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Last night you spent two hours deciding what to wear to the party this morning. It'll take you two minutes to list it on Depop and make your money back. Just grab your phone, snap a few photos and we'll take care of the rest. The sheer dress and platform heels you'll never wear again. There's a birthday girl searching for them right now. Your one and done look is about to pay for your next night out or at least the ride home. Your style can make you cash start selling on Depop, where taste recognizes taste. Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money. Whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion dollar swings, there's a money side to every story. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now@bloomberg.com welcome to the Watch floor. I'm Sarah Adams. I constantly get the question to walk through kind of the behind the scenes when it comes to our investigations into the terror who carried out the attacks against us in 2012 in Benghazi, Libya. Obviously this is an ongoing investigation. We're still tracking on well over a dozen of these terrorists. So it's not something we share a lot publicly. But I have been getting a lot of messages from people who want to start their own investigations. Now they're not all looking into terrorist networks. Some want to maybe do some sort of true crime investigation. Others want to do like the family tree genealogy investigations. Obviously there's a huge genealogy piece in our investigation. Another is others want to look at where their loved ones maybe serve, let's say it was Vietnam or World War II, and get the whole story and do something like maybe put out a book. So I understand where all this interest comes from because it is a rewarding thing to do your own investigation, to put in the work and then to see the final results. And in the case of us, we did put it in a book. And so that is an option for many people. I thought, hey, let's at least explain where we started our investigation because that can then maybe help other people think through things and get motivated and move some of their good ideas forward. First off, of course, me and Dave Boone Benton served in Benghazi. So in real time we were aware at least of some of the individuals who were believed to be located on the US Mission or as we call it, the US Consulate compound. That night when we left the CIA, we knew of eight individuals who at least were on the compound. So we started our investigation with those eight names. Now they were names. So how it works in terrorist circles, a Lot of times a terrorist doesn't use their true name. They'll use an alias. And so in some of these cases, they were aliases. And we'll kind of walk through that because it obviously makes an investigation that much harder. So here are the eight names we had at the start. There was Abubar Al Jazeri. So we knew he was in the group Aqim, and we knew very little about him because that is an alias or what we called Acuna. If you travel as much as I do, moving between investigations, working with law enforcement constantly on the go, your bag becomes your entire life. That's why I decided to upgrade to Ridge, because I'll be honest, I'm very good at tracking things down, which also means I'm also good at losing things. And with Ridge, they actually have a tracking option for lost wallets. I swear it was made for me. What also sold me is how slim and structured it is. It holds about 12 cards and some cash. But it's also made out of great materials like aluminum, titanium, and even carbon fiber. And yes, it has RFID blocking technology. So it even keeps away the digital pickpocketers. They've got over 50 styles, a limited warranty, over 100,000 reviews. And honestly, it would make for a great Mother's Day gift. Finally, give her something she can use every day. For a limited time, our listeners get 10% off at Ridge by using code floor at checkout. Just head to ridge.com and use code FLOOR FLOOR and you're all set. And after you purchase, they'll ask how you heard about them. Just let them know the watch floor sent you. Again, that's 10% off@ridge.com using code floor. There was Muhammad al Nooni. Now, we did not personally know who Mohammed was at that time. We learned later on there's two terrorists with the same name. And this spelling was actually incorrect in real time. And so. So we'll explain who he ended up being then. We knew a terrorist, and he was one of the senior leaders at the attack. He went by the name Kubab, so we knew he was likely Al Qaeda, but we did not know his true identity. So Kubaib is one of the terrorists we spent the most time and it took us the most years to truly identify him. Another terrorist we had was Yunus Abu Moad. This is the terrorist that took us the longest time to get his photo. But also part of his name there is real and part is an alias. So somehow his first name got mashed up with his alias. So his Real first name is Yunus. Abu Muad is his alias. And it got merged together somehow around the time of the attacks. So that was fun to figure out. But again, it was a little bit of the truth and a little bit of a fake name. The next is Ali Oni Al Kharzai. Now, we did know this Terran. He and his brother were senior in Al Qaeda in Iraq. And back in the day, they were close to the leader of aqi, Abu Musab Al Zarqawi. So we knew Ali. And actually, if you remember back to the time of our attacks, of course there was a protest in Egypt, there was an attack on our facilities, but then it led to a bunch of incidents and a bunch of different protests across North Africa and then in South Asia and places like Pakistan. Well, about two days after our attack, there was an attempted attack on the US Embassy in Tunisia. And Ali's brother Tariq was involved in that. So there was some crossover in some of those other locations as well. Then we had a terrorist named Khalid Al Sighlisi. Now, we knew Khalid in real time. He was a member of Al Qaeda. He was more known through his brother. His brother was very famous. His name was Mustafa Al Siglisi. He was one of the senior leaders in these kind of like quasi government militia movements at the time. And he was the one pushing for the integration of all these fighters, even though some were terrorists, into official military and police roles in the now new Libyan government. So that was a role he was very much involved in. And he's still alive. The last one was Abu Musab Al Mansur Al Libi. So we knew this was the terrorist leading the attacks on the ground that evening. We knew he was the head of AQIM in Libya, but we were not aware of what his true identity was, you know, what family he was from in Libya. We did know he was Libyan, but Abu Musab is, of course, another alias. So these are the eight terrorists we started with. And of course, our focus was to properly identify each of them and then prove if they indeed were attackers at the consulate location and then go from there. Obviously, we've done a lot more since then. So when we started looking into those eight, we started with Abu Bara. And so he was interesting. His name was actually Darusha Abdelkader. And this is one of those strange incidents. So during the attacks, he was actually a senior commander. But what we learned is he had only been at AQIM for a few years. What happened is, I believe it was in Algeria. It was in The Algeria Mali border area. Anyway, so Muktal Belmokdar, he was one of the senior leaders in aqim and he was the mastermind for the consulate. Piece of our taxes went into Abu Bara's village and his terrorists ended up taking over the village. Abu Bara was like a businessman, kind of a power broker in the town. And he was given the option, right, join us or likely die. So he choose to join aqim. Well, he ended up in Benghazi the night of the attacks because it was planned to be a kidnapping of the US Ambassador. So AQIM assigned several people to also, like be the English translators for the ambassador. And they did it in shifts. So it was almost like you would have an 8 or 12 hour shift and then you'd have another person come on for like an 8 or 12 hour shift and then another. So they actually chose three individuals. They chose Abu Bara and then they chose two Canadian terrorists, again just because of their English speaking ability. So it's just interesting that this gentleman, within just a couple years went from being a businessman to a commander in Al Qaeda and he is now detained, so he's no longer on the battlefield. The other terrorists, the Muhammad Al Nuni, he actually ended up being Muhammad Al Ayouni. So very close in name. There are two terrorists with this exact same name. They're both French Tunisian, and they both were very close to the leader of AQI and involved in Al Qaeda operations. So he is one of the two. And we lay out his background in the book and we do explain the other one to you just in case, you know, the other terrorists and you don't get them confused. This unfortunately happened in a lot of cases because terrorists do have very similar names. And some, like these two had the same nationality, you know, the same kind of ethnic background, they spoke the same languages, they were involved in a couple of the same group. So even they were both involved in the group Zarqawi had even before, before he created aqi. So it was just a very interesting thing. And also it's fascinating to look through these histories of where these terrorists start, the groups they move through, how they all come together and just how so many different terrorists, you know, were in Benghazi that night. But that's the future of terrorism. They have made these bonds and these relationships, you know, either in terrorist camps or sometimes in prison or fighting overseas. And it doesn't exactly matter anymore if you were Al Qaeda for a piece of it or ISIS for a piece of it, because you fought together at some point in time. So it's just a fascinating thing. So Kubebab, we spent a lot of time on him, and obviously when we identified him, he was very senior. So he was leading kind of a faction within eqim the time of our attacks, it was called the Mali Group. His name is Hashim Abu Sidra, if you follow my social media. You know, in the last couple years, he was detained in Libya. At the time, he was the head of ISIS in Libya. Remember, our terrorists didn't just attack us and then go and retire. They went on to commit more attacks. And then, as you can imagine, many of them became very senior to where obviously this is an incredibly senior person. The interesting thing is when he was arrested in Tripoli, he was the head of ISIS in Libya. He was also the operational head of Al Qaeda in Libya. So he ran the operations for Al Qaeda. So people who say ISIS and Al Qaeda don't work together, here's just one terrorist who worked in both groups as a senior leader. So things have changed. The groups have come together, and we need to start being honest about it. And he's really a great example. He's still detained. There have been a lot of effort to release him. So if he shows up released tomorrow, sorry. We keep trying to pay attention to him and make sure he stays in prison, but unfortunately there are big pushes to release him among the terrorist circles. The next was Yunus Abu Muad. This is the one I said, a real name mixed with an alias. He ended up being Yunus Al Fayedi. Now, he's the first one that we are talking about that actually wasn't a member of Al Qaeda. So the first three we talked about were all members of Al Qaeda. Yunus and his brothers really ran kind of the military wing of Ansar Sharia, Benghazi. That was a group that started several months before our attacks. And it was really created under kind of a thought process. Osama bin Laden had to, hey, we don't have to make everybody put on like an Al Qaeda hat. Why don't we make these umbrella organizations kind of like the tricky Taliban Pakistan did, and say, let's bring all groups together and kind of fight as one. And so that was the goal of Ansel Asharia. So they created this umbrella organization so you could be Al Qaeda or AQIM as we're seeing, or even form an AQI and be a part of Ansar Asharia, or if you weren't a member of a terrorist group, you can just join and be Ansel Asharia. So it's a very interesting thing. Now, that was in 2012. Since then, Al Qaeda has officially taken Ansel Ash Al Sharia on like an Al Shabaab, and now it's an official affiliate of Al Qaeda. So if you're a member of Ans Al Sharia, you're also automatically a member of Al Qaeda. So now you know there is a standard partnership. This episode is brought to you by Pocket Hose, the world's number one expandable hose. I used to spend more time messing with the hose than actually watering. Last summer I decided to clean up the patio because some friends were coming over and the hose kept twisting up on itself. And what should have been a five minute job turned into a 20 minute headache. That constant kinking and twisting, that's what Pocket Hose Ballistic was built to solve. It's reinforced with a liquid crystal polymer, the same used in bulletproof vests. So it makes the anti burst sleeve incredibly tough. That same fiber is actually five times stronger than steel, so it's built to last. It also features the pocket pivot that swivels 360 degrees with a steady flow, also reducing frustration. And when you're done, there's no wrestling with the hose. 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So in the aftermath of our attacks, and we've said this about a number of terrorists, a number of terrorists fled Benghazi right away because they thought the US Military was going to come in and rain hell on Benghazi and go after all these terrorists. So they were preemptive. Of course, we never did that. But Ali left on a fake passport and first went to Turkey and he was going to travel onto Syria. He gets caught in Turkey with this. It was basically a real passport, but a fake name. But they had his biometrics. So he gets detained. And so people like me and a lot of the other people served in Benghazi were really pushing, hey, us, you really need to take custody of Ali, because he's going to get released and go back into the wild. And unfortunately, the State Department wasn't interested in getting him extradited. I mean, they weren't interested really in anybody who had, like Al Qaeda after their name and carried our attacks. It's very frustrating because they were hiding the fact Al Qaeda was involved. So Ali, unfortunately gets released, he goes back to Tunisia, he kills, actually two very senior politicians who are likely going to win elections there. He then goes to Iraq and Syria with his brother Tariq, and then they end up joining ISIS and then both die in U.S. airstrikes, you know, one in Iraq and one in Syria. So we did end up getting him years later, but because he was isis, not because he did Benghazi. Well, the crazy part is Hillary Clinton was asked about this, you know, when she was still a Secretary of State, and she actually told Congress, oh, we know about Ali. When he gets released, we're going to monitor him. This is the same thing a government lied and told all the Americans, don't worry, when we release these Guantanamo Bay detainees, we're going to monitor them. It'll be fine. They can't even monitor the terrorists on US Soil. They're not monitoring any of these. So, of course, he went on to commit more acts of terrorism. And then, remember, we did have two former Guantanamo Bay detainees involved in our Benghazi attacks. One was Sufyan Ben, who we did know was active again, you know, with Al Qaeda at the time. And then he moved on to isis. And then there was Ashraf Sultan, you know, from Gitmo, when he attacked us, nowhere in the US Government did they have that he was operational. Secondly, we learned that the entire time he was at Guantanamo, he never admitted to be in Al Qaeda when he was, and he was released. And when he was released, the US Government was not even aware he was a member of Al Qaeda. So don't assume all these people that went to Guantanamo will even understand who they are, what they did, and what their role was. So I want you to keep that in mind. And nobody's really tracking on them since they've been released. Ashraf Sultan has completely vanished in the wind. He went on to become Al Qaeda's head for East Libya, and then last year disappeared from Libya. And the belief he is in Afghanistan, kind of leading some of the training there. And so we're looking for him, but it's just a frustrating thing, right, because there is no one following these Guantanamo Bay detainees, and they are active in plots against us. The next is Ahmed Abu Ktala. So we all knew Katala was at the location. And if you know the story of Benghazi, Katala is the individual the US Government framed as the mastermind for Benghazi. You know, we've put a lot of work into trying to figure out why he was framed. You know, we have eight terrorists here that we know were involved. There was Yunus, who was Ansel Ashaya, and then Katala. And those were the only two of the eight who weren't members of al Qaeda. And also, the U.S. government wasn't able to identify Yunus. You know, we ended up doing it years later. So of the eight, the US Government chose the one who wasn't Al Qaeda. And then they sent a team in, they captured him, and they brought him to U.S. soil. And then, of course, he got, I think, like, 22 years in prison for being the mastermind of our attacks when he wasn't. What happened is Al Qaeda and not even Ansel Ashrayer shared the attack with him because he was like, a little bit of, like a loose cannon. He was known to kind of do things on his own, not really follow the rules kind of, and he wasn't really trusted. After the attacks, Ansar Sharia, like, pulled him a little more into the organization. They started including him in meetings because, you know, he inserted himself after the attacks. But the night of the attacks, he was at home. He got calls from two attackers there saying, hey, we're attacking the consulate coming down. He actually went down to the facility. He stayed outside while Al Qaeda was inside doing the attacks. It wasn't until all of Al Qaeda, Al Qaeda's members fled the consulate compound that Kotalla went in. He did a little looting, and then he went home that night. There's even lies that he went and got mortars and was involved in the attack on ICI Annex. None of that's true. So, again, this was just an individual. He was a scapegoat. He was easy to capture. He had some mental health issues from his time in Abu Saleem prison. He was time and place predictable. He ran a construction company, he went to work every day, that type of thing. He was an easy catch. And unfortunately, our government lied to the American people saying, we got the mastermind. And so a lot of people, that was enough for them, and they moved on from Benghazi. Frustrating thing. The next person, as we talked about, Khalid al Sighlisi, member of Al Qaeda, he's now deceased. And the last one, we actually identified him. Remember, this was the Abu Musab. We had about five different Abu Musabs in our attack. So it was a lot of work to get through all of them. So his name is Omar Al Shalali. I have talked about him previously. Omar was the head of AQIM in Libya at the time. And he got involved in the attacks because, again, it was supposed to be a capture operation of the ambassador. And what they were going to do was ask for terrorists to get released. So he petitioned to have his brother, Adel Al Shalali, who was on death row in Iraq as he was a member of aqi, and he attempted to suicide bomb me against the US Military. So he said, hey, I'll lead this attack on the ground if you can make my brother a priority for release when you swap the ambassador. So he was involved in two of his other brothers. Their family had seven different brothers who were all members of Al Qaeda. So a long family history. But he really tried to save his brother. Both he now is dead and his brother did get the death penalty in Iraq. Both of them are now deceased. Now, besides the eight, I, of course, had seen the surveillance video at the consulate 50, 60, 70 times by that point. Then FBI did release a photo lineup of. It started to be, I think, like 28 of them. They first did three people. They then pushed more out. So we were, as you can imagine, able to use a photo lineup as well to identify some of those individuals. So we had a lot of successes with that. And we probably identified maybe just eight from the different pictures at the compound. So today we at least walked you through the eight Terrace. We started with a lot of people ask, well, where are you now? What's your count now? Because our original goal was to find 20 of the AL Qaeda members so we could prove it's an Al Qaeda attack. Because it's one thing for me to say, yeah, it was directed by Ayman al Zawahiri, given to Aqim Muktabalmuktar was involved. But it's a lot different if you can say, here's one of the faces at the attack. His face is also on camera and, oh, he's been a member of Al Qaeda for eight years prior to our attacks. Right. That kind of evidence is different. So we first got the 20 members of Al Qaeda and we're like, well, we should keep going. Maybe we should go for just 50 of the terrorists at the attack. So our next goal was to find 50 of the terrorists of the attacks. Remember, we've now been doing this investigation for a decade. When we put out the book, we had been working on it for eight years. So as of right now, we have about 155 of the terrorists in their true names. So we know exactly who they are. We have another 11 terrorists that we still only have their cunhas, but I think all 11 are now dead. So we don't spend tons of time looking for their true name. But we know obviously their group affiliation, what country they're from, you know, and what happened to him, et cetera. And then lastly, we identified the entire 10 man mortar team. They had a direct supervisor, we identified him too, but he is deceased. So we really haven't talked about him publicly. And then we have also identified the senior leader who they all report to, Mohamed Al Gharabi. So we have done a really good job. And so, you know, when you add all those together, you know we're around 175 terrorists who were involved in the attacks. Now there are a lot more terrorists. If we talk about facilitators, financiers, trainers, like this was a huge event when you have over 150 terrorists just to carry out an assault. You know, half went onto the compound, half blocked off the streets, and then you had a whole separate set of attacks on the CI annex. Those numbers add up quickly and there's a lot of people involved. And as you can imagine, the frustrating thing is there's a couple hundred people involved in this and we didn't collect anything in advance. And I think people think the US government is all knowing and has all the information in the world. But look, there's over 200 terrorists here and we collected zero regarding their role in this attack in advance. And I want people to be really clear about that and I want to be honest. And even in the years that followed, our government did not go after the terrorists that attacked us. We could have 50 of them cross the US border and none of them are on a watch list. So I just want you to understand that we have been failing in the counterterrorism fight for a long time. And a lot of propaganda gets put out that we won it. Al Qaeda's gone, we defeated isis. All these things to make the public feel good and feel safe, but it really isn't actually true. And so I want you to be aware that Al Qaeda is still a very big threat to our country, as is isis. And in a number of cases, some of these Al Qaeda attackers are now ISIS or vice versa too. So just I want to be very clear about that now. I want to talk through just a few of our wins. We do get a lot of questions. Osint, we don't do a lot of osint. We do a lot of collection from humans. But of course, we were able to do some osint in this case, as most people know, the Arab Spring was plotted and planned and it really kicked off on Facebook. So the majority of our terrorists had Facebook accounts. And at least back in that day, back in 2012-2013-2014-2015, there weren't a lot of restrictions on Facebook accounts. Like people weren't making them private or just for their family. So we could see all the posts, all the photos, we could even see the Libyan phone numbers on these accounts at the time. So we were able to do, as you can imagine, a lot of link analysis off of these. Another thing that really helped in our favor is obviously Gaddafi's government collapsed. So a number of our terrorists were previously detained and a lot of the information from during their detention was now widely available. So I don't even know the number. Let's say 25 of our terrorists were in Abu Saleem prison. Well, we could go get those 25 prison records, so we could get their photo, we could get their date of birth, their place of birth, their nationality, why they were detained, their previous roles in Al Qaeda. We even in some cases got some of their associates from this. So it was a really unique situation we're able to take advantage of. Another thing is we kind of came into the age where there was a lot more use of social media, and it was almost like grandstanding. So terrorists were taking a lot of group photos. They were literally taking videos of them carrying out terrorist attack in Benghazi and putting them on the Internet. So we got a lot of pictures of our terrorists just from them and their bravado, showing off. So we are able to learn a lot more than we would have because the terrorists were putting the information out themselves. Remember, a lot of these terrorists fought in the revolution, so they looked at themselves almost like heroes and they acted in that way. And they felt they needed to put out like a public show or a public front of what they're doing. So it's just a really interesting thing that a lot of people don't think about. The last piece that we were really able to take advantage of is in 2014, the Libyan National army and General Haftar and of course, the citizens of Benghazi had to come together and do something because Al Qaeda and ISIS had completely taken over the city. They were essentially in charge. So there had to be an entire campaign to rid the city of Benghazi of these terrorists. So in real time, a lot of this campaign was put up publicly because again, the public in Benghazi was involved. You had to keep them committed, right? You needed to get info from them, you needed to make sure the evacuated area so you didn't harm them when you went in to do clearing operations against terrorists. Remember, a lot of these citizens had their fathers and brothers and husbands killed by these terrorists. You know, in some of the families, the terrorists killed every male in the family so they could wipe out the bloodline. So this was, this wasn't just a fight against terrorism. This was like a real personal event. So there was a lot of information. So we were able to track in real time where these operations were occurring, what terrorists were dying in them. And probably half of our Benghazi attackers died in this like 2014, 2015 war against them. You know, it was called the second Libyan war. And so that really helped our investigation a lot because we learned a lot. And then as you can imagine, during that time when some of our terrorists were killed, those other individuals impacted by them pointed out that they assassinated their father, or that they killed this police officer, or that they beheaded this individual on film. And so we got to see some of the larger picture too, because remember, an attack occurred against us over the course of one night in Benghazi. These terrorists carried out thousands of attacks and thousands of assassinations in the city. And we can't forget that there is a long history of a lot of bad things they are involved in. And remember, terrorists don't just do terrorism. You know, they run drugs, they run weapons, there's a lot of child exploitation, child rape. So there's a lot of different crimes going on besides just looking for this attacker that came at us with a gun. So I hope that was a good overview of at least where we started, some of the things we were able to take advantage of at the time. Right. There's always going to be openings and things you can look for and gain information from there, or at least find other people who have access to the information, who have the same mindset as you. In this case, of course, we're talking about terrorism where the majority of the world is anti terrorist. So that gives us, as you can imagine, a ton of partners to work with and push along this investigation. And we're thankful for all of them. And we hope if you're looking at doing any sort of investigation, that maybe this helps you now think, hey, I can do this. I can get started. And we wish you best of luck with that. Thanks for being here today on the watch floor.