I cannot disclose all that Lieutenant Colonel Wood told me, but you’d better believe I lost sleep over what I heard. He knew personally each of the men who had been killed. He grieved their loss. He had worked closely with Ambassador Stevens. Although leaving Libya had not been his decision, he felt tremendous guilt about not being there.
Given the differences between what was being reported in the media and what I heard from Lieutenant Colonel Wood, I knew there was only one way to get to the truth.
I told my wife and Chairman Issa that I needed to go to Libya as soon as possible. I needed to talk to people on the ground in real time and get a sense in person of what we were dealing with at the embassy. I had already learned that the consulate in Benghazi had not been properly fortified yet housed numerous Americans in a dangerous and unstable environment. We also had personnel at our facility in Tripoli, which shared the same vulnerabilities. Even a small, unsophisticated attack could easily penetrate the compound. How could that be?
Screwing Up the Narrative
It has always been my nature to act quickly once I make a decision. That quality hasn’t always been congruent with the way government works. But it served me well in this case because I do not believe the bureaucrats were expecting me to show up in Libya just weeks after the attack. I hadn’t given them time to get their story straight.
It took a few days after my meeting with Lieutenant Colonel Wood for Oversight Committee staff to make the necessary travel arrangements. With such short notice and an election just weeks away, no one on the minority side of the committee accepted my invitation to join me in Tripoli, Libya. That wouldn’t stop them from later crying foul to the media when asked why there were no Democrats on that trip. Classic.
I drove to the airport without fully knowing or understanding where I was going or how I was going to get there. I carry a backpack everywhere I go and keep it fully loaded with my electronic equipment, my medicine, and my paperwork—such as my diplomatic passport. I traveled light.
I was told to get on a Delta flight in Salt Lake City on October 4, 2012, and fly to a European city where I would be met as I got off the plane. I didn’t know who would be meeting me, nor was I certain what I should be looking for. They told me not to be worried, as it would be evident. It was.
I then changed planes to board an aircraft to Stuttgart, Germany, where I met up with a member of our committee staff. We drove to our American military base to meet with General Carter Ham. As the four-star general in charge of African Command, often referred to as AFRICOM, General Ham would have been personally involved in the deliberations over whether to send help to Benghazi once the attacks were under way. His story would carry great weight—if he was allowed to tell it.
The military divides up the world in different commands, and AFRICOM is a fairly new one. It handles everything in Africa, except Egypt. It has little to no assets and relies heavily on European Command and Central Command to provide the military aircraft and other assets they need to do their job.
We breezed through several checkpoints and were escorted up to General Ham’s personal office. It was a rather large office with big maps and a large, long conference table. The room had the obligatory flags and the pomp and circumstance you would expect. The idea was to get an overview and then first thing in the morning fly with him to Tripoli.
But there was a surprise waiting for me in General Ham’s office. Somebody was waiting there who was neither invited nor expected. He was a tall young blond man dressed in a suit. He was standing in the room with the general, a notepad and pen in hand. We were not introduced. I had to ask who he was. The general said he was an attorney sent by the State Department. He was assigned to be present in all our discussions.
I later learned his name was Jeremy Freeman, a thirty-three-year-old who had interned at the United Nations. I would later find out he specialized in Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. This is not surprising. When a federal agency hires a lawyer to specialize in FOIA requests, they aren’t there to facilitate transparency. It’s a scandal in and of itself that the government is allowed to hire smart, talented people to keep the rest of the government from finding out what they’re up to.
This man was not here to help me get to the truth. He was sent by the Deep State to ensure I didn’t screw up their narrative. His presence would also intimidate witnesses from being too candid.
I felt blindsided. I had not asked for a State Department minder, nor had I been told to expect one. I immediately recognized that his presence would inhibit my ability to get the truth—which is exactly what he was sent there to do.
In Freeman’s presence, the general said he was fine with the arrangement, but he seemed a little agitated. I certainly was. I thought General Ham appeared resigned to having Freeman join us. Frankly, he told me, my presence was more problematic than the State Department’s. Interesting. People had lost their lives. Why didn’t they want the public to know what really happened?
I was accompanied by an Oversight Committee staffer with deep overseas government experience who questioned Freeman’s security clearance level. He had sufficient clearance for the meeting with General Ham, so we reluctantly continued with Freeman listening to every word.
General Ham’s account probably wasn’t the story the State Department wanted told. In that initial meeting in Germany, I asked Ham why the U.S. military appeared not to respond to news that Benghazi was being attacked and overrun. He told me then, as he did later the next day on more than one occasion, the United States had proximity and capability, but the military was not directed to go. It didn’t make sense then, and it still doesn’t make sense today.
After the attack, the FBI hadn’t shown up in Benghazi for eighteen days, but the media walked the grounds of our facility days after the attack. The fact remains that no American personnel outside of Libya were ordered to go into Benghazi to help save the more than thirty people who were under siege. Not at the onset and not during the event. Never.
Obama secretary of defense Leon Panetta gave the world a similar story a few weeks later. He would say, “[The] basic principle is that you don’t deploy forces into harm’s way without knowing what’s going on; without having some real-time information about what’s taking place. As a result of not having that kind of information, the commander who was on the ground in that area, Gen. Ham, Gen. Dempsey and I felt very strongly that we could not put forces at risk in that situation.”
A few months later, in February 2013, after an overwhelming backlash from the Special Forces community, Panetta would change the story yet again. He testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee that intervention was not possible due to “time, distance, the lack of an adequate warning.” It seems Panetta’s initial, unscripted analysis more closely reflected General Ham’s conversation with me than did Panetta’s later narrative. Ham would later change his own story—something I heard firsthand.
Clearly, they knew my presence in Libya so soon after the attacks would give them less flexibility to revise history later. That’s why Freeman was there.
When I later learned that this Jeremy Freeman specialized in Freedom of Information Act and congressional requests, I understood that his job at the State Department was to suppress the release of information to the public, the media, and Congress. His job was to use all the legal tools possible to make sure the Department of State and its senior personnel were only viewed in the most favorable light.
It is disgusting, but every department and agency I am aware of employs staff to serve this purpose. From my vantage point, Freeman’s mission was to spy on a congressional inquiry, suppress information, and intimidate State Department personnel on the ground.
After our initial hour and a half with the general, my staff person and I exited and went to a local restaurant for some really bad German stew.
The next day, I was scheduled to visit a U.S. embassy team whose ambassador had been murdered and who had lost three more of their own to terrorists. It was a
sobering duty. In an embassy the size of Libya, everybody knew everybody. It was a complex with limited mobility. Tripoli was considered a dangerous assignment that precluded personnel from bringing their families along. As a result, this team was a tight-knit group. The loss hit hard.
They deserved for the truth to be told. But I wasn’t sure they would be allowed to tell it.
The people at Embassy Tripoli knew precisely who Freeman was and who sent him. It was already obvious at that point that Secretary Clinton and her senior staff had their version of the truth and needed this congressional inquiry to go away.
With only weeks to go until President Obama’s reelection, he was desperately trying to sell the narrative that he had won the war on terror. Osama bin Laden was dead and Al Qaeda was on the run! The political fallout from the truth—that four Americans had just been murdered in a coordinated terror attack—was obvious. The truth would also presumably hamper Secretary Hillary Clinton’s long-term political ambitions.
In retrospect, I believe the truth would ultimately have been far less damaging to the Obama and Clinton campaigns than the lies. The outcome of Obama’s 2012 reelection was, unfortunately, not close. Did any votes hinge on whether or not Al Qaeda was on the run? Still, the Obama administration chose to send Susan Rice out to every news network to lie about a video that had nothing to do with the attack. Even worse, Hillary Clinton reportedly looked the families of the victims in the eye days after the attacks and told them the government would arrest the filmmaker who was responsible for the deaths of their sons. She knew at the time that terrorism, not a filmmaker, was the cause of the attack—a fact that came to light during the 2016 presidential race. Her email the night of the attack to her daughter, Chelsea, revealed she had immediately attributed Benghazi to a terrorist attack.
The Obama administration and its Deep State allies covered this up out of a reflexive—perhaps pathological—need to whitewash and conceal. The Benghazi tragedy, like Clinton’s clumsy use of a private email server, revealed a woman committed to keeping secrets—and a Deep State apparatus all too willing to help.
With our State Department minder in tow, we visited the embassy. I have traveled around the world, visiting nearly one hundred countries in my business, personal, and congressional capacity, and this was my first time as a member of Congress that the State Department had blatantly placed a person in my way. His presence was cumbersome and intimidating. No doubt he was emboldened by the notion that President Obama would win reelection and that Secretary Clinton was going to be the next president of the United States four years later! What did he have to lose?
I had been a constant agitator and visible opponent to the administration. That was my job per the Constitution. Freeman was there to make sure I didn’t dig too deep.
Later, the State Department would say everyone was fine with Freeman joining the discussions. Based on my observations that was not true. Absolutely not.
During the day of our trip, we tried to make small talk to learn more about his background, why he was here, and what he was doing. He was exceptionally closed-lipped and shared no details. It didn’t take long to realize he was an impediment to learning the truth. His only purpose was essentially to spy on me. During the day I did all I could to evade him and find the truth.
Hidden Witnesses
Despite my success in getting information during my visit to Libya, the State Department continued to go to great lengths to conceal the truth. To be successful in promoting their false narratives, they had to hide the witnesses. They were surprisingly successful in doing so.
Shortly after returning from Libya, I had tried to meet with the heroes who survived that night. But even for me, getting their names proved difficult. The State Department was nonresponsive to our requests for a listing of who had been there that evening. Subsequent transcripts provided in response to House and Senate committee inquiries carefully redacted the names of survivors. Six months after the attack, the public still had not heard from a single witness! CBS News reported that the State Department had been unresponsive to multiple FOIA requests for names and other information. We later learned that witnesses had been required to sign nondisclosure agreements. Having been badly wounded, many would not see service again and would be forced to depend on the federal government to care for their families. CIA director John Brennan denied that there was any effort to discourage witnesses from coming forward. But the implicit pressure to stay quiet was real.
In particular, the contractors were very difficult to find. I learned of one hero who, many months after the attack, was still at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. I wanted to visit him. But it took me months to even figure out what his name was. I was eventually able to get on the phone with his father and express my thanks and appreciation. I learned his name and that he was still at Walter Reed. His injuries had been severe. I tried to visit. But when I reached the hospital, they swore they had no patient by that name. I later learned his name had been changed to prevent people like me from tracking him down.
I don’t know who decided to hide David Ubben—if I had known, I would have hauled that person before our committee to answer for it. But there was no way to tell. I never did end up talking to Ubben. He chose not to join his fellow survivors in writing about his inside account for the book 13 Hours. But he finally told his story to Catherine Herridge from Fox News in 2013. He later testified against Benghazi attack mastermind Ahmed Abu Khattala in October 2017. His story was heroic and, like the stories of the other heroes that night, deserved to be told.
As a State Department Diplomatic Security Service agent at the time, David Ubben went to great lengths to recover the body of Foreign Service officer Sean Smith. In the second wave of the attack, Ubben was on the roof with Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty—the former Navy SEALs who lost their lives defending the compound.
More Congressional Oversight Is Needed
There is a game the State Department plays with the House and Senate. Any member of Congress can travel to see how the executive branch is spending taxpayers’ money. It is an important part of oversight. As I have said, I believe strongly in “management by walking around.” With more than 320 departments and agencies together employing more than two million people, hundreds of thousands of contractors, and dishing out more than $4 trillion each year, there is a lot for the 535 members of the House and Senate to visit, see, and question.
The biggest portion of the discretionary budget goes to the Department of Defense at more than $600 billion per year. There are billions of additional dollars spent on foreign aid, State Department activities, etc.
More members of Congress should be traveling and reviewing how this money is spent. “Sunshine is the best disinfectant” is a mantra to live by, and when members show up asking questions, it is quite revealing what they can learn. However, the Deep State has no desire to be open, transparent, or subject to questioning. Congressional engagement scares the living daylights out of them. Being held accountable feels too new for them.
When members of Congress travel outside the United States, it is the State Department that makes travel arrangements. While the trip is funded by taxpayers, it comes from the State Department budget. They have extraordinary control and insight as to what members see along the way. It takes experience as a member to insist and dictate where we go and what we get to see.
Waiting until the last moment, the State Department will often claim there has been a security threat, and therefore we cannot travel to a planned location. It took a while, but I came to realize that while this was sometimes true, it was often done to shield what was happening. The real purpose of highlighting the potential security threat was to make sure members of Congress didn’t see something. It isn’t just the State Department that does this but also the Department of Defense and others. I recognize the DOD is in a very difficult position, but that’s exactly what representatives and senators should be seeing . . . the difficulties! If we are puttin
g our men and women in harm’s way, then members should understand the realities and experience them. Firsthand experience will affect their votes, appropriations, and perspectives.
Often, I would have a prearranged trip with a beautiful, professional agenda. I would let them begin the program but after twenty minutes or so it was time for questions and deviation from the agenda. Yes, I want to see and experience what they recommend, but what I really want to see is what they don’t want me to see. Sometimes these detours turn up nothing, but I can’t begin to even list the wide array of things we were able to unveil by asking unexpected questions and going places they said I could not go.
If there was a federal employee there, then I expected to be able to go there. My favorite question if it got testy was “What is it you think Congress should not see?” It is an impossible question to try to answer and those who did went down in flames. If they really thought they could challenge me I would lift my phone and say, “Hold on, I want to get this on video. Please tell me your name, title, and what you just told me. I am going to want a real-time record of this for the hearing we are going to have in Washington.” It never got to that point. By then they were sufficiently worried and took down their guard.
That tactic worked overseas but does not work, unfortunately, at the main offices in Washington, D.C. The State Department, for instance, is so big and massive I have no idea even where to go to pull the documents I want to see. That is all done via congressional letters and subpoenas.
Chapter 9
They Think We Can’t Handle Truth
I was up early dealing with jet lag and anxious about our trip to Libya. We were picked up from our hotel and brought to the tarmac on the military base.
We boarded a white Gulfstream. The general and I sat on the right side of the plane in the front compartment, knee to knee. He was wearing his full military uniform with the accompanying jacket. I was wearing something much more casual, the equivalent of khaki pants and a long-sleeve shirt and vest. My staff person and Jeremy Freeman the minder sat in the back. The flight attendant, from the military, brought the general his coffee and I stuck with a bottle of water.
The Deep State Page 10
