Foreign Policy In Focus

Who would you believe: JSOC operatives past and present or the U.S. government?

Benghazi: The Definitive Report is the title of an e-book published on February 12 by William Morrow. It's written by two editors at SOFREP.com, the unofficial special operations site: Brandon Webb -- a former Navy SEAL -- and Jack Murphy -- a former Army Ranger and Green Beret. What's unique about the report is its bipartisan appeal. Its fodder for those who would attack the State Department, the administration, and the CIA from both the right and the left. Sure enough, it's caused ripples in Washington and garnered significant attention from the mainstream media.

To sum up, Webb and Murphy allege that the  Benghazi terrorist attack, during which Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were killed, was mounted by Islamist militants in retaliation for attacks on them by JSOC forces. Worse, the authors claim, neither Stevens nor CIA director David Petraeus knew about the raids, which were ordered by President Obama's Deputy National Security Adviser John Brennan, who was acting outside the command structure. 

Webb and Murphy also declare that Petraeus' affair with Paula Broadwell was leaked by the members of his personal protection detail in conjunction with members of the CIA who were unhappy with his emphasis on paramilitary activities over traditional espionage.

About Brennan, Murphy told Human Events:

The Senate should not confirm him as the new director of the CIA and Brennan should not continue in public life. … "I think we need to let this guy go."

Meanwhile, Eli Lake, the senior national security correspondent for the Daily Beast and Newsweek, writes:

… while the book is filled with juicy revelations that promise to shock even the most casual followers of counterintelligence gossip, government officials, including spokesmen for the National Security Council and Special Operations Command, dispute some of the key claims. … Ken McGraw, a spokesman for Special Operations Command, declined to discuss specific missions, but said “all U.S. Special Operations Forces work inside the established military chain of command,” and wouldn’t  “work in a foreign country without the knowledge and permission of the U.S. ambassador or chief of mission.”

The book also claims elements of the U.S. government either allowed or ran an operation to funnel weapons collected in Libya to Syria. The authors write, “[Ambassador] Stevens likely helped consolidate as many weapons as possible after the war to safeguard them, at which point Brennan exported them overseas to start another conflict.” … but Tommy Vietor, a spokesman for the National Security Council, says there was no program to send weapons from Libya to Syria. “This has no basis in reality and is completely made up,” he says. Hillary Clinton also denied any knowledge of this when she was asked about it by Sen. Rand Paul during last month’s hearings on the Benghazi attack.

Hmm, two spokespersons, plus Hilary Clinton during a hearing: that's all you've got, Eli? From the Human Events piece:

Because of the sensitivities involved, the authors double-source the claims in the book, he said. Many more stories were left out because there was no independent confirmation.

It all comes down to who you want to believe: the U.S. government or JSOC operatives past and present? In my case, it's more personal -- who do I want to believe: the U.S. government or my nephew? (By way of "full disclosure," as they say, Jack Murphy is my wife's sister's son.)

From national hero to cyber stalker in 1,000 easy emails.

While interviewing General David Petraeus's co-biographer Paula Broadwell, John Stewart asked her what it was like to be "embedded with a person at this level." Little did he know how embedded she was.

Of course, Petraeus resigned after his brief affair with Ms. Broadwell -- and his obsessive attempts to revive it in the form of over one thousand emails -- were discovered. Still, today's climate is forgiving enough to allow someone in such a high position to continue his job. One thinks of President Clinton.

However, it was out of the question in Petraeus's case, not only because he was head of an intelligence organization, but because Ms. Broadwell is under investigation for reading sensitive emails that Petraeus wrote. The Wall Street Journal reports:

The computer-security investigation … points to one reason Mr. Petraeus and the White House decided he couldn't remain in the senior intelligence position. An extramarital affair has significant implications for an official in a highly sensitive post, because it can open an official to blackmail. Security officials are sensitive to misuse of personal email accounts—not only official accounts—because there have been multiple instances of foreign hackers targeting personal emails.

FBI agents on the case expected that Petraeus would be asked to resign immediately rather than risk the possibility that he could be blackmailed to give intelligence secrets to foreign intelligence agencies or criminals. In addition, his pursuit of the woman could have distracted him as the CIA was giving Congress reports on the attack on the Benghazi consulate on Sept. 11.

Conservatives had already been claiming that someone at the CIA was "asleep at the wheel" of the Benghazi train wreck. Some now view one-time favorite Petraeus as a means by which they can further savage the administration over the attack. At Danger Room, Spencer Ackerman writes:

The Wall Street Journal cites several anonymous officials who go after Petraeus hard. The CIA [presence in Benghazi] … with the mission of hunting down ex-dictator Moammar Gadhafi’s unsecured rockets and missiles … operating out of an “annex” near the 13-acre consular compound, dwarfed the regular diplomatic presence in Benghazi. That apparently led to an expectation at the State Department that the CIA would secure the compound in the event of a disaster, which never congealed into a formal arrangement.

Worse …

The CIA had 10 people to protect its annex in Benghazi, but the State Department relied on a previously obscure British firm, Blue Mountain, [which] … paid its Libyan guards $4 an hour … to guard the entire compound. … It’s speculative, but the State Department’s expectation that the CIA would be “the cavalry” in an assault … might have contributed to State’s relatively lax security posture at the consulate.

Meanwhile, let's try to envision a scenario in which Ms. Broadwell perused Petraeus's official email account.

1. While he's deep in post-coital sleep, she sneaks off to his laptop. He has carelessly failed to log out of his email account.
2. While he scrolls through his emails, he lets her look over his shoulder.
3. He actually gave her his password. His intent might have been to allow her to log on and view saved drafts of emails he's written, but refrained from sending to avoid tracking. But, the sheer volume of emails he sent otherwise tends to invalidate this hypothesis.

Still a key question remains: was Ms. Broadwell just poking around on Petraeus's account out of curiosity? Or was she looking for something specific? If so, what?

In the end -- in fact, this story is just getting started -- it's ironic to those of us who have long stood in opposition to Petraeus that the woman who helped "hagiograph"* him was the catalyst for his fall from grace. Thanks to Petraeus's fatal encounter with Ms. Broadwell, he was transformed from engaged CIA director and "national hero" to a man who wrote over one thousand emails to the woman who'd broken up with him -- a common cyber-stalker, in other words.

*Write an idealizing biography.

U.S. foreign policy and a weakened CIA may have sown the seeds for disaster.

Mitt Romney embarrassed himself at the second presidential debate when he tried to score points against President Obama over the attack on the U.S. Benghazi consulate. As you no doubt recall, he claimed that the president didn't label it an "act of terror" for two weeks. However feeble a "gotcha" it would have been, as debate moderator Candy Crowley informed Romney, the president used the words in a press conference the day after the attack.

Romney supporters then mounted a brief campaign in an attempt to kill the messenger (Crowley) by insisting that correcting Romney showed partisanship on her part. The right has continued to make the case that the president and his administration were unprepared for the attack and responded poorly. In fact, some thought this would be critical to election results.

Specifically, the right asked:
1. Why wasn't the consulate more secure, especially with al Qaeda in the region?
2. Why weren't U.S. forces able to fend off the attackers?
3. Why is the Obama administration hiding the truth about the attack?

Obama supporters brushed them off. But is there any truth to the right's concerns about the Benghazi attack? At Counterpunch, Melvin Goodman, who writes about the decline of the CIA [I'm not exactly sure what constituted its peak -- RW], answers in the affirmative, but for reasons more complicated than the right believe.

It’s now apparent that the U.S. consulate in Benghazi was no ordinary consulate; in fact, it probably was. … the diplomatic cover for an intelligence platform and whatever diplomatic functions took place in Benghazi also served as cover for an important CIA base. 

Furthermore

Any CIA component in the Middle East or North Africa is a likely target of the wrath of militant and terrorist organizations because of the Agency’s key role in the global war on terror waged by the Bush administration and the increasingly widespread covert campaign of drone aircraft of the Obama administration. … The U.S. campaign to overthrow Gaddafi didn’t clean the slate of these abuses; it merely opened up the opportunity for militants and Islamists to avenge U.S. actions over the past ten years.

In other words, speaking as the former CIA analyst that he is, Goodman writes

Americans are devoting far too much attention to whether a so-called proper level of security in Benghazi could have prevented the attack, instead of trying to learn the motives and anticipate the actions of these militant organizations.

The CIA should have learned from a previous incident. 

The CIA failure to provide adequate security for its personnel stems from degradation in the operational tradecraft capabilities of the CIA since the so-called intelligence reforms that followed the 9/11 attacks. Nearly three years ago, nine CIA operatives and contractors were killed by a suicide bomber at their base in Khost in eastern Afghanistan in the deadliest attack on CIA personnel in decades.

Virtually every aspect of sound tradecraft was ignored in this episode.

But not much improved between then and the Benghazi attack.

The security situation in Libya, particularly Benghazi, was obviously deteriorating; the consulate was a target of a bomb in June. … Overall security for the consulate had been in the hands of a small British security firm that placed unarmed Libyans on the perimeter of the building complex. The CIA contributed to the problem with its reliance on Libyan militias and a new Libyan intelligence organization to maintain security for its personnel in Benghazi.

On the night of the attack, the CIA security team was slow to respond to the consulate’s call for help. [Also] Ambassador Christopher Stevens was an extremely successful and popular ambassador in Libya, but he had become too relaxed about security in a country that had become a war zone.

Meanwhile, at GQ, Sean Flynn, who recently wrote the definitive account of the Utoya kilings, also provides one for Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens's final days. He concludes:

Even the apparently important operational question—namely, was there enough security—seems irrelevant, because there can never be enough to prepare for every scenario. "The lethality and the number of armed people is unprecedented—there had been no attacks like that anywhere in Libya," a senior State Department official said. "In fact, it would be very, very hard to find an attack like that in recent diplomatic history."

But we'll give Goodman the final word.

The Benghazi failure is one more reminder of the unfortunate militarization of the intelligence community, particularly the CIA, in the wake of 9/11 that finds our major civilian intelligence service becoming a paramilitary center in support of the war-fighter.

Whither Libya after the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi?

Cross-posted from the Arabist.

Remarks from witnesses called for the Congressional hearing over the Benghazi attacks last month seem to indicate that there was no mass protest against the video “Innocence of Muslims” concurrent with the attacks. In the New York Times:

[T]he new account provided by the State Department made no mention of a protest. In this account, Mr. Stevens met with a Turkish diplomat during the day of the attack and then escorted him to the main gate of the mission around 8:30 p.m. At that time, there were no demonstrations and the situation appeared calm.

Congressional Republicans quickly seized on the fact that the State Department downgraded security in Benghazi despite the ratcheting up of warnings about the security threat to US nationals in the country ahead of 9/11/12. (Democrats struck back that it was Congressional Republicans who cut funding for such security in the first place.)

Beyond these Beltway-minded hearings, though, that will focus on (and politicize) these failures, the Libyan response to the attacks gives me more hope, rather than less, that the country is at the very least capable of confronting the militias in the long run. What is still of great concern is where the country will go next now that tensions over the militias are back to the fore, and the US enters an election year with a bone to pick over the North African nation?

A more detailed (and official) presentation of the events of that day has now emerged from testimony delivered by Charlene Lamb, Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Programs, Bureau of Diplomatic Security:

The attack began at approximately 9:40 pm local time. Diplomatic Security agents inside the compound heard loud voices outside the walls, followed by gunfire and an explosion. Dozens of attackers then launched a full-scale assault that was unprecedented in its size and intensity. They forced their way through the pedestrian gate, and used diesel fuel to set fire to the Libyan 17th February Brigade members’ barracks, and then proceeded towards the main building.

At the same time, attackers swept across the compound …. At 11pm, members of the Libyan 17th February Brigade advised they could no longer hold the area around the main building and insisted on evacuating the site.

…. They took heavy fire as they pulled away from the main building and on the street outside the compound.

…. In the early morning, an additional security team arrived from Tripoli and proceeded to the annex. Shortly after they arrived, the annex started taking mortar fire, with as many as three direct hits on the compound. It was during this mortar attack that Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty were killed and a Diplomatic Security agent and an annex quick reaction security team member were critically wounded.

A large number of Libyan government security officers subsequently arrived in more than 50 vehicles and escorted the remaining Americans to the airport. While still at the airport, we were able to confirm reports that the Ambassador’s body was at the Benghazi General Hospital.

Witnesses also told Congress that they had felt in the months prior to the attack that the new Libyan government did not have the capability to protect the consulate or confront the “al Qaeda” presence in the country.

The biggest headache for the White House has been that contradictory remarks made by Obama Administration officials and the US intelligence community last month about the nature of the attacks have yet to be fully resolved. Arch-neoconservative John Podhoretz implied that the Foreign Service and intelligence community are falling on their swords to protect the White House, which is surely a stretch given the reality of the Administration’s simple unpreparedness in light of a disaster like this goes a long way in explaining the muddled responses. But given the way in which information has been leaked/obtained by other news outlets about intelligence community assessments about the attack, it’s hard to not come to that conclusion Podhoretz does. Former DCIA (and current Romney advisor) Michael Hayden certainly feels this way as well, taking a defensive tone in a CNN editorial criticizing the White House.

I think what we will end up seeing, though, is that Obama Administration just failed to gauge the warnings it was receiving. Libya simply does not seem to have been prioritized despite the warnings; it was the success story, things were under control, the peripheral MENA theater compared to Syria or Egypt, and even Yemen.

Anti-interventionists in Congress reiterated their opposition to the whole Libyan issue by noting that NATO intervention gave Islamists breathing room. One such Islamist is Abd al Hakim Bilhaj, who has an instructive interview on his countrymen’s views of the attacks circulating in the UK Arabic press.

Before his rise to prominence in the Tripolitanian Military Council as a leader of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, Bilhaj was a person of interest to US intelligence because of his anti-Qadhafi AfPak excursions (arrested and extradited to Libya in 2004, he was pardoned by the regime in 2010). Bilhaj, whose Al-Watan Party was creamed in the summer elections, recently granted an interview to the UK’s Arabic press in which he condemned the attacks specifically, and al Qaeda in general, though ever politic, he did not blame any particular group.

Bilhaj, whose position has weakened greatly the 2012 elections and probably hopes to regain some influence in the new, “tense” atmosphere, is no fool. His reading of the mood in Libya — simmering anger at the militias, limited confidence in the government, an unwillingness to handover weapons “just in case” — shows that while Libya is not coming apart at the seams, it has weathered some truly trying tests better than others since 2011. Some of them have not gone so well, as we’ve seen with the highly symbolic airport siege, but other tests, such as the summer elections, did not end badly at all (and as the Arabist's Issandr el amrani has noted, when we talk about Libyan Islamists were are not generally talking about Salafists, though such men are represented among the militias and new political parties).

The attacks are indeed troubling because they illustrate how organized and professionally competent these Islamist organizations are — and how they have likely infiltrated the government.

But, for starters, the Libyan military did not abandon its posts when asked to defend American lives and property.

And if there were no crowds railing against that stupid Muslim-trolling con-artist film in Benghazi, there certainly were crowds protesting the attacks after the fact. Bear in mind that even in, say, Yemen, where protestors did storm embassy compounds and the US is deeply unpopular for its involvement in the government’s counterinsurgency campaign, the anti-American turnout was at most a few hundred people — perhaps a hundred times that number turned out to protest the attacks in Libya in a "Friday of Outrage." The attacks were a final straw for many Libyans already tired of the militias’ gun slinging (as was the case in Yemen, and elsewhere).

Perhaps the aftermath of the attacks will serve as a wake-up call for the new Libyan government, which is still reporting clashes in the stronghold of Bani Walid and hasn’t gotten the worst of the militias to cease their “polity within a polity” behavior. Problems with the judiciary and police are not going away anytime soon, either. Obviously, Libyans will have a long road to walk, as Borzou Daragahi notes in his latest dispatch for The Financial Times, with the grim subheading of “[o]ptimism born of the July elections has been replaced by uncertainty and fear.” It’s worth noting that the protests turned violent in some cases and demonstrators clashed with fighters:

The result [of the “Friday of Outrage”] has been political and economic deadlock in Tripoli as the various political forces battle for control of the direction of the new Libya. No camp wants any other to achieve success. Laws to clarify the role of civil society and private investment have been stuffed into drawers.

…. Islamist militias and their political allies now seethe with anger, feeling betrayed by the nation they defended during the revolution. They are openly mistrustful of the former exiles now dominating the government. They whisper of dark conspiracies by Gaddafi loyalists teaming up with liberal politicians and western powers.

But they are walking it, no one can deny that … except for Fox News, apparently.

While I’ve been critical of the Libyan government’s response to the militias, I’ve also been critical of the US for thinking that intervention could be carried out from 30,000 feet and everyone goes home in time for happy hour (Libyans not included).

They claimed interventionism, now they’d better act the postwar part of helping the government handle such difficult matters as setting up a judiciary, training a police force and securing loose arms, and that doesn’t mean putting dead Navy SEALs in a talking points memo or dispatching a fleet to show that all of a sudden “we mean business.”

Whether a less muscle-bound policy in Libya would have somehow prevented this all is going to be debated for years to come. Our track record in the region suggests, though, that more of such policies now, directed at Libya out of a desire to “avenge” our loss of life and face there, are not going to help anyone — except the armed Islamist spoilers Libyans are demonstrating their disdain for.