deploy to either Benghazi or Tripoli, and would also instruct special forces teams in Croatia and in the United States to prepare to travel to a staging base in southern Italy. Inside the State Department, Hillary and her aides discussed the delicate question of how to alert the public to the death of one American when another one was still missing. There was concern that if they released information on the death of Sean Smith, Chris Stevens’s family might think the ambassador was safe.

  By eleven-thirty p.m. in Benghazi—five-thirty p.m. in Washington—the CIA team and the survivors of the compound attack had made their way back to the annex, where they would shortly come under fire from RPGs. An American security team had also boarded a flight from Tripoli to Benghazi to provide reinforcement, if necessary. In Washington, the national security agencies, including the National Security Staff, State, the Pentagon, and the CIA, convened a “deputies meeting” via a secure video teleconferencing system. Deputy national security adviser Denis McDonough chaired the virtual conference, and all the other participants were the number two or number three person at their respective agencies.

  “We had a rolling videoconference with all the various people all night,” recalled one White House national security official. McDonough ran the videoconference from the Situation Room, with counterterrorism chief John Brennan, several of his aides, Tony Blinken of Vice President Joe Biden’s staff, and Ben Rhodes and Tommy Vietor of the president’s national security team at his side. Kurt Tidd, the operations officer for JSOC—Joint Special Operations Command—joined from the Pentagon, and Mills represented Hillary from the seventh floor of the State Department.

  At one point, Hillary walked to the operations center to participate in the meeting. The others on the call were surprised when Hillary appeared on their screens as afternoon turned to evening. It is very rare for a cabinet secretary to join a deputies meeting. “She wanted to talk it through,” one of her senior aides said. “I actually remember her coming into the room when we’re having the [videoconference] at the deputies level and sitting at the head of the table,” the White House national security aide said. “This was all they were doing at the State Department, obviously.”

  Hillary briefed McDonough and listened to updates from the other agencies. “You can tell when someone talks—their tone—she was really concerned,” a second White House official said, “really worried about her people. And she knew all the details and was on top of everything and briefing really pertinent, up-to-date information. She was as engaged as she could have possibly been.”

  At the White House, aides ran in and out of the Situation Room because they couldn’t use their BlackBerrys to receive e-mail or make phone calls in the secured area. In Foggy Bottom, officials braced for a long haul.

  For much of the night, Hillary shuttled between meetings in her outer office, the ops center, and a command center in a conference room where the senior leadership of the department had gathered. Hillary ducked out of the command center to make and take calls from her inner office to both foreign leaders and fellow American officials.

  She didn’t wait for Libyan president Mohamed Magariaf to call her. She called him and told him she needed his help—fast. She wanted him to help safeguard Americans in Benghazi and Tripoli. Magariaf pledged his support, but the coming weeks would demonstrate the logistical and political challenges of a partnership between the world’s most powerful nation and its newest government. She placed similar calls to leaders
in Egypt, Yemen, Tunisia, and other countries in the region, Deputy Secretary Tom Nides said. But it was hard to keep track of everything that was going on that night.

  “It was both intensely piquant and a complete blur because so much was happening so fast,” said a high-ranking State Department official who briefed Hillary that night, “and it was hard to grab hold of what was really happening in real time because there was chaos there. People got fairly frantic, particularly when we couldn’t find Chris.”

  Around two a.m. in Libya—eight p.m. in Washington—Hillary and her senior staff called Hicks in Tripoli to see if there was any update on Stevens and what course of action Hicks planned to follow in order to keep the embassy staff safe, in the event Tripoli came under attack, too. Hicks said he wanted to evacuate to another facility, and Hillary approved.

  At about the same time, a call came in to the Tripoli embassy from a cell phone number that Stevens had been using. The man on the other line, who spoke Arabic, said Stevens was at the hospital but wouldn’t put him on the line. The embassy contacted Beth Jones, the acting assistant secretary for Near Eastern affairs, who told Sherman that they might have located Stevens. The news, delivered to Deputy Secretary Tom Nides on a slip of paper, created “a lot of euphoria in the room,” Nides said.

  But there was still no confirmation that Stevens was alive. American officials asked that the man with the phone take a picture of the man at the hospital. “It was impossible to know what was true, until we finally, among other things, suggested they try to take a cell phone photo of whoever was in the hospital,” said a State Department official who declined to directly confirm that the picture was taken and relayed to Washington. “It was a really, really hard situation.”

  Hicks received a call at three a.m. from Libyan prime minister Abdurrahim Abdulhafiz el-Keib, who said that Stevens was dead. He passed the information on to Washington, and Hillary was informed around nine p.m. when one of her aides handed her a slip of paper. Stevens’s death wouldn’t be considered confirmed until American personnel made a positive in-person ID, but it appeared at that point that the only two non-security officials in Benghazi that day—Smith and Stevens—had been killed.

  Meanwhile the CIA team and the survivors from the Benghazi compound were hunkered down at the annex. There they weathered sporadic RPG fire through the night as they waited for reinforcements from Tripoli, who had landed but took several hours to get to the annex because of a series of logistical problems. Then, just minutes after the reinforcements arrived, militants fired mortars and RPGs at the annex. Unlike the small-arms fire that had come into the annex through the night, this second-wave attack included heavy artillery. Five mortar blasts were counted in a period of ninety seconds, including three so precisely aimed that they hit the roof of one of the buildings on the annex property. Two CIA contractors, Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods, were killed in the blasts.

  In Washington, where the focus had been on finding Chris Stevens and securing American personnel in Tripoli and at other embassies in the region, officials were shocked by the second-round attack. Most Americans found out about the two attacks in one burst of news the following day, but for those who were trying to manage the crisis in real time, the storming of the compound and the loss of the ambassador had appeared for a time to be the end of the assault. “There’s this gap of several hours,” the White House national security official said. “From my vantage point, I did not know there was an ongoing attack of any sort.” Administration officials didn’t anticipate the second strike.

  After the mortar attacks on the annex, a group of sympathetic Libyan militiamen escorted remaining American personnel as they evacuated to the Benghazi airport and a plane waiting to take survivors to Tripoli. Their flight to Tripoli departed at about the same time—roughly seven-thirty a.m. in Benghazi and one-thirty a.m. in Washington—that a second plane, which would carry the four dead Americans, arrived in Benghazi without a special forces unit that had been ready to go.

  At first, special forces personnel in Tripoli had hoped to be on the flight to provide additional reinforcements. “The people in Benghazi had been fighting all night,” Hicks later testified. “They were tired. They were exhausted. We wanted to make sure the airport was secure for their withdrawal.”

  But through the Pentagon chain of command, the special forces team was denied authorization to leave. “This is the first time in my career that a diplomat has more balls than somebody in the military,” one of the special forces troops said to Hicks.

  The flight departed without the unit, which included a medic, and did not arrive in Benghazi until after the firefight had ended. That is, despite the intense focus of congressional investigators on the questions of who told them to stand down and why, these special forces troops couldn’t have done anything to mitigate an assault that already had happened.

  Around seven-thirty a.m. local, wounded survivors of the attacks on the Benghazi compound and annex departed for Tripoli on the private jet that had brought the original team of reinforcements to Benghazi hours earlier. U.S. diplomats in Tripoli worked with Libyan officials to secure the use of a Libyan C-130 transport plane, and American security officers still in Benghazi contacted local allies to bring what they believed was Chris Stevens’s dead body to the airport. He was positively identified at 8:25 a.m. local.

  After one a.m. in Washington, Hillary left the State Department for her home on Whitehaven Street, where she stayed up to work until four a.m. She was there when she got word from Mills, at about two-thirty a.m., that Stevens had been confirmed dead.

  Hillary had been an anchor for the team in the command center, said people who were there with her that night, balancing the emotion of the moment with the need to execute.

  “She has this rare ability to be compassionate but also get stuff done,” said Nides. “She’s a really good executive. I saw it in real time, and she handled a real crisis. And you know, she wasn’t mechanical, screaming at people, but she was emotional, she was firm in getting facts and getting the issues resolved.”

  In private moments that night, through the hours of crisis management and profound heartbreak, Hillary wore unmistakable anguish on her face. She had sent Stevens to Libya. This was on her.

  The next morning she went to the White House to stand with Obama in the sunny Rose Garden as he delivered a mournful public statement. Before the address, he huddled with Hillary outside the Oval Office. He wanted to do more than just deliver remarks to reporters, he told her. He asked if he could visit the State Department, where she had planned to spend the morning with the men and women who served under her. Ben Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser for strategic communication, e-mailed one of Hillary’s aides to make the arrangements. Rather than riding with the president, Hillary raced back to the State Department so that she could greet him when he arrived.

  Together the once-bitter rivals made their way to the State Department’s courtyard, which is surrounded by dark granite walls and features a massive Marshall Fredericks sculpture of a man astride a globe with a disc in each hand. Hillary instructed her staff to gather the people who knew Chris Stevens best in one spot. She had to push her tired voice to deliver brief remarks because her microphone didn’t work.

  Obama, who was given the working microphone, spoke for about fifteen minutes, without notes, to the hundreds of employees who had answered an invitation to come to the courtyard, and to those who listened from open windows above. There was no official transcript, but Obama personalized the moment by discussing his childhood abroad and the meaning the U.S. foreign service held for him. When he was finished, he found the throng of Stevens’s coworkers and friends. Hillary introduced them to the president, one by one, name by name, as he shook their hands and offered his condolences.

  Heartbreak permeated the State Department. It is an unusually close-knit group for a government agency, in part because of the common experiences and values of the foreign service officers who dedicate their
lives to traveling the world on behalf of the United States. Bringing people together to focus on moving forward would be a delicate balancing act.

  She didn’t need to add the weight of televised interviews. The three networks all wanted her to appear that night on their broadcasts, but she agreed with Reines’s recommendation that she decline the requests. Within a few hours of the president’s visit—and within twenty-four hours of the attack on the annex—Sunday-morning television talk show producers began asking State and the White House whether Hillary would be available to appear that weekend.

  Reines responded that he didn’t think it was likely. A mythology has built up over time that Hillary never goes on Sunday-morning television. But during her tenure at State, she appeared on Meet the Press nine times. What is more accurate to say is that she doesn’t like appearing on the shows. She is judicious about how often, and under what circumstances, she goes on, and there was no advantage to be gained from appearing on television to talk about Benghazi.

  But the White House wanted her to go on. “Our thinking was, it made sense for a senior diplomat to go out and talk about the service of a senior diplomat. But it wasn’t just that issue that day,” said a White House official who was involved in picking someone to represent the administration on TV. “We also wanted somebody who could go out and talk about the Arab Spring, try to calm all the craziness about the video, deliver the message again that it was not a U.S. thing.”