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CBS Correspondent Apologizes for Report on Benghazi Attack CBS to Correct Erroneous Report on Benghazi
(about 4 hours later)
The correspondent for a disputed “60 Minutes'’ segment about the attack last year on the United States Special Mission in Benghazi, Libya, apologized on the air Friday morning. The reporter, Lara Logan, said it was a “mistake'’ to put on a security officer whose credibility has since been undermined by his diverging accounts of his actions that night. As it prepared to broadcast a rare on-air correction Sunday for a now-discredited “60 Minutes” report, CBS News acknowledged on Friday that it had suffered a damaging blow to its credibility. Its top executive called the segment “as big a mistake as there has been” in the 45-year-old history of the celebrated news program.
Ms. Logan said on “CBS This Morning'’ that the news division was misled by the officer, Dylan Davies, adding, “We will apologize to our viewers, and we will correct the record on our broadcast on Sunday night.” The executive, Jeff Fager, conceded that CBS appeared to have been duped by the primary source for the report, a security official who told a national television audience a harrowing tale of the attack last year at the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya. On Thursday night it was disclosed that the official, Dylan Davies, had provided a completely different account in interviews with the F.B.I., in which he said he never made it to the mission that night.
Mr. Davies appeared on the program, broadcast Oct. 27, and wrote a book about his experiences, "The Embassy House,” under the pseudonym Morgan Jones. After that revelation, CBS decided to take multiple actions Friday. It removed the report from the CBS News website, and the correspondent for the segment, Lara Logan, appeared on the CBS morning news show to apologize personally for the mistakes in the report. And the company’s publishing division, Simon & Schuster, said it was suspending publication of a book by Mr. Davies, in which he tells the same narrative he recounted on “60 Minutes.”
On Friday afternoon, the publisher of “The Embassy House,” Threshold Editions, an imprint of Simon & Schuster that specializes in conservative nonfiction, said in a statement that it would stop selling the book. “It’s a black eye and it’s painful,” Mr. Fager said in a phone interview. He declined to say whether there would be negative consequences for any of the journalists involved.
The apology by Ms. Logan followed the disclosure by The New York Times Thursday evening that Mr. Davies had provided the F.B.I. an account that contradicted the version of events he provided “60 Minutes.'’ On the show, and in the book, Mr. Davies presented a vivid, on-scene description of the attack, including his own role as a participant in the action. The retractions and the scale of the mistake spurred comparisons with another embarrassing episode for CBS News — a report in 2004 about George W. Bush’s National Guard record that CBS was also forced to retract. That report, which actually appeared on a short-lived spinoff program called “60 Minutes II,” resulted in several firings and played a role in the eventual separation between CBS and its longtime anchor, Dan Rather.
But Mr. Davies told the F.B.I. that he was not on the scene until the next morning, according to two senior government officials who were briefed on the investigation of the attack. That account, the officials said, is consistent with an incident report produced by the Blue Mountain security business, which had been hired to protect United States interests in Benghazi and which employed Mr. Davies. Mr. Davies, identified as Morgan Jones on the “60 Minutes” report and on the jacket of his book, “The Embassy House,” gave three separate interviews to the F.B.I., according to Obama administration officials. Each time he described the events in ways that diverged from his account to CBS, when he claimed to have been personally involved in the action during the attack — to the point of disabling one of the attackers with a blow from a rifle.
Ms. Logan said on Friday that Mr. Davies denied the substance of the incident report, adding “and he said that he told the F.B.I. the same story that he had told us. But what we now know is that he told the F.B.I. a different story to what he told us. And, you know, that was the moment for us when we realized that we no longer had confidence in our source. And that we were wrong to put him on air.” His interviews with the F.B.I., disclosed Thursday night by The New York Times, were critical in the unraveling of his story. Mr. Davies had already told his employer, the security firm Blue Mountain, that he never appeared at the mission the night of the attack, and the firm had prepared an incident report with that information. Mr. Davies contended that he had not created or approved the incident report and that he had needed to lie to his employer because he had defied orders to remain at his villa. The justification for believing him, Mr. Fager said Friday, was Mr. Davies’s assurance that had told the real truth to the F.B.I., one that would corroborate his account to CBS.
Ms. Logan said that since learning about the F.B.I. report, CBS has tried to contact Mr. Davies but has not heard back from him. CBS has removed the interview and related material from its “60 Minutes'’ Web site. With agents unable to operate freely in Benghazi, the F.B.I., which is conducting an investigation into the attack, has struggled to get interviews with the guards hired to protect the mission and other witnesses. That has forced the agents to rely on the accounts provided by State Department officials and contractors who have left the country. As part of those efforts, the F.B.I. interviewed Mr. Davies by phone, teleconference and in Wales, where Mr. Davies lives. (Mr. Davies could not be reached Friday. Mr. Fager said he had told CBS News he had “gone into hiding.”)
The lengthy apology on Friday, unusual for any news organization, was all the more notable because it came from “60 Minutes,” one of the most esteemed newsmagazines on American television. Mr. Fager said CBS had been duped by a convincing liar. “There are people in the world who try to deceive others,” he said. “We believe we have a really good system to guard against that. This guy got through that.”
“The most important thing to every person at ’60 Minutes’ is the truth, and today the truth is that we made a mistake,” Ms. Logan said. But the program seemed to make a crucial error in going ahead with its report before it knew for certain what was in the F.B.I. interviews. Mr. Fager said CBS had made extensive efforts to determine what Mr. Davies told the F.B.I. He said the network had sources who led the program to believe that the report was “in sync” with the account Mr. Davies gave to “60 Minutes.”
It remains to be seen what kind of repercussions the incident has within “60 Minutes” or whether CBS will conduct an independent investigation, the way it did following a discredited 2004 segment in which Dan Rather reported on George W. Bush’s national guard service. Informed Thursday night by The Times that the F.B.I. version diverged from what Mr. Davies said on “60 Minutes,” CBS News quickly checked its own F.B.I. sources, Mr. Fager said, and learned that what Mr. Davies had told the F.B.I. “differed from what he told us.”
The publisher of Mr. Davies’s book said in a statement, “In light of information that has been brought to our attention since the initial publication of ‘The Embassy House,’ we are suspending the publication and sale of this book in all formats, and are recommending that booksellers do the same.” Mr. Fager said that led to a difficult night with “a tremendous amount of soul-searching.” He said, “We were sick. We knew we were misled and for us that is a mistake and we shouldn’t have put him on the air.”
“The Embassy House” was published Oct. 29, and more than 38,000 copies are in print. He called Ms. Logan and said she would have to appear on “CBS This Morning” to admit the error and apologize. “It is one of the most difficult things for a reporter to do and she did it extremely well, with the recognition that this is about the organization, not about her,” Mr. Fager said.
Threshold Editions has published books by Glenn Beck, Karl Rove, Mary Cheney and Mark R. Levin. As CBS was backtracking on its report, Threshold Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, said in a statement that it was recommending that booksellers remove Mr. Davies’s book from their shelves. “The Embassy House” was published Oct. 29, and more than 38,000 copies are in print.
Mr. Davies, who worked for Blue Mountain, has disavowed the incident report, saying in an interview last week with the online magazine The Daily Beast that he did not write it, had never even seen it and was not responsible for the account of events it contained. Ms. Logan did not reply to requests for an interview Friday. In an interview earlier this week, she had ardently defended Mr. Davies’s character and his veracity against charges that he had given differing accounts of the events that night in Benghazi.
The incident report described Mr. Davies as remaining at the villa he occupied in Libya and not getting to the scene on the night of the attack. In the version he wrote in his book and gave to “60 Minutes,” Mr. Davies said he left the villa that night to visit a hospital where he said he saw the body of the deceased ambassador, J. Christopher Stevens, and twice rushed to the scene of the attack. She also suggested, as Mr. Fager did on Friday, that the “60 Minutes” report became enmeshed in the continuing political battle over the Benghazi incident. The compelling account from Mr. Davies had provided congressional Republicans with new ammunition to criticize the Obama administration.
At the compound, he said, he had a confrontation with an attacker, whom he dispatched with a blow to the face with a rifle butt. Since the attack on the mission in Libya, Republicans have contended that the administration failed to secure the mission adequately, held back on sending military forces to rescue the Americans there, then tried to cover up how it handled the matter.
Jeff Fager, the chairman of CBS News and executive producer of “60 Minutes,” said on Thursday after being contacted by The New York Times and told of the F.B.I. report, “We’re surprised to hear about this, and if it shows we’ve been misled, we will make a correction.” The day after the CBS report, several Republican senators held a news conference, demanding that the administration allow congressional investigators to interview survivors of the Benghazi attack. In particular, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said that he would block all administration nominations until it met the Republicans’ demands.
CBS News had extensively defended Mr. Davies this week, suggesting — as Mr. Davies did in The Daily Beast interview — that he was the object of a campaign by State Department officials to quiet continued questioning about the events in Benghazi. CBS also publicly vouched for the authenticity of Mr. Davies’s account on “60 Minutes.” “We really hope that this will force him to drop his block on the nominations,” a senior administration official said on Friday.
Mr. Fager issued a statement this week, saying that the program was “proud of the reporting that went into the story” and expressing confidence that the sources on the program “told accurate versions of what happened that night.” A spokesman for Mr. Graham declined to address the matter on Friday, saying that Mr. Graham would address it on Sunday in an interview with CNN.
Ms. Logan had also expressed confidence that the incident report did not contradict Mr. Davies’s account on “60 Minutes” because he had never signed it and disputed its details. “He never had two stories. He only had one story,” Ms. Logan said in an interview this week.

Julie Bosman and Brian Stelter contributed reporting.

But CBS had all along acknowledged that Mr. Davies had also been interviewed by the F.B.I. The network had suggested that the agency’s interview would corroborate Mr. Davies’s account on “60 Minutes.” Instead, the disclosure that the F.B.I. interview matched the incident report leaves CBS facing more questions about the primary source for its investigation.

Brian Stelter and Julie Bosman contributed reporting.