transcript
Speaker 1:
[00:19] Pushkin.
Speaker 2:
[00:19] Pushkin Plus subscriber. Sign up for Pushkin Plus on the Fiasco Apple Podcast Show page, or visit pushkin.fm slash plus. Now on to the show. On the night of September 11th, 2012, four Americans were killed in Benghazi, a city in Libya on the Mediterranean Sea.
Speaker 3:
[00:46] What potentially happened in Libya, in the city of Benghazi, not only did the attackers storm the building in Benghazi.
Speaker 2:
[00:54] The attack began when a group of armed assailants broke into a diplomatic compound operated by the State Department. It ended nearly eight hours later with the bombing of a secret CIA base nearby.
Speaker 3:
[01:05] First, they attacked it with RPG rifles, then they opened fire on it with machine guns.
Speaker 2:
[01:10] Among the victims was the American ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens.
Speaker 4:
[01:14] And again, his name is John Christopher Stevens, and he was born in Northern California in 1960.
Speaker 2:
[01:19] Stevens had been posted in Libya on and off for the better part of five years. On the night of the attack, he died of smoke inhalation after the assailants set fire to the villa where he was hiding from them. Afterwards, it seemed like all anyone in the United States wanted to talk about was whose fault it was.
Speaker 5:
[01:38] The Obama administration resisting responsibility.
Speaker 3:
[01:41] There's a lot of dispute when the administration knew how dangerous the situation was in Benghazi.
Speaker 2:
[01:46] Who had let it happen? Who had failed to stop it once it started? Whose lack of vigilance had allowed the attackers to do as much damage as they did?
Speaker 6:
[01:55] Should they have had more advanced warning?
Speaker 5:
[01:57] Should they have set more security?
Speaker 2:
[01:58] A question that usually got skipped over, as if the answer were self-evident, was what Ambassador Stevens was doing in Benghazi to begin with. All anyone seemed interested in was that the American mission in Libya had failed, not what the mission had actually been.
Speaker 7:
[02:17] My name is Chris Stevens, and I'm excited to continue the great work we've started, building a solid partnership between the United States and Libya to help you, the Libyan people, achieve your goals.
Speaker 2:
[02:35] For more than 40 years, Libya had been ruled by a violent and eccentric dictator, Muammar Gaddafi.
Speaker 8:
[02:41] We read that you are mad.
Speaker 1:
[02:44] You know that those things have been printed.
Speaker 2:
[02:47] Gaddafi had long been regarded in the West as an unparalleled menace. Before Bin Laden, Gaddafi was the face of international terrorism.
Speaker 9:
[02:55] He's been called the world's number one terrorist, a madman who exports terrorism around the world.
Speaker 2:
[03:01] Ronald Reagan once memorably called Gaddafi the mad dog of the Middle East. What I had forgotten or never really absorbed in the first place was that during the early 2000s under the Bush administration, the United States had reconciled with Gaddafi. We lifted sanctions. We established diplomatic relations. We even accepted his help in pursuing suspected terrorists.
Speaker 5:
[03:25] The United States may have a new ally in the war on terror. Libya's Muammar Gaddafi says...
Speaker 2:
[03:30] American oil companies were doing business with Libya for the first time in decades. In Tripoli, Libya's capital city, the State Department opened a new American embassy. As you'll hear, that was why Chris Stevens first came to Libya back in 2007.
Speaker 5:
[03:46] Muammar Gaddafi's regime has shown excellent cooperation against terrorism and dismantled its nuclear weapons...
Speaker 2:
[03:54] Back then, I wasn't paying much attention to international news. And I certainly wasn't paying attention to Libya. I was just graduating from college in 2007. I had heard of Gaddafi, but that was about it. I was only slightly more tuned in in 2011, when the Arab Spring swept into Libya and forced Gaddafi out of power as part of a US-backed revolution.
Speaker 10:
[04:16] The uprising against Gaddafi broke out in mid-February, and anti-regime protests quickly spread across the vast desert country of 6 million people.
Speaker 2:
[04:24] But even then, I just wasn't that invested or informed. So when I saw reports in September of 2012 about an attack on a diplomatic compound in Benghazi, I had no context for it. To be honest, I didn't even really think of Benghazi as a place. Instead, I experienced it as an American political scandal. I associated the word Benghazi with a drawn-out controversy that had spawned endless conspiracy theories and captivated the Republican Party.
Speaker 11:
[04:52] Benghazi gate.
Speaker 5:
[04:53] The political cover-up of some kind.
Speaker 12:
[04:54] The regime keeps lying about it.
Speaker 7:
[04:56] I think it could be as bad as Watergate, but nobody died in Watergate.
Speaker 5:
[04:59] The White House can sign those people to death.
Speaker 11:
[05:01] We kill the ambassador just to cover something up. You put two and two together.
Speaker 2:
[05:06] I wanted to make this podcast because I had a strong suspicion that I was missing something, that by not knowing what really happened in Benghazi or who it had happened to, I was checked out on something really important. Because in retrospect, the Benghazi attack looks incredibly consequential. For Libya, certainly, but also for the United States. Even though the scandal has a reputation, especially among liberals, as a nuisance and a distraction, it really changed history. Among other things, it led directly to Hillary Clinton's email scandal. So, if you're someone who thinks Clinton's emails cost her the 2016 election, you could make the case that Benghazi took down her presidency no less than Watergate did. What I've realized after dozens of interviews with people who watched the Benghazi story unfold from up close is that there are very specific reasons why the scandal had such longevity. Together, they tell a story about political warfare in America, how it was waged in the pre-Trump era through the media and the justice system and Congress, and how it laid the groundwork for the politics we live with today. But Benghazi is not just an American story. It's also about America's place in the world, and how after eight years of George W. Bush and the war on terror, the Obama administration set out to change the country's image abroad. At the height of the scandal, a lot of people were asking, sometimes earnestly, often performatively, why did Ambassador Chris Stevens die that night in Benghazi? And what I've learned is, there is an answer to that question. But all the noise around the scandal made it incredibly hard to see it clearly in real time. It turns out, to understand the truth about Benghazi, you have to understand what America was trying to achieve there. You have to know what was supposed to happen in Benghazi, in a perfect world, instead of what did. I'm Leon Neyfakh. From Prologue Projects and Pushkin Industries, this is Fiasco, Benghazi.
Speaker 13:
[07:17] Obama left four Americans to die in Benghazi.
Speaker 10:
[07:20] There is a certain self-fulfilling prophecy to outrage.
Speaker 14:
[07:23] Wild conspiracy theories.
Speaker 15:
[07:24] Intelligence officials acknowledge they originally got it wrong.
Speaker 2:
[07:28] It was a fucking mess. It was really hard to figure out what was going on.
Speaker 6:
[07:31] They're shooting through the door.
Speaker 16:
[07:33] I turned to the ambassador and said, if they blow the locks, I'm going to start shooting, and when I die, I want you to keep on fighting.
Speaker 17:
[07:40] You can't understand the story of Libya if you don't know what's going on in Benghazi.
Speaker 3:
[07:45] Muammar Gaddafi is not leaving without a fight.
Speaker 2:
[07:50] Episode 1, The Dictator, in which Muammar Gaddafi and the United States, after decades of hostility, discover they have a common enemy. We'll be right back. Hussain El Shafi was 20 years old when he was arrested in 1989 for criticizing Muammar Gaddafi.
Speaker 18:
[08:16] I was in the fourth semester, like a second year at that time, and they just knocked on my door. They put my hands in handcuffs.
Speaker 2:
[08:25] El Shafi was born and raised in Benghazi. At the time of his arrest, he was studying engineering at a local university.
Speaker 18:
[08:32] They took me to one of those, they call it like Murabba Emni, which means the security district for the area.
Speaker 2:
[08:40] El Shafi's crime was that he spoke up against the regime during a student forum on the Green Book, Gaddafi's rambling manifesto.
Speaker 19:
[08:47] He has compiled his thinking into a Green Book, a blending of the Koran and Gaddafi's own brooding thoughts.
Speaker 18:
[08:55] He calls it an nathariya tarita, means the third solution for the world. As the capitalism is dying and the socialism is dying, I am the solution for the world.
Speaker 2:
[09:08] El Shafi was required to attend the Green Book Forum in order to receive his degree. But he was tired of having to pretend to take Gaddafi seriously as a thinker. And he was tired of the regime having control over his mind.
Speaker 18:
[09:20] There's no library in none of our Libyan cities. If you want to read, the only books was brought by Gaddafi's authority and put on the shelves. No voice above Gaddafi's voice, you know?
Speaker 2:
[09:35] And so El Shafi stood up in front of his classmates and denounced Gaddafi for closing Libya off from the rest of the world. Even the Soviet Union was starting to open up, he said. It was time for Libya to change too. El Shafi was arrested at his home a few days later. He was taken first by bus, then by plane, to Tripoli, about 400 miles west of Benghazi. El Shafi was blindfolded and handcuffed throughout the journey. So when he was led into a prison cell, he didn't know where he was.
Speaker 18:
[10:08] There are small holes in the walls between cells. So I was able to talk to one of those people who was before us. I said, where we are? He said, you in a Muslim body. Welcome to Muslim.
Speaker 2:
[10:21] Abu Salim was an infamous detention facility known for housing political prisoners.
Speaker 8:
[10:26] The dark heart of Gaddafi's oppression, Abu Salim Prison, the name itself so frightening that Libyans avoid saying it.
Speaker 2:
[10:33] Abu Salim was full of people the Gaddafi regime considered enemies. Historically, opposition to Gaddafi in Libya had been tied up with religion. Although Gaddafi identified as Muslim, many Libyans came to see him as an apostate advancing a secular ideology. These critics included hardline Islamists who belonged to groups like the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, which supported the violent overthrow of the regime. But there were also people like Hussein al-Shafi, who opposed political violence and were unaffiliated with any organization.
Speaker 18:
[11:07] He claims those are Islamists. But I was, yeah, I was going to the mosque. I was very conservative at that time. But I did not belong to any group, like an armed group or anything like this.
Speaker 2:
[11:22] Al-Shafi says the Gaddafi regime branded anyone they didn't like a radical Islamist, and that many ordinary devout Muslims like him were swept up in the dragnet.
Speaker 18:
[11:32] He doesn't say I'm against Muslim because he claims too that he is a Muslim. But he claims that his problem with the Islamic parties, that was a pretext means that he's taken as a reason to kill or to demolish his opponents.
Speaker 2:
[11:53] It's worth saying here that the meaning of the term Islamist depends on who you're talking to. At its most basic, it refers to someone who subscribes to a political ideology based on Islamic principles. And under that umbrella, you can find both avowed hardliners and moderates. The word Islamism was introduced to English back in the 1980s as a less pejorative alternative to Islamic fundamentalism. Some people still use it that way, as a neutral word that imagines Islamism as just another political orientation. Others associate Islamism with violence and intolerance. For them, an Islamist government based on any form of Sharia or Islamic law is inherently undemocratic. At Abu Salim, Hussein al-Shafi was lucky to be classified as a low-risk inmate and kept separate from those suspected of being violent extremists. Still, he was beaten and tortured and never given any indication of when he would be released. Other former inmates from Abu Salim have reported being attacked by dogs, subjected to deafening nightly broadcasts of Gaddafi's speeches, and prodded with electric cables. When I interviewed al-Shafi, he had to take a break because the phone was hurting his ear. It had been mutilated at Abu Salim.
Speaker 18:
[13:13] I'll try to use this ear, not that ear, because this one cut in the jail.
Speaker 2:
[13:17] Oh, my God.
Speaker 18:
[13:17] Have you seen my ear?
Speaker 2:
[13:18] Yeah.
Speaker 17:
[13:19] Yeah.
Speaker 18:
[13:20] Yeah. It's touching the thing there, you know. Sorry about that.
Speaker 2:
[13:25] In 1995, about six years into al-Shafi's imprisonment, life at Abu Salim became more cruel and more isolating. It happened following a jailbreak, after which inmates were forbidden from going outside, and medical care was withheld from those who needed it.
Speaker 18:
[13:43] Things are getting worse and worse and worse. Some people die. Some people has cancers. You name it. Heart pressure. And some people has like stomach itches. Some of them, they said, we dying slowly, guys.
Speaker 2:
[14:02] As conditions worsened, a group of inmates planned a protest. And on June 28, 1996, they overpowered a guard, took his keys, and started letting people out of their cells. In the ensuing chaos, the prison guards reportedly killed seven inmates. Later that day, Gaddafi's intelligence chief arrived at the prison to survey the situation. Before leaving, he promised a delegation of inmates that conditions at Abu Salim would improve, and that those who needed medical attention would receive it. Instead, the following morning, the prisoners of Abu Salim, more than a thousand of them, were marched into the courtyards adjacent to their cell blocks. El Shafi remembers being taken outside and being ordered to lie face down on the ground.
Speaker 18:
[14:51] They came in the morning, they said, okay, room by room, they take them out, they tied their hands and they turn around, facing the wall in the yard.
Speaker 2:
[15:03] El Shafi estimates that there were about 1300 men lined up in the prison yards when he started to hear shooting.
Speaker 18:
[15:10] My friend, he's a cardiologist now in Ireland, his name's Saber. He was holding my hand tight. I said, no, I said, they scare us, that's all. They're not gonna kill him all. They wanna scare us. They try to teach us a lesson, you know. He said, no, no. Pray for our friends, their souls, raising up the gun.
Speaker 2:
[15:30] Al Shafi and his friend, whom I also interviewed, didn't know if they were next. But from the sound of the gunfire, they could tell the guards were moving. As the story ended, prison guards enlisted some of them to help clean the watches and rings they were taking off the bodies.
Speaker 18:
[16:16] And they have blood everywhere on them. And I said, oh my gosh, they're stealing their rings and their watches.
Speaker 12:
[16:23] Oh my gosh.
Speaker 2:
[16:26] For years, the massacre at Abu Salim was kept secret from the world. Even in Libya, it was nothing more than a rumor.
Speaker 18:
[16:35] No one knows nothing. All what they know, people heard shooting. And they heard sirens that night. And some of them, they said, they kill him. Some of them, they said, no, he just killed some of them. No one knows anything.
Speaker 2:
[16:52] The families of those who had been killed were not informed that their loved ones were dead. Instead, they were merely told that they could no longer visit them. In many cases, family members continued bringing letters and food to the prison and leaving them with the guards, who said nothing. According to Al Shafi, new inmates who arrived at Abu Salim in the years after the massacre would find bullets lodged in the prison yard walls.
Speaker 20:
[17:24] There is a figure emerging in the Middle East. He is Colonel Muammar el-Gaddafi, and he wants to unify the Arabs and restore the Arab crescent of nations to their ancient prestige and power.
Speaker 2:
[17:36] Before Muammar Gaddafi built prisons for his domestic enemies, he made a name for himself by standing up to his foreign ones. Gaddafi came to power in 1969, replacing the Western-backed King Idris by staging a military coup in Benghazi. Gaddafi was just 27 years old, a handsome young army officer who projected strength and vigor, and who was embraced by many Libyans.
Speaker 21:
[18:01] Libya was an obscure desert kingdom.
Speaker 22:
[18:03] Today it is on the center stage of Middle East politics, and the man responsible is under 30.
Speaker 19:
[18:09] A strong and asymmetric handsomeness, like the anti-hero movie stars of the 60s.
Speaker 2:
[18:14] Gaddafi, who was born in a Bedouin tent off the Mediterranean coast, positioned himself as a representative of the Arab world, and a challenger to Western imperialism.
Speaker 9:
[18:24] A revolutionary who believes people should rule themselves, not be ruled by government.
Speaker 20:
[18:28] If those ambitions seem grandiose for the young leader of a desert land of a mere 2 million people, it should be quickly pointed out that Gaddafi has one powerful asset, money.
Speaker 21:
[18:39] Oil money makes Libya's young leftist strongman a power in the Arab world.
Speaker 2:
[18:46] In a move that defined his early years in power, Gaddafi forced Western oil companies to renegotiate their export agreements with Libya.
Speaker 21:
[18:53] In March, Gaddafi's Deputy Prime Minister negotiated a new agreement with Western oil companies. Libya is now making twice as much money from oil as when Gaddafi and his young officers overthrew King Idris 2 years ago.
Speaker 2:
[19:06] The standoff ended up shifting the balance of power towards Arab countries like Libya that possessed huge amounts of oil and away from Western countries that depended on it.
Speaker 21:
[19:15] Now Libya is the world's sixth largest producer of oil, the fourth largest exporter. Enough oil will be shipped this year to earn Libya more than $2 billion.
Speaker 2:
[19:27] Starting in the 1970s, Gaddafi put his oil money to work, providing training and weapons for rebel groups around the world. He supported Latin American leftists like the Sandinistas, the PLO, the South African Anti-Apartheid Movement, and the IRA in Northern Ireland.
Speaker 20:
[19:43] Each year the IRA collects a check for $2 million from one of Gaddafi's money managers in Tripoli. Round the globe, dozens of scenes like this are being enacted for the benefit of Gaddafi's crusade.
Speaker 2:
[19:56] According to one estimate, more than 30 different organizations sent fighters to train in Libya at various points.
Speaker 9:
[20:03] Libya's strongman leader Muammar Gaddafi spends an estimated $200 million a year arming and training terrorists and insurgents.
Speaker 2:
[20:11] Gaddafi also spent a lot of money building up his own arsenal.
Speaker 23:
[20:15] Per capita, Libya, under Gaddafi in the 70s, was the biggest purchaser of weapons in the world. He was like a compulsive shopper.
Speaker 2:
[20:24] This is Lindsay Hillsom, a reporter for Channel 4 News in the UK, who has covered Libya extensively. In her book Sandstorm, Hillsom describes how Muammar Gaddafi came to loom over the American imagination as a symbol of violence and chaos.
Speaker 19:
[20:38] He's the ultimate villain, the godfather of international terrorism, a one-dimensional, erratic, irrational, unbalanced, two-bit dictator.
Speaker 11:
[20:46] The central character in real-world acts of terror, as well as the star of a number of best-selling thrillers, based on the premise that one day he would get the bomb.
Speaker 8:
[20:55] He's very volatile and opportunistic.
Speaker 2:
[21:00] In 1981, Newsweek put Gaddafi on its cover under the headline, The Most Dangerous Man in the World. Technically, there was a question mark in the headline, and if you read the article, the answer was maybe. But the cover accurately captured Gaddafi's reputation in America.
Speaker 19:
[21:17] He has three obsessions, hatred of Israel, hatred of the United States for supporting Israel, and a dream of a united Arab world.
Speaker 2:
[21:25] Libya became synonymous with terrorism. If you remember Back to the Future, which came out in 1985, Doc Brown is pursued by crazed terrorists from Libya who want to kill him for selling them a phony nuclear bomb.
Speaker 1:
[21:39] Oh, my God. They found me.
Speaker 4:
[21:41] I don't know how, but they found me. Who? Who?
Speaker 21:
[21:44] Who do you think?
Speaker 6:
[21:45] The Libyans!
Speaker 2:
[21:48] Gaddafi became even more closely associated with terrorism in 1986, when his regime was implicated in a bombing in Berlin. Reporter Lindsay Hillsom again.
Speaker 23:
[21:58] In 1986, he provided the weapons and the training, and his agents attacked the Bell Discotheque in Berlin.
Speaker 24:
[22:08] For the second time this week, Americans had been the victims of a terrorist attack in Europe. This time, the target was a nightclub in West Berlin, a favorite of American soldiers.
Speaker 1:
[22:17] Little was left of the West Berlin disco. Over 150 were injured, about 70 of them American servicemen.
Speaker 23:
[22:24] And it was quite clear from very early on that it was the Libyans behind that attack.
Speaker 5:
[22:30] Police are looking for a pattern to support their belief that Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi sponsored the attack.
Speaker 2:
[22:36] Two Americans were killed and 79 were injured in the Berlin attack. Ronald Reagan responded with airstrikes on Tripoli and Benghazi.
Speaker 19:
[22:45] At 7 o'clock this evening, Eastern Time, air and naval forces of the United States launched a series of strikes against the headquarters terrorist facilities and military assets that support Muammar Gaddafi's subversive activities.
Speaker 2:
[23:01] The bombs were not enough to convince Gaddafi to retreat. Neither were the economic sanctions that Reagan had imposed on him. In 1988, Gaddafi was accused of another major terrorist attack, this one targeting a passenger jet flying from London to New York. As Pan Am Flight 103 passed over the town of Lockerbie, New York City to New York City, a bomb exploded and the plane went down.
Speaker 22:
[23:24] In a few short violent moments, 270 people died. People from 21 countries filled these coffins. 189 of them were American.
Speaker 2:
[23:36] Gaddafi denied having anything to do with the Lockerbie bombing, but when evidence of Libyan involvement was uncovered, the attack came to define him in the eyes of the West.
Speaker 1:
[23:46] He's an egomaniac who would trigger World War III to make the headlines. He's the world's principal terrorist and trainer of terrorists. He's dangerous to peace.
Speaker 2:
[24:03] As Gaddafi's profile rose around the world, the violence he perpetrated against foreign targets overshadowed his brutal repression of the Libyan people.
Speaker 23:
[24:12] The violence was very visible to ordinary Libyans because they did see people hanging in the streets, and everybody knew somebody who had a relative who had been hanged or who had been imprisoned. But it didn't seem to be very obvious to people outside Libya because Libya was a closed country, and very few people were allowed into Libya from the outside.
Speaker 2:
[24:39] The regime's secrecy makes it difficult to know exactly how common public executions were. But there are documented instances of dissidents in Libya being hanged or executed by firing squad in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Hussein al-Shafi told me he remembers hearing about hangings before he was sent to Abu Salim.
Speaker 18:
[25:00] I remember in 1984, Gaddafi used to hang any opposition groups on a basketball stadium, like an arena we have here, like Spectrum Center. Can you imagine you wake up in the morning, your governor taking people, hang them in the stadium in front of everybody? He did this before, many times in the college, in the university, in the university, like in Tripoli or Benghazi. He takes them and he hang them. And he kills the students because they are a part of the opposition group.
Speaker 2:
[25:33] El Shafi never attended an execution in person, but he did see it happen on TV.
Speaker 18:
[25:39] I see this once and then I go cry, you know, I go hide in some in a room, cry. I see like he's hanging people and the crowd, the crowd supporting this, oh, Gaddafi, yeah, kill them, kill them.
Speaker 2:
[25:53] The 1996 massacre at Abu Salim is now considered Gaddafi's most brutal act, the pinnacle of his campaign of violence against the Libyan people. But when it first happened, there was so little information about it that few took notice. Reuters did report that some kind of deadly clash between inmates and guards had taken place at the prison. An Amnesty International called on Gaddafi to order an investigation. But that effort didn't go anywhere. Gaddafi did not even acknowledge the massacre. And the bodies of the dead were reportedly dumped in a mass grave that has never been found. It wasn't until four years later that Al-Shafi was released from Abu Salim. It happened on June 1st, 2000, more than a decade after his arrest. He was never told why. Just as he was never formally charged or convicted of anything in the first place. Al-Shafi went home to Benghazi and started trying to get a passport. He wanted to leave Libya and escape the Gaddafi regime for good. The passport still hadn't come when Al-Shafi started seeing reports that world leaders, including from the United States, were changing their stance on Gaddafi and inviting him in from the cold.
Speaker 6:
[27:09] The orchestrated announcements of the deal in Britain and Washington portrayed Gaddafi's change of heart as the result of President Bush's get-them-before-they-get-you doctrine.
Speaker 2:
[27:20] The man who had imprisoned Al-Shafi and killed so many of his fellow inmates was being officially rehabilitated. After decades of railing against the imperialist powers of Europe and the United States, Gaddafi was finding common cause with the West.
Speaker 5:
[27:35] American oil companies and the Libyan government could benefit from Libya's newly announced plan to give up trying to develop weapons of mass destruction.
Speaker 2:
[27:43] Al-Shafi remembers being enraged when he heard that one of Gaddafi's sons was coming to the United States for meetings at the State Department. Al-Shafi assumed that it meant the US was going to start selling Gaddafi weapons.
Speaker 18:
[27:56] I said, fuck politics, fuck the money, people first. If you invite Gaddafi sons and you give them weapons, then the US administration is a color-seeming Gaddafi.
Speaker 2:
[28:15] The process of normalizing relations between Gaddafi's Libya and the United States began towards the end of the Clinton administration. Gaddafi was desperate to have sanctions against Libya lifted. And as a first step, he agreed in 1999 to surrender two Libyans who were suspected of carrying out the Lockerbie bombing. But it wasn't until the Bush years and the start of the War on Terror that the relationship between the US and Libya really started to improve. In the wake of the invasion of Iraq and the fall of Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi was spooked. He became convinced that if he didn't make certain concessions, he would be next. And so, after months of secret talks with the Bush White House, Gaddafi agreed to give up his nascent nuclear program and to allow weapons inspectors into Libya.
Speaker 13:
[29:05] Libya's surprise announcement that it will give up its weapons of mass destruction is reverberating worldwide.
Speaker 2:
[29:11] The Bush administration hailed it as a diplomatic triumph.
Speaker 19:
[29:14] Today in Tripoli, Libya has begun the process of rejoining the community of nations. Its good faith will be returned.
Speaker 14:
[29:24] Without the Iraq War, the trajectory of the US-Libya relationship would have been much, much different.
Speaker 2:
[29:30] This is Ethan Chorin. He was sent to Tripoli by the State Department in 2004. It was his first posting as a member of the Foreign Service.
Speaker 14:
[29:38] I had a great privilege of being one of the few diplomats who was sent to Libya to help open up what would eventually become the embassy.
Speaker 2:
[29:48] Chorin, the author of a book about Libya called Exit the Colonel, explained to me that making a deal with Gaddafi was specifically attractive to the Bush White House as a follow-up to the invasion of Iraq.
Speaker 14:
[29:59] You have the neoconservative cabal in Washington looking for the next move essentially, and they really weren't interested in Gaddafi until essentially it dawned on a few people that the relationship with Gaddafi could actually solve several of the problems that the Iraq War was not solving, as in there were no weapons of mass destruction found in Iraq, but Gaddafi ostensibly had something that you could call such a program and he was willing to give it up.
Speaker 2:
[30:26] Chorin's point here was that Gaddafi's weapons program was extremely rudimentary and that sacrificing it was mostly a symbolic gesture. For the Bush White House, the more practical benefits of reconciling with Gaddafi were, one, that American companies could start doing business in Libya, and two, that the Gaddafi regime could be helpful in the war on terror.
Speaker 5:
[30:49] Gaddafi says intelligence agencies in Libya and the US are exchanging information.
Speaker 2:
[30:55] The terrorists America was now hunting in the Middle East and North Africa were Gaddafi's longtime enemies too. All through the 90s, he had been at war with Islamist groups suspected of having connections to Al-Qaeda. In fact, in 1998, the Gaddafi regime had issued an Interpol arrest warrant for Osama bin Laden on the basis that Al-Qaeda had been working with radicals in Libya. Reporter Lindsay Hillsom again.
Speaker 23:
[31:21] Gaddafi became afraid of the Islamists, and a lot of Islamists went to Afghanistan and they joined Al-Qaeda, and they became very senior in Al-Qaeda. Their aim was to overthrow Gaddafi, but they were part of this international jihad. And of course, that was the international jihad, which, you know, on 9-11, flew into the Twin Towers and murdered all the Americans.
Speaker 2:
[31:49] It was a convenient alliance. The United States got access to intelligence from a government operating in close proximity to many extremist groups, and Gaddafi got an ally in his quest to eliminate one of the only major threats to his power.
Speaker 15:
[32:02] Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi is now being called an enemy of Islam by al-Qaeda.
Speaker 2:
[32:10] Between all that and the oil contracts, it was enough to convince the White House that Gaddafi was worth the baggage.
Speaker 5:
[32:16] The first time in almost a quarter century, the US has diplomatic ties with Libya.
Speaker 2:
[32:22] The US mission in Tripoli had been abandoned in 1980. Shortly after, a crowd of demonstrators set the embassy on fire. Now, American diplomats would be returning to Libya to build a new one. We'll be right back. For a certain kind of diplomat, Libya was a dream assignment, a country everyone knew had been warped by decades of dictatorship, but which remained a black box. Ethan Chorin arrived in Libya in 2004, and he was excited.
Speaker 14:
[33:05] I was very eager. This was like, you know, exactly what I had joined the Foreign Service to do, to have a crazy experience where I felt like I could make an impact.
Speaker 2:
[33:14] It was up to Chorin and his state department colleagues to figure out what was going on in Libya, how the Gaddafi regime was running things, and what they wanted from their new relationship with America. Chorin was also tasked with briefing American companies on the Libyan market and writing an official state department guide to doing business in the country.
Speaker 14:
[33:33] And effectively, we were sent out there and told just to, you know, go find what you can find. We don't know much about this place, so see what you can do.
Speaker 2:
[33:42] As Chorin was finding his feet in Tripoli, he was introduced over email to another diplomat who was also interested in Libya. Chris Stevens was working out of Washington, DC at the time, but he had made it known to his superiors at the State Department that he wanted to be posted in Libya at the next available opportunity.
Speaker 14:
[34:00] He was bidding on a position after me in Libya, and he had just had this sort of enthusiasm. This is like one of the last places in the Middle East that's sort of completely off limits to Americans and unknown, and that clearly excited him. And it's excited me.
Speaker 2:
[34:16] Stephen's had been in the Foreign Service for about 20 years, after starting and abandoning a career as an international trade lawyer.
Speaker 25:
[34:23] He could have led a comfortable life in Washington, DC., making a lot of money as a trade lawyer, but it wasn't enough for him.
Speaker 2:
[34:30] This is journalist Paul Richter. He's the author of the book The Ambassadors, in which he details Chris Stevens' tenure at the State Department.
Speaker 25:
[34:37] So at a rather old age, he went into the Foreign Service. It was basically kind of a second career for him.
Speaker 2:
[34:45] From the start, Stevens was particularly interested in the Middle East and North Africa. Before he put in his bid for a post in Libya, he had worked in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jerusalem. He told friends he possessed a gene that drew him to the Arab world, a trait he apparently shared with a long line of Western diplomats.
Speaker 25:
[35:03] There's been a certain romance about the Middle East that goes back to TE. Lawrence and other British and Europeans who saw some mystery, some fascination that they didn't see in other parts of the world.
Speaker 2:
[35:21] One of Stevens' chief influences was a book called The Arabists, which traces the history of American diplomacy in the Middle East from its roots in missionary work and British imperialism. This earlier generation of Middle East specialists was part of a long colonial history of Westerners romanticizing the Arab world. Starting in the 19th century, these diplomats and adventurers often wrote about the region as ancient, otherworldly, and almost mystical.
Speaker 25:
[35:47] There is probably a colonialist dimension to it. Their attitude had some of that. There's something about the serenity, there's something about the harshness of the atmosphere and the beauty of the environment that draws them, and there's something about the exotic nature of the Arab world that they just can't find in other places and they keep going back to it.
Speaker 2:
[36:11] As Richter described it to me, Stevens was attracted to the lifestyle Libya offered and the feeling of timelessness he found there.
Speaker 25:
[36:18] He liked going out and enjoying goat meat cooked over a Bedouin campfire in the desert. He enjoyed talking to these Arabs who could tell you the history of their families going back many generations. These Arabs would talk about their distant relatives as if they died only a few years ago. And then later, Stevens would discover that they were talking about people who died centuries ago.
Speaker 2:
[36:46] For Stevens, the US opening to Gaddafi was an opportunity to discover a place that had been closed off from the West for decades. In emails to Ethan Chorin, Stevens made clear how excited he was at the prospect of being posted there.
Speaker 14:
[37:00] Chris would write and ask something along lines of should I take, you know, is this as interesting as I think it is? I would describe what I was experiencing there and the positives and negatives, and I have just had a sense that he understood. And he too was willing to take some risks to have that kind of an experience.
Speaker 2:
[37:18] In many ways, Stevens' defining feature as a diplomat was his openness to risk, and his willingness to sit down and talk to people whom others might have considered enemies. In 2006, when he was posted in Jerusalem, Stevens served as a liaison to the PLO, the Palestine Liberation Organization.
Speaker 9:
[37:36] The Palestinian elections had a stunning outcome, a landslide victory for Hamas. Official results today showed the Islamist militants...
Speaker 2:
[37:44] That same year, when the militant group Hamas was elected to a majority in the Palestinian legislature, Stevens expressed hope that the United States would engage with them instead of writing them off as terrorists.
Speaker 25:
[37:54] After Hamas had won that election, Stevens wrote his closest friends and family and said, I hope the American side doesn't misinterpret this. I hope they understand that Islamists are not always villainous, and maybe we can work, maybe we can find a way to deal with them.
Speaker 2:
[38:14] In this respect, Stevens represented one side of a long-standing debate in the world of American foreign policy about whether the United States should give the benefit of the doubt to Islamist political leaders in the Arab world. Stevens believed there were different kinds of Islamists. He once wrote that Islamist doesn't necessarily translate to extremist.
Speaker 25:
[38:35] I think he was always willing to open a conversation with people from pretty scary Islamist backgrounds. I tell a story about his meetings with one militia leader, where he stayed up way into the night to debate East German political theory with this guy who had been fighting as a jihadist in Afghanistan a couple of years before.
Speaker 2:
[38:59] Stevens' friendly posture towards Islamist groups distinguished him from some of his colleagues, including Ethan Chorin. Chorin believed then as now that America must be supremely careful when dealing with Islamists, whether they're hardliners or moderates. When I spoke to Chorin, it was clear he was troubled by Stevens' outlook on the Arab world, and more specifically, his approach to diplomacy in Libya. For Chorin, the tragedy of the Benghazi attack is that it might have been prevented if Stevens and his state department colleagues back in Washington had taken the Islamist threat more seriously.
Speaker 14:
[39:33] But this is at the heart of the Libya problem, is that there was this sort of long disjointed or absent period of many decades where the U.S.-Libya relationship was either non-existent or very stressed. We didn't know who all the parties were. There were certainly clues, but we didn't know whom to trust. And there were people in Libya at the time, you know, before the attack, who were basically saying, look, you Americans need to watch out because the people who you're dealing with are not your friends.
Speaker 2:
[40:06] Knowing the difference between friends and enemies had always been a problem for the American mission in Libya. Two weeks after Chris Stevens first arrived in Tripoli in the summer of 2007, he was invited to Muammar Gaddafi's fortress for a banquet in honor of the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy. Stevens was introduced to Gaddafi briefly on a receiving line. Journalist Paul Richter again.
Speaker 25:
[40:28] And he saw at this event Gaddafi's ambivalence toward the US. Gaddafi was hoping for a new relationship and he was hoping for trade deals, for weapons deals, for a new opening with the world provided by his new friends, the Americans. And yet his antipathy for the Americans still remained.
Speaker 2:
[40:50] Gaddafi did not try to hide this antipathy. As Stevens observed in letters to his family, the dinner for Sarkozy was staged directly in view of a building that had been destroyed by American airstrikes in 1986. Gaddafi had commemorated it with a plaque recalling the failed American aggression. Near where Gaddafi and Sarkozy were sitting was a massive gold sculpture of a fist crushing an American fighter jet.
Speaker 25:
[41:15] And there was music played at the event, a patriotic song about fighting off the enemies of Libya. And this old anti-American feeling that has sustained his regime for so many decades was still there.
Speaker 2:
[41:32] Despite this apparent tension, Chris Stevens and his colleagues in Tripoli tried to build relationships with Gaddafi's inner circle. Most importantly, his sons, who are widely regarded as the future of the country.
Speaker 12:
[41:44] Muammar Gaddafi has been married twice and has eight biological children and two adopted.
Speaker 2:
[41:50] In particular, Gaddafi's son Saif al-Islam emerged as his father's heir apparent and made great efforts to present himself to the West as a reasonable, moderating influence on the regime.
Speaker 12:
[42:01] Saif al-Islam may be the most recognized and outspoken of those offspring. He attended the London School of Economics, seen as an advocate of reform.
Speaker 2:
[42:10] By this point, Hussein al-Shafi, the former prisoner at Abu Salim, had finally gotten his passport. At one point, during the three year process, he had to submit a letter addressing Gaddafi personally. In it, al-Shafi said he needed to get to Egypt or Tunisia to seek medical help for his wife.
Speaker 18:
[42:29] I wrote a big petition, man. You'll be laughing if you see it. Like this, Muammar Gaddafi, my president, my leader, my god. I am the former prisoner with no charge. I promise I will defend the Libyan Revolution. I will defend Gaddafi. I love you, Gaddafi. I will be a good person, a good citizen. I will protect the green poke in my heart. I love green poke. Please, your follower, your lover, Hussein Al Shafi.
Speaker 2:
[43:04] For all that, Al Shafi finally got his passport. Once he did, he and his wife were able to fly to Switzerland, and from there, they boarded a flight to the United States. When I interviewed Al Shafi in 2021, he was living in Charlotte, North Carolina with his family and operating a luxury car service. By this point, he was used to telling the story of the Abu Salim massacre. One of the first things he did when he arrived in the US was recount what he had witnessed to a group of activists working with Human Rights Watch. Back in Libya, Al Shafi had kept his story to himself out of fear that the regime would kill him for spreading it. Remember, Gaddafi had barely acknowledged the massacre, and the government had not even informed the victims' families that their loved ones were dead. Lindsay Hillsome again.
Speaker 23:
[43:52] Bit by bit, some people were released, and so they went to see the families of the men who had been killed and gave them the bad news. And then the government started to issue some death certificates, which didn't say what had happened. They just said, you know, your relative, your husband, your son, your father died. And so they had some kind of official word of it. And then the families began to join together because it became clear that these weren't just deaths, these were murders.
Speaker 22:
[44:25] Nobody knew anything about that fateful day for many years, until the relatives of the victims began to protest the killings and demand an explanation.
Speaker 2:
[44:35] Human rights lawyers in Benghazi took on the family members as clients and filed a legal claim demanding information from the government. In 2007, the lawsuit gave rise to the first public protest movement in modern Libyan history.
Speaker 22:
[44:50] The relatives held protest rallies outside the Justice Department in Benghazi after they heard about what came to be known as Bloody Saturday at Abu Salim Prison.
Speaker 23:
[45:02] Now, this was a very bold move. Nobody demonstrated or protested in Gaddafi's Libya, but they didn't really care anymore. They'd lost everything, and so they started to do this, demanding justice, demanding compensation. And they were really a new group of opponents to the regime with an emotional power. And it was quite hard for the authorities just to lock them up and kill them because most of them were old ladies.
Speaker 2:
[45:31] The regime found the protesters impossible to ignore. And at the urging of Saif al-Islam, Gaddafi's ostensibly moderate son, the government started sending out death notices to hundreds of families, finally confirming after more than 20 years that their loved ones had been killed. Still, the protest continued. Every Saturday, the families would gather at the Benghazi courthouse, holding up photos of the people they had lost and praying, demanding the bodies of their loved ones from the Gaddafi regime. For a while, it was just about the only visible form of dissent in Gaddafi's Libya. But that was about to change. And for the second time in less than a decade, the United States government would be reevaluating its relationship with Muammar Gaddafi. On the next episode of Fiasco, Libya erupts in revolution, Gaddafi threatens to destroy Benghazi, and America decides to get involved. Did you feel relieved when you heard that the intervention had happened? Did it lift the pressure?
Speaker 10:
[46:44] Yes, yes, all of us.
Speaker 24:
[46:47] You know, he would have destroyed Benghazi.
Speaker 23:
[46:50] He didn't want Benghazi anymore.
Speaker 2:
[46:54] For a list of books, articles and documentaries we used in our research, follow the link in our show notes. Fiasco is a production of Prologue Projects and it's distributed by Pushkin Industries. The show is produced by Andrew Parsons, Ula Kulpa, Sam Lee and me, Leon Neyfakh, with editorial support from Sam Graham Felsen and Madeleine Kaplan. Our researcher was Francis Carr. Our score was composed by Dan English, Joe Valley and Noah Hecht. Additional music by Nick Sylvester and Joel St. Julian. Our theme song is by Spatial Relations. Audio mix by Rob Byers, Michael Rayfield and Johnny Vince Evans. Our artwork is by Teddy Blanks at Chips and Wine. Copyright counsel provided by Peter Yasi at Yasi Butler PLLC. Thanks to archive.org, Maraad Idris, Nina Ernest, Kay Glass, Carrie Baker, Ismael Swaya, Ellen Horn, Ben Ryder, James Brandt and Rachel Ward. Special thanks to Luminary and thank you for listening.