Security fears hinder FBI’S Libya probe

BENGHAZI, Libya — More than two weeks after the deaths of four Americans in an attack on a U.S. diplomatic mission, fears about the near-total lack of security have kept FBI agents from visiting the scene of the killings and forced them to try to piece together the complicated crime from Tripoli, more than 400 miles away.

Investigators are so worried about the tenuous security, people involved in the investigation say, that they have been unwilling to risk taking some potential Libyan witnesses into the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli.

Instead, the investigators have resorted to the awkward solution of questioning some witnesses in cars outside the embassy, which is operating under emergency staffing and was evacuated of even more diplomats Thursday because of a heightened security alert.

“It’s a cavalcade of obstacles right now,” said a senior U.S. law-enforcement official who is receiving regular updates on the Benghazi investigation and who described the crime scene, which has been trampled on, looted and burned, as so badly “degraded” that even once FBI agents do eventually gain access “it’ll be very difficult to see what evidence can be attributed to the bad guys.”

Piecing together exactly how Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans died would be difficult even under the best of conditions. But the volatile security situation in postGadhafi Libya has added to the challenge of determining whether it was purely a local group of extremists who initiated the fatal assault or whether the attackers had ties to international terrorist groups, as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton suggested Wednesday may be the case.

The Libyan government has advised the FBI that it cannot assure the safety of the U.S. investigators in Benghazi. So agents have been conducting interviews from afar, relying on local Libyan authorities to help identify and arrange meetings with witnesses to the attack and working closely with the Libyans to gauge the veracity of any of those accounts.

“There’s a chance we never make it in there,” said a senior law enforcement official.

Also hampering the investigation is fear among Libyan witnesses about revealing their identities or accounts in front of Libyan guards protecting the U.S. investigators.

One person with knowledge of the inquiry said the investigators had gathered some information pointing to the involvement of members of Ansar al-Shariah, the same local extremist group that other witnesses have identified as participating in the attack.

Benghazi residents and the leaders of the large militias that have constituted the city’s only police force insist that the attackers were purely local.

They note that many of the brigades that have sprung up in the city have the capability to conduct such an attack on short notice and that a few homegrown groups — like Ansar al-Shariah — have the ideological disposition to do it as well.

U.S. counterterrorism and intelligence officials say they have not found any evidence to indicate that the al-Qaida affiliate in North Africa, al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, ordered or planned the attack.

But the investigators are casting a wide net. To determine whether there was participation by an international element, intelligence analysts are poring over cell-phone conversations intercepted before and after the attacks, as well as informant reports, witness accounts and satellite imagery.

Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters Thursday in Washington that before the attack — he did not say when — “there was a thread of intelligence reporting that groups in the environment, in eastern Libya, were seeking to coalesce, but there wasn’t anything specific, and certainly not a specific threat to the consulate that I am aware of.”

Dempsey said that information was shared throughout the government.

Assigning culpability also complicates the U.S. response. For now, the administration awaits the FBI investigation and updated intelligence reports. President Barack Obama has said the United States will bring to justice those responsible for the attacks. But there is little appetite in the White House to launch drone strikes or a special-operations raid, like the one that killed Osama bin Laden, in yet another Muslim country.

U.S. officials would prefer that Libyan officials lead any military or paramilitary operation, or work alongside U.S. investigators, to arrest any suspects.

But the transitional Libyan government still does not command a meaningful national army or national police force.

At the Pentagon on Thursday, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said the government was waiting on the FBI investigation to determine who was responsible.

“We have made clear that as a result of that, we’re going to continue to go after those that would attack our individuals,” Panetta told reporters. “We are not going to let people who deliberately attack and kill our people get away with it.”

Panetta also indicated that the attack on the mission involved some degree of advance planning.

“As we determined the details of what took place there, and how that attack took place,” Panetta said, “it became clear that there were terrorists who had planned that attack.”