13 Hours: The Inside Account of What Really Happened in Benghazi Read Online Free PDF

calling it retaliation for the death of al-Qaeda commander Abu Yahya al-Libi, a native of easternLibya killed in a drone strike in Pakistan. Five days later, on June 11, 2012, attackers fired a rocket-propelled grenade at a car carrying Sir Dominic Asquith, the British ambassador to Libya, as it drove through Benghazi. Asquith was unhurt, but two members of his security team were injured. The attack took place a half mile from the US diplomatic Compound. American operators responded and brought their injured British cohorts to the hospital. The next day, the UK closed its Benghazi consulate and evacuated its staffers.
    A US government review of events in Benghazi during the spring and summer of 2012 found “a general backdrop of political violence, assassinations targeting former regime officials, lawlessness, and an overarching absence of central government authority in eastern Libya.”
    On June 25, America’s ambassador to Libya, J. Christopher Stevens, sent a cable to Washington quoting local sources who said “Islamic extremism” appeared to be rising in eastern Libya, and that al-Qaeda’s black-and-white flag “has been spotted several times flying over government buildings and training facilities.”
    On August 2, even as Jack was en route to join the GRS team in Benghazi, Stevens sent another cable to Washington seeking more bodyguards. The ambassador warned that “the security condition in Libya… [is] unpredictable, volatile and violent.”

    Two years before meeting at the Benghazi airport, Jack and Rone unexpectedly ran into each other in the lobby of an East Coast hotel. Both had signed up to undergo screening and training to become GRS operators. By coincidence,their friend and fellow former SEAL Glen “Bub” Doherty was there, too.
    Several times since entering the GRS, Rone and Jack had been assigned to the same hazardous places. Rone usually landed first, then cryptically told Jack via e-mail what to bring and what to expect. That was the case in Benghazi, where Rone had arrived a month earlier on his second trip to the city. Jack felt like a new kid in school with a savvy older buddy waiting to show him around. But that would soon change. Rone told Jack that the summer in Benghazi would be his last job for the GRS. His contract was set to expire in early September, and he wanted to spend more time with his wife and to help raise their infant son.
    As Rone drove from the airport and Jack scanned their surroundings, they steeled themselves for what lay ahead. The airport was outside the city, thirteen miles east of downtown Benghazi. Rone plotted an indirect course with twists and turns to make sure they weren’t being followed.
    Before flying to Benghazi, Jack had used Google Earth maps to learn the basic layout. His map study showed a city roughly the size of Atlanta, designed like one half of a target, with the port as its bull’s-eye. Radiating outward from the port were five curved, half-moon-shaped ring roads, named First Ring Road through Fifth Ring Road. Straight roads that moved traffic closer or farther from the port intersected the ring roads. From the air, Benghazi looked like a spider’s web.
    Minutes into the drive, Rone and Jack came upon a checkpoint, little more than a bullet-pocked cement building that straddled the road’s median. Rone slowed to a stop astwo young men approached the pickup carrying AK-47s and dressed in a mix of ragged military uniforms and civilian clothes. Off to one side, another young Libyan man stood in the bed of an improvised military vehicle known as a “Technical”: a pickup truck with a mounted heavy machine gun in back.
    Rone had good reason to be cautious. Several weeks earlier, he and another GRS operator were driving from the airport with a truckload of supplies when members of a radical Islamist militia stopped them at gunpoint. Rone and the other operator believed that their antagonists were from the extremist Ansar al-Sharia Brigade. The