The Unanswered Questions
It’s July 29, 2013. I’m out somewhere in Northern Virginia leading my private life when a U.S. Special Forces officer approaches me unsolicited.
“We were ready,” he tells me quietly, with no preface. No drama in his voice.
He assumes I know what he’s referring to. And I do.
I’ve been approached the same way on a regular basis since I began covering the September 11, 2012, terrorist attacks on Americans in Benghazi, Libya. Approached by men affiliated with the secretive world of military Special Operations. Men who know firsthand the abilities and capabilities of our elite teams and in extremis forces—so-called Tier 1 assets.
They speak to me about the lack of an outside military rescue attempt as several dozen Americans were trapped, under attack, at a CIA annex about a mile from our unofficial embassy compound in Benghazi. Two Americans, U.S. ambassador Christopher Stevens and Information Officer Sean Smith, were already dead. Two more, former Navy SEALs Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods, would die trying to help protect the rest of the Americans awaiting the U.S. military cavalry from outside Libya that never came.
These men who approach me won’t speak on camera and can’t be quoted by name. And if they say too much, they’ll be arrested. They challenge the insistences made by the Obama administration, the military’s top brass, and the Accountability Review Board (ARB) that nothing more could have been done to come to the rescue. They tell me there were military assets all over the place. Assets that should have been spun up and dispatched at the outset of the crisis when nobody knew how far it could spread or how long it would last—one hour? Eight? Three days?
They contend that for starters, a U.S. military plane should have gotten to Benghazi quickly and buzzed over the site. “The Libyans know that sound from the NATO missions” to oust Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi, says one source. “You should see ’em scatter when a plane buzzes in low! But we didn’t even try.”
They also tell me that every Special Forces Group (Airborne) includes an element trained for Direct Action-Counter Terrorism missions. This element is called a Combatant Commander’s in-Extremis Force (CIF) company. The night of the Benghazi attacks, there was a Europe-based CIF a few hours’ flight away. They had access to an AC-130 gunship. It’s the same kind of plane special ops forces used to attack suspected al-Qaeda militants in Somalia and strike Taliban targets in the Afghanistan war.
But instead of being poised to respond on the anniversary of September 11, 2001, the CIF and its plane were off on a practice mission in Croatia. It’s a sad irony: the CIF assaulters, breachers, and snipers were training for the very type of emergency unfolding that night but they couldn’t get there. Well, at least, they didn’t get there.
According to the Pentagon’s timeline, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta waited between two and a half and four hours before giving the order for the CIF to be ready to move. From Croatia, it’s a three-hour flight to Libya on an AC-130 with several fuel options along the way. Or it’s a two-hour flight to the U.S. Navy installation at Sigonella Naval Air Station in Sicily, Italy.
But according to the Pentagon’s timeline, it was eighteen to twenty long hours from the time of Panetta’s call until the CIF landed at Sigonella. From Sigonella, it’s a relatively short five-hundred-mile hop to Benghazi, but they were far too late to help. It was all over.
Why did it take close to a full day for the CIF to pack up and fly two hours to Sigonella? No explanation is provided. But my sources say the team should have been spun up immediately, in the first uncertain moments of the attack. That they could have had the chance to reach Benghazi before Doherty and Woods were killed. In fact, these sources say the CIF should have been staged hours before the Benghazi attacks . . . up to eight hours earlier when a giant mob of attackers descended upon the U.S. Embassy in Egypt with attackers climbing the walls. That should’ve put all the wheels in motion. Even if the United States had unwisely let its guard down on September 11, 2012, the Egyptian attack should’ve been the wake-up call that put every possible resource on full alert, spinning up and positioning in case of trouble anywhere else in the region. But that didn’t happen. Why didn’t the smartest military strategists on earth see the Cairo violence as the possible beginning of a string of attacks? And when the second in the series occurred in Libya, what made them conclude there wouldn’t be more in the region?
Special Operations Command deputy commander Lieutenant General John Mulholland later made a provocative statement about the CIF’s movements that night. He seemed to introduce an entirely different explanation than the idea that the CIF simply couldn’t get there in time. “Those forces worked as advertised, and they were in position,” he tells a Special Operations conference in Washington, D.C., on November 28, 2012. “I’ll leave it at that because other decisions came into play that perhaps aren’t privy to [Special Operations Command]. . . . [O]ther decisions took place . . . that other commanders can speak to.”
Other decisions. What decisions?
Obama administration officials insist there were no other decisions. Everything that could be done was done. Period. No one was ever stopped from moving. Nobody—not even a single U.S. military aircraft—could get to Benghazi over the course of eight hours.
Later, in secret closed sessions with Congress, there would be many qualifiers. General Carter Ham, the head of U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), would concede that assets were available. Just as my sources had said. But it was decided they wouldn’t be used. And it was decided that a potential rescue of Americans under attack on foreign soil wasn’t in line with the military’s mission.
Speaking of the lull between the attacks in Benghazi, Major General Darryl Roberson, one of the principal military advisors to the president, told the House Armed Services Committee that
the mentality of everybody was, it doesn’t make sense to launch an F-16 now, given what we know about the situation. Now, in hindsight, 20/20, we know that there was another attack at 5:15 in the morning. But again, given the environment, the circumstances, what these systems are designed to do, the F-16s are not on a mission to respond. It is not like a fire station. We don’t have assets to respond like a fire call, jump down the pole and respond for any American that is under fire anywhere in the world. That is not [Department of Defense’s] role. Our role is to support the State Department, whose primary responsibility is for security of their mission.
Roberson acknowledged that aircraft could have buzzed the hostile crowd to try to scatter it. But that, too, was ruled out because it wasn’t seen as a sure bet.
“So there is a potential you could have flown a show of force and made everyone aware that there was a fighter airborne,” Roberson conceded. “Would it have changed anything? Certainly, we couldn’t have gotten there before the ambassador was dead. We know that. But even if we had gotten there before the annex attack, in my experience, again, it doesn’t necessarily stop the fighting, especially if they are conditioned to it. . . . And so I can’t tell you if it would have been effective or not in Benghazi with a show of force.”
Representative Jason Chaffetz, a Republican from Utah, responds, “And General, I guess what the shame is, we didn’t even try.”
These admissions in six months of closed hearings in 2013 wholly contradict the administration’s public story line, which is still widely advanced to this day, with the assistance of many in the news media who frankly haven’t dug deeply into the facts. After all, Benghazi is a phony, political scandal. And old news. And most members of the House Armed Services Committee are satisfied with what they hear. Clearly, they tell the military officers in sympathetic tones, you did all you could. We hate to even have to be asking you these pesky questions. We thank you for your brave service. Republicans and Democrats pat themselves on the back for their “rigorous oversight” and go home.
On May 1, 2014, yet another military general provides testimony that contradicts the Obama administration’s we-did-everything-we-could-possibly-do posture. At a House Oversight Committee hearing, Retired Air Force Brigadier General Robert Lovell acknowledges to Chaffetz that there were military assets in the region but says that there was no attempt to move them.
“We had assets there in Europe. Did they actually go into the sound of the guns? Did they actually go into Benghazi?” Chaffetz asks.
“No sir, those assets did not,” Lovell replies.
“Why not?”
“Basically, there was a lot of looking to the State Department for what they wanted and the deference to the Libyan people and the sense of deference to the desires of the State Department in terms of what they would like to have.”
“Did they ever tell you to go save the people in Benghazi?” asks Chaffetz.
“Not to my knowledge, sir,” says Lovell.
But none of this information is public yet when I begin posing my first questions to White House officials in mid-October 2012 and they push back. Hard. I’m on the phone with National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor and Deputy National Security Advisor (later White House chief of staff) Denis McDonough. They try to push my questions off track and won’t give straight answers to most of them. And they won’t provide an on-camera interview with anyone representing the administration.
On Saturday, October 20, I publish a report on CBS This Morning titled, “Could U.S. Military Have Helped During Libya Attack?” Although most of my sources can’t appear on camera, I’m able to use their information and round out the report with additional on-camera experts.
The story says, in part:
The Pentagon says it did move a team of special operators from central Europe to the large Naval Air Station in Sigonella, Italy, but gave no other details. Sigonella is just an hour’s flight from Libya. Other nearby bases include Aviano and Souda Bay. Military sources tell CBS News that resources at the three bases include fighter jets and Specter AC-130 gunships, which the sources say can be extremely effective in flying in and buzzing a crowd to disperse it. . . . Add to the controversy the fact that the last two Americans didn’t die until more than six hours into the attack, and the question of U.S. military help becomes very important.
As is often the case, the Obama administration wishes to take issue with the story after refusing to provide the requested public information. The White House’s Vietor begins an email exchange with me, criticizing the experts we consulted after the administration rejected our interview requests. I tell Vietor the main question remains: Why no outside military help?
“What options were considered by whom and what decisions were made for what reasons (which you guys won’t say),” I ask via email. “Most of the questions I have, you folks haven’t answered. . . . Would you like to reconsider putting someone on camera and answer more of these questions?”
Vietor writes back arguing that “forces were sent from Tripoli to Benghazi as reinforcements. . . . That’s a relevant data point.”
“How many military reinforcements were sent and what time did they arrive on site at the compound?” I ask that same question three times. Surely, Vietor knows the answers or can find them, but he doesn’t budge.
“Why is the number required for you to include it?” he retorts. “I give up, Sharyl. . . . I’ll work with more reasonable folks that follow up, I guess.”
That remark makes me recall Vietor’s colleague, Eric Schultz, telling me during Fast and Furious, “Goddammit it, Sharyl! The Washington Post is reasonable, the L.A. Times is reasonable, the New York Times is reasonable, you’re the only one who’s not reasonable!”
Maybe I’m on to something here, too.
The White House isn’t filling in the blanks as to the commander in chief’s actions that night so I have to brainstorm other ways to get pieces of that information. My mind turns to the White House photo office. Your tax dollars pay to have a professional photographer cover most every aspect of the president’s work life. The positive images may be tweeted, posted, and sometimes autographed by the president himself and sent as souvenirs to those who appear in them. Remember the dramatic picture taken in the White House Situation Room during the successful raid on Osama bin Laden? It depicts the president and his top advisors as they watched the drama unfold in real time. They’re concerned. They’re engaged. From the standpoint of the administration, it’s great publicity. But not all of the photos taken by the White House photo office are released to the public.
Absent real information, I’m left to theorize. A photograph like the one taken during the bin Laden raid might have been taken during the Benghazi attacks. If not an image of the president in the Situation Room, there might be images taken in other White House locations. And they might give some insight into what the president was or wasn’t doing at what time.
For a few minutes, I try to think like a politician. There was a time during the attacks before anybody knew that Stevens was dead. When the administration might have thought there could be a “hero moment.” And, just in case the night would end positively, and with the presidential election campaign in full force, wouldn’t this administration—wouldn’t any administration—want to have a photograph memorializing the president and his advisors on the job? Concerned and engaged as the United States falls under attack in Libya as they mounted the rescue effort?
Getting such a photograph from the White House photo office, if it exists, should be easy. At least in a nonpolitical world. And when my producer Kim first calls on November 1, 2012, and asks for all photos taken that night, the office promises an answer by day’s end. But two months later, we still hadn’t heard back. The White House photo office ended up saying it needed permission from press officer Josh Earnest at the White House, who never returned a single of our phone calls or emails. No matter how many times we called the photo office and explained that Earnest was nonresponsive, the photo office would just send us back to Earnest, who wouldn’t return our calls. (I’m pretty sure nobody’s ever explained to him that he works for the public.)
My communications with the White House aren’t much more fruitful when we discuss some issues to be raised in my next story.
“Why wasn’t the Counterterrorism Security Group convened during the attacks?” I ask. Sources have told me that presidential directive requires the interagency Counterterrorism Security Group (CSG) to be convened in the event of a possible terrorist act. The CSG is made up of designated experts on coordinating assets and responses, the ones deemed best suited to brief agency leaders on what’s possible and what’s advisable. My sources tell me the CSG inexplicably wasn’t called upon during the Benghazi attacks.
“What moron is pushing this?” Vietor shoots back when I ask the question. “They don’t know what they’re talking about.”
He goes on to tell me that my information on the CSG “conjures up antiquated notions” and is “fake, a misimpression.” He says the CSG wasn’t needed because the principals were already engaged at a higher level and had access to all the advisors who make up the CSG. He says the CSG was used differently under the Bush administration, but now things have changed. Under Obama, the group is considered to be more policy analysts than emergency advisors.
Vietor will neither confirm nor deny whether the White House violated a presidential directive by the decision not to convene the CSG experts as a group. But considering the night’s tragic outcome, it makes sense to ask whether the CSG might have been able to provide helpful information and advice. Or an outcome that was less tragic.
I move on to another topic.
“Why wasn’t the FEST team deployed?”
FEST is short for Foreign Emergency Support Team, which is billed as “the U.S. government’s only interagency, on-call, short-notice team poised to respond to terrorist incidents worldwide.” Its members have hostage-negotiating expertise, something that it seems could have been potentially useful when U.S. Ambassador Stevens was reported missing shortly after the launch of the first attack.
To my surprise, Vietor and Deputy National Security Advisor McDonough indicate they haven’t heard of FEST before. They also seem befuddled by my questions as to the status of “Tier 1 assets” and “in extremis” forces. Nonetheless, Vietor implies I’m the one who’s ill-informed.
“I don’t know what [FEST] is,” he barks dismissively. “It sounds like a bogus, made-up effort. It’s antiquated. . . . You’re coming to me with low-level antiquated information . . . it’s a fake story.”
Moron. Bogus. Fake. Phony. The same kinds of words administration officials used to try to discredit Fast and Furious. Before they were forced to admit it was true. To me, this song has a similar tone and timbre. Their words and arguments aren’t based in facts. They sound like petulant middle school kids.
Oh yeah!!?? Who says!?
After our phone conversation, Vietor asks around and gets briefed on FEST—he learns that, yes, it does exist—and he follows up with me the next day. But now he contends the team, based in the United States, wouldn’t have gotten to Benghazi in time to help. Of course, since nobody knew at the start how long the crisis would last, it doesn’t explain why FEST wasn’t sent in the beginning.
Vietor doesn’t see FEST as the on-call, short-notice team with hostage-negotiating expertise poised to respond to terrorist incidents worldwide, as the team is described on the government’s website. The website also states FEST “has deployed to over 20 countries since its inception in 1986, [and] leaves for an incident site within four hours of notification, providing the fastest assistance possible.” Apparently, Vietor has his own unique and much more limited definition of FEST as logistical experts “used in the past to re-establish infrastructure, communications, etc. after a devastating attack. . . . That wasn’t the need here.”
This is at sharp odds with FEST’s own view of its training and mission. In fact, I later learn from an Obama administration source that FEST team members “instinctively started packing” as soon as they heard of the Benghazi attacks but that Undersecretary of State Patrick Kennedy advised against sending them. They wanted to go, but weren’t allowed.
We also later learn in testimony from the Accountability Review Board that nobody from the administration tried to get air clearance from Libya for a rescue attempt. Nobody asked NATO for assistance. (The review board’s Admiral Mike Mullen said there was “zero” likelihood that NATO could have responded, but I wonder who decided not to try to clear the way for all options—since the president said he had ordered officials to take all necessary actions.)
All of this information contributes to a report I publish on November 2, 2012. It states, in part:
Without the Counterterrorism Security Group being convened, as required by presidential directive, the response to the crisis became “more confused.”
The FBI received a call during the attack representing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton asking for agents be deployed but the FBI agreed it “would not make any difference without security and other enablers to get them in the country and synch their efforts with military and diplomatic efforts to maximize their success.”
A hostage rescue team was alternately asked to get ready and then stand down throughout the night, as officials seemed unable to make up their minds.
A counterterror force official stationed in Europe said components of AFRICOM were working on a course of action but no plan was put to use.
“Forces were positioned after the fact but not much good to those that needed it,” according to a military source.
“The response process was isolated at the most senior level,” says an official referring to top officials in the executive branch. “My fellow counterterrorism professionals and I [were] not consulted.”
The story is factually indisputable, with all opinions clearly sourced. But when it’s published, Vietor fires off a lengthy email complaint calling the article “fundamentally inaccurate.” He copies my bureau chief Chris Isham, as well as CBS News president David Rhodes and Rhodes’s brother Ben. Ben Rhodes is a top national security advisor to President Obama. Also copied on the email are Pentagon spokesman George Little, secretary of state spokesman Philippe Reines, and Paul Bresson. (I don’t know Bresson, but there’s a Paul Bresson listed as an employee at the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center.) I do know Reines. He’s a longtime Clinton confidant considered to be quite the character. About a month earlier, when reporter Michael Hastings had persisted with questions about Benghazi that were similar to mine, Reines emailed him to “have a good day. And by good day, I mean Fuck Off.” Reines and other Clinton advocates would later form a Washington PR firm called Beacon Global Strategies. The same firm would hire CIA deputy director Mike Morell, who defended Clinton’s State Department and bucked his own CIA boss, Director David Petraeus, in their internal dispute over the Benghazi talking points.
In his November 2012 email to me, Vietor repeats that the Counterterrorism Security Group didn’t need to be convened because higher-level officials met, including “Denis McDonough, John Brennan, [Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff James] Winnefeld, [and] Deputy Secretary of State Bill Burns . . . And the notion that the individuals I listed and others in these meetings don’t have decades of experience working these issues is wrong.”
The thing is, the “notion” with which Vietor takes umbrage appears nowhere in my story. Nobody claims that he and his colleagues lack “decades of experience.” But despite that experience, neither Vietor nor McDonough apparently knew FEST existed when I first asked them about it. And after they got briefed, they had a mistaken interpretation of its capabilities, as well as the Counterterrorism Security Group’s mandate, according to some of the men who actually serve on and supervise the teams. Sometimes decades of experience don’t add up to all that much.
Vietor’s email complaint recommends that my report be “pulled down” from the Web “until the facts are corrected.” Of course, since the story is entirely accurate, it remains on the Web and no correction is warranted.
I reply to Vietor via email: “I would point out that I included all of your on the record comments to me in my story and I would also repeat my request for an on-camera interview should you decide to provide someone from the administration to address these issues further.”
After all the stonewalling, it borders on humorous when, at a press conference two weeks later, on November 14, 2012, President Obama incorrectly tells reporters that his administration has provided all information regarding what happened in Benghazi.
“We have provided every bit of information that we have,” Mr. Obama tells reporters.
Does the president simply think that if he says it, people who don’t know better will be convinced? Or is he disconnected—misled by his staff into thinking all the questions have been answered? From my perspective, very few answers or documents have been given. Some were still dribbling out for the first time in 2014 as a result of a Freedom of Information lawsuit the conservative watchdog group JudicialWatch filed against the State Department.
In January 2013, I’m still seeking answers. The trajectory of this story seems to be following a course similar to Fast and Furious. The administration has deflected attention from its missteps by declaring the Benghazi story a scandal manufactured by Republicans for political purposes. Many in the media adopt the narrative and lose interest. The stories they do publish are often written as political reports without a thorough examination of what I consider key apolitical issues at heart.
I send a list of my unanswered questions in an email to Vietor to jog his memory. In case he’s forgotten.
What were the President’s actions that night?
What time was Ambassador Stevens’ body recovered, what are the known details surrounding his disappearance and death including where he/his body was taken/found/transported and by whom?
Who made the decision not to convene the Counterterrorism Security Group (CSG) the night of the Benghazi attacks?
We understand that convening the CSG is a protocol under Presidential directive (NSPD-46). Is that true? If not, please explain. If so, why was the protocol not followed?
Is the administration revising the applicable Presidential directive? If so, please explain.
Who is the highest-ranking official who was aware of pre-911 security requests from U.S. personnel in Libya?
Who is/are the official(s) responsible for removing reference to al-Qaeda from the original CIA notes?
Was the President aware of General David Petraeus’ potential [sexual scandal] problems prior to Thursday, November 8, 2012? What was the earliest that any White House official was aware? Please provide details.
What is your response to the President stating that on September 12, he called 9/11 a terrorist attack in light of his CBS interview on that date in which he answered that it was too early to know whether it was a terrorist attack?
Is anyone being held accountable for having no resources close enough to reach this high-threat area within 8+ hours on September 11 and has the administration taken steps to have resources available sooner in case of emergency in the future?
A Benghazi victim’s family member stated that Mrs. Clinton told him she would find and arrest whoever made the anti-Islam video. Is this accurate? If so, what was Mrs. Clinton’s understanding at the time of what would be the grounds for arrest?
If true, what is the administration’s view regarding other videos or future materials that it may wish were not published, but are legal?
What is the administration’s criteria in general for requesting removal of a YouTube or other Internet video?
Vietor, like Josh Earnest, apparently hasn’t been given the you-serve-the-public talk, either. He replies to me that he has no intention of giving answers unless I “correct all the stories about how we didn’t act fast enough to send troops to Benghazi when the [State Department’s Accountability Review Board] clearly said it wasn’t possible.”
“Our stories were entirely accurate and no correction is warranted,” I answer.
I then point out that the law doesn’t permit him to hold public information hostage to his demands for a certain behavior on the part of the media.
“[T]he info I’m asking for is public information, and you guys work for the public. We pay your salaries.”
“Thanks for paying my salary,” Vietor replies. “Your stories were terrible, misleading and did a disservice to all who read them.”
“Tommy, we’re not looking for thanks. We’re looking for the information that we own that you’re keeping secret. Politicians, government employees and their staff are not entitled to limiting the release of public information only when they like reporters or stories.”
“Thanks for the note,” writes Vietor. “I thoroughly reject your rationale for the response. I would point you to the [Accountability Review Board] report and hours upon hours of testimony for your answers.”
Of course, the answers to my questions aren’t in the Accountability Review Board’s report or the “hours upon hours of testimony.”
It’s spring 2014. An impeccable source who cannot go on camera tells me that Special Operators from the Commander’s in-Extremis Force (CIF) were launched on a C-130 airframe and headed toward Benghazi during the attacks. They traveled for about an hour before having to turn around and return to base. A second aircraft attempted to depart, but the pilot was late arriving and an argument ensued between the pilot and U.S. Special Operations Command Africa Commander Brigadier General James B. Linder. The general wanted an immediate departure but the pilot was objecting to gear that was being loaded. The pilot was concerned that the equipment had a lot of hazardous and unstable material. Apparently the pilot refused for long enough that the second aircraft never actually departed before the mission was canceled.
The administration has repeatedly denied that any such happenings occurred.
It’s another day. I’m somewhere out of state living my private life when another source affiliated with Special Forces approaches me. “We should’ve gone in to help,” he tells me. “We could have. We were ready. Someone at the highest level stopped us.”
| DYING FOR SECURITY
The entire Benghazi debacle begins with security threats ignored and security requests denied. But for me, the story begins three weeks after September 11, 2012.
Our correspondents have already broken some major news. There’s a feeling that much is yet to be uncovered. On the morning of Wednesday, October 3, I walk into the Washington, D.C., bureau newsroom and drop my bag near an empty desk and computer. The senior producer for Evening News is on a telephone conference call. He spots me and puts the call on mute.
“Pick up, they’re talking about you,” he says.
I join the call. The subject is the Benghazi story. On the phone are CBS News journalists conferencing in from New York, Washington, D.C., and London who are already working various angles. They share the latest about what they know and review the unknowns, inconsistencies, and controversies. The head of the CBS News investigative team in New York, Len Tepper, suggests I join in and see what I can dig up.
Rumors are circulating that the State Department denied the U.S. diplomats in Libya security they requested leading up to the brutal attacks. But there’s no proof. The witnesses and survivors are being kept secreted away. Nobody has seen or heard from them in public. It’s as if a strangely tight clamp is being kept on the information and people who hold the truth.
I start reading up on the public info and calling my contacts and sources. Two days later, I’m lucky to connect with the man who would provide the biggest break in the story to date: Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Wood. When I first contact him, Wood is in the middle of nowhere in Utah working in his civilian job to keep the nation’s dams secure from terrorist threats. Cell phone coverage is spotty. He tells me he’ll call back later.
I’m reaching out to Wood because my sources tell me that he led the last U.S. military security team in Libya. One that left just a month before September 11. What’s the story behind his team’s withdrawal? What was the security profile before and during the attacks? Most important, will he talk about any of this with me off or on camera?
Wood is a patriotic, mild-mannered Mormon family man. A longtime M-day soldier in the Utah National Guard. M-day is slang—short for “man day,” meaning he serves normal Guard duty one weekend a month and two weeks a year. But he’s no ordinary M-day soldier. He has thirty years of Special Forces experience: a highly decorated officer with expert training in counterterrorism. He wouldn’t blink if he needed to crush an enemy’s throat to save an American life. His National Guard duty has taken him on assignment in Afghanistan near the Pakistan border as part of Operation Enduring Freedom (2003–2004) and on a dangerous counterterrorism deployment in the Philippines (2006–2007).
In the Philippines in 2006, Wood’s expertise was applied to the insurgency and terrorism that have dominated the southern region for years. Terrorists exploit the area as a transitional route for entry into the United States and elsewhere. Planning for the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center was conducted against the glorious backdrop of the Philippines’ coral-filled ocean and tropical forests. In fact, shortly after 9/11, President George W. Bush quickly opened a second front in the War on Terror in the Philippines. When Wood and his hundred-member team of specialists arrived on the volcanic island of Jolo in the Sulu province, it was ground zero for the Muslim extremist violence. They joined five thousand Filipino marines and soldiers in Operation Ultimatum, targeting an Islamic separatist movement linked to al-Qaeda called Abu Sayyaf. The Abu Sayyaf fighters proved to be proficient in the deadly arts of improvised explosive devices, bombings, and kidnappings. In 2006 and 2007, they murdered 53 people and injured 270. They’re also suspected in the November 2007 bombing of the Philippine House of Representatives, which killed a local congressman and four staffers. Wood’s men trained Filipino forces how to sniff out roadside bombs and take on the bad guys themselves. By February 2007, Jolo was deemed to be clear of terrorists.
Five years later, on February 12, 2012, Wood hit the ground in Tripoli, Libya, to be the commander of a sixteen-member counterterrorism military team put into place a few months before. The element was a joint force primarily made up of senior noncommissioned officers from Army Special Operations and Navy SEALs. His arrival rounded out a thirty-four-member elite security contingent that also included three U.S. State Department six-man SWAT-style Mobile Security Deployment teams.
I’m still waiting for Wood to call me back from Utah after he finishes the day’s fieldwork. Hours pass and I’m worrying that I might not hear back from him, when my cell phone finally rings. It’s Wood. He tells me he’s seen the news reports about Benghazi and heard a lot of speculation. He says that much of what the government is saying simply isn’t true. He’s grown increasingly agitated as no one steps forward to correct the information and fill in the blanks. I can tell he’s eager for the truth to be told, even though he’s not terribly eager to be its public face.
He agrees to talk to me about his assignment—and what went wrong. It’s Friday and there’s a sense of urgency for me to check out his story and, if warranted, get him on camera. If I’ve managed to locate him, other reporters can’t be far behind. If I try to fly out to him in Utah, it’s a day out and a day back with a day in the middle for the actual sit-down interview. The travel would cost me valuable research time on a fast-moving story. It would also require me to find a good camera crew in Utah. Getting that ball rolling late on a Friday night isn’t ideal. My regular producer, Kim, would normally help, but it just so happens that she’s off.
But I have an idea. If Wood will come to Washington, D.C., I can continue my research while he flies. I can easily get a camera crew here. So I check flights from Utah, run the idea by him, and he agrees to fly to D.C. the next morning. Next, I book him a hotel room close to his airport in Utah so that he can get an early flight out with no worries about battling traffic. Putting him in a hotel also gets him away from his house, where other reporters might otherwise be able to find him. Meanwhile, I work to check him out further. In addition to my own reliable sources, the Pentagon verifies Wood’s identity to our military correspondent David Martin, and one of our foreign correspondents happens to know Wood from a previous assignment overseas. He’s the real deal. By Sunday morning, Wood and I are sitting down in the CBS bureau in Washington, D.C., for a one-on-one interview.
“My assignment there was to command what they call SST, or Site Security Team, to assist the State Department with security in Libya,” Wood tells me. “It was a military organization put together to assist [the State Department] in their ability to reestablish the embassy after it was evacuated during the revolution.”
This SST is a unique arrangement, with the military loaning forces to help the State Department mission on the ground. The United States had abandoned its embassy in Tripoli just a year earlier at the start of the uprising against Qaddafi’s regime. Pro-Qaddafi forces obliterated the embassy to retaliate for a NATO bombing that killed Qaddafi’s son. With the bad guys officially “out,” the State Department was anxious to cut through the chaos and normalize the post-Qaddafi relationship between the United States and Libya. Wood and his team were part of the effort to help make sure no Americans died in the process. They were tasked with supporting whatever the State Department regional security officer needed, whether it was help right there on the embassy compound in Tripoli or mobile security for travel by the principal officers and the ambassador himself. It was a flexible assignment that changed day to day, which made it both exciting and dangerous. And it demanded a heavy dose of knowledge about terrorism.
Wood had a nagging sense of déjà vu. As in Afghanistan and the Philippines, Libya was suffering under an unstable and deteriorating security situation. Terrorists and antigovernment forces had found a firm foothold among the disorganization and chaos. There was potential danger around every corner.
Many Libyans appreciated the fact that Americans were there. Others did not. The Americans never knew exactly how the locals would react. For Wood and his team traveling between neighborhoods, they could run into the same friendly guys for four days and then, on the fifth, have one of them point a loaded pistol at their head. It took a lot of diplomacy just to move about. It took a lot of explaining about who they were and why they were there.
Wood didn’t know it at the time, but a major terrorist plot had been thwarted in December 2011, not long before his arrival. It was a chilling foreshadowing of the September 11 attacks. In what was called Operation Papa Noel, pro-Qaddafi elements had planned to launch a sophisticated attack on foreign diplomatic missions and oil fields in Libya. Fortunately, the plot was exposed when several insurgents responsible for the planning were arrested before it was executed. Some details were later disclosed in the written emergency-evacuation plan for the U.S. mission in Benghazi, which warned, “the majority of Loyalist insurgents tasked with carrying out this plan are still active and free in Benghazi” and “Islamic terrorist elements do exist in this area of the country, and have been reported by open sources to be gaining operational capability.” Islamic terrorist elements . . . gaining operational capability.
The current security status in Libya was precarious at best, in Wood’s view. There were no organized services and there was no real government infrastructure. No police on the street, no trash pickup. Litter was strewn everywhere. The lights didn’t work. In an attempt to instill some sense of safety and order, civilians had established their own neighborhood watches. Most any Libyan man with a gun could form a self-standing militia. And plenty of them were wary of Americans.
Partnering with Wood in the security mission was Regional Security Officer Eric Nordstrom, who requested additional security help from headquarters in March 2012, but got no response. It was becoming clear to everyone on the ground that as things grew more dangerous, they were going to have to do more with less.
On April 10, an explosive device is thrown at a convoy traveling in Benghazi carrying United Nations envoy Ian Martin. On May 22, a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) hits the Benghazi offices of the International Red Cross and the agency decides to pull out. As the incidents pile up, they become more troublesome. They’re dissected, documented, and digested into reports sent regularly to State Department headquarters. Hundreds of pages. Week in and week out. There can be no doubt about the dangers in Libya. The security officers live with persistent concern. What’s the threat to the ambassador? To the embassy staff? To themselves? It’s work day and night. If they’re awake, they’re on duty. If they’re asleep, they’re on call.
Even more alarming, in an online posting, al-Qaeda had stated its intent to attack the Red Cross, the British, and then the Americans in Benghazi. With the first two promises fulfilled, the attack on Benghazi was the last outstanding threat. It seemed just a matter of time.
“This isn’t Afghanistan or Iraq,” the State Department’s Charlene Lamb at headquarters in Washington would tell the Libya contingent. The guys on the ground were made to feel as if they were being melodramatic, maybe even a little cowardly in asking for more resources to protect the U.S. mission and its diplomats. Wood couldn’t believe the disconnect. How little the bureaucrats in D.C. understood about the reality that he and the rest of the Americans were living in Libya. A disintegrating country that, in some respects, was as dangerous as Afghanistan. He knows because he’s been there, too. Washington seemed to have no concept of prevention. It was all about reacting.
Nordstrom later testifies before the House Oversight Committee, “It was abundantly clear we were not going to get resources until the aftermath of an incident. . . . The question that we would ask is, again, ‘How thin does the ice have to get before someone falls through?’”
Even before Ambassador Stevens’s time, the warning signs were clear. In 2009, Gene Cretz became the first U.S. ambassador to Libya in more than thirty years. He had to be temporarily pulled in December 2010 after embarrassing documents posted on WikiLeaks recounted Cretz describing Qaddafi’s fear of flying over water, and Qaddafi’s proclivities, which included a “fondness for flamenco dancing” and reliance on a “voluptuous blonde” Ukrainian nurse. When Cretz returned to Tripoli in 2011, he knew the security situation was perilous. Al-Qaeda was in town to exploit Libya’s unsettled status and to try to obtain some of the thousands of missing MANPADS (man-portable air-defense systems): shoulder-fired missiles seized by rebel forces that stormed Qaddafi government bases. Cretz realized there were seriously dangerous tensions among anti-Qaddafi factions: Islamists and secularists. “I think there is a genuine cause to be concerned that things could go wrong,” he told reporters. It was a premonition.
Ambassador Cretz was the first U.S. diplomat in Libya to be faced with the prospect of relinquishing much-needed security. The State Department pulled one of its six-man Mobile Security Deployment teams. Cretz gave up the team begrudgingly and not without objection. Then, in April 2012, he was chosen to be the next ambassador to Ghana and Stevens was picked to replace him.
“Was Ambassador Stevens one of your primary concerns?” I ask Wood.
“Yes he was. As the chief of mission he was the primary concern there as far as security is concerned. He’s a man that has to get out and see and be seen. So that makes security difficult. And it makes it extraordinarily difficult in an environment such as Tripoli and the rest of Libya.”
Stevens had already served as the deputy chief of mission from 2007 until the start of 2009, during a period when there was no U.S. ambassador. Later, during the Libyan revolution in 2011, he was appointed to be America’s special representative to the National Transitional Council, the anti-Qaddafi rebel government headquartered in Benghazi. His friends say this is when Stevens developed a deep affection for Benghazi.
Almost from the moment he became ambassador, Stevens spoke of his desire to revisit Benghazi, where he had forged many friendships and relationships the year before. It was a top priority. In some respects, Benghazi was home for Stevens, at least when it came to his comfort zone in North Africa.
Wood and Stevens developed a fast friendship. They ate dinner together almost every night and became close confidants. They talked a lot about the diminishing security and how to overcome it. Stevens wasn’t one of those diplomats to stay holed up in the office even if it’s dangerous in the field. A big part of his job was to be seen out in public. Interact with the locals. To visit local stores, run at the local track, portray a sense of confidence in the community. Never let them know about the private concerns discussed with the security specialists at the embassy. About cables quietly dispatched to headquarters documenting the threatening environment and making the case for better security. The public face has to be confidence and smiles. That’s an ambassador’s mission. And nobody did it better than Stevens.
At one point, the U.S. State Department’s regional security officer in Libya, Nordstrom, asked for a dozen additional security agents, and he says the State Department’s regional director told him, “You’re asking for the sun, moon, and the stars.” Nordstrom replied, “You know what makes it most frustrating about this assignment? It’s not the hardships, it’s not the gunfire, it’s not the threats. It’s dealing and fighting against the people, programs, and personnel who are supposed to be supporting me. . . . For me, the Taliban is on the inside of the building.”
Not only was Nordstrom’s request for additional help refused, but headquarters also broke the news to Stevens that he’d be losing a second Mobile Security Deployment team.
“Did Ambassador Stevens or the regional security officer fight losing another team?” I ask Wood.
“Yes.”
“How did they do that?”
“It was quite a degree of frustration on their part,” Wood says. “They were, I guess you would say, clenched-fist over the whole issue.”
Meanwhile, Stevens planned to visit Benghazi in June but the trip never came to fruition. On June 6, an improvised explosive device detonated just outside the Benghazi consulate compound. June also saw an al-Qaeda demonstration right smack in the middle of Benghazi. The terrorists advertised out in the open in advance: a three-day rally for all their supporters.
“A rally for al-Qaeda supporters out in public?” I ask Wood incredulously when he explains this to me. The last I’d heard, al-Qaeda was “on the run.” President Obama said so.
“Oh yes,” Wood says. “They had a parade down the streets. They raised their flag on one of the county buildings. And people came from different parts of Libya as well as outside of Libya for that event.”
Wood tells me that many Libyans do not support al-Qaeda and made sure the terrorist group didn’t feel welcome for the rally. “The people of Benghazi themselves surrounded that crowd and told them of their disgust for that type of thing and shut down the operation. They had one day of a three-day rally and they were pushed out of town.”
“On the other hand,” I ask, “isn’t that sort of a red flag for the security situation that you have al-Qaeda supporters rallying in the streets of Benghazi in June of 2012?”
“Yes, that was another indicator to watch, to be aware of, and to try to compensate for as well.”
Then, on June 11, a rocket-propelled grenade hit a convoy carrying the British ambassador in Benghazi. Wood happened to be in the city when the assault occurred.
“I was there to perform some additional work for the defense attaché in receiving some equipment for the Libyan army,” Wood says. Within minutes of the attack, he and other U.S. personnel were called upon to help. “We received a request from the security people in Tripoli stating that [the British ambassador] had been attacked and [they] asked us to go for assistance, which we responded to immediately. They had a security officer injured severely and we got over there as quickly as we could.”
After the attack, the United Kingdom decided Benghazi was too dangerous and closed its consulate there. But the United States stayed in place and continued its security drawdown. Not only a reduction in men with a very specific set of skills but also an important piece of equipment: a DC-3 fixed-wing prop plane that had been reengineered to play a security and support role. The DC-3 was used for resupply trips around the Mediterranean and offered a way for U.S. personnel to travel between Tripoli and Benghazi on short notice in the span of a little more than an hour. It transported all kinds of equipment, including weapons that can’t be taken on commercial flights.
“For security personnel, that was a great asset,” Wood says. But on May 3, Stevens was copied on an email from the State Department’s Libya post management officer. It said that Undersecretary of State Kennedy “determined that support for Embassy Tripoli using the DC-3 will be terminated immediately.”
“It was a loss again. It was ‘okay, now how are we going to compensate for this?’ Again, sub-optimizing to do the same thing you were trying with less resources,” says Wood.
Despite the multiple warnings about the dangerous circumstances in Benghazi, Kennedy later testifies that it just wasn’t enough to trigger alarm bells at the highest levels. Not the foiled terrorist plot in December 2011 and the warning that Islamic terrorist elements are gaining operational capability in the Benghazi region. Not the April 10 IED attack on the UN envoy’s convoy in Benghazi. Not the May 22, 2012, RPG attack on the Benghazi offices of the Red Cross. Not the June 6 IED explosion just outside the U.S. compound in Benghazi, nor the June al-Qaeda rally in the streets of Benghazi, nor the June 11 RPG attack on the British ambassador in Benghazi. The Red Cross pulls out. The United Kingdom closes its consulate. One wonders what it would have taken to trigger alarm bells at headquarters.
“We had no actionable intelligence . . . about this threat in Benghazi,” Kennedy testified a year later before Congress. “And therefore . . . I never went to the secretary of state and told her it was time to leave Benghazi.”
Two months before the attacks, on July 9, Stevens sent a cable asking headquarters to keep Wood’s sixteen-man military team and retain the last Mobile Security Deployment team at least through mid-September. His request said that benchmarks for a drawdown had not been met. However, the teams were not extended.
“We were fighting a losing battle,” Wood says. “We were not even allowed to keep what we had.”
State Department officials would later blame the Defense Department when asked why Wood’s team wasn’t allowed to stay. But Wood says that’s patently untrue. His team was on loan from U.S. Africa Command, commanded by General Ham.
“There was a great understanding reached where General Ham made Ambassador Cretz fully aware that as long as he needed Site Security Team or the security force from [the Department of Defense], he could have them there,” Wood tells me.
“You were told that?” I ask.
“Absolutely, yes,” Wood answers.
“By whom?”
“General Ham. I heard him on a number of occasions, personally as well as across videoconferencing.”
“So there was no pressure from the military to pull your team out?”
“No, none whatsoever.”
On August 2, six weeks before Stevens died, he made still another security request of headquarters. This one was for “protective detail bodyguard positions,” to “fill the vacuum of security personnel currently at post who will be leaving within the next month and will not be replaced.” He called the security condition in Libya “unpredictable, volatile and violent.” On August 8, as Wood’s special Site Security Team terminated its duty, Stevens dispatched yet another cable telling headquarters that “a series of violent incidents has dominated the political landscape,” and calling them “targeted and discriminate attacks.”
As he departed Libya, Wood was haunted by a lingering discomfort. He knew he was leaving behind embassy staffers—friends and colleagues—who were worried about their own safety. “I didn’t feel good about it. They asked if [they] were safe. They asked what was going to happen. And I could only answer that what we were being told is that [State Department headquarters is] working on it.”
On August 27, the State Department issued a travel warning for Libya, citing the threat of assassinations and car bombings in Benghazi and Tripoli. Then, when Stevens embarked upon his trip to Benghazi in September, he was guarded by two rookie Diplomatic Security guards who joined three already at the U.S. compound in Benghazi. They’re not military forces. They’re not counterterrorism experts. On September 11—the last day the ambassador was to awake on earth—he sent headquarters a weekly report that, in part, described Libyans’ “growing frustration with police and security forces . . . too weak to keep the country secure.” The agents guarding him didn’t even have their weapons and gear with them when they fell under attack. They had to rush to a storage area to retrieve their M-4 carbine assault riles after the terrorists used diesel fuel to set the compound on fire. The agents never fired a shot in defense. All of this confounds Wood.
“We slept with our rifles,” he says of the contrast between his own team’s standard operating procedure and that of the Diplomatic Security guards left to protect Stevens. “You never separated yourself from your weapon.”
Later, in a classified Senate hearing in December 2012, Kennedy is repeatedly challenged on the question of why no defense shots were fired.
“Were there orders for them not to shoot?” asks Senator Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat from California.
“No,” testifies Kennedy. There were no such orders. They just didn’t shoot.
Maybe there was no point. Maybe all they could do was to hide as best they could. They were so far outnumbered. The enemy swarmed the compound like bees.
The administration seemed pleased with how the closed hearing had gone. When the hearing adjourned, a CIA representative and State Department official who had been inside were practically “high-fiving,” says one observer present, “like they had pulled something over on the committee.”
In defending the substandard security, State Department officials would incorrectly tell reporters and Congress that even if Wood’s military team had been allowed to remain in Libya, it was tied to Tripoli and would never have been located in Benghazi to help. “It would not have made any difference in Benghazi,” Charlene Lamb, deputy secretary for Diplomatic Security, tells Congress on October 10, 2012.
Could it be that Lamb and other officials at State Department headquarters are ignorant of the plain facts even as they testify to Congress? Or are they using misinformation to spin? The truth is that Wood and his team members did travel to Benghazi for their official duties. Anyone who bothered to ask could have found that out. Heck, anyone who saw my recent interview with Wood knew it. Remember, he was in Benghazi when the British convoy was attacked and he helped with the rescue. He also planned to include members of his team on Stevens’s trip to Benghazi in June, had it not been postponed. “It was a security marathon, if you will, to encompass or try to provide security for that type of a movement,” Wood tells me. Wood describes other instances in which his team members went to Benghazi to protect a top U.S. diplomat. “At times there [was] a need for us to go out to Benghazi to perform those same static as well as mobile security functions for the principal officer that was out there. . . . So twice I sent [Site Security Team] members out there to support the security functions there,” Wood says.
With so many security questions, administration officials engage in their predictable strategy of deflection. State Department officials who don’t want to be quoted by name begin whispering to reporters that Stevens was partly at fault for his own demise. They imply he was a renegade. “I’m not even sure we knew he was going to Benghazi. Why would he go there on 9/11?” one official asks me rhetorically, quickly adding, “That’s not for attribution.” They also claim that Stevens had the final say-so in matters of his own security in Libya. Of course, if that’s true, then why did the State Department not grant his security requests? But State Department sources spread this spin to so many reporters that it’s repeated back to me with similar wording by a number of colleagues. They wander into my office or strike up a casual conversation and ask, Why would Stevens choose to go to Benghazi on 9/11? . . . I hear he was kind of a renegade. . . . I’m not even sure the State Department knew he was going to Benghazi. . . . You know, he was in charge of his own security and had final say. Others who knew Stevens bristle at the whispers and implications, telling me it’s the worst kind of violation to blame a dead man, who can never tell his own story.
The State Department’s Accountability Review Board continues to lay the groundwork for blaming Stevens in its December 2012 report. It says that Stevens’s “status as the leading U.S. government advocate on Libya policy, and his expertise on Benghazi in particular, caused Washington to give unusual deference to his judgments” (emphasis added). The clear implication is that Stevens’s misfortune was somehow a product of his own miscalculation or poor judgment. That the professionals in Washington deferred to his wishes and didn’t know any better. But it can’t be both true that Washington deferred to Stevens and that Washington also rejected his security requests. We know factually that the latter is true; so the former simply cannot be.
The Accountability Review Board also implies that Stevens was acting as a freelancer in arranging his schedule without the knowledge of headquarters or even his colleagues in Tripoli. “The Board found that Ambassador Stevens made the decision to travel to Benghazi independently of Washington, per standard practice,” reads the report. “Plans for the Ambassador’s trip . . . were not shared thoroughly with the Embassy’s country team, who were not fully aware of planned movements off compound.”
I note that the wording in the report uses a lot of qualifiers. It attempts to imply one thing but, if examined, may say quite another. When it comes to Washington politicians, investigations by appointed boards, and other such matters, I’ve learned that you have to carefully consider every word they choose. Often, lawyers and politicians construct phrasing that may be technically and legally defensible but is intentionally misleading. So what does the Accountability Review Board’s report really say? What does it leave unsaid? What can one discover reading between the lines?
FROM THE REPORT “The Board found that Ambassador Stevens made the decision to travel to Benghazi independently of Washington.”
ANALYSIS This sentence implies that Stevens was acting on his own. But a careful reading leaves open the possibility that headquarters was well aware of his travel.
FROM THE REPORT “Plans for the Ambassador’s trip . . . were not shared thoroughly with the Embassy’s country team. . . .”
ANALYSIS This implies Stevens kept his plans secret. However, it really seems to indicate the plans were shared with the embassy’s country team, just not “thoroughly” shared, whatever that means.
FROM THE REPORT “[The embassy’s country team members] were not fully aware of planned movements off compound.”
ANALYSIS This implies Stevens didn’t tell his colleagues about his plans off the compound. But in actuality, it seems to indicate they were aware, just not “fully” aware, whatever that means. Additionally, the supposed lack of knowledge about Stevens’s “planned movements off compound” is irrelevant since he was inside the compound when attacked. But perhaps it’s included to add to the implication that Stevens wasn’t keeping his colleagues clued in.
Later, Stevens’s number two, Gregory Hicks, tells me that Stevens did not secretively freelance his own schedule: quite the opposite. Hicks says that Stevens’s daily plans were routinely circulated within the State Department. Specifically, his planned travel to Benghazi was shared with headquarters via email several weeks in advance of the visit and in regular staffing reports during the trip. Headquarters “knew Chris was going to Benghazi for five days during a gap between principal officers until Benghazi’s new principal officer arrived,” Hicks tells me with certainty.
I’m not even sure we knew he was going to Benghazi, State Department officials had told reporters.
On a difficult assignment in Libya, Stevens wasn’t the kind to whine or complain when his security requests were denied. Given the choice to go to Benghazi with the protection he had or not go at all, he would always have chosen the former. To sit behind the relative safety of the walls of the posh embassy in Tripoli would be no kind of job for a guy like him. It wouldn’t be a job worth having.
Stevens served only three short months as the U.S. ambassador to Libya before being murdered by terrorist thugs.
On February 26, 2013, President Obama meets with a small group of senators at the White House and makes a brief reference to Stevens’s presence in Benghazi on September 11. “We screwed up,” Mr. Obama reportedly tells the lawmakers. “Chris shouldn’t have been there.”
| THE LIGHT SWITCHES OFF
There’s a saying some of us have: The news broadcasts are in love with a story, until the day they aren’t.
This refers to the mysterious popularity cycle many stories seem to follow. Developments on the same story may air night after night with the lead producers wanting more, More, MORE. So you keep digging. You work your sources. You get plugged in. Day and night. Then one day you come to work and they don’t want to hear it anymore. Like a light switch. Like you entered an alternate universe where they would never be interested in such a story. They look at you as if to say, Why are you still talking about this? From that point on, it can be a mighty battle to convince the broadcasts to air a development, even when it’s more significant than developments they aired just a few days before. In the other universe. Back when they were giddy over the story.
I can’t fully explain it; I can only tell you this is how it is. As the correspondent, you never really know why the interest falls off. Maybe a bigger story emerges. Maybe viewer feedback indicates the audience has tired of the subject. Maybe the White House and Democrats’ phone calls, emails, and blogs are taking a toll. You don’t ask and the bosses don’t explain. This is just part of the job.
But if you’re me, you keep pitching developments because the good ol’ University of Florida–trained journalist in you doesn’t allow herself to be steered away from a legitimate story that’s still unfolding. Your job is to keep following the leads no matter where they go. It’s what I’m trained to do.
For that reason, I suppose, two of my former CBS Evening News executive producers have independently referred to me as a “pit bull.” Jim Murphy was first to use the metaphor and I wasn’t quite sure initially whether he meant it as a compliment or insult. When one of Murphy’s successors, Rick Kaplan, also called me a pit bull, I settled on the idea that it was a compliment. (Why not?) Once a pit bull chews into something, it doesn’t let go. I think one of the shortfalls of journalists is our short attention span. Our tendency to cover a story, get stonewalled, and quickly move on to an easier target. We also lack follow-through. We raise questions and don’t stick with the story long enough to find the answers. Chewing in and not letting go—as long as there’s more meat—is what I love to do most.
Yet when you keep pitching a story they’ve grown tired of, it makes them uncomfortable. Colleagues say, Why don’t you just move on? You’re wasting your time. You know they don’t want that story anymore. You get the feeling that some of the managing producers are thinking, Why can’t you just make it easy on us and shut up? They don’t say that. But you can tell by the way they act. They don’t want to know what you’ve learned. They argue against the story without knowing the facts. Or they may say they love the story but there’s just no time for it in the broadcast. There’s that big weather story we have to cover. And more fires out west. You get the picture. They’re dug in and not going to change their mind.
A personal favorite is the attempt to squelch by labeling all new developments “incremental.” As in, the story you’re offering is just an incremental development. Or it’s too incremental. I first heard the term used in this context just a few years ago. Once a managing producer uttered it, it really caught on and it seemed everyone began to parrot it. Like the first time an executive said a story was “a bridge too far.” Pretty soon, all the senior producers around him were saying every story development they didn’t want was “a bridge too far.” Everybody’s got their own. NBC talks about stories not having “enough uplift,” as in they’re not positive enough. I was originally so stumped by the application of the term incremental that I looked it up in the dictionary. Incremental simply means an increase or decrease in a series on a fixed scale. What’s wrong with reporting a story development that’s incremental? If I can advance a story by reporting a development that’s 50 percent better each time, in fixed increments, isn’t that a good thing? But what these producers are really trying to imply—however inartfully—is that the development is too small or meaningless to merit a place in the broadcast. I found the word used in this context by broadcast producers dating as far back as January 15, 1994, in a story about how long it took the networks to begin covering the Clinton Whitewater scandal. In the article, an NBC Nightly News executive producer was quoted as using two of my favorite catchphrases often invoked to stop a story: “piling on” and “incremental.” In covering Whitewater, the producer stated that, “The caution for us is to make sure we are not piling on . . . not just another incremental nag.” Today we routinely hear “incremental” and “piling on” invoked as excuses for stories they really don’t want, even as we observe that developments on stories that they like are aired in the tiniest of increments. The phrase would rear its head again as I covered HealthCare.gov.
When this happens, I continue publishing online, where the thirst for great stories is insatiable and space is, thankfully, unlimited. There are always niche followers who will seek out the material online that they can’t find anywhere else.
The height of popularity for the Benghazi story inside CBS is when I get Colonel Wood on camera in October 2012. But even then, not everybody is happy. I happen to be in New York City, where I’ve just picked up an investigative Emmy for Fast and Furious. It’s the first New York visit that my producer on the Benghazi story, Kim, has made with me. She quite correctly detects that she’s getting the cold shoulder from New York colleagues she’s never met before. I’m getting it, too. I tell her I call it the Big Freeze and not to worry. There’s no point in trying to figure it out; their response isn’t logic based. It’s visceral. Having worked at CBS for nearly twenty years, I tell Kim that there are groups of people who are so ideologically entrenched, they literally see you as the enemy if you do stories that contradict their personal beliefs. They may not even consciously understand why it is that they hate you—and I do mean hate—but they do. “It has nothing to do with you,” I explain to Kim. “They don’t like you because you work with me.” She thinks it’s crazy. I’m used to it.
Through mid-October, I and my CBS News colleagues in Washington, D.C., including Jan Crawford, Margaret Brennan, and David Martin, break a number of important stories. So do our foreign correspondents. But as things look worse for the Obama administration and the election draws near in late October, the light switch turns off. Most of my Benghazi stories from that point on would be reported not on television, but on the Web.
| DYING FOR THE TRUTH
In the early days after the Benghazi attacks, high-ranking Obama administration officials seem to be on the very same page. But it’s a page pulled from a work of fiction.
First, here’s the nonfiction version.
Americans on the ground in Libya believed from the outset that it was an act of terror. And Libyan officials immediately concluded that it was terrorism. A State Department Operations Center alert issued mid-attack stated that the al-Qaeda–linked “Ansar al-Sharia Claims Responsibility for Benghazi Attack.” The first interagency talking points read “. . . Islamic extremists with ties to al-Qaeda participated in the attack.”
But before any of that information became public, the Obama administration painted a very different picture.
White House spokesman Carney doesn’t refer to the attacks as “terrorism” in briefing reporters on September 12. President Obama also avoids the t-word when speaking in the Rose Garden the same day. He calls what happened “an outrageous and shocking attack,” “senseless violence,” and “brutal acts” but never possibly the work of terrorists. He refers to the assailants as “killers” and “attackers.” Only when he segues to evoking the World Trade Center attacks does the president use the phrase “acts of terror.”
As luck would have it, 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft is at the White House on this day for a previously scheduled interview and asks the president about his wording on Benghazi.
STEVE KROFT Mr. President, this morning you went out of your way to avoid the use of the word terrorism in connection with the Libya attack.
PRESIDENT OBAMA Right.
STEVE KROFT Do you believe that this was a terrorist attack?
PRESIDENT OBAMA Well, it’s too early to know exactly how this came about, what group was involved, but obviously it was an attack on Americans.
That brief part of the interview isn’t big news at the time and doesn’t even make the air on CBS News. But weeks later, there’s a reason to take another look at it when President Obama is debating the Republican candidate for president, Mitt Romney. In that debate on October 16, Mr. Obama claims that in the Rose Garden on September 12, he definitively called Benghazi an act of terror.
Remember, that’s not what he said in the interview with Kroft. Too early to know.
Then there’s Secretary of State Clinton. Like Carney and President Obama, she avoids calling Benghazi a “terrorist act” in her September 11 public statement, her September 12 public statement and her September 14 speech at the ceremonial return of the bodies of the four American victims. Instead, she refers to it as an “attack.” “Assault.” “Rage and violence . . . over an awful Internet video.” She refers to the terrorist attackers as “thugs,” “killers,” and a “mob.” The only nod she gives to the notion that it might be something different is when she quotes a foreign official who called the event “an act of ugly terror.”
But administration officials being on the same page means a lot more than just tiptoeing around use of the word terrorism. They also steer public attention toward the idea that an anti-Muslim YouTube video turned ordinary protesters into violent attackers. “Some have sought to justify this vicious behavior as a response to inflammatory material posted on the Internet,” Clinton says the night of the attack. “The United States deplores any intentional effort to denigrate the religious beliefs of others.”
Family members of two victims say that Clinton and other administration officials personally consoled them at the return of the bodies by saying, We’ll find whoever made that awful video. Why focus the families’ attention on the producer of a perfectly legal video instead of the actual killers? Why not instead say, We’ll find whoever killed your loved one?
Meantime, the Sunday political talk shows were just a few days away and on September 13, the White House asks Clinton to take the hot seat and make the TV appearances. She has zero interest. One source tells me: “She’d rather chew tin foil.” So it’s decided the job of appearing on television will be assigned to the U.S. ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice.
On Sunday, September 16, Rice makes the rounds on TV and seems to be on the same page as Carney, the president, and Clinton. On Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer, even when she follows an appearance by a Libyan official who declares that the Benghazi attacks were “preplanned” and many of those arrested are linked to al-Qaeda and its affiliates, Rice sticks firmly to her own talking points, which differ. She says the attacks were “spontaneously” inspired by protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo.
It’s still unclear as to how an untrue story about protesters and a YouTube video grows to such prominence in the Obama administration’s initial narrative. But we do now know the genesis of Rice’s infamous talking points. Shortly after CIA director Petraeus gave a classified briefing on September 14 to the House Intelligence Committee, the lead Democrat on the panel, Maryland’s Dutch Ruppersberger, asked, “What can I say on TV”? Later, an administration source says to me, “How cynical is that? All he cares about is what he can say on the campaign trail.” In his defense, Ruppersberger said he simply wanted clarity on what material was classified and what could be shared with inquisitive constituents. In any event, Ruppersberger’s question got the ball rolling.
There’s interagency disagreement over how much should be disclosed. Should the public really be told about suspicions of terrorism? Is it wise to let Americans hear that the CIA had issued warnings in advance? As the various agencies duke it out, Mr. Obama’s deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes intervenes and emails that there will be a deputies’ meeting the next morning, on September 15, to work out the issues. One official involved later tells me, “That’s polite code for ‘let’s not debate this on email for eighteen hours.’” After the Saturday morning meeting, the talking points emerge drastically reduced and finessed. (As mentioned earlier, Ben Rhodes is the brother of CBS News president David Rhodes.)
Four days after Rice’s Sunday talk show appearances, on September 20, a team of Obama administration officials agrees to brief the House and Senate in closed sessions with the freshest information. There, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper removes any doubt as to the origin of the assaults and tells members of Congress that Benghazi “had all the earmarks of a premeditated attack.” No longer is it peddled as “spontaneous.” Upon hearing this news, Senator John McCain, a Republican from Arizona, storms out of the room while Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina utters an expletive to a colleague sitting next to him. They feel they’d been misled until this point. An Obama administration official who was present later calls this moment a turning point. “Something just snapped. [Senators] started yelling and screaming, ‘Why did Susan [Rice] lie?’ . . . Susan was done.”
Meanwhile, another controversy is waiting to boil over within the Obama administration: a sex scandal involving the CIA’s Petraeus. The timing is—intriguing. Only after the Benghazi attacks, as Petraeus’s loyalty to the administration falls into question, does everything turn sour for the spy chief.
In the immediate aftermath of the Benghazi attacks, Petraeus first draws ire from some administration colleagues for not reading from the Carney-Obama-Clinton-Rice book of fiction. While they’re pushing the spontaneous protest narrative, he’s disclosing full information on the suspected al-Qaeda links to House Intelligence Committee members at a classified briefing, according to those present. Then the talking points his agency approves for public dissemination on September 14 say that the CIA provided warnings on September 10 that the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, Egypt, could come under attack and that Benghazi was in a precarious state. Clinton’s state department sees the inclusion of that damning information in the CIA’s original proposed talking points as a “knee-jerk cover-your-ass moment” on Petraeus’s part. One official later tells me, “We thought, Why are you guys [Petraeus’s CIA] throwing us under the bus? . . . They made it seem like the State Department was given a warning they ignored. [But] no specific warning was given.”
Emails indicate that on September 15, 2012, a CIA representative sent Petraeus the final version of the talking points that had been revised “through the Deputies Committee” after “State voiced strong concerns with the original text.” The CIA’s references to terrorism and early warnings had been removed.
Petraeus expresses disapproval of the final version, writing that he assumes that they not be used. But his deputy, Morell, and the White House give them the green light.
Is all of this the beginning of the end of Petraeus’s career as CIA director?
Let’s look at a timeline constructed primarily using government accounts:
In November 2011, Petraeus, who’s married, allegedly begins an affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell.
The following summer, of 2012, the FBI discovers the affair and FBI director Robert Mueller is notified on a date the government won’t disclose. Also, at some point, the FBI interviews Petraeus and Broadwell and concludes national security hasn’t been breached. But the FBI continues investigating whether Petraeus had any involvement in sending harassing emails to a third party.
In late summer, on a date the government won’t reveal, Attorney General Eric Holder is notified of Petraeus’s troubles. Supposedly, the White House is kept in the dark. Apparently, Holder doesn’t think President Obama needs to know that one of his top cabinet-level officials is under FBI investigation (not to mention part of a potential sex scandal). No one starts developing a strategy in the event the Petraeus scandal blows up before the election. And, we’re to believe, not a soul worries that President Obama could get hit with a surprise question about Petraeus on the campaign trail.
Odd.
Then comes September 11.
Some Obama administration officials become frustrated if not downright angry with Petraeus and his post-attack behavior. His deputy, Morell, is given authority over the talking point edits and sides with the State Department against Petraeus’s desires. In late October, as Petraeus’s interagency relationships become increasingly strained over Benghazi, some FBI agents suddenly reach out to Republicans in Congress to disclose Petraeus’s dirty laundry. They eventually land at the office of Republican majority leader Eric Cantor. About that same time, the week of October 29, the FBI interviews Petraeus and Broadwell a second time.
Now, normally in Washington, D.C., this would be about the time the scandal goes viral. Republican leaders, alerted to a sensitive issue that they could argue has national security implications, could be expected to at least leak to the press. Especially with less than two weeks to go until the presidential election.
But strangely enough, that doesn’t happen. On October 31, in a move that seems to defy everything that defines Washington, the chief of staff for Congressman Cantor keeps publicly mum about the administration’s burgeoning scandal and instead confidentially contacts the FBI’s chief of staff about the Petraeus rumors. Even with the news having reached the president’s most ardent political opponents and with the election just a week away, the entire White House is still, somehow, for some reason, uninformed.
Fast-forward a week to November 6, the day of the election. Someone at the Justice Department, we’re told, has finally decided to tell Director of National Intelligence Clapper about Petraeus. (How good of a chief intelligence officer are you if you don’t know the head of the CIA has been under investigation by your FBI for months? And Republicans on the Hill know before you do?) Clapper calls Petraeus the same day and urges him to resign. It’s a stark reversal of the FBI’s pre-Benghazi determination that there was no harm in Petraeus staying on the job.
On Wednesday, November 7, according to the government’s accounts, somebody finally notifies the White House about all of the above. And when is the president himself finally looped in? Not until Thursday, November 8, say officials. The president accepts Petraeus’s resignation on Friday, November 9.
If President Obama was indeed kept out of the loop regarding one of his most important political appointees, it adds to the perceptions created during Fast and Furious when the president and his staff say they had no idea that a federal agency conducted a cross-border weapons operation that helped arm killer cartels in a foreign country. It adds to an image evoked after the Benghazi attacks when the president directed his staff to do everything they could, but didn’t speak to Libyan officials or personally keep in close touch with the secretary of defense. It builds upon the theme when the president said he didn’t know his own spy agency was monitoring friendly world leaders, and when his people insisted Obamacare was ready—only to have the website crash on opening day.
Then again, the timing of Petraeus’s departure could be purely coincidental. Maybe it had nothing to do with his supposed disloyalty to the administration after Benghazi. But one thing is certain: his inelegant and abrupt exit from the CIA ended the interagency resentments that he sparked in the aftermath of Benghazi. As for Petraeus’s insight into all of this? He’s not talking.
Though the administration and its supporters would repeat the mantra time and time again that the accusations were solely generated by politically motivated, conspiratorially minded, witch-hunting Republicans, the truth is that most of the damaging information came from Obama admnistration insiders. From government documents. From sources who were outraged by their own government’s behavior and what they viewed as a cover-up. From loyal Obama administration officials who testified truthfully under oath. From the State Department’s own employees. From military officials and rank-and-file.
Some of them were self-described Obama and Clinton supporters. One relayed to me how he had enthusiastically contributed to Obama’s first presidential campaign.
But all that was before Benghazi.
| MORE ON THE TALKING POINTS CONFUSION
Shortly after the talking points were constructed, there seemed to be endless secrecy and confusion surrounding them. But eighteen months later, called to a congressional hearing on the topic, former CIA deputy director Morell seems to have grown amazingly clear on the whole thing. Though he hadn’t offered up the information early on, he now tells Congress that he was the primary editing force behind the talking points. And that there were no political motivations behind removal of references to terrorism and prior warnings given to the State Department. That’s just the stuff of conspiracy theorists and right-wing crazies.
As I watch the testimony, my head spins with all the inconsistencies. I open the mental filing cabinet storing what’s been said over the many months and can’t help but notice that much of it doesn’t match up with what Morell is saying today. Today, he’s so bent on convincing Congress and the public that he, alone, made the substantive changes in the talking points, and that no politics were involved, that he’s in the awkward position of defending his mistaken reliance on bad intelligence as if he would do it all again the same way. Better for the false narrative to have been the result of poor intelligence analysis than politics.
The reason Morell is brought before the House Intelligence Committee is to answer for evidence unearthed in subpoenaed documents allegedly indicating he misled members of Congress by withholding what he knew about the genesis of the talking points.
First, he has to explain an email he received on September 15, 2012, from his own station chief on the ground in Libya stating that the attacks were “not an escalation of a protest” over a YouTube video. Morell says he and his Washington analysts disregarded the information as unreliable and didn’t pass it along to other agencies.
“I did not hide nor did I downplay the station chief’s comments as some have suggested, in fact I did the opposite,” Morell said.
Next, we finally learn the answer to the simple but much-dodged question: Who removed references to al-Qaeda from the talking points? Morell now says it was the CIA. Not him, personally, but “[t]he group of officers from our office of Congressional affairs and our office of public affairs.” (Previously, when I had reported the involvement of federal public affairs officials in editing the talking points, based on documents and my sources, government officials had vehemently denied the fact.)
Morell tells Congress it was his decision to remove the word Islamic from the phrase Islamic extremists and says he did it for two reasons: so as not to further inflame passions in the Islamic world and because “what other kind of extremists are there in Libya?”
Morell also explained that he opposed his boss, Petraeus, and removed language disclosing that the CIA had provided “warnings” in advance of the attacks.
“I thought it was an effort on the CIA’s part to make it look like we had warned and shift any blame to the State Department,” Morell testifies. “I made a decision at that moment I got the talking points I was going to take the . . . language out.” I wonder why Morell was calling the shots, subordinate to his boss. I wonder why he seemed to be watching out for the best interests of Clinton’s State Department over his own agency, the CIA.
As the hearing closes, I review the evolution of the talking points narrative.
On Friday, November 16, 2012, Petraeus had told members of Congress that it wasn’t the CIA that revised the talking points. And another CIA official told reporters that the edits were made at a “senior level in the interagency process” so as not to tip off al-Qaeda as to what the United States knew, and to protect sources and methods. Soon thereafter, another reason was given. A source from the Office of the Director for National Intelligence (ODNI) said that office made the edits as part of the interagency process because the links to al-Qaeda were deemed too “tenuous” to make public. Then, later in November 2012, Morell provided yet another account in a meeting with Republican senators John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Kelly Ayotte: he said it was the FBI that removed the references “to prevent compromising an ongoing criminal investigation.”
But it was just a matter of hours before there was yet another revision. A CIA official contacted Graham and stated that Morell “misspoke” in the earlier meeting and that it was, in fact, the CIA, not the FBI, that deleted the al-Qaeda references.
Morell is so clear today on his recollection that changed the talking points. Why was he so unclear right after it all happened?
| HISTORY REPEATING?
The Accountability Review Board’s investigative report on Benghazi begins with a quote attributed to Spanish philosopher George Santayana in 1905.
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
The inclusion of the quote is ironic because, in some ways, history has repeated itself with Benghazi. Back in 1998, there was another tragic story of embassy security requested and denied. Lack of money was blamed. An Accountability Review Board was convened. It made recommendations to prevent something similar from happening again.
But it did happen again.
In 1998, Clinton was in the White House as first lady. And who was at State Department headquarters? None other than Susan Rice, Patrick Kennedy, and their boss, Ambassador Thomas Pickering, future head of the Benghazi Accountability Review Board, where he will be tasked with impartially investigating his longtime friends and former colleagues.
In 1998, the terrorist targets were U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Two hundred twenty-four people, including twelve Americans, were killed by car bombers and more than five thousand were injured. The U.S. ambassador to Kenya, Prudence Bushnell, was among those hurt. Bushnell had warned eight months before that security at her embassy was inadequate. Twice she requested a new building.
“Unfortunately, we lacked the money to respond,” Kennedy explained to reporters at State Department headquarters in the immediate aftermath in 1998. “[O]ther embassy projects had a higher priority than Embassy Nairobi for our limited funds. We just did not have the funds to meet all our needs.”
As with Libya, the State Department also had declined the U.S. military’s offer of assistance in Kenya. Kennedy told reporters that months before the East Africa bombings, “the U.S. military Central Command expressed to the Department its concern over the vulnerability of the Nairobi chancellory,” and was also worried that “the embassy was close to the street at a busy intersection.” The military offered to do a survey of the embassy but “the [State] Department . . . declined the offer of the military to send one of their teams, because we had already scheduled a security assessment team to visit the post in March of this year,” said Kennedy.
The spring before the bombings, Bushnell tried to sound alarm bells at State Department headquarters as Stevens later did in Libya. She fired off an emergency cable to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. It said that resource constraints “were endangering embassy personnel” and “expressed concern about crime, administrative matters and safety.” State Department headquarters replied that “a new building was ranked low in relative priority, compared to the needs of other embassies.”
| TWO QUOTES
On January 23, 2013, Secretary of State Clinton appears before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and takes fire from Republicans on the Benghazi issue. Senator Ron Johnson, a Republican from Wisconsin, is probing Clinton’s initial blame of the YouTube video. Clinton gets testy and makes a statement that may haunt her for some time.
“With all due respect,” responds Clinton, raising her voice and appearing angry, “the fact that we had four dead Americans, was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided that they’d go kill some Americans? . . . What difference at this point does it make? It is our job to figure out what happened and do everything we can to prevent it from ever happening again, Senator.”
What difference at this point does it make?
To me, as a journalist, it certainly makes a difference. For one reason, it makes a difference if it turns out that anyone in the administration intentionally deceived the American public. And there are clues that point in that general direction. It also makes a difference if Benghazi was a well-planned attack long in the making amid warnings from Americans on the ground: it makes the poor security decisions even more egregious. Furthermore, as I listen to Clinton at the hearing, I can’t help but think that she’s continuing to pose scenarios in her controversial, passionate response that never happened. And she knows it. The Benghazi attacks were neither “because of a protest” nor were they the result of “guys out for a walk last night who decided to kill some Americans.” Why is she still evoking those spontaneous images when there have now been official acknowledgments that it was a preplanned terrorist attack that required a great deal of coordination and practice? From knowing when and where the ambassador would be, to the incredibly skilled mortar hits that landed on the CIA annex—too precise to be lucky or spontaneous.
Kennedy likewise seems out of touch with the public when he testifies to Congress on September 18, 2013, a year and one week after the attacks. When pressed by Representative Ted Poe, a Republican from Texas, Kennedy acknowledges Benghazi was the work of terrorists. But, as if reading from the same page as Clinton, he indicates it doesn’t really matter.
“I know that this was a terrorist attack and it doesn’t matter to me whether it was Ansar al-Sharia or al-Qaeda or whoever,” Kennedy testifies before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. “These were terrorists and whatever organization they belong to, they are enemies of the United States and they must be brought to justice.
Republican Adam Kinzinger of Illinois replies, “I think it does matter . . . because ultimately, it gives us a blueprint on who we need to kill or capture, which I think is very important and I hope that’s done.”
| MRS. CLINTON’S BENGHAZI CHAPTER
Earlier, I described the propaganda strategies employed by the powers that be to shape public opinion. Astroturf tactics. Controversializing stories and those who report them. Use of trademark catchphrases.
No power or political party holds a monopoly on these techniques. But Clinton’s use of them in the case of Benghazi is instructive.
In a June 18, 2014, interview with Greta Van Susteren of FOX News, Clinton said that her own assessment of the Benghazi attacks “careened from the video had something to do with it, the video had nothing to do with it . . . I was trying to make sense of it.” She also spoke of being confused in the “fog of war,” a phrase that Obama officials first evoked in the weeks after the attacks—and often repeated—to help explain why it didn’t mount an outside military rescue of the trapped Americans that night.
The thing is, there’s little sense of “careening” assessments or the “fog of war” in the documentary evidence recorded at the time.
It was the night of September 11, 2012, and at 5:55 p.m. Eastern time, while the attacks were still under way, a State Department email included a report that “the extremist group Ansar Al Sharia ha[d] taken credit” and U.S. officials had asked Libyan officials to pursue the faction. A few minutes later, an alert from Clinton’s State Department Operations Center stated that the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli also reported that the Islamic military group Ansar al-Sharia had claimed responsibility and called for an attack on the embassy in Tripoli.
But four hours later, in her first public statement on the attacks at 10:07 p.m., Clinton spoke of none of that. She did, for the first time, introduce the connection to the video.
“Some have sought to justify this vicious behavior as a response to inflammatory material posted on the Internet,” Clinton’s statement reported. “The United States deplores any intentional effort to denigrate the religious beliefs of others. Our commitment to religious tolerance goes back to the very beginning of our nation.”
If Clinton wasn’t part of an effort to steer the narrative, then why didn’t she report that terrorists might be involved, as many behind the scenes had already concluded? Or at least say what the administration has so vigorously claimed since: that there was wild uncertainty? Or that assessments were—foggy? And if they were so foggy, then why was she careful not to evoke terrorism—yet quick to finger the video?
We later discovered that President Obama telephoned Clinton during the attacks around the time that she issued the statement. White House spokesman Carney had, in the past, declined to answer whether that call came before or after. The obvious question is: Did the president and Clinton consult over her statement blaming the video?
Twenty-one months later, in an interview with FOX News anchor Bret Baier, Clinton was fuzzy on details and, apparently, hadn’t bothered to refresh herself on them even though she had just authored a new book that included a whole chapter about Benghazi—which is why she was now giving interviews.
Baier found Clinton vague when he asked about the timing of her statement and the president’s call.
“The statement went out, you know, I don’t know the exact time, it, my recollection is it went out before [the call with the president],” Clinton said. And she wouldn’t give a yes or no when asked whether they discussed the video: a fact she surely should know considering the controversy over that very issue.
“I don’t know that I talked about it with him at that conversation,” Clinton said.
Documents revealed in spring of 2014 cast further doubt on Clinton’s description of fogginess. In a State Department email the morning after the attack, her then-assistant secretary of state Beth Jones told Libya’s ambassador that “the group that conducted the attacks—Ansar Al Sharia—is affiliated with Islamic extremists.” Period.
In a September 20, 2012, appearance on Univision, with Congress and the media chipping away at the video narrative, President Obama seemed to take a stab at blending ideas: retaining the video story but merging it with one that matched more closely with the terrorism reality.
“What we do know is that the natural protests that arose because of the outrage over the video were used as an excuse by extremists to see if they can also directly harm U.S. interests,” Mr. Obama said.
The same day, there was a new spin from Carney who told the press that there was no reason to say there was a terrorist attack because everyone knew that, silly!
“It is, I think, self-evident that what happened in Benghazi was a terrorist attack. Our embassy was attacked violently, and the result was four deaths of American officials. So, again, that’s self-evident,” said Carney.
Except, perhaps, to Clinton, who says she was careening.
Carney’s remark reminds me of a comment Morell made in April 2014 when he finally admitted to Congress that he removed the word Islamic from the phrase Islamic extremists. He did it not to obfuscate, he told Congress, but because, “what other kind of extremists are there in Libya?” Everyone knows that. We don’t have to say it.
And on September 25, a full two weeks after the attacks, the president addressed the U.N. General Assembly and continued to refer to “killers” rather than “terrorists,” evoking the “crude and disgusting video” that “sparked outrage throughout the Muslim world.”
Why was the conversation with the American public so starkly different than the one taking place behind the scenes—the accurate one—unless the narrative was being seriously manipulated?
Clinton now freely embraces in her book what she and the White House so carefully avoided saying in those early days. In fact, she’s decided to own it, if one can glean anything from the first sentence in her Benghazi chapter: the American victims, she writes, “were killed in a terrorist attack.” It’s almost as if she wants to convince us that she said so all along. In what looks like a striking attempt to rewrite her post-Benghazi narrative and speeches, Clinton goes heavy in her book on recounting instances in which she used terms such as “heavily armed militants,” “violent attackers,” or “extremists,” but she conveniently omits how she repeatedly pointed to the YouTube video.
For example, she writes in her book that on September 12, “I laid out the facts as we knew them” to the press corps, reporting that “heavily armed militants” had assaulted the compounds. She fails to mention that, for the second day in a row, she pointed to the video. Same with the statement she made on September 13 when she appeared with Morocco’s foreign minister. Same with the statement she made on September 14 when she met with the victims’ families at Andrews Air Force Base.
Of that meeting, Clinton writes in her book, “All you can do is offer a human touch, a kind word, a gentle embrace.” She leaves out the part about her speech at that same event in which she stated, “We’ve seen rage and violence directed at American embassies over an awful Internet video that we had nothing to do with.” And she doesn’t address the reports from victims’ family members who said that Clinton privately promised them that she would hunt down the maker of the YouTube video—never mentioning that she intended to hunt down the terrorists who actually killed their loved ones.
With the passage of time and the release of more facts and documents, Clinton appears to be evolving her position from “the attackers were motivated by an awful, disgusting YouTube video” to “the video played a role.”
Clinton writes in her book, “I know there are some who don’t want to hear that an internet video played a role” in the September 11 upheaval in the Mideast, such as the attacks on the U.S. embassy in Cairo. She says it “would have been strange not to consider . . . that [the video] might have had the same effect [in Benghazi], too. That’s just common sense.”
The problem with that defense is that, at the time, Clinton hadn’t set forth the video scenario as “commonsense” musings. She falsely portrayed it as a fact, as if exclusive to the scenario of preplanned terrorism. We now know that this was contrary to the facts she and other Obama officials had in hand and contrary to what her own representatives were privately telling Libyan officials.
In her book, Clinton employs other techniques to deflect. She ridicules those pursuing unanswered questions as “fixated on chasing conspiracy theories.” It’s similar to the way in which Democrats reject allegations about the IRS’s targeting conservative groups and the conveniently missing emails as “conspiracy theories.” They seem to think that evoking the word conspiracy will lead some voters to dismiss the concerns. They controversialize the legitimate reporting of their self-generated controversies by using the language of propagandists.
Throughout her Benghazi chapter, Clinton inadvertently highlights contradictory characterizations that the Obama administration has switched between, depending upon which was needed for expediency.
For example, the administration advanced the narrative that it couldn’t have predicted the Benghazi attacks. (That was to explain why it denied security requests and had no military help accessible.) Yet Clinton also argues that they were vigilantly prepared. (That was so as not to appear to be out of touch with the well-documented dangers.)
To be specific, Obama officials have stated that there was no reason to put the military on special alert on the 9/11 anniversary because there had never been a repeat attack on that date. But in her book, Clinton states that, prior to the Benghazi attacks, the 9/11 anniversary added a “potentially combustible element” that “like every year . . . prompted our intelligence and security officials to proceed with extra caution.”
We’re left to wonder what extra caution was supposedly exercised, since examples are lacking. Stevens and his team weren’t granted the extra security that they said was necessary. Nobody dissuaded him from making the trip to Benghazi on September 11. The military says nobody was on a short leash for quick action the night of the assaults and that no assets were in place. And even when the assault on the U.S. Embassy in Cairo foreshadowed the Benghazi attacks, nobody seemed to “proceed with extra caution” to evacuate the Benghazi staff. Everything about the scenario seemed to telegraph a lack of extra caution.
Two more opposing narratives involve the administration originally indicating that it believed the attacks were going to be short-lived (to explain why they decided not to deploy outside military rescue teams at the outset), while Clinton claims, in her book, that they expected the violence to continue and spread (to give the impression that they were on top of it).
To be specific, Clinton writes that, during the Benghazi attacks, “I did not believe this crisis was over. We could expect more unrest to come.” She says she warned Libya’s president not to “assume the threat had passed . . . We also had to get ready for the possibility of other assaults elsewhere. We had to assume and plan for the worst—the possibility of further attacks against U.S. interests in the region.”
If the administration anticipated an indefinite spate of attacks and violence, as Clinton states, then why did they conversely argue there was no point in spinning up military resources because they “couldn’t get there in time”?
Further, Clinton seems to contradict her own assertion that they expected additional unrest when she writes that there was no point sending special operations forces standing by in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, because that they would take several hours to muster and were more than five thousand miles away. Why wouldn’t one go ahead and muster them if they were truly assuming and planning for the worst, and if the administration were doing everything possible (as the president says he had ordered)?
Regarding the talking points used by Ambassador Rice— Clinton appears to attempt to revise the facts by stating something that simply isn’t the case:
“The extensive public record now makes clear that Susan was using information that originated with and was approved by the CIA.”
In my opinion, that’s just plain wrong.
In fact, the “extensive public record” indicates that then-head of the CIA Petraeus expressed great disapproval of the talking points Rice used. Also, the “extensive public record” shows that White House officials and the State Department had significant input into editing the talking points into their final, scrubbed version.
Perhaps the most glaring section of Clinton’s Benghazi chapter that deserves analysis is the analogy she applies to those investigating Benghazi.
“If somebody breaks into your home and takes your family hostage,” she writes, “how much time are you going to spend focused on how the intruder spent his day as opposed to how best to rescue your loved ones and then prevent it from happening again?”
It strikes me that she and other administration officials who went to a great deal of effort to steer the public toward a false narrative now are spending equal effort asking why the narrative matters at all.
To expand on Clinton’s clumsy analogy, one might counter that:
If somebody breaks into your home and takes your family hostage, are you going to decide, somehow in advance, that the hostage rescue team can’t get there in time so there’s no point in trying? And if there are policemen in the next neighborhood who want to help, are you going to order them to stay put to protect the neighbors instead of helping the family that’s in danger now?
The fact is, the controversies over Benghazi don’t surround questions about how the terrorists “spent their day,” as Clinton implies. Those asking questions want to know why the landlord failed to secure the house when the family had asked for help in so many different ways, and when the landlord had been warned that a dangerous intrusion was imminent. They want to know the intruder’s motivation: did he act alone or is he part of a dangerous ring that could strike again? They want to know why the police were told to do everything they could to help, yet didn’t come to the rescue. They want to know why the police weren’t better placed to provide assistance. They want to know if the police attempted a cover-up after the fact. They want to make sure that the truth is fully aired and that those responsible for any missteps or cover-ups are held accountable to help avoid a repeat occurrence in the future.
Throughout the chapter, Clinton laments “a regrettable amount of misinformation, speculation and flat-out deceit by some in politics and the media.” On that point, many would agree. They just might disagree on who’s responsible for perpetuating the deceit.
| CBS HIRES BENGHAZI FIGURE
In January 2014, Morell, the ex-CIA deputy director was hired as a consultant for CBS News. At the same time, the government was still very much embroiled in controversy over its monitoring of citizens and journalists, targeting of whistleblowers, and the handling of Benghazi. The hire drew immediate commentary from some of my sources.
CBS is employing one of the most controversial figures in the Benghazi controversy. Are you comfortable with that? one asked.
Once in the CIA, always in the CIA, said another. And now he’s in your newsroom.
I felt that Morell was hired to spin rather than spy. But regardless, CBS was presenting him on the air to viewers as though he were a neutral observer, without disclosing his political and financial ties. This risked opening CBS to criticism that, in my view, we simply couldn’t afford. Network news operations are huge enterprises and it’s impossible to prevent every mistake. But it’s foolish not to prevent the obviously preventable ones.
About a month before CBS announced Morell’s hiring, he’d also been hired at that PR firm dominated by Hillary Clinton loyalists: Beacon Global Strategies. I also got a tip that Morell was the target of new congressional allegations that he hid or gave false information about Benghazi. To protect CBS’s reputation and interests, I felt it was urgent that we disclose Morell’s financial and political ties when he made his on-air appearances.
On February 18, 2014, I sent an email to the CBS ethics czar to express this concern. I said that for our own protection at CBS, we had a responsibility to disclose Morell’s relationships each time he appears. Putting it out front avoids criticism and gives the public the crucial information it needs to decide how much weight to give Morell’s opinions on various topics. Disclosure is our friend. It protects us.
I instinctively knew that my email would further my reputation as a troublemaker rather than that of a loyal employee watching out for CBS interests. But I hit the SEND button.
Before long, the ethics czar called me. He didn’t agree that we had an ethical duty to disclose Morell’s financial and political ties each time he appears. He did acknowledge we should reveal them if Morell were asked a question specifically about Hillary Clinton.
“Well, the problem with that,” I countered, “is that people who initiate propaganda are pretty clever. They steer public opinion in less obvious ways than in answers to direct questions. He may not be asked about Hillary, but can still subtly steer opinion in a certain direction. If we disclose his connections each time, we don’t have to worry that somebody will later accuse us of hiding them.”
I wondered if CBS even knew, prior to my pointing it out, that Morell worked for the company largely composed of ex-Clinton and Obama officials.
“Did you even know he worked for Beacon before I told you?”
“No,” admitted the ethics czar.
The next morning, Morell appeared on CBS This Morning. There was no disclosure of his financial or political ties.
| MORELL’S CONTRADICTIONS
On May 3, 2014, I have left my job at CBS and am now fully free to write on my own website about yet another contradiction in the administration’s Benghazi narrative. Morell is at the center of it.
The contradiction surfaces when Vietor, former spokesman for President Obama’s National Security Staff (NSS) gives an interview to FOX News anchor Bret Baier. In it, Vietor acknowledges that, while at the White House, he made at least one substantive change to the talking points. That change was to add a line that seemed to advance the notion that the attacks were born from spontaneous demonstrations.
It’s a stark one-eighty from the story the administration has told to date.
“According to the e-mails and the time line, the CIA circulates new talking points after they’ve removed the mention of al-Qaeda,” Baier says to Vietor, “and then at 6:21 the White House, you, add a line about the administration warning of September 10th of social media reports calling for demonstrations. True?”
“Uh, I believe so,” answers Vietor.
Both Morell and White House spokesman Carney had previously insisted that White House officials only made a single edit, changing “consulate” to “diplomatic post.”
Carney said it at a White House press briefing on May 10, 2013: “[T]he only edit made by the White House or the State Department to those talking points generated by the CIA was a change from—referring to the facility that was attacked in Benghazi, from ‘consulate,’ because it was not a consulate, to ‘diplomatic post.’ . . . But the point being, it was a matter of non-substantive/factual correction.”
On April 2, 2014, Morell repeated the claim under oath before Congress.
“To be very clear the White House did not make any substantive changes to the talking points.”
He was even more specific and adamant in the written testimony he submitted in connection with the hearing.
“No one at the NSS [where Vietor worked at the time] suggested or requested a single substantive change. That is a simple fact, and calling it a myth doesn’t change the reality,” wrote Morell.
With Vietor feeling chatty in the FOX News interview, Baier continues to press.
“Did you also change ‘attacks’ to ‘demonstrations’ in the talking points?” Baier asks.
“Uh maybe. I don’t really remember,” answers Vietor.
“You don’t remember?”
“Dude, this was like two years ago . . .”
“The key part is ‘attacks’ to ‘demonstrations . . .’” continues Baier.
“Yeah,” says Vietor.
“Did you do that?”
At this point, Vietor appears to rethink the wisdom of the conversation. Perhaps he recalls that Morell had provided a different account to Congress a month before.
“No . . . what did we—what was the question?” says Vietor.
“The CIA talking points,” Baier repeats. “It was edited from ‘attacks’ to ‘demonstrations.’”
“No,” says Vietor. “Michael Morell testified to what he changed and what was changed in those, in those emails, the whole process of that, Michael Morell testified that he took them back, didn’t like them and changed them.”
Vietor’s new contradictions create a turning point.
After more than a year of resistance, House Speaker John Boehner at last gets behind the idea of convening a special select committee to investigate Benghazi, replacing the piecemeal efforts of four separate committees.
About this time, a member of Congress sends me an email titled, “You see this? First question I have is, was this speech really delivered Sept. 12?”
The email links to a speech that CBS president Rhodes delivered to the San Antonio Chamber of Commerce the day after the Benghazi attacks. In it, Rhodes told the audience, “Our government thinks that, you know, there’s a really good chance this was not just a spontaneous mob reaction to what some thought was an offensive film but actually a coordinated effort timed to the 9/11 anniversary.”
Why were the Rhodes brothers giving their respective audiences opposing accounts at the same time? The CBS Rhodes seems to know right away that the government suspects a 9/11 terrorist attack. Did he know this from his brother at the White House, who then ended up steering the talking points toward the YouTube video narrative?
On May 8, 2014, my phone rings. It’s Senator Graham. He tells me he’s just had a conversation with the CBS Rhodes.
“He’s really worried about that speech he made,” Graham says.
“How do you know?” I ask.
“The sound of his voice.”
Senator Graham says he wanted to give Rhodes the benefit of the doubt. He told Rhodes that he assumed his information came from his own CBS reporters and “not your brother.”
“That’s absolutely true,” Rhodes replied, according to Graham.
“So how did it go from what you said on the twelfth based on good reporting, to what Rice said on the sixteenth? What happened during those days that fundamentally turned the story around?” Graham asked Rhodes.
“Therein lies the question,” Rhodes replied, according to Graham.
Graham also told Rhodes that he didn’t think his brother alone could have been responsible for the spontaneous protest narrative.
“Probably not,” Rhodes said, according to Graham.
| FACT-CHECK
If one compares the Obama administration’s first accounts of the Benghazi fiasco—the pages from the novel, if you will—to the facts that have trickled out since, the contrasts are stark.
CLAIM Nobody ever denied security requests for Libya.
FACT A long-documented trail of denied security requests was produced.
CLAIM The Defense Department pulled out Wood’s team.
FACT The Defense Department offered Wood’s team at no cost for the State Department’s use as long as they wanted it. It’s the State Department that ended its mission.
CLAIM Wood’s team never left Tripoli so wouldn’t have helped in Benghazi had they stayed.
FACT Wood and his team had been to Benghazi on numerous occasions and would have helped guard Stevens there.
CLAIM The administration didn’t even know Stevens was going to Benghazi on 9/11.
FACT Stevens’s trip and schedule were widely distributed in advance and during the trip.
CLAIM Stevens went to Benghazi independently and nobody really knew why.
FACT Headquarters was informed Stevens was filling the Benghazi post while it awaited arrival of a new principal officer and he was also said to be on a personal tasking from Secretary Clinton.
CLAIM The attackers were spontaneous protesters inspired by a YouTube video.
FACT Extensive eyewitness testimony and documents reflect terrorism from the very start. Nobody thought it was spontaneous or YouTube inspired.
CLAIM Security in Benghazi was adequate on 9/11.
FACT Security in Benghazi was sorely lacking on 9/11.
CLAIM The White House photo office will answer our CBS News photo request by the end of the day.
FACT The White House photo office never fulfilled our request.
CLAIM The FEST team doesn’t have any expertise relevant to the Benghazi attacks.
FACT The Benghazi attack scenario fits precisely what the team says it’s trained for.
CLAIM President Obama called the Benghazi attacks “terrorist attacks” in the Rose Garden the day after they happened.
FACT President Obama acknowledged in a 60 Minutes interview that day that he had intentionally avoided calling them terrorist attacks.
CLAIM Everything that could be done was done to attempt an outside rescue.
FACT No rescue airspace clearance from Libya was sought, no aircraft was sent to buzz the crowd, the nearest Special Forces team was not immediately dispatched, a special FBI team in the United States was stood up and down throughout the night but never left the States, President Obama did not call Libyan leaders for assistance, NATO was not contacted seeking possible help, one of the small teams in Tripoli that planned to fly to Benghazi was ordered to stay in Tripoli, the specialty FEST team in the United States was prevented from responding, the Counterterrorism Security Group tasked with providing advice on options was not convened even though it’s required by presidential directive.
CLAIM The White House made no substantive changes in the talking points.
FACT The White House made substantive changes in the talking points.
| BENGHAZI SELECT COMMITTEE
In June 2014, I’m on Capitol Hill to meet with Democrats and Republicans about the upcoming Select Committee on Benghazi.
I have little doubt that, as the committee spins up, there are meetings going on not far away. Meetings of PR officials strategizing how to delegitimize the Select Committee and its work, even before it’s begun. PR officials who are digging for dirt on the chairman of the committee, Trey Gowdy, a Republican former prosecutor from South Carolina.
These PR officials may not be the smartest kids on the block. But they have money. They have access to powerful people. And best of all, many in the news media are on their side.
| EPILOGUE
WOOD I heard about it in the evening, that there had been an attack on the compound in Benghazi. And I heard that there was a fatality. I didn’t find out till the next morning—when I woke up my son informed me—that the compound had been attacked and Ambassador Stevens had been killed.
ME Your friend.
WOOD Yes. (pause) I took it pretty hard. He was a great boss and a great man to know. The United States lost a lot when they lost him. He was a great diplomat. He was the president’s personal representative. It was an assault on the United States. It was a loss to the Libyans as well.
ME From a security standpoint, what are the thoughts that went through your head as you heard what happened?
WOOD We just lost, we lost big. . . .
ME Did you wonder if your team might have been able to do something to prevent that from even happening?
WOOD Yes, those thoughts go through your head. You do wonder. I won’t know. That’s one thing I guess we’ll never know. . . . But I do wonder about that from time to time. What could have been done differently. I think in the military you’re taught to war-game things a lot and you do wonder if different pieces had been on the ground what might have happened, what might have there been to avoid, perhaps.