by Damien Lewis
The Blue Mountain guard force was also accused of having left the pedestrian entrance open and of “letting the attackers in.” Five unarmed Libyan guards faced at least fifty enemy armed with AK-47s, light and heavy machine guns, and RPGs. Attackers ordered them to open the pedestrian gate or get blown to smithereens; the guards opened the gate. Had they been provided with appropriate weaponry with which to defend themselves and the Mission—weaponry that the State Department contract denied them—it might well have been a very different story. Either way, blame does not lie with the Blue Mountain guard force: it lies with those who dictated that they try to hold the line without a single weapon among them.
There have been reports in the media that the State Department refused to have a force of U.S. Marines based at the Mission or to let the Libyan guard force be armed, in an effort to keep the security at the Mission “low profile” and “nonconfrontational.” To attempt low-profile and nonconfrontational security in a place like Benghazi and at an American diplomatic mission is misguided, as the disaster that unfolded on the night of September 11, 2012, proves.
By having one Blue Mountain guard outside manning the barrier—something they had been told not to do for their own safety; but which they chose to do because we’d asked them to up their game—the guard force was able to detect the attackers early, which won them the vital seconds in which to hit the duck-and-cover alarm and/or radio warnings to the RSOs. (There are conflicting reports as to whether they radioed through warnings or hit the alarm: but either way, a warning was given.) As much as they were able to they stood by the Americans, and put their lives on the line.
Even I—with all my experience working as a private security operator, team leader, and manager on major American contracts and with senior American clients—was not permitted to carry a weapon at the Benghazi Mission, as stipulated on the State Department contract for all Blue Mountain personnel. In spite of not allowing the Blue Mountain force to be armed, let’s consider what that force did achieve on the night of the attack.
Blue Mountain employees were the first to detect the attackers and the first to raise the alarm. Blue Mountain employees—myself, and some of the guards—went back into the Mission when the attack was ongoing, to try to gather intelligence and find the missing Americans. Blue Mountain employees located the body of Ambassador Stevens and alerted U.S. authorities to its whereabouts and the need to secure it. Blue Mountain employees were the only people to go back into the Mission the morning after the attack to check for bodies, and to document the crime scene.
Considering the scope of Blue Mountain’s contract with the State Department, all of these actions—apart from raising the alarm—fall well outside of what Blue Mountain was contracted to provide. Only the State Department can provide answers as to why it believed an unarmed guard force was appropriate to secure a U.S. diplomatic mission in as volatile and dangerous a place as Benghazi. Either way, Blue Mountain employees delivered above and beyond what was asked of them.
For up to two weeks after the attack on the Benghazi Embassy and the Annex the U.S. administration maintained the line that the attack was a spontaneous demonstration against an anti-Islam video posted on YouTube called “The Innocence of Muslims.” On the contrary, this was a carefully planned and well-orchestrated attack by highly experienced and battle-hardened extremist fighters—ones that aimed specifically to target and kill Americans.
Bearing in mind that immediately after the attack I gave my detailed testimony and photographic evidence to an alphabet soup of American agencies—the State Department and FBI among others—and that my evidence was arguably the most detailed the U.S. administration possessed immediately following the attack, I cannot understand how the administration argued that this was a spontaneous demonstration that got out of hand. From my testimony alone it clearly was not.
The testimony and evidence that I provided made it clear who carried out the attack and the organized and highly effective nature of the fighters involved, and that they were specifically seeking to kill Americans. The State Department, FBI, and other agencies were clear in telling me that immediately following the attack my photographs and testimony were “all we’ve got.” In light of this I fail to understand why the attacks were initially portrayed as a “spontaneous demonstration that got out of hand.”
The official “spontaneous demonstration” line was the one that was picked up by most of the world’s media. However, I was far from being the only source immediately after the attack to state that this was a specifically targeted, carefully planned two-stage attack against two separate targets, involving many hundreds of heavily armed and mobile fighters from the Shariah Brigade, a militia with a worrying history of human rights abuses and extrajudicial executions in Benghazi, and one with known links to extremist groups, including Al Qaeda.
Demonstrations began on the streets of Benghazi and Tripoli about the Benghazi assaults and killings on September 12, so immediately following the attacks. Benghazians carried signs saying “Chris Stevens was a friend to all Libyans” and “Benghazi is against terrorism” and apologizing to America for the attack. That same day Libya’s deputy ambassador to London, Ahmad Jibril, told the BBC that Ansar al-Sharia—the Arabic name for the Shariah Brigade—was behind the attacks.
On September 13 the Libyan ambassador to the United States, Ali Aujali, apologized to then–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for this “terrorist attack” against the U.S. Mission in Benghazi. The Libyan ambassador praised Ambassador Stevens as a real friend to Libya and a hero, and urged the United States to keep supporting Libya through “a very difficult time” and to help “maintain security and stability” in the country.
On September 16 the Libyan president, Mohammed Magariaf, announced that the attack on the Benghazi Mission was planned many months in advance: “The idea that this criminal and cowardly act was a spontaneous protest that just spun out of control is completely unfounded and preposterous. We firmly believe that this was a pre-calculated, preplanned attack that was carried out specifically to attack the U.S. consulate.”
On September 21, ten days after the assault on the U.S. Mission in Benghazi, a popular uprising on the streets of the city drove out the Shariah Brigade militia. Some thirty thousand people marched through the streets, and over two days they fought open battles with the Islamist militias, targeting particularly the Shariah Brigade. They stormed several of the militia compounds and purged the city, forcing the militias to flee and seizing their headquarters.
In the aftermath of the Embassy siege, Secretary of State Clinton convened an Accountability Review Board (ARB), as required by America’s Omnibus Diplomatic and Antiterrorism Act of 1986. In December 2012 the State Department official ARB report was released. It was seen as being a sharp criticism of officials in Washington for ignoring requests for more guards and safety upgrades, and for failing to adapt security procedures to a deteriorating security environment.
It is worth considering the report at some length. While recognizing that the perpetrators of the attack are subject to ongoing criminal investigations, the ARB report reaches some interesting conclusions. It recognizes the gravity of the events of September 11, 2012, noting that “the Benghazi attacks represent the first murder of a U.S. Ambassador since 1988”—in other words, in more than two decades.
The report states: “There was no protest prior to the attacks, which were unanticipated in terms of their scale and intensity.” I’d take issue with the second part of that statement: the single greatest fear of myself and the RSOs in the Benghazi Mission was that we would be hit by a sizable force of extremist and/or Al Qaeda–allied militia, and that the Embassy would be overrun and everyone killed or captured. This was a repeating theme of our discussions, reflecting a very real fear of all those who served at the Benghazi Mission. Such fears were shared with Washington by the diplomats, RSOs, and others.
The ARB report further states: “Overall, the number of Bureau of Diplomatic Securit
y (DS) staff in Benghazi . . . was inadequate, despite repeated requests from Special Mission Benghazi for additional staffing.” DS are also known as RSOs, which is the term they used to refer to themselves in the field. The ARB report found a “pervasive realization amongst personnel who served in Benghazi that Special Mission was not a high priority for Washington when it came to security-related requests, especially those related to staffing.”
Unpacking that a little, it basically means there were not enough RSOs at the Benghazi Mission, or armed guards, and requests for more were denied by Washington. This is pretty much my experience and that of the RSOs as revealed in the pages of this book. The report further states: “dependence on the armed but poorly skilled Libyan 17th February Brigade militia members and unarmed, locally-contracted Blue Mountain Libya (BML) guards for security was misplaced.”
I’d agree on both counts: employing the 17th February Militia as the QRF at the Benghazi Mission was absolutely the wrong thing to do. Likewise, expecting our guard force to do their jobs unarmed was deeply misguided. The report goes on to find “the responses of both the Blue Mountain guards and February 17th to be inadequate.” While the report states that it found “little evidence that the armed 17th February guards offered any meaningful defense” of the Mission, it doesn’t specify in any detail how the response of the Blue Mountain guard force was “inadequate.”
In the recommendations made by the report it does support the deployment of more Marines to such diplomatic missions in future, and suggests the expanding of the Marine Security Guard program, with additional funding. The report suggests more Department of State personnel be deployed to “high-threat posts.” In other words, more Marines and more RSOs should be provided to missions like that of Benghazi in 2012, which was exactly what the RSOs stationed at Benghazi—and myself behind them—had repeatedly asked for.
The report also calls the “short-term, transitory nature of Benghazi’s staffing another primary driver behind the inadequate security platform in Benghazi. Staffing was at times woefully insufficient considering posts’ security posture and high-risk, high-threat environment . . . This staffing ‘churn’ had significant detrimental effects . . .” In other words, there were too few RSOs on too short contracts, something that I and the RSOs had repeatedly complained about, especially considering how dangerous Benghazi was.
The report states that while a five-person RSO complement was “initially projected and later requested multiple times,” it was rarely achieved. When I first worked at the Mission we had one RSO, and there were never more than three permanently based there. Even if five had been allocated, a mission of the size and risk factor of Benghazi should have had eight RSOs allocated to it, in my opinion—an opinion shared by many of the RSOs who served there.
The report noted significant failings in physical security measures at the Mission. Most notably, security cameras provided to cover the exterior of the Mission, and in particular the front gate, had not been installed because “technical support to install them had not yet visited post.” In other words, surveillance cameras that would have given early warning of the attack were not in use, because no one had been provided to fit them.
Indeed, the guardroom monitor that provided a view from the camera covering the front gate was out of service on the night of the attack—another reason one of our guard force was stationed outside the front gate, to keep eyes on the area and give early warning.
The report states several times that the responses of Blue Mountain’s guards and the 17th February Militia were “inadequate” on the night of the attack. It states that there were “no BML guards present outside the compound immediately before the attack ensued, although perimeter security was one of their responsibilities, and there is conflicting information as to whether they sounded any alarms prior to fleeing . . .”
The State Department report appears to equate the Blue Mountain guard force’s so-called failings with those of the 17th February Militia—the so-called QRF. This is mind-boggling. The only responsibility of our guard force in the event of an attack by an armed force was to raise the alarm, which they did (whether by radio, or by the duck-and-cover, or by both). Their only role thereafter was to run and save themselves, for the very reason that they were deployed at the Mission unarmed.
By contrast, the QRF were contracted as the armed guard with the responsibility of defending the Mission from an armed attack. They were also supposed to call in support from the 17th February Militia, who apparently had a major base not far from the U.S. Mission. In both of these supposed functions they categorically failed. Moreover, the RSOs had reached the conclusion that the 17th February Militia were at best useless, and at worst a danger to the Mission, and had asked for them to be replaced—requests that were repeatedly denied.
To my knowledge no RSO raised complaints about the Blue Mountain guard force or asked for them to be replaced—certainly not in the three months leading up to the attacks. Indeed, the Blue Mountain guard force was praised for doing a fine job in terms of what they were contracted to do, and they had even received State Department commendations for their response to the IED attack on the Mission. For the State Department report to equate the Blue Mountain guard force and the 17th February Militia as failing on a level somehow equal is unacceptable.
The State Department’s criticisms of the Blue Mountain guard force are also wrong in a number of specific aspects:
• According to my guards, we did have one guard stationed outside the main gate—the one who first spotted the attackers—on the night of the assault. He was there because we’d asked the guards to “up their game” security-wise due to the Ambassador’s visit, and because the screen via which they were supposed to be able to view the security camera covering the front gate was broken.
• The Blue Mountain guard force was contracted to patrol the interior of the Mission and its boundary—not to provide an external guard force. They were never supposed to be patrolling outside of the compound.
• I was told by my guards and by the FBI investigators that the guard force had hit the duck-and-cover alarm. Dave and Scotty have also indicated that the guard force radioed through a warning to them of the attack. Either one or both is true, and either way the Blue Mountain guard force did provide a warning.
Indeed, what is striking from the State Department official report is that there is no mention made of the considerable efforts made by myself or other Blue Mountain personnel after the attack began. There is no mention made of my or my guards’ attempts to get into the Mission to find the Americans, and to help rescue them and/or locate their bodies. There is no mention made of my and my guards risking our lives to locate and positively identify the Ambassador’s body at the Benghazi Medical Center, or of my alerting the U.S. authorities to his death and his body being there and providing photographic evidence of the same.
There is not even any mention made of my and my guard force driver documenting the crime scene the morning after the attack, when Shariah Brigade fighters were still present on the ground and menacing the Mission, or of my provision of such evidence (photographs and testimony) to U.S. authorities, including the State Department immediately thereafter. In fact there is no mention made whatsoever of any of this in the State Department’s official inquiry report into the Benghazi Mission attack. Why this should be so I fail to understand.
The report concludes that there were “systematic failures and leadership and management deficiencies at senior levels within two bureaus of the State Department resulting in a Special Mission security posture that was inadequate for Benghazi and grossly inadequate to deal with the attack that took place.” In other words, Washington failed the Benghazi Mission.
However, the report concludes that it “did not find that any individual U.S. Government employee engaged in misconduct or willfully ignored his or her responsibilities, and, therefore did not find reasonable cause to believe that an individual breached his or her duty so as to be the su
bject of a recommendation for disciplinary action.”
In other words, the official report into the Benghazi Mission attack concluded that no disciplinary action should be taken against anyone for all that had transpired. The RSOs had spent six months raising the grave security concerns that we all shared, and requesting more physical security and more staff and armed guards. They were repeatedly denied, and at the end of those six months the attack we all had feared did indeed take place—with consequences that actually went beyond what we had predicted.
No one in Washington seemingly takes the rap for any of this, yet at the same time justice is somehow seen as being done.
In the aftermath of the Benghazi Mission attacks, Rex Ubben, the father of RSO Dave Ubben, went public asking the State Department to own up to its mistakes and release all the information it has about what occurred in the lead-up to and during the Benghazi Mission siege. Rex Ubben said he found it troubling that “they have not owned up to their shortcomings: in government, in the military, and in business, if something goes wrong, you admit it, correct it and move on.”
Dave Ubben has been treated at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, outside Washington, D.C., for his injuries, which are extensive. His father describes his son as having been blown up twice, and that he kept going after the first time. His son suffered shrapnel damage from head to toe, and five broken bones, one of which was completely smashed, necessitating extensive surgery.
“I was surprised by how many parts of him were injured,” Rex Ubben remarked. “I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to whoever did the first aid the first time, the second time, and maintained the tourniquets until they could get him out of there.”
