by Scott McEwen
He now knew that Washington had not authorized any military rescue and that the military wasn’t going to offer false hope.
A second drone arrived over Benghazi at 11:10 p.m. and immediately began transmitting a live video feed back to Washington.18 All of the president’s men were watching the real-time images as the diplomatic villa burned and Americans struggled to save their own lives. In Washington, they watched and waited, as if it were just another television show. As if they were merely spectators, not decision makers with the power to send rescuers.
* * *
On the ground in Benghazi, Woods and the Global Response Staff (GRS) realized that they couldn’t hold the diplomatic outpost. They had searched for the ambassador without success and grimly retrieved the body of Sean Smith.
Now they had to fight their way to the TOC, where all of the surviving diplomats were trapped. With their single MK-46 machine gun and Heckler and Koch rifles they were picking off attackers, but the enemy was relentlessly returning automatic fire. One GRS officer hurled grenades, pushing back the enemy. But it was like sweeping away water, which just runs back to fill the gap.
They cleared a path to the TOC, but the enemy quickly regrouped behind them. The attackers were becoming bolder and their numbers were growing. It was time to retreat.
Then the news got worse. The overhead drone aircraft revealed that more enemy reinforcements were arriving at a staging area less than three hundred yards from the trapped Americans. They would now either have to fight their way out or battle a much larger force in a matter of minutes.
Woods led the diplomats across the open compound. He helped the men vault over the nine-foot-high perimeter wall and into the Land Cruisers. Miraculously, despite the bullets bursting around them, none of the Americans were shot.
As they climbed into the SUVs, a jihadi lookout spotted them.
Bullets pockmarked the windows of their vehicles as they roared off to the CIA Annex. As they sped down the narrow, snaking streets, the drivers had to be careful not to flip the heavy armored vehicles. If the Land Cruisers overturned, they would be trapped and quickly surrounded by the pursuing attackers.
The lead driver radioed the guard at the CIA’s main gate: “We’re coming in hot.”
By 11:15, both of the Toyota Land Cruisers arrive at the CIA Annex.19 As the gate closed behind the last vehicle, bullets ricocheted nearby. They had been followed.
Woods and his men had saved them. But for how long?
* * *
Starting at midnight Benghazi time, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta held meetings with Gen. Martin Dempsey and Gen. Carter Ham. He was working to create rescue options for the president to approve. Panetta ordered a Marine Fleet Antiterrorism Security Team stationed in Rota, Spain, and a second Fleet Antiterrorist Security Team (FAST) platoon to deploy to Naval Air Station Sigonella. He ordered a special operations team based in northern Europe to deploy to Sigonella, an hour’s flight away from Benghazi. A special operations team based in the U.S. was also ordered to deploy to Sigonella.20 From this base in Sicily, forces could be ordered to Benghazi—if the president approved a “boots on the ground” operation.
However, a C-110 special operations team deployed to Croatia stayed in place. This team, known as EUCOM CIF (European Command’s Commander’s In Extremis Force), could have flown to Benghazi in three and a half hours. Of course, gathering men and materiel might have taken another hour or two.21
Yet no team was ordered to go directly to Benghazi.
Meanwhile, the enemy had pivoted to attack the CIA compound. As Panetta and the generals debated the options, mortar rounds exploded inside the CIA compound.
Woods climbed onto the roof of a building to direct fire at the attackers. The Americans’ shots were accurate, dropping militants at one hundred yards. But the enemy force seemed to be growing larger.
Throughout the night, as Washington discussed and opined, Woods and the CIA team were fighting for their lives.
* * *
Meanwhile, Hicks and State Department officials were developing their own rescue option. The option amounted to one man: Glen Anthony Doherty.
The son of a former Massachusetts boxing commissioner, Doherty grew up as an all-around athlete in Winchester, Massachusetts. He surprised his family in 1995 by saying that he planned to join the Navy and become a SEAL. He was thirty years old. That made him a bit old to start a Navy career, but his family knew that nothing could stop him once he’d made his mind up.
Doherty got selected for BUD/S and made it through on his first attempt. He took additional schooling to be certified as a paramedic and a sniper. He was soon deployed all over the world. He was on the SEAL team that responded to the bombing of the USS Cole, the deadliest attack on a U.S. warship since World War II. Forty-four sailors were killed or wounded in that blast. (Bin Laden later released a poem celebrating the attack.)
In early 2001, Doherty was wondering about leaving the Navy. He was undergoing knee reconstruction surgery and weighing how much more punishment his body could take. The September 11 attacks on New York and Washington changed his mind. He went to serve in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Doherty and his team were assigned to secure oil fields prior to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. His mission was to prevent Saddam Hussein from setting the oil fields on fire, as he had during Desert Storm in 1991. Doherty then linked up with U.S. Marines fighting their way to Baghdad. As a sniper, he provided security for the advancing leathernecks in hellish fighting in Iraqi cities.
During his nine-year career as a SEAL, Glen served in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
Always on the lookout for an adventure, Doherty was a surfer, triathlete, white-water rafting guide, professional ski instructor, pilot, and self-professed adrenaline junkie. Other SEALs described him as “your quintessential SEAL.”
Doherty was lifelong friends with some of his team members, including Brandon Webb, with whom he coauthored the 2010 book, Navy SEAL Sniper: An Intimate Look at the Sniper of the 21st Century.
After leaving the Navy, he worked for a private security outfit in Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, Kenya, and Libya. In the month prior to the attack, Doherty gave an interview to ABC News. He surprised the reporter by saying that he was personally tracking down MANPADS, shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles, in Libya and destroying them. He loved the job.22
* * *
After hearing from Hicks, Doherty quickly put together a ragtag team of government contractors and DSS agents. Finding no scheduled flights, he reportedly bribed the Libyan pilots of an aging Learjet with $30,000 cash to fly his crew to Benghazi immediately.23 The pilots agreed. The Learjet arrived in Benghazi at 1:15 a.m. local time.
They were unloading guns and equipment on the tarmac when they ran into trouble. In the midst of the attack, local police had not been alerted to their arrival and found the men to be suspicious. An argument erupted when Doherty could not tell the Libyans exactly where he was going with all of his firepower. (Doherty had only GPS coordinates, and the Libyans wanted an exact street address.) With his friend Ty Woods and other comrades under mortar and machine-gun fire, Doherty had no patience for the police runaround. More than an hour was lost trying to get his team out of the airport.
Meanwhile, Washington vetoed a request by Gregory Hicks to send a second team. Hicks has said he believed the veto came from the military. As the afternoon came to an end in Washington, D.C., the president went to dinner with his family in the upstairs residence of the White House. He did not appear to have been engaged at this stage.
* * *
Strangely, Ambassador Stevens seemingly arrived at Benghazi Medical Center, a local hospital, around 1:00 a.m. It is not clear who transported him to the hospital, or whether the ambassador was alive or dead when he arrived.
Hospital personnel picked up the cell phone that Strickland had loaned to the ambassador. They dialed the last number called by Stevens: Greg Hicks in Tripoli. “We know where the ambassador is. Please, you ca
n come get him.”
Hicks and other embassy officials feared the calls were a hoax, knowing Ansar al-Sharia militia had surrounded the hospital. The calls were likely a trap.24
A source the embassy trusted—known as Bakabar—went to the hospital to negotiate for Stevens or his body. By the time Bakabar arrived, the ambassador was a corpse. He might have arrived dead or dying. No one would tell Bakabar the story. He got custody of Stevens’s body at around 5:15 a.m. The embassy instructed the hospital to place the name “John Doe” on the ambassador’s death certificate. Bakabar and his associates transported Stevens’s body to the Benghazi airport.
* * *
Overhead, one of the drone aircraft was running out of fuel. Another surveillance aircraft arrived over Benghazi at 5:00 a.m. to ensure a constant stream of video back to Washington.25
* * *
When Doherty finally arrived at the CIA Annex at approximately 5:00, he immediately asked for Ty Woods, his SEAL teammate.
Woods was on the roof, expertly using an MK-46 machine gun to thin the enemy’s numbers. The rising sun had emboldened the attackers, who were surging for the wall.
Doherty climbed on the roof to join Woods. From this elevated position, they could pick off militants.
The two friends had less than a minute to discuss the situation. A French-made 81 mm mortar round exploded—killing Woods and putting the machine gun out of action. Another GRS agent was speared with shrapnel, and his blood coated the rooftop.
Doherty, by instinct and training, reached for the MK-46 and repositioned it. Before he could return fire, another 81 mm mortar round landed on him. He died instantly.
Cutting ropes from gym equipment, other GRS men climbed onto the blood-soaked roof and retrieved the wounded. As gunshots crackled around them, one wounded man was lowered by ropes into the building. Another was carried down by hand.
Mortar shells continued to explode throughout the CIA compound.
* * *
The drone overhead relayed frightening news. The enemy was gathering for a major assault. Their staging area was less than three hundred yards out—a single American aircraft missile could have dispatched them all. But no air support had been ordered. The CIA chief of base realized that they had to flee now or die in minutes when “the Indians” topped the wall of the stockade.
At 5:15 a.m., another mortar exploded inside the CIA compound. Others quickly followed. The assault lasted eleven minutes.26
* * *
The Americans raced by armed convoy to the Benghazi airport and departed on a 7:40 a.m. flight for Tripoli.27 A second plane ferried the remaining Americans to Tripoli at 10:00 a.m. Later, on the night of September 12, the Americans departed for Germany. A C-17 aircraft left Tripoli for Ramstein Air Base in Germany with American personnel and the bodies of the four Americans killed in Benghazi. It arrived at Ramstein at 10:19 p.m.28 The Americans had gotten out of harm’s way as a result of the heroic acts of Glen Doherty and Ty Woods, and a handful of other GRS agents at the CIA compound. They had held the wall just long enough for a plan to be hatched to extract the remaining personnel from the compound to the airport.
* * *
Help arrived too late and remained too far away. The EUCOM special operations force arrives at Sigonella, Italy, at 7:57 p.m. A Marine FAST platoon arrived at Tripoli at 8:56 p.m.29 The special operations force from America arrived in Italy at 9:28 p.m.30
Almost twenty-four hours after the attack began, American Special Forces remained hundreds of miles over the horizon from the smoking ruins of America’s diplomatic facility in Benghazi. For the first time in a generation, a U.S. ambassador had been murdered. Three other Americans had been killed in an armed assault. And dozens more had been wounded, some so seriously as to require months of hospital care.
With a presidential election almost two months away, the search for answers began.
The big question—“Could they have been rescued in time?”—is addressed in the next chapter.
CHAPTER 9
The Rescue That Wasn’t
The funeral of Ty Woods was silent, sobering, and sadly moving. At Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery, on a hill overlooking San Diego Bay and the Pacific Ocean, the afternoon sun falling on the bagpipers and Navy men in crisp white uniforms. Admirals stood side by side with enlisted SEALs, took their SEAL tridents off their chests, and pounded them in the top of the fallen SEAL’s casket with their fists. A traditional SEAL farewell, sending another teammate, warrior, and friend to Valhalla. Glen Doherty was put to rest in a similar service in western Massachusetts.
There was no distinction, to the men in the teams, that Woods and Doherty were no longer active-duty SEALs when they had fallen. They were SEALs, and they died fighting to save American lives.
As the shock of the loss of two respected veteran SEALs reverberated across the secret brotherhood, a series of private calls, e-mails, and texts made it clear that many SEALs were angry with the president, the defense secretary, and the entire chain of command. Their rage was incandescent and inconsolable. Nothing had been done to try to save these two men after an eight-hour firefight?
Then the tone changed. The SEALs debated a series of options—steps that could have saved the lives of Woods and Doherty. We spoke with a number of SEALs as well as other fighter pilots and senior military officers to examine these options and to answer the two biggest unanswered questions: Could they have been saved? If so, how?
We combed publicly available records, congressional testimony, and State Department and Defense Department reports, and we reached out to Navy SEALs, mission planners, and veteran fighter pilots. We talked to witnesses and attorneys for witnesses who had been threatened to stay silent by their government supervisors. In the course of our investigation, we discovered five realistic scenarios—based on the presence of military assets, standard mission parameters, and capabilities—that reveal how the Americans encircled in Benghazi could have been saved.
* * *
The Obama administration offers two technical military defenses for its apparent inaction: There were no military assets that could be brought to bear in time to make a difference, and that there were no tankers available to support fighter aircraft if the fighters had been sent in to help. As we shall see, both statements are false and tactically irrelevant.
There were military assets available. There were options.
The following scenarios have been prepared based upon assets known to have been available to the United States at the time, as well as information provided to us by several career officers from different branches of the military. We provide realistic rescue scenarios to rebut the argument by President Obama and his senior officials: that there was nothing that could have been done to save American lives.1
The reason this story cuts so deep with Americans is because we, as a people, know that everything the government could have done was not done. A U.S. ambassador, a senior official, and two brave former Navy SEALs were killed as a result of the inability of those in power to protect our own. These rescue scenarios are consistent with the theme of this book—that SEAL culture matters—and the creed of the SEAL teams:
We expect to lead and be led. In the absence of orders I will take charge, lead my teammates, and accomplish the mission. I lead by example in all situations.
I will never quit. I persevere and thrive on adversity. My Nation expects me to be physically harder and mentally stronger than my enemies. If knocked down, I will get back up, every time. I will draw on every remaining ounce of strength to protect my teammates and to accomplish our mission. I am never out of the fight.
We demand discipline. We expect innovation. The lives of my teammates and the success of our mission depend on me—my technical skill, tactical proficiency, and attention to detail. My training is never complete.
We train for war and fight to win. I stand ready to bring the full spectrum of combat power to bear in order to achieve my mission and the goals established by my countr
y. The execution of my duties will be swift and violent when required yet guided by the very principles that I serve to defend.
Brave men have fought and died building the proud tradition and feared reputation that I am bound to uphold. In the worst of conditions, the legacy of my teammates steadies my resolve and silently guides my every deed. I will not fail.
* * *
These scenarios are dedicated to the memory of Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty and to the Ty Woodses and Glen Dohertys of this nation’s future. Without them, this great nation will not survive. Remember, they may have been ordered not to go and they went anyway. As a result of their unique and heroic efforts, dozens of American lives were saved. Woods and Doherty are already passing into legend. Doherty and Woods were not “bumps in the road.” They were soldiers and heroes of this nation, and they should be honored as such.2
Rescue Scenario One
Date: September 11, 2012
Aviano Air Base
Mission Complete Time: 1:30 A.M.
Aviano Air Base is a NATO base located in northeastern Italy, in the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region. It lies at the foot of the Italian Alps, about ten miles from Pordenone, Italy.
Aviano is home to the United States Air Force’s Thirty-First Fighter Wing. The Thirty-First is the only U.S. fighter wing south of the Alps, and it is critical to operations in NATO’s southern region. It maintains two fighter squadrons, the 555th Fighter Squadron (Triple Nickel), and the 510th Fighter Squadron (Buzzards).3
The Thirty-First Fighter Wing Operations Group ensures the combat readiness of two F-16CG squadrons, one air control squadron, and one operational support squadron conducting and supporting worldwide air operations. Each F-16 squadron maintains approximately twenty operational fighter jets.4 The Thirty-First is the first permanently based fighter aircraft wing south of the Alps since World War II.
