The Central Intelligence Agency is the elephant in the room, big and clumsy and bumping into everything, even though everyone tries to avoid mentioning it. The CIA misjudged the security threat in Benghazi and contributed mightily to the confusion afterwards. The ass-covering of then-CIA Director David Petraeus, particularly, muddled the question of what could and should be told to the public.
On Wednesday, the White House released
100 pages of emails about the preparation of the Benghazi talking points in the days after the tragedy. They were written and edited for use by members of the intelligence committees on the Hill, and only later passed along, almost as an afterthought, to UN Ambassador Susan Rice for her much-criticized appearances on Sunday talk shows.
If you actually slog through the whole stack, a couple of points become apparent:
First of all, nobody in any of the drafts that were zipping back and forth between the CIA, the White House, the State Department and the FBI on September 14 questioned the central assertion of the first bullet point of the first CIA version: On the basis of the scant evidence available at that time, it said, the attacks in Benghazi “were spontaneously inspired by the protests at the US embassy in Cairo” and evolved into a “direct assault” on the outposts in Benghazi.
In a press conference Thursday, President Obama demanded congressional help to prevent future tragedies like Benghazi.
This was clearly an important point for the CIA to make because it had failed completely to come up with any actionable intelligence of an impending attack in Benghazi before the event. And given the very substantial presence of the CIA in Benghazi at that time—a presence the agency actively tried to obscure in all subsequent reporting—that failure was hard to excuse. But if the attack were “spontaneous,” of course there wouldn’t have been a warning to give.
So the initial CIA drafts for the talking points were full of generalizations suggesting the agency really was aware of the overall threat environment (as was everybody else in Libya). In several early versions the agency kept making the point that it had warned the embassy in Cairo the night before the demonstrations that there were “
social media reports” (my italics) “encouraging jihadists to break into the embassy.” That is, the embassy in Egypt, not Libya.
The early CIA drafts said the crowd that attacked in Benghazi “almost certainly was a mix of individuals from across many sectors of Libyan society. That being said, we do know that Islamic extremists with ties to Al-Qa’ida participated in the attack.”
But when challenged about how they knew this about Al Qaeda, the authors of the agency talking points backed down. As for the involvement of a shady Islamist group called Ansar al-Sharia, that
bit of information had been reported already by journalists on the ground and in the early drafts of the talking points the CIA just cited “open sources,” meaning previously published reports. There was no indication that the agency knew anything directly about Ansar’s involvement.
The next morning all that CYA from the CIA was edited out with a few sweeping strokes of the pen by Michael Morell, the agency’s deputy director. What was left was very little because, in point of fact, the agency had few facts to muster. When Petraeus saw the end result he was disappointed. “No mention of the cable to Cairo, either?” he asked. That is, the cable that quoted the social media about an impending demonstration at the embassy in Egypt.
In December under orders from then–secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the State Department Accountability Review Board issued
a report on Benghazi overseen by Ambassador Thomas Pickering and Admiral Michael Mullen, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In the unclassified version, the Central Intelligence Agency, as such, is not mentioned a single time. There are just references to people in "the Annex."
In fact, the whole picture of the "consulate" in Benghazi, as portrayed in most of the headlines and hearings, is misleading. It was not really a consulate at all by the strict State Department definition of the term, it was called a "special mission" and had grown out of the improvised presence that Chris Stevens had established in Benghazi as the envoy to the rebels during the fighting to overthrow the Gaddafi dictatorship. From the beginning, the agency was there behind the scenes. When a terrorist bomb hit the hotel where Stevens was staying during the fighting in 2011, he and his team just moved in with the CIA at their so-called "Annex."
Even after Stevens officially became ambassador in Tripoli in mid-2012 he did not take the initiative to turn the diplomatic mission in Benghazi into a formal consulate. Partly as a result, it started to fall between the bureaucratic cracks at Foggy Bottom and couldn’t command as many security measures as it should have. as it should have. As one knowledgeable U.S. official
told The Daily Beast's Eli Lake, "The Benghazi compound was a U.S, intelligence station with State Department cover."