Book Review: 13 Hours in Benghazi

13 Hours in Benghazi: The Inside Account of What Really Happenedby Mitchell Zuckoff (with the Annex Security Team)Twelve, 2014Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in her 2014 book Tough Choices, summarizes the events of September 11, 2012 in Benghazi, Libya, with the full Clintonian skill at using assemblages of words not to say things but to avoid saying them: "Losing these fearless public servants in the line of duty was a crushing blow," she writes. "As Secretary I was the one ultimately responsible for my people's safety and I never felt that responsibility more deeply than I did that day." The public servants she refers to were former Navy SEALS Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods, information officer Sean Smith, and the U.S. ambassador to Libya, J. Christopher Stevens, and if you squint hard enough, you'll see that although former Secretary and looming presidential candidate Clinton acknowledges that she was ultimately responsible for the safety of those men, she doesn't say she was ultimately responsible for their deaths. It's a tricky and very, very studied elision, and it's born of the kind of political considerations that professional politicians like the Clintons do as easily as breathing.Boston University journalism professor Mitchell Zuckoff steps very gingerly around such political considerations in his lean, intensely readable new book 13 Hours in Benghazi. He's as aware as anybody of the explosive political dimension of his subject:

Like much else in Washington, most answers have fallen on one side or the other of a partisan divide. Republicans and conservatives have been the harshest critics of President Obama, then-Secretary of State Clinton, and the administration's handling of the Benghazi attacks. Democrats and liberals have been the stoutest defenders of the president, Clinton, and the administration. Media reports have run the gamut on who, if anyone, in Washington deserves blame and punishment, and whether the attacks should be considered a tragedy, a scandal, or both.

"However," he's forced to conclude, "by early 2014 one conclusion had gained considerable traction across partisan lines: The attacks could have been prevented."Central to the subject of that prevention is the question of armed protection for the civilians who found themselves trapped inside the U.S. compound by over a hundred armed attackers on the night of September 11, 2012, and that's the heart of Zuckoff's book, the men whose job it was to protect and serve that civilian contingent - men like Mark "Oz" Geist, Kris "Tanto" Paronto, and John "Tig" Tiegen (plus the luckless Doherty and Woods) and members of the Global Response Staff (GRS).Zuckoff follows these men at close range and through copious direct quotations - this is a 'boots-on-the-ground' contemporary history account of the debacle that happened that night, and it has all the strengths and weaknesses usually associated with oral history. Among the strengths is immediacy, of course; the men Zuckoff quotes were there as the night fell and the rifle fire started - they faced the smoke and the fire and the mortar shells without knowing how it was all going to end. At one point in the tense final moments of the book's action, one of these men looks at an oncoming convoy of vehicles and thinks, "I hope they're going to escort us to the airport and not attack us. We don't know who's friendly, who's bad. There are militias out there, they all look the same, and some of them are trying to kill me." Quotes like that won't find their way into the longer and more scholarly histories of the U.S. involvement in Libya that will be written in coming decades, but they make for spellbinding reading in the present day.It has its limitations, too, and our author doesn't try all that hard to work his way around them. His book is full of hoo-rah military lingo, both his own and that of his subjects. "As a running joke," we're told, "during meals or just walking through the Annex, one would randomly call out the cliche line from every bad horror or war movie: 'I've got a bad feeling about this.' Likewise Zuckoff indulges in such lingo himself. "The smell of burning diesel can be overpowering by itself," he tells us at one point, "a scrambled sulfur-and-egg mixture sometimes described as the scent of Satan cooking breakfast." When authors write lines like that, they don't mean to say anybody's ever seriously described the smell of burning diesel as "the scent of Satan cooking breakfast" - what they mean is that they themselves just thought up such a description and think it's neat, and they're right, it is.Despite his best attempts, Zuckoff can't entirely avoid the larger, darker questions that hover around Benghazi, especially when he's describing the crucial hour of the attack, when the compound was being swarmed and nearby armed help was being told to stand down so that there'd be "no direct American involvement other than the DS agents already trapped inside the Compound":

Several GRS operators considered that wishful thinking at best, negligent leadership at worst. They suspected that they knew a motive for such idle hopes: If the operators' Quick Reaction Force remained at the Annex, the CIA wouldn't be forced to reveal or explain in presence in Benghazi. On the other hand, if American clandestine operators and contract security employees went into combat against radical Islamists, the battle would be guaranteed to attract global attention and massive scrutiny. Especially on September 11. During his previous trips to Benghazi, Tig had experienced multiple instances where Bob the base chief had told the operators to "stand down," even when Americans were potentially in danger, apparently to avoid the risk of exposing the CIA presence.

But the main dramatic power of 13 Hours in Benghazi derives from Zuckoff's focus on the men who fought that night, and his book ends with a quiet coda watching the survivors make their way back home (his book also reprints the very unsettling picture of Ambassador Stevens' body being removed from the compound by a crowd of civilians). In assembling these primary accounts of those 13 hours, Zuckoff has done work future historians will find indispensable, and the bigger picture will have to be painted elsewhere.