The Siege

by Damien Lewis

  I came in one morning and there were four guys in the compound whom I’d never seen before. They were dressed in the same casual “uniform” as the RSOs, and for a moment I thought that all our prayers had been answered and Washington had finally agreed to send out some more RSOs.

  I bumped into Rosie on her way to the TOC. “Jesus, Rosie, result! Four new RSOs! How the hell did you manage that?”

  She shook her head. “Sadly, no. It’s four guys down from Tripoli to teach the QRF some tactics.”

  I laughed. “It’s worth a try, I guess. But how long have they got? A couple of years?”

  Rosie grinned. “Stop it, Morgan, stop it!” She was getting used to my sense of humor by now.

  At least this meant that my complaints about the QRF had to be hitting home. But in truth there was only one way to deal with the QRF—and that was to sack the whole lot of them and get a dozen U.S. Marines in their place. Even if it was possible to teach them all they needed to know, that wouldn’t for one moment put the necessary moral fiber or loyalty into their souls that the job demanded.

  Rosie and Adam gathered with the four arrivals as they prepared to do their stuff with the QRF. I could tell by their body language that they didn’t want me around, so I moved off to a place where I could watch unobserved. Jim joined me. He was a straight-talking ex-Army guy, and he and I got along real well. In a firefight, he was the kind of soldier I’d want by my side every time.

  I nodded in the direction of the four new guys. “You seen that lot?”

  Jim spat tobacco juice. “I seen ’em.”

  “Not SF, obviously,” I remarked. “You wouldn’t waste Delta or SEALs on that shower of shit.”

  Jim laughed. “No way. Green Berets, maybe. Or Marines.”

  We watched as the four guys tried to teach the QRF some basic room clearance techniques. They started by doing a demo. They had their M4 carbines at the shoulder, as they bunched up tight at a doorway, kicked it in, and stormed inside. They were awesome. Their drills were perfection. But the trouble was, room clearance was way above the QRF. They needed to start by learning to strip and reassemble an AK-47, and by doing some live firing out on the ranges.

  In room clearance you have to keep your formation tight before going in, but without putting a bullet in the head of the guy in front of you. In spite of what the instructors kept telling them, Mutasim kept holding the muzzle of his AK-47 against the head of Hamza as they massed to go in.

  The instructors were going mental: “Stop putting your gun on the back of his head, brother! One slip and he’s dead!”

  The QRF boys kept blaming each other when they got it wrong, and Mutasim typically went into a big sulk. He had Americans yelling and bawling at him, and he was too much of a man to take any of that. He chose now to use the “I don’t speak English” excuse. Mutasim was the QRF leader for the simple fact that his English was great. Claiming that he didn’t understand was total bullshit.

  I shook my head, despairingly. “This is just lost on ’em.”

  Jim grunted in agreement. “You can’t teach those motherfuckers nothin’.”

  Jim would say things to me in private that he wouldn’t in front of his fellow RSOs. He’d completed two tours of Iraq and been in some major firefights. In my eyes he’d more than earned the right to voice such thoughts.

  “Get those pieces of shit in a firefight, they’ll run. Plain as.” Jim spat into his bottle, as if that was the gospel on the QRF, and in my view it pretty much was.

  We had to laugh as we watched, but it was a laughter born out of desperation—not of any sense of high spirits. After all, this was the force tasked to defend the American Embassy in Benghazi. We headed to the canteen for lunch and the four instructors came in. The leader was a fiery-looking redhead.

  “Morgan, right?” he remarked, as he took a seat. “You’re the security guy, right?”

  “That’s me.”

  “I’m Sam, from Vegas,” he continued. “And this here’s Ivan.”

  Ivan nodded a greeting. “Good to meet you, Morgan.”

  Ivan spoke with a thick accent that had to be Russian. “Ivan? Where the hell are you from, Moscow?”

  “Somewhere in Russia, yes. But now I am serving in the U.S. military.”

  “Fuck me, if they let the Russians in there’s hope for me yet,” I joked.

  Being a typical Russian, Ivan got the humor right away. He was a small, wiry, tough-looking operator. I told him how he was the second Russian I’d met who’d gone over to the Americans. Janos was an ex-Spetsnaz—the Russian Special Forces—guy who’d been on my team for the U.S. ACE contract in Iraq. He was a crack operator and we’d become great friends—a friendship we’d maintained when Janos subsequently went to live in the United States.

  “So, Morgan, what d’you think of security at the mission?” Sam ventured.

  “Lacking in many areas.”

  “Such as?” he probed.

  “Not enough RSOs, obviously. Physical security. Visual barriers. There’s all sorts you could do. Put up signs saying ‘electrified fencing.’ Electrify the fencing. Hell, just complete the fence so there’s no gaps in it. You could put up dummy cameras everywhere. You could put up signs saying ‘guard dogs on patrol.’ You could get some dogs. Muslims hate dogs. They’re shit scared of them. There are kennels out the back there and the former occupants had dogs. That way at least my guards would have some dogs to bite the bad guys on the ass.”

  Sam couldn’t help but laugh. “Yeah, yeah, buddy, I hear you. So, what about your guard force?”

  I fixed him with a look. “What about them?”

  He shrugged. “Like, are they up to the job?”

  “What job is that, exactly? Guarding a U.S. diplomatic mission armed only with batons? If we get hit in a sustained attack we’ve trained them to sound the alarm and run. So are they up to that job? Yeah. Running away—I figure they can manage that.”

  “Agreed, buddy.” Sam shook his head. “Five unarmed guards against armed attackers . . .”

  “You’d run and all,” I finished the sentence for him.

  “So, what do you think of the QRF?”

  I put down my knife and fork. “You want the truth? Or d’you want it dumbed down a little, so it’s all good and politically correct?”

  By now Rosie and Adam had joined us and were listening in. I could see them cringing.

  “No, no, buddy—give it to us straight,” said Sam.

  “All right. The QRF are totally out of their depth. You could spend a year instructing them and you’d still not get them up to speed. Plus they’re not to be trusted. They won’t stand and fight for Americans or the Mission. You could spend a lifetime training them and that won’t change.”

  Someone choked on their food. People were looking at me horrified. Ivan was staring hard at his plate, trying not to laugh. I figured the guys had realized this during their abortive training session, but no one wanted to be the one to say it.

  Sam whistled. “Jesus, buddy, you don’t hold back.”

  “You asked. You got.”

  At that moment the cricket came on the TV. I threw an insult at Asaf, just to lighten things up a little.

  “Hey, gandu, so who you losing to today?”

  “Hey, benshoot, England no good!”

  I knew I was sounding like a stuck record as far as the QRF were concerned. Rosie and Adam were probably thinking, Jesus, does he ever stop. But I had this horrible suspicion I was going to be proven right, and if they kept asking I’d keep telling the truth. I did not want to be proven right. I really liked the Americans here, and I felt we’d gelled as a tight team. They were good-natured, hardworking professionals, and the last thing they deserved was to get saddled with the 17th February Militia as their QRF. No one deserved that.

  I was expecting someone to say something to me afterward, maybe Rosie to pull me aside and have words. But not a bit of it. It was like there was an emperor-has-no-clothes syndrome going on here. Everyone
knew. No one wanted to say anything. So they left it up to the grumpy Brit to give voice to the unspeakable.

  Mutasim became even more unbearable once he was issued an old M16 assault rifle. It didn’t make any sense for him to have one, for now he was armed with a weapon that fires 5.56mm ammo, whereas the other three had AKs that use a 7.62mm round. If Mutasim ran out of ammo, he couldn’t use that of his fellow QRF—not that I believed they would ever stand and fight. But still Mutasim with his M16 clearly felt vastly superior to the others with their AKs.

  Mutasim had a somewhat schizophrenic attitude toward me. On the one hand he knew I saw right through his bluster and bullshit, and he hated it. On the other, he kept trying to ask me to tell him my “war stories.” I was a good deal older than Adam and Jim and I guess Mutasim knew I must have seen some action. I didn’t tell him or any of the other QRF boys anything. I didn’t trust them, and as far as they were concerned I was more than happy to remain the gray man.

  But truth be told, all this crap with the QRF was getting to me. I’d never known anything like it, not in ten years working as a private military operator. It was so obvious what needed to be done here: 17th February Militia out, Marine Corps in. With 250,000 U.S. Marines to choose from, I couldn’t believe Washington couldn’t spare us a dozen. I decided I needed to go find me a proper gym. I needed to work out some of my anger and frustration pumping iron.

  I’d noticed this place in downtown Benghazi that looked like a members-only gym. It was a white building with a mural of a bodybuilder painted on the front. I got Tom to drive me there and ask if there were any other Westerners using the place. He came out and told me there were. I offered him a deal. I’d pay for his membership if he’d train with me, just so I had someone to watch my back.

  Tom knew well he could do with losing some weight, and so we started to train there every day. We’d alternate timings, either before or after work, so as not to set too regular a pattern. It was a well-equipped place, and there were at least three hard-core bodybuilders working out there. I didn’t see any other Westerners, but the locals couldn’t have done more to make me feel welcome and secure.

  From the get-go the owner gave me a great deal of reassurance. “Don’t worry about being here,” he told me. “If anyone tries to come in who I don’t know and trust, I’ll warn you—then you can get out the rear.”

  He showed me where the back exit was, and how to make a getaway from there. The other regulars gave me similar reassurances. These were the decent, honest Libyans whom I hoped the revolution would favor, not the likes of the Shariah Brigade—but sadly, I wasn’t too sure these educated, liberal types would come out on top. Still, I had myself a gym and a training partner in Tom, and I was able to work off some of my worst frustrations, which was a blessing.

  I was at the Embassy a few days after the abortive training of the QRF when something struck me as being really odd. My guard force, the QRF, and the RSOs shared the one radio net. They carried these small Motorola radios, which were fine for communications in and around the compound.

  But I’d noticed that the RSOs had an extra radio, and every now and then I’d seen them take a call on it. They’d do their best to make themselves scarce whenever they got a buzz on this second net, but today there was going to be no hiding it. We were at lunch in the canteen when all three of the RSOs’ radios hummed into life. They reached as one to turn the volume down, but still I caught most of the message.

  “Bulldog, Eagle One, wheels up in five minutes. Wheels up in five . . .”

  Rosie got up from the table, and I knew she was going to take the call somewhere private. The caller’s accent had been very American, and I knew Rosie had to be communicating with some other “agency,” one that couldn’t be so far away. Even with a repeater station—a gizmo that would sit on a rooftop somewhere between the two transmitters, to increase the reach of the radios—they wouldn’t have a range of more than a few kilometers.

  With Rosie gone there was a bit of an uncomfortable silence, because both Adam and Jim knew that I’d heard. “Wheels-up” is generally code for a vehicle or aircraft leaving a base, “wheels-down” meaning the opposite. A few moments later Rosie was back, trying her best to act as if nothing had happened.

  I stopped eating and glanced at the three of them. “Okay, guys, listen, I’m not stupid. You’ve clearly got another call sign somewhere in Benghazi. I don’t know where or who they are, but I don’t need you to keep running outside every time they come up on the net. I’ve worked alongside your CIA and SOF for eight years or more, so I know how it works. When they come up on the net I’ll walk outside, for the less I know the better.”

  There was a moment’s silence after my little speech, before all three of them burst out laughing.

  “Fair enough,” Rosie remarked. “From now on, we’ll do it your way.”

  I meant what I had said. The less you know about a secret, black outfit—one that’s operating under the radar—the less you can give away to an enemy if you’re captured and interrogated. Whoever this other call sign was, it was clearly a need-to-know operation, and I didn’t need to know anything about them in order to do my job properly.

  As matters transpired there was a second American base in Benghazi situated about ten minutes’ drive away from us. It was called simply “the Annex.” The mixed CIA/Special Operations Forces team located there served a dual purpose. Their primary role was to hunt down any MANPADS—man-portable surface-to-air missiles—and sophisticated antitank rockets that had fallen into militia (and hence possibly Al Qaeda) hands.

  Over the years Colonel Gaddafi’s regime had sourced thousands of antiaircraft missiles, the most sophisticated being the Russian Igla-S. The Igla-S is known as “the Grinch” to NATO forces, and it is a state-of-the-art missile system. It boasts a six-kilometer range, a two-color infrared seeker system that is all but impossible for an aircraft’s defenses to defeat, plus a 2.5-kg high-explosive warhead with a proximity fuse, meaning it can explode simply when close to a target (in other words, it doesn’t actually have to hit it).

  There were also worrying reports that the French had airdropped MANPADS to the militias, as part of the process of arming them to bring down Gaddafi’s regime. If that was true, then the French had doled out MANPADS to the rebels only for the Americans to have to try to hunt them down and get them back again. I guess this all made sense to someone, somewhere—just not to me.

  If any Igla-S had fallen into Shariah Brigade or Al Qaeda hands, airliners were very likely going to start getting shot down, hence the need to track them down. Trouble was, the MANPADS in Libya had gone underground: they’d fallen into militia hands and very quickly been squirreled away. Likewise, many of the Libyan Army’s sophisticated ATGMs—antitank guided missiles—had gone the same way. The MANPADS and ATGMs had been cached by the militias, awaiting future conflicts—or, with the more extremist groups, terrorist applications.

  Hence the Annex.

  Officially, the Annex didn’t exist, but there were those in Benghazi who knew about it, and now I was one of them. It was what people in the know call a “Velvet Hammer Operation”—a deep black project, one hidden behind layers of “deniability,” denoting a soft approach to getting something hard done. I figured there would be a mixture of CIA, Delta Force, and SEAL operators based there, plus ex–Special Forces private contractors. The secrecy surrounding the Annex had to be real tight, for my guards had never mentioned it, and they knew pretty much everything that went down in Benghazi.

  Apart from hunting for surface-to-air missiles, the other role of the Annex was to act as an extra layer of backup for the Embassy. While I didn’t know exactly where they were located, it was good to know the boys from the Annex were around somewhere, as an added layer of security.

  Once I had learned of the Annex’s existence several things fell into place. I understood now why we were billeted off compound, and why there had been sensitivity over us using the Internet and the canteen. No on
e wanted us hanging around too much and witnessing the liaison between the Embassy and the Annex, and the night visits that were very likely going down. That was all part of the deniability. I also had a good sense now from where Rosie, Adam, and Jim were getting their intel.

  Shortly after learning of the Annex’s presence I was in the canteen eating lunch when a guy walked in whom I’d never seen before. He glanced in my direction, uttered a quiet “hello,” then went to the hot plate and loaded up some food. He came and joined me. He had U.S. Special Forces written all over him. When you have worked with these types before you start to be able to recognize certain traits. He was around six feet tall, lean and muscular, but quiet.

  “You must be Morgan,” he volunteered. “I’m Frank.”

  “Yeah, nice to meet you, mate,” I replied.

  We ate the rest of our food pretty much in silence. I knew the protocol. No outside agency was supposed to be privy even to the existence of the Annex, let alone its function, and to all intents and purposes I was an outside agency. I finished my meal, got up to leave, and wished the guy a pleasant day.

  “You too, buddy,” he replied.

  I never saw him again, but I did see other teams coming through now and again. I made a point of making myself scarce whenever they were around. I didn’t want to embarrass any of the RSOs, or the Annex guys, by forcing them into a situation where they’d have to ask me to leave. It was better I got out of the way of whatever cloak-and-dagger stuff was going down at the Embassy.

  All seemed to be going well at the downtown Benghazi gym, and it offered a good refuge whenever I had to make myself scarce at the Mission. Tom was acting a bit like Arnie throwing the weights around, but otherwise all seemed to be good. One afternoon we were working out and one of the regulars, a thickset Libyan, took his position at the bench press next to me and struck up a conversation.