Fox News reports that the Benghazi attackers stole cell phones from the State Department and used them to communicate with their leaders during the attack, and that U.S. spies overheard these conversations.
Eric Stahl, the commander of a U.S. Air Force crew that flew in to Benghazi to rescue survivors and bear the corpses of the four victims, told Fox's Brett Baier he learned this from members of a CIA-trained response crew which was present on the ground the day of the attack.
"After they had left the consulate in Benghazi and went to the safe house," Stahl said, "they were getting reports that cell phones, consulate cell phones, were being used to make calls to the attackers' higher-ups."
Stahl spoke with the response staff on the 13th of September, two days after the attack.
Stahl said the staff was "puzzled" by reports that the attack had been spurred by an anti-Islam video: "They were completely perplexed. They knew that this was a full scale attack while it was going on."
Before Stahl flew in to Tripoli, he and his crew had been stationed in Germany, waiting on Bravo alert status for a detainee transfer from Guantanamo Bay.
Baier asked, "Bottom line, in the alert status you were in, conceivably, if they had called early enough, you could have evaded those people from Benghazi?"
"Absolutely," Stahl replied. "If they would've called we could've been down there in three hours basically."
Stahl also remarked, "You would've thought that we would have had a little bit more of an alert posture on 9/11."
Stahl was not chosen to appear before the Accountability Review Board which investigated the attack. Another source confirmed his story to Fox News, strengthening evidence that U.S. officials knew the attack was coordinated by terrorists.