Michael Morell wants you to know that he’s been misunderstood, mischaracterized, and maligned. Morell, the former deputy director of the CIA, was at the center of the controversy over the Benghazi attacks and the Obama administration’s attempts to sell the country a phony narrative about what had happened and why. He’s written a memoir of his time at the highest levels of U.S. intelligence, The Great War of Our Time: The CIA’s Fight Against Terrorism—From al Qa’ida to ISIS, and it includes two chapters on Benghazi.
Morell would have us believe that he’s written these 47 pages on Benghazi to correct misperceptions about his role and provide context for his actions. His critics will see his account rather as a transparent attempt to rewrite history and salvage what little credibility Morell retained after the Benghazi scandal. The critics are right. Morell’s attempt fails miserably.
Start with the facts about Benghazi that Morell doesn’t challenge:
* In every case, the changes made by administration and intelligence officials to the Benghazi talking points originated by the CIA had the effect of downplaying the significance of the attacks—cutting “Islamic,” replacing “attacks” with “demonstrations,” removing “with ties to al Qaeda,” excising mention of the involvement of Ansar al Sharia.
* Despite his own heavy hand in editing the Benghazi talking points, Morell sat silent when members of Congress grilled intelligence officials, including Morell, about who had made the changes.
* When he was asked if the intelligence community had provided the Benghazi talking points to the White House for “awareness or coordination,” Morell claimed that they were provided for awareness—as something of a courtesy. He made that claim despite the existence of dozens of pages of email traffic showing the clear coordination of the talking points between the intelligence community and top Obama officials at the White House and elsewhere.
* Although Susan Rice made misleading claims during her Sunday television appearances—claims that never appeared in the intelligence on Benghazi—Morell agreed to a White House request that he accompany her to a meeting with senators as she prepared for her possible nomination as Obama’s next secretary of state.
Morell doesn’t dispute these facts. That is both prudent and necessary: They’re indisputable.
Instead, he concedes that it was a “serious mistake” for CIA public affairs officials to remove the fact that the attackers had “ties to al Qaeda.” He allows that the talking points “could have been more robust.” He concedes that he should have acknowledged his role in editing the talking points when members of Congress asked him about the changes. He abandons his claim that the talking points were shared with the White House only for “awareness” and not “coordination,” and concedes that his original claim “was clearly not right.” He further concedes that he never should have accompanied Rice on her repair-the-damage visit to Capitol Hill: “Attending the meeting was a mistake.”
Such mea culpas are common in political memoirs. The former government officials who write tell-all accounts of their service often include admissions of error or mistaken judgment, and whether the authors intend it or not, these confessions often engender some empathy and occasionally seem to restore some of the credibility lost in the original commission of the errors.
That doesn’t happen here because Morell’s revisionist account of what happened in Benghazi reeks of the same mendacity that got him in trouble in the first place. At times, Morell, who scratched and clawed and pleased his way to the very top of the intelligence bureaucracy in Washington, would have us believe that he was a naïf, unaware of the politics being practiced by everyone around him. This is true of his explanation for his decision to accompany Susan Rice to Capitol Hill.
Morell writes that there were two sets of talking points: those produced by the intelligence community and a second set produced by the White House. In its talking points, the White House was “blaming the Benghazi attack on the [YouTube] video which is not something CIA did in its talking points or in its classified analysis.” And while Rice echoed the intelligence community talking points in her Sunday show appearances, “she also said that the video had led to the protests in Benghazi,” Morell argues. “Why she said this I do not know.”
This is no small point. The video story was the centerpiece of the White House effort to create a false narrative of what happened in Benghazi. The president repeatedly blamed the attacks on the video. At the memorial service for those killed, Secretary of State Hil-lary Clinton promised family members that the administration would make sure the filmmaker was brought to justice. White House spokesman Jay Carney repeatedly invoked the video as the proximate cause of the attacks. But Rice, in particular, sought to shift the blame for American deaths in Ben-ghazi from a terrorist attack on U.S. facilities on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks to unruly protesters whose understandable anger over a video disrespectful of Islam spun out of control.
This created a problem for Obama. He wanted to nominate Rice to replace Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, but in the face of the politicization of Benghazi she was unlikely to win support from Republicans. As Morell writes: “It was clear that her potential nomination for secretary of state was in jeopardy.” In an effort to revive her prospects, the White House asked Morell to accompany her to meetings with Republicans on Capitol Hill.
Morell writes that Denis McDonough, then a deputy national security adviser, gave him the simple task of showing that “the talking points were fully consistent with the classified analysis produced by the intelligence community.” So he agreed to go. “I was politically naïve to have attended,” he says.
This strains credulity. If that had been the objective, Rice could have simply brought copies of the classified analysis and the talking points. The Republicans were sure to ask about the video, the heart of the administration’s Benghazi story. Morell knew that Rice’s claims were not backed up by either the talking points or classified analysis, and he understood that the purpose of the trip to the Capitol was to save her potential nomination. So what would Morell say when he was asked about the video? Was he prepared to sink Rice’s nomination by telling the truth? Or would he spin for his political masters?
We don’t get the answer from his book. But here’s how he put it last week:
That’s Morell in an interview with Bret Baier, anchor of Special Report on the Fox News Channel. It’s a telling argument. U.S. officials on the ground in Libya have made clear that the video played no role in the attacks. Gregory Hicks, the top diplomat in Libya after Ambassador Christopher Stevens was killed, told Congress, “The YouTube video was a nonevent in Libya.” That’s consistent with the account in 13 Hours, a book about Benghazi from several CIA contractors who fought the attackers there. The security personnel in Libya “had been told about the events in Egypt, but they neither saw nor heard anything to suggest that anyone in Benghazi was upset about an offensive YouTube video clip from an anti-Muslim movie.”
So Morell is still defending Rice, whose account is contradicted by CIA analysis and credible witnesses on the ground. Why he says this we do not know.
One of the most striking aspects of Morell’s chapters on Benghazi is his dogged insistence that the attacks were simply the result of a mob spinning out of control. He does not resurrect the long-discredited claim that they were merely part of a protest, and he allows that some in the group were, in fact, “hardened Islamic extremists.” But Morell maintains that the attacks were not planned and claims, repeatedly and bizarrely, that the attackers did not necessarily want to harm Americans.
The events of 9/11/12 took place “with little or no advance planning,” he writes. Morell argues that after watching video from that evening, his view was that the group “did not appear to be looking for Americans to harm.” And “the rioters started to set fires, but there was no indication that they were targeting anyone.” He adds: “Clearly, this was a mob looting and vandalizing the place, with tragic results. . . . There is no evidence that the attackers were targeting the ambassador specifically or U.S. officials generally when they set that fire or any of the other fires that night.”
It’s a bizarre line of argument. But it’s not hard to understand why Morell would use it. If the attacks of September 11, 2012, were planned in celebration of the anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks by terrorists with ties to al Qaeda, they would undermine claims from some at the CIA, amplified by the Obama campaign, that al Qaeda was on the verge of elimination. What’s more, the failure to anticipate and prevent such attacks would be, by definition, an intelligence failure.
While Morell continues to peddle the notion that the Americans who died in Benghazi were accidental victims of looters and vandals, the U.S. government has publicly abandoned that falsehood in its case against a ringleader of the Benghazi attacks.
The indictment of Abu Khattala, a leader of Ansar al Sharia Benghazi, tells a very different story. The “objects and purposes” of the attackers in Benghazi, it says, were to “kill United States citizens at the Mission and the Annex.” Khattala and the other attackers acted “willfully, deliberately, maliciously and with premeditation and malice aforethought” when they killed Ambassador Stevens and the others. The indictment charges that Khattala “committed the offenses after substantial planning and premeditation to cause the death of a person and commit an act of terrorism” and “intentionally participated in an act intending that lethal force be used in connection with a person other than one of the participants in this offense, and the victims died as a result of the act.”
According to the indictment, Khattala learned before the attacks that there was “an American facility in Benghazi posing as a diplomatic post,” and “he believed the facility was actually being used to collect intelligence.” Khattala believed U.S. intelligence activities were “illegal” and “was therefore going to do something about this facility.”
Baier asked Morell about the indictment.
“Is the indictment wrong?”
“So, I’m not an attorney. I’m not a Justice Department lawyer. I’m just telling you what the intelligence community’s analysis was and is of what happened there that night,” Morell responded. “If you read further in the indictment, there’s—there is also charges with softer language.” And, later, in response to a question about Susan Rice’s claims about the YouTube video: “If you keep reading in the indictment, right, even Abu Khattala says that that was one of the things that motivated him.”
This is false. There is no mention of the video in the 21-page indictment.
Morell spends much of his Benghazi chapters challenging his critics. One of his biggest complaints: His critics have cherry-picked information in their effort to build a case against him. “Critics cannot have it both ways,” he writes, using information from a source that “fits their narrative and rejecting from the same source what does not.”
It’s an odd charge for Morell to level. Nowhere in his two chapters does Morell tell his readers that his central claims about the attacks are directly contradicted by the Khattala indictment, the U.S. government’s official account of the attacks. Similarly, in attempting to convince readers that the attacks were not planned, Morell chooses to exclude evidence that strongly suggests they were planned.
In 13 Hours, the CIA contractors describe in great detail the surveillance of the U.S. diplomatic facility in Benghazi in the hours before the attacks. On the day of the attacks, “at 6:43 a.m., three men in a car with Libyan police markings slowed to a stop on the gravel street on the north side of the U.S. diplomatic compound.” One of the men “climbed to the second floor of a half-finished building . . . that overlooked the compound.” That vantage point gave him a “clear view over the wall and into the compound” and allowed him to see “the villa where Ambassador Chris Stevens slept.” The man “recorded what he saw with a cell-phone camera.”
They write: “Surveillance of an American diplomatic site was worrisome, to be answered at a minimum by countersurveillance to determine the observer’s identity and intent. Reconnaissance was worse, as it anticipated offensive military or militant action.” The incident caused U.S. security officers to go on “high alert,” and these officers “informed officials at the CIA Annex of the suspicious incident as part of their longstanding arrangement to share security information.”
These are important details that have a direct bearing on how we understand the attacks. But they are inconvenient to Morell’s insistence that the attacks were spontaneous. So he simply left them out.
Will Morell’s rehabilitation tour work? It might. Politico published an excerpt of Morell’s book under the headline “The Real Story of Benghazi,” and the New York Times published an article that accepted at face value most of Morell’s claims and portrayed him as an apolitical intelligence professional.
Morell, for his part, has offered occasional criticism of the Obama administration, a fact that has won him softer interviews than he might have expected in some quarters. But on the big questions, Morell is still spinning for the White House.
Speaking of the president, Morell said last week: “He always did the right thing when it came to protecting the country.” But Morell’s assessment is not rooted in a dispassionate analysis of the intelligence. Obama has repeatedly argued throughout his tenure that the “tide of war is receding” and that he is bringing the 9/11 wars to an “end.” The president has never told the American people that we are embroiled in what Mike Morell now calls “the great war of our time.”
Stephen F. Hayes is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.
