13 Hours: The Inside Account of What Really Happened in Benghazi (14 page)

The GRS Team Leader told the operators they wouldn’t be going in alone. He said they’d be linking up with a large group of 17 February fighters, who’d be fulfilling their militia’s promise to serve as a Quick Reaction Force. The T.L. told them that the attackers seemed to be armed with AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades, and that the Americans at the Compound were separated into several groups. The T.L. instructed the five operators to stay ready and wait for his signal to leave.

They tossed their gear into a dark-blue BMW sedan and a boxy, black Mercedes SUV. Both were armored, with bullet-resistant windows and tires called “run-flats,” designed to live up to the name if hit by bullets, spikes, or shrapnel. Both vehicles were tuned like racecars but dusty and worn outside, so they wouldn’t attract additional notice as they moved toward the Compound. The operators staged the vehicles outside Building C, pointing toward the gate, with the BMW in front.

Rone got behind the wheel of the BMW, Jack rode shotgun, and Tig slid into the backseat, armed with a grenade launcher in addition to a lightweight machine gun with two bandoliers of ammunition. Tanto and D.B. jumped into the front seat of the Mercedes, with Tanto behind the wheel. Along with his usual weapons Tanto brought a light
machine gun with a bandolier of ammunition. He knew that there were other, similar bandoliers already in the car, in case he needed more ammo. The GRS Team Leader remained outside near Building C, talking on a cell phone.

Several of the operators demanded to know what they were waiting for. The Team Leader pulled away from his phone: “We need to come up with a plan,” he said, referring to how they’d coordinate with the 17 February militia. Also standing outside the vehicles talking on phones were Bob the Annex chief and his second-in-command, a CIA officer who’d earned the operators’ esteem by treating them with respect.

Inside the vehicles, the five GRS operators triple-checked their gunsights, tightened their armor, and tried to figure out why they hadn’t already left. They likely could have reached the Compound on foot in the time they’d been waiting. Most sat quietly, but Tanto tried to keep the atmosphere light by complaining that he had nowhere to put the coffee cup he’d brought with him. “Spend $250,000 on a damn Mercedes and there’s no cup holder? What kind of bullshit is that?”

As minutes passed and they grew tense listening to the conversations outside the cars, the operators got the distinct impression that the rescue plan being discussed somehow didn’t include them.

Standing outside the Mercedes, Tig called out, “Hey, we gotta go now! We’re losing the initiative!”

“No, stand down, you need to wait,” Bob the base chief yelled back.

“We need to come up with a plan,” the Team Leader repeated.

“It’s too fucking late to come up with a plan,” Tig yelled. “We need to get in the fucking area and
then
come up with a plan.”

Tanto got out of the Mercedes and approached the Team Leader and Bob. He asked them to request US military air support, specifically an unmanned ISR drone, named for its ability to provide intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. Tanto also asked them to call in a heavily armed AC-130 Spectre gunship, a four-engine, fixed-wing plane designed for lethal ground assaults. In the meantime, Tanto told the bosses, he and the other operators were overdue to move out.

The CIA chief looked at Tanto, then at the Team Leader, then back to Tanto. Tanto felt as though the chief was looking right through him. “No,” Bob said, “hold up. We’re going to have the local militia handle it.”

Tanto couldn’t believe his ears. He turned to the Team Leader: “Hey, we need to go.”

“No,” the T.L. said, “we need to wait. The chief is trying to coordinate with 17 Feb and let them handle it.”

“What do you mean, ‘Let them handle it?’ ” Tanto demanded. He had little confidence in the 17 February militia, whose members he and several other operators considered as liable to turn on them as to serve alongside them. Tanto especially wouldn’t trust the militia on its word when the objective was to save American lives. “We need to go. We’re not letting 17 Feb handle it.”

Tanto’s memory flashed back to the airport standoff earlier in the summer. He believed that Bob was repeating the go-slow, stand-down, let-the-friendly-militia-handle-it approach he’d taken when hostile militiamen held up Rone and another GRS operator. That incident was resolved
peacefully, without injuries and without exposing the CIA presence in Benghazi, when Rone and his companion demonstrated that they wouldn’t be robbed without a fight. This time, Tanto thought, Bob was taking the same passive tactic even though the fight had already begun and the Americans were losing, possibly dying.

“I’ve been through this before,” Tanto told the T.L., “when the chief didn’t let us go when our own guys were in trouble. Go ask Tyrone. He’s right over there. He was one of the guys out there when the chief said to have 17 Feb handle it and held us back.”

“Tanto, I know,” the T.L. said. “I’m working on it.”

Tanto returned to the Mercedes SUV and told D.B.: “This is a bunch of fucking bullshit.” D.B. was incredulous. His head slumped forward in frustration. Yet both knew that it wasn’t over. Plans were still forming and changing, with input and decisions flying between Benghazi, Tripoli, and Washington. They didn’t know whom Bob was speaking with, but they hoped that the “wait” order would be reversed quickly and they’d be given a green light.

Tanto got on the radio and relayed his conversation to Rone, Jack, and Tig in the BMW. Rone looked over through the car window, his expression trapped between anger and disgust. Tanto held his palms up and shrugged.

Rone got on the radio and called out: “We gotta go, gotta go, gotta go!”

His vision still blurred from his misaligned contact lenses, Jack stared out the window of the BMW, wondering whether whoever was attacking the Compound might try a simultaneous assault on the Annex. He experienced the familiar yin and yang of the moment: disbelief that this was happening, contrasted by a sense that he had expected
it all along. As he considered the situation, Jack remembered that he’d left his laptop on. The e-mail that he’d intended to send his wife remained unwritten.

From the driver’s seat in the Mercedes, Tanto noticed a civilian named Henry, an owlish, balding, olive-skinned man with glasses, walking across the Annex driveway. Tanto bounded out of the SUV. Henry was a US citizen in his sixties working as an interpreter at the Annex. Some translators in hostile areas are designated combat interpreters because they’ve had specialized weapons training. Henry wasn’t among them. He was an office worker who reviewed and translated documents from Arabic and occasionally went out on operations no more dangerous than dinner with locals. Tanto stopped Henry in his tracks.

“I’ve been through this before, and we need you to come with us,” Tanto said. “If we’re linking up with 17 Feb, none of us speaks the language well enough to communicate. We need you in here.”

“Tanto,” Henry replied, “I’m not weapons qualified.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Tanto said. He pulled out a pistol and handed it to Henry. “Here’s your weapon. Go get your helmet and your armor. We need you.”

Without hesitating, Henry said: “Roger. I’ll be right back.”

Barely two minutes later, Henry was seated in the back of the Mercedes, his armor and helmet secured, Tanto’s gun in his hand, and a look of pure fright on his weathered face. Tanto thought he resembled a Middle Eastern version of the comic Bob Newhart. He handed Henry an extra magazine of ammunition.

When Jack saw Henry jocked up and ready, he felt a
flush of admiration.
Here’s a guy
, Jack thought,
who’s an administrative guy, and somebody gave him body armor and a helmet and a pistol
.
He volunteered to come basically on a suicide mission. For us, it’s our job to do stuff like that. His job is to sit behind a desk and interpret Arabic into English. But he’s doing what he thinks is right.

From their idling vehicles, the operators could vaguely see the orange flames rising from the Compound. With their doors flung open, they could hear chanting in the distance. Tanto grabbed his radio, so everyone in the Annex would hear his message. He hoped it also would reach someone on the same frequency at the Compound. Tanto repeated his earlier request as a demand: “Get us an ISR [drone] and a Spectre gunship!”

Tanto didn’t know it, but one part of his demand was already being fulfilled. Within the first half hour of the attack, at 9:59 p.m., the US military’s Africa Command ordered a drone surveillance aircraft to reposition itself over the Special Mission Compound. It would take more than an hour to reach Benghazi, but once there the drone could monitor events and beam live images to Washington.

But a request for close air support wouldn’t be so easy to fulfill. A Pentagon spokesman would say later that none of America’s punishing AC-130 gunships were anywhere within range of Benghazi on the night of September 11, 2012.

As minutes ticked by and the operators waited for clearance to leave, the air in the vehicles grew thick with
tension. The operators imagined bloody scenes of what was happening to their countrymen less than a mile away. And the longer they sat idle, the more likely the same fate awaited them.

As the hour neared 10:00 p.m., with the operators’ radios tuned to the same frequency as those at the Compound, they heard the voice of one of the DS agents in the Compound TOC, Alec Henderson or David Ubben.

“We’re being attacked!” one yelled, his voice tight with stress. “There’s approximately twenty to thirty armed men, with AKs firing. We’re being attacked! We need help! We need help now!”

Adrenaline surged through the operators’ veins, but again they were told to wait. They were used to following orders, and they knew that insubordination could mean their jobs or worse. But a shared thought took hold in both vehicles: If they weren’t given permission to move out soon, they’d take matters into their own hands.

B
EHIND THE LOCKED STEEL GATE INSIDE THE VILLA’S
safe haven, Ambassador Chris Stevens and communications expert Sean Smith cowered in the dark with DS agent Scott Wickland.

Wickland heard the intruders breaking through the villa’s reinforced wooden front doors, apparently by blowing them open with a rocket-propelled grenade. Staying out of sight, the DS agent peered through the openings between the bars of the security gate. Wickland watched from his protected position as their enemies burst into the building carrying AK-47s.

They plundered the living room, destroying furniture as they swarmed through the villa. Several reached the safe-haven gate and banged on the bars. They tried to look inside but the area beyond the gate was dark, and they couldn’t see Wickland or the two men he was determined
to protect. The attackers attempted to break in, but the bolts and locks held.

Still unseen, Wickland aimed his assault rifle at the intruders when they reached the gate, ready to shoot if they tried to blast or force it open. Until they made that move, Wickland resolved, he’d hold his concealed position and his fire, to avoid revealing his location and the presence of the ambassador and the information officer. Wickland warned Stevens and Smith to brace themselves for an assault.

But instead of trying to blow open the gate and enter the safe haven, the attackers moved back. They hauled in the jerry cans of diesel fuel that they’d found near the Compound’s new generator and had already used to torch the vehicles and the 17 February barracks. Wickland couldn’t know whether the attackers believed that the American ambassador was locked inside the villa’s safe haven, but it stands to reason that they knew the barred gate separated them from Americans that they had hoped to reach. The attackers’ intent was evident: They meant to use the Americans’ own fuel to smoke them out or roast them alive.

The attackers doused diesel on the overstuffed chairs, pillows, and couches, drenched the Persian rugs, and splashed the viscous fuel around the living room. As the intruders left, they set the villa ablaze. Outside, they spread more diesel to set fires against the building’s exterior concrete walls.

Unable to see deep into the living room from his hiding place, at first Wickland couldn’t tell what was happening. Then the light from the villa’s lamps and chandeliers dimmed. The DS agent realized that he, Stevens, and Smith had a new enemy. The villa was on fire and rapidly filling with toxic smoke.

The Villa C safe haven was supposed to provide the ambassador and other Americans short-term protection against physical attack until host-country rescuers or American fighters could drive away the invaders or protesters. It wasn’t designed to keep them safe indefinitely, and it wasn’t built to safeguard them from fire or chemical agents. In that sense, the Benghazi safe haven was analogous to a shark cage used by ocean divers. The longer it remained in use, the greater the likelihood that killers would batter their way in or the air would run out. Time favored the enemy.

Visibility in the villa squeezed down to zero. Breathable air became scarce. The smoke of burning diesel fuel is a lethal black cloud containing dozens of poisons, including benzene, arsenic, and formaldehyde. The trapped Americans felt their breathing become labored. Each time they inhaled, the smoke tortured their lungs with soot, nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide, and razor-like particles of hot ash. The smell of burning diesel can be overpowering by itself, a scrambled sulfur-and-egg mixture sometimes described as the scent of Satan cooking breakfast. Brief exposure triggers painful coughing, nausea, eye pain, and headaches. Loss of consciousness and organ damage come next. Extended contact causes death.

As the smoke intensified, the three Americans dropped to the floor of the safe haven. Crawling on his hands and knees, Wickland led Stevens and Smith into a bathroom that he knew had a barred exterior window. He rolled wet towels in an attempt to seal the gap between the bottom of the door and the tile floor, but smoke continued to seep inside. Wickland rose to his feet and opened the window in the hope of improving ventilation, but it had the
opposite effect. Smoke from outside the villa poured into the bathroom, making it even harder for the besieged men to breathe.

The villa had neither emergency sprinklers nor a foam fire-suppression system. If the Americans hoped to survive, they’d have to get outside among their enemies, either on their own or with help.

Wickland, Stevens, and Smith pressed their bodies against the floor, gulping at the little breathable air remaining. The smoke grew so thick that Wickland lost sight of the ambassador and the computer expert in the small bathroom. Starved for oxygen, confined to a smoke-filled room, unable to see his companions, Wickland realized that remaining in place meant death by suffocation.

The bars on the bathroom window were set in concrete, so Wickland yelled to Stevens and Smith to follow him to a nearby bedroom. There, Wickland knew, an emergency latch might allow him to open the metal window bars from inside. Still unable to see through the foul black smoke, the DS agent crawled out of the bathroom into the safe-haven hallway. He scuttled toward the bedroom. Wickland yelled and banged on the floor as he went, using sound to guide Stevens and Smith, who he believed were following close behind.

As Wickland moved toward the bedroom, he could hear explosions and gunfire from outside. Bullets and tracers screamed through the overrun Compound. The American DS agents and their paid Libyan militia guards had still mounted no resistance.

Thinking that Stevens and Smith had followed him from the bathroom, Wickland reached the window at the far end of the bedroom and unlatched the security grill.
The vertical window, its lower edge about two feet off the floor, was about five feet tall and three feet wide. His strength waning, Wickland climbed through the window and crumpled onto a small outdoor patio that was partly enclosed by a four-foot-high wall of white sandbags.

Through a haze of oxygen deprivation, on the verge of passing out, Wickland grasped that he was alone. He’d somehow become separated from Stevens and Smith, while they were either in the smoke-filled bathroom or somewhere in the safe-haven hallway between there and the bedroom. Maybe they had taken a wrong turn, or maybe they had never followed him into the hallway to begin with. Either way, Wickland understood the horrifying reality: The two men he was sworn to protect, one of them the diplomatic representative of the United States, were trapped somewhere inside the burning safe haven. To add to his misery, Wickland heard gunfire and believed that someone was shooting at him from the other side of the sandbags.

The exhausted DS agent struggled to his feet. Wickland hauled himself back through the villa window, returning to the smoke-filled safe haven to search for Chris Stevens and Sean Smith.

At the Annex, each passing minute increased the GRS operators’ anger. Rising with it was concern that the invaders had established defenses against a counterattack and tightened their grip on the Compound.

The attackers had used one of the oldest and most potent weapons of warfare: surprise. Without a quick and overwhelming counterpunch, the aggressors would have time
to solidify their tactical gains and increase their chances of achieving their presumed objective: killing or capturing any Americans they could find, above all the ambassador. Chris Stevens’s presence in Benghazi was widely known, especially after the local councilmen had alerted the media to the El Fadeel Hotel event the previous night. Killing or kidnapping an American ambassador on the anniversary of the September 11 attacks would be a major coup for any extreme Islamist group or militia. Reducing an American diplomatic outpost to a charred ruin would be a bonus.

Inside the Mercedes SUV, Tanto couldn’t contain his fury. “You know how hard it’s going to be?” he asked D.B. rhetorically. “You know how hard it’s going to be to fight back on that objective? We’re losing the initiative!”

If he had been alone with D.B., Tanto would have raged even hotter, unleashing a stream of creative, emphatic curses that ran through his mind. But with Henry the translator already looking green around the gills in the backseat, Tanto didn’t want to spook the older man into a panic. The operators divided the world into two categories: shooters and non-shooters. Henry was a non-shooter.

Yet even as he seethed about being held in check, Tanto felt an inner calm. He considered it a gift, and he felt certain from years of military and contracting experience that the more chaotic things became, the more confident he’d grow. To distract himself from the delays, Tanto tried to focus on their assets. Their Quick Reaction Force team would be six shooters strong: five contract GRS operators—everyone but Oz, who was still at dinner—and the GRS Team Leader. Tanto and the other operators knew that they’d be outnumbered. But they weren’t just any guys with guns. The operators were disciplined and experienced, abundantly
armed and as expertly trained as any force their size on the planet. They had the protection of body armor and the advantage of night-vision goggles. All in all, Tanto liked the odds of the Annex team against what he expected would be a disorderly force of raw, chanting, gun-toting radicals.

That is, unless the continued passage of time gave the enemy an insurmountable edge.

If the Compound attackers had any military experience whatsoever, the GRS operators knew, they’d be preparing for a counterstrike. The more time the attackers had to dig in, the more likely they’d secure the Compound perimeter and organize defensive positions, at least until they achieved their objectives.

“They’ve got ahold of everything by now,” Tanto groused. “The longer we’re waiting, the bad guys are going to be entrenched. They’re going to have their bearings.”

In the passenger seat of the BMW, Jack sat blinking and rubbing his eyes, still trying to adjust his contacts. Even with blurred vision, he wished the delay would end and they could get to work. Ringing in his ears was the voice of the DS agent at the Compound reporting the attack and asking for help. Jack twisted toward the backseat, where Tig heard the same voice in his head.

“Why the fuck aren’t we moving?” Tig asked, even as he knew the answer. It was plain to all the GRS operators that their superiors were still working the phones to get a firm commitment and a strategy from leaders of the 17 February militia. Tanto echoed Tig’s lament on the radio: “Why the fuck aren’t we moving?”

En masse, they decided that the time for asking permission had ended. The operators climbed out of their idling vehicles and assembled in a huddle outside Building C,
near the Team Leader, Bob the CIA Annex chief, and his second-in-command. Jack caught Rone’s attention and they exchanged incredulous, wide-eyed looks. To Jack, the meaning was clear: This delay is nuts. Worse, it’s dangerous, for the guys at the Compound and also for us.
The situation is beyond serious, people need our help, and we’re the only ones available
, Jack thought.
We need to go.

Their radios again crackled with beseeching calls from the DS agents at the Compound TOC. “Armed men!”

“Taking fire!”

“Taking heavy fire!”

“They’ve overrun the Compound!”

“We’re all locked up!”

“We need help!”

Yet the CIA base bosses and the Team Leader, all talking animatedly on their cell phones, still wouldn’t give the operators the go-ahead. From overhearing the Annex staffers’ side of the ongoing phone calls, the GRS contract operators became convinced that the agency wanted the 17 February militia to repel the attack entirely on its own, with no direct American involvement other than the DS agents already trapped inside the Compound.

Several GRS operators considered that wishful thinking at best, negligent leadership at worst. They suspected that they knew a motive for such idle hopes: If the operators’ Quick Reaction Force remained at the Annex, the CIA wouldn’t be forced to reveal or explain its presence in Benghazi. On the other hand, if American clandestine operators and contract security employees went into combat against radical Islamists, the battle would be guaranteed to attract global attention and massive scrutiny. Especially on September 11. During his previous trips to Benghazi, Tig had experienced multiple
instances where Bob the base chief had told the operators to “stand down,” even when Americans were potentially in danger, apparently to avoid the risk of exposing the CIA presence.