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

by Mitchell Zuckoff

  Rone drove the packed Mercedes forward. The moment they reached the gate, the United States Special Mission Compound in Benghazi would effectively cease to exist.

  NINE

  Zombieland

  WHEN SCOTT WICKLAND TURNED RIGHT OUT OF THE Compound’s front entrance with his four fellow DS agents, gunshots struck the armored Land Cruiser. They drove on, but more trouble lay directly ahead. Just as they’d been warned, Wickland and his passengers saw a menacing crowd looming farther east down the gravel road. Wickland threw the Land Cruiser into reverse and turned it in the opposite direction, heading west as he’d been advised, toward the intersection with Gunfighter Road where the operators had initially left their vehicles.

  As they began driving west, the DS agents saw a man they believed to be a friendly 17 February militiaman waving at them to turn around. The confused DS agents interpreted the signal to be a warning that they were driving into an ambush. Wickland put his trust in the man and turned a second time, back east toward clumps of Arab men lining the gravel road in the dark.

  One reason the operators had told Wickland not to turn right was the warning they’d received from genuinely friendly 17 February militia leaders. Attackers were massing to the east of the Compound, the militia leaders said, and their fighters couldn’t hold their positions. Another reason was the operators’ educated belief that radical Islamists from the Ansar al-Sharia militia had established a base on one of the residential properties a short distance east of the Compound. Days earlier, Tanto had spoken about the Ansar al-Sharia base with Henry, who’d translated documents that described how the fundamentalist, rabidly anti-American militia had furtively become a neighbor to the US Special Mission Compound.

  The Benghazi DS agents also knew about the neighboring compound, which they considered to be one of several dozen nearby properties controlled by potentially hostile militias.

  After the second turnaround, Wickland drove cautiously, holding steady at about 15 mph. As the Land Cruiser approached the armed men lining the street, none of the Libyans raised his weapon. Wickland continued heading east. Less than a quarter-mile from the main Compound gate, a man stepped into the street and waved his hands in an attempt to direct the Land Cruiser into a driveway. It wasn’t clear whether this was the suspected Ansar al-Sharia base the operators and DS agents had heard about, but Wickland and his fellow agents suspected a trap. Several called out to keep moving, and Wickland tried to speed away.

  Immediately the men along the roadway leveled their guns and opened fire. Bullets pounded against the sides of the Land Cruiser. Attackers rolled two grenades under the vehicle. The explosions rocked the SUV and blew out two tires. Spiderweb cracks spread across the bullet-resistant windows. But the armor held, the men inside remained unhurt, and the Land Cruiser kept gaining speed on its run-flat tires.

  The attackers surged forward, some firing AK-47 rounds from as close as two feet as Wickland drove on. The windows didn’t roll down, so the DS agents couldn’t return fire without opening the doors, something they weren’t about to do.

  Dave Ubben grabbed the radio Jack had given him. He called to the operators and the Annex: “We’re taking heavy fire! We’re on our run-flats!”

  Still wheezing from smoke inhalation, Wickland steered through the crowd and around a roadblock. He neared the end of the gravel road, where it reached a T-intersection with the street the operators called Adidas Road. The road’s real name was Shari’ al-Qayrawan, and it ran through the heart of a commercial district lined with retail shops. Wickland turned a hard right at the corner, avoided pedestrians in the street, and ran into a typical late-night Benghazi traffic jam.

  Fearing that the attackers were close behind, Wickland steered the Land Cruiser over a curb and drove as fast as he could along the grass-and-dirt center median. When the street became less choked with traffic, he bounced the Land Cruiser down off the median and weaved through oncoming cars. After a short distance Wickland tugged the wheel and shifted the SUV rightward into the proper lane.

  As they drove on toward the Annex, the rattled DS agents braced again for battle when they spotted two cars that appeared to be following them. The first turned off not long after it began tailing the SUV, but the second remained behind the Land Cruiser with its lights off. When the Land Cruiser neared the Annex, the second tail car peeled off into the area of warehouses at the edge of the barren area the operators called Zombieland.

  As he patrolled inside the Annex shortly after 11:00 p.m., Oz heard gunfire from perhaps a half mile away. That was his first notice that the DS agents were en route. Confirmation came in a radio call from the operators, who remained at the Compound: “State Department is leaving.”

  The Annex’s exterior video cameras showed the damaged Land Cruiser racing down Annex Road. Alec Henderson radioed that they were coming in hot. The security officer at the front entrance opened the gate and lifted the steel arm bar to let them roll right in. He quickly dropped the arm and locked the gate behind them.

  Oz heard the flop-flop sound of flattened tires as he came down the ladder from the roof of Building C. He rushed to see whether the DS agents were injured inside the bullet-ridden SUV. Wickland steered the Land Cruiser to a stop at a carport between Buildings B and C. Bob the base chief and several Annex officials wanted to rush out of Building C to greet the DS agents, but Oz convinced them to remain inside where he could protect them. Oz promised to send at least one agent inside for a debriefing.

  The five DS agents stepped out of the SUV looking exactly as Oz expected from men who’d just been attacked by militants, repeatedly searched a burning building, and driven through gunfire and explosions. Oz thought Alec Henderson could use a tall glass of water, or something stronger, and a place to lie down. But Henderson went inside Building C to tell Bob and other Annex officials about what happened at the Compound during the previous two hours.

  When Scott Wickland came out from behind the wheel, he looked like a performer in a blackface burlesque, with patches of ghostly white skin peeking out from swaths of soot. His damaged lungs weren’t delivering enough oxygen, so Wickland went into Building C for rest and medical care. Oz took a quick look at Dave Ubben’s injured forearm, but Ubben said he was fine.

  “I need people up on the roofs,” Oz told Ubben and the two DS agents from Tripoli. He wanted them in place quickly, as an added layer of defense in case the cars that tailed the SUV foretold an attack, or if the operators returned with enemies in tow. Oz sent Ubben to the roof of Building D, on the west side of the Annex property. He separated the two Tripoli-based agents, sending one to Building A, near the front gate, and the other to Building B, on the east side. Oz returned to his post on the Building C roof.

  Oz had begun hearing more worrisome sounds, ranging from tires screeching to periodic gunfire from the direction of the Compound. He occasionally saw tracers cutting through the black sky, some green, some red. The tracers’ purpose was to help shooters to see the trajectory of their rounds and to correct their aim. Oz could only hope the tracers came from the American side.

  He radioed the operators to check their status and was told they were mustering at the Mercedes and preparing to leave. Knowing that his teammates would soon be on the way, Oz climbed down the ladder to make one last check of Annex defenses. Then he made sure the front gate would be opened quickly, so Rone could pull inside without waiting.

  As Rone drove the Mercedes under the archway to exit the Compound, his fellow operators called out in unison: “Left. Go left!”

  “I got it, guys,” Rone answered calmly.

  Now that Jack knew the attackers had rocket-propelled grenades, his concerns rose. The armor beneath the Mercedes’s metal skin could stop AK-47 rounds, but RPGs were a deadlier story. He felt certain that their enemies would be waiting for them in the street, to repeat the ambush they’d sprung on the DS agents. He’d heard via radio that the Land Cruiser had made it to the Annex without casualties. Jack doubted they’d be so fo
rtunate.

  As they pulled out through the gate, Jack realized that he’d felt safer inside the destroyed Compound than he did locked in an SUV heading into uncertain territory beyond the walls. He gripped a handle on the dashboard in front of him, to brace for an explosion he felt certain would come. Not for the first time during the two hours since the attack began, Jack thought about his family. He told himself: OK, probably not going to make it out of this one, but got to keep trying.

  To the operators’ surprise, no one shot at the Mercedes when they turned left to drive west on the gravel road. Still, Tanto thought Rone’s foot was too heavy on the gas. “Whoa, whoa,” he said. “Slow down, man, we need to blend.” Rone eased off and cautiously approached the Gunfighter Road intersection. He kept the headlights off on the dark street, to attract less attention.

  When the operators reached the corner where they’d left the BMW roughly an hour earlier, they saw several bearded men wandering around, some holding rifles. The operators had no way to know whether the men were friendly 17 February members, or if those militiamen had been replaced by rivals from Ansar al-Sharia or another zealously anti-American militia.

  The Arab men stared stone-faced at the packed SUV. A few covered their features with balaclavas. Rone and the Team Leader gave the men small, confident waves. Jack made eye contact with an especially tall man in sandals and loose-fitting “man jammies.” The man held an AK-47, but he made no move to raise it.

  Tanto found himself looking out the window and memorizing details about the path that he and D.B. had taken on foot from this point to the Compound. So much had happened in so little time. Only two hours earlier they’d been watching Wrath of the Titans.

  Tig stewed about the ambush that befell the DS agents, blaming the 17 February militia for not locking down the entire Western Fwayhat neighborhood. With friends like that, they didn’t need enemies. When Rone turned left onto Gunfighter, Tig looked mournfully through the rear window at their abandoned BMW. When he’d grabbed his grenade launcher and gone to the corner to return fire, Tig had left his go-bag in the car. It contained his medical kit, extra magazines, and worst of all, his passport. He knew that it would be tempting danger to stop, so he kept silent as Rone drove past. It’s not worth getting into a gunfight over, Tig told himself.

  Several of the armed men in the street called for the Mercedes to stop. The passengers told Rone to keep going, but he was way ahead of them. No shots or cars pursued them from the intersection.

  The operators continued south down Gunfighter across the Fourth Ring Road. They momentarily relaxed as they neared their destination without engaging enemy gunmen, then quickly returned to high alert. Rone made a few swift detours to make sure they weren’t being followed. Tanto pulled down his night-vision goggles but saw no one moving in the open fields around the Annex. He noticed that the nearby 17 February base looked desolate, as it often did late at night. The Rancilio Café, a neighborhood coffee shop, seemed open, but Tanto saw no one inside. Gates were down and shutters were closed on local stores. With little traffic on the roads and no pedestrians in sight, Tanto thought it looked like a typical night when they returned from a move.

  Rone felt confident enough to turn on the headlights as they cruised along darkened streets. He kept an easy pace with the light traffic around them. The idea was to disguise three uncomfortable facts: The Mercedes SUV had a dead body in the back, it was packed with heavily armed American operators, and it was seeking refuge in a covert CIA Annex.

  When they were one minute away, Tanto radioed the Annex: “Coming in hot.” Not wanting to give the misimpression that they were being followed, Tanto quickly amended his radio call: “Disregard. We’re coming in lukewarm.”

  Rone parked near Building A and the operators got out. Sean Smith’s body remained in the cargo area of the Mercedes. D.B. made sure someone found a bedsheet to cover him.

  While the Team Leader spoke with Bob, Henry the translator got a well-deserved respite among the non-shooters inside Building C. Others inside the building kept busy destroying classified material in anticipation of evacuating. They also filled dozens of magazines with ammunition for the rooftop and tower security teams.

  Rone went inside, too, to care for Scott Wickland. The other operators rushed to their assigned battle stations. Before heading to his post on Building B, Tanto told D.B. he wanted an update from inside Building C, to see how much external support and overhead firepower they might expect.

  Jack moved toward the ladder leading to the roof of Building D. Looking across the grassy triangle where the turtle family lived, Jack saw the battle-scarred Land Cruiser and considered the DS agents lucky to be alive. At the very least, it was a battered tribute to the engineers who’d designed the SUV’s protective armor.

  As they climbed to the flat-topped roofs, none of the operators allowed himself to imagine that they were out of danger. Yet several experienced a brief wave of relief. Although everyone at the Annex felt a pall from the death of Sean Smith and the disappearance of Chris Stevens, Jack detected an uptick in morale now that all the other Americans were together inside the Annex and none had been injured or killed during their escape from the Compound.

  As midnight approached and September 11, 2012, neared its end, Annex defenses settled into place. The taller of the two Tripoli DS agents was on the roof of Building A, watching the south wall and the front gate. The view was obscured, so soon he’d move to join Tanto and D.B. as they readied themselves behind the parapet on the roof of Building B. The CIA case officer with battle experience in Afghanistan remained atop Building C, soon to be joined there by Rone. Atop Building D were Jack, Dave Ubben, and the second DS agent from Tripoli, a stocky African-American Army veteran. The T.L. remained inside Building C, with occasional trips outside to the building’s patio.

  The Annex security leader positioned himself near the front gate but moved elsewhere at times. The three Libyan guards were on the steel towers. One remained near the front gate, but the guard who’d been at the northwest tower moved to join his friend at the southeast corner of the property. Oz was on the move, bringing water and ammo where needed, and checking to see that everyone was in position. When that was done, Oz moved to the tower fighting position located to the northeast of Building C. Tig linked up with two of the local guards and spent some time with them on the tower at the Annex’s southeast corner.

  As the Annex’s defenders steeled themselves for whatever lay ahead, midnight passed and September 11 ended. Minutes after the start of the new day, the State Department’s Operations Center in Washington sent an e-mail to the White House, Pentagon, FBI, and other government agencies. The e-mail, sent at 12:06 a.m. Benghazi time, September 12, 2012, had the subject line, “Update 2: Ansar al-Sharia Claims Responsibility For Benghazi Attack.” The message said: “Embassy Tripoli reports the group claimed responsibility on Facebook and Twitter and has called for an attack on Embassy Tripoli.”

  When the e-mail was revealed, weeks later, it set off a firestorm about when the Obama administration knew that the Compound attack wasn’t simply a disorganized, spontaneous protest over the anti-Muhammad Innocence of Muslims video on YouTube, as several administration officials initially suggested. But the issue became muddied further when an investigation by a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy found no evidence that the radical militia group had made any such statements on social media.

  Around the same time the e-mail was sent, the gates of the embassy in Tripoli opened, and out rode the reinforcement security team for a private charter flight to Benghazi. The seven-member force consisted of former Navy SEAL Glen “Bub” Doherty; two Delta Force members; the top GRS Team Leader in Libya; two other GRS operators; and a linguist.

  From his position on the southeast tower, Tig asked over the radio for someone to turn on the exterior perimeter floodlights that pointed beyond the Annex walls. The exterior lights soon shone, but someone also turned on spotlights that illuminated insid
e the Annex property. Those lights made it easier to move around in the dark, but they silhouetted the rooftop and tower-based defenders, exposing their positions. Equally troubling, the interior lights blinded them from looking out beyond the Annex walls to where any attackers might be hiding.

  Jack got on the radio and asked that the interior lights be switched off. Tig seconded the request. When nothing happened, Jack considered shooting them out, just as he’d done as a Navy SEAL on nighttime assaults of ships at sea. On one mission, Jack’s SEAL team received intelligence that one of Osama bin Laden’s sons was hiding on a vessel off the coast of Pakistan. They brought a fast boat alongside the ship, hooked on ladders, and climbed aboard. Their search turned up no trace of any bin Laden. The only shots they fired that night were to kill the lights.

  Atop Building D, Jack stewed about the lights but he hesitated to shoot, not wanting to draw attention to the Annex with gunfire. As minutes passed that seemed like hours, Jack began to reconsider. Just then, Tig’s southwestern twang came raging over the airwaves: “Someone turn off the fucking lights!”

  Sheepishly, an Annex security staffer called back: “I’m on it. I’m on it.” By the time Jack stopped laughing, the interior lights had been switched off.

  The operators on Building B got a kick out of Tig’s outburst, too. From their perch on the east side of the Annex, Tanto and D.B. heard a voice somewhere in the distance, chanting and speaking in animated tones in Arabic over a megaphone. Tanto wondered if someone was riling up students at a nearby medical college to march on the Annex, as a cover for Ansar al-Sharia militiamen or other enemies of the United States who might sneak in among the students to attack. Other scenarios rocketed through Tanto’s mind, all of them climaxing with gunfire. Waiting patiently wasn’t Tanto’s strong suit. God dang those sons of bitches, he thought. If you’re gonna attack us, attack us now.