13 Hours The Inside Account of What Really Happened In Benghazi (3 page)

J
ACK
S
ILVA LEANED FORWARD IN HIS WINDOW SEAT
aboard the Turkish Airlines jet as it approached Benghazi’s Benina International Airport. He looked outside at the plane’s shadow racing across the caramel-colored desert below. Jack believed deeply in yin and yang, the Chinese concept that a connection exists between seemingly opposing forces, like dark and light, life and death. So it was unsurprising that two conflicting thoughts entered his mind. First was excitement:
I wonder what adventures this place is going to bring.
Then came its counterbalance, worry:
I wonder if I’ll ever see my family again.

It was August 2012, and Jack was about to join the Benghazi team of a secretive US government organization called the Global Response Staff. Created after the 9/11 attacks, the GRS consisted of full-time CIA security staffers, supplemented by former military special operators like Jack, who were hired on a lucrative contract basis. GRS
officers served as bodyguards for spies, diplomats, and other American personnel in the field. The more dangerous a posting, the more likely GRS operators were nearby in the shadows, protecting America’s envoys and covert intelligence gatherers. Few if any postings were more dangerous than Benghazi, Libya.

As a former Navy SEAL, Jack was a natural fit for the GRS. At thirty-eight years old, self-possessed and darkly handsome, he stood six foot two and carried 210 pounds on his muscular frame. In his usual attire of a black T-shirt and khaki shorts, Jack looked like a strapping construction worker. On the plane, though, wearing dress slacks, brown leather shoes, and a tucked-in button-down shirt, he might be mistaken for an American businessman seeking import-export opportunities ten months after the death of deposed dictator Muammar al-Gaddafi. At least that was Jack’s hope as the jet’s wheels touched down.

Jack’s arrival marked his first visit to Libya and the start of his sixth trip as a GRS operator; his previous trips had taken him to the Middle East and elsewhere. For official purposes in Benghazi, Jack would simply say that he’d be working as a security staffer for diplomats from the US State Department. Men who protect spies don’t advertise that fact.

Before leaving the plane, Jack slipped off his gold wedding band and tucked it into a small box for safekeeping. He’d picked up the habit years earlier, after deciding that he didn’t want his enemies to know that he had a family: a wife and two young sons waiting for him back home in the Pacific Northwest.

Jack stepped onto the tarmac and felt the bone-dry afternoon heat of the Libyan summer. His aviator sunglasses
were modest protection from the harsh white glare of the North African sun. Entering the run-down terminal building, Jack pushed through doors to a room with a luggage carousel and more than a hundred people packed inside a space that would have felt crowded with half as many. His fellow luggage-seekers, most of them men, shouted in Arabic and gestured wildly as they fought to claim bags. The air was thick with flies and the nauseating stench of baked-on body odor. Jack took short breaths through his mouth in a futile effort to keep both at bay.

He’d been on guard from the moment he left the plane, a reflex reaction whenever Jack arrived in hostile territory. Hyper-aware, his jaw set, his every movement grew deliberate, measured to convey in body language that he wasn’t looking for trouble but wouldn’t flinch from it, either. Jack felt the stares of strangers upon him and knew that at least some were armed. He also knew that everyone watching him had reached the same instant conclusion: American. He suspected that at least some wished him dead.

As he waited for his bags, Jack caught sight of a burly, bearded man standing with his back against a wall at the periphery of the scrum. The man’s eyes scanned the crowd while his body remained as still as a lizard on a tree limb. He wore khaki cargo pants and a navy-blue button-down shirt, untucked, Jack knew, to conceal a gun in his waistband. Their eyes met for an instant. Jack returned his gaze to the luggage carousel, and the bearded man remained expressionless, glued to the wall.

When Jack grabbed his bags, the man pushed away from the wall and turned toward the exit door leading to Customs. Jack followed a short distance behind. By the time Jack stepped outside the terminal building, he and
the bearded man had closed the distance between them and fallen into step with each other. Still they didn’t speak as the man led Jack toward a white Toyota pickup truck caked in dust.

Jack tossed his bags in the back and slid into the passenger seat. The bearded man got behind the wheel. In a single, practiced motion, the man reached down and grabbed a pistol.

“It’s loaded,” the man said.

He held it out, butt-end first.

Jack relaxed as he took the gun. He reached out his right hand and returned a powerful handshake offered by his fellow former SEAL and GRS colleague Tyrone Woods, whose radio call sign was “Rone.”

“How’s it going, brother?” Rone said, a bright smile emerging from his thick salt-and-pepper beard.

As Rone started the truck, they caught up on each other’s lives and families, then set aside those thoughts like wedding rings slipped into boxes. Rone drove toward the airport exit, bound for an upscale neighborhood called Western Fwayhat. Their destination was a CIA-rented property known as the Annex, which was the agency’s secret headquarters in Benghazi. Less than a mile from the Annex was the United States’ public presence in the city: a walled estate known as the US Special Mission Compound, which served as a base for State Department diplomats.

As their talk turned to business, Rone filled Jack in about the peculiarities of the treacherous place where they’d be working to keep other Americans safe. Rone’s overriding message was that they’d be kept busy, and they’d have to remain alert, but there was nothing about
Benghazi they couldn’t handle. In a strange way, Rone said, he almost liked the place.

Still, something about how his old friend described Benghazi—a lawless city where no one was in control, where lines between America’s friends and enemies shifted and blurred, where they could trust only each other—gave Jack the distinct impression that Rone considered this to be their diciest assignment yet.

Jack had landed in a country most Americans know only from disturbing headlines. A North African nation roughly the size of Alaska, Libya is a vast desert with a tiny fringe of fertile soil at its northern coast. To its west are Tunisia and Algeria, to its east is Egypt, and to its south are Niger, Chad, and Sudan. The country is divided into three regions: Tripolitania, to the west, with Tripoli as its capital; Cyrenaica, to the east, with Benghazi as its capital; and Fezzan, to the arid south. A majority of the six million Libyans live in or around Tripoli and Benghazi, at the edge of the Mediterranean Sea. Some 97 percent of the population is Sunni Muslim.

A brief history of Libya is an inventory of invasions by outside powers. If an empire had ships and armies in the Mediterranean, its to-conquer list included Libya’s two major ports, Tripoli to the west and Benghazi to the east, separated by the Gulf of Sidra. Over the millennia, occupiers included the Phoenicians, the Persians, the Romans, the Byzantines, and the Ottomans. Sometimes competing empires split the baby. The Greeks claimed the area around Benghazi in 630 BC, while the Romans settled near Tripoli. Historians say the Greeks even named Libya, using it as a term to describe all of northern Africa west of Egypt.

By 74 BC, the Romans had conquered eastern Libya, temporarily uniting east and west. Then came the Vandals, a Germanic tribe that drove out the Romans and earned their namesake reputation by plundering the east. The Ottomans invaded Tripoli in 1551 and ruled Libya for more than three centuries, with limited success controlling the ever-restive eastern tribes around Benghazi.

While successive conquerors were vanquishing and bleeding Libya, two Arab tribes flowed onto its sands from Egypt. Starting in the eleventh century, the Bani Hilal tribe settled near Tripoli, while the Bani Salim tribe settled in the east. The Bani Salim freely mixed with and married the native Berbers around Benghazi. As generations passed, the result was a homogeneous ethnic and religious region, what one historian called the “total Arabization” of eastern Libya.

During the 1800s, the Ottoman Turks gave up hope of controlling Benghazi. The Turks allowed eastern Libya to exist as a semi-independent state ruled by the Senussi Muslim sect, which preached a pure form of Islam under which followers conducted all aspects of their lives by the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad. While Tripoli and western Libya matured into a relatively modern region, eastern Libya retained its old ways, governed by tribal bonds and religious laws. That divide made it impossible to understand present-day Libya without contrasting Benghazi with its larger, richer, better-looking, and worldlier sister, Tripoli.

In 1912, the exhausted Ottoman Empire signed a secret pact that gave Italy control of both west and east Libya. Tripoli adapted to Italian rule, but eastern Libya fought colonization, especially by a Christian nation. By 1920,
the Italians had had enough. Drained by the First World War, Rome ceded autonomy over eastern Libya to Idris al-Senussi, head of the strict Senussi religious order.

When Benito Mussolini rose to power in Italy two years later, the fascist dictator wanted Benghazi to be part of his empire. Years of fierce fighting followed. In September 1931, Italian forces finally captured and hanged the leader of the opposition guerrillas, Omar al-Mukhtar, a Senussi sheikh who became a martyr to Libyan independence. Even with Mukhtar gone, Mussolini set out to destroy any entrenched opposition around Benghazi. He built a two-hundred-mile fence along the border of Egypt and by some estimates deported one-third of eastern Libya’s civilian population to concentration camps. He executed twelve thousand more.

With Benghazi under Italian control, waves of workers arrived from across the Mediterranean. The Arab natives were forced into menial jobs, deprived of schooling, and excluded from politics. World War II made matters worse, as Benghazi was bombed hundreds of times as the Axis and Allied powers traded control over the rubble. British pilots adapted a popular song to reflect the carnage, with a lyric that included the line, “We’re off to bomb Benghazi.” Like a long-abused animal, Benghazi grew mean and wary.

After World War II, Libya was divided among the British, French, and Americans. Oil had yet to be discovered, so no one wanted colonial responsibility for an impoverished, bombed-out Arab sandbox. In 1951, the Allies helped to establish the United Kingdom of Libya, an independent, constitutional monarchy ruled by the Muslim leader Idris al-Senussi. The title was better than the job: King Idris had dominion over the world’s poorest country and one of its least literate.

That changed radically in 1959 with the discovery of immense oil reserves, enough to eventually account for 2 percent of global supplies, or more than a million barrels exported daily in 2012. Suddenly King Idris had money to lavish on friends and pet projects in his native east, leaving Tripoli and Libya’s west to decay. In east and west alike, the elite grew rich while everyone else remained poor.

In 1969, while the eighty-year-old King Idris was abroad, the timing was ripe for a bloodless coup led by a power-hungry twenty-seven-year-old army officer: Muammar al-Gaddafi. Over the next forty-two years, the erratic, brutal, egomaniacal Gaddafi earned the sobriquet bestowed on him by Ronald Reagan: “[M]ad dog of the Middle East.”

From the start, Gaddafi worried about Benghazi’s rebellious bent and its ties to the exiled King Idris. So he squeezed the region dry. Previously, the Libyan capital had alternated between Tripoli and Benghazi; Gaddafi made Tripoli the permanent capital. He moved the National Oil Corporation from Benghazi to Tripoli, despite the fact that most of the country’s oil is in the east. He relocated a memorial that had been erected in Benghazi to honor Omar al-Mukhtar, fearing that Benghazans would rally behind the rebel martyr’s legacy, as eventually they did.

As hospitals, schools, and the standard of living rose in Tripoli, Benghazi suffered oppression and neglect while its oil paid Tripoli’s bills. Benghazans seethed as they watched Gaddafi celebrate himself in countless statues and endless tributes. The bitter separation between Benghazi and Tripoli wasn’t just political and cultural, but physical. No railway or highway connected the two cities, only narrow roads that snaked through more than six hundred miles of desert.

Through all the turmoil, one comfort for Benghazans
was their local soccer club, Al-Ahly Benghazi SC, whose name translates as “The People’s Club.” Gaddafi favored rival Tripoli soccer clubs and despised Al-Ahly Benghazi. That hatred deepened after the Benghazi team won the 1974 league championship, a victory that coincided with the anniversary of Gaddafi’s coup. Benghazi fans flooded the streets to celebrate their club’s triumph, ignoring the milestone of Gaddafi’s rule. He wouldn’t forget or forgive.

Years later, Gaddafi’s soccer-playing son Saadi became owner, manager, and captain of a soccer club called Al-Ahly Tripoli. Saadi raided Al-Ahly Benghazi for its best players, and bribed or bullied referees to ensure victories. By the summer of 2000 Al-Ahly Benghazi was on the verge of disgrace: One more loss and it would fall from the country’s top soccer division. Saadi Gaddafi came to Benghazi to luxuriate in his rivals’ agony.