Dark Forces: The Truth About What Happened in Benghazi Read Free Page A

battalions of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps. They wait until the next opportunity to strike a deadly blow, preferably in such a way as to leave no trail back to Tehran. I detailed many of these covert Iranian terror attacks in an earlier book, Countdown to Crisis: The Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran .
    So, I was not surprised when I began hearing anecdotal evidence of an Iranian involvement in Libya.
    Americans on the ground in Benghazi during the early days of th e anti-Qaddafi rebellion were already reporting on the Iranian presence at that time (see chapter 6). Once Benghazi became the hotbed for arming the Syrian rebels—Iran’s deadly enemies—they expanded their activity dramatically.
    By June 2012, the CIA was briefing the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli on Iran’s efforts to fund, train, and equip jihadi militias in Benghazi, including Ansar al-Sharia, the group most frequently blamed for carrying out the attacks. Those briefings—with redacted headers—were incorporated into a damning report released by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in January 2014.
    But the CIA fatally underestimated Iranian resolve. In chapter 12, I reveal the details of the ingenious ploy the Iranians devised to lull the CIA chief of base into believing the danger they posed was over, along with the names of the Iranian operatives in charge of the attacks and the mechanism they used to finance them.
    Put simply, the CIA got played. The story of how the Iranians outsmarted them will not be remembered as one of the agency’s finest hours.
    Benghazi will “go down in history as the greatest cover-up. And I’m talking about the Pentagon Papers, Iran-Contra, Watergate and the rest of them,” predicted the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe. 1
    A bipartisan report from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence concluded in January 2014 that the Benghazi attacks “were likely preventable.” The intelligence community “produced hundreds of analytic reports in the months preceding the September 11–12, 2012, attacks, providing strategic warning that militias and terrorist and affiliated groups had the capability and intent to strike U.S. and Western facilities and personnel in Libya,” the senators concluded. 2
    The real scandal of Benghazi did not begin on September 11, 2012, but years earlier. This book will tell that story.

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    FROM TERRORIST TO FRIEND
    It’s hard to believe that a U.S. president could once look to Libya as a success story. To most Americans, Libya has become synonymous with chaos, a wild and dangerous place where, as in Iraq, American dreams of democracy went to die. President Obama’s hesitation to use U.S. military might against Qaddafi in early 2011 prompted his political opponents to accuse him of leading from behind, even though U.S. aircraft, U.S. airmen, and U.S. taxpayers bore the brunt of the NATO-led no-fly zone over Libya during the first few months of the conflict, at a cost to taxpayers of $550 million for the first two weeks alone.
    The debacle in Benghazi and the image of U.S. weakness it projected to the world only heightened this sense of futility. It prompted at least one prospective Republican presidential hopeful, Senator Rand Paul, to argue in favor of a broad American pullback from around the world and a major military downsizing. It also will undoubtedly become a campaign issue should former secretary of state Hillary Clinton enter the 2016 race.
    As they contemplated a similar U.S. military involvement in Syria’s bloody civil war over the summer of 2013, politicians of both parties became increasingly worried that U.S. military aid could fall into the hands of jihadi terrorist groups, such as the ones who benefited from the U.S.-Qatari arms pipeline to the Libyan rebels who ousted Qaddafi.
    But one U.S. president could look to Qaddafi’s Libya as a success story. And it’s a story that has never been fully told.
    THE MAD DOG