Benghazi Consulate Gaps: OPSEC Savvy and Boogie Plans

While American media preoccupies itself with presidential debate discussions, news from Libya goes unremarked of the toll of an ill-prepared diplomatic post. Specifically, as suggests a thoughtful of interpretation of the latest news (available at http://m.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/sensitive-documents-left-behind-at-american-mission-in-libya/2012/10/03/11911498-0d7e-11e2-bd1a-b868e65d57eb_story.html ), it is becoming increasingly clear that American consular staff in volatile Benghazi proved unforgivably overmatched in two areas.

One glaring area, as the foregoing news revealed, was in operational security, or OPSEC. Underscored by bushels of exploitable and sensitive records left untended, the consulate in its ruins became as useful to American adversaries as it is worthless to American diplomats. Strewn among the bombed-out rubble are lists and identifying information of Libyan employees and other local nationals who provided useful service to the American mission in this country. Personal details of American staff are or were also unsecured, hence CNN’s ready access to the office calendar of slain Ambassador Stevens. Analytical observers may only speculate on what more revealing documents and records have already found their way into enemy hands that were too full to bother with the ambassador’s calendar as they went scavenging through the ruins in the immediate aftermath of the Benghazi attack of 9/11/12. So, item one is a flagrant breach of basic OPSEC which would instruct diplomatic staff in volatile regions to minimize the quantity of sensitive records on hand and to secure or destroy that bare minimum at the first sign of hostilities.

Even 30 years ago, the takeover of the US Embassy in Teheran found our overseas staff making a better effort to purge sensitive documents in the face of imminent attack. Only given the availability of today’s advances in encryption and digital data storage, it is nothing short of astonishing for paper records such as those compromised in Benghazi not to have been all but virtually eliminated in favor of safeguarding the same data as electronic files whose deletion could be handled instantaneously or even remotely without waiting for another salvo of assault rifle and rocket-propelled grenade.

The second apparent deficiency complements a much touted security shortfall: the apparent absence of a well thought-out and properly executed contingency plan for evading lethal attackers. Some old hands in operations call this a boogie plan. Its purpose is to lay out in advance carefully vetted options for evading and escaping from hostile natives so as to save lives and prevent the compromise of sensitive activities. If there was a boogie plan in Benghazi, it either fell apart because of betrayal to the attackers themselves, or its intended beneficiaries failed to act on it before it was too late.

One need go no further than to re-read Mark Bowden’s 2006 Guests of the Ayatollah to see that such gaps and more came to the surface as a result of the Iranian takeover of the US Embassy in Teheran as the 1970s ended and the 1980s began. Since those tumultuous days, the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security has grown and evolved considerably, to the point of either employing or having access to a cadre of security professionals who could easily address such gaps. Recent events, however, make one wonder: Is the expertise on OPSEC and boogie plans altogether missing, or is that expertise going unheeded by higher echelons whose panjandrums think themselves above these prosaic details that save lives and safeguard operations?

-- Nick Catrantzos