It's curious that a kid from California who grew up knowing nothing about the Arab world would come to devote his career to the Middle East and North Africa—as opposed to, say, Asia or Scandinavia or even no particular place. A European woman named Henriette, who met Stevens in Jerusalem in 2003 and had a "fantastic, turbulent" on-and-off romance with him for nine years, tried to explain it to me.
"After we had become a couple," she said, "I asked Chris when was the first time he noticed me with interest. He told me that it was at the dinner party where we first met. He said that he had liked the way I smelled. Chris was a sensualist—he applied all his senses in experiencing the world. For people like us, the Middle East is tantalizing. The smell of coffee with cardamom, and of apple tobacco burning in water pipes; the color and touch of carpets and fabrics; the sounds of the muezzin call to prayers and the energy of crazy urban traffic and large desert landscapes. The warmth of its people and the sound of their music and language. If you combine that with analytical curiosity invested in understanding the long history of the region and the complex dynamics of its current politics, the Middle East is a place you can't resist. It is not only an intellectual endeavor—it makes you feel fully alive."
···
According to senior State Department officials, the agent in the tactical-operations center saw, on the screen monitoring the main gate, armed men swarming in. There were too many to count. He punched the alarm, grabbed the microphone for the loudspeakers. "Attack! Attack!" he yelled.
The other four security agents were in the main residence with Stevens and Smith. One of them hustled the ambassador and Smith into the back half of the building, dropped the metal grille, sealed them inside the safe haven. The other three sprinted for their own automatic weapons and body armor. The agent with Stevens and Smith radioed that they were secure in the safe haven.
The barracks at the front gate of the compound was in flames, and attackers were spreading through the property. They broke into the main residence, which was very dark. They tried the locks on the grille to the safe haven but couldn't break them. The security agent, quiet in the shadows, trained his M4 submachine gun on their silhouettes, ready to fire if they made it into the safe haven. They didn't. But they had jerricans of diesel fuel from the barracks. They doused the floor, the furniture, the puffy couches and overstuffed chairs, and set the place alight.
Oily smoke and the fumes of melting synthetics billowed through the residence, choking, poisoning the men trapped inside. Stevens, Smith, and the bodyguard moved into a bathroom, got to a window covered with a grate. The smoke was a black fog. The men were down on the floor, gasping for whatever air was left in the building. They decided to get outside, so they crawled to a bedroom where the window grille could be opened from the inside.
The agent, wheezing and half blind from the smoke, flopped out onto a patio bunkered with sandbags. He immediately came under fire: There were dozens of attackers flooding Château Christophe, firing wildly.
Neither Stevens nor Smith followed the agent out the window, so the agent climbed back in after them. He couldn't find either man. He went back out for a gulp of fresher air, then came back in again, out, in, out. He still couldn't find Stevens or Smith. His lungs and throat seared, the agent managed to pull himself up a ladder to the roof. He collapsed as he radioed the other guards.
The other four American security operatives could barely understand him. The attackers had broken inside Building B, the smaller residence at the compound, but they couldn't get to the agents barricaded in an interior room, and they hadn't been able to penetrate the operations center at all.
There wasn't a direct line of sight from either Building B or the operations center, but the agents could see a black cloud rising. They had to get to the safe room in the main residence. An agent in the operations center opened the door, lobbed a smoke grenade to cover him, then sprinted into Building B, joining the other two agents. The three of them got into an armored SUV parked outside and floored it to the main residence. Two of the agents held off the attackers while the third slipped inside. He searched for Stevens and Smith on his hands and knees until the smoke got too bad and he had to get outside for some air. He went back in, and when he was too incapacitated, another agent took his place. Then the third.
One of them found Smith and pulled him out. He was already dead from the smoke. But they still couldn't find Stevens.
Reinforcements arrived, six Americans from a quick-reaction force stationed in an annex about a mile away, accompanied by sixteen more men from the 17th of February Martyrs Brigade. They retrieved the lone agent from the operations center, who'd been on the phone calling for backup from the quick-reaction team and Tripoli. Then all the men regrouped at the main residence. The agent from the operations center clambered inside; a couple of the reinforcements did, too. None of them could find Stevens. Finally, the agent who'd made all the calls stripped off his T-shirt, soaked it in a swimming pool, wrapped it around his face, made one more sweep. Nothing.
The Americans and their Libyan allies tried to hold a perimeter around the residence, but, overwhelmed, they were forced to evacuate to the annex. The ambassador's security agents piled into an SUV with Smith's body.
The fleeing Americans took fire, close-range, coming out of the compound. Farther down the road, more armed men strafed the vehicle with automatic rifles. A hand grenade bounced off it; another rolled underneath. Two tires were blown out. The SUV was still rolling but slowed by traffic, so they jumped a median and drove down the wrong side of the road.
They reached the annex. The men got into firing positions inside the walls and on the roof. For hours they took bursts of rifle fire and RPGs. In the early morning, more reinforcements arrived, Americans flown in from Tripoli. Still the attack continued. At about four o'clock, mortars fell from the dark sky. One landed on the roof. Two former Navy Seals, Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods, were killed, and a third man—one of Stevens's original bodyguards—was badly wounded.
The survivors decided to abandon the city. They organized a convoy of SUVs, secured a route to the airport from friendly militiamen, and finally escaped on two airplanes just after dawn.
The fire in the residence eventually died down. The attackers faded away. Libyans, maybe looters or maybe just curious men, managed to break into the safe haven, where they found Stevens. They pulled him out, carried him from the compound, loaded him into a car, raced to the hospital.
Doctors in the emergency room tried to revive him for forty-five minutes. Unable to identify the dead man on the gurney, they fished a cell phone from his pocket and began dialing numbers in the call history.
The attackers who overran the American mission in Benghazi were suspected to be, not surprisingly, Islamic militants. It is unlikely, though, that they had any idea who, exactly, they were poisoning with diesel smoke. If Chris Stevens had been the target, it would have been simpler to hit his convoy or grab him on his morning run or snatch him from a meeting. Also, a live American ambassador would have been a more valuable asset than a dead one.
But because Chris Stevens was killed fifty-six days before the presidential election, he became a political prop within hours of his death. Before dawn on September 12, Mitt Romney claimed him as a martyr to American weakness. Paul Ryan said the killing was emblematic of the Obama foreign policy, which "is unraveling literally before our eyes on our TV screens." Republican congressmen who'd happily cut the State Department's security budget ginned up hearings to figure out why there wasn't more security in Benghazi (and managed to out a CIA safe house in the process).
Sean Hannity announced to his many millions of listeners that Stevens had been raped and his body dragged through the streets, a slur that was not only horribly cruel to Stevens's friends and family but plainly false. Six weeks after the fact, during the second presidential debate, Romney was frantically parsing whether Obama had declared Stevens's murder an "act of terror" and if he'd done so promptly enough. The Obama administration was criticized for initially suggesting that the attack began with a protest over that idiotic Internet video. But by mid-October, that still seemed a fair conclusion: The New York Times reported that locals said the invaders had indeed been Islamists enraged by the video.
Sean Hannity announced to his many millions of listeners that Stevens had been raped and his body dragged through the streets, a slur that was not only horribly cruel to Stevens's friends and family but plainly false. Six weeks after the fact, during the second presidential debate, Romney was frantically parsing whether Obama had declared Stevens's murder an "act of terror" and if he'd done so promptly enough. The Obama administration was criticized for initially suggesting that the attack began with a protest over that idiotic Internet video. But by mid-October, that still seemed a fair conclusion: The New York Times reported that locals said the invaders had indeed been Islamists enraged by the video.
Even the apparently important operational question—namely, was there enough security—seems irrelevant, because there can never be enough to prepare for every scenario. "The lethality and the number of armed people is unprecedented—there had been no attacks like that anywhere in Libya," a senior State Department official said. "In fact, it would be very, very hard to find an attack like that in recent diplomatic history."
And all of it missed, almost entirely, the point of Chris Stevens's career. Diplomats do not work effectively from behind fortress walls. The foreign service sends people all over the planet to gather information and represent American interests, yes, but also to make friends.
Ten days after the attack on Château Christophe, on what was to have been an American Space, 30,000 Benghazi civilians marched in the streets and drove the Islamist militias from their city. Thousands sent condolences to his family. And on a memorial website, scattered among the stories from old friends and colleagues, there are notes from ordinary Libyans who never even met the man. They say things like:
I feel ashamed that a man like this was killed by a bunch of low life, religious zealot cowards. This is a man that has done so much for Libya.
And: Amb Chris Stevens, all the Libyan people love you and will never forget your views toward us here in Libya.
And: We feel very sorry, please forgive us, we love you chris and your family also all american.
That was the point of Chris Stevens's work.
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