13 Hours: The Inside Account of What Really Happened in Benghazi (8 page)

Sitting around together over morning coffee, Jack and Rone frequently discussed flaws in security at both the Compound and the Annex. As contract operators, they were powerless to change the security system. But that didn’t stop them from identifying holes in the defensive
shield, anticipating ways terrorists might exploit them, and brainstorming potential responses. Some of the weak points they discussed were structural, involving the Annex and Compound properties’ designs. Some perceived problems focused on staff levels and training. The macabre scenarios ranged from a truck bomb parked outside the Annex wall to a large force of attackers overrunning the Compound.

As the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks approached, coinciding with the ambassador’s planned visit, Rone taped an eight-by-ten sheet of paper to a whiteboard in the GRS Team Room. On it was a printed warning that the GRS operators felt certain had come from somewhere higher up the chain of clandestine services in Washington. As several operators recalled, the intelligence cable warned:
Be advised, we have reports from locals that a Western facility or US Embassy/Consulate/Government target will be attacked in the next week.
If those weren’t the exact words, that was the unambiguous message the operators took from the cable.

As a precaution, the operators moved their body armor, long guns, ammunition, night-vision goggles, and other tactical gear into their bedrooms, so they could more quickly “jock up,” as they called preparing for battle. Discussions had been under way for some time about “co-locating” the Compound and the Annex on the same property, so Bob the Annex chief suggested a trial run. He urged the Diplomatic Security team at the Special Mission Compound to move to the Annex during the ambassador’s visit, for added layers of protection. The offer was declined.

In the days after Rone posted the intel cable, GRS team members signed their initials on the paper to show that they’d read it. It remained on all of their minds, but none
were unnerved by it. When Oz read it, he concluded that it lacked a specific date or location, so he took no special action: “Other than just being extra vigilant, as always, it’s nothing to worry about.”

When Tanto saw that everyone on the team had initialed the cable, he peeled it off the whiteboard and shredded it. The date was September 11, 2012.

U
NDER A BLAZING
L
IBYAN SUN
, C
HRIS
S
TEVENS
flashed his toothy smile, gripped a pair of scissors, and approached a ceremonial red ribbon like he meant business. But before putting blade to satin, Stevens pulled a signature move: He invited an official from the Libyan Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Abdurrahman al-Gannas, to join him for the honors. With their right hands clasped together on the scissors, Stevens and al-Gannas snipped the ribbon, triggering applause from US Embassy workers and Libyan officials, as a clutch of journalists recorded the scene.

The occasion was the August 26, 2012, reopening of the visa-granting Consular Section of the US Embassy in Tripoli. Including al-Gannas in the ribbon ritual was classic Stevens. As the American ambassador to Libya in the post-Gaddafi era, Stevens considered it essential to promote and protect US interests by working hand in hand, literally and figuratively, with the nascent Libyan government and
the people it was supposed to represent. Trust-based bonds and personal connections, Stevens believed, led to successful diplomacy.

“The reopening of our Consular Section will create new opportunities for deepening ties between our two countries,” he told the gathering. “Relationships between governments are important, but relationships between people are the real foundation of mutual understanding. That’s why the reopening of our Consular Section is such an important milestone in relations between our two countries. So, my message to Libyans today is
ahlan wasahlan bikum
. You are welcome to visit America, and there’s the door!”

The ceremony was one of the more public ways Stevens carried out his role as ambassador to Libya. Outside the view of reporters, he met with fellow diplomats and Libyans of high and low station, from government ministers to local officials, powerful businessmen to small shopkeepers, always with the goal of providing Washington policymakers with essential information about the North African hotspot. Often Stevens’s contacts grew so comfortable in his presence that they dispensed with titles altogether and used his first name. The informality pleased Stevens, and the way Arabic speakers said “Chris” tickled him so much that he signed e-mails to friends by gently mimicking the pronunciation:
Krees
.

Stevens knew that much work remained. When the Consular Section ceremony ended, he returned to the nonstop chores of hands-on diplomacy. In the coming days he’d hold lengthy suit-and-tie meetings, but he’d also sit barefoot on the floor of a traditional underground Berber house and use his hands to eat a messy plate of barley
dough, braised lamb, and tomato stew called
bazeen
. For a brief respite, he’d fly to Stockholm for a friend’s white-tie wedding, and from there to Vienna for a two-day getaway. Two weeks after the ribbon cutting, Stevens would make a homecoming of sorts: his first visit as ambassador to the city where the Libyan revolution began, Benghazi.

There are generally two kinds of American ambassadors: high-profile business or civic leaders sent to glamour spots like France or Britain as payback for contributions or political support, and workhorses sent to hostile places like Libya as a reward for experience and know-how. Chris Stevens exemplified the latter.

Born John Christopher Stevens, he was fifty-two, never married, trim and long-limbed, with a high forehead crowned by puffy blond hair turning gray. His blinding smile drew people’s attention, but his expressive blue eyes held it. They could flash anger when needed but more often displayed Stevens’s true nature: thoughtful, inquisitive, empathetic, resolved, and patient.

Raised in Northern California, Stevens was a saxophone-playing son of a lawyer father and a cellist mother. He graduated in 1982 from the University of California at Berkeley with a history degree. He spent two years in the Peace Corps, teaching English in the remote Atlas Mountains of Morocco, where he fell in love with the region and found his calling. In 1989, he received a law degree from the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco. Later, he received a master’s in national security studies from the National War College. For two years after becoming an attorney, Stevens practiced international
trade law in Washington, DC, but his heart was set on the Foreign Service.

His focus was the Middle East, and upon joining the State Department he won stints in Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt, and Israel, where he worked on Palestinian issues during the second intifada. He became fluent in Arabic and developed a taste for the strong, syrupy tea over which relationships in the region are forged. Between foreign postings, Stevens worked on Middle Eastern policy at the State Department headquarters in Washington and served as a Pearson Fellow with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

In 2007, Stevens was appointed Deputy Chief of Mission, later chargé d’affaires, at the US Embassy in Tripoli. Within a year of his arrival in Libya, Stevens became a footnote to one of the many strange stories about Gaddafi. A diplomatic cable disclosed by WikiLeaks showed that in August 2008, Stevens tactfully warned Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that the Libyan leader had his lecherous eye on her. “A self-styled intellectual and philosopher,” Stevens wrote to Rice, “he has been eagerly anticipating for several years the opportunity to share with you his views on global affairs.” During Rice’s visit to Libya in September 2008, Gaddafi confessed that he had a crush on her. Rice later called the attention “weird and a bit creepy.”

Stevens returned to Washington to run the State Department’s Office of Multilateral Nuclear and Security Affairs. But when the Libyan revolution began in early 2011, the Obama administration wanted an experienced hand to reach out to the rebels. In March 2011, Stevens became the United States’ Special Representative to the anti-Gaddafi rebels’ umbrella political organization, the
Libyan Transitional National Council, the TNC, based in Benghazi.

With no commercial airlines flying into the war zone, Stevens arranged for a Greek cargo ship to sail from Malta to Benghazi carrying him, ten DS agents, and a political attaché. The ship’s hold bulged with armored vehicles, communications equipment, and supplies needed to establish a temporary diplomatic station. They arrived on April 5, 2011, spent a night aboard ship, then set up shop in rooms at the downtown Tibesti Hotel. Rebel leaders in Benghazi frequently met at the Tibesti, which also housed the Italian and Qatari envoys, United Nations officials, and foreign journalists covering the war.

The embassy in Tripoli had suspended operations and evacuated all Americans six weeks earlier, so Stevens’s arrival made him the highest-ranking US diplomat in Libya. He and Political Officer Nathan Tek immediately scheduled an endless stream of meetings with TNC officials and civic and business leaders, to provide US policymakers with information about the rebellion and to develop relationships in anticipation of a post-Gaddafi Libya. As Stevens told a State Department magazine in a story published in December 2011, they also funneled nonlethal aid to the TNC and created a program in cooperation with the rebel council to collect shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles called MANPADS.

On June 1, 2011, an explosion in the Tibesti Hotel parking lot destroyed two cars and blew out windows hundreds of feet away. A rebel spokesman described it as an attempt by Gaddafi loyalists to show they could still strike at will. Soon after, Stevens’s security team learned of what US officials described as “a credible threat” against the Special Envoy mission and raced to find safer lodgings.

On June 21, 2011, Stevens and his Special Envoy team moved to a walled sanctuary of blooming guava and palm trees, wide swaths of emerald-green lawns, rows of gnarled vines heavy with purple grapes, and abundant flowers. Located in the Western Fwayhat neighborhood, the property opened onto a gravel street. Its rear wall bordered the Fourth Ring Road.

Among its convenient charms, the property was across the street from an upscale restaurant called the Venezia, which was popular with well-heeled Libyans and the multinational diplomatic corps. Throughout the summer, the onetime private compound was renovated for increased security. By August 2011 it was dubbed the United States’ Special Mission Compound in Benghazi.

The Compound covered nearly eight verdant acres. One appeal of the property to the Diplomatic Security staff was that the main buildings were set back far enough from the surrounding walls to protect inhabitants against car bombs. In addition, the DS team arranged for sections of the walls to be reinforced and raised to nine feet, though some areas remained eight feet high. A barbed-wire crown topped most of the wall’s length.

Inside and outside the property’s three gates, rows of concrete Jersey barriers were arranged in serpentine patterns to prevent truck or car bombers from crashing through to the Compound. Steel traffic bars were installed to control vehicle entrance to the property, which occurred primarily through an imposing main gate in the north wall topped with spikes and known as Gate C1. To the side of the main vehicle gate entrance was a narrower pedestrian gate.
A secondary gate, farther east along the same wall, was called B1, or Bravo gate. The third gate to the Compound, in the wall opposite the main gate, was called Gate C3 and opened out to the Fourth Ring Road. Other enhanced security measures on the property included sandbag fortifications, high-intensity lighting, explosive-detection devices, and an Internal Defense Notification System—known as a drop-and-cover alarm—in case the Compound came under attack.