Worthy Fights: A Memoir of Leadership in War and Peace

by Leon Panetta

  That would, as Ehud recognized, trigger an international response. The Israeli government under the late Ariel Sharon had heroically picked up and left Gaza in 2005, leaving the million Palestinians who live there with the right to govern themselves. Unfortunately, the Palestinians chose Hamas in the next election, and Hamas had not allowed real elections or any progress since. Though it played a role in politics and social welfare, Hamas was still at its heart a terrorist organization bent on the destruction of Israel and the United States.

  I asked Ehud how the United States could help avert that confrontation, and he calmly asked for some $700 million in American defense funding for an expansion of an Israeli antirocket system called Iron Dome. If perfected, the Iron Dome could knock Hamas’s rockets out of the sky and minimize Israeli casualties. That, Barak noted, might be enough to allow Israel to absorb Hamas’s aggression without having to invade to clean out the rocket infrastructure.

  I appreciated Ehud’s logic and already knew of the system’s capacity. The Iron Dome system, which was developed with initial know-how from American defense companies and was operationalized in Israel, was truly an amazing innovation. Within seconds, it could effectively create a missile shield to protect population centers from short-range rockets and missiles. The problem was that the batteries, launchers, and interceptors were expensive, and we weren’t rolling in money at that point. We had just announced that we were cutting defense spending by $487 billion in ten years. To turn around and request $700 million more for additional batteries was not going to be easy.

  But the prospect of war was worse, so we went to work. Over the next several weeks, we worked with Israel to refine its request. President Obama declared his support, at least for an initial payment to get the system going. Congress wanted to help Israel as well, and soon thereafter approved full funding for the program.

  In August 2012, I got my first look at the system in action. While visiting the port city of Ashkelon, I was taken to an Iron Dome battery, set in a field on the outskirts of the city. It was ringed by a series of trailers, inside of which young Israel Defense Force soldiers were riveted to computer screens, watching for any indication that a missile had been launched. In this demonstration, simulated rockets rose out of Gaza, appearing as blips on the screen. The radar immediately determined the course of the missiles—those headed for unpopulated areas were ignored while those bound for cities or towns were targeted in a flash. A barrage of interceptor missiles was launched, knocking down the incoming threats. It is an amazingly effective defense system, largely because of its sophistication in concentrating firepower on rockets whose trajectories are most threatening.

  It wasn’t long before it would go into action. On November 14, 2012, I was in Perth, Australia, with Chairman Dempsey and Secretary Clinton, attending the annual meeting with our Australian counterparts. Hosted by Australian defense minister Stephen Smith, we were discussing the rebalance to the Pacific and how to strengthen bilateral security ties between Australia and the United States.

  During the morning’s first session, Lieutenant General Tom Waldhauser, who had replaced John Kelly as my military assistant, tapped me on the shoulder and said I had an urgent call from Ehud Barak.* I stepped out of the conference ballroom where we were meeting and took Ehud’s call on a secure cell phone in the kitchen.

  “Leon,” he said. “The rocket firings from Gaza have become intolerable. We cannot allow our citizens to be attacked by Hamas. The prime minister has authorized a limited military operation to go into Gaza and take out the Hamas rocket infrastructure.”

  “Do what you have to do,” I told Ehud. “Obviously, it will be important to limit civilian casualties, and you know that. But every country has to be able to defend its people and its borders. Please keep me posted.” I wanted to press him on additional details, but the phone line cut out. I retook my seat in the ballroom, unable to share the news with my colleagues right away.

  Ehud called back a moment later, and Jeremy spoke to him to get a few additional details about the operation, which Israel dubbed “Pillar of Defense.” We consulted back at the Pentagon with Undersecretary Jim Miller, who was closely monitoring events there as well as the unfolding civil war on Israel’s other border, in Syria. Finally we had a break in our discussions with the Australians, and I huddled with Marty Dempsey and Hillary Clinton on a patio overlooking the Swan River. We agreed that we would recommend to the White House that the president stand by Israel during the war, but that it was in everyone’s interest not to let this erupt into a wider regional crisis. By limiting civilian casualties, Iron Dome, which knocked down more than four hundred rockets, helped make that possible.

  After an eight-day ground campaign, Secretary Clinton and Egypt’s foreign minister successfully brokered a cease-fire, which was announced on November 21.

  • • •

  I have always regarded politics as personal, and the best politics as those that are the result of men and women of goodwill getting to know each other, understanding the other’s point of view, and searching for solutions that can benefit both. I was reminded of that in the spring of 2012, on the very evening that I’d seen Iron Dome in action.

  Ehud and I returned from the coast that afternoon and settled in for a private dinner in Tel Aviv with a few close aides. As we were wrapping up, Ehud grew serious. “Leon,” he said, “tell me the story of your family in a few sentences.”

  “Well,” I began, “my parents were immigrants from Italy who came to America with little money in their pocket, no language skills, no jobs. They made their way to California, where they opened a restaurant; I washed glasses in the back of that restaurant. They would have never imagined that their son would grow up to become secretary of defense of the most powerful country on earth.”

  “That’s pretty good,” Ehud said, smiling broadly.

  “Now tell me yours,” I countered.

  “My grandparents were physically dragged out of their home to the Nazi death camp at Treblinka,” he said, his voice low and grave. “They and most of my family were exterminated. They would have never imagined that their grandson would grow up to become defense minister of the most powerful military within a thousand miles.”

  As I watch events in the Middle East unfold, I often think about that “thousand miles.” Since its inception, Israel has faced the hostility—and sometimes the aggression—of its immediate neighbors. Today, Israel must cope with a much broader and more complex set of threats ranging from failed states on its borders to bomb-carrying terrorists to missiles to the nuclear ambitions of Iran.

  The United States and Israel will not agree on everything. Neither country is obliged to shelve its judgment in order to work together. But our bond is unbreakable, and my admiration for Israel and its leadership is unsurpassed. Ehud Barak and his colleagues trusted me and mine on Iran; we helped defend Israel against Hamas, and helped negotiate the truce that brought that fighting to an end. Those were neither the first nor the last times that we will stand with each other.

  Born in the aftermath of the Holocaust and under attack from its earliest days, Israel has weathered more danger than any country on earth. Those dangers remain and evolve. We face them together, as something more than allies. We face them as friends.

  • • •

  In the six months leading up to September 11, 2012, the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) identified hundreds of threats against American diplomats, embassies, and diplomatic facilities around the world. Those threats come in all shapes and sizes, from specific warnings against specific people to generalized anti-Americanism. We take them seriously, of course, but not all can be acted on equally. And because we don’t have the resources to be everywhere, we have to make tough decisions about which are credible, how much and what kind of protection to deploy, and where it is needed the most.

  The anniversary of 9/11 always prompts a harder than usual review of thos
e threats, since the opportunity to strike at America on that day has the additional terror bonus of reminding the world of our losses in 2001. As I was the year before in advance of the tenth anniversary, in the weeks leading up to this September 11, I was in regular contact with officials across the intelligence community and at the White House to stay on top of the threat picture. On September 10, I hopped aboard a Marine helicopter to visit the Flight 93 National Memorial in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Shortly before we left, I received word that the president wanted to speak with his National Security Council Principals for an update on any 9/11-related threats at home or abroad. When the door of my helicopter popped open in the Pennsylvania valley, a Chevy Suburban with tinted windows and some large satellite dishes was waiting for me.

  “This is your mobile command center,” my chief communications specialist told me. “We drove it here from D.C. so you could take the call with the president.”

  I climbed into the back of the Suburban, and the operator patched me in to the call.

  General Dempsey represented the Joint Chiefs; Hillary Clinton was on for State; Director of National Intelligence Jim Clapper spoke for his agency; Matt Olsen reported for the National Counterterrorism Center; David Petraeus was there for the CIA; and John Brennan was on as the president’s adviser on terrorism. The president ran the call and directed the questioning. Our assessment to the president was unanimous: Although there were persistently general threats against U.S. interests and facilities, we saw no specific intelligence or warning about an attack on or around the 9/11 anniversary.

  We were already tracking an inflammatory anti-Muslim video that was circulating on the Internet and inciting anger across the Middle East against the United States—even though the U.S. government had nothing to do with it. We braced for demonstrations in Cairo and elsewhere across the region, and General Allen was especially concerned that it might lead to violence against our forces in Afghanistan. Press reports indicated that the radical anti-Muslim pastor Terry Jones—who had previously created a stir by threatening to publicly burn a Koran—was connected to the video. Several senior officials from around the government requested that Chairman Dempsey personally call Jones and ask him to disavow the video. If Dempsey’s request failed, I was going to call him next. Dempsey placed the call but was only able to leave a message.

  On September 11, as I was heading out of my office with General Dempsey for my weekly meeting with the president at the White House, I received the first reports of violence at our diplomatic compound in Benghazi (we later determined that the attack began at 3:42 p.m. EST, or 9:42 p.m. in Libya). Ambassador Chris Stevens, who had traveled to Benghazi from Tripoli the day before, was inside.

  I arrived at the White House between 4:30 and 4:45 p.m., and Dempsey and I presented what little information we had to the president as soon as we entered the Oval Office. We told him that some kind of attack had taken place that threatened our ambassador and compound in Benghazi, but we also cautioned that these were very preliminary reports. The president directed us to do everything we could to help our embattled embassy staff. Around that time, the five diplomatic security agents at the mission were able to escape to a secret CIA facility less than a mile away, and by 5:30 p.m. Washington time there were no remaining Americans inside the compound.

  As soon as I got back to the Pentagon, I asked General Kelly to get me the latest. The first reports were confusing and contradictory—one suggested that Stevens had been taken hostage—and the number of casualties was unclear. I summoned the key players to my office. They included Dempsey; members of the Joint Staff; Carter Ham, commanding general of AFRICOM, who happened to be in Washington that day; and several of our senior civilians. Admiral Winnefeld and General Kelly came in and out every few moments with additional information, and Winnefeld briefed the group on where our forces were located.

  After hearing the briefing, I gave several orders. First, I directed that two Marine Fleet Anti-Terrorism Support Teams, or “FAST” teams, which were stationed in Rota, Spain, prepare to deploy to Benghazi and Tripoli. Second, I directed that a special operations team, called a “Commander’s In-Extremis Force” (CIF), which was then training in the Balkans, cease the exercise and prepare for a rescue mission. Third, I directed that a hostage rescue unit from our special operations teams in the United States load up and fly to Libya in case we had an opportunity to rescue Stevens or others. Those orders went into effect immediately and were followed up that evening with written directives. Dempsey and Winnefeld advised that those were the only units that could reach Tripoli within hours to effect a rescue.

  General Kelly, Jeremy, and other senior members of the DoD team spent most of the evening, into the night, tracking events from the Pentagon. At 6:30 p.m. EST, a seven-man team in Tripoli, composed of five CIA security officers and two military men, found a private plane to fly them to Benghazi, arriving an hour later. Although the seven of them worked together, they were not a military unit that had trained together for this type of mission, but acted bravely on their own initiative.

  Those were all of the units that could plausibly respond. No aircraft, no aircraft carrier, no surface ship would have gotten there any faster, given the realities of moving those assets over the great distances needed to get them into position in time to make a difference.

  At 11:15 p.m. EST, just before dawn in Benghazi, the CIA facility near the diplomatic compound came under fire, this time by attackers using mortars. Two CIA security officers were killed in that attack, bringing the total number of Americans killed to four. By early daylight in Libya, the first group of Americans was able to leave by plane to Tripoli. Later that morning, the remaining Americans, including the bodies of Ambassador Stevens—which had been recovered from a local hospital—Sean Smith, Tyrone Woods, and Glen Doherty, also flew from Benghazi to Tripoli.

  I recount the above in such detail because the events of that night in Benghazi have unfortunately become the object of much conjecture and suspicion. The simple, sad fact of Benghazi is that we did not have intelligence that such an attack might occur, and as a result did not have forces close enough when the violence struck to be able to save our people from harm. We moved as quickly as we could, but this took place too far away for our forces to reach them in time.

  Any suggestion that anyone, from the president on down, delayed or was indifferent to the ambassador and his staff in Benghazi is simply false. One conspiracy theory held that the CIA security team in Tripoli had been ordered by their own chain of command to “stand down.” That was not only false but directly the opposite of the sum of everyone’s efforts in response to the president’s orders, which was to move as quickly as possible to help. I have had the honor of leading the brave men and women of both the Department of Defense and the CIA. One thing I know is that when Americans are in danger, you don’t need to give the order to help twice. That time and distance were simply too much to overcome should never be mistaken for a lack of swift and honest effort to help our people. That conclusion was affirmed by an accountability review board, cochaired by Admiral Mullen, which said of the attempts to rescue our people that night, “The interagency response was timely and appropriate, but there simply was not enough time, given the speed of the attacks, for armed U.S. military assets to have made a difference.” House Armed Services chairman Buck McKeon, a Republican stalwart, conducted his own review and arrived at the same conclusion. “I think I’ve pretty well been satisfied that given where the troops were, how quickly the thing all happened and how quickly it dissipated, we probably couldn’t have done more than we did,” he later told the press.12

  The initial reports provided to the president and his top staff suggested that the attack in Benghazi was the work of a mob of protesters rather than an organized assault. Petraeus, working off the assessments drawn up by CIA analysts, presented the theory to the national security team at a meeting in the Situation Room the day after the attack.
I questioned it from the beginning, not because I had different information but because it seemed to me that most spontaneous demonstrators don’t arrive for a protest carrying rocket-propelled grenade launchers. Others agreed. Maybe the first assault was from a mob of protesters, but the second attack, hours later, certainly was not. It was not clear at the time that there were two separate incidents, separated by distance and by several hours. Petraeus defended the theory of his analysts, however, arguing that there was so much weaponry floating around Libya that it was plausible in this instance. That theory was translated into talking points prepared for the House Intelligence Committee. Although they weren’t intended for use by UN ambassador Susan Rice, she used them during several interviews she gave that weekend.* The theory proved to be wrong, but Rice was not to blame, and it did not originate at the White House. To the contrary, it was the working premise of CIA analysts as of that time. Intelligence is difficult and often contradictory. That it took some time to get a handle on what happened should surprise nobody.

  On Friday of that week, I was scheduled to provide closed-door testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee. I was asked whether I thought the embassy attack was an act of terrorism, and I said it certainly looked like terrorism to me. Storming a diplomatic facility and killing a U.S. ambassador was an act of terrorism, as the president noted in the Rose Garden the day after the attack. In hindsight, we as a government could have made that point more clearly publicly following the attack, but not doing so was merely prudent reluctance to go beyond the official intelligence assessments. As was often the case, I was less cautious and could afford to be, since I was speaking in a closed-door hearing. I was asked for my opinion, and I gave it. I was proven right, but I could easily have been proven wrong. Like everyone else at that point, I was working from initial reports that could only be verified by a fuller investigation.