by Brandon Webb
In this case, Stevens was probably not excluded from the program because of his ideological differences with Brennan as much as for the sake of maintaining a need-to-know around the classified project. With the left hand not talking to the right, it was impossible for Stevens to see or predict the JSOC expedition into Libya in late summer of 2012, which ultimately led to the attack on the consulate.
2
The Secret War in North Africa
DURING THE REBELLION against Gaddafi and in the aftermath of his death, Libya and North Africa became a staging ground for a dizzying array of operations by SpecOps, paramilitary forces, and international private military contractors working for everyone from European nations to multibillion-dollar oil corporations. At the same time, militant Islamic groups began taking advantage of the power vacuum across North Africa and consolidated their strength in places like Benghazi instead of sending their homegrown fighters abroad to Afghanistan and elsewhere. These groups were keeping JSOC in business. Meanwhile, CIA operatives fanned out across Libya, searching for Gaddafi’s stores of chemical weapons and yellow cake uranium. Amid this caldron of (often violent) covert activity, diplomats like Ambassador Chris Stevens were in-country attempting to practice statecraft and establish relationships with the new leaders of Libya. This chapter aims to provide a sense of the scale and scope of the “secret war” raging in Libya that created the conditions for three of the major players mentioned above—State Department diplomats, CIA and JSOC covert operators, and militant Islamist groups—to collide on 9/11/12.
ON DECEMBER 17TH, 2010, Tarek Al-Tayeb Mohamed Bouazizi was immortalized when he set himself alight in protest of harassment by local officials in Tunisia. Tarek’s self-immolation and the disclosure of documents that showed evidence of government corruption by WikiLeaks fueled a revolutionary movement in Tunisia that ultimately unseated the government in early 2011.
What became known as the Arab Spring then jumped to Egypt in a campaign of civil disobedience against authoritarianism that much of the Arab world had waited nearly fifty years for. The leadership of both Tunisia and Egypt was soon toppled while protests were breaking out all across the Middle East.
With movements directed against authoritarian regimes springing up throughout the Middle East, Libyan protestors took to the streets and quickly gained control of Benghazi before moving into Tripoli. Security forces attempted to fight back against them.
By March of 2011, NATO nations—joined by Sweden, Qatar, the UAE, and Jordan—enforced a no-fly zone over Libya and began bombing Libyan military and pro-Gaddafi targets. Many questions remain as to why the Western elites shifted from a policy of accommodation and even cooperation with Libya to one of providing airstrikes for the Arab Spring movement. While the Arab Spring represented a real movement by people with legitimate grievances against their government, to what extent Western intelligence services exploited this movement to their own ends remains unknown.
What we do know is that the British Special Air Service (SAS) landed in Libya at some point—probably the secretive intelligence gathering component of the SAS called “The Increment,” which works alongside MI–6. Elite counter-terrorist operators from America’s Delta Force were deployed to Libya as “analysts,” which allowed President Obama to declare that America did not have any boots on the ground but was simply providing air support for the rebels. The reality was that Delta Force had a small contingent instructing the rebels in the finer points of weapons and tactics. However, they probably took a backseat role when it came to combat, allowing the rebels to fight and die for their country rather than putting themselves in a position where they could be killed or captured by Gaddafi’s forces.
Any Americans who chose to take an active role in the fighting faced some very real risks. Matthew VanDyke made friends with a number of Libyans while traveling through the country on a motorbike tour in 2008. When he talked to his Libyan friends over the phone during the uprising in 2011, he decided to join the fight. Not long after his return home from the civil war, SOFREP interviewed Matthew about his experiences in Libya—including his capture by enemy forces.
There were front lines. Thanks to NATO intervention the sides were evenly matched enough on the ground that it never really devolved into a guerrilla war, at least not in eastern Libya where I was fighting. The terrain on the eastern front lines was flat, open desert, which also limited the ability to use guerrilla tactics. We didn’t really have night vision gear and the enemy had very little, ruling out night operations. The rebels also didn’t have enough time to train, or enough experience, to be effective with guerrilla warfare. We also had an appalling lack of intel, and very little communications equipment which made coordinating attacks difficult. The enemy did hit us at Ra’s Lanuf with a hit and run attack while I was in the city, and I was part of the mission to search the desert for the attackers afterwards.
At the beginning of the war we mostly had small arms. The heaviest thing I saw before my capture was the DShK machine gun, although I do know that rockets were being used by our side at that time. When I escaped prison and returned to the front lines things had dramatically changed. There were a variety of rocket launchers, AA guns, and 106s mounted on technicals, GRAD trucks, and tanks. The artillery, GRADs, and tanks operated as organized, coordinated units, but the majority of rebels were small militias consisting of technicals, and many rebels and militias operated largely independently.
As a result, the front lines were basically both sides throwing an incredible amount of rounds at each other day after day, often without visual confirmation of the enemy, and often from great distances which meant a sometimes constant whizzing of bullets over your head fired from unknown positions. There were a lot of snipers, a lot of mortars and rockets, and a lot of seemingly random firing in the general direction of the enemy by both sides. Life or death was largely a matter of luck.
Often times you would just see muzzle flashes of the enemy, or nothing at all. Eventually the gunfire from the other side would die down because a few were killed or were flushed out and retreated, and we would advance. It was town to town, treeline to treeline, street to street, and building to building. Usually they’d put up a good fight for the day, withdraw a bit at night, take up new defensive positions, and be waiting for us as we advanced the next day. They did a good job of predicting where our rally points would be, and had zeroed on them to hit us with mortar and rocket fire when we arrived.
Most of the combat was along the coastal highway, so the front lines were predictable and well-defined. Once inside of Sirte the situation changed somewhat and several fronts opened up, and the lack of intel and communications equipment (some rebels had radios or satellite phones but most did not, and our jeep did not) made it extremely dangerous in terms of not knowing where the enemy was at any moment, and the danger of friendly fire. Friendly fire was always a major concern given the lack of intel and communication, and the fact that very few rebels had enough training with firearms and firearm safety.
Combat was exactly what you’d expect in a popular revolution fought by citizen soldiers. It was like something you’d expect to see after the apocalypse. Motley crews of freedom fighters in pickup trucks with a lot of weapons and little training, firing a ton of rounds in the direction of the enemy and trying to gain some ground each day. We fought with mostly 1970s and 80s Soviet weaponry. There wasn’t much body armor—I only got a used vest a few days before the war ended and it didn’t have any plates in it. I only wore it for some protection from shrapnel. I never had a helmet. The only protective gear that I had consistently were ballistic shades.
It really was just like in the media reports. And at times strange. I saw dead camels in the street in Sirte, and camels standing around calmly in the middle of combat.
I had around 40 engagements during the war. I kept notes of each one to keep track.
Matthew was captured while conducting a reconnaissance patrol
to the town of Bregna. His patrol was ambushed, and he was knocked unconscious in the process. He woke up in a Libyan jail cell and was imprisoned by the Internal Security Agency and placed in Maktab Al-Nasser Prison. He remained imprisoned for 165 days. Finally, rebels advanced toward the prison, and other escaping prisoners freed Matthew, allowing him to link back up with his rebel friends and continue to fight Gaddafi’s forces.
Private Military Companies (PMCs) were also on the ground during the Libyan civil war. British oil companies dispatched military contractors to Libya to help extract their workers and secure expensive pieces of oil-drilling equipment—echoing the actions of Executive Outcomes in Soyo, Angola, during the ’90s.
Other PMCs were working for various intelligence agencies.
Private Military Contractors in Libya. Courtesy of SOFREP.
Among the PMCs in Libya at this time were SECOPEX of France, led by Pierre Marziali; Blue Mountain Group of the UK; Canada’s Garda Security Group; Control Risks Group, HIS, and the Olive Group, also out of the UK; AKE, run by former SAS operator Andew Kain; and Galice Security out of France, led by former GIGN commando Federic Gallois. MVM, a company that had a large number of CIA contracts at the time, also had people on the ground in the aftermath of the civil war. Rumor has it that they may have been hunting down and destroying Gaddafi’s weapons stockpiles. The possible involvement of other American PMCs with known agency links—such as Xe (Select), Triple Canopy, and SOCMG—is something that needs further investigation.
(One curious event involving a Private Military Company in Libya happened when the CEO of SECOPEX was executed in Benghazi. Something that often escapes the public and the media alike is that PMCs are often used as proxy forces by their home countries, giving policy makers at home a certain amount of protection from their electorate when things go wrong. Keeping with the theme of “no boots on the ground,” France allegedly dispatched SECOPEX into Libya to serve their interests. In May of 2011, The New York Times reported on vague information coming out of Libya about the company’s co-founder Pierre Marziali. The initial reports sounded strange because the CEO had been killed at a rebel checkpoint, but the other SECOPEX employees in the vehicle had been left unharmed. SOFREP sources report that the CEO was removed from his vehicle, taken aside, and killed. The other French contractors were then sent on their way. It seems that someone saw Pierre as an obstacle.)
Since the rebels announced soon after the war began that they would be opening a central bank and were ready to begin oil exports, it seems likely that various intelligence services that wanted to see Gaddafi thrown out of power may have used PMCs to avoid putting soldiers on the ground. They may even have given money to the rebels under the table, with which to pay their own PMCs.
The South African press has reported that white South African mercenaries were recruited by an oil corporation employee named Sarah Penfold to save the Gaddafi family. These mercenaries provided close protection for Gaddafi and also evacuated his sister to Algeria. Some speculation holds that these South Africans were recruited to be double agents. First they would build trust with Gaddafi by getting his sister out of the country, but later they would turn on him. What the truth is behind these rumors we may never know.
We do know that the South Africans were protecting Gaddafi when his convoy came under air attack from NATO aircraft. After the bombing, a large group of rebels attacked the convoy. The South Africans cut their losses and ran while the rebels moved in and killed Gaddafi. At least one South African mercenary died in the process.
SOFREP corresponded with former SAS Officer Simon Mann in the days after Gaddafi’s execution. Mann, the architect behind the failed 2004 “Wonga Coup” in Equatorial Guinea, confirmed that he knew several of the South African mercenaries protecting Gaddafi.
The story gets stranger still. A video showing Gaddafi’s body being dragged and sodomized with a bayonet has voices in the background, voices speaking Spanish with a Colombian accent. Could this misplaced Colombian have been working for the UAE’s Reflexive Responses? Set up by Erik Prince—of Blackwater fame—Reflexive Responses was established at the request of one of the UAE’s princes. With a core nucleus consisting of Kiwi SAS veterans and South Africans that functions as a counter-terrorist force, the main body of this Private Military Company is known to consist of Colombian military veterans.
With only the support of the one prince, Erik Prince was kicked out of the UAE after a falling-out over a New York Times story that laid out the terms and conditions of Reflexive Responses’s entire contract. The company still exists, but it seems that Prince has been persona non grata in the UAE ever since.
Who the mysterious Colombian heard in the videotape is will be difficult to discern. Too many people across Western Europe and the Middle East wanted Gaddafi dead. It would have been highly embarrassing if Gaddafi had stood trial in the International Criminal Court and started talking about what governments he had under-the-table agreements with. This is the same reason that SEAL Team Six had to liquidate Osama Bin Laden in Abbotabad, Pakistan. Had he been brought back for trial, he would have revealed the associations he’d had with the US government when the CIA supported the Mujahedin’s war against the Soviets, calling American foreign policy into question.
Libya seemed to be becoming something of a free-for-all, with Gaddafi loyalists, rebel fighters, mercenaries, jihadists, contractors, and SAS and Delta force soldiers running around the battle space. Navigating this mess on behalf of the United States was Christopher Stevens, who arrived in Libya as a Special Representative of the State Department during the civil war.
With NATO enforcing a no-fly area over the warzone, there were no commercial flights into Libya, so Stevens and his entourage had to come into the country on a Greek cargo ship docking in Benghazi. Fluent in Arabic and French, Stevens had held diplomatic posts in Israel, Syria, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, in addition to his previous position as the Deputy Chief of Mission between 2007 and 2009. Known for his ability to mix it up with the locals and stroll around the souks of the Middle East on his own, Stevens was by all accounts the right man for the challenging task that lay ahead of him in the midst of a full-blown civil war.
BY THEIR NATURE, very little is known about covert and clandestine operations—unless, of course, something goes drastically wrong.
At five in the morning on April 20th, 2012, a van hurtled over the guardrail on a bridge crossing the Niger River in the West African nation of Mali. In total, six people were killed when the van sank into the river below. Three were Moroccan prostitutes. One was a US Army Civil Affairs soldier. Another was listed as Civil Affairs as a cover for his real work. The remaining fatality was Master Sergeant Trevor Bast, assigned to Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM) at Ft. Belvoir, also a cover. Bast and one of the Civil Affairs soldiers were almost certainly members of the elite, but relatively unknown, Intelligence Support Activity.
Intelligence Support Activity, or ISA, operates under various codenames, which rotate every few years. As a part of JSOC, ISA operators help prepare battlespace for other Special Operations units, usually Delta Force or SEAL Team Six. Previous ISA missions include hunting down war criminals in the Balkans and locating Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar. Man hunting is one of this unit’s specialties—part of a robust list of SIGINT and HUMINT capabilities. Like the rest of JSOC, ISA has not been hurting for work during the War on Terror.
Special Operations forces had been focusing on Africa for a number of years. As Rangers, Delta, and SEALs churned through one High Value Target after another in Afghanistan and Iraq, strategic planners knew that Islamic radicals would be looking for new places to seek safe harbor and to stage future operations. Blue Squadron of SEAL Team Six culled more than a few Al-Shabbab terrorists in Somalia, while Red Squadron executed the USS Maersk hostage rescue mission in Somali pirate waters. Meanwhile, Special Forces and SEALs moved into Uganda, seeking to rid the country of the alr
eady-defunct Lord’s Resistance Army. The British SBS launched a failed hostage rescue mission in Nigeria, in broad daylight, in March of 2012.
West Africa took on a different flavor. Through the Joint Special Operations Task Force Trans-Sahara, Special Forces ODAs had been training soldiers in Mali to battle AQIM. Making life difficult for the operators working out of the US embassy in Mali was Ambassador Milovanovic, who did not care for or trust the military. Compounding the problem, the Defense Attaché came from the US Air Force and had a poor understanding of Special Operations missions and capabilities.
In the months immediately after 9/11, Delta Force operators had been able to hunt down terrorists in a number of different countries, sometimes unilaterally, usually through host nation counterparts. Eight years later, the bureaucracy had come back in full swing, and the days were long gone when missions could be blessed by a handshake between a JSOC operator and the ambassador.
The nearby 2011 Libyan civil war also affected Mali, as Gaddafi had been a heavy hitter in the country before he was abandoned by his South African bodyguards and executed in the street.
Many taureg fighters, who had been allied with Gaddafi going back to the 1987 Toyota War with Chad, fought for him during the Libyan civil war in 2011. After Gaddafi was defeated, these fighters returned home with weapons, combat experience, and the motivation to carve out a separate, independent state for themselves.
When the coup sparked in Mali, formal US military assistance to the government was withdrawn, however AQIM remained a regional threat, one that no one wanted to see rise to power in the wake of a coup. AQIM was known for kidnapping—mostly Europeans, from whom they made millions in ransom dollars each year. Jihadist fighters coming back from Afghanistan also joined their ranks and began making deals with Al-Shabbab in Somalia and the Nigerian Taliban. Reportedly, many of these Nigerians had attended AQIM training camps.
