September 8, 2025 • 48 mins
How a prison massacre carried out under Libya’s long-time dictator, Muammar Gaddafi, set the stage for the Benghazi attack.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:16):
Pushkin. Hey Leon here, before we get to this episode,
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Plus on the Fiasco Apple podcast showpage or visit Pushkin
dot Fm Slash Plus now onto the show. On the
(00:47):
night of September eleventh, twenty twelve, four Americans were killed
in Benghazi, a city in Libya on the Mediterranean Sea.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
What potentially happened in Libya in the city of Benghazi.
Not only did the attackers storm the building in Benghazi.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
The attack began when a group of armed assailants broke
into a diplomatic compound operated by the State Department. Would
mean that it ended nearly eight hours later with the
bombing of a secret CIA base nearby.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
First they attacked it with RPG rifles, then they opened
fire on it with machine guns.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
Among the victims was the American ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens.
Speaker 3 (01:24):
And again.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
His name is John Christopher Stevens, and he was born
in Northern California in nineteen sixty.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
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 in elation 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 4 (01:48):
The Obama administration resisting responsibility.
Speaker 5 (01:51):
There's a lot of dispute when the administration knew how
dangerous the situation with Lizim ben Ghazi, the situation.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
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.
Should they have had more advanced warning, should they have
set more security. 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
(02:19):
seemed interested in was that the American mission in Libya
had failed, not what the mission had actually been.
Speaker 5 (02:27):
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 1 (02:45):
For more than forty years, Libya had been ruled by
a violent and eccentric dictator, Mumar Gadafi.
Speaker 6 (02:52):
We read that you are mad.
Speaker 7 (02:54):
You know that those things had been invented.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
Gaddafi had long been regarded in the West as an
unparalleled menace. Before bin Laden, Kaddafi was the face of
international terrorism.
Speaker 4 (03:05):
He's been called the world number one terrorist, a madman
who exports terrorists them around the world.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
Ronald Reagan once memorably called Kadafi the mad dog of
the Middle East. What I had forgotten, or never really
absorbed in the first place, was that during the early
two thousands, under the Bush administration, the United States had
reconciled with Kadafi. We lifted sanctions, we established diplomatic relations.
We even accepted his help in pursuing suspected terrorists.
Speaker 8 (03:35):
The United States may have a new ally in the
war on terror, Libya's Momar Kadafi says.
Speaker 1 (03:40):
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 two thousand and seven.
Speaker 8 (03:56):
Moamar Kadafi's regime has shown excellent cooperation against terrorism and
dismantled its nuclear weapons.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
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 two thousand and seven. I
had heard of Gaddafi, but that was about it. I
was only slightly more tuned in in twenty eleven when
the Arab Spring swept into Libya and forced Gadafi out
of power as part of a US backed revolution.
Speaker 9 (04:26):
The uprising against Gaddafi broke out in mid February, and
an anti regime protests quickly spread across the vast desert
country of six million people.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
But even then I just wasn't that invested or informed.
So when I saw reports in September of twenty twelve
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 benng Ghazi as a place. Instead,
I experienced it as an American political scandal. I associated
(04:55):
the word Benghazi with a drawn out controversy that it
spawned endless conspiracy theories and captivated the Republican Party. Ben
Ghazi gaate the political cover up of some kind.
Speaker 10 (05:04):
Of regime gigs lying about it.
Speaker 4 (05:06):
I think it could be as bad as Watergate, but
nobody died in water Gate.
Speaker 11 (05:09):
The White House can sign those people to death.
Speaker 12 (05:11):
We kill the ambassador just to cover something up. You
put two and two together.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
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
(05:40):
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 Quinton's emails cost her the twenty
sixteen election, you could make the case that Benghazi took
down a presidency no less than Watergate did. What I've
(06:02):
realized after dozens of interviews with people who watched the
Benghazi story unfold 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 in Congress, and how it laid
(06:23):
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.
(06:43):
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
(07:05):
understand the truth about Benghazi, you have to understand what
America was trying to achieved there. You have to know
what was supposed to happen in Benghazi in a perfect world,
instead of what did I'm Leon Napok from Prologue Projects
and Pushkin Industries. This is fiasco Benghazi.
Speaker 13 (07:27):
Obama, who have four Americans to die in Benghazi?
Speaker 1 (07:30):
There is a certain self fulfilling prophecy to outrage.
Speaker 11 (07:33):
Wild conspiracy theory.
Speaker 7 (07:34):
Intelligence officials acknowledged they originally got it wrong.
Speaker 3 (07:38):
It was a fucking mess.
Speaker 1 (07:39):
It's really hard to figure out what's going on.
Speaker 10 (07:41):
They're shooting through the door.
Speaker 6 (07:43):
I turned to the ambassador and said, if they blow
the locks, I'm gonna start shooting.
Speaker 7 (07:47):
And when I die, I want you to keep on fighting.
Speaker 3 (07:50):
You can't understand the story of Libya if you don't
know what's going on in Benghazi.
Speaker 12 (07:55):
Omar Ghadavi is not leaving without a flight.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
Episode one The Dictator, in which Muamar Gadafi and the
United States, after decades of hostility, discover they have a
common enemy. We'll be right back. Hussein el Shafi was
(08:20):
twenty years old when he was arrested in nineteen eighty
nine for criticizing Muammar Gadafi.
Speaker 9 (08:26):
I was in the fourth semester, like a second year
at that time, and they just knock on my door.
They put my hands in a handcuffs.
Speaker 1 (08:35):
El Shafi was born and raised in Benghazi. At the
time of his arrest, he was studying engineering at a
local university.
Speaker 9 (08:42):
They took me to one of those They call it
like Mora Bamni, which means the security district for the area.
Speaker 1 (08:50):
El Shafi's crime was that he spoke up against the
regime during a student forum on the Green Book, Kadafi's
rambling manifesto.
Speaker 11 (08:57):
He has compiled his thinking into a green book, a
blending of the Koran and Kadafi's own brooding thoughts.
Speaker 9 (09:05):
He called the Anovaria Tarita means the third solution for
the world. You know, as a capitalism is dying and
the socialism is dying, I am the solution for the world.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
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 Gadafi seriously as a thinker,
and he was tired of the regime having control over
his mind.
Speaker 9 (09:30):
There is no library in none of our Libyan cities.
If you want to read, the only books was brought
by Godavi's authority and put on the shelves.
Speaker 10 (09:43):
No voice above Godav's voice, you know.
Speaker 1 (09:45):
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,
(10:05):
then by plane to Tripoli, about four hundred miles west
of Bengui. Zi Alshafi was blindfolded and handcuffed throughout the journey,
so when he was led into a prison cell, he
didn't know where he was.
Speaker 9 (10:18):
There were small holes in the walls between cells, so
I was able to talk to one of those people
he was before us. At where we are, said Unibuslim body,
welcome to Buslim.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
Abu Salim was an infamous detention facility known for housing
political prisoners.
Speaker 14 (10:36):
The dark heart of Gaddafi's oppression, Abu Salim prison the.
Speaker 12 (10:40):
Name itself so frightening that Libyans avoid saying it.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
Abu Salim was full of people the Gadafi regime considered enemies. Historically,
opposition to Gaddafi and 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
(11:05):
Islamic Fighting Group, which supported the violent overthrow of the regime.
But there were also people like husay In El Shafi,
who opposed political violence and were unaffiliated with any organization.
Speaker 9 (11:17):
He claims those are Islamists, but I was, yeah, I
was going to the mosque. I was very con conservative
at that time, but I did not belong to any group,
like an armed group or anything like this.
Speaker 1 (11:32):
El 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 9 (11:42):
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 taken as a reason to kill or to
demolish his opponents.
Speaker 1 (12:03):
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 nineteen eighties as a
(12:25):
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
(12:50):
Abu Salim, Hussein el 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 Sulim have reported
being attacked by dog, subjected to deafening nightly broadcasts of
(13:12):
Gaddafi's speeches, and prodded with electric cables. When I interviewed
El Shafi, he had to take a break because the
phone was hurting his ear. It had been mutilated at
Abu Sulim.
Speaker 9 (13:23):
I'll try to use this ear, not that ear, because
this one cut in the jail oh my god, have
did you see my ear?
Speaker 11 (13:29):
Yeah?
Speaker 10 (13:29):
Yeah, yeah, it's touching the thing, you know. Sorry by that.
Speaker 1 (13:35):
In nineteen ninety five, about six years into El Shafi's imprisonment,
life at Abu Sulim became more cruel and more isolating.
It happened following a jail break, after which inmates were
forbidden from going outside and medical care was withheld from
those who needed it.
Speaker 9 (13:53):
Things getting worse and worse and worse. Some people died,
Some people has cancers, you name it, heart pressure, and
some people has like stomach issues.
Speaker 10 (14:04):
Some of them, they said, were dying slowly guys.
Speaker 1 (14:12):
As conditions worsened, a group of inmates planned a protest,
and on June twenty eighth, nineteen ninety six, 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
(14:33):
arrived at the prison to survey the situation. Before leaving,
he promised a delegation of inmates that conditions at Abu
Sulim would improve and that those who needed medical attention
would receive it instead. The following morning, the prisoners of
Abu Sulim, More than a thousand of them were marched
into the courtyards adjacent to their cell blocks. Elshafi remembers
(14:56):
being taken outside and being ordered to lie face down
on the ground.
Speaker 9 (15:01):
They came in the morning, they said okay, room by rum,
they take them out.
Speaker 10 (15:08):
They tied their hands and the turn around facing the
wall in the yard.
Speaker 1 (15:13):
El Shaffie estimates that there were about thirteen hundred men
lined up in the prison yards when he started to
hear shooting.
Speaker 9 (15:20):
My friend is Cardiolois now in Ireland, his named Sab.
He was holding my hand tight. I said no, I said,
the care.
Speaker 10 (15:28):
Us, that's all.
Speaker 9 (15:28):
They're not gonna kill them all. They want to scare us.
They try to teach us a lesson, you know. He said,
three for our friends, their souls raising up the gun.
Speaker 1 (15:41):
Al Shaffie 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 from
one section of the prison to another.
Speaker 9 (15:51):
The shootings continued for at least three and a half hours.
Speaker 10 (15:58):
The last shot was individuals like they're finishing up, you know.
Speaker 1 (16:08):
El Shaffie thinks he and the other men in his
cell block were spared because of their low risk classification.
He says there were only about three hundred survivors. After
the shooting ended, prison guards enlisted some of them to
help clean the watches and rings. They were taking off
the bodies.
Speaker 9 (16:26):
And they have plots info the wear on them. And
I said, oh my gosh, they're sitting. They have rings
and they watches, Oh my gosh.
Speaker 1 (16:36):
For years, the massacre at Abu Salim was kept secret
from the world, even in Libya. It was nothing more
than a rumor.
Speaker 10 (16:45):
No one knows nothing.
Speaker 9 (16:46):
All well, they know people heard shooting and they hit
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 1 (17:02):
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 be at 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
(17:22):
at Abu Sulim in the years after the massacre would
find bullets lodged in the prison yard walls.
Speaker 9 (17:34):
There is a.
Speaker 15 (17:34):
Figure emerging in the Middle East. He is Colonel Muammar
El Kadafi, and he wants to unify the Arabs and
restore the Arab Crescent of Nations to their ancient prestige
and power.
Speaker 10 (17:44):
In the Shaving.
Speaker 1 (17:46):
Before Mumar Gadafi built prisons for his domestic enemies, he
made a name for himself by standing up to his
foreign ones. Gaddafi came to power in nineteen sixty nine,
replacing the Western backed king Idris by staging a military
coup in Benghazi. Gaddafi was just twenty seven years old,
a handsome young army officer who projected strength and vigor,
(18:08):
and who was embraced by many Libyans.
Speaker 14 (18:11):
Olibya was an obscure desert kingdom. Today it is on
the center stage of Middle East politics, and the matter
responsible is under thirty.
Speaker 11 (18:19):
A strong and asymmetric cancerness like the anti hero movie
stars of the.
Speaker 1 (18:23):
Sixties, Kaddafi, 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 13 (18:34):
A revolutionary who believes people should rule themselves, not be
ruled by government.
Speaker 15 (18:38):
If those ambitions seem grandiose for the young leader of
a desert land of a mere two million people, it
should be quickly pointed out that Kadafi has one powerful asset.
Speaker 14 (18:47):
Money Oil money makes Libya's young leftist strong man a
power in the Arab world.
Speaker 1 (18:56):
In a move that defined his early years in power,
Kaddafi forced Western oil companies to renegotiate their export agreements
with Libya.
Speaker 14 (19:03):
In March, Kaddafi's deputy prime minister negotiated a new agreement
with Western oil companies. Libya is now making twice as
much money from oil as when Gadaffi and his young
officers overthrow King DRIs two years ago.
Speaker 1 (19:16):
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 14 (19:26):
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 two billion dollars.
Speaker 1 (19:37):
Starting in the nineteen seventies, 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, South African Anti apartheid movement, and the IRA
in Northern Ireland.
Speaker 15 (19:53):
Each year, the IRA collects a check for two million
dollars from one of Gadaf's money managers in Tripoli.
Speaker 10 (20:00):
Round the globe, dozens of scenes like.
Speaker 15 (20:02):
This are being enacted for the benefit of Gadaf's crusade.
Speaker 1 (20:06):
According to one estimate, more than thirty different organizations sent
fighters to train in Libya at various points.
Speaker 15 (20:13):
Libya's strong man leader Mumar Khadaffi, spends an estimated two
hundred million dollars a year arming and training terrorists and insurgents.
Speaker 1 (20:21):
Gaddafi also spent a lot of money building up his
own Arsenal her capital.
Speaker 16 (20:26):
Libya under Gaddaffi in the seven sies was the biggest
purchaser of weapons in the world. He was like a
compulsive shopper.
Speaker 1 (20:34):
This is Lindsay Hilsom, a reporter for Channel four News
in the UK who has covered Libya extensively. In her
book Sandstorm, Hilsomon describes how Mumar Gadafi came to loom
over the American imagination as a symbol of violence and chaos.
Speaker 13 (20:48):
He's the ultimate villain, the godfather of international terrorism, a
one dimensional, erratic, irrational, unbalanced two bit dictate.
Speaker 5 (20:56):
A central character in real world acts of terror, as well.
Speaker 8 (21:00):
As the star of a number of best selling thrillers
based on the premise that one day he would get
the bomb.
Speaker 15 (21:05):
He's very volatile, an opportunistic.
Speaker 1 (21:10):
In nineteen eighty one, Newsweek put Gadafi 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 13 (21:27):
He has three obsessions. Hatred of Israel, hatred of the
United States for supporting Israel, and a dream of a
united Arab world.
Speaker 1 (21:35):
Libya became synonymous with terrorism. If you remember Back to
the Future, which came out in nineteen eighty five, Doc
Brown is pursued by crazed terrorists from Libya who want
to kill him for selling them a phony nuclear bomb.
Oh my god, they found me.
Speaker 3 (21:51):
I don't know how they found who?
Speaker 2 (21:53):
Who?
Speaker 8 (21:54):
What do you think?
Speaker 1 (21:58):
Gaddafi became even more closely associated with terrorism in nineteen
eighty six, when his regime was implicated in a bombing
in Berlin. Reporter Lindsay Hilsome.
Speaker 16 (22:07):
Again in nineteen eighty six, he provided the weapons, training
and his agents attacked a belgiscotheque in Berlin.
Speaker 17 (22:18):
For the second time.
Speaker 13 (22:19):
This week, Americans had been the victims of a terrorist
attack in Europe.
Speaker 17 (22:22):
This time the target was a nightclub in West Berlin,
a favorite of American soldiers. Little was left of the
West Berlin Disco.
Speaker 15 (22:29):
Over one hundred and fifty were injured, about seventy of
them American.
Speaker 16 (22:33):
Servicemen, and it was quite clear from very early on
that it was the Libyans behind that attack.
Speaker 8 (22:40):
Police are looking for a pattern to support their belief
that Libyan leader Colonel Muamar Kadaffi sponsored the attack.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
Two Americans were killed and seventy nine were injured in
the Berlin attack. Ronald Reagan responded with air strikes on
Tripoli and Benghazi.
Speaker 4 (22:55):
At seven 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
Muhama Kadafi's subversive activities.
Speaker 1 (23:11):
The bombs were not enough to convince Gaddafi to retreat,
Neither were the economic sanctions that Reagan had imposed on him.
In nineteen eighty eight, Gaddafi was accused of another major
terrorist attack, this one targeting a passenger jet flying from
London to New York. As PanAm Flight one oh three
passed over the town of Lockerby, Scotland, a bomb exploded
(23:33):
and the plane went down.
Speaker 6 (23:34):
In a few short, violent moments, two hundred and seventy
people died. People from twenty one countries filled these coffins,
one hundred and eighty nine of them were American.
Speaker 1 (23:46):
Gaddafi denied having anything to do with the Lockerby bombing,
but when evidence of Libyan involvement was uncovered, the attack
came to define him in the eyes of the West.
Speaker 13 (23:56):
Is an egomaniac who would trigger World War three to
make the headlines, is the world's principal terrorist and trainer
of terrorists, and dangerous to peace.
Speaker 1 (24:12):
As Gaddafi's profile rose around the world, the violence he
perpetrated against foreign targets overshadowed his brutal repression of the
Libyan people.
Speaker 16 (24:22):
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
(24:42):
closed country and very few people were allowed into Libya
from the outside.
Speaker 1 (24:49):
The regime's secrecy makes it difficult to know exactly how
common public executions were, but there are documented instances of
dissidence in Libya being hanged or executed by firing squad
in the seventies, eighties and nineties. Hussein al Shafi told
me he remembers hearing about hangings before he was sent
to Abu Salim.
Speaker 9 (25:10):
I remember in nineteen eighty four, Ladafi Wah used to
hang any opposition groups, you know, on the like a
basketball stadium, you know, like arena we have here, like
Spectrum center, you know. 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
(25:32):
many times in the college in the university Libia university,
like in Trebly or Benghazi.
Speaker 10 (25:37):
He takes them and.
Speaker 9 (25:38):
They hang them and he kills the students because they
are a part of the opposition group.
Speaker 1 (25:43):
Alshafi never attended an execution in person, but he did
see it happen on TV.
Speaker 9 (25:49):
I see this once and then I go cry. You know,
I go hiding some in a room cry. I see look,
he's hanging people, and the crowd, the crowd supporting this.
Speaker 10 (25:59):
Oh, Gadaffi, yeah, your them, call them.
Speaker 1 (26:03):
The nineteen ninety six 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
(26:24):
Amnesty International called on Gadafi to order an investigation, but
that effort didn't go anywhere. Kadafi 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 el Shafi was
(26:45):
released from Abu Salim. It happened on June first, two thousand,
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. Elshafi went home
to Benghazi and started trying to get a passport. He
wanted to leave Libya and escape the Gadafi regime for good.
(27:08):
The passport still hadn't come when Elshafi started seeing reports
that world leaders, including from the United States, were changing
their stance on Gadafi and inviting him in from the cold.
Speaker 17 (27:19):
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 1 (27:30):
The man who had imprisoned El 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 8 (27:45):
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 1 (27:53):
El 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. Alshafi assumed that it meant
the US was going to start selling Gaddafi weapons.
Speaker 10 (28:06):
I said, fuck politics, fuck the money people.
Speaker 9 (28:09):
First, if you Invagadavi sons and you give him whapons,
US administration as a color seem freaking Goadavi.
Speaker 1 (28:25):
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 nineteen ninety nine
to surrender two Libyans who were suspected of carrying out
the Locker bebombing. But it wasn't until the Bush years
(28:48):
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 in 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
(29:08):
White House, Kadafi agreed to give up his nascent nuclear
program and to allow weapons inspectors into Libya.
Speaker 4 (29:15):
Libya's surprise announcement that it will give up its weapons
of mass destruction is reverberating worldwide.
Speaker 1 (29:21):
The Bush administration hailed it as a diplomatic triumph.
Speaker 4 (29:24):
Today in Tripoli, Libya has begun the process of rejoining
the Community of Nations. Its good faith will be returned.
Speaker 18 (29:34):
Without the Iraq War, the trajectory of the US Libya
relationship would have been much much different.
Speaker 1 (29:40):
This is Ethan Chorin. He was sent to Tripoli by
the State Department in two thousand and four, who was
his first posting as a member of the Foreign Service.
Speaker 18 (29:48):
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 1 (29:58):
Chorin, the author of a book about Libya called Exit.
The colonel explained to me that making a deal with
Kaddafi was specifically attractive to the Bush White House as
a follow up to the invasion of Iraq.
Speaker 18 (30:10):
The neo conservative cabel in Washington looking for the next move, essentially,
and they were weren't interested in Kadafi until essentially it
dawned on a few people that the relationship with Kadafi
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 Kadafi ostensibly had
(30:32):
something that you could call such a program, and he
was willing to give it up.
Speaker 1 (30:36):
Chorn's point here was that Kadafi'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 Kadafi were one that American companies could start
doing business in Libya, and two that the Kadafi regime
could be helpful in the war on terror.
Speaker 8 (30:59):
Kadafi says, intelligence agencies in Libya and the US are
exchanging information.
Speaker 1 (31:06):
The terrorists America was now hunting in the Middle East
and North Africa. Daffi's longtime enemies too. All through the nineties,
he had been at war with Islamist groups suspected of
having connections to Al Qaida. In fact, in nineteen ninety eight,
the Gaddafi regime had issued an Interpol arrest warrant for
Oslam Bin Laden on the basis that al Qaeda had
(31:26):
been working with radicals in Libya. Reporter Lindsay Hilsom.
Speaker 16 (31:30):
Again, Gaddaffi 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 Gadaffi. But they were part of this
international Jihat, and of course that was the international Gia
(31:52):
had which you know on nine to eleven flew into
the Twin Towers and murdered all the Americans.
Speaker 1 (31:59):
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 2 (32:12):
Kalybean leader Mamar al Kadafi is now being called an
enemy of Islam by al Qaeda.
Speaker 1 (32:19):
Between all that and the oil contracts, it was enough
to convince the White House that Kaddafi was worth the baggage.
Speaker 4 (32:26):
The first time in almost a quarter century, the US
has diplomatic ties with Libya.
Speaker 1 (32:32):
The US mission and Tripoli had been abandoned in nineteen eighty,
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
(33:01):
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 two thousand and four, and he was excited.
Speaker 18 (33:15):
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 1 (33:24):
It was up to choren and his State Department colleagues
to figure out what was going on in Libya, how
the Goadathi 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 18 (33:43):
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 1 (33:52):
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, d C.
At the time, but he had made it known to
his superiors of the State Department that he wanted to
be posted in Libya at the next available opportunity.
Speaker 18 (34:10):
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 sort of completely off limits to Americans and unknown,
and that clearly excited him, and it's excited me.
Speaker 1 (34:26):
Stevens had been in the Foreign Service for about twenty
years after starting and abandoning a career as an international
trade lawyer.
Speaker 3 (34:33):
They 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 1 (34:40):
This is journalist Paul Richter. He's the author of the
book The Ambassadors, in which he details Chris Stevens's tenure
at the State Department.
Speaker 3 (34:47):
So at a rather old age he went into the
Foreign Service. It was basically kind of a second career
for him.
Speaker 1 (34:55):
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
apparently shared with a long line of Western diplomats.
Speaker 3 (35:13):
There's been a certain romance about the Middle East that
goes back to T. E. Lawrence and other British and
Europeans who saw some mystery, some fascination that they didn't
see in other parts of the world.
Speaker 1 (35:31):
One of Stephens's 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 nineteenth century. These diplomats and adventurers often
(35:53):
wrote about the region as ancient, otherworldly, and almost mystical.
Speaker 3 (35:57):
There is probably a colonialist dimension to it in their attitude,
and some of that. There's something about the serenity. There's
something about the harshness of the atmosphere and the beauty
of the vironment that draws them, and there is something
about the exotic nature of the Arab world that they
just can't find in other places, and they keep going
(36:20):
back to it.
Speaker 1 (36:21):
As Richter described it to me, Stevens was attracted to
the lifestyle Libya offered and the feeling of timelessness he
found there.
Speaker 3 (36:28):
He liked going out and enjoying goat met 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
(36:50):
years ago, and then later Stephens would discover that they
were talking about people who died centuries ago.
Speaker 1 (36:56):
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 Schorin, Stevens
made clear how excited he was at the prospect of
being posted there.
Speaker 18 (37:10):
Chris would write and ask something along lines of should
I tay you know, 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 1 (37:28):
In many ways, Stevens's 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 two thousand and six, when he was posted in Jerusalem,
Stephens served as a liaison to the PLO, the Palestine
Liberation Organization.
Speaker 4 (37:46):
The Palestinian elections had a stunning outcome, a landslide victory
for harmas official results today showed the aslam.
Speaker 1 (37:54):
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 3 (38:04):
After Hamas had won that election, Stephens wrote his closest friends,
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 1 (38:24):
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 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 3 (38:45):
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
(39:05):
a jihadist in Afghanistan couple of years before.
Speaker 1 (39:09):
Stevens's friend 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's outlook on
the Arab world, and more specifically his approach to diplomacy
(39:31):
in Libya. For Chorin, the tragedy of the Bengazi 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 18 (39:43):
But this is the heart of the Libya problem, is
that there was this sort of long, disjointed or absent
period of uh in many decades where the US Libya
relationship with 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
(40:05):
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 1 (40:16):
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 two thousand and seven, he was invited to Mulmar
Gadaffi's fortress for a banquet in honor of the French
president Nicholas Sarkozi. Stevens was introduced to Gaddafi briefly on
a receiving line journalist Paul Richter again.
Speaker 3 (40:38):
And he saw at this event Kadafi's ambivalence toward the US.
Kadafi 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 1 (41:00):
Gaddafi did not try to hide this antipathy, as Stevens
observed in letters to his family. The dinner for Sarkosi
was staged directly in view of a building that had
been destroyed by American air strikes in nineteen eighty six.
Gaddafi had commemorated it with a plaque recalling the failed
American aggression. Near where Gadaffi and Sarkozi were sitting was
(41:20):
a massive gold sculpture of a fist crushing an American
fighter jet.
Speaker 3 (41:25):
And there was a music played at the event, a
patriotic song about fighting off the enemies of Libya. And
this old anti American feeling that had sustained his regime
for so many decades was still there.
Speaker 1 (41:42):
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 were widely regarded as the future
of the country.
Speaker 12 (41:54):
Lu Mahgadafi has been married twice and has eight biological
children and to adopted.
Speaker 1 (42:00):
In particular, Gaddafi's son Safe al Islam, emerged as his
father's heir apparent and made great efforts to present himself
to the West as a reasonable, moderated influence on the regime.
Speaker 12 (42:11):
Say Al Islam may be the most recognized and out
spoken of those offspring. He attended the London School of Economics,
saying as an advocate of reform.
Speaker 1 (42:20):
By this point, Hussain al Shafi, the former prisoner at
Abu Sulim, had finally gotten his passport. At one point
during the three year process, he had to submit a
letter addressing Gaddafi personally. In it, Alshafi said he needed
to get to Egypt or Tunisia to seek medical help
for his wife.
Speaker 10 (42:39):
I wrote a big petition.
Speaker 9 (42:41):
Man, you'll be laughing if you see it like this,
Wamar Ghadafi, my presidents, my leader, my God. I am
the former prisoners with no charge applying for the nest.
I promise I will defend liberal revolution. I would defend Bukadafi.
I love you Ghadafi. I would be a good person,
(43:03):
a good citizens. I'll protect the greenpook in my heart.
I love green Pook. Please you follower your lover, Hossin
o Sofi.
Speaker 1 (43:14):
For all that, El 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 El Shaffie in twenty
twenty one, 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
(43:35):
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, Elshafi 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
(43:55):
the government had not even informed the victim's families that
their loved ones were dead. Lindsay Hilsome again, Bit by.
Speaker 16 (44:02):
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
(44:24):
kind of official.
Speaker 7 (44:26):
Word of it.
Speaker 16 (44:27):
And then the families began to join together because it
became clear that these weren't just deaths, these were murders.
Speaker 7 (44:35):
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 1 (44:45):
Human rights lawyers in Benghazi took on the family members
as clients and filed the legal claim demanding information from
the government. In two thousand and seven. The lawsuit gave
rise to the first public protest movement in modern Libyan history.
Speaker 7 (45:00):
The relatives held protest rallies outside the Justice Department in
Benghazi after they heard about what came to be known
as Bloody Saturday at Abusli in prison.
Speaker 16 (45:12):
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,
(45:32):
and it was quite hard for the authorities just to
lock them up and kill them because most of them
were old ladies.
Speaker 1 (45:41):
The regime found the protesters impossible to ignore, and at
the urging of Safe al Islam, Gaddafi's ostensibly moderate son,
the government started sending out death notices to hundreds of families,
finally confirming after more than twenty years, that their loved
ones had been killed. Still, the protest continued. Every Saturday,
(46:02):
the families would gather at the Benghazi courthouse, holding up
photos of the people they had lost and.
Speaker 7 (46:07):
Praying, demanding the bodies of the loved ones from the
Gaddafi regime.
Speaker 1 (46:13):
For a while, it was just about the only visible
form of descent 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 Muamar Gadafi. On the next episode of Fiasco,
(46:42):
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.
Speaker 18 (46:52):
Did it lifts the pressure?
Speaker 7 (46:54):
Yes, all of us.
Speaker 11 (46:57):
You know he would have destroyed Binghazi.
Speaker 10 (47:00):
He didn't want Benghazi anymore.
Speaker 1 (47:04):
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 Prolog Projects, and it's distributed
by Pushkin Industries. The show is produced by Andrew Parsons,
Ula Culpa, Sam Lee and me Leon Mayfock, with editorial
support from Sam Graham Felsen and Madeline Kaplan. Our researcher
(47:27):
was Francis Carr. Our score was composed by Dan English,
Joe Valley and Noah Hecht. Additional music by Nick Selevester
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 Yass
(47:52):
Butler PLLC. Thanks to Archive dot Org, muraud Idris, Nina,
Ernest tay Glass, Kerry Baker, Ismael Swea ellen Horn, Ben Ryder,
James Brandt, and Rachel Ward Special Thanks to Lubnary, and
thank you for listen
Pushkin. Hey Leon here, before we get to this episode,
I want to let you know that you can binge
the entire season of Fiasco Benghazi right now ad free
by becoming a Pushkin Plus subscriber. Sign up for Pushkin
Plus on the Fiasco Apple podcast showpage or visit Pushkin
dot Fm Slash Plus now onto the show. On the
(00:47):
night of September eleventh, twenty twelve, four Americans were killed
in Benghazi, a city in Libya on the Mediterranean Sea.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
What potentially happened in Libya in the city of Benghazi.
Not only did the attackers storm the building in Benghazi.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
The attack began when a group of armed assailants broke
into a diplomatic compound operated by the State Department. Would
mean that it ended nearly eight hours later with the
bombing of a secret CIA base nearby.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
First they attacked it with RPG rifles, then they opened
fire on it with machine guns.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
Among the victims was the American ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens.
Speaker 3 (01:24):
And again.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
His name is John Christopher Stevens, and he was born
in Northern California in nineteen sixty.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
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 in elation 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 4 (01:48):
The Obama administration resisting responsibility.
Speaker 5 (01:51):
There's a lot of dispute when the administration knew how
dangerous the situation with Lizim ben Ghazi, the situation.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
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.
Should they have had more advanced warning, should they have
set more security. 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
(02:19):
seemed interested in was that the American mission in Libya
had failed, not what the mission had actually been.
Speaker 5 (02:27):
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 1 (02:45):
For more than forty years, Libya had been ruled by
a violent and eccentric dictator, Mumar Gadafi.
Speaker 6 (02:52):
We read that you are mad.
Speaker 7 (02:54):
You know that those things had been invented.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
Gaddafi had long been regarded in the West as an
unparalleled menace. Before bin Laden, Kaddafi was the face of
international terrorism.
Speaker 4 (03:05):
He's been called the world number one terrorist, a madman
who exports terrorists them around the world.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
Ronald Reagan once memorably called Kadafi the mad dog of
the Middle East. What I had forgotten, or never really
absorbed in the first place, was that during the early
two thousands, under the Bush administration, the United States had
reconciled with Kadafi. We lifted sanctions, we established diplomatic relations.
We even accepted his help in pursuing suspected terrorists.
Speaker 8 (03:35):
The United States may have a new ally in the
war on terror, Libya's Momar Kadafi says.
Speaker 1 (03:40):
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 two thousand and seven.
Speaker 8 (03:56):
Moamar Kadafi's regime has shown excellent cooperation against terrorism and
dismantled its nuclear weapons.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
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 two thousand and seven. I
had heard of Gaddafi, but that was about it. I
was only slightly more tuned in in twenty eleven when
the Arab Spring swept into Libya and forced Gadafi out
of power as part of a US backed revolution.
Speaker 9 (04:26):
The uprising against Gaddafi broke out in mid February, and
an anti regime protests quickly spread across the vast desert
country of six million people.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
But even then I just wasn't that invested or informed.
So when I saw reports in September of twenty twelve
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 benng Ghazi as a place. Instead,
I experienced it as an American political scandal. I associated
(04:55):
the word Benghazi with a drawn out controversy that it
spawned endless conspiracy theories and captivated the Republican Party. Ben
Ghazi gaate the political cover up of some kind.
Speaker 10 (05:04):
Of regime gigs lying about it.
Speaker 4 (05:06):
I think it could be as bad as Watergate, but
nobody died in water Gate.
Speaker 11 (05:09):
The White House can sign those people to death.
Speaker 12 (05:11):
We kill the ambassador just to cover something up. You
put two and two together.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
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
(05:40):
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 Quinton's emails cost her the twenty
sixteen election, you could make the case that Benghazi took
down a presidency no less than Watergate did. What I've
(06:02):
realized after dozens of interviews with people who watched the
Benghazi story unfold 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 in Congress, and how it laid
(06:23):
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.
(06:43):
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
(07:05):
understand the truth about Benghazi, you have to understand what
America was trying to achieved there. You have to know
what was supposed to happen in Benghazi in a perfect world,
instead of what did I'm Leon Napok from Prologue Projects
and Pushkin Industries. This is fiasco Benghazi.
Speaker 13 (07:27):
Obama, who have four Americans to die in Benghazi?
Speaker 1 (07:30):
There is a certain self fulfilling prophecy to outrage.
Speaker 11 (07:33):
Wild conspiracy theory.
Speaker 7 (07:34):
Intelligence officials acknowledged they originally got it wrong.
Speaker 3 (07:38):
It was a fucking mess.
Speaker 1 (07:39):
It's really hard to figure out what's going on.
Speaker 10 (07:41):
They're shooting through the door.
Speaker 6 (07:43):
I turned to the ambassador and said, if they blow
the locks, I'm gonna start shooting.
Speaker 7 (07:47):
And when I die, I want you to keep on fighting.
Speaker 3 (07:50):
You can't understand the story of Libya if you don't
know what's going on in Benghazi.
Speaker 12 (07:55):
Omar Ghadavi is not leaving without a flight.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
Episode one The Dictator, in which Muamar Gadafi and the
United States, after decades of hostility, discover they have a
common enemy. We'll be right back. Hussein el Shafi was
(08:20):
twenty years old when he was arrested in nineteen eighty
nine for criticizing Muammar Gadafi.
Speaker 9 (08:26):
I was in the fourth semester, like a second year
at that time, and they just knock on my door.
They put my hands in a handcuffs.
Speaker 1 (08:35):
El Shafi was born and raised in Benghazi. At the
time of his arrest, he was studying engineering at a
local university.
Speaker 9 (08:42):
They took me to one of those They call it
like Mora Bamni, which means the security district for the area.
Speaker 1 (08:50):
El Shafi's crime was that he spoke up against the
regime during a student forum on the Green Book, Kadafi's
rambling manifesto.
Speaker 11 (08:57):
He has compiled his thinking into a green book, a
blending of the Koran and Kadafi's own brooding thoughts.
Speaker 9 (09:05):
He called the Anovaria Tarita means the third solution for
the world. You know, as a capitalism is dying and
the socialism is dying, I am the solution for the world.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
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 Gadafi seriously as a thinker,
and he was tired of the regime having control over
his mind.
Speaker 9 (09:30):
There is no library in none of our Libyan cities.
If you want to read, the only books was brought
by Godavi's authority and put on the shelves.
Speaker 10 (09:43):
No voice above Godav's voice, you know.
Speaker 1 (09:45):
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,
(10:05):
then by plane to Tripoli, about four hundred miles west
of Bengui. Zi Alshafi was blindfolded and handcuffed throughout the journey,
so when he was led into a prison cell, he
didn't know where he was.
Speaker 9 (10:18):
There were small holes in the walls between cells, so
I was able to talk to one of those people
he was before us. At where we are, said Unibuslim body,
welcome to Buslim.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
Abu Salim was an infamous detention facility known for housing
political prisoners.
Speaker 14 (10:36):
The dark heart of Gaddafi's oppression, Abu Salim prison the.
Speaker 12 (10:40):
Name itself so frightening that Libyans avoid saying it.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
Abu Salim was full of people the Gadafi regime considered enemies. Historically,
opposition to Gaddafi and 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
(11:05):
Islamic Fighting Group, which supported the violent overthrow of the regime.
But there were also people like husay In El Shafi,
who opposed political violence and were unaffiliated with any organization.
Speaker 9 (11:17):
He claims those are Islamists, but I was, yeah, I
was going to the mosque. I was very con conservative
at that time, but I did not belong to any group,
like an armed group or anything like this.
Speaker 1 (11:32):
El 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 9 (11:42):
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 taken as a reason to kill or to
demolish his opponents.
Speaker 1 (12:03):
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 nineteen eighties as a
(12:25):
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
(12:50):
Abu Salim, Hussein el 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 Sulim have reported
being attacked by dog, subjected to deafening nightly broadcasts of
(13:12):
Gaddafi's speeches, and prodded with electric cables. When I interviewed
El Shafi, he had to take a break because the
phone was hurting his ear. It had been mutilated at
Abu Sulim.
Speaker 9 (13:23):
I'll try to use this ear, not that ear, because
this one cut in the jail oh my god, have
did you see my ear?
Speaker 11 (13:29):
Yeah?
Speaker 10 (13:29):
Yeah, yeah, it's touching the thing, you know. Sorry by that.
Speaker 1 (13:35):
In nineteen ninety five, about six years into El Shafi's imprisonment,
life at Abu Sulim became more cruel and more isolating.
It happened following a jail break, after which inmates were
forbidden from going outside and medical care was withheld from
those who needed it.
Speaker 9 (13:53):
Things getting worse and worse and worse. Some people died,
Some people has cancers, you name it, heart pressure, and
some people has like stomach issues.
Speaker 10 (14:04):
Some of them, they said, were dying slowly guys.
Speaker 1 (14:12):
As conditions worsened, a group of inmates planned a protest,
and on June twenty eighth, nineteen ninety six, 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
(14:33):
arrived at the prison to survey the situation. Before leaving,
he promised a delegation of inmates that conditions at Abu
Sulim would improve and that those who needed medical attention
would receive it instead. The following morning, the prisoners of
Abu Sulim, More than a thousand of them were marched
into the courtyards adjacent to their cell blocks. Elshafi remembers
(14:56):
being taken outside and being ordered to lie face down
on the ground.
Speaker 9 (15:01):
They came in the morning, they said okay, room by rum,
they take them out.
Speaker 10 (15:08):
They tied their hands and the turn around facing the
wall in the yard.
Speaker 1 (15:13):
El Shaffie estimates that there were about thirteen hundred men
lined up in the prison yards when he started to
hear shooting.
Speaker 9 (15:20):
My friend is Cardiolois now in Ireland, his named Sab.
He was holding my hand tight. I said no, I said,
the care.
Speaker 10 (15:28):
Us, that's all.
Speaker 9 (15:28):
They're not gonna kill them all. They want to scare us.
They try to teach us a lesson, you know. He said,
three for our friends, their souls raising up the gun.
Speaker 1 (15:41):
Al Shaffie 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 from
one section of the prison to another.
Speaker 9 (15:51):
The shootings continued for at least three and a half hours.
Speaker 10 (15:58):
The last shot was individuals like they're finishing up, you know.
Speaker 1 (16:08):
El Shaffie thinks he and the other men in his
cell block were spared because of their low risk classification.
He says there were only about three hundred survivors. After
the shooting ended, prison guards enlisted some of them to
help clean the watches and rings. They were taking off
the bodies.
Speaker 9 (16:26):
And they have plots info the wear on them. And
I said, oh my gosh, they're sitting. They have rings
and they watches, Oh my gosh.
Speaker 1 (16:36):
For years, the massacre at Abu Salim was kept secret
from the world, even in Libya. It was nothing more
than a rumor.
Speaker 10 (16:45):
No one knows nothing.
Speaker 9 (16:46):
All well, they know people heard shooting and they hit
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 1 (17:02):
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 be at 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
(17:22):
at Abu Sulim in the years after the massacre would
find bullets lodged in the prison yard walls.
Speaker 9 (17:34):
There is a.
Speaker 15 (17:34):
Figure emerging in the Middle East. He is Colonel Muammar
El Kadafi, and he wants to unify the Arabs and
restore the Arab Crescent of Nations to their ancient prestige
and power.
Speaker 10 (17:44):
In the Shaving.
Speaker 1 (17:46):
Before Mumar Gadafi built prisons for his domestic enemies, he
made a name for himself by standing up to his
foreign ones. Gaddafi came to power in nineteen sixty nine,
replacing the Western backed king Idris by staging a military
coup in Benghazi. Gaddafi was just twenty seven years old,
a handsome young army officer who projected strength and vigor,
(18:08):
and who was embraced by many Libyans.
Speaker 14 (18:11):
Olibya was an obscure desert kingdom. Today it is on
the center stage of Middle East politics, and the matter
responsible is under thirty.
Speaker 11 (18:19):
A strong and asymmetric cancerness like the anti hero movie
stars of the.
Speaker 1 (18:23):
Sixties, Kaddafi, 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 13 (18:34):
A revolutionary who believes people should rule themselves, not be
ruled by government.
Speaker 15 (18:38):
If those ambitions seem grandiose for the young leader of
a desert land of a mere two million people, it
should be quickly pointed out that Kadafi has one powerful asset.
Speaker 14 (18:47):
Money Oil money makes Libya's young leftist strong man a
power in the Arab world.
Speaker 1 (18:56):
In a move that defined his early years in power,
Kaddafi forced Western oil companies to renegotiate their export agreements
with Libya.
Speaker 14 (19:03):
In March, Kaddafi's deputy prime minister negotiated a new agreement
with Western oil companies. Libya is now making twice as
much money from oil as when Gadaffi and his young
officers overthrow King DRIs two years ago.
Speaker 1 (19:16):
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 14 (19:26):
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 two billion dollars.
Speaker 1 (19:37):
Starting in the nineteen seventies, 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, South African Anti apartheid movement, and the IRA
in Northern Ireland.
Speaker 15 (19:53):
Each year, the IRA collects a check for two million
dollars from one of Gadaf's money managers in Tripoli.
Speaker 10 (20:00):
Round the globe, dozens of scenes like.
Speaker 15 (20:02):
This are being enacted for the benefit of Gadaf's crusade.
Speaker 1 (20:06):
According to one estimate, more than thirty different organizations sent
fighters to train in Libya at various points.
Speaker 15 (20:13):
Libya's strong man leader Mumar Khadaffi, spends an estimated two
hundred million dollars a year arming and training terrorists and insurgents.
Speaker 1 (20:21):
Gaddafi also spent a lot of money building up his
own Arsenal her capital.
Speaker 16 (20:26):
Libya under Gaddaffi in the seven sies was the biggest
purchaser of weapons in the world. He was like a
compulsive shopper.
Speaker 1 (20:34):
This is Lindsay Hilsom, a reporter for Channel four News
in the UK who has covered Libya extensively. In her
book Sandstorm, Hilsomon describes how Mumar Gadafi came to loom
over the American imagination as a symbol of violence and chaos.
Speaker 13 (20:48):
He's the ultimate villain, the godfather of international terrorism, a
one dimensional, erratic, irrational, unbalanced two bit dictate.
Speaker 5 (20:56):
A central character in real world acts of terror, as well.
Speaker 8 (21:00):
As the star of a number of best selling thrillers
based on the premise that one day he would get
the bomb.
Speaker 15 (21:05):
He's very volatile, an opportunistic.
Speaker 1 (21:10):
In nineteen eighty one, Newsweek put Gadafi 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 13 (21:27):
He has three obsessions. Hatred of Israel, hatred of the
United States for supporting Israel, and a dream of a
united Arab world.
Speaker 1 (21:35):
Libya became synonymous with terrorism. If you remember Back to
the Future, which came out in nineteen eighty five, Doc
Brown is pursued by crazed terrorists from Libya who want
to kill him for selling them a phony nuclear bomb.
Oh my god, they found me.
Speaker 3 (21:51):
I don't know how they found who?
Speaker 2 (21:53):
Who?
Speaker 8 (21:54):
What do you think?
Speaker 1 (21:58):
Gaddafi became even more closely associated with terrorism in nineteen
eighty six, when his regime was implicated in a bombing
in Berlin. Reporter Lindsay Hilsome.
Speaker 16 (22:07):
Again in nineteen eighty six, he provided the weapons, training
and his agents attacked a belgiscotheque in Berlin.
Speaker 17 (22:18):
For the second time.
Speaker 13 (22:19):
This week, Americans had been the victims of a terrorist
attack in Europe.
Speaker 17 (22:22):
This time the target was a nightclub in West Berlin,
a favorite of American soldiers. Little was left of the
West Berlin Disco.
Speaker 15 (22:29):
Over one hundred and fifty were injured, about seventy of
them American.
Speaker 16 (22:33):
Servicemen, and it was quite clear from very early on
that it was the Libyans behind that attack.
Speaker 8 (22:40):
Police are looking for a pattern to support their belief
that Libyan leader Colonel Muamar Kadaffi sponsored the attack.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
Two Americans were killed and seventy nine were injured in
the Berlin attack. Ronald Reagan responded with air strikes on
Tripoli and Benghazi.
Speaker 4 (22:55):
At seven 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
Muhama Kadafi's subversive activities.
Speaker 1 (23:11):
The bombs were not enough to convince Gaddafi to retreat,
Neither were the economic sanctions that Reagan had imposed on him.
In nineteen eighty eight, Gaddafi was accused of another major
terrorist attack, this one targeting a passenger jet flying from
London to New York. As PanAm Flight one oh three
passed over the town of Lockerby, Scotland, a bomb exploded
(23:33):
and the plane went down.
Speaker 6 (23:34):
In a few short, violent moments, two hundred and seventy
people died. People from twenty one countries filled these coffins,
one hundred and eighty nine of them were American.
Speaker 1 (23:46):
Gaddafi denied having anything to do with the Lockerby bombing,
but when evidence of Libyan involvement was uncovered, the attack
came to define him in the eyes of the West.
Speaker 13 (23:56):
Is an egomaniac who would trigger World War three to
make the headlines, is the world's principal terrorist and trainer
of terrorists, and dangerous to peace.
Speaker 1 (24:12):
As Gaddafi's profile rose around the world, the violence he
perpetrated against foreign targets overshadowed his brutal repression of the
Libyan people.
Speaker 16 (24:22):
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
(24:42):
closed country and very few people were allowed into Libya
from the outside.
Speaker 1 (24:49):
The regime's secrecy makes it difficult to know exactly how
common public executions were, but there are documented instances of
dissidence in Libya being hanged or executed by firing squad
in the seventies, eighties and nineties. Hussein al Shafi told
me he remembers hearing about hangings before he was sent
to Abu Salim.
Speaker 9 (25:10):
I remember in nineteen eighty four, Ladafi Wah used to
hang any opposition groups, you know, on the like a
basketball stadium, you know, like arena we have here, like
Spectrum center, you know. 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
(25:32):
many times in the college in the university Libia university,
like in Trebly or Benghazi.
Speaker 10 (25:37):
He takes them and.
Speaker 9 (25:38):
They hang them and he kills the students because they
are a part of the opposition group.
Speaker 1 (25:43):
Alshafi never attended an execution in person, but he did
see it happen on TV.
Speaker 9 (25:49):
I see this once and then I go cry. You know,
I go hiding some in a room cry. I see look,
he's hanging people, and the crowd, the crowd supporting this.
Speaker 10 (25:59):
Oh, Gadaffi, yeah, your them, call them.
Speaker 1 (26:03):
The nineteen ninety six 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
(26:24):
Amnesty International called on Gadafi to order an investigation, but
that effort didn't go anywhere. Kadafi 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 el Shafi was
(26:45):
released from Abu Salim. It happened on June first, two thousand,
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. Elshafi went home
to Benghazi and started trying to get a passport. He
wanted to leave Libya and escape the Gadafi regime for good.
(27:08):
The passport still hadn't come when Elshafi started seeing reports
that world leaders, including from the United States, were changing
their stance on Gadafi and inviting him in from the cold.
Speaker 17 (27:19):
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 1 (27:30):
The man who had imprisoned El 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 8 (27:45):
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 1 (27:53):
El 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. Alshafi assumed that it meant
the US was going to start selling Gaddafi weapons.
Speaker 10 (28:06):
I said, fuck politics, fuck the money people.
Speaker 9 (28:09):
First, if you Invagadavi sons and you give him whapons,
US administration as a color seem freaking Goadavi.
Speaker 1 (28:25):
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 nineteen ninety nine
to surrender two Libyans who were suspected of carrying out
the Locker bebombing. But it wasn't until the Bush years
(28:48):
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 in 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
(29:08):
White House, Kadafi agreed to give up his nascent nuclear
program and to allow weapons inspectors into Libya.
Speaker 4 (29:15):
Libya's surprise announcement that it will give up its weapons
of mass destruction is reverberating worldwide.
Speaker 1 (29:21):
The Bush administration hailed it as a diplomatic triumph.
Speaker 4 (29:24):
Today in Tripoli, Libya has begun the process of rejoining
the Community of Nations. Its good faith will be returned.
Speaker 18 (29:34):
Without the Iraq War, the trajectory of the US Libya
relationship would have been much much different.
Speaker 1 (29:40):
This is Ethan Chorin. He was sent to Tripoli by
the State Department in two thousand and four, who was
his first posting as a member of the Foreign Service.
Speaker 18 (29:48):
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 1 (29:58):
Chorin, the author of a book about Libya called Exit.
The colonel explained to me that making a deal with
Kaddafi was specifically attractive to the Bush White House as
a follow up to the invasion of Iraq.
Speaker 18 (30:10):
The neo conservative cabel in Washington looking for the next move, essentially,
and they were weren't interested in Kadafi until essentially it
dawned on a few people that the relationship with Kadafi
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 Kadafi ostensibly had
(30:32):
something that you could call such a program, and he
was willing to give it up.
Speaker 1 (30:36):
Chorn's point here was that Kadafi'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 Kadafi were one that American companies could start
doing business in Libya, and two that the Kadafi regime
could be helpful in the war on terror.
Speaker 8 (30:59):
Kadafi says, intelligence agencies in Libya and the US are
exchanging information.
Speaker 1 (31:06):
The terrorists America was now hunting in the Middle East
and North Africa. Daffi's longtime enemies too. All through the nineties,
he had been at war with Islamist groups suspected of
having connections to Al Qaida. In fact, in nineteen ninety eight,
the Gaddafi regime had issued an Interpol arrest warrant for
Oslam Bin Laden on the basis that al Qaeda had
(31:26):
been working with radicals in Libya. Reporter Lindsay Hilsom.
Speaker 16 (31:30):
Again, Gaddaffi 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 Gadaffi. But they were part of this
international Jihat, and of course that was the international Gia
(31:52):
had which you know on nine to eleven flew into
the Twin Towers and murdered all the Americans.
Speaker 1 (31:59):
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 2 (32:12):
Kalybean leader Mamar al Kadafi is now being called an
enemy of Islam by al Qaeda.
Speaker 1 (32:19):
Between all that and the oil contracts, it was enough
to convince the White House that Kaddafi was worth the baggage.
Speaker 4 (32:26):
The first time in almost a quarter century, the US
has diplomatic ties with Libya.
Speaker 1 (32:32):
The US mission and Tripoli had been abandoned in nineteen eighty,
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
(33:01):
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 two thousand and four, and he was excited.
Speaker 18 (33:15):
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 1 (33:24):
It was up to choren and his State Department colleagues
to figure out what was going on in Libya, how
the Goadathi 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 18 (33:43):
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 1 (33:52):
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, d C.
At the time, but he had made it known to
his superiors of the State Department that he wanted to
be posted in Libya at the next available opportunity.
Speaker 18 (34:10):
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 sort of completely off limits to Americans and unknown,
and that clearly excited him, and it's excited me.
Speaker 1 (34:26):
Stevens had been in the Foreign Service for about twenty
years after starting and abandoning a career as an international
trade lawyer.
Speaker 3 (34:33):
They 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 1 (34:40):
This is journalist Paul Richter. He's the author of the
book The Ambassadors, in which he details Chris Stevens's tenure
at the State Department.
Speaker 3 (34:47):
So at a rather old age he went into the
Foreign Service. It was basically kind of a second career
for him.
Speaker 1 (34:55):
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
apparently shared with a long line of Western diplomats.
Speaker 3 (35:13):
There's been a certain romance about the Middle East that
goes back to T. E. Lawrence and other British and
Europeans who saw some mystery, some fascination that they didn't
see in other parts of the world.
Speaker 1 (35:31):
One of Stephens's 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 nineteenth century. These diplomats and adventurers often
(35:53):
wrote about the region as ancient, otherworldly, and almost mystical.
Speaker 3 (35:57):
There is probably a colonialist dimension to it in their attitude,
and some of that. There's something about the serenity. There's
something about the harshness of the atmosphere and the beauty
of the vironment that draws them, and there is something
about the exotic nature of the Arab world that they
just can't find in other places, and they keep going
(36:20):
back to it.
Speaker 1 (36:21):
As Richter described it to me, Stevens was attracted to
the lifestyle Libya offered and the feeling of timelessness he
found there.
Speaker 3 (36:28):
He liked going out and enjoying goat met 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
(36:50):
years ago, and then later Stephens would discover that they
were talking about people who died centuries ago.
Speaker 1 (36:56):
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 Schorin, Stevens
made clear how excited he was at the prospect of
being posted there.
Speaker 18 (37:10):
Chris would write and ask something along lines of should
I tay you know, 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 1 (37:28):
In many ways, Stevens's 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 two thousand and six, when he was posted in Jerusalem,
Stephens served as a liaison to the PLO, the Palestine
Liberation Organization.
Speaker 4 (37:46):
The Palestinian elections had a stunning outcome, a landslide victory
for harmas official results today showed the aslam.
Speaker 1 (37:54):
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 3 (38:04):
After Hamas had won that election, Stephens wrote his closest friends,
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 1 (38:24):
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 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 3 (38:45):
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
(39:05):
a jihadist in Afghanistan couple of years before.
Speaker 1 (39:09):
Stevens's friend 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's outlook on
the Arab world, and more specifically his approach to diplomacy
(39:31):
in Libya. For Chorin, the tragedy of the Bengazi 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 18 (39:43):
But this is the heart of the Libya problem, is
that there was this sort of long, disjointed or absent
period of uh in many decades where the US Libya
relationship with 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
(40:05):
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 1 (40:16):
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 two thousand and seven, he was invited to Mulmar
Gadaffi's fortress for a banquet in honor of the French
president Nicholas Sarkozi. Stevens was introduced to Gaddafi briefly on
a receiving line journalist Paul Richter again.
Speaker 3 (40:38):
And he saw at this event Kadafi's ambivalence toward the US.
Kadafi 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 1 (41:00):
Gaddafi did not try to hide this antipathy, as Stevens
observed in letters to his family. The dinner for Sarkosi
was staged directly in view of a building that had
been destroyed by American air strikes in nineteen eighty six.
Gaddafi had commemorated it with a plaque recalling the failed
American aggression. Near where Gadaffi and Sarkozi were sitting was
(41:20):
a massive gold sculpture of a fist crushing an American
fighter jet.
Speaker 3 (41:25):
And there was a music played at the event, a
patriotic song about fighting off the enemies of Libya. And
this old anti American feeling that had sustained his regime
for so many decades was still there.
Speaker 1 (41:42):
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 were widely regarded as the future
of the country.
Speaker 12 (41:54):
Lu Mahgadafi has been married twice and has eight biological
children and to adopted.
Speaker 1 (42:00):
In particular, Gaddafi's son Safe al Islam, emerged as his
father's heir apparent and made great efforts to present himself
to the West as a reasonable, moderated influence on the regime.
Speaker 12 (42:11):
Say Al Islam may be the most recognized and out
spoken of those offspring. He attended the London School of Economics,
saying as an advocate of reform.
Speaker 1 (42:20):
By this point, Hussain al Shafi, the former prisoner at
Abu Sulim, had finally gotten his passport. At one point
during the three year process, he had to submit a
letter addressing Gaddafi personally. In it, Alshafi said he needed
to get to Egypt or Tunisia to seek medical help
for his wife.
Speaker 10 (42:39):
I wrote a big petition.
Speaker 9 (42:41):
Man, you'll be laughing if you see it like this,
Wamar Ghadafi, my presidents, my leader, my God. I am
the former prisoners with no charge applying for the nest.
I promise I will defend liberal revolution. I would defend Bukadafi.
I love you Ghadafi. I would be a good person,
(43:03):
a good citizens. I'll protect the greenpook in my heart.
I love green Pook. Please you follower your lover, Hossin
o Sofi.
Speaker 1 (43:14):
For all that, El 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 El Shaffie in twenty
twenty one, 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
(43:35):
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, Elshafi 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
(43:55):
the government had not even informed the victim's families that
their loved ones were dead. Lindsay Hilsome again, Bit by.
Speaker 16 (44:02):
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
(44:24):
kind of official.
Speaker 7 (44:26):
Word of it.
Speaker 16 (44:27):
And then the families began to join together because it
became clear that these weren't just deaths, these were murders.
Speaker 7 (44:35):
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 1 (44:45):
Human rights lawyers in Benghazi took on the family members
as clients and filed the legal claim demanding information from
the government. In two thousand and seven. The lawsuit gave
rise to the first public protest movement in modern Libyan history.
Speaker 7 (45:00):
The relatives held protest rallies outside the Justice Department in
Benghazi after they heard about what came to be known
as Bloody Saturday at Abusli in prison.
Speaker 16 (45:12):
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,
(45:32):
and it was quite hard for the authorities just to
lock them up and kill them because most of them
were old ladies.
Speaker 1 (45:41):
The regime found the protesters impossible to ignore, and at
the urging of Safe al Islam, Gaddafi's ostensibly moderate son,
the government started sending out death notices to hundreds of families,
finally confirming after more than twenty years, that their loved
ones had been killed. Still, the protest continued. Every Saturday,
(46:02):
the families would gather at the Benghazi courthouse, holding up
photos of the people they had lost and.
Speaker 7 (46:07):
Praying, demanding the bodies of the loved ones from the
Gaddafi regime.
Speaker 1 (46:13):
For a while, it was just about the only visible
form of descent 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 Muamar Gadafi. On the next episode of Fiasco,
(46:42):
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.
Speaker 18 (46:52):
Did it lifts the pressure?
Speaker 7 (46:54):
Yes, all of us.
Speaker 11 (46:57):
You know he would have destroyed Binghazi.
Speaker 10 (47:00):
He didn't want Benghazi anymore.
Speaker 1 (47:04):
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 Prolog Projects, and it's distributed
by Pushkin Industries. The show is produced by Andrew Parsons,
Ula Culpa, Sam Lee and me Leon Mayfock, with editorial
support from Sam Graham Felsen and Madeline Kaplan. Our researcher
(47:27):
was Francis Carr. Our score was composed by Dan English,
Joe Valley and Noah Hecht. Additional music by Nick Selevester
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 Yass
(47:52):
Butler PLLC. Thanks to Archive dot Org, muraud Idris, Nina,
Ernest tay Glass, Kerry Baker, Ismael Swea ellen Horn, Ben Ryder,
James Brandt, and Rachel Ward Special Thanks to Lubnary, and
thank you for listen
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