The book 13 Hours is not:
- A novel
- A political tirade
- An expose
- An examination whether our government deliberately misled about the terrorist involvement
- A prescription to avoid future incidents
- A blame cast (although it’s obvious that there is plenty to blame if one wanted)
13 Hours is an hour-by-hour account of the time immediately before, during and after the September 11, 2012 Benghazi attack on the US consular office and CIA annex as seen by, acted by, thought and felt by the surviving members of the “annex security team”. The security team members were ex-military men contracted to provide extra security to the CIA case officers present in Benghazi, Libya.
I was impressed by the care the authors took to avoid compromising security or blaming others by name. Naturally they were furious about certain measures, notably that the local CIA security chief “Bob” (not his real name) insisted on relying on local Libyan militia and, per their narrative, insisted on delaying the response to the first attack on the local consular office while he tried to reach the local militia leaders. They used matter of fact, timeline narration to show their incredulous anger at the delay, during which two American consular staff and the US Ambassador to Libya were holed up in a burning residence.
They raised several points simply by stating the facts and narrating their response. For example, the consular office had no fire suppression or breathing masks, the local CIA chief seemed more interested in protecting the CIA mission secrecy than in responding to the crisis, the local militia were mixed quality and uncertain loyalty, and someone was able to fire mortars accurately onto the roof of a house-sized building. (The authors stated a mortar team needs exact coordinates to be that accurate – which leads one to wonder how the attackers got those coordinates.)
13 Hours does an excellent job making us see the security personnel as people instead of as faceless contractors, or stereotyped ex-military mercenary hard noses. They included several maps of local Benghazi and of the two compounds that helped set context. (Before reading I had the impression the “CIA annex” was in the same compound as the ambassador’s temporary residence when in fact it was about 2 miles away.)
Overall this is a sad book with an unhappy ending. The attacks killed the US ambassador, a computer expert and two of the contractors. The security team helped the few dozen other American staff to leave Benghazi alive.
Compliments to the authors for bringing a horrific situation to life via matter of fact, calm narratives instead of indulging in blame or rage. 4 Stars
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