CHAPTER 8

Benghazi 911: When SEALs Answer the Call

On the last day of his life, Ambassador Stevens wrote in his diary: “It is so nice to be back in Benghazi.”¹

He meant it. It was September 11, 2012, and the morning dawned beautifully. The rosy skies revealed few clouds, and a breeze off the Mediterranean promised a gentle day—much like the beautiful weather that came before the deadly terror attacks on American soil on that same day eleven years earlier.

At first, the morning kept its peaceful promise. The morning call to prayer, which sounded from the minarets just before dawn, didn’t produce any large crowds outside the diplomatic facility. Instead, Stevens heard birds chattering in the trees, the grumble of trucks and squeak of donkey cart wheels on their way to market.

The ambassador had arrived the day before with information management officer Sean Smith and two Diplomatic Security Service (DSS) agents. There were three other DSS agents already on site. The compound held eleven people that day: seven Americans and four local Blue Mountain Libya guards.

Then, as the morning sunlight was moving down the side of the buildings, a Blue Mountain Libya security guard spotted something suspicious. A wink of something metallic flashed in the sun from the scaffolding of a building directly across the street. It was 6:45 a.m. in Benghazi—a little too early for the construction crews to arrive.

The guard looked more closely. He saw a man, wearing a Libyan Supreme Security Council uniform, taking photos of the U.S. compound from the construction site. The second-story scaffolding gave the man a commanding view of the compound, and the photos would be useful in planning any assault. It was an ominous development.

The guard rounded up a colleague and walked across the street to confront the mysterious photographer. The uniformed man angrily refused to talk to the Blue Mountain Libya guards and, instead, climbed into a parked police car and sped off.²

The incident was reported, but its true importance would not become obvious for hours. By then, it would be too late.

* * *

Meanwhile, the diplomatic staff went through their daily routines. A memorandum drafted by David C. McFarland, later sent by the U.S. embassy in Tripoli to the State Department in Washington, details the official responsibilities that day: Ambassador Stevens planned to open American Space Benghazi, a cultural organization, while staff met with a thicket of nonprofit groups, including the Libyan Society for Industrial Engineering, My Environment Society, and the cancer-fighting Cure Foundation.³ All meetings occurred inside the compound to avoid alerting militias that their number one target had returned to Benghazi.

Somehow, the enemy knew anyway. Did they have a source on the inside?

Ambassador Stevens’s last scheduled meeting ended at 7:20 p.m., as he walked Turkish Consul General Ali Kemal Akin to the main gate.⁴ In his diary, Stevens noted that Akin “helped me land in Benghazi last year.” The Turks had some one hundred thousand citizens working in Libya as oil engineers, electricians, and technicians. They often use these informal networks to alert Americans to developing threats. But the Turkish consul issued no warnings that day.

By 8:30 p.m., the last British security team drove its armored cars through the main (or C1, or “Charlie 1”) gate.⁵ They were returning borrowed equipment as previously arranged. The British quickly left the compound as night fell. The only guards left outside the gate were two local Benghazi police in a marked car. (Five other guards remained inside the compound, along with four local guards.)

Then the police mysteriously sped away at 9:42 p.m. Why? Did the police know that something was about to happen? A local Libyan newspaper quoted a Supreme Security Council official saying that the car was ordered to leave “to prevent civilian casualties.” A guard interviewed by Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, a London-based Arabic newspaper with unusually good sources in the region, said that “my colleague guards and I were chatting and drinking tea. The situation was normal.”⁶ The disappearance of the local police was never fully explained.

Within a minute of the police car’s departure, masked men appeared at the main gate. They were members of Ansar al-Sharia and al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, two known al Qaeda affiliates.

The masked men carried a rocket-propelled grenade launcher. They fired it at the main gate, shouting “God is great!” in Arabic. The RPG exploded in a thunderclap, blasting open the gate. More masked men emerged from the shadows and swarmed into the compound.⁷

The local guards, perhaps knowing what was coming, ran off into the night. They were armed only with clubs, not guns. They knew that they were no match for an army of armed men. Two guards were captured and beaten. After pleading for their lives and reassuring the invaders that they are observant Muslims, they are released.

Compound guards interviewed by Al-Sharq Al-Awsat estimate that some fifty attackers flooded into the compound in the first wave, led by four men who wore masks and “Pakistani clothes.”⁸ The turbans and long shirts worn by Pakistanis are markedly different from clothes usually worn by Libyans, especially to Arab eyes.

The invaders fired their AK-47s into the air—a rolling growl of automatic fire.

The Americans were now alone. State Department staff methodically locked doors and windows. The compound’s Tactical Operations Center coolly notified the State Department in Washington, the embassy in Tripoli, and the Annex (a facility operated by the CIA, also called Villa A) within four minutes of the blast at the main gate.⁹ The DSS officer in charge of the Tactical Operations Center radioes Scott Strickland, another DSS officer. Find the ambassador, Strickland was told, and bring him to safety.

Moments later, Strickland forcefully knocked on Ambassador Stevens’s door. Stevens noticed that the man was carrying an M-4 automatic rifle and a 9 mm pistol. The ambassador’s quarters were far enough from the main gate that he likely didn’t hear the blast over his television set.

Strickland told Stevens and Sean Smith, who was nearby, to put on their body armor and to follow him. He led them to a safe room in a single-story concrete structure, in the rear of an office building. Strickland bolted the door.

Moments later, the jihadis broke down an exterior door and looted the office outside the safe room.

Inside the safe room, the Americans heard angry shouts in Arabic and the sounds of smashing furniture. How long would it take before this fury shattered the safe-room door?

* * *

In Tripoli, Libya’s capital city across the Gulf of Sidra from Benghazi, Gregory Hicks was at home watching television. He was finally off duty after a long day. Hicks was second only to the ambassador in the Libya delegation and was the highest-ranking State Department officer in Tripoli that night. A foreign service officer knocked on his door and said, “Greg, Greg, the embassy’s under attack.”

He meant the facility in Benghazi.

Hicks saw that he had received a call from an unknown phone number on his cell phone and returned the call. It was Strickland’s cell phone. Ambassador Stevens answered and said, “Greg, we’re under attack,” before the phone call is cut off.¹⁰ These turned out to be the ambassador’s last known words.

Hicks notified Washington.

The State Department requested that military assets be deployed to gather intelligence on the emerging emergency in Benghazi. A drone plane over Libya was retasked to fly over the U.S. compound in Benghazi.

The unarmed surveillance aircraft was directed to reposition over Benghazi and arrived on station by 9:59 p.m.—less than ten minutes after the ambassador’s call.¹¹

The images that the drone transmitted were frightening. Armed men were thronging the compound, and some vehicles were on fire.

* * *

Ambassador Stevens, information security officer Smith, and DSS officer Strickland were holed up in a safe room in Villa C, the diplomatic portion of the U.S. compound. This was where they were trained to run in the event of an attack. They had locked themselves in, behind steel-bar gates, in the inner room.

Inside the single-story concrete structure, on the other side of the safe-room door, the attackers set the office furniture on fire. The militants quickly located the diesel fuel drums, which were to be used to power new generators that hadn’t been installed yet, and rolled the barrels toward the safe house. They beat them open with tools found in the equipment shed. They poured the fuel on the walls and doors of the ambassador’s safe house. Then they set it ablaze. In seconds, the house was a howling inferno.

The building filled with noxious smoke. Strickland opened a window to draw in breathable air, but more smoke surged in. So the trio crawled to a bathroom in the rear of the safe room.

Now they had to make a life-or-death choice: stay and die choking on the bathroom tile, or climb out the window and take their chances in the open compound. Strickland shouted for Stevens and Smith to follow him. He couldn’t see them in the dense smoke.

Strickland leaped out a back window, but amid the acrid black smoke he lost contact with Stevens and Smith, both of whom seemed to have separated in the smoke. They were last seen by Strickland crawling on the floor, desperate for clean air to breathe.

Boldly, Strickland reentered the building several times, but he failed to find Stevens or Smith.¹² The smoke was too thick, and he knew the fire would be through the door in minutes. Coughing from the thick smoke, he plunged from the window and, dodging gunfire, made his way across the darkened compound.

* * *

Six minutes after the arrival of the surveillance drone, the State Department Operations Center transmitted an “Ops Alert,” notifying the White House Situation Room, senior department officials, and others that Benghazi was under attack: “approximately 20 armed people fired shots; explosions have been heard as well.”¹³ (The actual number of attackers would prove to be far higher.)

The Tactical Operations Center on the Benghazi compound was a concrete structure with steel-barred windows and doors. Most of the DSS officers were using the makeshift fortress as their Masada, a place to make a last, desperate stand against enormous odds. Then, they heard knocking. The Americans exchanged surprised glances. After peeking out, one saw Strickland. Relieved, he opened the door to let Strickland inside.

Strickland reported that both Stevens and Smith were missing and that the terrorists had overrun their last known position. The two men were now either casualties or captives. They could do nothing to help either man now.

Everyone in the room knew one more thing: They would be next. And soon.

The DSS officer in charge placed an urgent call to the CIA Annex roughly five hundred yards away: “We’re under attack, we need help, please send help now…” Then the line went dead.

* * *

At the CIA Annex, Tyrone Woods discussed the call with the Global Response team leader. Together, the two men walked over to see the CIA’s chief of base, who was adamantly opposed to mounting a rescue. Woods persisted, saying, “If we don’t act, people will die.”

It was clear that Woods would go against orders if he was ordered to remain. He and the chief of base argued.

People who knew Woods knew how hardheaded he could be. He refused to back down when he believed he was right.

Tyrone Snowden Woods, known as “Ty” in the teams, was born in 1971 and served for twenty years in the U.S. Navy SEALs. He was awarded the Bronze Star, with combat “V” device, for leading a series of dangerous raids and reconnaissance missions that captured thirty-four enemy insurgents in the volatile Al Anbar province of Iraq. That province proved to be the turning point in the Iraq war. When tribal leaders switched their support from insurgents to Americans, the enemy was soon routed in that large, lawless province. The surge in 2007 built on the SEALs’ success in Al Anbar. Woods served multiple tours in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other battlegrounds. He retired from the SEALs as a chief petty officer in 2007, but he didn’t retire from dangerous assignments. He joined the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service and, ultimately, was sent to Libya.

* * *

Woods, who didn’t like to take no for an answer, gathered six other heavily armed men. They climbed into two Toyota Land Cruisers and raced over to the embattled compound, arriving at 10:07 p.m.

Woods’s plan was to avoid a suicidal frontal assault through the compound’s main gate. Instead, he and his men parked their vehicles along the diplomatic facility’s outer perimeter wall. They radioed the men trapped in the Tactical Operations Center (TOC) not to open fire on their position, a wise precaution. Using their own Land Cruisers as ladders, they scaled the wall.

The jihadis soon spotted them and opened fire. Woods and his team were running and gunning, shooting at attackers while moving toward the ambassador’s last known location. The CIA team, composed largely of former special forces (including SEALs) were more accurate shots, and they drove back the attackers. They gained entrance to the burning building and dragged out Smith’s body.¹⁴

Ambassador Stevens remained missing. Could he still be alive?

* * *

The U.S. National Military Command Center notified the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the situation at 10:32 p.m. Benghazi time.¹⁵ At this stage, the attack had been underway for more than forty minutes.

Another half hour passed before Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey discussed the Benghazi situation with President Barack Obama during a regularly scheduled weekly meeting. That meeting started at 11:00 p.m. Benghazi time.¹⁶

It is unclear why the defense secretary was unable to see the president sooner. Yet, based on the timelines made public by the Obama administration, it seems likely that the president either denied the secretary’s request for an earlier meeting or didn’t acknowledge his request. It is mind-boggling that the president did not convene an immediate meeting, given the nature of a direct attack on an ambassador of the United States. By the time the defense secretary and chairman of the Joints Chiefs sat down with President Obama, the attack in Benghazi had been raging for more than one hour and fifteen minutes.

* * *

At the same time, Gregory Hicks asked the defense attaché at the Tripoli embassy if any military help was forthcoming. The attaché said that it would take two to three hours for the nearest fighters to get on-site from Italy—and that there would be no refueling aircraft available for the fighters to return to their base. Hicks said: “Thank you very much.”¹⁷

He now knew that Washington had not authorized any military rescue and that the military wasn’t going to offer false hope.

A second drone arrived over Benghazi at 11:10 p.m. and immediately began transmitting a live video feed back to Washington.¹⁸ All of the president’s men were watching the real-time images as the diplomatic villa burned and Americans struggled to save their own lives. In Washington, they watched and waited, as if it were just another television show. As if they were merely spectators, not decision makers with the power to send rescuers.

* * *

On the ground in Benghazi, Woods and the Global Response Staff (GRS) realized that they couldn’t hold the diplomatic outpost. They had searched for the ambassador without success and grimly retrieved the body of Sean Smith.

Now they had to fight their way to the TOC, where all of the surviving diplomats were trapped. With their single MK-46 machine gun and Heckler and Koch rifles they were picking off attackers, but the enemy was relentlessly returning automatic fire. One GRS officer hurled grenades, pushing back the enemy. But it was like sweeping away water, which just runs back to fill the gap.

They cleared a path to the TOC, but the enemy quickly regrouped behind them. The attackers were becoming bolder and their numbers were growing. It was time to retreat.

Then the news got worse. The overhead drone aircraft revealed that more enemy reinforcements were arriving at a staging area less than three hundred yards from the trapped Americans. They would now either have to fight their way out or battle a much larger force in a matter of minutes.

Woods led the diplomats across the open compound. He helped the men vault over the nine-foot-high perimeter wall and into the Land Cruisers. Miraculously, despite the bullets bursting around them, none of the Americans were shot.

As they climbed into the SUVs, a jihadi lookout spotted them.

Bullets pockmarked the windows of their vehicles as they roared off to the CIA Annex. As they sped down the narrow, snaking streets, the drivers had to be careful not to flip the heavy armored vehicles. If the Land Cruisers overturned, they would be trapped and quickly surrounded by the pursuing attackers.

The lead driver radioed the guard at the CIA’s main gate: “We’re coming in hot.”

By 11:15, both of the Toyota Land Cruisers arrive at the CIA Annex.¹⁹ As the gate closed behind the last vehicle, bullets ricocheted nearby. They had been followed.

Woods and his men had saved them. But for how long?

* * *

Starting at midnight Benghazi time, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta held meetings with Gen. Martin Dempsey and Gen. Carter Ham. He was working to create rescue options for the president to approve. Panetta ordered a Marine Fleet Antiterrorism Security Team stationed in Rota, Spain, and a second Fleet Antiterrorist Security Team (FAST) platoon to deploy to Naval Air Station Sigonella. He ordered a special operations team based in northern Europe to deploy to Sigonella, an hour’s flight away from Benghazi. A special operations team based in the U.S. was also ordered to deploy to Sigonella.²⁰ From this base in Sicily, forces could be ordered to Benghazi—if the president approved a “boots on the ground” operation.

However, a C-110 special operations team deployed to Croatia stayed in place. This team, known as EUCOM CIF (European Command’s Commander’s In Extremis Force), could have flown to Benghazi in three and a half hours. Of course, gathering men and materiel might have taken another hour or two.²¹

Yet no team was ordered to go directly to Benghazi.

Meanwhile, the enemy had pivoted to attack the CIA compound. As Panetta and the generals debated the options, mortar rounds exploded inside the CIA compound.

Woods climbed onto the roof of a building to direct fire at the attackers. The Americans’ shots were accurate, dropping militants at one hundred yards. But the enemy force seemed to be growing larger.

Throughout the night, as Washington discussed and opined, Woods and the CIA team were fighting for their lives.

* * *

Meanwhile, Hicks and State Department officials were developing their own rescue option. The option amounted to one man: Glen Anthony Doherty.

The son of a former Massachusetts boxing commissioner, Doherty grew up as an all-around athlete in Winchester, Massachusetts. He surprised his family in 1995 by saying that he planned to join the Navy and become a SEAL. He was thirty years old. That made him a bit old to start a Navy career, but his family knew that nothing could stop him once he’d made his mind up.

Doherty got selected for BUD/S and made it through on his first attempt. He took additional schooling to be certified as a paramedic and a sniper. He was soon deployed all over the world. He was on the SEAL team that responded to the bombing of the USS Cole, the deadliest attack on a U.S. warship since World War II. Forty-four sailors were killed or wounded in that blast. (Bin Laden later released a poem celebrating the attack.)

In early 2001, Doherty was wondering about leaving the Navy. He was undergoing knee reconstruction surgery and weighing how much more punishment his body could take. The September 11 attacks on New York and Washington changed his mind. He went to serve in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Doherty and his team were assigned to secure oil fields prior to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. His mission was to prevent Saddam Hussein from setting the oil fields on fire, as he had during Desert Storm in 1991. Doherty then linked up with U.S. Marines fighting their way to Baghdad. As a sniper, he provided security for the advancing leathernecks in hellish fighting in Iraqi cities.

During his nine-year career as a SEAL, Glen served in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

Always on the lookout for an adventure, Doherty was a surfer, triathlete, white-water rafting guide, professional ski instructor, pilot, and self-professed adrenaline junkie. Other SEALs described him as “your quintessential SEAL.”

Doherty was lifelong friends with some of his team members, including Brandon Webb, with whom he coauthored the 2010 book, Navy SEAL Sniper: An Intimate Look at the Sniper of the 21st Century.

After leaving the Navy, he worked for a private security outfit in Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, Kenya, and Libya. In the month prior to the attack, Doherty gave an interview to ABC News. He surprised the reporter by saying that he was personally tracking down MANPADS, shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles, in Libya and destroying them. He loved the job.²²

* * *

After hearing from Hicks, Doherty quickly put together a ragtag team of government contractors and DSS agents. Finding no scheduled flights, he reportedly bribed the Libyan pilots of an aging Learjet with $30,000 cash to fly his crew to Benghazi immediately.²³ The pilots agreed. The Learjet arrived in Benghazi at 1:15 a.m. local time.

They were unloading guns and equipment on the tarmac when they ran into trouble. In the midst of the attack, local police had not been alerted to their arrival and found the men to be suspicious. An argument erupted when Doherty could not tell the Libyans exactly where he was going with all of his firepower. (Doherty had only GPS coordinates, and the Libyans wanted an exact street address.) With his friend Ty Woods and other comrades under mortar and machine-gun fire, Doherty had no patience for the police runaround. More than an hour was lost trying to get his team out of the airport.

Meanwhile, Washington vetoed a request by Gregory Hicks to send a second team. Hicks has said he believed the veto came from the military. As the afternoon came to an end in Washington, D.C., the president went to dinner with his family in the upstairs residence of the White House. He did not appear to have been engaged at this stage.

* * *

Strangely, Ambassador Stevens seemingly arrived at Benghazi Medical Center, a local hospital, around 1:00 a.m. It is not clear who transported him to the hospital, or whether the ambassador was alive or dead when he arrived.

Hospital personnel picked up the cell phone that Strickland had loaned to the ambassador. They dialed the last number called by Stevens: Greg Hicks in Tripoli. “We know where the ambassador is. Please, you can come get him.”

Hicks and other embassy officials feared the calls were a hoax, knowing Ansar al-Sharia militia had surrounded the hospital. The calls were likely a trap.²⁴

A source the embassy trusted—known as Bakabar—went to the hospital to negotiate for Stevens or his body. By the time Bakabar arrived, the ambassador was a corpse. He might have arrived dead or dying. No one would tell Bakabar the story. He got custody of Stevens’s body at around 5:15 a.m. The embassy instructed the hospital to place the name “John Doe” on the ambassador’s death certificate. Bakabar and his associates transported Stevens’s body to the Benghazi airport.

* * *

Overhead, one of the drone aircraft was running out of fuel. Another surveillance aircraft arrived over Benghazi at 5:00 a.m. to ensure a constant stream of video back to Washington.²⁵

* * *

When Doherty finally arrived at the CIA Annex at approximately 5:00, he immediately asked for Ty Woods, his SEAL teammate.

Woods was on the roof, expertly using an MK-46 machine gun to thin the enemy’s numbers. The rising sun had emboldened the attackers, who were surging for the wall.

Doherty climbed on the roof to join Woods. From this elevated position, they could pick off militants.

The two friends had less than a minute to discuss the situation. A French-made 81 mm mortar round exploded—killing Woods and putting the machine gun out of action. Another GRS agent was speared with shrapnel, and his blood coated the rooftop.

Doherty, by instinct and training, reached for the MK-46 and repositioned it. Before he could return fire, another 81 mm mortar round landed on him. He died instantly.

Cutting ropes from gym equipment, other GRS men climbed onto the blood-soaked roof and retrieved the wounded. As gunshots crackled around them, one wounded man was lowered by ropes into the building. Another was carried down by hand.

Mortar shells continued to explode throughout the CIA compound.

* * *

The drone overhead relayed frightening news. The enemy was gathering for a major assault. Their staging area was less than three hundred yards out—a single American aircraft missile could have dispatched them all. But no air support had been ordered. The CIA chief of base realized that they had to flee now or die in minutes when “the Indians” topped the wall of the stockade.

At 5:15 a.m., another mortar exploded inside the CIA compound. Others quickly followed. The assault lasted eleven minutes.²⁶

* * *

The Americans raced by armed convoy to the Benghazi airport and departed on a 7:40 a.m. flight for Tripoli.²⁷ A second plane ferried the remaining Americans to Tripoli at 10:00 a.m. Later, on the night of September 12, the Americans departed for Germany. A C-17 aircraft left Tripoli for Ramstein Air Base in Germany with American personnel and the bodies of the four Americans killed in Benghazi. It arrived at Ramstein at 10:19 p.m.²⁸ The Americans had gotten out of harm’s way as a result of the heroic acts of Glen Doherty and Ty Woods, and a handful of other GRS agents at the CIA compound. They had held the wall just long enough for a plan to be hatched to extract the remaining personnel from the compound to the airport.

* * *

Help arrived too late and remained too far away. The EUCOM special operations force arrives at Sigonella, Italy, at 7:57 p.m. A Marine FAST platoon arrived at Tripoli at 8:56 p.m.²⁹ The special operations force from America arrived in Italy at 9:28 p.m.³⁰

Almost twenty-four hours after the attack began, American Special Forces remained hundreds of miles over the horizon from the smoking ruins of America’s diplomatic facility in Benghazi. For the first time in a generation, a U.S. ambassador had been murdered. Three other Americans had been killed in an armed assault. And dozens more had been wounded, some so seriously as to require months of hospital care.

With a presidential election almost two months away, the search for answers began.

The big question—“Could they have been rescued in time?”—is addressed in the next chapter.