HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton

by Jonathan Allen

  Then without warning, they kicked reporters off of the Internet to ensure that the connection to the ambassador’s house would have enough capacity. With Hillary at the desk, her aides piled onto the ambassador’s bed behind her to watch.

  Nick Merrill, a press secretary who dabbles in photography as a hobby, tried to snap photos stealthily as Hillary sat glued to the monitor. His mission was complicated by the loud sound his Canon 7D camera normally made when it clicked away at eight frames per second. Merrill switched over to taking single frames, ducking behind an armoire between shots so as not to make Hillary aware that she was being photographed. Finally, he crept up close enough to capture a memorable image of her, smiling with her hand resting at the top of her sternum in a gesture of pride, as she watched. In the photo, a half-eaten sandwich sits on the desk. Hillary wore a look of satisfaction when Obama came out to the stage to greet her husband. Her aides later expressed mild surprise that Hillary was so enthralled, given the innumerable speeches she had seen her husband give over the course of more than thirty years.

  When it was released by the State Department, Merrill’s photograph was powerful enough to merit play on most major American news sites the following morning. Without uttering a word—without risking a controversial appearance or partisan jab—Hillary conveyed that she had her eyes on the presidential race and on her husband’s role in it.

  Even though she followed the tradition of most secretaries of state by declining to campaign for the president’s reelection, Hillary closely monitored electoral developments, particularly in the battle for control of the Senate. During the 2012 election cycle, according to a Democratic source on Capitol Hill, she spoke to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, the Nevada senator, as many as five times about electoral politics. “It was like ‘I just want to know,’ ” the source said. “She wasn’t asking to do anything. We weren’t asking her to do anything, obviously. But she wanted to have a little bit of the fix.”

  Hillary, who could watch Bill take care of her politics at arm’s length, was largely focused on doing well in the job that she had. In a few months, she would leave the administration, and it looked as if she would do so with a spotless record.

  FIFTEEN

  Benghazi

  When Hillary Clinton had met with Libyan opposition leader Mahmoud Jibril for the first time in the penthouse suite at the Westin Paris on March 14, 2011, as part of her campaign to build a coalition to fight Qaddafi, Chris Stevens was one of the handful of American officials in the room. Stevens was so taken with Jibril’s presentation that day—the vision of an inclusive post-Qaddafi Libya—that he urged Hillary to repeat it to President Obama.

  A model practitioner of the kind of expeditionary diplomacy that Hillary believed was essential to improving America’s standing abroad, particularly in the Arab and Muslim worlds, the rangy Stevens had literally stood out from the crowd in his foreign service training class years earlier. Fluent in Arabic and French, he had spent much of his twenty-year career as a political officer in Middle Eastern and North African capitals, including Jerusalem, Damascus, Riyadh, and Tripoli, where he served in the roles of deputy chief of mission and chargé d’affaires for a two-and-a-half-year stretch ending in 2009. During his first tour in Libya, he had delivered blunt assessments of Qaddafi’s eccentricities back to Washington, including observing at one point that the Libyan strongman “often avoids making eye contact during the initial portion of meetings, and there may be long, uncomfortable periods of silence.”

  The combination of his expertise in the region, his commitment to a view of diplomacy that emphasized on-the-ground engagement with the public and civil institutions, and his belief in Jibril’s vision for Libya made him a natural choice to become America’s liaison to the Libyan opposition in the weeks after the coalition began hammering Qaddafi’s forces.

  He arrived in Benghazi, the rebel stronghold, via a Greek cargo ship on April 5, 2011, with what he described as a mandate to “go out and meet as many members of the leadership as I could in the Transitional National Council.”

  Hillary’s whole approach to conflict regions—articulated in the QDDR and demonstrated by the State Department’s work with the Pentagon in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq—was to foster partnerships among government agencies that allowed diplomats to be on the ground in the most dangerous parts of the world. The risk, she believed, was necessary to protecting and advancing American interests. Released just a few months before Stevens landed in Benghazi, the first QDDR noted that “as we expand U.S. expeditionary capacity for conflict and crisis, we are building on the experience of innovative field officers at State and USAID who have set new standards for impact on the ground.” The report argued that “these kinds of efforts must become a part of the ‘new normal’ for our personnel deployed to conflict and post-conflict environments.” It also talked about how to “manage risk” in such places rather than avoiding it.

  Stevens served in his Benghazi-based post until November 2011, left Libya, then returned in May 2012, this time to Tripoli, as America’s ambassador to the fledgling government. Stevens was “famous for always maintaining his California sense of calm, even when he’s up against the most challenging diplomatic crises out there,” Hillary said at a State Department ceremony in honor of his promotion. Challenge was exactly what Stevens found. In March his predecessor, Ambassador Gene Cretz, had cabled Washington from Tripoli to ask for an alteration in the State Department’s plan for transitioning from an emergency security posture to “normalized security operations.” State was in the process of a phased withdrawal of three mobile security detachment (MSD) teams, groups of six specialized State security officers who coordinated closely with other agencies, including the Marine Corps and the FBI, and a sixteen-member Pentagon site security team (SST). The plan called for replacing them with a combination of traditional diplomatic security officers from the State Department and local security forces.

  But with the unstable security environment in Tripoli, during a political transition expected to last for a year beyond the June 2012 election, and with frequent visits from VIPs who needed security, Cretz requested in a March 28 cable that one MSD team remain in place to provide training for local forces through July 1, 2012, that Tripoli get an increase in the number of full-time regional security officers and that State provide a dozen traditional temporary-duty diplomatic security officers to replace the departing MSD teams. In addition, he requested that State maintain a force of five temporary diplomatic security officers, on rotations of forty-five to sixty days, in Benghazi.

  In requesting more assistance, Cretz dealt primarily with Eric Boswell, the head of diplomatic security at the State Department’s Washington headquarters. At the time, there wasn’t believed to be a specific threat to American diplomats or assets in Libya, just a chaotic environment in which the new government had little authority to rein in the hundreds of militia groups across the country. Cretz said later that he did not bring up his request for more security with Hillary, Cheryl Mills, or anyone else in the secretary’s personal office.

  “To be honest, I felt that I could probably live within the gradual transition,” Cretz said of his decision not to go higher up the chain of command. “If you had said to me ‘Would you like more or less security?’ of course I would have said ‘I want more.’ But given the fact that we really didn’t have, to my knowledge, a credible threat against us, and we were facing what everybody else was facing [in conflict zones around the world], we had had at least sufficient resources to do what we were doing.”

  Before Cretz could get a reply to his cable, the Benghazi compound was hit with a small bomb, and in a separate incident, another improvised explosive device was thrown at an American diplomatic motorcade. When word finally came back from Washington on April 19, three weeks after his cable, Cretz was disappointed. The reply he received suggested that the original plan would remain in place.

  “Whether that was a misjudgment or not, we had to live
with the decision to basically go through as much normalization as we could, but we kept pushing for extensions,” Cretz said. Instead of holding meetings in several locations, diplomats would now stay in one place and bring in other people to meet with them, as a means of reducing security force needs. “When faced with a situation, we saluted and we made the adjustments that we needed to make.”

  When Stevens arrived to replace Cretz in May, the situation on the ground was growing worse. But his requests to maintain a higher level of security met with similar resistance from Washington. Less than a month into the job, he sent an e-mail asking the director of the State Department’s Mobile Security Deployment Office to allow two departing MSD teams to remain in place. The day before, an IED had blown a large hole in the outer wall of the Benghazi compound. But the informal request was denied.

  In July, Eric Nordstrom, a regional security officer on the ground in Tripoli, was planning to send a formal cable requesting continued support from the sixteen-member SST and two MSD teams. Charlene Lamb, a deputy assistant secretary of state in Washington, responded angrily when informed of it. “NO, I do not [repeat] not want them to ask for the MSD team to stay!” she wrote in an e-mail to other State staff. Stevens and his security team ignored her admonition, sending a cable three days later expressing concern about a planned reduction from the existing thirty-four U.S. security personnel in Tripoli to only seven by mid-August. Specifically, the embassy asked for an extension of support from at least thirteen high-level security agents, through mid-September 2012. The conditions on the ground didn’t meet the necessary benchmarks for a reduction in force, he argued, and the Libyan governing authority wasn’t equipped to provide support, either for normal operations or in an emergency.

  Pat Kennedy, the undersecretary for management, denied the request, according to a subsequent congressional investigation. There is no evidence that the request ever made it above Kennedy, who, as an undersecretary, was two levels below Hillary in the State Department power structure.

  The brewing fight between Tripoli and increasingly senior State officials in Washington escalated over the summer. But the high-level security teams were stationed in Tripoli and seldom traveled to Benghazi. Indeed, while repeated requests for additional security were generally focused on Tripoli, in the western part of the country, the security situation in Benghazi, in the east, had been deteriorating badly throughout 2012.

  In addition to attacking American facilities and personnel, terrorists fired rocket-propelled grenades at an International Red Cross building; Sudanese and Tunisian diplomats came under fire; and the British closed their consulate after their convoys were twice targeted by rocket-propelled grenade fire and possibly AK-47s. Despite the presence of a Libyan government police force, Benghazi was really a war zone dominated by competing militias, some of which were willing to provide protection for Americans for a price.

  As State moved to normalize its security operations in Tripoli, it beefed up the physical compound in Benghazi—heightening the outer wall; reinforcing the facility with Jersey barriers, steel gates, and a steel door; and adding guard booths, safety grilles on windows, and an internal communications system. Technically, it was a temporary facility with a residence and workspace for the ambassador to use on visits to Benghazi, but State was preparing to turn it into a permanent consulate.

  Stevens traveled from Tripoli to Benghazi for what would be his final trip on September 10, 2012, and attended a briefing at a secret CIA annex a mile or so from the compound. The number-two State Department official on the ground at the time, Greg Hicks, would later testify that Stevens went to Benghazi to prepare for a visit Hillary planned to make to Libya just before the end of her term.

  “At least one of the reasons he was in Benghazi,” Hicks said, “was to further the secretary’s wish that the post become a permanent constituent post, and also there, because we understood that the secretary intended to visit Tripoli later in the year. We hoped that she would be able to announce to the Libyan people our establishment of a permanent constituent post in Benghazi at that time.”

  Stevens had told Hicks that Hillary personally conveyed that message just before he had arrived in Tripoli as the new ambassador that summer, and with the end of the fiscal year approaching, the State Department had only until September 30 to transfer funds from an Iraq reconstruction account if Hillary hoped to announce the transition during a trip to Tripoli later in the year, Hicks testified.

  “Timing for this decision was important,” Hicks told a House committee. “Chris needed to report before September thirtieth, the end of the fiscal year, on the physical—the political and security environment in Benghazi—to support an action memo to convert Benghazi from a temporary facility to a permanent facility.”

  But Benghazi was growing ever more dangerous, and when Stevens, the American diplomat most familiar with the area, set out for what was supposed to be a five-day visit on September 10, 2012, he knew it. Wary of potential violence on the anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist assault on the United States, and believing himself to be a target of extremists, he decided to hold meetings and work inside the compound that day.

  Early in the morning, before seven a.m., someone was spotted taking pictures of the compound, which was guarded by American security officers, local militia, and the government’s ragtag police force. That morning Stevens sent a memo to Washington in which he detailed that in response to U.S. support for Jibril’s candidacy for prime minister, local militia members were threatening to stop protecting Americans. In a meeting two days earlier, militia leaders had said that “very fluid relationships and blurry lines” defined membership in various militias, and many men were members of multiple militias. It was difficult to ascertain, at any given moment, who was fighting for what. Beyond that, there was a labor dispute with one of the major local militias.

  Late that afternoon Hicks, the deputy chief of mission in Libya, sent a text message from Tripoli asking whether Stevens had heard about the attack on the American embassy in Cairo. Worried about mounting fury over an anti-Muslim video produced in the United States, the Cairo embassy staff had put out a statement around noon condemning “the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims.”

  The statement failed to quell the outrage, and several hours later a demonstration outside the embassy turned violent. Protesters stormed the grounds, lowered the American flag, and raised a black banner with Arabic script in its place. The State Department was consumed with the unfolding situation in Cairo and with fear that the protests—and perhaps violence—could spread around the region.

  Up to that point, it had been a routine day in Benghazi, save for Stevens’s decision to work inside the compound gates. He met with a Turkish official in the evening and walked his visitor to the main gate about 7:40 p.m. local time—or 1:40 p.m. in Washington. Two hours later, at 9:42 p.m., a local police car left its post outside the compound gate. That was when a pack of dozens of armed militants stormed the compound, quickly gaining access to the grounds. There were seven Americans inside at the time—five diplomatic security officers, Stevens, and Sean Smith, an Air Force veteran and information management specialist. The exact number of attackers remains unknown, but estimates ranged from a low of 20 to as many as 125. “FUCK,” Smith wrote to a friend he was chatting with through an online instant-messaging service called Jabber. “Gunfire.” The sound of explosions blasting the compound could be heard around Benghazi, all the way to the CIA annex a mile away.

  The attackers set fires with petroleum, which emits cyanide gas. Within minutes, a diplomatic security officer in the compound’s tactical operations center contacted the CIA annex, the embassy in Tripoli, and the State Department’s operations center in Washington. Scott Wickland, a diplomatic security officer serving as Stevens’s bodyguard, instructed Stevens and Smith to put on body armor. The three of them moved to a gated safe area inside Villa C, the residential space wher
e Stevens lived when he was in Benghazi.

  Stevens began dialing out for help. He tried twice, from two different numbers, to get Hicks, who was watching television in his villa in Tripoli and didn’t pick up.

  Hicks was alerted to the situation moments later, when a security officer stormed in. “Greg, Greg, the consulate’s under attack,” the officer blurted out.

  Hicks looked at his phone, where he saw he had missed calls from Stevens’s number and from a number he would learn was Wickland’s. One State Department source later contended that Hicks had seen the incoming calls and declined to answer them. Hicks ultimately called Wickland’s phone and reached Stevens.

  “Greg, we’re under attack,” Stevens said.

  The call abruptly cut off.

  In the safe area, Wickland, Stevens, and Smith could hear that militants had broken into Villa C, where they were setting fires. Billowing smoke was cutting off the air supply, so Wickland, Stevens, and Smith dropped to the floor and crawled to a bathroom in the safe area. Desperate to find a source of fresh air, Wickland opened a window in the bathroom. Smoke poured through the opening, further depriving the three men of needed oxygen. The black smoke was so thick, they couldn’t see even a few feet in front of them. Wickland decided the only chance to make it out was to leave the safe area.

  He crawled toward an emergency escape window in the villa, banging on the floor so that Smith and Stevens could follow the sounds. He crashed onto an outdoor patio, convinced he was being shot at. Stevens and Smith hadn’t made it out. He tried repeatedly to go back into the villa, but had to stop after he threw up and began to lose consciousness. With one officer still in the tactical operations center, communicating with the annex personnel, Washington, and the Tripoli embassy, the other three security officers made their way from another building to Villa C, where they found Wickland in dire condition. They made forays into the burning building to try to find Stevens and Smith.