13 Hours: The Inside Account of What Really Happened in Benghazi

by Mitchell Zuckoff

  The intruders looted and sacked the Cantina, and tried unsuccessfully to break through the barricade. Back outside, with Ubben and Henderson watching them on the security monitors, the attackers hauled jerry cans to cars parked near the TOC. But the cans were almost empty, foiling the plan to set more vehicles ablaze.

  Back at the villa, Wickland made several more unsuccessful attempts to find Stevens and Smith. Spent and unable to return inside for another try, Wickland knew that remaining on the patio would expose him to gunfire. If he blacked out, as he feared he would, he’d be easy prey. A few feet from the patio, a ladder leaning against the side of the villa led to the roof. Wickland climbed it and leapt over a nearly four-foot parapet around the edge of the villa’s flat roof.

  Wickland radioed his fellow DS agents Alec Henderson and David Ubben in the TOC for help, but his throat and lungs were so ravaged by smoke inhalation he could barely choke out the words. Finally his colleagues understood the awful message: Wickland couldn’t find Ambassador Stevens or Sean Smith, and Villa C was in flames. After making the call, Wickland collapsed on the rooftop.

  Until that moment, in the relative safety of the TOC, Henderson and Ubben had only a vague idea what was happening at the ambassador’s residence some fifty yards away. The monitors in the TOC showed smoke but not fire at Villa C, and Henderson and Ubben had no line of sight from their location to the ruin that had been Château Christophe.

  Before Wickland’s call from the roof, all that the DS agents in the TOC knew was that Wickland had ushered Ambassador Chris Stevens and communications specialist Sean Smith into the locked safe haven. To the best of their knowledge, the three men had remained there, waiting for help. Henderson and Ubben had no reason to presume otherwise. As a result, the DS agents’ early radio and telephone calls to the Annex, Tripoli, Washington, and elsewhere didn’t inform potential rescuers that the three Americans at Villa C had been separated in an inferno of fire and diesel smoke, and that they were in mortal peril. Whether that information would have shortened the delay in the operators’ departure from the Annex can’t be known.

  Henderson and Ubben immediately spread word that Stevens and Smith were missing, and that Wickland was hurt and exhausted on the roof. With the surveillance monitor showing the attackers starting to peel away, Ubben decided to leave the TOC to see if he could help Wickland and find the missing Americans.

  As the operators drove toward the Annex’s front gate, D.B. turned his head to the backseat of the Mercedes and peppered the Team Leader with questions. They had moved out without a clear understanding of the arrangement, if any, with the 17 February militia. D.B. knew that the militia had a large base nearby, and depending on their route, the operators’ vehicles might pass it on the way to the Compound. He didn’t want any surprises or misunderstandings.

  “How many guys are we linking up with from 17 February?” D.B. asked. “Do they know that we’re coming? Do they know what they’re looking for?”

  The Team Leader wasn’t sure, but he understood the potential hazards. He got on the radio to warn Rone and the men in the BMW: “Be advised, as we may be coming into friendly fire. We don’t know if 17 Feb knows we’re coming.”

  “Roger that,” Rone said. “We’re gonna take the back route.”

  They reached the front gate of the Annex, a guard raised the steel traffic bar, and Rone turned left onto the dark street they called “Annex Road.” With Tanto following about fifty yards behind in the Mercedes, Rone drove a short distance and turned right onto an unnamed road. He soon reached an intersection and turned right again, onto Racetrack Road, driving past the dirt oval horse track as he headed west toward Gunfighter Road. There, he turned right a third time and headed north in the direction of the Compound.

  Rone’s intent was to minimize their time spent on the busy Fourth Ring Road. If they approached via the Fourth Ring, attackers at the Compound might see them coming from a long way off. Rone’s route would take a minute or two longer, but the operators felt certain it was worth it, if they hoped to maintain any surprise for their counterattack. Rone had used the same back route, in reverse, when he and Tig drove past the then-quiet Compound after checking the location of the ambassador’s scheduled meeting the next morning. The whole world had changed in the two hours since then.

  Rone drove the BMW at just-above-normal speeds, with Tanto keeping pace at a distance in the Mercedes, so each could respond to the other in case of an attack. They bypassed several other cars without drawing unwanted attention. Rone and Tanto worried that if they raced at high speed toward the Compound, any 17 February militiamen they encountered might mistake them for enemy extremists looking to join in the attack. Or, overaggressive police from the already-suspect Libyan SSC might try to pull them over in the hope of extorting a bribe. Little talk passed among the seven men in the two luxury-vehicles-turned-troop-carriers as the Compound drew closer.

  Jack considered Rone the best driver among them, so he felt comfortable with his old friend at the wheel of the lead car. Yet he worried that they’d be ambushed along the way. His eyes still weren’t focusing properly, but he kept his head on a swivel, scanning back and forth, left and right, for hostile fighters or anything that looked out of place. Tig did the same in the backseat.

  Jack mentally ticked off a list of possible hazards: roadside bombs, rocket-propelled grenades, snipers. Jack’s conflicting emotions ran on a loop in his mind: Fuck them. How dare they attack us? On the other hand: I’ll probably never see my wife and kids again. But that’s the job: We don’t have a choice. There are Americans that need our help, and we would want somebody to do the same for us. We’ll never be able to live with ourselves if we don’t make the effort. Finally he came full circle on his enemy: Fuck them.

  Shortly after the two Quick Reaction Force vehicles left the Annex, a DS agent from the Compound came onto the radio again. This time he made no effort to disguise the panic in his voice. By then Scott Wickland had told his fellow DS agents Alec Henderson and David Ubben that Villa C was on fire and the ambassador and Sean Smith were missing. It wasn’t clear whether the new radio call came from Wickland on the villa roof or Henderson and Ubben in the Compound TOC.

  Jack heard the voice say: “We need help. They’re lighting the building on fire… filling with smoke.”

  In the BMW, the three operators said nothing to one another about the agent’s plea. They didn’t need to. The operators knew that their job was to remain focused on the tasks and the dangers ahead. In Jack’s decade-long career as a Navy SEAL, he typically had time to plan an operation meticulously, taking into account every imaginable obstacle. This was the opposite. They had to be ready for anything.

  Traffic was light on Gunfighter Road, or as the locals called it, Shari’ al-Andalus. Then the operators approached an intersection where they’d have to cross the Fourth Ring Road. Cars were stopped and pedestrians milled around. Rone and Tanto slowed the vehicles and passed cautiously through the intersection.

  A few hundred yards ahead, at the pitch-dark corner of an east-west gravel road that led from Gunfighter to the front gate of the Special Mission Compound, Jack saw a group of Arab men with weapons, standing around several vehicles. Some of the men wore black ski masks. Jack spotted a Technical—a pickup truck with what he thought was a mounted heavy machine gun, called a “Dushka.” From the backseat, Tig thought it might be an anti-aircraft gun. If Tig was right, it would be useless in this fight because it only pointed skyward. If Jack was right, a Dushka could blow them clear off the road.

  From that distance, seeing the world through the green fog of night-vision goggles, the operators didn’t know whether the Arab men were a platoon of friendly 17 February militiamen or part of the attack force, intent on blocking the road to the Compound. Either way, the operators had no choice. They’d keep moving forward.

  Rone turned off the BMW’s headlights and slowed to a crawl before the intersection. He stopped the car next to an eight-foot cement-block wall.
Tanto pulled the Mercedes in behind. The Arab men made no hostile moves toward them, so the operators began to hope they were in fact 17 February allies.

  As they parked, the operators heard an anxious DS agent in the Compound broadcast another beseeching radio message: “You need to hurry up. The buildings are on fire.” Then he repeated the earlier, desperate plea: “If you don’t get here soon, we’re all going to die!”

  Rone warned the other operators in the BMW to get out slowly, so they wouldn’t spook potentially friendly militiamen into thinking they were bad guys.

  From the back of the Mercedes, the GRS Team Leader said he believed the intersection was supposed to be their meeting point with 17 February militiamen. When the Arab men remained at ease, the operators prepared to leave their vehicles. Tanto turned to the translator. “Henry, get this stuff coordinated and find out who the commander is. We need to get moving. We’re way behind.”

  Henry and the GRS Team Leader warily approached the men in the intersection, hunched forward, weapons in hand but angled downward. Rone, Jack, Tig, Tanto, and D.B. remained on alert by the vehicles, weapons ready.

  Suddenly gunshots rang out close by, and everyone snapped to attention. The sound crackled and echoed off the roadside walls and buildings, making it difficult to tell their origin. The shots came in sporadic and random bursts, one, two, three at a time.

  As they tucked close to the walls or inside the vehicles, it occurred to several operators that if anyone got panicky about taking fire, a shootout could easily erupt among the men assembled at the intersection. A gunfight on Gunfighter Road. The operators weren’t worried about each other, but they still weren’t sure what to make of the Arab men with whom they apparently were supposed to join forces. Jack imagined the worst possibility: a deadly friendly-fire incident.

  When he first heard the shots, Jack thought someone was firing directly at them from farther north up Gunfighter Road. Then he realized that the shots were coming from the direction of the Compound, some four hundred yards away to the east. Someone was shooting toward the intersection where the Arab men stood. Rounds from that direction couldn’t reach the operators, who remained just south of the intersection, protected by the wall and out of the line of fire.

  In the darkness and the confusion, with rounds flying and cars passing and people moving in all directions, Jack wondered if some of the shots came from snipers in the three-and four-story buildings near the intersection. Crouching inside the BMW, the passenger door flung open, he held his assault rifle down between his legs, ready to raise it and return fire.

  Henry and the Team Leader were relieved to learn the Arab men at the intersection were, in fact, 17 February militiamen, and that their commander spoke passable English. The commander confirmed that he and his men would help the Americans to regain control of the Compound. Or at least try.

  Still, Tanto didn’t like the scene. He’d already expressed his doubts about the 17 February Martyrs Brigade to his fellow operators, suspecting that the militia was neither adequately trained nor wholly genuine in its claimed friendship with the Americans. Watching the militiamen in action, he judged them undisciplined and disorganized, as they spread out and stood around in no apparent order or military bearing. Several seemed mainly interested in controlling traffic between Gunfighter Road and the Fourth Ring Road. Yet occasionally cars still cruised by, their occupants staring at the armor-wearing, gun-toting, goggle-eyed, helmet-topped Americans in the street.

  Incredulous, Tanto turned to D.B.: “We were waiting for these guys?”

  The only militiaman who impressed Tanto was a black African fighter in a ski mask. As sporadic incoming gunfire continued, the militiaman dropped prone onto the ground and fired a Kalashnikov light machine gun, called a PKM, answering the incoming gunfire by firing east toward the Compound. As far as Tanto was concerned, the masked man’s comrades didn’t seem to know what to do.

  Tig heard the militia commander say that he and his men had tried to drive down the road to the Compound but had turned back when they came under fire. The Team Leader, Rone, and the commander discussed a new approach.

  As the plan took shape, Tanto and D.B. moved cautiously from their car toward the intersection. They looked down the gravel road. “It’s a fucking fatal funnel,” Tanto said, imagining how exposed they’d be to enemy fire if they tried walking or driving on the road toward the Compound. They could see swirling black smoke and orange firelight rising from their destination. The sky above buildings close to the Compound seemed to glow amber. Tanto briefly tilted his head back farther and saw pinpoints of starlight, radiating an eerie green in his night-vision goggles. When they wore the goggles, the operators had no peripheral vision and little depth perception, making it seem as though they were looking at the world through narrow cardboard tubes with green cellophane on the ends.

  Several minutes after they arrived in the intersection, as strategy talks continued, D.B. turned to Tanto.

  “Hey Tanto, let’s get high.”

  “Roger that. I’ll try.”

  D.B. was thinking like the Marine sniper he’d trained to be. He’d noticed a four-or five-story building on the other side of the eight-foot wall where they’d parked for cover. If they could reach an upper floor, they might be able to establish a vantage point to see who was firing at them and what was happening inside the Compound. They might even be able to pick off the enemy shooters.

  First, though, they’d have to get over that eight-foot wall. A thought crossed Tanto’s mind: Jesus Christ, I’m getting too old for this. He’d left the Annex still in his cargo shorts, and he knew that he’d be scraping skin the whole way over the wall.

  Tanto approached the Team Leader and the 17 February commander.

  “Me and D.B. are going on foot,” Tanto said. “We can’t wait any longer.”

  The Team Leader gave them the go-ahead, and Tanto went to Rone. “Hey buddy, we’re going. I’ll maintain contact, let you know when I think it’s clear to go down that road.”

  Tanto slung his assault rifle over his left shoulder, grabbed his light machine gun, and draped a two-hundred-round bandolier across his chest. He threw his go-bag over his right shoulder. He filled his pockets with magazines. As he finished jocking up, Tanto caught sight of two young 17 February militiamen with AK-47s, watching him.

  “Hey, you two, come with us.” The militiamen nodded their heads in agreement. Tanto and D.B. led them toward the wall.

  Locked inside the Compound TOC, DS agent Alec Henderson continued to communicate with the Annex, the embassy in Tripoli, and the State Department in Washington. He spread word that Scott Wickland was suffering from severe smoke inhalation on the roof of Villa C, and that Chris Stevens and Sean Smith remained missing. He described the fires and the attackers roaming the Compound.

  DS agent David Ubben knew that they needed only one agent in the TOC to maintain communications. From what he and Henderson could see on the monitor, it looked as though the attackers had moved away from the TOC and the Cantina after unsuccessfully trying to reach the Americans inside both. If Ubben could get to the two Tripoli DS agents still barricaded in the Cantina with a local guard, maybe they could team up and find the lost men. He described his plan to the agents in the Cantina via radio.

  In full combat gear, weapon in hand, Ubben cracked open the door to the TOC and threw a smoke grenade into the brick walkway separating the TOC from the Cantina. Henderson provided cover as Ubben prepared to leave. Using the white smoke to conceal his movements, Ubben ran across the walkway and inside the looted Cantina. Making his way through the ransacked building, Ubben found the room where the two Tripoli DS agents were waiting with the Blue Mountain guard. They removed the barricade that had kept out the attackers, and the two Tripoli DS agents joined Ubben in the effort to reach Villa C. They told the local guard to stay hidden in the Cantina.

  Unsure where the attackers might be, going on foot seemed like a death wish. Outside the TOC was an armored vehicle
that the attackers had failed to burn when they ran out of diesel. After retrieving the keys from inside the TOC, Ubben and the two Tripoli-based agents leapt in and drove the short way to the villa. They ran to the patio where Wickland had come through the open bedroom window. The three DS agents climbed the ladder up to the roof and found Wickland vomiting from severe smoke inhalation and on the brink of unconsciousness.

  Desperate to find Stevens and Smith, Ubben and the two Tripoli-based agents scrambled back down. Noxious diesel smoke still filled the safe haven. Visibility remained poor. Two of the agents set up a defensive perimeter to guard the window, while the third went inside, crawling across the floor to search for the ambassador and the communications expert. He could only remain inside briefly before the lack of air drove him back to the window.

  Ubben and the two other DS agents rotated between the grim, strenuous search duty and manning the defensive perimeter. Each time one man came out of the villa breathless and empty-handed, a new man went in.

  SIX

  Gunfighter Road

  UPON DRIVING INTO THE ANNEX, OZ HEADED DIRECTLY for Building C. There he found Bob the base chief and several other agency staffers standing outside, talking on their cell phones. Oz’s dinner companion rushed from the Toyota and went inside Building C to find out what was happening. Other Annex staffers roamed the walled property, moving at will from building to building. Some grabbed personal belongings from their living quarters. To Oz, several Annex residents seemed caught up in the commotion, unsure where to go or what to do.

  This is gonna be like herding cats, Oz thought.

  His body armor and kit were in his room, but there wasn’t yet time for that. Still in the brown pants and long-sleeved collared shirt he’d worn to dinner, Oz strode directly to Bob and swamped him with questions. “What’s the latest? Did the guys take enough weapons? Where, exactly, is everyone who’s still here?”