13 Hours The Inside Account of What Really Happened In Benghazi (12 page)

Operators have two words to describe unknown persons photographing secure locations without warning or permission: “surveillance,” to gain information, and “reconnaissance,” to gain tactical advantage. Surveillance of an American diplomatic site was worrisome, to be answered at a minimum by countersurveillance to determine the observer’s identity and intent. Reconnaissance was worse, as it anticipated offensive military or militant action.

A Blue Mountain Libya guard working the early shift spotted the photographer and went outside the Compound gate to speak with him. Confronted by the unarmed guard,
the man in the SSC uniform denied wrongdoing, returned to the car, and left with his two companions and his photographs.

Even before the suspicious photographer showed up, Stevens had intended to spend the day inside the Compound walls, to avoid making himself a tempting target to anyone with al-Qaeda sympathies or other anti-American sentiments on the anniversary of 9/11. The ambassador’s agenda included discussions at Villa C with a local appellate court judge; the owner of a shipping company whose brother had political aspirations; and a political analyst. His final scheduled meeting of the day would be with the Turkish consul general, Ali Akin, who had helped the Americans when Stevens first landed in Benghazi in April 2011.

The Blue Mountain guard’s report about the photographer sent the American DS agents into high alert. Two agents asked the guard to show them where he saw the uniformed man, to determine what the photographer had been able to observe. A DS agent also informed officials at the CIA Annex of the suspicious incident, as part of their longstanding arrangement to share security information in the event that the GRS operators needed to be called in as a Quick Reaction Force.

In addition, a DS agent spread word about the photographer among 17 February militia commanders presumed to be friendly to the Americans. The 17 February militia leaders told the DS agents that they would complain on the Americans’ behalf to the local office of the SSC.

Separately, Stevens reviewed a draft of a complaint about the incident that he wanted delivered to local
police authorities. “Early this morning,” read the draft, as reported by
Foreign Policy
magazine, “one of our diligent guards made a troubling report. Near our main gate, a member of the police force was seen in the upper level of a building across from our compound. It is reported that this person was photographing the inside of the US Special Mission.” Another complaint, intended for the Benghazi office of the Libyan Ministry of Foreign Affairs, began with a protest that requests for police protection at the Compound during Stevens’s visit had been ignored. “We were given assurances from the highest authorities in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that all due support would be provided for Ambassador Stevens’ visit to Benghazi. However, we are saddened to report that we have only received an occasional police presence at our main gate,” it read. “Many hours pass when we have no police support at all.”

September 11 was a typical half day of work at Libyan government offices, where bureaucrats had perfected the art of late arrivals, long lunches, and early departures. By the time Stevens approved the final drafts, no Libyan officials were around to receive them. The complaints would have to wait at least another day.

In late morning, Stevens sent cables to Washington that included a weekly report of security incidents. He described Libyans’ “growing frustration with police and security forces.” Previously, a local SSC official had acknowledged to Stevens that they were too weak to keep the country secure.

Also on September 11, Stevens approved a cable, later reviewed by
The Daily Beast
, that raised the disturbing possibility that two leaders of ostensibly friendly Libyan militias in Benghazi had soured on the United States. The
cable said the militia leaders believed that the United States was supporting one of their rivals in his bid to become the country’s first elected prime minister. If the rival leader won a vote scheduled for the following day, September 12, 2012, in the Libyan Parliament, Stevens wrote, the two disgruntled militia leaders warned that they “would not continue to guarantee security in Benghazi, a critical function they asserted they were currently providing.”

Between sending cables, attending meetings, and doing paperwork, Stevens received an unsettling text message from Gregory Hicks, the Deputy Chief of Mission at the embassy in Tripoli, which made him Stevens’s second-in-command among US diplomats in Libya.

“Chris,” Hicks wrote, “are you aware of what’s going on in Cairo?”

Stevens responded that he wasn’t, so Hicks explained that protesters had stormed the US Embassy in the Egyptian capital. Stevens shared the news with a member of his security team and went on with his day.

Separately, one of the DS agents in Benghazi, Alec Henderson, heard about the Cairo protests from a counterpart in Tripoli. From his post in the Compound, Henderson called the Annex to be sure that all the Americans in Benghazi were aware of the escalating unrest seven hundred miles away in Egypt.

By all accounts, the Cairo demonstration was sparked by Egyptian media reports about an amateurish movie trailer posted on YouTube for an anti-Islamic film called
Innocence of Muslims
. The video, made by a Christian Egyptian-American with a history of bank fraud and multiple aliases, defamed the Prophet Muhammad by depicting
him as a bloodthirsty, womanizing buffoon, a homosexual, and a child molester.

Fueling the anger among Egyptian Muslims, erroneous reports suggested that the US government was somehow involved in producing the film. The US Embassy in Cairo might have unwittingly contributed to that impression by issuing a noontime statement awkwardly disavowing the video. As Gregory Hicks told Ambassador Stevens, the Egyptian protesters had scaled the embassy wall and burned the American flag. They replaced it with a black jihadist flag with white lettering in Arabic that read: “There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is His messenger.”

September 11, 2012, began as a typical day for the GRS operators at the Annex. For the first move of the day, Tig accompanied Bob the base chief, his deputy, and a case officer to a 9:00 a.m. meeting with Libyan contacts at an office on the Fourth Ring Road, almost directly across from the back gate of the diplomatic Compound. While there, Tig heard Bob and the other staffers discussing how Libyan officials had asked about the location of the Annex. Afterward, Tig provided security as the CIA officers went to the Compound to inform the ambassador and the DS agents that the Libyans they’d met with had warned them about a threat to local government buildings that day. Tig listened as Stevens said he wasn’t concerned because he intended to remain inside the walls of the Compound, and because the threat apparently was made by one group of Libyans against another.

After a breakfast of oatmeal and eggs, Oz ran into Rone
outside Building A. They sat together enjoying coffee, conversation, and the warm morning breeze. Oz had been reading
No Easy Day
, a memoir by a former SEAL Team Six member about the raid to kill Osama bin Laden. For days he’d been needling Rone—“Hey, is writing books part of SEAL training?”—knowing that Rone had mixed feelings about a SEAL discussing his work.

“I finished that book,” Oz said. “You can have it now—I know you’re wanting to read it.”

“Yeah, fuck you,” Rone answered, returning to his coffee.

Oz had a light daytime schedule of
Call of Duty
games, a workout, a nap, an afternoon snack, and a shower. At night he was scheduled to escort a female case officer to a dinner with a prosperous Libyan businessman and his wife. Oz and the case officer, who had grown friendly with the Libyan couple through work contacts, left the Annex around 6:00 p.m. They stopped at an Internet café for coffee, then drove by the beach on their way to their hosts’ upscale home. During the drive, the case officer idly wondered whether the Annex needed quite so many security officers and GRS operators. Oz assured her that they needed every last one. As sunset approached shortly before 7:00 p.m., nothing seemed out of the ordinary. The evening was clear and Benghazi was its usual bustling, boisterous self.

Oz, the case officer, and the Libyan couple sat down over a traditional North African meal of lamb kebab, dates, and dessert pastries made from delicate layers of phyllo dough with pistachios and honey. They talked about politics and life in their respective countries. After dinner, the hosts poured tea and brought out a hookah pipe, but it was missing the upper bowl that holds the tobacco. Using his
combat knife, Oz hollowed out a pear and fashioned it into an improvised hookah bowl. Their host admired his skill and his knife, so Oz surprised him by making it a gift.

During late afternoon, Tig and Rone began looking ahead to the next morning, when they were scheduled to protect the ambassador during a planned visit to the offices of the Benghazi-based Arabian Gulf Oil Company. The DS agents at the Compound were unfamiliar with the oil company’s neighborhood, as they normally relied on a local driver to get them around. But Tig and Rone knew the area well, so they agreed to serve as the advance team.

As night fell, the two operators drove to the oil company’s offices to scope the place out and to be sure they knew where to take Stevens the next day. On the way back to the Annex, at around 8:30 p.m., Rone and Tig drove past the Compound. All was quiet. Rone called the DS agents on his cell phone.

“Hey,” Rone told a DS agent, “we figured out where the place is. Do you want us to come over now, to tell you where it’s at, or do you want us to wait?”

The DS agent told Rone they should wait until morning. As they drove back to the Annex, Rone and Tig talked about how troubling they found it that the DS agents were so unfamiliar with their surroundings that they had to rely on a local driver to get them around Benghazi.

In general, all the GRS operators worried that the ambassador’s visit was rife with vulnerability. Highest on their list of concerns was the planned American Corner ribbon cutting because it had been announced in advance. But as they talked among themselves, the operators concluded
that Stevens could be targeted at any time and at any place during the five-day visit because the State Department security team was so lightly staffed.