Eyes on Target: Inside Stories From the Brotherhood of the U.S. Navy SEALs

by Scott McEwen

  Finally, after a bureaucratic battle of epic proportions, every element of the mission was approved. Zero hour would come several hours after darkness fell.

  * * *

  In the hangar, the small number of SEALs assembled. Given the few Americans, everyone would have to do two jobs. Higbie was both a team leader and communications guy. “I was carrying three radios, I had four magazines, three on my body and one in the gun. I had two grenades, flashbang, and a shaped charge on my leg. I had a pistol, too. That’s pretty standard. I had my M4 and then the pistol.”

  The SEALs, the camerawoman, and the Iraqis boarded three helicopters and roared out into the night. It was an unwieldy combination, but somehow it had to work.

  * * *

  Some eight miles south of the city of Fallujah, the village of Amiriyat Falujah was basically a walled, fortified complex set up to defend itself from potential invaders.

  The aerial surveillance photos were intimidating. Ringed by dunes, the interior was an interlocking series of buildings that would provide ample opportunity for snipers to fire on the SEALs. “It was a fortress,” Higbie said.

  The group was dropped by the helicopters just over two miles from the target village. The night was dark, humid, and hot. The SEALs were sweating just standing still. The CH-60 helicopters lifted off in a spray of sand that the SEALs called “rotor wash.” They knew to put their backs to the bird and not watch it dust off.

  As the dust cloud cleared, the SEALs listened as the helicopter engines died away in the starry sky.

  It was silent, save the wind ruffling their desert camo pants.

  The team was shaped in a V pattern, a standard defensive move for a nighttime SEAL movement.

  While the land was flat, it was treacherous—with soft, almost quicksand-like soil. Higbie called it “moon dust.” SEALs, heavily laden with weapons and equipment, sank up to their knees. With every step, each SEAL had to pull his boot out of the sucking sand, shift his weight, and then pull the other boot out. During the 2.5-mile trek, each person had to pull his boots out some forty-five thousand times.

  It was slow going. The camerawoman and the Iraqis demanded rest stops repeatedly. Higbie scanned the horizon nervously as the non-SEALs took frantic gasps of air. He knew that they were exposed and vulnerable in the badlands.

  * * *

  Higbie used a careful strategy in “stacking” his air assets. An AC-130 helicopter gunship was silently overhead, almost a mile above the struggling team. Its job was to keep eyes on the team and provide aerial gunfire if needed. Its electric-powered machine guns and cannons could put thousands of rounds downrange in minutes.

  Above the AC-130 and five hundred yards ahead was a Predator drone plane.

  “The sole reason we had that Predator was so that our commanding officer could see what we were doing. That’s why I pushed it ahead of us instead of keeping it on us. He was like ‘I want to see what you guys are doing right now.’ ” Instead, the Predator showed the terrain ahead, so that the officer who didn’t support the mission was not able to micromanage it. (The officer couldn’t see the video feed from the AC-130.)

  This was a little passive-aggressive pushback from Higbie. He didn’t want to give the officer video that could be used against his team later. It would turn out to be a wise strategy.

  * * *

  The high dune walls of Amiriyat Falujah loomed above the team, blocking out stars and the horizon. Slowly, they scanned for sentries. They heard only the wind and saw only empty sand slopes. They found a narrow gap in the walls and filed through it. Inside the dune walls was a sprawling concrete complex of ramshackle buildings and dusty cars. They heard the hum of the diesel generators. The village seemed asleep.

  They approached cautiously and quietly. The target building had been marked by an informer, who used a sign that could be seen only through infrared goggles.

  They moved silently along the concrete walls, looking for the infrared sign. When they found it, it was time for action.

  The team stood at the front door, discussing the entry plan using only their hands and eyes. Higbie waited outside. “So my job was to deal with the AC-130 and the Predator, and to keep scanning the town to make sure that there was no movement at any time, and I was in charge of making sure no one entered the building without us knowing.”

  The Iraqi police were deployed as perimeter guards.

  Then the village began to come to life. Doors and windows opened, voices in Arabic wanted to know what was going on. The villagers were armed, and tension was building in their voices. They knew something was up, but they just weren’t sure what it was yet. The operation would have to be completed quickly and efficiently, or it could turn into a bloodbath in a heartbeat.

  * * *

  The SEALs burst through the door. A SEAL new to the Iraq war, Mathew McCabe, spotted Abed, the target, lunging for a gun. He tackled him.

  “This happened for two reasons,” Higbie said. One, inexperience, because he was a new guy and he wasn’t allowed to get experience by our commanding officer. He was hesitant to shoot because, this is the second reason, because the commander told everybody that if they killed somebody, they’d better have a damn good reason.”

  The tackle was a risky move. If Abed had been a few seconds faster, the SEAL would be dead. In the normal course of “threat/no threat” analysis Abed would have been instantly shot. As it happened, shooting Abed would have been a better outcome for almost all concerned.

  * * *

  With Abed in white plastic zip ties behind his back, the team moved rapidly out of the village. They needed to go before the villagers had the chance to wipe the sleep from their eyes and open fire with their automatic weapons.

  Higbie radioed the helicopters to land a few hundred yards from the village’s high dune walls. (Retreating over the “moon dust” would have been a death sentence.)

  The choppers landed, the team and prisoner were loaded, and helicopters dusted off into the night sky. It was a perfect op, Higbie said. Mission accomplished and no shots fired.

  The detention center at Camp Baharia, a nearby SEAL base, was a twenty-foot-long conex box, a shipping container with doors and windows cut out with welding torches.

  Higbie turned Abed over to the master-at-arms, a young navy enlisted man on his first deployment overseas.

  It was time to celebrate a little. “We debriefed with the helo pilots on site, we gave our high fives, and we say we got this motherfucker.” No alcohol was served, but Higbie treated himself to a hot shower and went to bed.

  In the predawn hours, fate soured for the SEALs.

  * * *

  Higbie was shaken awake and told to report to the officer who never liked the mission. When he arrived, his other teammates were there, ashen faced. The officer was apoplectically angry. He held up Abed’s tunic. It was spotted with blood. “There is going to be an investigation,” the officer said.

  Someone had given the prisoner a bloody lip, and criminal charges would be brought.

  NCIS arrived the next day.

  It was possible, if not probable, that the prisoner gave himself the bloody lip. Al Qaeda operatives knew America’s strict rules on treating prisoners—and they were known to use these rules against their captors. Al Qaeda handbooks, captured by U.S. forces in Afghanistan, teach them how to bring false charges while in American custody. It was another case of using America’s assets against her. Just as al Qaeda used America’s planes against her on September 11, 2001, it now used America’s military legal system against her war fighters.

  Another, perhaps more likely possibility, is that the young master-at-arms beat up Abed. He later made comments that Higbie took to be an admission of guilt.

  NCIS investigated and determined that no SEALs were ever alone with the prisoner and that no evidence or testimony implicated them. Abed fingered the master-at-arms as the culprit. The investigation of the SEALs conduct continued anyway.

  NCIS briefed the officer who ne
ver liked Higbie’s mission, telling him there was no evidence of wrongdoing. The officer told the NCIS investigator: “I don’t care, find something. I am not going to go down for this.”

  * * *

  All eight of the accused SEALs quickly got lawyers. Four of them were eventually charged.

  The officer insisted on a captain’s mast, an informal disciplinary procedure that doesn’t involve lawyers.

  The SEALs, citing naval regulations, demanded a court-martial. Higbie said: “You’re charging us with a serious offense here and we’re not going to take captain’s mast, we’re going to take court-martial, because we know we didn’t do anything wrong.”

  The SEALs were separated and sent home. It would take months before the trial began. After the U.S. Army’s Abu Ghraib scandal, Navy commanders were taking no chances with the politicians or the press. They would go strictly by the book, no matter what they privately thought about the charges.

  * * *

  The trial ultimately took place in Baghdad. Higbie’s testimony was mercifully short. The first thing the prosecutor asked was “Did you abuse this prisoner?”

  Higbie was sitting upright, looking straight out, as he addressed the courtroom. “No, sir.”

  The prosecutor put his hand on his forehead, looked down, and shook his head. Higbie got the impression that the young prosecutor didn’t like the case or even being made to ask these questions.

  The military jury exonerated Higbie and, in a separate tribunal, the other SEALs.

  A post on a Facebook page called “Support the Navy SEALs Who Captured Ahmed Hashim Abed” summed it up best: “SEALs 3—Terrorist 0.”

  Higbie and his team had captured a notorious killer and defeated the charges brought by a politically correct commander. But the politics and bureaucracy made him lose trust in his leaders. He left the SEALs with sadness. While they were exonerated of all charges, the careers of the other SEALs were also damaged. The trial was a black mark on their records that they would have to explain for the rest of their careers. A Big Navy mentality—designed for regulating life among other American sailors aboard the closed world of ship at sea—treats accusations as evidence that a man can’t get along with teammates. If the accused sailor were more diplomatic, the charge would not have occurred, or so goes the thinking. This attitude isn’t well suited to SEALs who take prisoners on the battlefield. Accusations made by enemy prisoners are a natural product of war and should be treated differently as a result. But the Big Navy culture makes no such allowances for the SEALs when evaluating men for promotion.

  In the end, the navy lawyers did what the terrorists could not—effectively end the careers of Higbie and other SEALs.

  CHAPTER 7

  Benghazi, Libya: SEALs Alone

  Benghazi is a city of high walls and narrow streets perched on Libya’s Mediterranean coast.

  Once the capital of Libya, where Arabs gathered to trade fish and gossip on its shores while sheikhs and captains plotted intrigue on its leafy terraces, whatever charm the city once had was stolen away by World War II, when the Allies and General Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps fought over the coast roads that were the city’s lifeline. After the war came waves of migrants from Libya’s hot, poor interior. By the time Col. Moammar Gadhafi’s bloody coup succeeded in 1969—driving out a pro-American king—the city was a crowded slum, and all economic and political power had shifted to its longtime rival city, Tripoli.

  Benghazi briefly reverted to relevance when it became the center of the anti-Gadhafi rebellion in 2010. The tribes that called Benghazi home never liked Gadhafi. With the help of U.S. air power overhead and special forces on the ground, the Arab world’s longest-serving dictator was driven from power and ultimately killed in October 2011.

  The new Libyan government, the Transitional National Council, was temporarily based in Benghazi, but it had little control over the city or the country.1 The police had shed their uniforms and were hiding in the homes, fearing retribution. A welter of competing militias had taken control of the streets, often setting up roadblocks to demand “taxes.” Criminal mafias moved in, and radical Islamic militants soon followed. As night fell and the call to prayer drifted away, gunshots echoed.

  This was the cauldron of chaos that the U.S. ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, called home in April 2011. He helped coordinate with Libyan officials during their long fight with Gadhafi’s forces in the spring and summer of 2011. While the security situation remorselessly worsened over the next twelve months, senior officials in the State Department’s Washington headquarters kept reducing Stevens’s security detail. They did this for budgetary reasons (the Benghazi station was temporary and therefore bureaucratically difficult to assign security personnel and equipment to) and for political reasons (the State Department wanted to present the Libyan war as “won” and downplay any risks that might smudge the banner of victory). This proved to be a miscalculation.

  While the war against Gadhafi was over and Libyans overall remained very pro-American (in polls, Libyans had a higher opinion of Americans than citizens of any other Arab country), the war weakened the central government and invited opportunistic interlopers, including al Qaeda.

  * * *

  Stevens, a debonair Arabic-speaking career foreign-service officer, put up a brave front.2 He kept extending his stay throughout 2011 and 2012, knowing that few would volunteer to take his place.3

  He set up temporary headquarters in April 2011 at the Tibesti Hotel, which the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel describes as “a monstrous concrete tower on the shore road” that is home to representatives from nine European countries, with the European Union renting an entire wing.4 The guest list made the hotel an obvious target for terrorists.

  Stevens was still registered at the Tibesti Hotel on June 1, 2011, when a car bomb exploded and rocked the hotel.5 Stevens was unharmed. But the bombing vividly showed that even interlocking sets of security agents couldn’t safeguard foreign diplomats in the rebel capital from terror attacks.

  The attacks would continue to escalate over the next fourteen months, while Washington repeatedly reduced security forces in Benghazi because, officials told us, they “thought the war was over.” In fact, a new war on America and her allies was just beginning.

  * * *

  Stevens tried appealing directly to Washington-based policy makers at his only in-person appearance at the State Department press briefing on August 3, 2011. He was emphatic about the rising dangers in Benghazi: “There was a security vacuum when the regime fell, and they [the rebels] had to stand up very quickly to this organization called the TNC [Transitional National Council]. The police, for the most part, just left their posts because they were afraid of popular reaction against them because they had committed abuses in the early days against the people. So there’s hardly any police around, and because of that vacuum, militias started to form and step in. And so looking after the security of Benghazi and eastern Libya, you’ve got a lot of militias and a few police. And this had led to some security challenges that you’ve already read about and know about.”6

  Later that month, American diplomats moved into a walled compound. The compound was surrounded by concrete-block walls and set back almost three hundred yards from the main road. “We need that much room to provide the best possible setback against car bombs,” Stevens said.

  By December 2011, the perimeter wall was raised to nine feet and topped by three feet of concertina wire. Large lights were hung to flood the street with bright light. Jersey barriers, long concrete blocks reimbursed with rebar, were positioned outside and inside the main gate to slow vehicular traffic into the compound and deter car bombs.7 Yet all of these security measures are backward looking—they are designed to stop the car bombs that bedeviled diplomats at the Tibesti Hotel. They weren’t designed to defeat new types of attacks, such as an armed invasion.

  No one, in Washington at least, worried about the growing threat of an armed assault on the tiny piece of Amer
ican real estate in Benghazi. After all, the war was over.

  * * *

  In addition, throughout 2011, angry demonstrations become a daily occurrence. Fifteen commanders of the Protective Security Brigade protested in front of the Transitional National Council headquarters, saying they weren’t getting proper gear, and the menace of the militias made their jobs impossible.8 Several hundred other protesters demanded the removal of “climbers,” survivors from the Gadhafi era who were still working for the Libyan government.9

  Belatedly, the State Department hired Blue Mountain Libya, a British security outfit, to guard the American compound in Benghazi. The firm used its $783,284 contract to hire twenty Libyans to act as guards.

  Embassy staff flagged problems with the Blue Mountain Libya guards almost immediately. Eric Nordstrom, former regional security officer for the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli, told congressional investigators: “It’s my understanding that there was a very high turnover with those people.” This is diplomatic understatement. Some guards lasted only a few weeks.

  Two former Blue Mountain employees told Reuters they had “minimal training,” and they described “being hired by Blue Mountain after a casual recruiting and screening process.”10

  Then the kidnappings began. An American running a nonprofit humanitarian group in Libya was attending a friend’s bachelor’s party when armed men stormed into the room on December 1, 2011. They called themselves the Zintan Martyrs Brigade. They claimed the power to arrest the revelers and held everyone for thirty-six hours. Finally, after a botched attempt to secure ransoms from family members of the Libyans present, the police arrived. The Martyrs Brigade agreed to turn over their captives in exchange for the police investigating the “crimes” of those that they held. The police soon released everyone due to “lack of evidence.”11