13 Hours: The Inside Account of What Really Happened in Benghazi

by Mitchell Zuckoff

  Before leaving the plane, Jack slipped off his gold wedding band and tucked it into a small box for safekeeping. He’d picked up the habit years earlier, after deciding that he didn’t want his enemies to know that he had a family: a wife and two young sons waiting for him back home in the Pacific Northwest.

  Jack stepped onto the tarmac and felt the bone-dry afternoon heat of the Libyan summer. His aviator sunglasses were modest protection from the harsh white glare of the North African sun. Entering the run-down terminal building, Jack pushed through doors to a room with a luggage carousel and more than a hundred people packed inside a space that would have felt crowded with half as many. His fellow luggage-seekers, most of them men, shouted in Arabic and gestured wildly as they fought to claim bags. The air was thick with flies and the nauseating stench of baked-on body odor. Jack took short breaths through his mouth in a futile effort to keep both at bay.

  He’d been on guard from the moment he left the plane, a reflex reaction whenever Jack arrived in hostile territory. Hyper-aware, his jaw set, his every movement grew deliberate, measured to convey in body language that he wasn’t looking for trouble but wouldn’t flinch from it, either. Jack felt the stares of strangers upon him and knew that at least some were armed. He also knew that everyone watching him had reached the same instant conclusion: American. He suspected that at least some wished him dead.

  As he waited for his bags, Jack caught sight of a burly, bearded man standing with his back against a wall at the periphery of the scrum. The man’s eyes scanned the crowd while his body remained as still as a lizard on a tree limb. He wore khaki cargo pants and a navy-blue button-down shirt, untucked, Jack knew, to conceal a gun in his waistband. Their eyes met for an instant. Jack returned his gaze to the luggage carousel, and the bearded man remained expressionless, glued to the wall.

  When Jack grabbed his bags, the man pushed away from the wall and turned toward the exit door leading to Customs. Jack followed a short distance behind. By the time Jack stepped outside the terminal building, he and the bearded man had closed the distance between them and fallen into step with each other. Still they didn’t speak as the man led Jack toward a white Toyota pickup truck caked in dust.

  Jack tossed his bags in the back and slid into the passenger seat. The bearded man got behind the wheel. In a single, practiced motion, the man reached down and grabbed a pistol.

  “It’s loaded,” the man said.

  He held it out, butt-end first.

  Jack relaxed as he took the gun. He reached out his right hand and returned a powerful handshake offered by his fellow former SEAL and GRS colleague Tyrone Woods, whose radio call sign was “Rone.”

  “How’s it going, brother?” Rone said, a bright smile emerging from his thick salt-and-pepper beard.

  As Rone started the truck, they caught up on each other’s lives and families, then set aside those thoughts like wedding rings slipped into boxes. Rone drove toward the airport exit, bound for an upscale neighborhood called Western Fwayhat. Their destination was a CIA-rented property known as the Annex, which was the agency’s secret headquarters in Benghazi. Less than a mile from the Annex was the United States’ public presence in the city: a walled estate known as the US Special Mission Compound, which served as a base for State Department diplomats.

  As their talk turned to business, Rone filled Jack in about the peculiarities of the treacherous place where they’d be working to keep other Americans safe. Rone’s overriding message was that they’d be kept busy, and they’d have to remain alert, but there was nothing about Benghazi they couldn’t handle. In a strange way, Rone said, he almost liked the place.

  Still, something about how his old friend described Benghazi—a lawless city where no one was in control, where lines between America’s friends and enemies shifted and blurred, where they could trust only each other—gave Jack the distinct impression that Rone considered this to be their diciest assignment yet.

  Jack had landed in a country most Americans know only from disturbing headlines. A North African nation roughly the size of Alaska, Libya is a vast desert with a tiny fringe of fertile soil at its northern coast. To its west are Tunisia and Algeria, to its east is Egypt, and to its south are Niger, Chad, and Sudan. The country is divided into three regions: Tripolitania, to the west, with Tripoli as its capital; Cyrenaica, to the east, with Benghazi as its capital; and Fezzan, to the arid south. A majority of the six million Libyans live in or around Tripoli and Benghazi, at the edge of the Mediterranean Sea. Some 97 percent of the population is Sunni Muslim.

  A brief history of Libya is an inventory of invasions by outside powers. If an empire had ships and armies in the Mediterranean, its to-conquer list included Libya’s two major ports, Tripoli to the west and Benghazi to the east, separated by the Gulf of Sidra. Over the millennia, occupiers included the Phoenicians, the Persians, the Romans, the Byzantines, and the Ottomans. Sometimes competing empires split the baby. The Greeks claimed the area around Benghazi in 630 BC, while the Romans settled near Tripoli. Historians say the Greeks even named Libya, using it as a term to describe all of northern Africa west of Egypt.

  By 74 BC, the Romans had conquered eastern Libya, temporarily uniting east and west. Then came the Vandals, a Germanic tribe that drove out the Romans and earned their namesake reputation by plundering the east. The Ottomans invaded Tripoli in 1551 and ruled Libya for more than three centuries, with limited success controlling the ever-restive eastern tribes around Benghazi.

  While successive conquerors were vanquishing and bleeding Libya, two Arab tribes flowed onto its sands from Egypt. Starting in the eleventh century, the Bani Hilal tribe settled near Tripoli, while the Bani Salim tribe settled in the east. The Bani Salim freely mixed with and married the native Berbers around Benghazi. As generations passed, the result was a homogeneous ethnic and religious region, what one historian called the “total Arabization” of eastern Libya.

  During the 1800s, the Ottoman Turks gave up hope of controlling Benghazi. The Turks allowed eastern Libya to exist as a semi-independent state ruled by the Senussi Muslim sect, which preached a pure form of Islam under which followers conducted all aspects of their lives by the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad. While Tripoli and western Libya matured into a relatively modern region, eastern Libya retained its old ways, governed by tribal bonds and religious laws. That divide made it impossible to understand present-day Libya without contrasting Benghazi with its larger, richer, better-looking, and worldlier sister, Tripoli.

  In 1912, the exhausted Ottoman Empire signed a secret pact that gave Italy control of both west and east Libya. Tripoli adapted to Italian rule, but eastern Libya fought colonization, especially by a Christian nation. By 1920, the Italians had had enough. Drained by the First World War, Rome ceded autonomy over eastern Libya to Idris al-Senussi, head of the strict Senussi religious order.

  When Benito Mussolini rose to power in Italy two years later, the fascist dictator wanted Benghazi to be part of his empire. Years of fierce fighting followed. In September 1931, Italian forces finally captured and hanged the leader of the opposition guerrillas, Omar al-Mukhtar, a Senussi sheikh who became a martyr to Libyan independence. Even with Mukhtar gone, Mussolini set out to destroy any entrenched opposition around Benghazi. He built a two-hundred-mile fence along the border of Egypt and by some estimates deported one-third of eastern Libya’s civilian population to concentration camps. He executed twelve thousand more.

  With Benghazi under Italian control, waves of workers arrived from across the Mediterranean. The Arab natives were forced into menial jobs, deprived of schooling, and excluded from politics. World War II made matters worse, as Benghazi was bombed hundreds of times as the Axis and Allied powers traded control over the rubble. British pilots adapted a popular song to reflect the carnage, with a lyric that included the line, “We’re off to bomb Benghazi.” Like a long-abused animal, Benghazi grew mean and wary.

  After World War II, Libya was divided among the British, Fr
ench, and Americans. Oil had yet to be discovered, so no one wanted colonial responsibility for an impoverished, bombed-out Arab sandbox. In 1951, the Allies helped to establish the United Kingdom of Libya, an independent, constitutional monarchy ruled by the Muslim leader Idris al-Senussi. The title was better than the job: King Idris had dominion over the world’s poorest country and one of its least literate.

  That changed radically in 1959 with the discovery of immense oil reserves, enough to eventually account for 2 percent of global supplies, or more than a million barrels exported daily in 2012. Suddenly King Idris had money to lavish on friends and pet projects in his native east, leaving Tripoli and Libya’s west to decay. In east and west alike, the elite grew rich while everyone else remained poor.

  In 1969, while the eighty-year-old King Idris was abroad, the timing was ripe for a bloodless coup led by a power-hungry twenty-seven-year-old army officer: Muammar al-Gaddafi. Over the next forty-two years, the erratic, brutal, egomaniacal Gaddafi earned the sobriquet bestowed on him by Ronald Reagan: “[M]ad dog of the Middle East.”

  From the start, Gaddafi worried about Benghazi’s rebellious bent and its ties to the exiled King Idris. So he squeezed the region dry. Previously, the Libyan capital had alternated between Tripoli and Benghazi; Gaddafi made Tripoli the permanent capital. He moved the National Oil Corporation from Benghazi to Tripoli, despite the fact that most of the country’s oil is in the east. He relocated a memorial that had been erected in Benghazi to honor Omar al-Mukhtar, fearing that Benghazans would rally behind the rebel martyr’s legacy, as eventually they did.

  As hospitals, schools, and the standard of living rose in Tripoli, Benghazi suffered oppression and neglect while its oil paid Tripoli’s bills. Benghazans seethed as they watched Gaddafi celebrate himself in countless statues and endless tributes. The bitter separation between Benghazi and Tripoli wasn’t just political and cultural, but physical. No railway or highway connected the two cities, only narrow roads that snaked through more than six hundred miles of desert.

  Through all the turmoil, one comfort for Benghazans was their local soccer club, Al-Ahly Benghazi SC, whose name translates as “The People’s Club.” Gaddafi favored rival Tripoli soccer clubs and despised Al-Ahly Benghazi. That hatred deepened after the Benghazi team won the 1974 league championship, a victory that coincided with the anniversary of Gaddafi’s coup. Benghazi fans flooded the streets to celebrate their club’s triumph, ignoring the milestone of Gaddafi’s rule. He wouldn’t forget or forgive.

  Years later, Gaddafi’s soccer-playing son Saadi became owner, manager, and captain of a soccer club called Al-Ahly Tripoli. Saadi raided Al-Ahly Benghazi for its best players, and bribed or bullied referees to ensure victories. By the summer of 2000 Al-Ahly Benghazi was on the verge of disgrace: One more loss and it would fall from the country’s top soccer division. Saadi Gaddafi came to Benghazi to luxuriate in his rivals’ agony.

  As the referees made dubious calls, the crowd grew restless. When a loss seemed inevitable, something snapped. The humiliation of their cherished soccer club became a symbol of all that Benghazi had endured under Gaddafi, from public executions to relentless poverty amid spectacular oil wealth. Al-Ahly Benghazi’s head coach shoved the referee. Fans stormed the field then spilled into the streets. They torched the National Soccer Federation building and hurled stones at monuments to Gaddafi’s regime.

  The penalties were predictably severe: eighty arrested, thirty sent to Tripoli to stand trial, and three sentenced to death. On September 1, 2000, on the thirty-first anniversary of Gaddafi’s coup, his security forces stormed the Al-Ahly Benghazi clubhouse. They smashed furniture, memorabilia, and trophies, then bulldozed the building. The club was suspended indefinitely.

  Benghazi got its revenge a decade later, in 2011. After suffering countless more indignities and witnessing the Arab Spring revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia, the city became the cradle of the Libyan Civil War that ended Gaddafi’s rule and his life.

  Jack’s arrival in Benghazi was the latest chapter in the adventurous life of a modern gunfighter. He grew up in Northern California, the only child of immigrants who worked long hours to send him to private school. As a boy Jack spent as much time as possible outside, building forts and imagining what it would take to survive if America’s enemies invaded his hometown. He excelled at science and math, but after a single day of college decided that he’d had enough formal education. Jack enlisted in the Navy with a single goal: to become a SEAL.

  Jack was nineteen and had completed boot camp when he was sent to a ten-week Navy vocational training program. There Jack badgered his instructors to arrange a screening test for admission to the Navy’s Basic Underwater Demolition School, the first step in the yearlong process to become a SEAL. But when the opportunity arrived without notice, Jack had been enjoying himself so much in vocational classes during the day and partying at night that he’d let his physical training slip.

  The screening test was only a fraction of what it took to become a SEAL, but it was tough enough to weed out candidates with no chance of making it. Jack’s friends considered the chiseled young sailor a shoo-in. He made it through the five-hundred-yard swim in the required time. Jack climbed out of the pool and far exceeded the required number of push-ups, completing more than eighty in two minutes. Next were sit-ups, and he exceeded the standard there, too. Then came pull-ups. The screening test required applicants to do eight perfect, dead-hang pull-ups with virtually no rest between exercises. After weeks of slacking, Jack did six, then willed himself to a seventh. His muscles screamed. His lungs ached. His arms were on fire. Jack made it halfway up on the eighth but couldn’t get his chin over the bar.

  Jack hung there, refusing to let go but lacking the strength to pull himself higher. The veteran Master Chief SEAL giving Jack the test prodded him: “If I light a fire under your ass, can you get over the bar?” Jack tried again but couldn’t. When he dropped to the ground, his eyes filled with tears. Jack returned to his room and told his shocked friends that he’d failed.

  He’d remember it as one of the most traumatizing and motivating moments of his life. Instead of going through the legendary SEAL training program and becoming an elite special operator, Jack spent the next two years as a Navy airman on an aircraft carrier. When his next chance came, Jack destroyed every category of the SEAL screening test. By the time he finished SEAL training, Jack came to appreciate the yin and yang of what he’d experienced the previous two years. The humbling failure and its consequences gave him the strength and willpower to push through the brutal selection process and earn his Trident, the prized SEAL insignia, while scores of other would-be warriors quit.

  Jack didn’t talk much about his exploits, but during a decade in the service he spent time in more than twenty countries and carried out missions in Kosovo and the Middle East. He left the SEALs to spend more time with his growing family and to try his hand at business. Jack bought and sold real estate, renovating and flipping properties while working to stay one step ahead of the tumultuous market.

  By the time Jack and Rone joined forces as GRS operators in Benghazi, the two former Navy SEALs had been friends for nearly a decade. They’d met when both served as instructors at the Naval Special Warfare training facility in Niland, California. One night not long after they met, Jack spent a night drinking at a local bar and didn’t want to drive home. He walked to Rone’s nearby condo, planning to crash there until morning. Not knowing who was at his door, Rone climbed out a window wearing only boxer shorts and carrying a pistol. He moved tactically around the corner to the front door, gun raised, to outflank the presumed intruder. When he saw it was a drunken Jack, Rone lowered the gun and laughed.

  When Rone wasn’t pointing a gun at him, Jack considered Rone to be smart and effective, a natural leader, and perhaps the most motivated and hardest-working person he’d ever met, no small praise among Special Operations veterans.

  Rone was forty-one, a twice-married father of three sons.
A former high school wrestler, he liked fast motorcycles and muscle cars, especially Ford Cobra Mustangs. Rone had a weightlifter’s broad chest, light-brown hair, a meaty chin, and forearms like pile drivers. He’d earned his SEAL Trident in 1991 after twice going through Hell Week, a five-and-a-half-day torture test of mental and physical toughness, pain and cold tolerance, teamwork and determination, all on fewer than four hours of sleep. As a SEAL, Rone had served bravely in Somalia, Afghanistan, and Iraq, where he received a Bronze Star with a “V” for valor. The citation described his “heroic achievement, extraordinary guidance, zealous initiative, and total dedication to duty” in al-Anbar province of western Iraq. He was a healer as well as a warrior, having become a registered nurse and a paramedic. Rone retired from the SEALs in 2010 with twenty years of service. He bought a bar called The Salty Frog in Imperial Beach, California, and helped his wife in her dental practice.

  While Rone and Jack were adapting to civilian life, US government agencies began increasing their reliance on Special Operations veterans willing to provide security to Americans in the world’s hottest spots. Jack and Rone each heard through the SEAL grapevine about openings at GRS for accomplished former operators. Both saw a chance to return to the camaraderie and the purpose they’d loved as SEALs. And then there was the money. Each trip by a GRS contractor generally lasted several months, and even with generous downtime between trips, contract operators typically earned more than $150,000 a year.

  If challenge and money were the yin, danger was the yang. They worked undercover in small teams, in places where some locals saw the very presence of armed Americans as provocation. In December 2009, three GRS operators were among the seven Americans killed in Khost, Afghanistan, when a Jordanian triple agent working for al-Qaeda detonated a suicide bomb at a CIA compound.