9.

The Cool of Night

There is a soothing relief that overruns a desert landscape once darkness falls. The moment the unforgiving sun retreats for the brief respite of night, the cruel heat dissipates with a welcome anticipation. Visitors to the desert, the dreaded salibiyeen, or crusaders, never respected the preciousness of night. They raced about, perspiring madly in their blue blazers and khaki trousers, loosening their ties as they tried to show their hosts that the stifling heat didn’t matter to them. The masquerade was foolish. Those who dwell in the desert, people who have endured the skin-searing scorch of the sun, awaken once darkness falls. Throughout the Middle East, daytime is for shelter and incubation. Darkness is when life begins. The sun set at 1851 hours on the evening of September 11, 2012.

Benghazi’s Western Fwayhat neighborhood was eerily quiet on the night of September 11. Most of the homes in Western Fwayhat were villas, and neighborhood residents were still behind their walls and gates once darkness fell; the sun had to stay hidden for several hours before the neighborhood awoke and people emerged to their lemon-tree-covered patios to grill meats and entertain or visit friends and family. Dusk was the time to enjoy one of the several dozen cups of eye-squinting diabetic sweet tea that was a staple for Libyans, or, for the less pious, some black-market vodka; Libya, officially, is a dry country, though spirits from all over the world are plentiful in the markets of Tripoli, Benghazi, and the border regions. The main roads, both the Third and the Fourth Ring arteries, saw the usual Tuesday evening traffic. The odd SUV or Mercedes sedan raced along the dimly lit roadways, ignoring any semblances of speed laws, but that didn’t matter; few of the drivers had licenses, and virtually none had insurance. Many of the drivers, expressing an absolute disdain in the face of both the Qaddafi loyalists and the Salafists, shouted out their sense of liberation by raising the volume on the car sound systems to window-shattering levels, so that the heavy bass beats of Lebanese songstresses singing the usual fare of ten-minute-long ballads with the words habibi (my dear) and ya-albi (my heart, or “apple of my eye” for a truly romantic Arabic colloquial) were heard coming and going throughout the darkened landscape. The smaller roads, some that were paved and others that just connected the main roads to the villas and the square lots of barren real estate, were quiet.

Pedestrians were few and far between in Western Fwayhat—one of the trappings of an affluent area where Mercedes sedans and satellite dishes outnumbered residents. Many of the homes were abandoned, and many residents were absentees; wealth had afforded those with means and with links overseas to flee the city when the civil war began. Occasionally, though, people did use the side and back streets to walk to the homes of friends and relatives, or for a stroll to work off the gut-busting breakfasts of hummus, eggs, and fava beans that were the Libyan staples that usually parked themselves inside one’s belly for most of the day. Sometimes two or three men, cigarettes in one hand and prayer beads in the other, walked slowly in their flip-flops and gowns as they discussed their affairs. People also sometimes walked to the Venezia Café for an escape.

Darkness brought a beguiling eeriness to the neighborhood. The thick rows of foliage and beautiful desert flowers—some manicured in meticulous shapes and heights just outside the walled barriers separating homes—became blackened shapes that twisted in the shadows. The local streetlights cast a flickering fluorescent whitish glow to parts of the street and provided a diffused haze to others. There was the sound of the odd car engine zooming away and, of course, the nerve-punctuating shrill of feral cats at play in the dark. The quiet was occasionally interrupted by the unmistakable clank of a security gate opening or closing; this meant someone was leaving his grounds for a night out inside the medina, the dangerous old city, or that he was returning home for the evening and putting his property on lockdown.

The security crew at the Special Mission Compound was pleased when, at 1940 hours, Ambassador Stevens escorted his Turkish guest outside the residence, on foot, to the Charlie-1 gate. Chris Stevens was the central-casting Californian—full of energy and great enthusiasm. Ali Sait Akin possessed a bookish aspect. He had a narrow face and wire-rimmed headmaster glasses and could have, a hundred years earlier, played the part of a stern Ottoman governor. Both men seemed truly out of place under a calm night’s sky inside the most dangerous city in North Africa. Stevens, the gracious host, walked his Turkish guest out the front door and down the marble steps and then slowly toward the front gate. The two men spoke in a deep and flowing conversation as they made their way toward Charlie-1. Two members of Stevens’s detail, and the lead agent of the consul general’s protective detail, followed faithfully one step behind; the two DS agents scanned the surroundings, and the local guard force, suspiciously as they walked to the main gate. As the two diplomats reached the gate, Stevens offered his hand to Ali Sait Akin in a warm and friendly embrace. “Good night,” Stevens said to his guest. “Iyi geceler,” the Turkish diplomat replied with a smile.

Stevens, the gregarious person who never shied away from a chance to meet and greet and make new friends, engaged the Blue Mountain Libya guards at the gate in flawless colloquial Libyan Arabic. The conversation was brief yet very respectful and made it clear that Ambassador Stevens appreciated the work of the men, wearing their light blue uniforms, who helped protect the compound.

D. walked back to the residence with Stevens as the Turkish consul general’s bullet-resistant sedan sped off into the darkness. A Blue Mountain Libya guard watched as a February 17 militiaman shut the main gate. A lone dog was heard barking in the distance. The grounds looked majestic at night as the well-placed night lights illuminated the garden to its full glory. It was time to call it a night. D. walked step in step with Ambassador Stevens inside the majestic home and retreated to his room to watch a video. Sean Smith was in his room, immersed in his online gaming forum, and Ambassador Stevens wrapped up some paperwork and checked in with his staffers at the embassy in Tripoli. He had been trying to keep up with developments in Cairo, Tunis, and at his own post in Tripoli concerning the rioting and the breach of the perimeter in Egypt, but the news in North Africa was fluid and violent. Stevens was sending out e-mails and trying to assemble a clear picture of what had happened and what the next day might bring. It had been a long day, and even though the cooling breeze was ideal for a blissful night of sleep, there was still work to be done. It had been a tremendously busy day for Stevens. Earlier, in fact, he had cabled Main State over his growing concern with the problem of security in Benghazi and his sense of absolute frustration with the local militias and the so-called Libyan police. According to reports, the cable specifically addressed Stevens’s worry that these forces were too weak to keep the country secure.

At the outer gate, there was still some activity at Charlie-1, though. Members of a British specialist protective detail arrived at Charlie-1 to drop off their vehicles, Heckler and Koch MP5 9 mm submachine guns, M4s, and their personal sidearms at the Special Mission Compound. The British, in the wake of their immediate pullout from the city following the attempt on the life of their ambassador in June, had called upon their American allies to assist them with special security considerations and arrangements when they had personnel moving about through Benghazi; they also had left behind one of their armored SUVs following the assassination attempt. Such arrangements were common in critical-threat locations and, as explained by a former DS agent who spent time at the U.S. consulate in Karachi, Pakistan, critical to emergency contingency planning. “One of the jobs of an RSO is to get to know the local police commanders and internal security heads, as well as the security staffs at friendly posts. We knew our counterparts at the British, Australian, New Zealand, French, and other consulates, and we all knew if and when the shit would hit the fan that we would have one another’s backs.”1 There were friendly consulates in town—the Turks, the Italians, the European Union representation, and the Qataris—but no mutual aid agreement existed between the Special Mission Compound and any other government. The Brits were in town for just the day, and they departed Charlie-1 at precisely 2030.

With no more visitors scheduled that night, the last security protocols were attended to. One agent was responsible for securing the grounds one last time the night of September 11. He suited up for his patrol on foot, harnessing himself inside the standard DS critical-threat uniform—oversized blouse concealing his holstered SIG. The security walkabout was never carried out alone; an armed member of the February 17 Brigade always walked shotgun next to the watch commander. The militia member was brought along for tactical support, as well as to serve as translator if an intruder was found inside the wire or milling about the outer perimeter in a suspicious manner. R. checked in via radio with the Blue Mountain Libya guard at Charlie-1, as well as with the personnel at Bravo-1. It was, seemingly, just another night. There was nothing suspicious to report. The four guards on duty that night, identified as Nasser, Ubayd, Abdullah, and Anwar,2 thought that they were in for a routinely boring midnight shift.

The militiaman retreated to his headquarters on the compound near the northwest corner of the perimeter wall for his evening prayers; they would be operating on a skeleton crew that night, as one of the February 17 troopers had called in sick, leaving only three armed Libyans on the compound for that shift. R. removed his tactical kit when he returned to the TOC and quickly hydrated himself with bottled water. It had been a stress-filled, danger-strewn day on the ambassador’s detail, and the time had come to unwind.

High-threat tours drained an agent of his strength and lowered his alert levels; the Benghazi heat didn’t help much, either. It was impossible to live off the adrenaline of threat for more than a few days. “Sleep was a welcome respite from the exhaustion of dignitary protection work,” the retired agent Scot Folensbee reflected, referring to his countless danger tours to Africa, the Middle East, and South America. “Sleep was a tool by which an agent could deal with the mind-numbing exhaustion, the fear, and the sense of being so isolated, so very alone, in the heart of such danger. Sometimes, though, it was just impossible to let down your guard to properly rest. You always slept when you could, but in reality you weren’t really sleeping. Some places are just too dangerous to sleep.”3

But there was also a therapeutic quality to downtime. Downtime was also known as “smokin’ and jokin’” among the working humps—the semi-affectionate and completely accurate term for agents in the field. The DS slang originated from the New York Field Office, known as NYFO. Inside their temporary command posts in New York hotels, inside their rooms or sometimes in the lobby, agents read, played cards, watched TV, or rested their eyes while on the couch. In Benghazi, agents sat around at night waiting and watching, never in a truly restful state. Protection TDYs placed agents on constant edge, like coiled snakes. Some agents on critical-threat details exercised until their brains reveled in endorphin overload. Others, in posts where there were women, applied the “five thousand miles from home rule” and found comfort in the sexual pleasures of convenience that they hoped would remain secret forever. Some agents simply immersed themselves in music or books; iPods and Kindles made a library full of tunes and learning available for agents crisscrossing time zones, and they fit neatly in the Maxpedition hard-use gear bags that many carried their extra necessities in. For the ARSOs in Benghazi downtime meant cards.

With the day done and the night still young, A., B., and C. retreated to the pool deck behind the villa. They hadn’t had the time on the job to truly get into the game of “I remember when” and talk about the wild and crazy experiences that older agents usually played when in the company of their contemporaries—each side trying to outdo the other with stories, extravagance, and laughs. Most had not been through RSO training, which prepared agents for one- to three-year tours in embassies and consulates, due to the endless demands of protection work around the world or assignments to task forces and overworked domestic field offices inside the United States. The agents had, though, all been through the cutting-edge high-threat tactical course that prepared them for places like Libya, including the intense tactical medicine instruction. The agents in Benghazi were a new breed of DS agent—one rushed into the fire to stand guard for an American world that was spread thin.

The blue light from the pool glistened in the floodlights of the compound. From inside the walls, the special agents could have been at a resort in the Bahamas or enjoying some free time in the Caribbean on the secretary of state’s detail. Of course, paradise was nowhere near the reality that existed outside the walls, and State Department agents were still on 24/7 duty. The agents never went anywhere without their SIG ***** SIG ****, or Glock ** * mm semiautomatics and two additional magazines. Still, the night was blissful. On the eleventh anniversary of the September 11 attacks against the United States, under a North African sky, three State Department agents enjoyed the relaxing pleasures of a Montecristo and played a hand of cards. Aces were high.

*   *   *

D. had put Ambassador Stevens and Sean Smith to bed and checked the residence one last time before turning in. Tomorrow, after all, was going to be another hectic day. Following breakfast, the ambassador had a meeting scheduled with executives from the Arabian Gulf Oil Company, AGOCO, at their corporate headquarters in the Dar al Kish area of downtown Benghazi; such moves, inside the twisting and narrow streets of the city, warranted advance trips and route suggestions. Even with the assistance of the February 17 militia and their Toyota pickup and the 14.5 mm heavy machine gun it towed, motorcades inside town were fast-moving targets, but targets nonetheless. And that was just getting to the meeting.

AGOCO’s corporate headquarters consisted of several multistory office buildings spread throughout a complex of smaller buildings. There was a common area near the two main parking lots with trees and heavy underbrush. There were at least a dozen ideal sniper positions available to anyone interested in taking out the American ambassador, as well as choke points where suicide bombers or VBIEDs could deploy. There were militia checkpoints all along the route; some belonged to gangs of armed thugs who sought a toll in order to enter and whose sole goal was money and watching the neighborhood, while other checkpoints were manned by militias espousing fundamentalist militancy.

To safeguard Ambassador Stevens during his meeting at AGOCO, the DS agents conducted advance route checks, as well as a thorough review of the building where the meeting would be held. The agents had to examine all emergency exits, stairwells, and other physical features of the blueprints in order to prepare evacuation plans should someone make an attempt on the ambassador’s life during his time at the location and they had to get Stevens out in a hurry. The agents would also coordinate their movements—arrival and departure—with the corporate security force. In most countries large corporations fielded suit-wearing retired secret service agents or police officers to protect their premises. But in Libya, these security officers, whose backgrounds could be very suspect, carried AK-47s and would be close to the ambassador. The resulting security challenge was daunting.

D. shut the lights around the lavish mansion and then retreated to his bedroom to unwind with a video and then, shortly thereafter, some well-deserved shut-eye. He took off his shoes and his pants and then went to lie down. He was exhausted. He closed his eyes and saw flashbacks of the route the detail had taken earlier in the day into town. He saw the faces, the hundreds of nameless faces that he passed as the motorcade raced across junctions toward the ambassador’s destinations. As D. closed his eyes, he could hear the small talk and laughter of the agents near his window as they relaxed at poolside.

R. monitored the cameras from his fortified command-and-control center inside the TOC. He was the senior man on post, and his mind was wandering and thinking about the surveillance report earlier in the day on the perimeter. “Why was the so-called cop taking a picture? Why was the threat level severe? What in the hell does that mean?” He knew that previous TDY agents had identified vulnerabilities, but those were always there. Risk can never be eliminated, only mitigated. There was no countersurveillance support, or “watchers,” on the perimeter. In a perfect high-threat world, MSD operators lurked as shadows on the outside, watching for surveillance indicators, fixated on a mental matrix of time and distance variables. These highly experienced hunters, eyes searching for the same car, truck, vendor, or person seen earlier in the day or last week, were able to provide invaluable proactively tactical and defensive eyes-outside-target intelligence. The Special Mission Compound had no observation perch, or safe house, across from the main gate manned by agents, with eyes and cameras trained 24/7 on the main gate, looking for assassins or suicide bombers. The agents were inside behind protective walls, much like prisoners, on foreign soil.

In many ways, without the outside eyes and ears, the Special Mission Compound was blind and deaf. The computer monitors showed no activity outside the gate, but of course the camera monitor in the local guard force booth for Charlie-1 gate was inoperable; additional surveillance cameras that were supposed to be set up throughout the compound were still in their boxes, unopened and uninstalled.

Still, those cameras that were up and running enabled DVR surveillance coverage of much of the inner perimeter. The radio on the Blue Mountain Libya frequency was silent. There was no chatter on the February 17 frequency, either.

There was, for the most part, silence. And then, like a wind from the east, there were the sounds of slow-moving tires rolling on a road strewn with sand and gravel. It was 2130 hours in Benghazi—1500 hours in Washington, D.C.