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Sign up for Pushkin Plus on the Fiasco Apple podcast show page, or visit Pushkin dot Fm slash Plus now onto the show.

Previously on Fiasco.

He's been called the world's number one terrorist, a madman who exports terrorism around the world, Colonel Murima Coduti.

The first time in almost a quarter century, the US has diplomatic ties with Libya.

We were sent out there and told just to go find what you can find.

Chris Stevens was always willing to open a conversation with people from pretty scary Islamist backgrounds.

Nobody demonstrated or protested in Goddafi's Libya.

But they didn't really care anymore.

They'd lost everything.

Hamis Gadaffi arrived in Houston, Texas on January twentieth, twenty eleven.

While in town, Hamis, one of Mumar Gadaffi's sons, was scheduled to visit a NASA facility and the Port of Houston.

There's a photo from the trip in which Camise can be seen smiling with the chairman of the Houston Port Commission and ten other men in suits.

Camise was around thirty at the time, and in the photo he looks sharp, wearing jeans and shiny other shoes, with a sport coat and a simple black necktie.

Camisa's visit to Houston was part of a wide ranging tour of the United States sponsored by a large American infrastructure firm with business in Libya.

According to Camisa's schedule, the trip was to inclclude a VIP tour of Universal studios and visits to Apple, Google and Intel.

Whether he ended up doing all that we don't know for sure, because it wasn't reported on at the time.

The specifics of what Camise actually did in the United States are fuzzy.

One of the few people who knows some of the details is Colonel Brian Linville.

Hamis went to the United States not as a part of an official government function per se.

Instead, at that time he was working on his master's degree at a school in Spain and was really interested in the business management aspects of the United States.

At the time of Camise's American safari, Lynnville was a Foreign Area officer in the US Army.

He was living in Tripoli and serving as a diplomatic liaison to the Libyan military.

Foreign area officers like myself refer to ourselves hyphenated as soldier diplomats because it really does incorporate the aspects of both, and you can't separate the two.

Linnville accompanied camise on the part of his trip that was planned in coordination with the Department of Defense.

The DoD had agreed to take camise on tours of the US Air Force Academy West Point and the National Defense University.

It fell to Linnville's escort Camiste to each of those stops.

I sincerely believe he wanted to go and observe and learn and take back something that might be to the benefit of his country, his military.

For most of the trip, Camisee tried to keep his identity under wraps.

He was extremely hesitant to allow himself to be identified as Kaddafi's son.

Everywhere we went.

He asked that we introduce him as Captain Camise not as Captain Kadafi.

He wanted to disassociate himself from any stigmas that might be associated with that name.

In the United States officials are saying no to being leader Momar Kadafi.

Does anybody think that Momarkadafi is not a terrorist?

This is a man who simply does not accept a responsibility for Libya's a terrorist past.

Camis knew that we'd had Araqi past, and his purpose wasn't to make waves or to ruffle any feathers.

Camis's American hosts didn't want to ruffle his feathers either.

He and his brothers were important to the American government because they were widely understood to be the future of Libya.

Whatever happened after Muamar Gadaffi eventually died, his sons would be a huge part of it.

In the meantime, it was possible they could serve as a positive influence on their father.

With Camis, we knew that he had the potential to talked to his dad and explain what he'd seen and encouraged the Libyan government to make some changes.

Not all of Gadafi's sons inspired this kind of faith or enjoyed equal standar in the eyes of the West.

The Kadafi boys were a motley assortment.

Perhaps the most respected of the Gaddafi brothers was Saif al Islam, whom you heard about in episode one Scyphal.

Islam, as the heir apparent, took on a much larger role than his other brothers, and much more political role, whereas the other brothers struggled to find.

Their way up.

Those other brothers included Matassim, who once paid Beyonce a rumored two million dollars to perform at a New Year's Eve concert in Saint Bart's and Sadi, who was caught using steroids during a stint as a professional soccer player in Italy.

By comparison, Camisee did not attract much attention while his brothers made headlines in The New York Times.

In Gawker, Camis seemed to fly under the radar as he worked towards an MBA in Spain.

But back home in Libya he had another role.

He was the commander of the regime's most important and probably best equipped, best trained regiment, of the thirty second Enhanced Brigade.

The thirty second Enhanced Brigade was one of the few elite units of the Libyan military, which on the whole was underfunded and poorly organized.

This was at least in part because Colonel Gaddafi liked it that way.

As he saw it, if a military coups were ever attempted against him, it would be much easier for his loyalists to defeat a weak army than a strong one.

He focused on developing specific regime protection forces that he knew were loyal and were manned by family members or tribal members that were loyal to him and loyal to the Kadafi government.

And so camisse led the main one of those.

Yes, that's correct.

While Camisee traveled the United States, the Middle East was experiencing a historic convulsion.

A little over a month earlier, in December of twenty ten, a street vendor in Tunisia had doused himself in paint dinner and lit himself on fire.

It was a protest against corrupt local authorities who had harassed him and confiscated the scale he used to weigh his produce.

His closest friends, anguished by Mohamlet's actions, took to the streets and began a popular uprising.

When words spread about what the produce vendor had done and why Tunisians poured into the streets in protest.

Anger erupted onto the streets.

Today, while police rushing a crowd carrying banners reading yes we can.

It was enough to bring down the government and force the nation's president to flee.

Before long, the president of Tunisia was forced from power, and the revolutionary mood started spreading to Egypt.

Just listen to the chance roaring in downtown Cairol, the hundreds of people walking to the streets.

It's unprecedented for people to.

March to the streets this way as an act of protests without security is he's trying to prevent them.

On January twenty fifth, twenty eleven, protests erupted in Tariar Square in Cairo as thousands of Egyptians demanded that President Hosni Mubarik stepped down.

It was the beginning of what would come to be known in the West as the Arab Spring.

Of course, a wave of protests has swept through the Arab world, and now many are wondering how far that wave will spread and what it means to the rest of the Middle East.

Including Mubarak resigned as president of Egypt on February eleventh.

That same day, Kamiska Dafi was in Chicago sitting in on a class at Northwestern University taught by Deepak Chopra.

The class was called the Soul of Leadership, and at one point Chopra brought up Mubarik and the Egyptian Revolution as Camise took extensive notes.

After his visit to Chicago, Camise flew to DC, where Brian Linville took him to the National Defense University.

At a roundtable discussion with American government officials, a US ambassador asked Camise the question that was on everyone's mind.

And he said, you know, I can't pass up this opportunity.

I want to ask what are your thoughts on and the uprisings that are going on?

And I think Camise shocked the room when he said, I think it's a good thing.

I think it's good that the people of the region are finally having an opportunity to express themselves in this way.

And you could have heard a pin drop in the room.

From DC, Camise traveled to New York City, where he toured the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

The next day, he was scheduled to take in a performance of Mamma Mia on Broadway.

Brian Linnville, who was supposed to meet Camise in New York.

Was still at his hotel in Washington when he heard about unsettling reports coming out of Libya.

On the news.

There were reports that there been some uprisings in eastern Libya around Benghazi.

Well, in a rare show of unrest, hundreds of opponents of Libyan leader.

Moammar Gadaffi clashed with police overnight.

Lynnville was getting ready to travel to New York when he got a phone call.

My cell phone rings and it's Camisi's handler.

Well that the handler says, Hey, Camisi is cutting his trip short and he's flying back.

To Libya tonight.

And that was it.

We both knew what was going down.

The Arab spring had arrived in Libya.

When you say you knew what was going down, like you mean you understood what he was going back there to do.

Oh yeah, for sure, Hamis was going to go back to Libya and play a prominent role in putting down the uprisings.

I think we were both airborne at the same time, different planes, and we both probably got back to Triple Hit about the same time.

Then ultimately we would go on to be on the opposite sides of the battlefield.

I'm Leon Nafok from Prologue Projects and Pushkin Industries.

This is Fiasco Benghazi.

Dramatic showdown between a dictator with a ruthless grip on power and a population demanding freedom.

My mother knew she might not see us again.

It's easy for people to say you take the consequences if something bad happened.

And I just said to him, you've just guaranteed your future as an ambassador.

He went in into Benghazi in the height of a war.

It was pretty remarkable.

Episode two, We Will Stay Here, in which Libya revolts and a beloved American diplomat makes his mark in Benghazi.

We'll be right back.

There was a joke that went around in early twenty eleven that summed up how a lot of Libyans felt at the beginning of the Arab Spring.

It had to do with Libya's geographic position in North Africa, sandwiched between Egypt and Tunisia.

The Tunisians were joking about us.

They say that we asked Libyans to sit down so we can't see Egyptians and in spite of them, to start their revolution.

This is Iman Bugagis in twenty eleven.

She was an orthodonist on the teaching staff at the University of Benghazi.

The joke she's referring to here basically meant that no one was expecting the Libyan people to join in when the revolutionary wave started sweeping the Arab world, because we were hopeless.

They knew the autrocity of Gavefi and we felt that also.

We felt that we never kick out Gembefi.

But sometime in early February, social media posts started circulating calling for mass protests to take place in Libya.

On Thursday, February seventeenth.

It was being called a day of rage.

Brian Linnville, the American Army Liaison, says the Gadafi regime started quietly mobilizing for potential unrest.

It was apparent that the regime was nervous.

Right.

We noticed a definite uptick in security forces in downtown Tripoli, and there was a certain tension in the air because you'd watch on Al Jazer and every other news agency as these governments started to topple across the region and everybody was asking can it happen here?

On February fifteenth, the Kadafi regime arrested a prominent lawyer in Benghazi named Fati Turbil.

It was seemingly a precautionary measure.

Turbil was best known as a representative of the families whose loved ones had been killed at Abu Salim prison in nineteen ninety six.

As you heard in episode one, the Kadafi regime had been allowing the families to protest every Saturday outside the courthouse in Benghazi.

Fati Turbil, who was helping the families in their fight for restitution and who had also lost relatives in the massacre, often joined them.

They were the mothers, the sisters.

The wives of political prisoners, and always they were They were asking, They were making noise and requesting to know the fate of their relatives and what had happened.

They wanted the truth because at that time, even at that time, there was no clear admission of the regime of what happened exactly.

Gaddafi apparently thought that arresting Turbil would silence anyone who might be thinking of revolution.

Instead, soon after Turbil's arrest, a group of fifteen to twenty women, all family members of abously imprisoners, gathered outside the building where Turbil was being held.

They came in front of the intelligence headquarter, and what they were saying was wake up, wake up, being Ghazzi.

This is the day that you were waiting for Knu the Nudi Yban Ghazzi had Yomtrai.

It walked up at the sentence, they walked us.

After that people started gathering.

It was very strange to see women protesting and with all of this courage.

So the people and the youth started to come and then they walked till the city center, which was a few kilometers.

Later that night, Fati Turbil was allowed to go free.

But like the self immolation of a street vendor in Tunisia, Turbill's arrest had sparked something unconfirmed.

Video it's claimed, shows protesters outside a police station in Benghazi on Tuesday.

They've come to demonstrate against the arrest of human rights lawyer Fati Turbill.

After dark, the protesters regroup outside the city's security directorate, their chance turn against the government and the forty one year long rule of Mama Gaddafi.

On February seventeenth, the day of Rage, Iman and Bugegis left her home to join a protest on the steps of the Bengazi courthouse.

She was joined by her sister, Salwah, another lawyer who've been helping the Abu Sulim families.

As they headed to the courthouse, the sisters didn't know if they were to return home alive.

We left our children with my mother, and my mother knew and we knew that she might.

Not see us again.

We didn't talk about it.

We thought that it's something we have to do regardless, So we didn't what if, what if?

No, no, no no, But they thought about that.

You know, we have something we have to do.

It's our responsibility, the older generation.

We have to do something.

You know, we have a students, We have children who deserves better life.

They deserve to live in peace, to have good education.

Iman joined her sister in front of the courthouse just before one pm.

At first, the protesters made relatively modest demands, calling for a constitution and social reforms, not full on regime change.

But as the afternoon wore on, the crowd kept growing and many of the new arrivals were young people who were less restrained in their ambitions.

They didn't just want change, they wanted Gaddafi gone.

Imman initially tried to discourage them because she was afraid that Gaddafi would simply kill them all if they called for his ouster.

But by four o'clock she could tell the tide had turned.

A revolution that started and there was no going back.

For seven eight hours, we were just chanting about Libya.

It was the first time that we say it's our country, we love it.

It was like a love song, you know.

All of a sudden we recognized how much we love our country.

This is our country, we love it, We love you, you know.

It was unbelievable.

Declaring love for Libya was revolutionary in and of itself.

Colonel Gaddafi had only ever encouraged love for Colonel Gaddafi.

He didn't use the name Libya for anything, so for a long time he replaced Libya with himself.

So at that time, we just moved away that curtain and Libya returned to us, and we discovered how much we love our country.

It was a euphoric moment.

Even though the revolution was just starting, the mere act of public descent felt like a victory.

On February eighteenth, a man climbed up a utility pole in Benghazi and hung the old flag of the Kingdom of Libya, red, black and green with a star and crescent in the center.

Are screaming, you know it's ourn flag.

It came back to us.

Thousands of protesters in Benghazi joined together to sing a protest song called Salfa Napka Hunah we will stay here.

For the first time, we were singing for our country and we were saying that we will stay here.

Libya will stay here.

The unrest wasn't limited to Benghazi.

Within a week, protests were occurring throughout Libya.

The response from the Gadafi regime was quick and violent.

Dramatics showdown between a dictator with a ruthless grip on power and a population demanding freedom.

Kaddafi is lashing back with force and brutality on a scale not yet seen in the revolutions that have been sweeping across the Arab world.

Reports of casualties have come from all over the country.

Sources suggest Libyan security forces shot and killed demonstrators.

With borders closed and telephone and internet jam, it's impossible to get an accurate picture, but there are reports of massacres by the military.

Army attache Brian Linnville returned to Tripoli from his trip with Kamiska Dathi on February nineteenth, just two days after the Day of Rage.

By this point the uprising had reached the Libyan capital as well.

As soon as the sun went down, we could hear outside like echoing through the streets, this chanting, this low roar, angry people in the streets.

Shortly after that, we started hearing gunfire, and that gunfire developed into machine gun fire, and we started seeing tracers shoot across the sky, and the chanting got worse and worse throughout the night.

It was all night long, and looking out across the city and hearing all the gunfire, you knew people were dying.

There's no way it could be any other outcome.

Like February twentieth, Human Rights Watch had put the country wide death toll at one hundred and seventy three.

Two days later, Colonel Gaddafi appeared on state television from his compound in Tripoli.

Gaddafi looked like a ghoul, his skin gray and pallid, ranting for over an hour.

He vowed to never relinquish power and called in his supporters to track down protesters and search for them Zengazenga roughly Ali by Ali, until the country was clean of dirt.

Momar Gaddafi is not leaving without a fight.

He's trying to extinguish protests like these that keep popping up.

A number of people killed ranges anywhere from three hundred two one thousand, and residents say militiamen are roaming the streets firing their weapons.

Some fear that will trigger a civil war, and they were begging.

The war to get Please, we need to help.

The US is considering sanctions to put pressure on Gadaffi.

In the meantime, protesters say they will continue to march in the streets and won't stop until Gaddafi is no longer in power.

Good out, noon, everybody.

On February twenty third, President Barack Obama addressed the nation from the White House, with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton standing by his side.

We strongly condemned the use of violence in Libya.

This violence must stop.

This is not simply a concern of the United States.

The entire world is watching, and we will coordinate our assistance and accountability measures with the international community.

Obama underscored the uprisings in Libya, Egypt, and Tunisia were organic, not the result of foreign interference region, but he made it clear that the protesters had America's support.

This change doesn't represent the work of the United States or any foreign power, presents the aspirations of people who are seeking a better life, and throughout this time of transition, the United States will continue to stand up for freedom, stand up for justice, and stand up for the dignity of all people.

Thank you very much.

Obama's expression of solidarity with the rebels in their fight against Gaddafi masked his reluctance to allow America to be caught in the crossfire, and with violence in triplely escalating, the US decided to abandon its embassy and get its diplomats out of Libya.

The day after Obama's address, The nineteen staffers still working out of the embassy in Tripoli, including Brian Linnville, were tasked with destroying everything so that sensitive information didn't wind up in the wrong hands.

One of Lynnville's deputies showed him what to do.

He's like, all right, sir, take this sledgehammer, take that computer, hit it there and there, put a hole there, put a hole there, put a hole there, and then come back and see me.

There was a whole embassy's worth of computers and other equipment that needed destroying.

The destruction took all night.

I think the sun was coming up when I was able to crawl into my office and line on the floor for a few hours to catch a little bit of sleep.

After that it was time to go.

Before leaving, Linnville and his deputy brought down the embassy's American flag.

They folded it and tucked it away safely.

Then they lined up their convoy and drove to the airport.

It was shortly after two PM, and Friday prayers were letting out at mosques all over the city.

That's when the protests started again.

This time, the violence started right in the middle of the afternoon, and our convoy had to pass right through several of those protests as they were occurring.

We had gunfire going off within a few feet of our car as they were engaging these protesters.

Linnville and the embassy staff managed to make it safely to the airport, where they boarded a charter plane to Istanbul.

American diplomatic mission to Libya was coming to an end for now.

By mid March, less than a month after the Libyan revolution began, the US had frozen more than thirty billion dollars in assets belonging to Gaddafi and four of his kids, including Camise.

But the Libyan rebels wanted more from the West than just economic sanctions.

They wanted firepower.

While Colonel Gaddafi publicly insisted that al Qaida was to blame for the unrest and that casualties were at most two hundred, France, the UK, and the Arab League pressured the US to join them in a military intervention.

When Secretary of State Clinton arrived in Paris for meetings with the g Eight, the question of what to do about Libya followed her there.

The Secretary starts her week in Paris facing international pressure for a Libyan no fly zone.

Clinton has been skeptical, saying, even with international backing, it's the US that takes all the risks.

It's easy for people to say do this, do that, and then they turn and say, okay, us go do it.

You take the consequences if something bad happen.

He was decided that while she was in Paris, Clinton would meet with a representative of what the Libyan rebels were calling the Transitional National Council or the TNC, who's basically a temporary de facto government whose leaders were trying to replace Goaddafi.

For Secretary Clinton, it's a trip to the great unknown.

She will meet the Libyan opposition this week, although what the US might offer and which rebel leaders she should see has the State Department working overtime.

Because we know that there are some with whom we'd want to be allied and others with whom we would not.

There was no real appetite on the US part to enter into the Libyan frey at that particular point.

This is Gene krets the US ambassador to Libya at the time of the revolution.

As Ambassador, Kretz was responsible for making contact with the leaders of the TNC and sizing them up.

As Kretz explains it now, one big fear at the State Department was that the rebel coalition would include too many radical Islamists, that in addition to people like Iman Bugegis who wanted to build a democracy, there was also a large constituency of ultra conservative, anti American Muslims who wanted to impose strict Sharia law in Libya.

I had been sent to find out exactly who these people were.

Was this a real uprising or was it?

As Kadafi and as minions were claiming a jihadist plot that America would regret.

My view after meeting people from the TNC, and what they were doing was that it was a legitimate national uprising which probably included jihadist elements by virtue of the fact that they existed.

One of Kretz's contacts within the TNC was a man in his late fifties named Mahmoud Jabriel, the Foreign Minister for the Transitional Government.

Jabriel had a PhD in political science from the University of Pittsburgh and he spoke English fluently.

Here he is speaking in a twenty twelve documentary Who.

Were Racing with time with Mike Police all over the place and the meeting with the Madame Clinton was Philip Cruscher.

Ambassador Crets arranged a meeting between Gabriel, Clinton and one of his colleagues from the State Department who had just been named Special Envoy to the Transitional Government.

His name was Christopher Stevens.

Clinton, Kretz and Stephens sat down with Gabriel in a hotel suite overlooking the Tuilerie Garden.

In her memoir Hard Choices, Clinton writes that she could see the Eiffel Tower from her window as Jabriel made the argument for American intervention in Libya.

He laid out the case for why America, leader of the world's democracies, should look on this situation and see that there were elements that very much coincided with what America's interests in the world were and what American values were.

The meeting lasted just forty five minutes, but by the end Clinton seemed convinced that Jabriel and his fellow rebels were trustworthy and sincere.

I think the meeting was one of the first times that the US and the guys of the Secretary was able to meet and put a face to the revolution, to see that these were not wild eyed jihadists and that in fact, they were really people committed to setting up a democratic country.

And the meeting with Jabriel then was the one that I think that at least helped convince the Secretary that our participation in this reaction against Kadafi was justifiable.

And then the President made the decision a few days later, I.

Believe, on March fifteenth, Obama called his national security team together for a meeting in the White House Situation Room.

Who was conferencing in from Paris told the President She supported intervention, but Obama wasn't yet convinced.

American forces are already stretched thin with the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

If we get preoccupied and bogged down in Afghanistan, I Rock and now Libya, We're not going to.

Have much left.

Obama was hesitant to put American troops on the ground and yet another far away country.

It's called war fatigue Afghanistan.

That war's very unpopular.

The American people hate being stuck in another third World country over there.

We're stuck in two of them now.

It's easy to blow the trumpets, it's hard to end the war.

But Iraq and Afghanistan were not the only reference points on people's minds.

You can have another Sudan.

You can't have another Rwanda.

You could have another Rwandan genocide on your hands in Libya if you don't do something.

Susan Rice, Obama's ambassador to the United Nations, had worked in the Clinton administration during the Rwanda crisis, and she was adamant that in the case of Libya, US intervention was necessary to prevent a slaughter.

Let's remember President Clinton, and reflecting on his presidency, said his greatest regret was not acting sooner in Rwanda.

At this point, Camis Gadaffi's thirty second brigade had arrived at Misrata, the third largest city in Libya and the only rebel stronghold in the western part of the country.

Rebel commanders in Misrada pleaded for NATO's help as Camisa's troops encircled the city.

Meanwhile, in the east, other brigades were marching towards Benghazi.

It was clear they outnumbered and outgunned the rebels, most of whom were ordinary citizens with little to no military training.

Iman bugegis again, we could.

See the smoke of Gerethi's convoy coming.

It was obvious that something is coming.

Death is coming.

We welcomed the international intervention.

We didn't have any other option.

It was a survival.

Tonight, things are at a turning point and Colonel Kaddaffi could face international intervention.

Earlier today, he took to the radio to warn the opposition in Benghazi of a looming offensive.

We are coming, he said.

We are looking for the traitors and shall have no mercy nor compassion.

With Gaddafi's forces approaching Benghazi, the US needed to make a decision before it was too late, and so Obama agreed to a kind of compromise.

The US would participate in the intervention, but only as part of a collective effort that would be led by other countries, namely the UK and France.

Later, one of Obama's advisers would describe the arrangement as leading from behind.

The point was that the US would not be responsible for whatever came next in Libya.

It would have to be someone else's problem.

With that, Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice began coordinating with NATO and the UN to authorize military action.

On March seventeen, just three days after Clinton's meeting with Mahmud Jabriel in Paris, the UN passed a resolution allowing for all necessary measures to protect civilians in Libya.

This evening, the UN Security Council voted in favor of a resolution that would take all measures necessary to protect civilians.

For the residents of Ben Razzi, this military intervention is coming in the nick of time, because Gaddafi's forces are already closing in on the city.

The people of eastern Libya will be hoping it's not too late.

On March nineteenth, French jets led the Way bombing Gaddafi forces outside Benghazi.

The move effectively saved the revolution and likely prevented significant bloodshed.

The French have gone in with jets and attacked Momarket offees, military vehicles.

American missile strikes followed the beginning of what the US named Operation Odyssey Dawn.

Today, I authorized the Armed Forces of the United States to begin a limited military in Libya in support of an international effort to protect Libyan civilians.

In his televised address announcing the airstrikes against Kadafi, Obama emphasized that the United States was not acting alone.

Make no mistake today, we are part of a broad coalition.

We are answering the calls of a threatened people, and we are acting in the interests of the United States and the world.

Thank you very much.

Did you feel relieved when you heard that the intervention had happened?

Did it lift the pressure?

Yes, all of us.

You know he would have destroyed Binghassi.

He didn't want Binghazzi anymore.

What did you feel when you heard that it was done, that the convoy was destroyed.

Big relief.

We went after that and we saw the convoy destroyed, burned tanks, burned military cars a lot.

It was very long convoy, but also we knew many people who died, so it was very, very sad destituation.

Libya was now essentially split in two, with Tripoli in the west under Gadafi's control and Benghazi in the east serving as the rebels base of operations, but with American diplomats out of the country and Obama strict no boots on the ground policy, intelligence on what the rebels were actually doing was hard to come by.

Ambassador krets and the team from Tripoli were now working out of a makeshift office in DC.

The consensus was that someone from the American mission needed to go to Benghazi.

Some of the other European nations had gone back into Benghazi with representation.

There was a strong sense in Washington that we had to be there as well.

Kretz immediately thought of his colleague Chris Stevens, the man who had joined him in Secretary Clinton for the meeting with Jabriel in Paris and who had served in Libya for two years during the brief and ill fated reconciliation with Gaddafi.

Kret suggested Stevens to his State Department colleague Jeff Feltman, the Assistant Secretary in charge of the Middle East.

Here is Feltman.

We felt that he had the right personality to play this ambiguous liaison role in Benghazi that was sort of undefined because of his background, because of his personality, because of his ability to connect with people.

Chris Stevens was about to turn fifty one.

A native of California, he had blonde hair, a tan and a big, bright smile.

As you heard in episode one, Stevens had helped build the US embassy in Tripoli that had just been abandoned.

Now he was up for another unusual position in Libya, one that his superiors at the State Department thought he was particularly well suited to Jeff Veltman.

Again, he also was sort of fearless.

It's not usual to send in a diplomat and basically say make your way.

He did not inherit an office or a local staff that could help guide him.

He didn't inherit the old proverbial rollerdecks from his predecessors.

Chris Stevens arrived in Benghazi on April fifth, twenty eleven, aboard a Greek cargo ship.

He went in by water into Benghazi in the height of a war.

It was pretty.

Remarkable at first.

Stevens set up his operation in a suite at the Tabestie Hotel, fifteen story building in the city center.

When Chris went to Benghazi, there was essentially nothing.

He and his immediate staff were essentially inventing a diplomatic facility out of whole cloth.

It was a high risk venture, but one that was extremely rewarding for Chris and obviously beneficial for US as we're trying to understand more about what's happening in the most opaque country in the Arab world.

Even though the US was now supporting the rebels in their fight against Ghadafi, the State Department still had very little knowledge about who they were, what they believed, and what their goals were for Libya.

The TNC desperately wanted the United States to recognize them as Libya's legitimate government, but the Obama administration was guarded.

They wanted more information.

Chris's responsibilities were to figure out who were these guys, what did they stand for?

If Kadafi would leave, what would they put in his place?

Was there a chance for them to have a unified government?

What was happening with the sort of very nascent Islamist movements that were coming up.

These were questions we did not know the answers for.

It's worth reiterating that the administration's big fear was that radical anti American Islamists would take over the Libyan Revolution.

The leaders of the tnc said they were building a democracy, but did they have the power and popular support to follow through In a country where the population was more than ninety percent Muslim religion would inevitably influence the workings of the government, but different people had different ideas about the degree to which Islam should dictate the law of the land.

The US feared inadvertently aiding extremists who had no intention of establishing democracy once Gaddafi fell.

It was against this backdrop that Chris Stevens launched himself into the work of diplomacy in Benghazi.

He was known for taking jogs around town and chatting up regular citizens on the street, no matter what their politics were.

You know, there were people who said, Chris, you shouldn't meet with person X, person XES and Islamis.

You're giving the Islamis status by meeting with the Islamist.

Don't do it.

Chris would push back and insist on meeting with anyone who might have the ability to influence the direction in Libya moves in the future.

So I don't think he was naive, but he did try to embrace a very wide spectrum of Libyan contacts.

The people of Benghazi embraced Stephens as well.

When the US killed us Laden in May of twenty eleven, locals stopped Stevens in the street to congratulate him and said they hoped Kaddafi would be next.

Still, when Jeff Feltman from the State Department visited Benghazi that spring, he was shaken by the precarious conditions in which Stevens and his team were working.

I was very worried about his security.

The doors to his suite were plate glass, so you had these two big glass doors with handles.

And the way you closed that suite at night when Chris and his team would go to bed was you put a chain with a key lock on it.

That horrified me.

Near the end of the summer, the State Department leased a compound of villas in Benghazi and moved the American mission out of the Tabesti Hotel.

Guards were hired and vehicle screenings were arranged in an effort to secure the property.

But the Americans were not allowed to do much to physically fortify it, and because it was a temporary facility, not an official embassy or consulate, it didn't have to meet the State Department's typical security stand Chris Stevens didn't want to stay hold up in a bunker anyway.

He wanted to be out meeting people where they lived.

Again, former Libya Ambassador Gen Kratz.

We both believed that we needed some flexibility in terms of the way we were allowed to operate.

We were not cowboys, believe me, but we wanted to do our job, and we thought that we had the ground knowledge to determine what was an acceptable risk for us and what was not, and so we designed a program to allow us to meet people that we needed to meet.

And I think Chris certainly shared that view and certainly practiced it to the extent that he could while he was in Benghazi.

Hello, good afternoon, Chris Stevens.

I got in from Benghazi a couple of days ago.

On August second, twenty eleven, Stevens was briefly back in the US to provide an update on what he had learned about the TNC during his time in Benghazi.

By then, it had been almost six months since the started, but as Stevens told reporters, there was no indication that Gaddafi was going to step down or leave Tripley.

What is your.

Sense of how much longer the sort of conflict is likely to go on before Kadafi leaves?

I mean three months, six months, a year.

I wouldn't want to put a date on it, but all I can say is that, you know, the world has lined up against him, and his bas is shrinking, and the tnc forces are closing in around him, and so are sanctions and other things.

So I think everybody agrees it's a matter of time.

Later that month, the rebels took Tripli, and Gaddafi had no choice but to flee.

Libby and leader Momark.

Adafi's defenses are collapsing and his regime appears to be crumbling fast.

According to a rebel leader, the unit in charge of protecting Dadafi and Tripoli has surrendered and joined the revolt, allowing the opposition force to move into TRIPLEI.

In Gaddafi's absence, rebels breached his compound, set fire to his tent, and carried off souvenirs, including thick gold jewelry and a green golf cart.

They also raided Gaddafi's stash of weapons.

The next day, rebels busted the locks of the blue cast iron doors of the Abu Salim prison in Tripoli and set the remaining inmates free.

The rebels went cell to sell, breaking the locks with hammers until the prison was an empty shell.

After their release, more than one hundred former prisoners found their way back home to Benghazi.

Just six months earlier, Colonel Gaddafi's son, Camise, had been in Chicago sitting on lectures by Deepak Chopra, now the senior rebel commander, telling cn in Gaddafi's son Kamis is dead.

The military commander is said to have died during a battle in northwest Libya.

A man claiming to be one of Camisa's bodyguards told reporters that Gaddafi's son had been killed in a NATO airstrike.

Brian Linville, who had accompanied Camis during his US visit, wasn't sure how to feel about the news.

Sadness isn't the right term, but maybe disappointment because when I knew him, up to that point of early February, his unit had not committed atrocities.

He didn't have blood on his hands.

I had to contrast that in my mind that, you know, at this one moment in February, it seems so promising, and then something was lost, not just an opportunity, but something was lost.

That fall, Hillary Clinton visited Tripoli to make a show of support for the TNC.

This is Libya's moment, this is Libya's victory, and the future belongs to you.

During her trip, Clinton toured the new US embassy.

In her memoir, she wrote that she heard gunshot in the distance and wondered if it was fighting or celebration.

The embassy staff seemed quite used to it by now.

She wrote.

Two days later, on October twentieth, Clinton was in Cobble, Afghanistan, and during a break from a taped interview, she was handed a BlackBerry.

Wow confirmed unconfirmed NC now unconfirmed reports about Kadafi being captured unconfirmed.

Yeah, we've had too many.

We've we've had a bunch of those before.

We've had, you know, have him, have had him captured a couple of times.

Then it became official, Mummar Gaddafi was dead.

We came, we.

Saw he died.

Didn't have anything to do with your visit now I'm sure did.

Almost immediately, cell phone footage emerged of Kadafi being beaten by his captors.

Words spread that he had been tortured and sodomized and shot in the head.

Afterwards, his body was taken to a meat locker where Libyans took photos of his corpse.

Again, the State Department's Jeff Feltman.

I mean, there was a sense of horror how he was killed.

These were not the sorts of methods that the TNC had said that they would be using to bring to accountability members of the former regime.

But there was also a sense of relief that it would probably be harder to have a sustained insurrection against the change in Libya.

Emon Bugegis, the Libyan orthodonist turned revolutionary, had mixed emotions too.

It was a relief that okay, that's it, our country is liberated.

And it was a heavy price.

But what happened after that to him, it was said, But what he was doing and what he was implanting of hate and revenge, and what happened to him, there was no other way, you know.

He forced that.

He didn't want to surrender, he didn't want to leave country.

What did you think would happen next.

We were hoping that with the elections then a democratic government will come and things will change and for the better.

It didn't happen.

We'll be right back.

Six months after the uprising against Momar Kadafi, Libya is flooded with weapons and faces a potential power vacuum.

After Kadafi's death, the political situation in Libya was delegate.

The former prime minister who led the fight against the colonel, believes the country is now at risk of being taken over by extremists.

Mahmud Jabriel also says it's the result of NATO abandoning Libya after the former regime was toppled.

After the regime filled out most of the Western countries, that the mission has been accomplished.

They neglect the fact that Libya is a stateless site.

Any political vircuum can be filled by anybody, you know, and it's a fertile soil, you know, for xumism to grow.

That was the state of play.

Chris Stevens inherited in May of twenty twelve when he was confirmed as the new US ambassador to post Gaddafi Libya.

Asala Malikum.

My name is Chris Stevens, and I'm the new US Ambassador to Libya.

In a video posted to the embassy's YouTube account, Stevens expressed hope that the US could help Libya achieve democracy Libyan Hospital.

Standing on a roof with a view of Washington, DC behind him, he invited Libyans to imagine a better future.

Over my shoulder, here you can see the US Capitol Building.

In that building, five hundred and thirty five elected representatives from every corner of America come together to debate the issues of the day.

There are men and women from every religious, ethnic and family background.

I look forward to watching Libya develop equally strong institutions of government.

Libyans were anxious to get their new government going to and elections for the new General National Congress were set for July seventh, twenty twelve.

As the date approached, some Americans, as well as liberal minded Libyans, feared that strict ultra conservative Islamists would take a majority in the new government.

There was something else on their minds, too, militias.

For a year and a half, militia groups had fought together to defeat Gadathi.

Now that their common enemy was gone, they were almost like gangs, each one vuying to control their turf.

Hospitals, airports, even oil fields fell under the control of various militias, and because the new leadership of Libya needed time to rebuild a formal military and police force, the TNC essentially put the militias in charge of security, even putting them on the public payroll.

Here again is former Resistant Secretary of State Jeff Veltman.

We knew that we did not know enough about the militias.

We still thought that with the proper support, that the civilian leadership would be able to knit this back together.

The problem was the militias all had different interests, different loyalties, different ideologies, and thanks to the TNC, they were all flush with money, as well as guns that had been taken from Gaddafi's armories for foreigners.

It added up to a simmering sense of danger in Benghazi, and on June sixth, twenty twelve, that danger revealed itself when the American diplomatic compound was targeted with a homemade bomb.

One evening, somebody placed a bomb outside inn exterior wall of the compound and blew probably a man sized hole in it.

Colonel Brian Linville again and.

Of course, we took this very seriously, and the embassy team huddled to talk about it.

Ambassador Stevens, now based in Tripoli, gathered his tea for an emergency meeting to discuss the attack.

Stevens made it clear he felt strongly that the US needed people in Benghazi despite the apparent risks.

You can't understand the story of Libya if you don't know what's going on in Benghazi, and Chris knew that if we shut down operations in Benghazi, we would be blind.

We missed the commencement of the Libyan revolution because we didn't have a presence in Benghazi.

We didn't know what was going on there.

And I know Chris was loath to give that up because it would have crippled our ability to understand the Libyan story.

If we gave up on Benghazi, we were giving up on Libya.

He didn't want to do that.

Not everyone at the embassy agreed with Stevens.

There were voices of descent saying that this is too much, we need to get out, But the prevailing voice was that we would try to stick it out and as best we could address the security situation.

It wasn't like we did nothing.

Stevens wanted to keep the Bengazi mission open despite the security risks.

He knew that in addition to the homemade bomb, there had been an attack on a UN officials convoy in another on a Red Cross building.

In fact, Stevens had flagged the increase in violence in his communications with DC.

Stevens also took steps to fortify the ben Ghazi compound.

He deployed security officers from Tripoli to figure out ways the mission could be better protected, and he talked with Libyan authorities about increasing the presence of the militia that had been hired to help guard the compound.

They were called the February seventeenth Martyrs Brigade, named after the day the Libyan revolution started.

He didn't ignore the threat by any stretch of the imagination, but he tried to mitigate it instead of avoiding it all together and pulling out.

You know, in retrospect, that would have been our moment to shut down operation to Benghazi.

The warning signs kept coming.

Shortly after the bomb attack at the compound, a parade of trucks drove through Benghazi flying black flags.

It was a rally of at least fifteen different militia groups demanding that the new Libyan government be based on Sharia law.

What are you marching for today?

What are your protesting?

We need cherry Alo to kill them, Kufa to kill the infidels.

Yes.

Yes.

After one month after that Islamist rally, Libyans voted in their country's first free elections since Gadafi's death.

The State Department considered it a success, with sixty two percent of the eligible population turning out to vote and the vast majority of polling places reporting no incidents of violence.

This is what all of the fighting in Libya was about last year, not just the removal of Ghadafi, but the chance to choose a democratically elected government.

Despite predictions of an Islamist victory, Mahmoud Jabriel's party dramatic outperformed more conservative parties in what was considered a landslide for the moderates.

It's a journing point in theory of Lydia.

Most people in Libya are savoring their new democratic rights.

The many challenges ahead about what exactly they're going to do with them can wait until after the election.

Party It was about two months later in September of twenty twelve, that Ambassador Chris Stevens decided to leave the US Embassy in Tripoli and visit Benghazi.

Stevens would arrive on Monday, September tenth, and he would have several days of meetings with the Benghazi City Council and various business leaders.

Stevens planned the trip despite warnings from the head diplomatic security agent in Tripoli, who was concerned about the escalating violence and tension in Benghazi.

Friends who were in touch with Stephens shortly before his trip remember him being excited to return to a place he loved.

Chris comes across as this really nice, embracing California surfer dude.

People can underestimate his intelligence because of just the persona he had.

I have to say, I don't want to play blame the victim here, but I do wonder about that twenty twelve Benghazi trip.

I mean, of course we would all think about it, given the horror of what happened to my friend.

Chris.

Stevens did take precautions, making no advanced announcement of a trip and traveling with a larger than usual group of diplomatic security agents.

He was supposed to be back in Tripoli by Friday.

On the next episode of Fiasco, Chris Stevens' trip to Benghazi is halted by violence and tragedy.

Scott Wicklum does this several times, you know, to search for his colleagues, and I remember him saying that if he went in one more time, he would die.

For a list of books, articles and documentaries we used in our research, Hello the link in our show notes.

Fiasco is a production of Prolog Projects, and it's distributed by Pushkin Industries.

The show is produced by Andrew Parsons, Ulla Kulpa, Sam Lee and me Leon Mayfock, with editorial support from Sam Graham Felsen and Madeline Kaplan.

Our researcher was Francis Carr.

Our score was composed by Dan English, Joe Valley and Noah Hect.

Additional music by Nick se Levester and Joel Saint Julian.

Our theme song is by Spatial Relations audio mixed by Rob Buyers, Michael Raphael and Johnny Vince Evans.

Our artwork is by Teddy Blanks at Chips and y Copyright Council provided by Peter Yassi at Yasi Butler PLLC.

Thanks to archive dot Org.

Mifen Alba, Peter bartu Aa, Buruela Ben Fishman, Baker habib Anna, Lynnville Ian Martin Ismaele, Sweya Murad Idris and Frederick Warehe Victual.

Thanks to Lubinary and thank you for listening.