This story was co-published with Gawker.
Starting weeks before Islamic militants attacked the U.S. diplomatic
outpost in Benghazi, Libya, longtime Clinton family confidante Sidney
Blumenthal supplied intelligence to then Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton gathered by a secret network that included a former CIA
clandestine service officer, according to hacked emails from
Blumenthal’s account.
The emails, which were
posted on the internet in 2013,
also show that Blumenthal and another close Clinton associate discussed
contracting with a retired Army special operations commander to put
operatives on the ground near the Libya-Tunisia border while Libya’s
civil war raged in 2011.
Blumenthal’s emails to Clinton, which were directed to her private
email account, include at least a dozen detailed reports on events on
the deteriorating political and security climate in Libya as well as
events in other nations. They came to light after a hacker broke into
Blumenthal’s account and have taken on new significance in light of the
disclosure that she conducted State Department and personal business
exclusively over an email server that she controlled and kept secret
from State Department officials and which only recently was discovered
by congressional investigators.
The contents of that account are now being sought by a congressional
inquiry into the Benghazi attacks. Clinton has handed over more than
30,000 pages of her emails to the State Department, after unilaterally
deciding which ones involved government business; the State Department
has so far handed almost 900 pages of those over to the committee. A
Clinton spokesman told Gawker and ProPublica (which are collaborating on
this story) that she has turned over all the emails Blumenthal sent to
Hillary.
The dispatches from Blumenthal to Clinton’s private email address
were posted online after Blumenthal’s account was hacked in 2013 by
Romanian hacker Marcel-Lehel Lazar, who went by the name Guccifer. Lazar
also broke into accounts belonging to George W. Bush’s sister, Colin
Powell, and others. He’s now serving a seven-year sentence in his home
country and was charged in a U.S. indictment last year.
The contents of the memos, which
have recently become the subject of speculation in
the right-wing media, raise new questions about how Clinton used her
private email account and whether she tapped into an undisclosed back
channel for information on Libya’s crisis and other foreign policy
matters.
Blumenthal, a New Yorker staff writer in the 1990s, became a top aide
to President Bill Clinton and worked closely with Hillary Clinton
during the fallout from the Whitewater investigation into the Clinton
family. She tried to hire him when she joined President Obama’s cabinet
in 2009, but White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel
reportedly nixed the idea on
the grounds Blumenthal was a divisive figure whose attacks on Obama
during the Democratic primary had poisoned his relationship with the new
administration.
It’s unclear who tasked Blumenthal, known for his fierce loyalty to
the Clintons, with preparing detailed intelligence briefs. It’s also not
known who was paying him, or where the operation got its money. The
memos were marked “confidential” and relied in many cases on “sensitive”
sources in the Libyan opposition and Western intelligence and security
services. Other reports focused on Egypt, Germany, and Turkey.
Indeed, though they were sent under Blumenthal’s name, the reports
appear to have been gathered and prepared by Tyler Drumheller, a former
chief of the CIA’s clandestine service in Europe who left the agency in
2005. Since then, he has established a consulting firm called Tyler
Drumheller, LLC. He has also been affiliated with a firm called DMC
Worldwide, which he co-founded with Washington, D.C., attorney Danny
Murray and former general counsel to the U.S. Capitol Police John
Caulfield.
DMC Worldwide’s now-defunct website describes it at as offering “innovative security and intelligence solutions to global risks in a changing world.”
In one exchange in March 2013, Blumenthal emailed Drumheller,
“Thanks. Can you send Libya report.” Drumheller replied, “Here it is,
pls do not share it with Cody. I don’t want moin speculating on sources.
It is on the Maghreb and Libya.” Cody is Cody Shearer, a longtime
Clinton family operative—his brother was an ambassador under Bill
Clinton and his now-deceased sister was married to Clinton State
Department official Strobe Talbott—who was in close contact with
Blumenthal. While it’s not entirely clear from the documents, “Moin” may
refer to the nickname of Mohamed Mansour El Kikhia, a member of the
Kikhia family, a prominent Libyan clan with ties to the Libyan National
Transition Council. (An email address in Blumenthal’s address book,
which was also leaked, is
associated with his Facebook page.)
There’s no indication in Blumenthal’s emails whether Clinton read or
replied to them before she left State on February 1, 2013, but he was
clearly part of a select group with knowledge of the private
clintonemail.com address, which was unknown to the public until
Gawker published it this year.
They do suggest that she interacted with Blumenthal using the account
after she stepped down. “H: got your message a few days ago,” reads the
subject line of one email from Blumenthal to Clinton on February 8,
2013; “H: fyi, will continue to send relevant intel,” reads another.
The memos cover a wide array of subjects in extreme detail, from
German Prime Minister Angela Merkel’s conversations with her finance
minister about French president Francois Hollande–marked “THIS
INFORMATION COMES FROM AN EXTREMELY SENSITIVE SOURCE”—to the composition
of the newly elected South Korean president’s transition team. At least
10 of the memos deal in whole or in part with internal Libyan politics
and the government’s fight against militants, including the status of
the Libyan oil industry and the prospects for Western companies to
participate.
One memo was sent on August 23, 2012, less than three weeks before
Islamic militants stormed the diplomatic outpost in Benghazi. It cites
“an extremely sensitive source” who highlighted a string of bombings and
kidnappings of foreign diplomats and aid workers in Tripoli, Benghazi
and Misrata, suggesting they were the work of people loyal to late
Libyan Prime Minister Muammar Gaddafi.
While the memo doesn’t rise to the level of a warning about the
safety of U.S. diplomats, it portrays a deteriorating security climate.
Clinton noted a few days after the Benghazi attack, which left four dead
and 10 people injured, that U.S. intelligence officials didn’t have
advance knowledge of the threat.
On September 12, 2012, the day after the Benghazi attack, Blumenthal
sent a memo that cited a “sensitive source” saying that the interim
Libyan president, Mohammed Yussef el Magariaf, was told by a senior
security officer that the assault was inspired by an anti-Muslim video
made in the U.S., as well as by allegations from Magariaf’s political
opponents that he had CIA ties.
Blumenthal followed up the next day with an email titled “Re: More
Magariaf private reax.” It said Libyan security officials believed an
Islamist radical group called the Ansa al Sharia brigade had prepared
the attack a month in advance and “took advantage of the cover” provided
by the demonstrations against the video.
An October 25, 2012 memo says that Magariaf and the Libyan army chief
of staff agree that the “situation in the country is becoming
increasingly dangerous and unmanageable” and “far worse” than Western
leaders realize.
Blumenthal’s email warnings, of course, followed a year of Libyan
hawkishness on the part of Clinton. In February of 2011, she told the UN
Human Rights Council in Geneva that "it is time for Gaddafi to go.” The
next month, after having described Russian reluctance over military
intervention as “despicable,” Clinton met with rebel leaders in Paris
and drummed up support for a no-fly zone while in Cairo. On March 17,
2011, the UN Security Council voted to back Libyan rebels against
Gaddafi.
It’s this buildup, which Clinton still proudly recalled in her 2014
memoir, that Blumenthal appears to join in on 2011. In addition to
the intel memos, his emails also disclose that he and his associates
worked to help the Libyan opposition, and even plotted to insert
operatives on the ground using a private contractor.
A May 14, 2011 email exchange between Blumenthal and Shearer shows
that they were negotiating with Drumheller to contract with someone
referred to as “Grange” and “the general” to place send four operatives
on a week-long mission to Tunis, Tunisia, and “to the border and back.”
Tunisia borders Libya and Algeria.
“Sid, you are doing great work on this,” Drumheller wrote to
Blumenthal. “It is going to be around $60,000, coverting r/t business
class airfare to Tunis, travel in country to the border and back, and
other expenses for 7–10 days for 4 guys.”
After Blumenthal forwarded that note to Shearer, he wrote back
questioning the cost of the operation. “Sid, do you think the general
has to send four guys. He told us three guys yesterday, a translator and
two other guys. I understand the difficulty of the mission and realize
that K will be repaid but I am going to need an itemized budget for
these guys.”
“The general” and “Grange” appear to refer to David L. Grange, a
major general in the Army who ran a secret Pentagon special operations
unit before retiring in 1999. Grange subsequently founded
Osprey Global Solutions,
a consulting firm and government contractor that offers logistics,
intelligence, security training, armament sales, and other services. The
Osprey Foundation, which is a nonprofit arm of Osprey Global Solutions,
is listed as one of the State Department’s “global partners” in a
2014 report from the Office of Global Partnerships.’
Among the documents in the cache released by Lazar is an August 24,
2011, memorandum of understanding between Osprey Global Solutions and
the Libyan National Transition Council—the entity that took control in
the wake of Qadaffi’s execution—agreeing that Osprey will contract with
the NTC to “assist in the resumption of access to its assets and
operations in country” and train Libyan forces in intelligence,
weaponry, and “rule-of-land warfare.” The document refers to meetings
held in Amman, Jordan between representatives of Osprey and a Mohammad
Kikhia, who represented the National Transition Council.
Five months later, according to a document in the leak, Grange wrote
on Osprey Global letterhead to Assistant Secretary of State Andrew
Shapiro, introducing Osprey as a contractor eager to provide
humanitarian and other assistance in Libya. “We are keen to support the
people of Libya under the sponsorship of the Ministry of Finance and the
Libyan Stock Exchange,” Grange wrote. Shapiro is a longtime Clinton
loyalist; he served on her Senate staff as foreign policy advisor.
Another document in the cache, titled “Letter_for_Moin,” is an appeal
from Drumheller to then-Libyan Prime Minister Ali Zeidan offering the
services of Tyler Drumheller LLC, “to develop a program that will
provide discreet confidential information allowing the appropriate
entities in Libya to address any regional and international challenges.”
The “K” who was, according to Shearer’s email, to be “repaid” for his role in the Tunisia operation appears to be someone named
Khalifa al Sherif,
who sent Blumenthal several emails containing up-to-the-minute
information on the civil war in Libya, and appears to have been cited as
a source in several of the reports.
Contacted by ProPublica and Gawker, Drumheller’s attorney and
business partner Danny Murray confirmed that Drumheller “worked” with
Blumenthal and was aware of the hacked emails, but declined to comment
further.
Shearer said only that "the FBI is involved and told me not to talk.
There is a massive investigation of the hack and all the resulting
information.” The FBI didn’t immediately respond to a request for
comment.
Blumenthal, Grange, and Kikhia all did not respond to repeated
attempts to reach them. Nick Merrill, a spokesman for Clinton had no
comment on Blumenthal’s activities with Drumheller.
Whatever Blumenthal, Shearer, Drumheller, and Grange were up to in
2011, 2012, and 2013 on Clinton’s behalf, it appears that she could have
used the help: According to State Department personnel directories, in
2011 and 2012—the height of the Libya crisis—State didn’t have a Libyan
desk officer, and the entire Near Eastern Magreb Bureau, which which
covers Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco and Libya, had just two staffers.
Today, State has three Libyan desk officers and 11 people in the Near
Eastern Magreb Bureau.
Reached for comment, a State Department
public affairs official who would only speak on background declined to
address questions about Blumenthal’s relationship to Clinton, whether
she was aware of the intelligence network, and who if anyone was paying
Blumenthal. Asked about the Tunisia-Libya mission, the official replied,
“There was a trip with the secretary in October of 2011, but there was
also a congressional delegation in April, 2011. There were media reports
about both of these at the time." Neither trip involved travelling via
Tunis.
