* On January 12, 2013, Ambassador De Sanctis was targeted by terrorists as he drove through Benghazi. Terrorists had ambushed his motorcade and hit his vehicle with automatic weapons fire; he had been issued an armored Mercedes G-Wagon following the attack on the Special Mission Compound and the Annex. De Sanctis was not injured in the attack. Italy ruled Libya until the Allies liberated the country from the Axis, and it remains Libya’s closest ally in Europe. Still, the attack, which followed nearly a year of lethal strikes against Western interests in the city, prompted the Italian government to close down its consulate in Benghazi and to call home its diplomatic personnel. Interestingly enough, nearly seven years earlier, on February 17, 2006, eleven people were killed and the Italian consulate burned to the ground during mob violence protesting the publication of cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad.
**According to a source and resident of the Western Fwayhat neighborhood in Benghazi.
*For a larger discussion of SCIFs, see Rajini Vaidyanathan, “Barack Obama’s Top Secret Tent,” BBC News (U.S. and Canada), March 22, 2011, as well as other public domain sources.
*For more personal detail of the night of September 11, 2012, as per events at the U.S. embassy in Tripoli, see the May 8, 2013, testimony of former DCM Gregory Hicks before the House Oversight Committee (Benghazi: Exposing Failure and Recognizing Courage).
* According to interviews conducted with Benghazi residents on the day immediately following the attack by the Al Jazeera correspondent Hoda Abdel-Hamid, the militiamen drove through Benghazi looking to generate a mob that could, reportedly, be similar to the crowds and the TV-spewing rage that was witnessed earlier in the day outside the U.S. embassy in Cairo.
*For a discussion of laser capabilities deployed in Benghazi, see Jennifer Griffin, “What Laser Capability Did Benghazi Team Have,” Fox News, November 4, 2012.
* The exact number of times that the DS agents and the GRS operators entered the smoke-filled safe haven in the desperate search for Ambassador Stevens is unknown, but a conservative estimate is that they ventured inside more than twelve times.
*See May 8, 2013, testimony of Gregory Hicks before the House Oversight Committee (Benghazi: Exposing Failure and Recognizing Courage).
* The identity of the FSN is withheld to safeguard his security and the security of his family in Libya.
* The identity of the agent is being concealed.
* Some accounts have identified this man as Ahmed Busheri, as well as Adel Ibrahim.
* Identity witheld for security concerns.
* The British and German embassies in Khartoum were also attacked that day. The U.S. embassy sustained the greatest damage and only reopened for full business on March 25, 2013.