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

heavily armed militiamen told Rone that the supplies now belonged to them.
    Rone and the other GRS operator raised their assault rifles and declined the offer to be robbed. Rone radioed for backup from his fellow GRS operators still at the Annex. But the CIA’s top officer in Benghazi, a man known publicly only as “Bob,” instead promised that he’d alert the 17 February Martyrs Brigade and have the ostensibly friendly militia serve as a Quick Reaction Force.
    Hearing Rone’s call for help, other GRS operators at the Annex had grabbed guns and gear and rushed to an armored car. But Bob, the CIA base chief, ordered them to stay put. After fifteen tense minutes, during which several GRS operators argued with Bob, Rone radioed that he’d talked his way out of the standoff without firing a shot. Had it escalated, the outnumbered and outgunned Americans would have stood little chance. No “friendly” 17 February militiamen ever arrived to help.
    Weeks later, the GRS operators were still fuming. Festering tensions with the CIA’s Benghazi chief became an ongoing issue. Some of the more vocal operators wrote Boboff as spineless, or as one put it, “a chickenshit careerist” focused on retirement and a cushy government pension. Another possibility was that Bob’s primary concern was not blowing the CIA’s cover, even if it meant leaving the operators to fend for themselves.
    When Rone and Jack were stopped on the drive from the airport, Rone knew that they’d encountered a relatively benign, quasi-official checkpoint. Rone calmly held up a document that identified him as a US government employee. The young men scanned it and waved them on. Rone told Jack about the gunpoint confrontation the previous month, warning him about makeshift roadblocks that militia groups threw up unexpectedly. Some GRS operators called the rogue militias “gangs with guns,” filled with twitchy young men amped up from chewing leaves of khat. If Rone and Jack crossed paths with those militiamen, they’d likely need to fight, flee, or both.

    Driving west along barren stretches of the highway that Rone called “Airport Road,” Jack saw undernourished horses scrounging for garbage, scraggly sheep, and walls marked with Arabic graffiti. As they approached more densely populated areas, the landscape shifted to ramshackle strip malls with Internet cafés, hookah shops, and fabric stores, flanked by roadside stands where vendors hawked tomatoes and melons. No rain falls in Benghazi from June through August, so desert dust covered everything from the cars to the stores to the people in the streets.
    Most of the men Jack and Rone passed wore Western clothing, though some dressed in loose-fitting cotton clothes the operators called “man jammies.” Women were scarce inthe streets, and the few Jack spotted wore black abayas and hijabs, the traditional Muslim cloaks and veils. Children and feral cats roamed unpaved alleys off the main streets, and Jack saw boys five to seven years old playing with a discarded tire. Jack and Rone talked about bringing their sons to a Third World country, to show them how fortunate they were.
    As Rone continued his circuitous drive, Jack noticed Benghazi’s most common architectural style: the unfinished, scaffold-wrapped concrete building. He smelled diesel fuel, roasting meat, rotting fruit, and cutting through it all, urine and feces. The city of more than seven hundred thousand residents had one badly outmatched sewage treatment plant. Waste flowed into the streets, the ground, and the 23 July Lake, a lagoon between downtown and the port where families picnicked.
    As Jack’s tour continued, he learned that the city’s infrastructure was broken or nonexistent. Electricity went on and off at random. Dry fields featured bumper crops of plastic bags. If motor vehicle laws existed, no one seemed to know or care. Every other car seemed to have broken brake lights. Traffic routinely choked up at even minor