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

by Mitchell Zuckoff

  Also in Building C was the GRS Team Room, the operators’ Command Post, with a broken-in couch and a wall of wooden cubbies that looked like high school lockers without doors. The cubbies overflowed with the operators’ assault rifles, night-vision goggles, helmets, body armor, ammunition, and everything else they needed to keep other Americans safe. Some operators personalized their cubbies, hanging photos of their wives and children. Along another wall were desks with computers and a whiteboard that recorded the operators’ schedules for the week. A second whiteboard contained notices and classified intelligence updates.

  Whenever a CIA case officer planned a meeting with a source to gather intelligence, he or she ideally gave the GRS operators at least a couple days’ warning, to plan for their safety. If they didn’t know the area well, the operators headed to their computers and used special mapping software developed for the military. Then, if time allowed, they’d get a feel for the place and familiarize themselves with the people who frequented it. But Rone told Jack that scenario was rare; the case officers in Benghazi seldom gave them much time, so he’d need to be ready to scramble at a moment’s notice. Everything in Benghazi was on a short fuse, Rone explained, making it difficult for the operators to feel comfortable about providing adequate security.

  On the east side of Building C were generators and a swimming pool shaped like a shark’s tooth, with swampy, greenish-brown water and a half dozen or so goldfish named for several of the operators. The operators built a filtration system, partly covered the pool with a wooden deck, and called it “the pond.”

  At the back of Building C were glass doors that faced the Annex compound’s north wall. Beyond that wall was an enormous stockyard with more than a dozen large, rectangular, tin-roofed sheds. Annex residents could hear sheep heading for slaughter bleating and whining inside. Rone told Jack that the operators called the area north and east of the Annex walls “Zombieland,” because it looked like the set of a movie about the undead. On the far side of the Annex’s east wall was an acre of scrub and trees, and beyond that stood a compound with a single-story home. To the south, across Annex Road, were other homes and a four-story concrete building under construction. Farther south, about a half mile away, was a dirt oval horse track. Every Thursday night was race night, featuring high-spirited Arabian stallions. To the west of the Annex was another walled compound, with a single large concrete home.

  The diplomatic Special Mission Compound was located to the northwest of the Annex, across the Fourth Ring Road, only a half mile away as the crow flies and within ten minutes on foot.

  The operators had embedded broken glass atop the Annex walls for added security, but the walls were no protection from the thick smell of manure and the swarms of flies drawn to the neighborhood by the stockyard, the racetrack, and the pond. Buzzing veils of insects made life miserable for the GRS operators. Flies landed on their sweaty faces and rattled in their ears when they lifted weights at a makeshift workout area they called their “prison gym,” located under a carport roof to the east of Building C.

  Rone continued showing Jack around the property. Building A, closest to the front gate, housed four bedrooms and the main dining area, where an American chef prepared meals with the freshest local ingredients he could muster. Chicken and rice were staples, but they sometimes feasted on thick steaks. The chef earned the GRS operators’ affection by keeping the refrigerator stocked with leftovers for nights when they returned late to the Annex. Building B, on the east side of the Annex, provided housing and work space, as did Building D, on the west side, where Rone led Jack with his bags.

  Jack had three basic standards for a GRS workplace: good food, a good workout area, and his own room. Rone assured him that the food would be fine, but otherwise Benghazi was a bust. The workout area was a flyspecked mess, and Jack would be sharing a room. A heavy curtain strung down the middle provided a fig leaf of privacy. At least Jack would get along with his roommate, a GRS operator named John “Tig” Tiegen.

  Tig was a laid-back thirty-six-year-old former Marine. He had brown hair, a close-cropped goatee, and a wary expression that he’d occasionally relax into a smile. He stood five foot eleven, weighed two hundred rock-solid pounds, wore wire-rimmed glasses, and sported a pair of dragon tattoos, one on each side of his chest. Tig grew up in Colorado in the sort of situation that typically leads nowhere or worse: a fractured family that included a father who disappeared before Tig’s third birthday. He developed an attitude toward school that ranged from clownish to bored, making it easy for teachers to ignore him, which was fine with Tig.

  When Tig was an aimless high school freshman, he stopped by the home of a friend’s girlfriend one night when steaks were on the grill. “You want one?” the girl’s father asked. When Tig answered yes, the man said: “Go mow the lawn.” The connection between hard work and reward, discipline and order, had never been part of his life. Earning the steak satisfied Tig in a way he couldn’t quite describe. He barely knew his friend’s girlfriend, but within a month he moved into a bedroom that her father built for him in the basement. With help from his surrogate father, Tig set himself on a new path. He enlisted in the Marines before his eighteenth birthday because it was the toughest place he could find to prove himself.

  Tig left the Marines as a sergeant but didn’t want to stop doing military work, so in 2003 he signed up as a contract operator. After a year at the Army’s Camp Doha in Kuwait and some time back home, Tig joined the private military company Blackwater. Security stints followed in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq, where avoiding mortar fire became part of his daily routine. On paper Tig didn’t meet certain GRS operator qualifications, but his experience and persistence won him a shot at the screening program. He earned his way in. On his first trip to Benghazi, in February 2012, Tig returned home early when his wife, a former diesel mechanic in the US Army, gave birth two months prematurely to twins, a boy and a girl.

  When Jack arrived, Tig was on his third stay in the Annex, which made him the most experienced GRS operator in Benghazi. Tig had a hard edge, and he wasn’t a big talker, but his fellow operators learned to appreciate his sardonic wit and his dark humor. One day he found a disabled flamethrower in Benghazi and used it to create a series of staged photos in which he looked like an action movie hero setting fires as he marched alone down an abandoned street. None of the other operators doubted that they could count on Tig if the action became real. Tig considered loyalty to be his greatest strength but also his main weakness: “I’m loyal to people who’ve tried to screw me over.”

  The operators were slaves to the assignments posted on the Team Room whiteboard, which was usually maintained by Rone, who was the highest-ranking contractor and the Assistant Team Leader. Endless tasks awaited Benghazi’s CIA case officers, from gathering intelligence throughout the restive city to developing local sources. Generally, they were engaged in highly classified activities typical of Western spies in unstable countries. Like all case officers in Muslim countries, one of their tasks was to constantly plumb the depths of al-Qaeda sympathy and affiliation.

  Twenty-first-century CIA case officers, or COs, were more likely to be Ivy League valedictorians than licensed-to-kill Jason Bourne types. That meant they needed GRS operators, even if the COs often acted as though they’d handle danger fine on their own. The Benghazi operators felt that the COs treated them as excess baggage, slowing them down and getting in the way. Yet every operator in Benghazi had a story about young, inexperienced case officers walking blithely into trouble or failing to perceive a threat, only to be steered clear of danger by a GRS escort.

  One night not long after Jack arrived, he and Rone teamed up to protect a case officer on an intelligence-gathering operation in the heart of the city. Rone and Jack conducted countersurveillance to make sure the CIA staffer wasn’t being followed. Jack watched unseen as two Arab men began trailing the case officer, who was oblivious as he strolled toward Rone’s car. Jack tried to call Rone to inform him about t
he tail and to set up a new meeting place, so Jack’s cover wouldn’t be blown when he returned to the car. That proved impossible, so Jack got in the passenger seat and told the case officer in back, “You’re being followed.” The unknown men jumped into a car and began driving close behind the Americans. Rone hit the gas, expertly avoiding the usual traffic snarls and roadblocks. Eventually Rone lost the tail and returned them safely to the Annex.

  Benghazi GRS operator Kris “Tanto” Paronto described the case officers’ failings in the salty vernacular of a gung-ho former Army Ranger: “They’re not combat COs, they’re intel collectors. They’re fucking glorified desk jockeys, that’s what they are. They’re smart people, but smart doesn’t outsmart a bullet. They don’t want us there, until something bad happens.” Tanto had felt a similar attitude among certain CIA staffers earlier in his GRS career, but he considered none worse than Bob, the Benghazi CIA base chief: “As far as he’s concerned, we’re Walmart security guards.”

  No one on the GRS team, and perhaps no one in Benghazi, had a bigger personality than Tanto. The basic outline of his life could describe any number of people: forty-one years old; five foot nine; 175 pounds; brown hair; hazel eyes; the middle child of a college football coach and a first-grade teacher; gifted athlete; fishing enthusiast; twice married; devoted father of a boy he called “Bubba” and a girl he called “Princess”; former member of the Army’s 75th Ranger Regiment; holder of a master’s degree in criminal justice; owner of an insurance adjusting business.

  A more vivid picture of Tanto emerged from his candid self-assessment: teenage vandal; adrenaline junkie; onetime steroid dealer; “loose cannon”; go-too-far practical joker; “a bit of an egomaniac”; take-a-bullet friend, warrior, and teammate; “worst student-body president” in his high school’s history; serially imperfect husband; contract operator who rolled through Kabul blasting the Ricky Martin song “La Bomba” with his windows open. A brief version of his life philosophy: “If you’re going to die, go down laughing. Laughing and fighting.”

  Tanto’s other distinguishing characteristics were tattoos on his muscular body. One on his rib cage made it appear as though his skin was being ripped open to reveal an American flag within. One on his shoulder displayed the Army Rangers’ tab and scroll insignia. Another, covering his back from shoulder to shoulder, was a customized version of the iconic painting by Raphael of St. Michael vanquishing Satan. Instead of Raphael’s wooden spear, Tanto told the tattoo artist to give the saint a Crusader shield and a spear made from a crucifix. The design reflected Tanto’s desire for God to help him destroy the demons in his life, demons that ended his first marriage and interrupted his military career. “It also symbolizes my job,” he’d say. “You feel yourself as an avenging angel. You’re killing or destroying or pushing back the evil in this world. There’s a lot of it that’s out there, and people still don’t understand that. People think they can reason with it. You can’t. They’re evil and they will kill you.”

  “I don’t wish the Crusades would come back,” added Tanto, who’d spent a decade working as a contract operator, much of it in Muslim countries. “But I sometimes feel that they should come back. The tattoo is more or less a Christian warrior emblem, which a lot of us think that we are and believe that we are. We believe that we’re warriors for the US, warriors for each other, but also warriors for God. Same as the terrorists, I guess. Warriors for God. It’s just, I don’t blow up and kill little girls. I don’t go blow myself up and kill women indiscriminately. I’ve never shot anybody that hasn’t been shooting at me.”

  Another Tanto-ism: “The last thing in the world that you’re going to have when the money runs out or everybody leaves you is your word. Your balls and your word. If you can’t say that you have stuck those out there and done everything you can to protect people, you ain’t got anything. If you’re not honest and willing to give your life for your brother, you’re not worth your weight in piss.” Tanto had a special place in his heart for the Ranger Creed, particularly the fifth stanza, which begins: “Energetically will I meet the enemies of my country. I shall defeat them on the field of battle for I am better trained and will fight with all my might. Surrender is not a Ranger word.”

  Tanto kept things lively at the Benghazi CIA Annex.

  The garrulous Tanto usually partnered with his good friend and roommate, the taciturn Dave “D.B.” Benton. At thirty-eight years old, D.B. had black hair, brown eyes, and a compact, muscular build. A middle child born to mixed-race parents, D.B. grew up in Pennsylvania, where he hated school, loved the outdoors, and idolized a grandfather who taught him “respect, integrity, courage, humility, empathy, and discipline.” Above all, “He taught me how to win, and he taught me how to lose.”

  A military career seemed a natural inheritance: D.B.’s father served as a corpsman in the Navy and his uncles served in the Army and Marine Corps. His older brother preceded D.B. in the Marines, and the two served together from 1993 to 2000. During his years as a Marine sergeant, D.B. served as a member of a Maritime Special Purpose Force, a Special Operations–capable unit trained for everything from hostage rescue to direct-action assaults. D.B. was a scout sniper whose specialties included surveillance, reconnaissance, and close-quarters battle.

  After leaving the Marines, D.B. joined a police SWAT team in Georgia, but after 9/11 he felt compelled to return to military service. He’d already been in contact with a Marine recruiter when a friend told him about an opportunity to work for the State Department as a contract personal security specialist. Since then, D.B. had collected multiple awards for performance under fire in hot spots including Iraq, Afghanistan, and Haiti. One of those awards came in Iraq in 2004, when D.B. worked for the State Department under a contract with Blackwater. He was the Team Leader in a five-vehicle convoy ambushed while driving through Baghdad after escorting Secretary of State Colin Powell to the airport. As the driver of the lead vehicle sped toward safety, D.B. calmly kept the rest of the convoy updated on what was happening, allowing them to respond to the insurgents and escape the ambush without casualties, according to the citation he received.

  Married to his high school sweetheart, D.B. had a son and two daughters. His biggest worry was that he might let someone down who relied on him, so he remained on permanent guard to prevent that from happening. His favorite author was Joseph Campbell, who wrote famously about mythmaking and the hero’s journey. D.B. considered one of Campbell’s maxims especially apt: “A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.”

  D.B.’s friendship with Tanto was sealed when they worked together for the State Department in Baghdad in 2004. At the end of a workday, they were relaxing atop a Humvee when a Russian-made Katyusha rocket flew over their heads into a tent with more than thirty military contractors inside. D.B. knew that a natural reaction for some people would be to run the other way. But he and Tanto simultaneously had the opposite response, sprinting side by side into the smoke-filled tent to see who needed help. In the years that followed, both felt they’d developed a sixth sense that allowed each to know how the other would react when all hell broke loose.

  Trips beyond the Annex walls, called “moves,” could happen at any time, day or night. Though Benghazi was unsafe for most Westerners, the operators prided themselves on knowing the city like natives and on being comfortable and confident enough to move by car or on foot almost anywhere they chose. The engines of their cars and SUVs were meticulously maintained, while the exteriors were invariably beaten up. Cars without dirt and dings in Benghazi revealed their owners as rich people, Americans, or both.

  Growing beards and wearing local clothes, the operators tried to blend in, or at least not to stand out quite so much. They ate in restaurants, frequented coffee shops and hotels, shopped in stores and bazaars, and even walked like tourists through a small art museum located in an ancient palace near the port. Tanto’s travels formed his impression of Benghazi as a seedy, savage city, ruled by dangerou
s militias and fueled by oil, guns, and “the almighty dinar.”

  Still, the operators knew that their lack of Arabic language skills and their distinctly American way of carrying themselves could put targets on their backs. So they took pains to attract as little notice as possible.

  Usually the operators traveled armed with concealed knives and pistols. Some had custom leather holsters that allowed them to hide their guns without conspicuous bulges. Jack developed a quick-draw technique—lifting his shirt with his left hand, grabbing his pistol with his right—that an Old West gunfighter would have envied. Their cars carried their long guns, lethally dependable assault rifles.

  Depending on the perceived danger of a move, the operators might drive armored vehicles and wear body armor with bullet-stopping inserts they called “chicken plates.” Just as often they’d use locally purchased cars, which they called “soft-skinned” vehicles, and eschew personal armor to avoid calling attention to their movements. Sometimes they found greater safety in stealth than armor.

  Occasionally the entire Global Response Staff team would be on duty for a move, but more often they worked in small units, with Jack and Rone frequently assigned together. Jack’s roommate, Tig, usually partnered with contractor Mark Geist, whose call sign was “Oz.”

  Beefy and self-assured, at forty-six Oz was the oldest member of the team. A shade under six feet tall, weighing more than two hundred pounds, Oz had thick blond hair, sharp blue eyes, and a country boy’s way about him. In junior high school and high school, Oz rode bulls in rodeos and broke wild horses. Since childhood he’d dreamed of becoming a soldier, a police officer, a cowboy, or a firefighter. He’d achieved the first three.