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"FacebookPinterest\n\n On the morning of September 11, when the American flag flew at half-mast above the U.S. mission in Benghazi, J. Christopher Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya, had breakfast with a man named Habib Bubaker.\n\n Stevens was in Benghazi for the first time since being sworn in last May, having spent all of the previous four months working out of the embassy in Tripoli. But when Bubaker had greeted him at the airport the previous morning, a Monday, Stevens had told him, \"I'm very excited to be back.\"\n\n Bubaker had known the ambassador for more than a year. He'd introduced himself in April 2011, two months into the Libyan revolution, when Stevens had been dispatched to Benghazi as the U.S. envoy to the rebel coalition. The United States had already chosen a side in the war, and Stevens was assigned to establish ties with the people who, it was assumed, would eventually govern the country. Bubaker ran an English school in the city, and he offered to be Stevens's translator. Stevens spoke Arabic, but the language of diplomacy being delicate and precise, he preferred English in his official meetings. And so Bubaker made introductions and accompanied him on business and was basically his local right-hand man during that spring and summer of war. They were also friends; Bubaker, in fact, refers to himself as \"Chris Stevens's best friend.\" A lot of people do. Stevens was a man who made friends easily.\n\n Stevens planned to stay in Benghazi for five days. He'd had meetings in the city on Monday, and he would have more outside the compound on Wednesday. On Thursday, perhaps the most important day of his visit, he planned to turn over the Benghazi mission to the Libyans. The compound would be rechristened \"an American Space,\" and it would offer English lessons and Internet access and show films and stock a library. The United States would provide some computers, books, and the rest of the materials and support\u2014but it would be owned and operated by locals. \"An American Space,\" Stevens planned to say, \"is a living example of the kind of partnership between our two countries which we hope to inspire.\"\n\n Stevens had an affection for Benghazi\u2014where the uprising against Muammar Qaddafi had begun\u2014and the city for him, because Stevens had stood with its people during that uprising. During the revolution, he'd spent most of his time in the streets, talking, mingling, exploring. Nathan Tek, a young foreign-service officer who'd been at his side in 2011, remembers Stevens getting antsy if he was cooped up too long. \"He wanted to experience the city as normally as possible,\" Tek says. \"And he understood that security wasn't just big guys with guns and armored convoys. It was having friends, lots of friends, and having people treat you as a guest.\"\n\n Which Benghazians generally did. Though considering the date, September 11\u2014the eleventh anniversary of the attacks\u2014and considering the Islamist militias loitering in Benghazi, Stevens had adjusted his routine. He'd brought two bodyguards with him from Tripoli, complementing the three security agents already in Benghazi. He skipped his habitual morning run outside the walls, and he'd scheduled all of his meetings on September 11 inside the compound. The Americans had created the mission in August 2011, after a bombing at the hotel they'd been using. They rented three villas, tore down garden walls dividing them, and encircled them into a single property, four low buildings set amid grapevines and guava trees. Stevens's colleagues teasingly called it \"Ch\u00E2teau Christophe.\"\n\n As a temporary mission\u2014as opposed to a more formal consulate or embassy\u2014the facility was less fortified than many U.S. outposts. Still, Ch\u00E2teau Christophe was not unprotected. The property was 300 yards deep and a hundred yards wide, which gave the buildings a significant setback from outside attacks. The wall surrounding it was nine feet high and topped with an additional three feet of concertina wire. There were steel drop bars at the gates to control vehicles coming in and concrete Jersey barriers both inside and out to prevent a ramming attack. Screens in the tactical-operations center monitored the security cameras mounted on the perimeter. In the main residence, a steel grate could be dropped and locked, turning half the building into a safe haven; within that, moreover, was a smaller room, even more isolated, with food and water and medical supplies and no exterior exposure.\n\n Ch\u00E2teau Christophe was reasonably secure for the ambassador's business trip. Benghazi, on the other hand, was dodgier. The Libyan government had yet to stand up a proper police force, and violence had been intermittent all summer\u2014some random and criminal, some targeted against Westerners. Indeed, Stevens sent a cable to Washington on September 11 recounting the locals' concerns about the lawlessness. Still, the city was calm when Stevens arrived, and he assumed it would remain so. \"Believe me one thing,\" Bubaker says. \"If Chris was afraid, he would not have been in Benghazi on September 11.\"\n\n Bubaker stayed through Stevens's meetings that morning. At three o'clock, they reviewed his schedule for Wednesday, which was stacked with appointments; Stevens told him they'd have to grab sandwiches for a quick lunch. Stevens's last meeting of the day, coffee with a Turkish diplomat, ended at eight thirty. Stevens walked his guest to the main gate, where there was a small barracks for four men from the 17th of February Martyrs Brigade, a friendly militia hired to provide security.\n\n Seven hundred miles to the east, a mob surrounded the U.S. embassy in Cairo, ostensibly enraged by a third-rate video that depicted the Prophet Mohammed as a womanizer and a thug. But Benghazi was quiet, and the streets outside Ch\u00E2teau Christophe were empty.\n\n Stevens returned to his room in the main residence. At nine forty, he heard a burst of gunfire. Such a racket is not unusual in the Arab night. \"Most of the gunfire,\" Stevens used to tell his brother, \"is celebratory.\" Stevens used to joke with Bubaker whenever they heard it. \"So,\" he would say, \"we have another wedding.\"\n\n But in the tactical-operations center, the agent monitoring the screens saw armed men swarming through the main gate.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n Stevens landed in Benghazi for the first time on April 5, 2011. He was smuggled in on a freighter that sailed from Malta, empty except for him, Nathan Tek, a small security detail, a USAID team, and a crew of mostly puzzled Greeks and Romanians. Later, Stevens would tell friends that other ways into the city had been considered\u2014driving overland from Egypt, zipping ashore in a Zodiac with a Seal team launched from a submarine\u2014but he didn't mind the boat ride or bunking in a tiny cabin with Tek, who was not even half his age. \"He thought it was romantic,\" Tek says. \"Like a nineteenth-century adventure.\"\n\n Stevens had been an obvious choice for the mission. He was a veteran diplomat, twenty years in the foreign service, almost all of them in the Middle East and North Africa. A lanky Californian with gray hair and a smile made of teeth that seemed a half size too big for his mouth, he had a reputation for patience and calm and, as one colleague puts it, \"incessant optimism.\" And he knew Libya: He'd been the deputy chief of mission at the embassy in Tripoli for two years, beginning in 2007, back when the United States was tepidly establishing relations with Qaddafi.\n\n Tek is right, too: For Stevens, sailing on a ghost ship into a revolution really was an adventure. True, there was a good measure of altruism to what Stevens did for a living, which appears to be a family trait: His father, Jan, was a lawyer in the California attorney general's office who worked on water rights and public-land access and such; his brother, Tom, left a career as a civil litigator to prosecute federal white-collar crimes; his sisters, Anne and Hilary, are doctors. Like them, Stevens did want to make the world a better place. But he also thought his job was a terrific amount of fun. In fact, when he was posted to Libya under the Qaddafi regime, he told a foreign-service officer named S. Sita Sonty that she and her family should come, too. \"This is gonna be awesome,\" he told her. \"It'll be like the Wild, Wild West. We'll have a great adventure.\"\n\n Stevens grew up in Northern California\u2014Grass Valley, Marin County, Davis, then Piedmont, across the bay from San Francisco\u2014and by the time he was a senior at UC Berkeley, he'd already lived overseas twice, spending a high school summer in Spain and a college semester in Italy. He was a history major, but he wandered the course catalog. \"He took a class in logic, because why not? He took a class in Italian, because why not?\" says Austin Tichenor, a high school friend and one of his college roommates. \"He was the walking embodiment of a liberal-arts education.\"\n\n Stevens decided when he was still at Berkeley that he wanted to join the foreign service. He took the test before he graduated but apparently failed; he told his roommates he thought he'd done pretty well on the written exam but flubbed the oral. \"They asked me to compare and contrast how American democracy is like jazz,\" he'd said.\n\n Instead of the foreign service, then, he joined the Peace Corps. (That time, he bluffed the oral: When a recruiter asked him almost offhandedly if he spoke French, he immediately answered, \"Moi? Oui, of course.\" Then he hung up the phone and turned to his roommate: \"Shit, I haven't taken French since high school.\") He was sent to teach English for two years high in Morocco's Atlas Mountains, which are rugged and isolated and desolately beautiful. Stevens was captivated. More than twenty years later, in a video he recorded before his final return to Libya, he would remember that Peace Corps tour as the time when he \"quickly grew to love this part of the world.\" Yet when his two years were up, he returned to California, got a law degree, and by 1990 was practicing international-trade law in the Washington office of a large and prestigious firm.\n\n But his heart wasn't in it. He still wanted to be an overseas diplomat. \"I don't think he fled the law,\" says Terry Calvani, who was a partner in the firm at the time. \"I think it was, 'Gee, I really want to do this.' And my goodness, you oughta chase those things that are important to you.\"\n\n So he did. He took the foreign-service exam again, passed, and in 1991 began his training. The following year, he was posted to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and every overseas assignment after that was in the part of the world that diplomats call, usually with affection, the Sandbox. He studied Arabic in Tunisia and did tours at the embassies in Cairo and Damascus, and at the U.S. mission in Jerusalem during the second intifada. Even when he rotated back to Washington, his jobs\u2014Iran desk officer, staff assistant in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs\u2014usually related to the Sandbox.\n\n It's curious that a kid from California who grew up knowing nothing about the Arab world would come to devote his career to the Middle East and North Africa\u2014as opposed to, say, Asia or Scandinavia or even no particular place. A European woman named Henriette, who met Stevens in Jerusalem in 2003 and had a \"fantastic, turbulent\" on-and-off romance with him for nine years, tried to explain it to me.\n\n \"After we had become a couple,\" she said, \"I asked Chris when was the first time he noticed me with interest. He told me that it was at the dinner party where we first met. He said that he had liked the way I smelled. Chris was a sensualist\u2014he applied all his senses in experiencing the world. For people like us, the Middle East is tantalizing. The smell of coffee with cardamom, and of apple tobacco burning in water pipes; the color and touch of carpets and fabrics; the sounds of the muezzin call to prayers and the energy of crazy urban traffic and large desert landscapes. The warmth of its people and the sound of their music and language. If you combine that with analytical curiosity invested in understanding the long history of the region and the complex dynamics of its current politics, the Middle East is a place you can't resist. It is not only an intellectual endeavor\u2014it makes you feel fully alive.\"\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n When Stevens and Nathan Tek docked in Benghazi in April 2011, they were greeted by the rebel deputy minister of foreign affairs. Over the next days and weeks and months, the two met with everyone they could: the leaders of the Transitional National Council (the rebel government), shopkeepers, teachers, doctors, militiamen back from the front. \"It was like they all spoke from the same script,\" Tek says. \"They were all saying the same things to me: They all wanted a new Libya that represented the aspirations of the people. In my mind, it truly was a popular revolution.\"\n\n That was a critical message for Stevens to convey to his superiors. Stevens's job, which is every diplomat's job, was to provide reliable information and thorough analysis upon which Washington could formulate policy. Though the United States had already chosen a side in the revolution, opposing a sitting head of state is not undertaken lightly. (Qaddafi, despite being a vicious nut, had been marginally helpful in the so-called war on terror, and Libya has the largest proven oil and gas reserves in Africa.) Had the rebels been less credible\u2014had they, for instance, been unstable butchers likely to plunge the country into bloody chaos for years on end\u2014the calculus would have changed considerably.\n\n \"Chris was the single most important voice,\" says Jeffrey D. Feltman, who at the time was the assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs. \"That didn't mean he was the only voice, and it didn't mean everything he said was acted on. But his was the single most important voice.\"\n\n What made Stevens good at his job was his ability to get people to trust him. That is not something that can be faked: It is possible to manipulate people into confiding in you, of course, but it is not sustainable, especially for an outsider in a foreign land. \"He understood,\" says Tek, \"that you have to express empathy in a genuine way. And he defied the stereotype of an American diplomat who was equal parts arrogant and ignorant. He was honest and human.\n\n \"To me,\" Tek says, \"he was the kind of diplomat I want to be. He wielded American influence through respect rather than intimidation and swagger.\"\n\n In late August of 2011, Feltman, who was both Stevens's boss and friend, traveled to Benghazi for an update. One of their last meetings, on August 20, was with a high-ranking rebel minister Stevens had gotten to know well. The Americans wanted to know when the rebels would try to take Tripoli.\n\n As they entered the El Fadeel Hotel, where the minister was waiting for them in a conference room, Stevens gave Feltman a sideways glance. \"We've got time,\" he said quietly. \"Let's just hang out for a while.\" Stevens liked to hang out. He liked to hang out in caf\u00E9s and markets, in offices and living rooms. He wanted information\u2014sometimes general, sometimes specific\u2014but he rarely gathered it by asking pointed questions. He listened more than he spoke, and he paused often, leaving spaces for the other person to fill.\n\n The minister, a former exile whom Qaddafi had sentenced to death in absentia, greeted them warmly. Tea was served. After some small talk, Stevens and Feltman listened as the minister gradually explained that the battle for Tripoli would begin in the neighborhood of Souq al-Jumaa. Other areas would rise up with weapons that had been smuggled into the city, and only then, after the people of Tripoli had claimed the revolution as their own, would rebel forces advance from the east.\n\n The minister was very specific. Feltman wondered how much of what he'd said could be trusted.\n\n \"When is this going to happen?\" Stevens asked.\n\n \"It's imminent,\" the Libyan said.\n\n Stevens sipped his tea. \"Well,\" he said after a moment, \"what do you mean by imminent?\"\n\n \"Soon.\"\n\n \"We hear that a lot,\" Stevens said softly. He sipped more tea and sat quietly. It was not an uncomfortable pause but more of a gentle, overlong rest. He had a gift for making silence seem inviting.\n\n The minister spoke next. \"This will all begin tonight.\"\n\n This was astonishing information, assuming it was true: the timing, even the choreography, of an armed revolt in the capital city of a country ruled for more than forty years by a despot. Stevens and Feltman quickly sent an encrypted report of their meeting to Washington. But it was cautious; who knew what to trust in a war zone?\n\n The sun set behind the walls of Ch\u00E2teau Christophe. Night fell over the grapevines and the guava trees and the guesthouses. Then, in the darkness, Feltman heard rapid blasts of rifle fire. The noise was incessant, celebratory.\n\n The battle of Tripoli had begun with the muezzins' call, and the first neighborhood to rise up was Souq al-Jumaa.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n As dusk fell over the American mission in Benghazi on September 11, an information-management specialist named Sean Smith was logged into an elaborate role-playing game called Eve Online. He was 34 years old, a veteran of the air force and ten years in the foreign service, with a wife and two kids in the Netherlands. Smith was also one of the more prominent players in Eve. He went by the name vile_rat. \"Assuming we don't die tonight,\" he typed to his co-players six minutes before eight. Dark humor\u2014Smith had done tours in far more dangerous places than Benghazi. \"We saw one of the 'police' that guard the compound taking pictures.\"\n\n He probably meant one of the Libyans patrolling the perimeter. But there were nine other guards in the compound\u2014five armed Americans and four Libyans from the 17th of February Martyrs Brigade, the same militia that had helped protect Stevens when he was stationed in Benghazi the first time.\n\n Almost two hours later, at nine forty, vile_rat typed: \"FUCK. gunfire.\" He logged off.\n\n According to senior State Department officials, the agent in the tactical-operations center saw, on the screen monitoring the main gate, armed men swarming in. There were too many to count. He punched the alarm, grabbed the microphone for the loudspeakers. \"Attack! Attack!\" he yelled.\n\n The other four security agents were in the main residence with Stevens and Smith. One of them hustled the ambassador and Smith into the back half of the building, dropped the metal grille, sealed them inside the safe haven. The other three sprinted for their own automatic weapons and body armor. The agent with Stevens and Smith radioed that they were secure in the safe haven.\n\n The barracks at the front gate of the compound was in flames, and attackers were spreading through the property. They broke into the main residence, which was very dark. They tried the locks on the grille to the safe haven but couldn't break them. The security agent, quiet in the shadows, trained his M4 submachine gun on their silhouettes, ready to fire if they made it into the safe haven. They didn't. But they had jerricans of diesel fuel from the barracks. They doused the floor, the furniture, the puffy couches and overstuffed chairs, and set the place alight.\n\n Oily smoke and the fumes of melting synthetics billowed through the residence, choking, poisoning the men trapped inside. Stevens, Smith, and the bodyguard moved into a bathroom, got to a window covered with a grate. The smoke was a black fog. The men were down on the floor, gasping for whatever air was left in the building. They decided to get outside, so they crawled to a bedroom where the window grille could be opened from the inside.\n\n The agent, wheezing and half blind from the smoke, flopped out onto a patio bunkered with sandbags. He immediately came under fire: There were dozens of attackers flooding Ch\u00E2teau Christophe, firing wildly.\n\n Neither Stevens nor Smith followed the agent out the window, so the agent climbed back in after them. He couldn't find either man. He went back out for a gulp of fresher air, then came back in again, out, in, out. He still couldn't find Stevens or Smith. His lungs and throat seared, the agent managed to pull himself up a ladder to the roof. He collapsed as he radioed the other guards.\n\n The other four American security operatives could barely understand him. The attackers had broken inside Building B, the smaller residence at the compound, but they couldn't get to the agents barricaded in an interior room, and they hadn't been able to penetrate the operations center at all.\n\n There wasn't a direct line of sight from either Building B or the operations center, but the agents could see a black cloud rising. They had to get to the safe room in the main residence. An agent in the operations center opened the door, lobbed a smoke grenade to cover him, then sprinted into Building B, joining the other two agents. The three of them got into an armored SUV parked outside and floored it to the main residence. Two of the agents held off the attackers while the third slipped inside. He searched for Stevens and Smith on his hands and knees until the smoke got too bad and he had to get outside for some air. He went back in, and when he was too incapacitated, another agent took his place. Then the third.\n\n One of them found Smith and pulled him out. He was already dead from the smoke. But they still couldn't find Stevens.\n\n Reinforcements arrived, six Americans from a quick-reaction force stationed in an annex about a mile away, accompanied by sixteen more men from the 17th of February Martyrs Brigade. They retrieved the lone agent from the operations center, who'd been on the phone calling for backup from the quick-reaction team and Tripoli. Then all the men regrouped at the main residence. The agent from the operations center clambered inside; a couple of the reinforcements did, too. None of them could find Stevens. Finally, the agent who'd made all the calls stripped off his T-shirt, soaked it in a swimming pool, wrapped it around his face, made one more sweep. Nothing.\n\n The Americans and their Libyan allies tried to hold a perimeter around the residence, but, overwhelmed, they were forced to evacuate to the annex. The ambassador's security agents piled into an SUV with Smith's body.\n\n The fleeing Americans took fire, close-range, coming out of the compound. Farther down the road, more armed men strafed the vehicle with automatic rifles. A hand grenade bounced off it; another rolled underneath. Two tires were blown out. The SUV was still rolling but slowed by traffic, so they jumped a median and drove down the wrong side of the road.\n\n They reached the annex. The men got into firing positions inside the walls and on the roof. For hours they took bursts of rifle fire and RPGs. In the early morning, more reinforcements arrived, Americans flown in from Tripoli. Still the attack continued. At about four o'clock, mortars fell from the dark sky. One landed on the roof. Two former Navy Seals, Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods, were killed, and a third man\u2014one of Stevens's original bodyguards\u2014was badly wounded.\n\n The survivors decided to abandon the city. They organized a convoy of SUVs, secured a route to the airport from friendly militiamen, and finally escaped on two airplanes just after dawn.\n\n The fire in the residence eventually died down. The attackers faded away. Libyans, maybe looters or maybe just curious men, managed to break into the safe haven, where they found Stevens. They pulled him out, carried him from the compound, loaded him into a car, raced to the hospital.\n\n Doctors in the emergency room tried to revive him for forty-five minutes. Unable to identify the dead man on the gurney, they fished a cell phone from his pocket and began dialing numbers in the call history.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n The attackers who overran the American mission in Benghazi were suspected to be, not surprisingly, Islamic militants. It is unlikely, though, that they had any idea who, exactly, they were poisoning with diesel smoke. If Chris Stevens had been the target, it would have been simpler to hit his convoy or grab him on his morning run or snatch him from a meeting. Also, a live American ambassador would have been a more valuable asset than a dead one.\n\n But because Chris Stevens was killed fifty-six days before the presidential election, he became a political prop within hours of his death. Before dawn on September 12, Mitt Romney claimed him as a martyr to American weakness. Paul Ryan said the killing was emblematic of the Obama foreign policy, which \"is unraveling literally before our eyes on our TV screens.\" Republican congressmen who'd happily cut the State Department's security budget ginned up hearings to figure out why there wasn't more security in Benghazi (and managed to out a CIA safe house in the process). Sean Hannity announced to his many millions of listeners that Stevens had been raped and his body dragged through the streets, a slur that was not only horribly cruel to Stevens's friends and family but plainly false. Six weeks after the fact, during the second presidential debate, Romney was frantically parsing whether Obama had declared Stevens's murder an \"act of terror\" and if he'd done so promptly enough. The Obama administration was criticized for initially suggesting that the attack began with a protest over that idiotic Internet video. But by mid-October, that still seemed a fair conclusion: The New York Times reported that locals said the invaders had indeed been Islamists enraged by the video.\n\n Even the apparently important operational question\u2014namely, was there enough security\u2014seems irrelevant, because there can never be enough to prepare for every scenario. \"The lethality and the number of armed people is unprecedented\u2014there had been no attacks like that anywhere in Libya,\" a senior State Department official said. \"In fact, it would be very, very hard to find an attack like that in recent diplomatic history.\"\n\n And all of it missed, almost entirely, the point of Chris Stevens's career. Diplomats do not work effectively from behind fortress walls. The foreign service sends people all over the planet to gather information and represent American interests, yes, but also to make friends.\n\n Ten days after the attack on Ch\u00E2teau Christophe, on what was to have been an American Space, 30,000 Benghazi civilians marched in the streets and drove the Islamist militias from their city. Thousands sent condolences to his family. And on a memorial website, scattered among the stories from old friends and colleagues, there are notes from ordinary Libyans who never even met the man. They say things like:\n\n I feel ashamed that a man like this was killed by a bunch of low life, religious zealot cowards. This is a man that has done so much for Libya.\n\n And: Amb Chris Stevens, all the Libyan people love you and will never forget your views toward us here in Libya.\n\n And: We feel very sorry, please forgive us, we love you chris and your family also all american.\n\n That was the point of Chris Stevens's work.\n\n Sean Flynn is a GQ correspondent."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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