U.S. intelligence agencies have determined that the attack on the U.S. mission in Libya involved a small number of militants with ties to al-Qaeda in North Africa but see no indication that the terrorist group directed the assault, U.S. officials said Thursday.
The determination reflects an emerging consensus among analysts at the CIA and other agencies that has contributed to a shift among senior Obama administration officials toward describing the siege of U.S. facilities in Benghazi as a terrorist attack.
U.S. intelligence officials said the composition of the militant forces involved in the assault has become clearer over the past week and that analysts now think that two or three fighters affiliated with al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb were involved.
“There are people who at least have some association with AQIM,” said a senior U.S. intelligence official, who added that “it’s not so direct that you would say AQIM as an organization planned and carried this out.”
Instead, U.S. officials said a lesser-known Islamist group, Ansar al-Sharia, played a much larger role in sending fighters and providing weapons for the attack, which killed the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans. U.S. officials have previously cited suspicion of al-Qaeda connections to the attack.
The intelligence picture assembled so far indicates that militants had been preparing an assault on the U.S. compound in Benghazi for weeks but were so disorganized that, after the battle started, they had to send fighters to retrieve heavier weapons.
Further, U.S. intelligence officials said they think the attack was not timed to coincide with the Sept. 11, 2001, anniversary. Instead, the officials said, the assault was set in motion after protesters scaled the walls of the U.S. Embassy in Cairo as part of a protest of an amateur anti-Islamic YouTube video.
“There’s never been any intelligence, nor any I’m aware of now, that indicated this was a plot planned months in advance to get turned on on 9/11,” said an Obama administration official.
The emerging scenario, the official said, “is that extremists in the region had cased out and hoped to target U.S. facilities in Benghazi for some time. When they saw what was happening in Cairo, that influenced their timing.”
The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the preliminary assessments of analysts involved in an ongoing investigation of the Benghazi attack that involves the FBI, the CIA and other agencies.
After Obama administration officials initially characterized the assault as a protest that turned violent, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Wednesday became the highest-ranking official to call the attack an act of terrorism. In remarks at the United Nations, Clinton said that terrorists were “working with other violent extremists to undermine the democratic transitions underway in North Africa, as we tragically saw in Benghazi.”
U.S analysts have combed through intercepted communications, pictures and video from the scene and information from sources, including suspects taken into custody by the Libyan government.
Describing the militants involved, one U.S. official said: “Those individuals — whoever they may be — who took part in the attack all swim in the same, relatively small, extremist pond. So there could be a number of individual or ad hoc ties with AQIM or other extremist groups. These connections alone do not mean AQIM was behind or planned the attack. This is why there’s an ongoing investigation, to identify the attackers and determine motives and relationships to extremist groups.”
