Even before Ambassador Stevens’s time, the warning signs were clear. In 2009, Gene Cretz became the first U.S. ambassador to Libya in more than thirty years. He had to be temporarily pulled in December 2010 after embarrassing documents posted on WikiLeaks recounted Cretz describing Qaddafi’s fear of flying over water, and Qaddafi’s proclivities, which included a “fondness for flamenco dancing” and reliance on a “voluptuous blonde” Ukrainian nurse. When Cretz returned to Tripoli in 2011, he knew the security situation was perilous. Al-Qaeda was in town to exploit Libya’s unsettled status and to try to obtain some of the thousands of missing MANPADS (man-portable air-defense systems): shoulder-fired missiles seized by rebel forces that stormed Qaddafi government bases. Cretz realized there were seriously dangerous tensions among anti-Qaddafi factions: Islamists and secularists. “I think there is a genuine cause to be concerned that things could go wrong,” he told reporters. It was a premonition.
Ambassador Cretz was the first U.S. diplomat in Libya to be faced with the prospect of relinquishing much-needed security. The State Department pulled one of its six-man Mobile Security Deployment teams. Cretz gave up the team begrudgingly and not without objection. Then, in April 2012, he was chosen to be the next ambassador to Ghana and Stevens was picked to replace him.
“Was Ambassador Stevens one of your primary concerns?” I ask Wood.
“Yes he was. As the chief of mission he was the primary concern there as far as security is concerned. He’s a man that has to get out and see and be seen. So that makes security difficult. And it makes it extraordinarily difficult in an environment such as Tripoli and the rest of Libya.”
Stevens had already served as the deputy chief of mission from 2007 until the start of 2009, during a period when there was no U.S. ambassador. Later, during the Libyan revolution in 2011, he was appointed to be America’s special representative to the National Transitional Council, the anti-Qaddafi rebel government headquartered in Benghazi. His friends say this is when Stevens developed a deep affection for Benghazi.
Almost from the moment he became ambassador, Stevens spoke of his desire to revisit Benghazi, where he had forged many friendships and relationships the year before. It was a top priority. In some respects, Benghazi was home for Stevens, at least when it came to his comfort zone in North Africa.
Wood and Stevens developed a fast friendship. They ate dinner together almost every night and became close confidants. They talked a lot about the diminishing security and how to overcome it. Stevens wasn’t one of those diplomats to stay holed up in the office even if it’s dangerous in the field. A big part of his job was to be seen out in public. Interact with the locals. To visit local stores, run at the local track, portray a sense of confidence in the community. Never let them know about the private concerns discussed with the security specialists at the embassy. About cables quietly dispatched to headquarters documenting the threatening environment and making the case for better security. The public face has to be confidence and smiles. That’s an ambassador’s mission. And nobody did it better than Stevens.
At one point, the U.S. State Department’s regional security officer in Libya, Nordstrom, asked for a dozen additional security agents, and he says the State Department’s regional director told him, “You’re asking for the sun, moon, and the stars.” Nordstrom replied, “You know what makes it most frustrating about this assignment? It’s not the hardships, it’s not the gunfire, it’s not the threats. It’s dealing and fighting against the people, programs, and personnel who are supposed to be supporting me. . . . For me, the Taliban is on the inside of the building.”
Not only was Nordstrom’s request for additional help refused, but headquarters also broke the news to Stevens that he’d be losing a second Mobile Security Deployment team.
“Did Ambassador Stevens or the regional security officer fight losing another team?” I ask Wood.
“Yes.”
“How did they do that?”
“It was quite a degree of frustration on their part,” Wood says. “They were, I guess you would say, clenched-fist over the whole issue.”
Meanwhile, Stevens planned to visit Benghazi in June but the trip never came to fruition. On June 6, an improvised explosive device detonated just outside the Benghazi consulate compound. June also saw an al-Qaeda demonstration right smack in the middle of Benghazi. The terrorists advertised out in the open in advance: a three-day rally for all their supporters.
“A rally for al-Qaeda supporters out in public?” I ask Wood incredulously when he explains this to me. The last I’d heard, al-Qaeda was “on the run.” President Obama said so.
“Oh yes,” Wood says. “They had a parade down the streets. They raised their flag on one of the county buildings. And people came from different parts of Libya as well as outside of Libya for that event.”
Wood tells me that many Libyans do not support al-Qaeda and made sure the terrorist group didn’t feel welcome for the rally. “The people of Benghazi themselves surrounded that crowd and told them of their disgust for that type of thing and shut down the operation. They had one day of a three-day rally and they were pushed out of town.”
“On the other hand,” I ask, “isn’t that sort of a red flag for the security situation that you have al-Qaeda supporters rallying in the streets of Benghazi in June of 2012?”
“Yes, that was another indicator to watch, to be aware of, and to try to compensate for as well.”
Then, on June 11, a rocket-propelled grenade hit a convoy carrying the British ambassador in Benghazi. Wood happened to be in the city when the assault occurred.
“I was there to perform some additional work for the defense attaché in receiving some equipment for the Libyan army,” Wood says. Within minutes of the attack, he and other U.S. personnel were called upon to help. “We received a request from the security people in Tripoli stating that [the British ambassador] had been attacked and [they] asked us to go for assistance, which we responded to immediately. They had a security officer injured severely and we got over there as quickly as we could.”
After the attack, the United Kingdom decided Benghazi was too dangerous and closed its consulate there. But the United States stayed in place and continued its security drawdown. Not only a reduction in men with a very specific set of skills but also an important piece of equipment: a DC-3 fixed-wing prop plane that had been reengineered to play a security and support role. The DC-3 was used for resupply trips around the Mediterranean and offered a way for U.S. personnel to travel between Tripoli and Benghazi on short notice in the span of a little more than an hour. It transported all kinds of equipment, including weapons that can’t be taken on commercial flights.
“For security personnel, that was a great asset,” Wood says. But on May 3, Stevens was copied on an email from the State Department’s Libya post management officer. It said that Undersecretary of State Kennedy “determined that support for Embassy Tripoli using the DC-3 will be terminated immediately.”
“It was a loss again. It was ‘okay, now how are we going to compensate for this?’ Again, sub-optimizing to do the same thing you were trying with less resources,” says Wood.
Despite the multiple warnings about the dangerous circumstances in Benghazi, Kennedy later testifies that it just wasn’t enough to trigger alarm bells at the highest levels. Not the foiled terrorist plot in December 2011 and the warning that Islamic terrorist elements are gaining operational capability in the Benghazi region. Not the April 10 IED attack on the UN envoy’s convoy in Benghazi. Not the May 22, 2012, RPG attack on the Benghazi offices of the Red Cross. Not the June 6 IED explosion just outside the U.S. compound in Benghazi, nor the June al-Qaeda rally in the streets of Benghazi, nor the June 11 RPG attack on the British ambassador in Benghazi. The Red Cross pulls out. The United Kingdom closes its consulate. One wonders what it would have taken to trigger alarm bells at headquarters.
“We had
no actionable intelligence . . . about this threat in Benghazi,” Kennedy testified a year later before Congress. “And therefore . . . I never went to the secretary of state and told her it was time to leave Benghazi.”
Two months before the attacks, on July 9, Stevens sent a cable asking headquarters to keep Wood’s sixteen-man military team and retain the last Mobile Security Deployment team at least through mid-September. His request said that benchmarks for a drawdown had not been met. However, the teams were not extended.
“We were fighting a losing battle,” Wood says. “We were not even allowed to keep what we had.”
State Department officials would later blame the Defense Department when asked why Wood’s team wasn’t allowed to stay. But Wood says that’s patently untrue. His team was on loan from U.S. Africa Command, commanded by General Ham.
“There was a great understanding reached where General Ham made Ambassador Cretz fully aware that as long as he needed Site Security Team or the security force from [the Department of Defense], he could have them there,” Wood tells me.
“You were told that?” I ask.
“Absolutely, yes,” Wood answers.
“By whom?”
“General Ham. I heard him on a number of occasions, personally as well as across videoconferencing.”
“So there was no pressure from the military to pull your team out?”
“No, none whatsoever.”
On August 2, six weeks before Stevens died, he made still another security request of headquarters. This one was for “protective detail bodyguard positions,” to “fill the vacuum of security personnel currently at post who will be leaving within the next month and will not be replaced.” He called the security condition in Libya “unpredictable, volatile and violent.” On August 8, as Wood’s special Site Security Team terminated its duty, Stevens dispatched yet another cable telling headquarters that “a series of violent incidents has dominated the political landscape,” and calling them “targeted and discriminate attacks.”
As he departed Libya, Wood was haunted by a lingering discomfort. He knew he was leaving behind embassy staffers—friends and colleagues—who were worried about their own safety. “I didn’t feel good about it. They asked if [they] were safe. They asked what was going to happen. And I could only answer that what we were being told is that [State Department headquarters is] working on it.”
On August 27, the State Department issued a travel warning for Libya, citing the threat of assassinations and car bombings in Benghazi and Tripoli. Then, when Stevens embarked upon his trip to Benghazi in September, he was guarded by two rookie Diplomatic Security guards who joined three already at the U.S. compound in Benghazi. They’re not military forces. They’re not counterterrorism experts. On September 11—the last day the ambassador was to awake on earth—he sent headquarters a weekly report that, in part, described Libyans’ “growing frustration with police and security forces . . . too weak to keep the country secure.” The agents guarding him didn’t even have their weapons and gear with them when they fell under attack. They had to rush to a storage area to retrieve their M-4 carbine assault riles after the terrorists used diesel fuel to set the compound on fire. The agents never fired a shot in defense. All of this confounds Wood.
“We slept with our rifles,” he says of the contrast between his own team’s standard operating procedure and that of the Diplomatic Security guards left to protect Stevens. “You never separated yourself from your weapon.”
Later, in a classified Senate hearing in December 2012, Kennedy is repeatedly challenged on the question of why no defense shots were fired.
“Were there orders for them not to shoot?” asks Senator Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat from California.
“No,” testifies Kennedy. There were no such orders. They just didn’t shoot.
Maybe there was no point. Maybe all they could do was to hide as best they could. They were so far outnumbered. The enemy swarmed the compound like bees.
The administration seemed pleased with how the closed hearing had gone. When the hearing adjourned, a CIA representative and State Department official who had been inside were practically “high-fiving,” says one observer present, “like they had pulled something over on the committee.”
In defending the substandard security, State Department officials would incorrectly tell reporters and Congress that even if Wood’s military team had been allowed to remain in Libya, it was tied to Tripoli and would never have been located in Benghazi to help. “It would not have made any difference in Benghazi,” Charlene Lamb, deputy secretary for Diplomatic Security, tells Congress on October 10, 2012.
Could it be that Lamb and other officials at State Department headquarters are ignorant of the plain facts even as they testify to Congress? Or are they using misinformation to spin? The truth is that Wood and his team members did travel to Benghazi for their official duties. Anyone who bothered to ask could have found that out. Heck, anyone who saw my recent interview with Wood knew it. Remember, he was in Benghazi when the British convoy was attacked and he helped with the rescue. He also planned to include members of his team on Stevens’s trip to Benghazi in June, had it not been postponed. “It was a security marathon, if you will, to encompass or try to provide security for that type of a movement,” Wood tells me. Wood describes other instances in which his team members went to Benghazi to protect a top U.S. diplomat. “At times there [was] a need for us to go out to Benghazi to perform those same static as well as mobile security functions for the principal officer that was out there. . . . So twice I sent [Site Security Team] members out there to support the security functions there,” Wood says.
With so many security questions, administration officials engage in their predictable strategy of deflection. State Department officials who don’t want to be quoted by name begin whispering to reporters that Stevens was partly at fault for his own demise. They imply he was a renegade. “I’m not even sure we knew he was going to Benghazi. Why would he go there on 9/11?” one official asks me rhetorically, quickly adding, “That’s not for attribution.” They also claim that Stevens had the final say-so in matters of his own security in Libya. Of course, if that’s true, then why did the State Department not grant his security requests? But State Department sources spread this spin to so many reporters that it’s repeated back to me with similar wording by a number of colleagues. They wander into my office or strike up a casual conversation and ask, Why would Stevens choose to go to Benghazi on 9/11? . . . I hear he was kind of a renegade. . . . I’m not even sure the State Department knew he was going to Benghazi. . . . You know, he was in charge of his own security and had final say. Others who knew Stevens bristle at the whispers and implications, telling me it’s the worst kind of violation to blame a dead man, who can never tell his own story.
The State Department’s Accountability Review Board continues to lay the groundwork for blaming Stevens in its December 2012 report. It says that Stevens’s “status as the leading U.S. government advocate on Libya policy, and his expertise on Benghazi in particular, caused Washington to give unusual deference to his judgments” (emphasis added). The clear implication is that Stevens’s misfortune was somehow a product of his own miscalculation or poor judgment. That the professionals in Washington deferred to his wishes and didn’t know any better. But it can’t be both true that Washington deferred to Stevens and that Washington also rejected his security requests. We know factually that the latter is true; so the former simply cannot be.
The Accountability Review Board also implies that Stevens was acting as a freelancer in arranging his schedule without the knowledge of headquarters or even his colleagues in Tripoli. “The Board found that Ambassador Stevens made the decision to travel to Benghazi independently of Washington, per standard practice,” reads the report. “Plans for the Ambassador’s trip . . . were not shared thoroughly with the Embassy’s country team, who were not fully a
ware of planned movements off compound.”
I note that the wording in the report uses a lot of qualifiers. It attempts to imply one thing but, if examined, may say quite another. When it comes to Washington politicians, investigations by appointed boards, and other such matters, I’ve learned that you have to carefully consider every word they choose. Often, lawyers and politicians construct phrasing that may be technically and legally defensible but is intentionally misleading. So what does the Accountability Review Board’s report really say? What does it leave unsaid? What can one discover reading between the lines?
FROM THE REPORT “The Board found that Ambassador Stevens made the decision to travel to Benghazi independently of Washington.”
ANALYSIS This sentence implies that Stevens was acting on his own. But a careful reading leaves open the possibility that headquarters was well aware of his travel.
FROM THE REPORT “Plans for the Ambassador’s trip . . . were not shared thoroughly with the Embassy’s country team. . . .”
ANALYSIS This implies Stevens kept his plans secret. However, it really seems to indicate the plans were shared with the embassy’s country team, just not “thoroughly” shared, whatever that means.
FROM THE REPORT “[The embassy’s country team members] were not fully aware of planned movements off compound.”
ANALYSIS This implies Stevens didn’t tell his colleagues about his plans off the compound. But in actuality, it seems to indicate they were aware, just not “fully” aware, whatever that means. Additionally, the supposed lack of knowledge about Stevens’s “planned movements off compound” is irrelevant since he was inside the compound when attacked. But perhaps it’s included to add to the implication that Stevens wasn’t keeping his colleagues clued in.
Later, Stevens’s number two, Gregory Hicks, tells me that Stevens did not secretively freelance his own schedule: quite the opposite. Hicks says that Stevens’s daily plans were routinely circulated within the State Department. Specifically, his planned travel to Benghazi was shared with headquarters via email several weeks in advance of the visit and in regular staffing reports during the trip. Headquarters “knew Chris was going to Benghazi for five days during a gap between principal officers until Benghazi’s new principal officer arrived,” Hicks tells me with certainty.
Stonewalled: My Fight for Truth Against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation, and Harassment in Obama's Washington Page 19
