The Murder of an Idealist: The Sad Tragedy of the Death of Christopher Stephens in Benghazi
For six hours on September 11, the American compounds in Benghazi, Libya, stood siege. When the attack was over, J. Christopher Stevens’s body was pulled from the wreckage—the first U.S. ambassador killed by militants in over thirty years. Since then, his death has been politicized and the details of the attack distorted. The story of Stevens’s last days in Libya—and reveals the true believer we lost that day
On the morning of September 11, when the American flag flew at half-mast above the U.S. mission in Benghazi, J. Christopher Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya, had breakfast with a man named Habib Bubaker.
Stevens was in Benghazi for the first time since being sworn in last May, having spent all of the previous four months working out of the embassy in Tripoli. But when Bubaker had greeted him at the airport the previous morning, a Monday, Stevens had told him, “I’m very excited to be back.”
Bubaker had known the ambassador for more than a year. He’d introduced himself in April 2011, two months into the Libyan revolution, when Stevens had been dispatched to Benghazi as the U.S. envoy to the rebel coalition. The United States had already chosen a side in the war, and Stevens was assigned to establish ties with the people who, it was assumed, would eventually govern the country. Bubaker ran an English school in the city, and he offered to be Stevens’s translator. Stevens spoke Arabic, but the language of diplomacy being delicate and precise, he preferred English in his official meetings. And so Bubaker made introductions and accompanied him on business and was basically his local right-hand man during that spring and summer of war. They were also friends; Bubaker, in fact, refers to himself as “Chris Stevens’s best friend.” A lot of people do. Stevens was a man who made friends easily.