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Diplomat Says Questions Over Benghazi Led to Demotion Diplomat Says Questions Over Benghazi Led to Demotion
(about 2 hours later)
WASHINGTON — A State Department official on Wednesday offered the first public testimony from an American diplomat who was on the ground in Libya the night last September when the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi was attacked. And he said he was later demoted for raising questions about how the attack was handled. WASHINGTON — A veteran diplomat gave a riveting minute-by-minute account on Wednesday of the lethal terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, last Sept. 11 and described its contentious aftermath in nearly five hours of testimony at a charged Congressional hearing that reflected the weighty political stakes perceived by both parties.
The official, Gregory Hicks, described a frantic series of phone calls from the American Embassy in Tripoli, where he was stationed, to Washington and, ultimately, to J. Christopher Stevens, the American ambassador, who was in Benghazi. He only heard Mr. Stevens utter, “Greg, we’re under attack,” before the line went dead. During a chaotic night at the American Embassy in Tripoli, 600 miles away, the diplomat, Gregory Hicks, got what he called “the saddest phone call I’ve ever had in my life” informing him that Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens was dead and that he was now the highest-ranking American in Libya. For his leadership that night when four Americans were killed, Mr. Hicks said, he subsequently received calls from both Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and President Obama.
Mr. Hicks was serving at the time as the embassy’s second-ranking official, but he said that since returning to Washington he felt he had been punished for speaking out. But within days, Mr. Hicks said, after raising questions about the account of what had happened in Benghazi offered in television interviews by Susan E. Rice, the United Nations ambassador, he felt a distinct chill from State Department superiors. “The sense I got was that I needed to stop the line of questioning,” said Mr. Hicks, who has been a Foreign Service officer for 22 years.
“I’ve been effectively demoted from deputy chief of mission to desk officer,” he said during a six-hour hearing of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. He was soon given a scathing review of his management style, he said, and was later “effectively demoted” to desk officer at headquarters, in what he believes was retaliation for speaking up.
Mr. Hicks described asking in vain for air support from Italy and being told that it could not make it there in time. Then, later, he pleaded for men who would never come. Fearing that armed Islamic militants might storm the embassy in Tripoli, staff members there hurriedly dismantled their sensitive communications equipment and got ready to evacuate to a more secure annex operated by the Central Intelligence Agency. One aide started smashing hard drives with an ax. House Republican leaders made the hearing the day’s top priority, postponing floor votes so that the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform could continue without interruption. The Obama administration appeared focused on the testimony, with senior officials at the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon responding throughout the day to Republican accusations of incompetence and cover-up in campaign war room style.
In the balance, in the view of both Democrats and Republicans, is not just the reputation of Mr. Obama but also potentially the prospects for the 2016 presidential election as well, since Mrs. Clinton, who stepped down in February, is the Democratic Party’s leading prospect. If the testimony did not fundamentally challenge the existing facts and timeline of the Benghazi attack and the administration’s response to it, it vividly illustrated the anxiety of top State Department officials about how the events would be publicly portrayed.
Mr. Hicks offered an unbecoming view of political supervision and intimidation inside the Obama administration. When Representative Jason Chaffetz, Republican of Utah, visited Libya after the attack, Mr. Hicks said his bosses told him not to talk to the congressman. When he did anyway, and a State Department lawyer was excluded from one meeting because he lacked the necessary security clearance, Mr. Hicks said he received an angry phone call from Mrs. Clinton’s chief of staff, Cheryl Mills.
“So this goes right to the person next to Secretary of State Clinton. Is that accurate?” asked Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio. Mr. Hicks responded, “Yes, sir.”
In a statement late Wednesday, a State Department spokesman, Patrick H. Ventrell, said the department had not and would not retaliate against Mr. Hicks. Mr. Ventrell noted that Mr. Hicks “testified that he decided to shorten his assignment in Libya following the attacks, due to understandable family reasons.” The spokesman said that Mr. Hicks’s current job was “a suitable temporary assignment” at the same salary, and that he had submitted his preferences for his next job.
The accounts from Mr. Hicks and two other officials, Mark I. Thompson, the former deputy coordinator for operations in the State Department’s Counterterrorism Bureau, and Eric Nordstrom, an official in the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security who had testified previously, added some detail to accounts of the night of Sept. 11 in Benghazi, where armed Islamic militants penetrated the diplomatic compound, starting the fire that killed Mr. Stevens and an aide, and later killed two security officers in a mortar attack; in Tripoli, where frantic diplomats fearing a similar invasion used an ax to destroy classified hard drives; and in Washington, where officials struggled to keep up with events.
The hearing offered a compelling, often emotional view from the ground, where officials were desperate for a rescue mission. Mr. Hicks, for instance, described his exchange with the furious leader of a four-member Special Operations team that wanted to fly from Tripoli to Benghazi to help but was ordered not to. Mr. Thompson wanted to see his Foreign Emergency Support Team dispatched to the scene and could not understand why his superiors did not agree.
But from the more detached standpoint of senior officials in Washington — offered in statements from the Defense Department and the State Department — neither unit could have reached Benghazi before the attacks were over. The team in Tripoli worked much of the night on moving American Embassy personnel to a secure annex and were not ready to leave for Benghazi until the early morning. The emergency support team would have deployed from the United States and would have arrived many hours after the last Americans were evacuated from Benghazi.
“None of us should ever experience what we went through in Tripoli and Benghazi,” Mr. Hicks said.“None of us should ever experience what we went through in Tripoli and Benghazi,” Mr. Hicks said.
Mr. Hicks and two other State Department officials who were witnesses said they felt that the investigation of the episode undertaken by the department was inadequate because many people who were directly involved in the attacks — including some of them — were not interviewed. The hearing became a political spectacle well before the committee’s chairman, Representative Darrell Issa of California, gaveled it to order. Republicans had promised damning revelations that could ultimately undo the Obama presidency. “Every bit as damaging as Watergate,” Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said this week.
“They stopped short of interviewing people who I personally know were involved in key decisions,” said Eric Nordstrom, an official in the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security. Congressional Republicans have threatened to hold additional hearings and subpoena witnesses, including Mrs. Clinton and Ms. Rice, and Democrats see a partisan fishing expedition.
The hearing into the Obama administration’s handling of the Benghazi episode became a political spectacle well before the panel’s chairman, Darrell Issa of California, gaveled it to order on Wednesday morning. Republicans promised damning revelations that could ultimately undo the Obama presidency. “Every bit as damaging as Watergate,” Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said this week. “This is a subject that has, from its beginning, been subject to attempts to politicize it by Republicans,” the White House spokesman, Jay Carney, said Wednesday.
The Benghazi inquiries have drawn the White House into a tense standoff with Congressional Republicans, who are threatening to subpoena witnesses, including Hillary Rodham Clinton, the former secretary of state, and Susan E. Rice, the ambassador to the United Nations. The three witnesses challenged both the Obama administration’s initial version of events — long ago withdrawn — and its claim to have exhaustively investigated the attacks.
“This is a subject that has, from its beginning, been subject to attempts to politicize it by Republicans,” the White House spokesman, Jay Carney, said Wednesday as the hearing was under way. When Ms. Rice suggested on Sunday talk shows days after the attack that it had begun with protests against a crude anti-Muslim video that had been posted on YouTube, Mr. Hicks said, “I was stunned. My jaw dropped and I was embarrassed.”
Mr. Hicks testified that his relationship with his superiors began to sour after he started asking questions about why Ms. Rice initially blamed a YouTube video, not terrorism, for the attack. “The sense I got was that I needed to stop the line of questioning,” he said. Her remarks angered the president of Libya’s National Assembly, Mohamed el-Magariaf, who had said on one of the television programs that the attack was the “preplanned” act of militants, including some from Al Qaeda, Mr. Hicks said. He asserted that Mr. Magariaf’s fury at being undercut caused Libyan officials to drag their feet on cooperating with F.B.I. investigators.
And when Representative Jason Chaffetz, Republican of Utah, visited Libya to investigate further, Mr. Hicks said his bosses told him not to talk to the congressman. When he did anyway, and a State Department lawyer was excluded from one meeting because he lacked sufficient security clearance, Mr. Hicks said he received an angry phone call from Mrs. Clinton’s chief of staff, Cheryl Mills. The witnesses also said they felt that the administration’s own official investigation, led by a veteran retired diplomat, Thomas R. Pickering, and a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, was inadequate.
This revelation made the Republicans on the committee take note. “So this goes right to the person next to Secretary of State Clinton. Is that accurate?” asked Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio. Mr. Hicks responded, “Yes, sir.” “They stopped short of interviewing people who I personally know were involved in key decisions,” Mr. Nordstrom said.
Ultimately the testimony seemed to resolve few, if any, of the questions that Republicans have raised about how robustly the military responded to the attacks. The answers the witnesses provided left both sides stuck where they were before: Republicans insistent that the military could have done more to scramble fighter jets and deploy commandos to help fight off the militants, and Democrats firm in their assertions that the military did all it could in a confusing situation in which the closest help was too far away. Mr. Hicks also said the State Department’s Accountability Review Board, as the inquiry was called, failed to hold high-level political appointees at the department responsible for inadequate security in Benghazi.
But in other ways, the witnesses challenged the Obama administration’s version of events and its assertions that it had exhaustively investigated the attacks. Mr. Nordstrom said that when he pressed for additional security personnel, he was told, “Basically, stop complaining.”
The most devastating moment in the attack, Mr. Hicks said, came at about 3 a.m., when the prime minister of Libya called to inform him of the death of Mr. Stevens. “I think it’s the saddest phone call I’ve ever had in my life,” he said, fighting back tears as he described how he and his team in Tripoli then quickly began their efforts to flee. Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland, the committee’s senior Democrat, accused the Republicans and Mr. Issa in particular of distorting the facts of the investigation for partisan purposes.
All three witnesses — Mr. Hicks, Mr. Nordstrom and Mark I. Thompson, the former deputy coordinator for operations in the State Department’s Counterterrorism Bureau — insisted that the inflammatory anti-Islamic YouTube video that the White House initially blamed for the attack was something they never considered a factor in the assault on the compound. But Mr. Cummings joined Republicans in promising that they would make sure the three witnesses did not suffer for their candid testimony. “I try to do everything in my power to protect witnesses,” he said. “I don’t care if they are brought by Republicans or Democrats.”
Republicans raised the question of the video again and again on Wednesday because it has become clear that American officials on the ground and in Washington immediately believed the attackers were terrorists, not demonstrators who turned violent, as Ms. Rice alleged in a series of Sunday talk show interviews shortly after the Benghazi attack.
“I was stunned,” Mr. Hicks said when asked what he thought when he heard Ms. Rice’s explanation. “My jaw dropped and I was embarrassed.”
“Why in the world would Susan Rice go on five talk shows and perpetuate a demonstrably false narrative?” asked Representative Trey Gowdy, Republican of South Carolina.
To Republicans the answer was obvious: the president, desperate to head off questions about why his administration failed to thwart a terrorist attack just weeks before the November 2012 election, wanted to cover it up.
The three witnesses said they repeatedly requested greater security before the attacks because they felt dangerously exposed in a corner of Libya that was especially lawless. When they pressed on, Mr. Nordstrom said, the response was “Why do you keep raising these issues? Why do you keep putting this forward?” In essence, he added, “So basically stop complaining.”
Republicans have zeroed in on why the military did not respond with greater force. But senior American officials have said that they decided against using what is known as the Foreign Emergency Support Team out of concern that the team would not have been able to effectively coordinate with their Libyan counterparts that night and the following morning and because there was great concern for their safety.
What has emerged after months of investigations is a picture of poorly defended American facilities in Libya and military commanders grappling on the night of the attacks with a decision about sending more Americans into harm’s way.
Mr. Chaffetz told the witnesses on Wednesday, “My concern is there was never an intention, there was never an attempt to actually get these military craft over there.”
Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland, the committee’s senior Democrat, unloaded on Republicans and Mr. Issa in particular, accusing them of distorting the facts of the investigation for their own partisan purposes.
“What we have seen over the past two weeks is a full-scale media campaign that is not designed to investigate what happened in a responsible and bipartisan manner, but rather to launch unfounded accusations and to smear public officials,” Mr. Cummings said.
For his part, Mr. Issa, one of the Obama administration’s biggest foes in Congress, kept his comments measured even as Democrats on the panel attacked him.
As he banged the gavel to close the afternoon’s testimony, Mr. Issa said the hearing might have concluded, “but this investigation is not over.”