Dark Forces: The Truth About What Happened in Benghazi by Kenneth R. Timmerman Page A

plausable deniability.
    The Letfallah II docked in Khoms, Libya, on March 28 and stayed in port for six days before moving fifty-five nautical miles down the coast to Misrata on April 4. Most shipping companies spend a great deal of time and effort to keep their ships busy, since every day they idle in port is another day they have to pay crew, insurance, and port fees. But apparently Khafaji—or whoever was paying him—didn’t care. The Letfallah II spent six more days in Misrata with its Automatic Identification System (AIS) disabled. Since 2002, the International Maritime Organization has required all cargo vessels of three hundred tons or more to carry AIS equipment to reduce the risks of maritime accidents. Turning off the system—and thus, disappearing from the live charts kept by the IMO and its affiliates—is a trick used by smugglers and others (such as Iran) seeking to disguise the movements of their vessels.
    Why the additional six-day wait? Perhaps whoever had organized the weapons collection was having problems. When the ship was intercepted in Lebanon, only three containers were seized, not twelve as initially planned. One of the seized containers bore the distinctive green, white, and red logo and two-foot letters of the IRISL, the Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines. 3
    Once the ship was loaded in Misrata, it began a deceptive zigzag course across the Mediterranean. The first stop was the commercial port of Gulluk, Turkey, a picturesque fishing and tourist haven in the Aegean Sea on Turkey’s Turquoise Coast, where it stopped from April 14 to 16. Then, it disappeared for five days, with its AIS equipment switched off, surfacing again on April 21 in Alexandria, Egypt, where, according to the UN report, it offloaded construction materials it had picked up in Gulluk. After leaving Alexandria on April 24, it disappeared yet again for several days until a Lebanese navy vessel intercepted it off the coast of the northern Lebanese port of Tripoli on April 27. Official reports suggested that the Lebanese navy was suspicious because the Letfallah II was riding high in the water and reasoned it would be easier to contain a potential gunfight and prevent civilian casualties if they diverted the ship to Selaata, a military port just down the coast.
    The ship’s manifest showed that it was carrying engine oil. Lebanese customs officials offloaded three containers of smuggled weapons, which had been sealed in Misrata, and loaded them onto trucks with a heavy military escort and drove them down to Beirut. The Lebanese authorities arrested Ahmad Hussein Khafaji, the captain of the ship (and brother of the owner), as well as a local Lebanese agent. They kept Khafaji in jail for over a year. He was pending trial as this book went to press. 4
    Many questions about the Letfallah II shipment remain unanswered, despite an extensive investigation by the UN Panel of Experts appointed by the secretary general to report on the implementation of UN Security Council resolutions imposing an arms embargo and an assets freeze on Libya.
    The Turkish government initially rebuffed UN inquiries about the ship. Turkey’s permanent representative to the UN, Ertug rul Apakan, sent an indignant letter to the secretary general and to the president of the Security Council, rejecting “unfounded allegations” that Turkey was conspiring with Libya to send weapons to the Syrian rebels. The Letfallah II “neither docked at any Turkish port nor has any affiliation with Turkey in terms of its registration or operator,” Ambassador Apakan wrote on May 15, 2012. That turned out to be untrue. 5
    The Turkish government eventually admitted that the Letfallah II had docked in Turkey, and declared it was carrying three containers of “combustible engines” ( sic ) as its cargo, the UN inspectors reported in March 2014. 6
    An official inventory provided by the Lebanese government showed that the Libyans had scoured the local arms market for