The September 11, 2012, attack on the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi was not the first time such a catastrophic event had occurred in that city. On June 5, 1967, a mob had laid siege to, taken control of, and burned down the then–U.S. Consulate in Benghazi. A quote from a first-person account of that event is chillingly reminiscent of what took place forty-five years later.
“The mob finally battered its way in. They pushed themselves in through broken windows and came at us cut and bleeding . . . Dropping tear gas grenades we fought our way up the stairs and locked ourselves in the second-floor communications vault. There were ten of us in there including two women. The mob set fire to the building.”
That testimony is from the lead Diplomatic Security agent at the time, John Kormann, paratrooper and a World War II veteran of behind-enemy-lines missions, who had joined the State Department Foreign Service in the 1950s. The ten Embassy staff remained locked in the vault, as the flames and heat drove the attackers out of the building. They set about burning secret documents, as a British armored column tried to get through to them, but it was beaten back by gasoline bombs.
At one stage the attackers were on the Embassy roof and tried to tear down the U.S. flag. Kormann ordered the flag raised again, which an American Army captain managed, to the rage of the attackers. Fearing that the Americans were being burned alive in the building, a British armored column eventually did get through to the Embassy building and all were rescued.
The main difference between the 1967 attack on the U.S. Mission in Benghazi and that of 2012 is that no Americans lost their lives in 1967. But there are other key differences. The 1967 attack was a spontaneous uprising by a mob, one that had become enraged by false reports that the U.S. Navy was attacking the Egyptian capital, Cairo. That which occurred forty-five years later was a carefully planned assault by a group of battle-hardened fighters.
The 1967 attackers were largely unarmed: they hit the embassy with rocks and boulders and firebombs. The attackers of 2012 were heavily armed—wielding assault rifles, light machine guns, grenade launchers, and vehicle-mounted heavy machine guns. The 1967 mission wasn’t relying on a Libyan militia for its armed security as was that in 2012. And while the 1967 siege was broken by a column of (British) armored vehicles, no such major armored force was able to come to the aid of those in 2012. That rescue was mounted by six extremely brave and principled former elite forces operators.
The makeup of Libya in 2012 was also markedly different from that of 1967. In 1967 there was a strong central government and rule of law, with a functioning military and police force. In 2012, especially in eastern Libya—the birthplace of the revolution—central government held little sway. The city of Benghazi, like much of the east, was controlled by a mishmash of militias. Those militias—which were nominally government-aligned and -controlled—supposedly carried out most of the duties that the military and police would do in a normal, functioning state, but they did so following their own often violent and lawless agendas, and in some cases driven by Islamic extremism.
As the Libyan revolution had gained momentum during 2011, there was an ever more worrying trend witnessed on the front line of battle. Bit by bit, the frontline units were being taken over by jihadists, most of whom were Salafist in orientation—ultra-hard-line Sunni Muslims who sought to turn Libya into an Islamic state ruled by Shariah law. In effect, an uprising that had been born out of the desire for freedom and democracy had been hijacked by those with a very different agenda. Fellow Islamists flocked to the cause in Libya from all over the world.
With many being international jihadists—ones hardened in battle in Iraq and Afghanistan—they had a natural ability to command frontline units. They began to transform amateur revolutionary fighters into jihadi fighting units. The turning point in the struggle for control of the revolution between the jihadists and the secular revolutionaries came with the assassination of rebel leader and former Libyan Army general Abdul Fatah Younis. During the 1990s General Younis had conducted Libyan Army campaigns against the rising forces of Islamism in the east of the country. Consequently he was hated by the Islamists, but revered by the people of the revolution.
As the revolution gained pace, General Younis realized the extremists were receiving the bulk of the weaponry that was arriving in covert air shipments from Qatar, Abu Dhabi, and Saudi Arabia, ones being flown into Benghazi or Derna airports. General Younis raised his voice to complain about this: sophisticated weaponry was falling into the wrong hands. An attempt had already been made on the general’s life. During one frontline operation his vehicle had been hit by RPGs.
In response to his opposition to the covert weapons drops, General Younis was seized by Islamists in Benghazi and taken to a 17th February Militia/Shariah Brigade base. General Younis was a highly experienced Special Forces soldier and a man of bravery and principle. He was tortured and shot to death. His body was dumped outside the city. His eyes had been gouged out; his body was partly burned and was riddled with bullet holes.
After his assassination the front line changed radically—with the Islamists seizing ever more iron control. The Islamists made up only 10 percent of the frontline fighters, but with their battle experience and hard-line fanaticism they exerted far greater influence than their numbers alone warranted. Many of these Islamists hailed from outside Libya: they came from Sweden, Norway, and the United Kingdom. Some spoke fluent Pashtun—a result of having lived and fought in Afghanistan on the side of the Taliban and Al Qaeda for many years.
They were fanatical and proved extremely aggressive toward Westerners even as the revolution was ongoing. A French ex-commando was captured by Islamists in Benghazi and killed by them. It was 17th February Militia and/or Shariah Brigade fighters who captured and killed him. Two British ex–Special Forces operators were very lucky to escape from Benghazi with their lives.
After Gaddafi was toppled, the Shariah Brigade in particular began to exert its control on the streets of Benghazi. Citizens were terrified of their marauding bands of militiamen. They would beat people if they were caught drinking alcohol, or if a man was caught on the streets in the company of a woman. One person was whipped eighty times on the soles of his feet for being caught drinking. Another was cut twenty times on his back for being caught with a bottle of whisky in his car.
This was akin to some of the worst excesses of the Taliban, once they had seized control of Afghanistan. It gave the lie to exactly who the Shariah Brigade were, their background, beliefs, and intentions.
On the morning of the 2012 attack on the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi, twenty to thirty Shariah Brigade gun trucks reportedly left the coastal city of Derna, some 125 miles to the east of Benghazi. Derna was known by Libyans to be a hotbed of Islamic extremism and to be a stronghold of such forces, one more or less completely under the control of the Shariah Brigade. Those Shariah Brigade gun trucks headed to Benghazi to reinforce those fighters already in the city preparing to hit the U.S. Embassy.
Twenty to thirty gun trucks generally hold some 160 to 240 fighters—a good proportion of those who assaulted the U.S.Mission and the Annex that September evening. This is yet another indication of how carefully planned and premeditated was the entire assault. Moreover, the attack took place on the symbolic anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks on America, and Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens had only just arrived at the Mission.
Ambassador Stevens was a veteran diplomat who joined the U.S. Foreign Service in 1991. He had expressed his “extraordinary honor” at being appointed the U.S. Ambassador to Libya in May 2012. He had held two previous posts in Libya, as Deputy Chief of Mission between 2007 and 2009 and then the American envoy to Libya’s Transitional National Council (TNC) during the uprising in 2011.
Ambassador Stevens was reported to have facilitated “nonlethal military assistance” to the TNC during the Libyan revolution. A speaker of French and Arabic, he had previously been posted to Jerusalem, Damascus, Cairo, and Riyadh. In Washington he’d acted as the director of the Office of Multilateral Nuclear and Security Affairs; as a Pearson Fellow with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; and as an Iran desk officer and a staff assistant to the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs.
Ambassador Stevens was an old Libya hand. As early as August 2, 2012, he was making his concerns regarding security in Libya clear to the State Department and requesting additional security. In cables to Washington he described the security situation in Libya as “unpredictable, volatile and violent” and requested further “protective detail bodyguard positions.” Throughout August 2012 he sent further alerts, outlining how “a series of violent incidents has dominated the political landscape,” referring to “targeted and discriminate attacks.”
By August 27 the State Department had gone as far as issuing a travel warning for Libya, citing the threat of assassination and car bombings in both Tripoli and Benghazi. On September 11, 2012—the day of the Embassy attack—Ambassador Stevens had sent cables to Washington including a weekly update on Benghazi security incidents, which reflected ordinary Libyans’ “growing frustration with police and security forces who were too weak to keep the country secure.”
Bearing in mind the makeup of the armed groups at large in Benghazi post-Gaddafi, the American Embassy should have been provided with a level of security befitting a Mission in a postconflict zone menaced by America’s foremost enemies. Extremely reliable and well-placed sources involved in constructing the Benghazi Embassy’s physical defense and security measures have told the authors of this book how they warned the Americans that they needed far greater physical security measures in place if they were to ensure the security of the Benghazi Mission.
Those sources—who have asked to remain anonymous due to worries over their security—pointed out to U.S. authorities that the security measures that were recognized as standard for a U.S. diplomatic mission had not been put in place in Benghazi. They were stunned when no further security measures were undertaken at the Benghazi Mission, and they raised this with the State Department, warning that the Mission remained vulnerable to attack.
Other “outsiders” also warned those at the Mission what was self-evident to any moderately experienced Benghazi watcher—that the U.S. Embassy was woefully underprotected. Veteran New Zealand ex–elite forces soldier Mike Mawhinney—a private security operator widely experienced in Libya—provided security for Al Jazeera and other news crews during the height of the fighting to topple Gaddafi forces, plus for a number of other private contractors.
He visited the Benghazi Mission and general vicinity on two occasions, and on both he was shocked to witness the woeful lack of proper security measures and manning at the Mission. “I visited the Mission twice between March and September 2012,” Mawhinney remarks. “I could not believe how poorly it was protected, to such a degree that I could not at first believe it could be a U.S. Diplomatic Mission.”
Mawhinney was shocked to discover that the 17th February Militia had been retained as the Mission’s Quick Reaction Force. “Both I and my Libyan friends knew immediately that they had entirely the wrong people supposedly protecting the Mission. The female RSO in charge at the time seemed dynamic, capable and smart, and I presumed the inability to get anything changed at the Mission had to come from on high.”
If there was sensitivity about providing U.S. Marines to safeguard the Benghazi Mission—as has been suggested in some quarters—any number of private military contractors (PMC) could have provided such a force. A PMC could have provided a dozen top operators—as indeed the British diplomatic mission in Benghazi had a security team made up of six to eight private contractors. Of course, when a PMC was contracted to assist with security at the Benghazi Mission, the British firm Blue Mountain was contracted to provide a local, Libyan guard force who were at all times to remain unarmed.
Use of PMCs deploying teams of private operators is far from unusual. In 2006 there were at least one hundred thousand contractors working for the U.S. Department of Defense in Iraq, which equates to a force larger than the entire British military. That amounts to a tenfold increase in the use of PMCs since the Persian Gulf War just over a decade earlier. Today PMCs are contracted to supply security for U.S. military bases; they provide live ammunition and training packages, they maintain complex weapons systems, they escort convoys, and they provide close protection teams for VIPs. They would have been well capable of securing the Benghazi Mission.
A cable quoted in the U.S. media indicates that a meeting was held at the U.S. State Department on August 15, 2012, to discuss security failings at the Benghazi Mission. The cable is quoted as stating: “RSO expressed concerns with the ability to defend Post in the event of a coordinated attack due to limited manpower, security measures, weapons capabilities, host nation support, and the overall size of the compound.” The Mission was also aware of “the location of approximately ten Islamist militias and AQ training camps within Benghazi,” AQ standing for Al Qaeda. Due to the date of this cable, it would seem likely this was a summation of the issues raised by the Mission’s then lead RSO. Of course, nothing was done to address those concerns.
Some have suggested the Annex was the hidden extra layer of security for the Mission. I never went to the Annex, but it seems as if it had up to thirty operators based there, making it a far larger setup than the Mission itself. That raises the question of whether the Mission was a cover for the Annex. No more than seven State Department officials—RSOs and diplomatic staff—were ever based at the Mission, whereas the Annex appears to have had more than four times that number of personnel. It stands to reason that the Annex was therefore a key focus of U.S. activity and interest in Benghazi.
The mass of weaponry that fell into militia hands—both “liberated” from Gaddafi’s armories, and provided by the Gulf states and Western nations—was a genuine concern after Gaddafi’s fall. Much of that weaponry had disappeared off the radar and was controlled by extremists; some of that weaponry had already fueled conflicts in West Africa and as far afield as Gaza. Hunting down that weaponry was a legitimate and worthwhile aim, and so the U.S. effort in Benghazi may well have been first and foremost a CIA-led operation—the Mission itself being something of a sideshow, providing a veneer of diplomatic legitimacy.
But that in turn raises the question of who was really in charge in Benghazi—the State Department or the CIA? It seems likely that the Annex was somehow “contracted” to provide an added layer of security to the Mission, although few were made aware that this was so. If the RSOs knew of this backup agreement they certainly didn’t mention it to me, and they weren’t reassured by it, for they shared my concerns and worries over the lack of appropriate security at the Mission.
In any event, whatever security support the CIA-run Annex agreed to provide to the State-run Mission, the policy was a flawed one, as the events of the night of September 11, 2012, proved. Four Americans, the U.S. Ambassador to Libya included, lost their lives, many more were injured, and the U.S. Mission was reduced to a smoking ruin. America was humiliated by a mass of Islamist militiamen. By anyone’s reckoning, the policy of having a secret Annex providing covert security backup to the Mission—if indeed there was such a policy in place—was flawed and resulted in catastrophic failure.
Some U.S. officials have claimed that the Shariah Brigade fighters stumbled upon the existence of the Annex, having followed the QRF back to its base. This seems unlikely. The mortar team that hit the Annex rooftop position with several highly accurate rounds would have needed either a set of accurate coordinates—GPS grids—to pinpoint such a small target in a busy, built-up urban environment, or detailed recces and target rehearsals beforehand, to be able to get mortar rounds directly on target. This necessitates having prior knowledge of the existence of the Annex.
In much of the media reporting following the Benghazi siege the Blue Mountain guard force were criticized for running away. The guards were five unarmed men facing fifty-plus heavily armed Shariah Brigade fighters. If they hadn’t run away all of them would have been captured, injured, or killed. As it was, two were taken captive and one was shot through both kneecaps. More to the point, their training and their orders were that they were to sound the alarm and then save themselves if the Mission was attacked by an armed force.
The Blue Mountain guard force was also accused of having left the pedestrian entrance open and of “letting the attackers in.” Five unarmed Libyan guards faced at least fifty enemy armed with AK-47s, light and heavy machine guns, and RPGs. Attackers ordered them to open the pedestrian gate or get blown to smithereens; the guards opened the gate. Had they been provided with appropriate weaponry with which to defend themselves and the Mission—weaponry that the State Department contract denied them—it might well have been a very different story. Either way, blame does not lie with the Blue Mountain guard force: it lies with those who dictated that they try to hold the line without a single weapon among them.
There have been reports in the media that the State Department refused to have a force of U.S. Marines based at the Mission or to let the Libyan guard force be armed, in an effort to keep the security at the Mission “low profile” and “nonconfrontational.” To attempt low-profile and nonconfrontational security in a place like Benghazi and at an American diplomatic mission is misguided, as the disaster that unfolded on the night of September 11, 2012, proves.
By having one Blue Mountain guard outside manning the barrier—something they had been told not to do for their own safety; but which they chose to do because we’d asked them to up their game—the guard force was able to detect the attackers early, which won them the vital seconds in which to hit the duck-and-cover alarm and/or radio warnings to the RSOs. (There are conflicting reports as to whether they radioed through warnings or hit the alarm: but either way, a warning was given.) As much as they were able to they stood by the Americans, and put their lives on the line.
Even I—with all my experience working as a private security operator, team leader, and manager on major American contracts and with senior American clients—was not permitted to carry a weapon at the Benghazi Mission, as stipulated on the State Department contract for all Blue Mountain personnel. In spite of not allowing the Blue Mountain force to be armed, let’s consider what that force did achieve on the night of the attack.
Blue Mountain employees were the first to detect the attackers and the first to raise the alarm. Blue Mountain employees—myself, and some of the guards—went back into the Mission when the attack was ongoing, to try to gather intelligence and find the missing Americans. Blue Mountain employees located the body of Ambassador Stevens and alerted U.S. authorities to its whereabouts and the need to secure it. Blue Mountain employees were the only people to go back into the Mission the morning after the attack to check for bodies, and to document the crime scene.
Considering the scope of Blue Mountain’s contract with the State Department, all of these actions—apart from raising the alarm—fall well outside of what Blue Mountain was contracted to provide. Only the State Department can provide answers as to why it believed an unarmed guard force was appropriate to secure a U.S. diplomatic mission in as volatile and dangerous a place as Benghazi. Either way, Blue Mountain employees delivered above and beyond what was asked of them.
For up to two weeks after the attack on the Benghazi Embassy and the Annex the U.S. administration maintained the line that the attack was a spontaneous demonstration against an anti-Islam video posted on YouTube called “The Innocence of Muslims.” On the contrary, this was a carefully planned and well-orchestrated attack by highly experienced and battle-hardened extremist fighters—ones that aimed specifically to target and kill Americans.
Bearing in mind that immediately after the attack I gave my detailed testimony and photographic evidence to an alphabet soup of American agencies—the State Department and FBI among others—and that my evidence was arguably the most detailed the U.S. administration possessed immediately following the attack, I cannot understand how the administration argued that this was a spontaneous demonstration that got out of hand. From my testimony alone it clearly was not.
The testimony and evidence that I provided made it clear who carried out the attack and the organized and highly effective nature of the fighters involved, and that they were specifically seeking to kill Americans. The State Department, FBI, and other agencies were clear in telling me that immediately following the attack my photographs and testimony were “all we’ve got.” In light of this I fail to understand why the attacks were initially portrayed as a “spontaneous demonstration that got out of hand.”
The official “spontaneous demonstration” line was the one that was picked up by most of the world’s media. However, I was far from being the only source immediately after the attack to state that this was a specifically targeted, carefully planned two-stage attack against two separate targets, involving many hundreds of heavily armed and mobile fighters from the Shariah Brigade, a militia with a worrying history of human rights abuses and extrajudicial executions in Benghazi, and one with known links to extremist groups, including Al Qaeda.
Demonstrations began on the streets of Benghazi and Tripoli about the Benghazi assaults and killings on September 12, so immediately following the attacks. Benghazians carried signs saying “Chris Stevens was a friend to all Libyans” and “Benghazi is against terrorism” and apologizing to America for the attack. That same day Libya’s deputy ambassador to London, Ahmad Jibril, told the BBC that Ansar al-Sharia—the Arabic name for the Shariah Brigade—was behind the attacks.
On September 13 the Libyan ambassador to the United States, Ali Aujali, apologized to then–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for this “terrorist attack” against the U.S. Mission in Benghazi. The Libyan ambassador praised Ambassador Stevens as a real friend to Libya and a hero, and urged the United States to keep supporting Libya through “a very difficult time” and to help “maintain security and stability” in the country.
On September 16 the Libyan president, Mohammed Magariaf, announced that the attack on the Benghazi Mission was planned many months in advance: “The idea that this criminal and cowardly act was a spontaneous protest that just spun out of control is completely unfounded and preposterous. We firmly believe that this was a pre-calculated, preplanned attack that was carried out specifically to attack the U.S. consulate.”
On September 21, ten days after the assault on the U.S. Mission in Benghazi, a popular uprising on the streets of the city drove out the Shariah Brigade militia. Some thirty thousand people marched through the streets, and over two days they fought open battles with the Islamist militias, targeting particularly the Shariah Brigade. They stormed several of the militia compounds and purged the city, forcing the militias to flee and seizing their headquarters.
In the aftermath of the Embassy siege, Secretary of State Clinton convened an Accountability Review Board (ARB), as required by America’s Omnibus Diplomatic and Antiterrorism Act of 1986. In December 2012 the State Department official ARB report was released. It was seen as being a sharp criticism of officials in Washington for ignoring requests for more guards and safety upgrades, and for failing to adapt security procedures to a deteriorating security environment.
It is worth considering the report at some length. While recognizing that the perpetrators of the attack are subject to ongoing criminal investigations, the ARB report reaches some interesting conclusions. It recognizes the gravity of the events of September 11, 2012, noting that “the Benghazi attacks represent the first murder of a U.S. Ambassador since 1988”—in other words, in more than two decades.
The report states: “There was no protest prior to the attacks, which were unanticipated in terms of their scale and intensity.” I’d take issue with the second part of that statement: the single greatest fear of myself and the RSOs in the Benghazi Mission was that we would be hit by a sizable force of extremist and/or Al Qaeda–allied militia, and that the Embassy would be overrun and everyone killed or captured. This was a repeating theme of our discussions, reflecting a very real fear of all those who served at the Benghazi Mission. Such fears were shared with Washington by the diplomats, RSOs, and others.
The ARB report further states: “Overall, the number of Bureau of Diplomatic Security (DS) staff in Benghazi . . . was inadequate, despite repeated requests from Special Mission Benghazi for additional staffing.” DS are also known as RSOs, which is the term they used to refer to themselves in the field. The ARB report found a “pervasive realization amongst personnel who served in Benghazi that Special Mission was not a high priority for Washington when it came to security-related requests, especially those related to staffing.”
Unpacking that a little, it basically means there were not enough RSOs at the Benghazi Mission, or armed guards, and requests for more were denied by Washington. This is pretty much my experience and that of the RSOs as revealed in the pages of this book. The report further states: “dependence on the armed but poorly skilled Libyan 17th February Brigade militia members and unarmed, locally-contracted Blue Mountain Libya (BML) guards for security was misplaced.”
I’d agree on both counts: employing the 17th February Militia as the QRF at the Benghazi Mission was absolutely the wrong thing to do. Likewise, expecting our guard force to do their jobs unarmed was deeply misguided. The report goes on to find “the responses of both the Blue Mountain guards and February 17th to be inadequate.” While the report states that it found “little evidence that the armed 17th February guards offered any meaningful defense” of the Mission, it doesn’t specify in any detail how the response of the Blue Mountain guard force was “inadequate.”
In the recommendations made by the report it does support the deployment of more Marines to such diplomatic missions in future, and suggests the expanding of the Marine Security Guard program, with additional funding. The report suggests more Department of State personnel be deployed to “high-threat posts.” In other words, more Marines and more RSOs should be provided to missions like that of Benghazi in 2012, which was exactly what the RSOs stationed at Benghazi—and myself behind them—had repeatedly asked for.
The report also calls the “short-term, transitory nature of Benghazi’s staffing another primary driver behind the inadequate security platform in Benghazi. Staffing was at times woefully insufficient considering posts’ security posture and high-risk, high-threat environment . . . This staffing ‘churn’ had significant detrimental effects . . .” In other words, there were too few RSOs on too short contracts, something that I and the RSOs had repeatedly complained about, especially considering how dangerous Benghazi was.
The report states that while a five-person RSO complement was “initially projected and later requested multiple times,” it was rarely achieved. When I first worked at the Mission we had one RSO, and there were never more than three permanently based there. Even if five had been allocated, a mission of the size and risk factor of Benghazi should have had eight RSOs allocated to it, in my opinion—an opinion shared by many of the RSOs who served there.
The report noted significant failings in physical security measures at the Mission. Most notably, security cameras provided to cover the exterior of the Mission, and in particular the front gate, had not been installed because “technical support to install them had not yet visited post.” In other words, surveillance cameras that would have given early warning of the attack were not in use, because no one had been provided to fit them.
Indeed, the guardroom monitor that provided a view from the camera covering the front gate was out of service on the night of the attack—another reason one of our guard force was stationed outside the front gate, to keep eyes on the area and give early warning.
The report states several times that the responses of Blue Mountain’s guards and the 17th February Militia were “inadequate” on the night of the attack. It states that there were “no BML guards present outside the compound immediately before the attack ensued, although perimeter security was one of their responsibilities, and there is conflicting information as to whether they sounded any alarms prior to fleeing . . .”
The State Department report appears to equate the Blue Mountain guard force’s so-called failings with those of the 17th February Militia—the so-called QRF. This is mind-boggling. The only responsibility of our guard force in the event of an attack by an armed force was to raise the alarm, which they did (whether by radio, or by the duck-and-cover, or by both). Their only role thereafter was to run and save themselves, for the very reason that they were deployed at the Mission unarmed.
By contrast, the QRF were contracted as the armed guard with the responsibility of defending the Mission from an armed attack. They were also supposed to call in support from the 17th February Militia, who apparently had a major base not far from the U.S. Mission. In both of these supposed functions they categorically failed. Moreover, the RSOs had reached the conclusion that the 17th February Militia were at best useless, and at worst a danger to the Mission, and had asked for them to be replaced—requests that were repeatedly denied.
To my knowledge no RSO raised complaints about the Blue Mountain guard force or asked for them to be replaced—certainly not in the three months leading up to the attacks. Indeed, the Blue Mountain guard force was praised for doing a fine job in terms of what they were contracted to do, and they had even received State Department commendations for their response to the IED attack on the Mission. For the State Department report to equate the Blue Mountain guard force and the 17th February Militia as failing on a level somehow equal is unacceptable.
The State Department’s criticisms of the Blue Mountain guard force are also wrong in a number of specific aspects:
• According to my guards, we did have one guard stationed outside the main gate—the one who first spotted the attackers—on the night of the assault. He was there because we’d asked the guards to “up their game” security-wise due to the Ambassador’s visit, and because the screen via which they were supposed to be able to view the security camera covering the front gate was broken.
• The Blue Mountain guard force was contracted to patrol the interior of the Mission and its boundary—not to provide an external guard force. They were never supposed to be patrolling outside of the compound.
• I was told by my guards and by the FBI investigators that the guard force had hit the duck-and-cover alarm. Dave and Scotty have also indicated that the guard force radioed through a warning to them of the attack. Either one or both is true, and either way the Blue Mountain guard force did provide a warning.
Indeed, what is striking from the State Department official report is that there is no mention made of the considerable efforts made by myself or other Blue Mountain personnel after the attack began. There is no mention made of my or my guards’ attempts to get into the Mission to find the Americans, and to help rescue them and/or locate their bodies. There is no mention made of my and my guards risking our lives to locate and positively identify the Ambassador’s body at the Benghazi Medical Center, or of my alerting the U.S. authorities to his death and his body being there and providing photographic evidence of the same.
There is not even any mention made of my and my guard force driver documenting the crime scene the morning after the attack, when Shariah Brigade fighters were still present on the ground and menacing the Mission, or of my provision of such evidence (photographs and testimony) to U.S. authorities, including the State Department immediately thereafter. In fact there is no mention made whatsoever of any of this in the State Department’s official inquiry report into the Benghazi Mission attack. Why this should be so I fail to understand.
The report concludes that there were “systematic failures and leadership and management deficiencies at senior levels within two bureaus of the State Department resulting in a Special Mission security posture that was inadequate for Benghazi and grossly inadequate to deal with the attack that took place.” In other words, Washington failed the Benghazi Mission.
However, the report concludes that it “did not find that any individual U.S. Government employee engaged in misconduct or willfully ignored his or her responsibilities, and, therefore did not find reasonable cause to believe that an individual breached his or her duty so as to be the subject of a recommendation for disciplinary action.”
In other words, the official report into the Benghazi Mission attack concluded that no disciplinary action should be taken against anyone for all that had transpired. The RSOs had spent six months raising the grave security concerns that we all shared, and requesting more physical security and more staff and armed guards. They were repeatedly denied, and at the end of those six months the attack we all had feared did indeed take place—with consequences that actually went beyond what we had predicted.
No one in Washington seemingly takes the rap for any of this, yet at the same time justice is somehow seen as being done.
In the aftermath of the Benghazi Mission attacks, Rex Ubben, the father of RSO Dave Ubben, went public asking the State Department to own up to its mistakes and release all the information it has about what occurred in the lead-up to and during the Benghazi Mission siege. Rex Ubben said he found it troubling that “they have not owned up to their shortcomings: in government, in the military, and in business, if something goes wrong, you admit it, correct it and move on.”
Dave Ubben has been treated at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, outside Washington, D.C., for his injuries, which are extensive. His father describes his son as having been blown up twice, and that he kept going after the first time. His son suffered shrapnel damage from head to toe, and five broken bones, one of which was completely smashed, necessitating extensive surgery.
“I was surprised by how many parts of him were injured,” Rex Ubben remarked. “I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to whoever did the first aid the first time, the second time, and maintained the tourniquets until they could get him out of there.”
Rex Ubben is a twenty-four-year veteran of the U.S. Air Force, who retired in 1995 as a master sergeant. He said his son had described the events of the night of September 11, 2012, as “obviously an attack and not a riot.” Dave had sketched out what appeared to be a sophisticated mortar attack during the assault on the Annex, during which ex-SEALs Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods were killed.
“The first [mortar] dropped fifty yards short and the next two were right on target,” Rex Ubben explained. “This indicates to me that someone was either very, very good, highly trained and skilled, or that the mortar was already set up and pointed at the safe house and only minor adjustments were needed.”
Rex Ubben said he was bothered, too, that “people do not seem to realize that this was a much bigger disaster for the people of Libya than it was for us, that they were attacked just as we were.”
Of course, Rex Ubben is right. The attack on the Benghazi Mission was an assault on the wider movement for democracy, freedom, and the rule of law in Libya, and a victory for those who espouse fascistic Islamic control in Libya and the rule of Shariah law—as the Shariah Brigade does. As their name suggests, the Shariah Brigade are hard-line supporters of Shariah law.
Sadly, the expulsion of the militias from Benghazi hasn’t lasted. Today, the Shariah Brigade is back in Benghazi, and their black flags fly in many of the city’s southern areas. They dominate some areas and control city checkpoints. They are a force to be reckoned with. They are well trained, battle-hardened, and well armed—thanks largely to the weapons they seized from Gaddafi’s armed forces and the weapons provided to them by the Gulf Arab States.
For these reasons the new Libyan Army is reluctant to take them on, but they know they will have to, and before they consolidate their control, at which stage it will be too late. The Libyan Army was never particularly strong, and many argue it was kept deliberately weak by Gaddafi, to lessen the threat of regime change via military coup. The question remains, which will come out the stronger: the new Libyan ruling regime and its organs of law and order and defense (the police and the armed forces), or the heavily armed militias?
To assist Libya in disbanding such extremists groups, the Obama administration has rightly allocated $8 million to train an elite Libyan commando force. After the attack on the Benghazi Mission, President Obama ordered security to be increased at all such diplomatic missions worldwide, and in Libya itself a fifty-member Marine FAST team was deployed to bolster security.
The FBI was tasked to investigate the attack on the U.S. Mission, and U.S. officials announced that surveillance over Libya would be increased, including the use of unarmed drones to “hunt for the attackers.” The effectiveness of such measures remains to be proven: they certainly came too late for those who died and were injured during the Benghazi Mission siege.
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On April 23, 2013—seven months after Benghazi 9/11—the French Embassy in Tripoli, the Libyan capital, was targeted by a car bomb. The blast destroyed the embassy’s ground floor reception area and perimeter wall, as well as damaging neighboring homes. One embassy guard was severely injured and another suffered light injuries. As with the United States, France would have had every right to consider herself a friend of the Libyan people: France was at the forefront of the NATO air strikes that helped topple Colonel Gaddafi.
Also in April 2013 a political action committee called Special Operations Speaks (SOS) called for the U.S. Congress to open a new investigation into the Benghazi 9/11 attacks. An SOS letter signed by seven hundred military Special Operations veterans urged support for House Resolution 36, a measure introduced by Virginia Republican representative Frank Wolf, calling for the appointment of a House Special Committee to determine what happened at the U.S. Mission in Benghazi.
“Additional information is now slowly surfacing in the media which makes a comprehensive bipartisan inquiry an imperative,” the letter from SOS states. “Many questions have not been answered thus far . . . It appears that many of the facts and details surrounding the terrorist attack which resulted in four American deaths and an undetermined number of American casualties have not yet been ascertained by previous hearing and inquiries.”
I hope the lessons from Benghazi 9/11 have been learned by America and her allies. It is important that they are: if the catastrophic failures at Benghazi are ever repeated at another U.S.—or allied—mission, more lives will very likely be lost. As a security expert with decades of experience I am in no doubt that the lives lost on that ill-fated night could have been saved, had the security measures recommended by me, as well as the RSOs and diplomats, been implemented.
If the same numbers of Shariah Brigade fighters had hit the Embassy, but it had had proper physical security measures in place, plus the weaponry and personnel along the lines that we had repeatedly requested, the attackers would have been repulsed, or at the very least held off until everyone was safely evacuated. That is the saddest part of this whole sorry and tragic tale.
Twelve U.S. Marines; one or two .50-caliber heavy machine guns; a team of German shepherd guard dogs with handlers; standard extra-physical security measures: Do the math—what would that have cost, compared to the tragic loss of life and injuries suffered, not to mention the humiliating and shaming of America in the eyes of her enemies?
For all our sakes I hope to God the lessons from Benghazi 9/11 have been learned.