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

by Mitchell Zuckoff

  One of the DS agents who met Jack and Rone was Scott Wickland. Suffering from smoke inhalation, his lungs scarred by diesel fumes, Wickland had climbed down from the villa roof to rejoin the rescue effort. Jack barely recognized him. Wickland looked like a chimney sweep, his boyish face and light-brown hair coated in black soot. Red vines of broken blood vessels covered his heavy-lidded eyes. Wickland’s shoulders slumped. His feet were bare. His clothes were blackened rags. The other DS agent, standing alongside Wickland, was big David Ubben, drooping from fatigue, his T-shirt smudged with ash, his meaty face slack. Only days earlier, the four men had sat outside the villa discussing their worries about the understaffed Compound security team; now their worst fears had been realized.

  For a few seconds no one said anything, as the two former SEALs and the two DS agents looked at one another in disbelief. Ubben and Wickland shook their heads and looked at the ground. They’d trained for this and had known that it was possible. They’d responded to the best of their abilities. But now it was real and awful, and it wasn’t nearly over.

  From the corner of his eye Jack glanced toward the open front doors. The villa’s entrance foyer was dark, but through the smoky haze he could see red-hot coals from the wood of incinerated furniture, smoldering on the ruined marble tile floors. It reminded Jack of looking inside a wood-fired pizza oven. He could feel the intense heat pulsing from within.

  His voice hoarse from smoke, Ubben broke the silence: “There’s still guys in the building.”

  Immediately Rone and Jack went to the window at the far end of the patio. Wickland, Ubben, and the two DS agents from Tripoli had already gone through it multiple times, and now the window hung crooked in its frame, attached to the building from only one top corner. Jack didn’t know where the Tripoli-based agents had gone, but he got the impression that Wickland and Ubben were on the verge of collapse. He could tell that they were deeply relieved to see him and Rone take over the search for Chris Stevens and Sean Smith.

  As they rushed to the window, Rone and Jack shared a brief, can-this-possibly-get-worse look. Jack believed that it would take a miracle to pull anyone out alive, and they’d need to be vigilant if they wanted to get out themselves.

  Jack climbed through the window into the bedroom in the villa’s safe-haven area. The moment his feet hit the floor he felt the most intense blast of heat he’d ever experienced. The only comparison he could think of was opening an oven door on Thanksgiving after a turkey had been roasting all day. His nose and eyes recoiled from the noxious vapors and caustic diesel smoke. Sharp fumes from burning textiles and plastic added to the stench. Jack felt his contact lenses dry out instantly. He wondered if they might melt against his eyeballs.

  Rone and Jack took deep breaths and held them for as long as possible. They bulled their way past furniture and mattresses strewn around the bedroom from the DS agents’ previous searches. They went as far as they could, as fast as they could, inside the bedroom. But with no clean air, that wasn’t far. They rushed back to the window for fresh breaths. With each trip inside, they tried to reach deeper, to push themselves farther on a single chestful of air, even as they knew they were tempting fate. Go too far, or take a wrong turn, or lose your way in the dark, Jack told himself, and you’ll be a missing man, too.

  Coughing and feeling light-headed, Jack and Rone began to alternate their searches of the safe haven, taking turns going inside the villa through the window. Time after time they emerged alone. Frustrated that they couldn’t explore the far reaches of the safe haven, they tried going in through the front doors. Depending on which way they went, the operators might be able to sneak in a few tolerable breaths inside and search a minute or two longer. But inevitably the furnace pushed them back outside.

  In much of the villa, visibility was a few feet or less. Rone and Jack lit the flashlights mounted on their weapons, but the white beams barely penetrated the smoky blackness. They moved or lifted whatever furniture they came upon, in the hope of finding their missing countrymen underneath. Anyone still inside was likely to be on the ground, they reasoned, so they focused their searches close to the floor. The heat was slightly less intense down low, but their feet still baked in their boots.

  Jack felt a wave of gloom. There’s no way in hell that they could possibly be alive, he thought. There’s no way to survive this for more than a few minutes.

  Yet he and Rone continued looking.

  After more than a dozen attempts each, Jack and Rone grew discouraged that they still hadn’t been able to reach some parts of the back half of the villa. Each time they’d tried, they’d been forced out by the smoke and heat. From outside on the patio, they ran around to the rear of the building to see if they could get in another way. They heard pops of gunfire in the distance, but the attackers had fallen back from the area around the villa and were nowhere in sight. Still, Jack and Rone moved on high alert, guns up, elbows tucked close to their torsos, heads swiveling, eyes scanning for targets.

  They found an open back door and stepped inside. But it was just as dark, hot, and smoky, and they couldn’t explore far before they were forced back to the door for breaths. After several attempts with the same dispiriting results, they abandoned that approach and moved outside. Jack ran around to the front of the villa, expecting Rone to follow. But in the darkness the two operators became separated.

  Jack continued alone toward the patio area near the bedroom window.

  Tig had approached the villa by running up the same brick driveway and across the same grass field as Rone and Jack. He reached the building while his fellow operators were inside searching. No one was on the patio when he arrived, so Tig positioned himself behind the sandbags to create a perimeter defense while he waited. When he’d first entered the Compound, Tig saw a Libyan man in camouflage pants and a T-shirt walking away from the burning 17 February barracks. The man was unarmed, and he seemed to belong there, so Tig didn’t shoot him. Otherwise, Tig found the Compound quiet except for the crackling of burning buildings.

  As he stood near the sandbag fighting position toward the front of the villa, Tig heard loud noises and crashing sounds from inside. He heard someone kick in a door. Tig wasn’t sure who was inside, but he concluded that the racket must be coming from Jack, Rone, DS agents, or militiamen overturning furniture and clearing rooms. As Tig waited for them to emerge, he was startled by the sight of a gray Land Cruiser speeding around a corner in front of the villa.

  Here come the bad guys, Tig thought.

  He raised his belt-fed machine gun and followed the SUV’s movements with the weapon’s barrel. Tig prepared to unload as the vehicle drove past him toward the front of the villa. At the last second before he opened fire, Tig recognized David Ubben’s face through the windshield. Also in the vehicle was one of the Tripoli-based DS agents.

  Tig took his finger off the trigger, lowered the machine gun, and exhaled.

  When Jack returned to the front of the villa, he found several 17 February militiamen going in and out through the main entrance, trying to help with the search. Jack went to the patio and poked his head inside the bedroom window, intending to try again. Immediately he saw two DS agents, Dave Ubben and the taller of the two agents from Tripoli, coming toward the window through the smoke wearing gas masks. Jack’s first thought was to wonder where they’d gotten the gear and how he could get similar masks for himself and his fellow operators.

  As the agents grew closer, Jack’s smoke-strained eyes focused. The two DS agents stood on either side of a limp man, dragging him toward the window. The man faced upward, wearing dark jeans and a gray T-shirt. Dave Ubben and the Tripoli agent each had the man by an arm, holding his torso and bald head off the ground. His legs and rear dragged along the ashy floor. Jack leaned through the window and reached out with both arms. When the agents approached, Jack slid his hands under the man’s arms and locked them in front of his chest. Jack pulled the unresponsive man up and through the window, then gently laid him on a concrete p
ad protected behind the sandbags. Jack didn’t recognize the man. He couldn’t tell whether he was American or Libyan.

  Jack dropped to his knees to the right of the man’s head. He knew from his SEAL training that even before trying to establish an airway, he needed to make sure the man wasn’t in danger of bleeding to death. Jack lifted the man’s T-shirt and checked his torso for chest or stomach trauma. He found no signs of injury. No blood appeared to be seeping through his pants. Jack pulled up the man’s shirt all the way to his neck. He turned the man onto one side, to look and feel around his back for blood or trauma that might reveal internal bleeding. Finding none, Jack eased the man down onto his back. The man flopped limply each time Jack moved his body or limbs.

  Jack leaned down and put his ear to the man’s nose and mouth. He listened and felt for breath but found none. He searched fruitlessly for a pulse.

  Jack’s hands were on the man’s bare chest, and he noticed that the skin felt deathly cold to the touch. He looked at the man’s face and saw a dark ring around his lips, from inhaling diesel smoke. Jack considered trying CPR, but he felt certain it would do no good. The DS agents stood over Jack as he worked, watching and hoping.

  Jack looked up at Dave Ubben. “No,” Jack said. “He’s gone.”

  Ubben shook his head and turned away. Jack saw tears in his eyes.

  Soon Jack would learn that the man he’d just declared dead was Sean Smith, a thirty-four-year-old State Department communications expert, a married father of two young children, a star video-game player known to his online friends as Vile Rat. Only hours earlier, Smith had written an online message complaining about the Libyan “police” photographing the Compound that morning. Smith had begun that message with what now seemed like an anxious prophecy: “assuming we don’t die tonight.”

  Jack didn’t know Smith well. They’d met several days earlier when they were introduced during a dinner at the Annex kitchen. Jack felt miserable about Smith’s death, but there was no time to mourn him. Jack and the other DS agent lifted Smith’s body and carried it to a spot near the villa’s front doors.

  While Jack was trying to help Smith, he heard one of the DS agents say they weren’t finished searching the villa: “The ambo’s still missing.”

  Jack resumed searching, as did the DS agents and several of the 17 February militia members who’d come onto the Compound as the attackers fell back. At one point Jack counted more than ten searchers, but the inside of the villa still burned hot. They focused as much as possible on the safe-haven area, but no one could find Ambassador Chris Stevens.

  After getting separated from Jack in the dark on their way back to the front entrance, Rone ran into Tig outside the villa. Together, they saw Jack bent over Sean Smith’s body. “Is that one of ours?” Tig asked. Rone didn’t know.

  Word spread that Stevens remained lost and the villa hadn’t yet been declared clear. Tig and Rone turned on the flashlights on their assault rifles and went through the front doors side by side.

  Tig had been in the villa months earlier, so he had a mental picture of the floor plan that he thought would be helpful to the search. They went in low, crouching to stay beneath the smoke, but on their first trip the heat was so overpowering they lasted only about thirty seconds and reached no more than fifteen feet inside. Even with their lights, they could barely see beyond the end of their rifle barrels. It reminded Tig of turning on a car’s headlights in a thick fog.

  “Holy shit,” Tig said outside, sweat dripping from every pore. “This is gonna be rough.”

  They took deep breaths and went back in, lasting about a minute on their second trip. On the third attempt, Tig went farther than he had earlier, reaching a pile of furniture outside the steel gate to the safe haven. The gate looked as though it remained locked, and Tig couldn’t get through the furniture to reach it.

  “Chris! Chris!” Tig called for the ambassador at the top of his lungs.

  From behind him, outside the villa, came an answer, “Yeah, I’m here.”

  Tig recognized the voice as belonging to the Team Leader, who’d joined them by driving the Mercedes SUV with Henry the translator from the Gunfighter Road intersection into the Compound.

  Coughing from the smoke, Tig called back: “No, not you! Chris Stevens!” Tig got no reply from inside the safe haven.

  Calling out the ambassador’s name filled Tig’s lungs with smoke. He and Rone went back out to the front steps. After a few deep breaths, they gave it a fourth try. Again they went to the deepest part of the open living space, but again they found no sign of Stevens. Tig circled back around toward the front doors. He couldn’t see more than a foot in either direction, but he thought that Rone was next to him the whole time.

  “I’m lost!” Rone called from somewhere across the smoke-filled room. “I can’t find my way out!”

  Tig turned toward his friend. “Come to my voice!”

  “I’m lost!” Rone called.

  “Follow my voice!”

  Each breath filling their lungs with smoke, they continued the call-and-response exchange several times. From the direction of Rone’s calls, Tig realized that Rone was disoriented and moving toward the kitchen. From his previous searches, Tig knew that that part of the villa remained engulfed in flames. He yelled to Rone to keep talking, then rushed toward Rone’s voice. When he caught sight of Rone through the smoke, Tig reached out and grabbed him.

  Both were coughing madly, their lungs desperate for fresh air, as Tig led Rone to the front doors and safely outside.

  As the two operators caught their breath, bent over with hands on knees, their rifles dangling, Tig and Rone heard a radio call from Tanto and D.B. saying that they were ready to move into the Compound through the back gate. DS agents and militiamen continued to search the villa, so Tig and Rone moved to cover the incoming operators.

  Rone and Tig went to a dirt pathway that bisected the Compound, stretching from the north wall to the south wall. Along much of the path, toward the rear half of the Compound, an orchard and a vineyard provided abundant potential hiding places for their enemies. Tig and Rone took positions on either side of the path.

  Rone was still thinking about the deadly serious game of Marco Polo they’d played inside the villa. “Hey dude, thanks,” Rone said. “You just saved my life. I thought I was gonna die in there.”

  Tig knew that Rone would have done the same for him. “Hopefully we’ll all get out of this alive,” Tig said.

  Standing a dozen feet apart across the dirt pathway, Tig and Rone watched the darkened areas of trees and vines to make sure Tanto and D.B. weren’t walking into an ambush. A man walked slowly out of the orchard, and the operators trained their sights on him. But Tig recognized the man as a Blue Mountain guard who’d apparently hidden among the trees, waiting for the Americans to arrive.

  Before moving to the Compound’s back gate, Tanto and D.B. took cover behind concrete Jersey barriers on the Fourth Ring Road, anticipating that some of the attackers might flee that way when Rone and Tig moved toward the rear of the property. But after several minutes no one came through, so Tanto radioed Tig.

  “We’re starting to come in,” Tanto said. “Don’t shoot at us.”

  “Roger that.”

  Tanto and D.B. tested the back gate but found it locked. D.B. moved down the property wall to the southwest corner, to see if he could locate another way in. Finding no other entrance and no easy way over the wall topped with razor wire, D.B. decided to climb over the gate. Tanto thought he had a better idea, so he ran back to the 17 February commander outside the grocery store to ask for help.

  “Hey, get one of your trucks in here to push this gate open,” Tanto said. “We’re thinking we’re going to need to jump it, but if you got one of those trucks we can ram it open.”

  “No sir. No,” the militia commander said, politely but firmly.

  “Get a fucking truck over here and ram it open,” Tanto demanded.

  “No, I don’t think we can do th
at,” the commander said. “We don’t have a truck.”

  Tanto noticed that the militia had failed to block traffic on the Fourth Ring Road, so cars kept driving past, with drivers honking horns as rubbernecking passengers tried to see the burning buildings inside the Compound.

  “Well, then let’s commandeer one of these fucking vehicles,” Tanto said, pointing to the cars and trucks cruising by.

  “No sir, we don’t want to do that.”

  So much for a helpful, friendly militia. Tanto fought to keep his cool. D.B. had heard enough. He climbed over the gate and checked a small guard shack inside the Compound to be sure it was empty. Tanto stood by the gate, expecting D.B. to open it from the inside. But after clearing the guard shack, D.B. ran to meet up with Tig and Rone.

  Loaded down with weapons and gear, already sore and bleeding from the collapsed wall, Tanto continued waiting outside the property with the two young militiamen he’d grown to trust. Also nearby were a couple dozen militiamen with a commander he’d begun to hate.

  He yelled to his partner: “D.B., open the fucking gate for me!” He laughed at the absurdity of the situation, throwing back his head and looking to the dark sky for help. I’m out here by myself with all these militia guys, Tanto thought. Nobody is shooting at me—not yet. D.B., come back and OPEN THE FUCKING GATE! Tanto tried several times to raise D.B. on the radio, but he couldn’t get through.

  D.B. had, in fact, heard Tanto. He’d yelled “No!” in response, though Tanto didn’t hear him. With an unsecured guard shack and a darkened vineyard before him, D.B. wasn’t about to turn his back to potential threats and unlock the gate.