Stephen Hayes: Book Review: ’13 Hours in Benghazi’ by Mitchell Zuckoff with the Annex Security Team
http://online.wsj.com/articles/book-review-13-hours-by-mitchell-zuckoff-with-the-annex-security-team-1410392325?mod=hp_opinion
Book Review: ’13 Hours in Benghazi’ by Mitchell Zuckoff with the Annex Security Team
The CIA contractors describe arming for battle, only to be told to ‘wait’ by their base chief as Americans were under assault half a mile away.
In a polarized time, in a polarized country, very little has been more polarizing than the national debate over the attacks on the U.S. diplomatic compound and CIA annex in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11, 2012.
For critics of Barack Obama’s handling of national security, Benghazi is representative of his many failings. The administration failed to heed dire warnings before the attacks, failed to respond adequately as they unfolded and lied to cover up its mistakes afterward. For defenders of the White House, Benghazi has come to represent the excesses of Mr. Obama’s critics. Mitt Romney hastily condemned the president’s handling of Benghazi just hours after the attacks, before the facts were known. Republicans have been doing the same ever since. Or so the argument goes.
What’s most remarkable about the millions of words spoken and written during three years of debate is that none of them have come from the small group of American officials who were there. This finally changes with the publication of “13 Hours: The Inside Account of What Really Happened in Benghazi,” written by Mitchell Zuckoff with five members of the team of six CIA contractors who fought in Libya that night. (One of them, Tyrone Woods, died during the attack on the CIA annex.) “13 Hours” is a crisply written, gripping narrative of the events of the battle in Benghazi that adds considerable detail to the public record of what happened there.
The authors acknowledge the rancorous debate upfront and announce that they don’t intend to join it. Their account “is not about what officials in the United States government knew, said or did after the attack, or about the ongoing controversy over talking points, electoral politics, and alleged conspiracies and cover-ups.”
Instead, it is about what happened that terrible night. The contractors—three ex-Marines, a former Army Ranger and two former Navy SEALs—were in Libya to provide protection for CIA case officers, and they sought to defend U.S. facilities and diplomats during the attacks. What the five survivors have to say is at once compelling and enthralling, infuriating and heartbreaking.
13 Hours in Benghazi
By Mitchell Zuckoff with the Annex Security Team
(Twelve, 328 pages, $28)
Early on the morning of Sept. 11, 2012, 15 hours before the attacks on the U.S. facilities began, local security guards working with the Americans observed a man wearing the uniform of the Libyan Supreme Security Council, a sometimes-friendly coalition of local militias, casing the compound. He had climbed to the second floor of an abandoned building next door to the diplomatic compound and was “surreptitiously taking photographs of the layout” of the enclosed area. When confronted, he left.
The incident put U.S. diplomatic security agents on “high alert.” Those agents shared the information with the CIA contractors, the Libyan foreign ministry and ultimately with Amb. Chris Stevens, who was alarmed enough that he wanted a formal complaint sent to the local police.
Forty minutes before the attacks began, at 9:02 p.m., a pickup truck bearing the insignia of the Supreme Security Council parked outside the walls of the compound, where the driver and passengers sat inside. Then, at 9:42 p.m., “almost the moment the SSC pickup pulled away from the Compound, shots and an explosion rang out.” The fighting came in waves and continued at the CIA annex down the road, where a series of intense clashes were fought through the night. Before sunrise, four Americans were dead, including the ambassador.
The narrative momentum drives the reader to conclude that the uniformed militiamen were involved in the attack. While that is certainly the most likely of several possible explanations—and, one senses, the view of at least some of the contractors—Mr. Zuckoff takes care to present the others, however far-fetched. In one alternative hypothesis, the SSC team was answering an old request to provide 24-hour security to Stevens—a theory that doesn’t explain the early-morning visit, the surveillance or the absence of SSC militiamen throughout the day.
Such attempts at impartiality are commendable, yet it’s hard not to read this authoritative account as an indictment of the Obama administration’s tattered narrative.
The White House has long maintained, for instance, that no one was prevented from coming to the aid of the diplomats and security officials under attack at the compound. But the CIA contractors describe in agonizing detail how they were forced by their base chief to wait at the CIA annex before responding to the desperate pleas for help from their countrymen a half-mile away. “If you don’t get here soon, we’re all going to die!” one of the Americans trapped at the compound said over the radio.
After waiting in idle vehicles for several minutes, fully dressed and armed for battle, one contractor shouts to the CIA base chief: “Hey, we gotta go now! We’re losing the initiative!” The base chief, on the phone trying to get a local militia to respond instead, replies: “No, stand down, you need to wait.” Eventually the team grew so frustrated they defied the chief’s orders and raced to the fighting.
Administration officials still contend that the attack was unplanned. But the contractors write that the attackers’ actions “suggest a blend of tactical planning, perhaps based on reconnaissance, and opportunistic rampage.”
The Obama administration has abandoned its claims that the attacks grew out of protests in front of the facility—a wise move considering that the CIA contractors who drove past the compound around 8:30 p.m. report that “all was quiet.” It continues to maintain, though, that an Internet video played a role in triggering the attacks. The contractors “neither saw nor heard anything to suggest that anyone in Benghazi was upset about an offensive YouTube video clip from an anti-Muslim movie.”
Administration officials have defended the decision not to scramble air support by insisting that there was a long gap between the initial attack on the compound and the subsequent battle at the CIA annex. But the timeline of the fighting offered by those who were actually engaged in it is much more fluid, with long stretches of continuous combat punctuated by short periods of unnerving quiet. There is still no clear timeline of the events of 2012.
The House Select Committee on Benghazi begins its hearings next week. Addressing the discrepancies raised by Mitchell Zuckoff and the Annex Security Team should be among its first orders of business.
Mr. Hayes is a senior writer for the Weekly Standard.
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