CIA officers recount Benghazi attack at trial – By Josh Gerstein (politico.com) / Oct 10 2017
Two battle-hardened CIA veterans grew emotional Tuesday as they recounted first-hand one of the most politically explosive events in recent U.S. history: the deadly 2012 attack on Americans at government facilities in Benghazi.
Testifying under unusual secrecy measures—including wearing what the judge described as “light disguise”—the CIA officers told a federal jury at the Washington trial of a Benghazi militia leader about how they flew in from Tripoli on the night of the assault on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi only to eventually find themselves caught up in an intense firefight at a CIA annex nearby.
While Ambassador Chris Stevens and State Department computer technician Sean Smith appear to have died in the initial attack, the ensuing shelling of the CIA facility claimed the lives of CIA security contractors Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods and left State Department Diplomatic Security Agent David Ubben gravely wounded.
Libyan militia leader Ahmed Abu Khattala is facing a slew of criminal charges, including conspiracy to murder the four Americans and to destroy U.S. property. Khattala, snatched by U.S. forces from a seaside villa near Benghazi in 2014, listened impassively as the CIA veterans detailed their harrowing ordeal.
The Benghazi attack and claims that then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was lackadaisical in responding to the assault became a key storyline in the 2016 presidential campaign where Clinton was the Democratic nominee.
A series of congressional investigations found little evidence that anything could have been done that night to assist the Americans who came under fire, although Republicans were critical of Clinton and her aides for doing too little to address the security threats to U.S. diplomatic personnel in Libya as the situation deteriorated in 2012.
There was no discussion of the political impact of the episode during the testimony Tuesday.
The two CIA witnesses described leaving Tripoli around midnight on a small jet chartered for $30,000 in cash and arriving in Benghazi in the wee hours of the morning after the initial assault. After waiting a few hours at the airport for a local militia escort, the Americans headed to the CIA annex, about a mile and a half from the main U.S. compound.
“We came in and a few minutes later all hell broke loose,” recalled the CIA officer, an Arabic speaker who testified using the pseudonym Alexander Charles. “Maybe eight minutes since we arrived, they used mortars….You can feel the whole ground shaking….The building itself, the walls start falling apart, big blocks of cement falling.”
The officer, who said he has three decades of experience in the military and CIA, said he expected to die.
“All these years that I spent in the military really, I concluded that night that that was my last night on this Earth, pretty much, really,” he said. “I think if it continued we would be buried alive.”
The top security official for the CIA in Libya at the time, who used the name Roy Edwards when testifying Tuesday, also described the assault as frightening.
“It’s a pretty horrifying thing,” he said. “I would say you get used to it…but I knew were were taking fire and it was bad.”
Ubben was severely wounded by a mortar round on the roof of a key building in the CIA annex, Edwards recalled. The State Department security agent was brought morphine, but kept screaming in pain. “Despite that 20 milligrams, he was still screaming like—I can never forget that scream,” he said.
His testimony became halting as he described climbing to the rooftop of the building and hearing a colleague reporting that Doherty had died. “It didn’t register right away….He said, ‘Bub’s dead, move to the other medic,'” he said, before taking a long pause to maintain his composure. “I grabbed Ty by the pants and dragged him 15 [feet] to the ladder. He expired during that time.”
Charles said he and Edwards eventually concluded the situation was too perilous to remain at the annex.
“I said, ‘Let’s get out of here,'” Charles said, as the two men discussed clearing personnel off the roof where Ubben, Woods and Doherty had been trying to defend the annex. “He said, ‘I need to get Ty and Glen.’ I said, ‘Why do you need to get them? Just tell them to get down….’ And he looked at me and said, ‘They’re both dead.'”
After the Americans at the annex evacuated to the Benghazi airport and were loaded aboard the small jet, Charles decided that as an Arabic speaker he should stay in Benghazi to continue the effort to recover Stevens, who was thought to be dead but whose status was not certain. Charles said at one point he walked over to some Libyan militia members who were protecting the American group on the airport tarmac, along with the bodies of Smith, Doherty and Woods.
“I decided at that point just to walk close to the revolutionaries. I don’t know why, maybe divine intervention….I heard two Libyans say, ‘Should we tell them about the dead American at the hospital?” Charles said.
After the Americans pressed the issue, Stevens’ body arrived at the tarmac about 15 minutes later.
“He arrived on an orange litter that came with an ambulance and he was in a body bag. When they pulled him out, unzipped the body bag, you could tell they cleaned him at the hospital,” Charles said. “There was no soot on his face.”
Charles choked up and his voice quivered as he described offering the ambulance driver money so the Americans could take the stretcher Stevens was lying on.
“I asked him, ‘I’m willing to pay $1000 for the litter.’ I don’t want to strip the ambassador from his last iota of dignity. I said, ‘We owe it to the ambassador,” Charles said. The Libyans ultimately gave up the gurney and took no money for it, he said.
The few remaining U.S. nationals and the bodies of the four dead Americans were taken to a Libyan Air Force C-130 military transport flown into Benghazi that morning by the shaky political coalition that nominally governed Libya at the time.
“We put the four bodies on the deck of the plane. I remember Ty was still bleeding. Even though he was dead, there was still blood exiting his body. I remember it made a stream of blood from the bodies all the way to the rear of the plane,” Charles said.
Edwards said that despite the fierce battle at the annex, he was most concerned about flying on the dilapidated Libyan C-130. “It was in horrible condition. I really felt how I was going to die was on this aircraft, not what happened earlier in the night,” said Edwards, who told jurors he continues to work in security for the U.S. government but did not say in what capacity.
One of the CIA witnesses said Tuesday that when he arrived back in Tripoli on the Libyan plane with the four bodies he was told to separate from the American dead and immediately report to the CIA facility there for a video conference with the White House.
The two CIA witnesses spent most of their time on the stand being questioned by the prosecution. The cross-examination by the defense amounted to just a few minutes for each man. Defense attorney Michelle Peterson seemed to be stressing that the two CIA men had no idea which Libyan militia was attacking the CIA annex that night.
While jurors have seen video that appears to show Khattala at the scene of the diplomatic compound after it was attacked, there is no obvious evidence yet connecting him to the assault on the annex several hours later. An informant called “Ali,” who worked with U.S. authorities and allegedly received about $7 million for his services, is expected to implicate Khattala in both attacks.
In addition to the pseudonyms and the light disguise, the courtroom was closed to the public Tuesday—a rarity since criminal defendants are guaranteed a public trial. A video feed showing Khattala, lawyers and the judge was displayed in a nearby courtroom and in a media room, but there was no video of the CIA witnesses, just audio of their voices.
The precautions were tighter than those used at a leak trial involving multiple CIA witnesses in federal court in nearby Alexandria in 2015. There the public was allowed in the courtroom, but large dividers prevented those in the gallery from seeing the witnesses as they testified.
At the outset of Tuesday’s trial session, U.S. District Court Judge Christopher Cooper told the jurors that the prosecution and defense had agreed to the arrangements. Cooper called the identities of the witnesses “confidential and classified.”
“To accommodate your receiving their testimony and the government’s interest in maintaining the confidentiality of their identities, the parties have agreed to allow them to testify with a light disguise,” the judge said. It is unclear whether jurors were aware that the public was excluded from the courtroom.
While Khattala was originally charged with offenses that can carry the death penalty, former Attorney General Loretta Lynch decided last year not to seek capital punishment in the case. As a result, the maximum punishment the Libyan militia leader faces is life in prison.
http://www.politico.com/story/2017/10/10/cia-officers-testify-benghazi-attacks-243637
