Eyewitness Hicks: How Benghazi Actually Unfolded

Here is a partial transcript of his testimony, provided by Federal News Service(www.fednews.com).

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REP. DARRELL ISSA, COMMITTEE CHAIRMAN: Mr. Hicks, as the principal officer and the — you know, once the ambassador had been murdered, THE highest ranking officer on September 11th from the moment that you unexpectedly became the charge, America has heard many accounts of what happened. We’ve never heard accounts from a single person who was in Libya that night. You will be the first person who observed it. In your own words — take as much time as you want — please take us through the day of Sept. 11th, from whatever time you want to begin, through when you first heard from Ambassador Stevens and through the hours and days immediately following that, if you would, so we could have an understanding for the first time from somebody who was there.

GREGORY HICKS: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. As I remember Sept. 11th, 2012, it was a routine day at our embassy and — until we saw the news about Cairo. And I remember sending a text message to Ambassador Stevens saying, Chris, are you aware of what’s going on in Cairo? And he said, no. So I told him that the embassy in — in another text, that the embassy had been stormed and they were trying to tear down our flag. And he said, thanks very much. And, you know, then I went on with business.

Closed the day and I went back to my villa and was relaxing, watching a television show that I particularly like, and at 9:45 p.m. — and all times will be Libyan times, there’s a six-hour time difference — the RSO [Regional Security Officer], John Martinec, ran into my villa, yelling, Greg, Greg, the consulate’s under attack. And I stood up and reached for my phone because I had an inkling or a thought that perhaps the ambassador had tried to call me to relay the same message, and I found two missed calls on the phone, one from the ambassador’s phone, one from a phone number I didn’t recognize.

And I punched the phone number I didn’t recognize, and I got the ambassador on the other end, and he said, Greg, we’re under attack. And I was walking out of the villa on my way to the tactical operation center, because I knew we would all have to gather there to mobilize or try to mobilize a response. And it was also a bad cellphone night in Tripoli. Connections were weak. And I said OK, and the line cut. As I walked to the tactical operations center, I tried to reach back on both of the numbers, the unknown number and the ambassador’s personal number, and got no response.

When I got to the tactical operations center, I told people that the ambassador — that I’d just talked to the ambassador and what he said. At the time John Martinec was on the phone with Alec Henderson in Benghazi, the RSO there. And I asked one of our DS agents who — what number did I reach Ambassador Stevens on. And he said, oh, that’s Scott Wickland‘s telephone. Scott Wickland was Ambassador Stevens’ agent in charge, his personal escort for that night, and was with him in the villa during the attack.

So I asked — when John Martinec got off the telephone, I asked him what was going on, and he said that the consulate had been breached and there were at least 20 hostile individuals armed in the — in the compound at the time.

So I next called the annex chief to ask him if he was in touch with the Benghazi annex to activate our emergency response plan.

REP. ISSA: Please explain the annex chief, so that people that don’t know as much would understand that.

No, go ahead, please.

MR. HICKS: OK. Thank you.

And he said that he had been in touch with the annex in Benghazi, and they said they were mobilizing a response team there to go to the — to our facility and provide reinforcements and to repel the attack.

With that knowledge, I called the operations center at the State Department at approximately 10 p.m. to report the attack and what we were doing to respond to it. The next thing I did was to begin calling the senior officials in the government of Libya that I knew at the time. And so I dialed first President Megarif’s chief of staff and reported the attack and asked for immediate assistance from the government of Libya to assist our folks in Benghazi. I followed that up with a call to the prime minister’s chief of staff to make the same request and then to the MFA Americas director. “MFA” is “Ministry of Foreign Affairs.”

The defense attache was at the same time calling the leadership of Libya’s military with the same purpose, to ask them for assistance. Once that was done, I called again to Washington to report that these actions had been commenced.

Over the night we — over that night that is basically how our team operated. I was talking to the government of Libya, reporting to the State — the State Department through the operations center and also staying in touch with the annex chief about what was going on.

Let me step back one minute, if I could, and say that I also discussed with the annex chief about mobilizing a Tripoli response team, and we agreed that we would move forward with a — chartering a plane from Tripoli to fly a response team to Benghazi to provide additional reinforcements.

The defense attache was also reporting through his chain of command back to the AFRICOM and to the Joint Staff here in Washington about what was going on in the country.

David McFarland, our political section chief, had just returned from Benghazi, where he had been our principal officer for the previous 10 days. And so he jumped into this picture by reaching out to his contacts in Benghazi and trying to get them at the local level there to respond to the attack. And he also was in touch with our local employee there as well.

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The attack unfolded in four phases — or the night unfolded in four phases. The first phase was the attack on our consulate. The story is well known, I think. The Benghazi — the consulate was invaded. The Villa C where the ambassador and Sean Smith and Scott Wickland were hiding in the safe area was set on fire. The attackers also went into another — went into another building. They were unable to enter the tactical operations center in Benghazi because of improvements to that facility that had been made. They — Scott attempted to lead the ambassador and Sean Smith out of the burning building. He managed to make it out. He tried repeatedly to go back in to try to rescue Sean and the ambassador but had to stop due to exposure to smoke.

The response team from the annex in Benghazi, six individuals, drove the attackers out of our compound and secured it temporarily. There have been estimates as high as 60 attackers were in the compound at one particular time. There were repeated attempts by all of the RSOs and by the response team from the annex to go into the burning building and recover — or try to save Sean and the ambassador. They found Sean’s body and pulled it out, but he was no longer responsive. They did not find the ambassador.

I spoke with a medical officer, one of our medical officers, after the attack and the heroism of these individuals in repeatedly going into the petroleum-based fire cannot be understated. Petroleum — according to this — to our regional medical officer, petroleum- based fires emit enormous amounts of cyanide gas. And he told me that one full breath of that would incapacitate and kill a person if exposed to it.

The second — it was noticed that a second wave of attackers was coming to attack the facility and our teams evacuated, five RSOs and Sean Smith in one vehicle which suffered heavy fire, but they managed to break through and — into the annex, and then the annex team also withdrew from the facility and the second wave of attackers took it over.

After the second phase of the evening occurs — the timing is about 11:30 or so — the second phase commences after the teams have returned to the annex and they suffer, for about an hour and a half, probing attacks from terrorists. They are able to repulse them and then they desist at about 1:30 in the morning.

The Tripoli response team departs at about midnight and arrives at about 1:15 in Benghazi. If I may step back again to Tripoli and what’s going on there at this point. At about 10:45 or 11:00, we confer and I asked the defense attache who’d been talking with AFRICOM and with the Joint Staff: Is anything coming? Will they be sending us any help? Is there something out there? And he answered that the nearest help was in Aviano, and the nearest — where there were fighter planes. And he said that it would take two to three hours for them to get on site, but that there also were no tankers available for them to refuel. And I said, thank you very much, and we went on with our work.

Phase three begins with news that the ambassador — ambassador’s body has been recovered. And David McFarland, if I recall correctly, is the individual who began to receive that news from his contacts in Benghazi. And we began to hear also that the ambassador’s been taken to a hospital. We don’t know initially which hospital it is, but we — through David’s reports we learn that it is in a hospital which is controlled by Ansar al-Shariah, the group that Twitter feeds had identified as leading the attack on the consulate.

We’re getting this information as the Tripoli response team arrives in Benghazi at the airport. Both our annex chief and the annex chief in Benghazi, and our defense attache, are on the phone during this period, trying to get the Libyan government to send vehicles and military and/or security assets to the airport to assist our response team. At this point, this response team looks like it may be a hostage rescue team — that they are going to — we are going to need to send them to try to save the ambassador who is in a hospital that is, as far as we know, under enemy control.

Our contacts with the government in Tripoli are telling us that the ambassador is in a safe place, but they imply that he is with us in the annex in Benghazi. And we keep telling them, no, the — he is not with us. We do not have his — we do not have him. About 12:30, at the same time that we see the Twitter feeds that are asserting that Ansar Shariah is responsible for the attack, we also see a call for an attack on the embassy in Tripoli.

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On that night, if I may go back, I would just like to point out that with Ambassador Stevens and Sean Smith in Benghazi there are five diplomatic security agents — assistant regional security officers. With us in — at our residential compound in Tripoli, we have the RSO John Martinec, three assistant and regional security officers, protecting 28 diplomatic personnel. In addition we also have four special forces personnel who are part of the training mission.

During the night I’m in touch with Washington. We’re keeping them posted of what’s happening in Tripoli and, to the best of my knowledge, what I’m being told, in Benghazi. I think that about 2:00 p.m. the — 2:00 a.m., sorry — the secretary called — Secretary of State Clinton called me, along — and along with her senior staff, were all on the phone. And she asked me what was going on. And I briefed her on developments.

And a few minutes later came the word of the mortar attack.

If I could return to Benghazi a little bit — and I’ll talk to Tripoli — I’m sorry if I bounce back and forth — but the Tripoli team was basically — had to stay at the Benghazi airport because they had no transport and no escort from the Libyans. After the announcement of Chris’ passing, military escort and vehicles arrived at the airport. So the decision was made for them to go to the annex.

One of the — before I got the call from the prime minister, we had received several phone calls on the phone that had been with the ambassador saying that we know where the ambassador is; please, you can come get him. And our local staff engaged on those phone calls admirably, asking very, very good, outstanding, even, open-ended questions about where was he, trying to discern whether he was alive, would you let — whether they even had the ambassador or that person was with the ambassador; send a picture; could we talk to the ambassador.

Because we knew separately from David that the ambassador was in a hospital that we believe was under Ansar Sharia’s call, we suspected that we were being baited into a trap. And so we did not want to go send our people into an ambush. And we didn’t. We sent them to the annex.

Shortly after they arrived at the annex, the mortars came. First mortar round was long. It landed, actually, among the Libyans who escorted our people. They took casualties from us that night. And the next was short. The next three landed on the roof, killing Glen and Tyrone, severely wounding David. They didn’t know whether any more mortars were going to come in. The accuracy was terribly precise. The call was, the next one is coming through the roof, maybe, if it hit.

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In Tripoli, we had — the defense attache had persuaded the Libyans to fly their C-130 to Benghazi. We wanted to airlift — we had — since we had consolidated at the annex, and the Libyan government had now provided us with external security around our facilities, we wanted to send further reinforcements to Benghazi. We determined that Lt. Colonel Gibson and his team of special forces troops should go. The people in Benghazi had been fighting all night. They were tired. They were exhausted. We wanted to make sure the airport was secure for their withdrawal.

As Colonel Gibson and his three personnel were getting in the cars, he stopped, and he called them off and said — told me that he had not been authorized to go.

The vehicles had to go because the flight needed to go to Tripoli — I mean, to Benghazi. Lieutenant Colonel Gibson was furious. I had told him to go bring our people home. That’s what he wanted to do. Paid me a very nice compliment; I won’t repeat it here. So the plane went. I think it landed in Benghazi around 7:30.

The other thing that we did was — and I — and I want to mention Jackie Levesque’s (sp) name in this hearing. She was our nurse. …

I knew David was severely wounded and I knew others were wounded as well. And Jackie had just made terrific contacts with a hospital in town, and so we sent her — I sent her to that hospital to start mobilizing their ER teams and their doctors to receive our wounded so that when the charter flight arrived in Tripoli we had ambulances at the — at the — at the airport waiting. Their doctors were ready and waiting for our wounded to come in, to be brought into the operating room. And they certainly saved David Ubben’s leg and they may very well have saved his life. And they treated our other wounded as well, as if they were their own.