An American Cemetery Goes Missing In Gaddafi's Libya

In which I follow the trail of the victims of the USS Intrepid (Part 2 of 4)

Lieutenant Richard Somers, Commander of the USS Intrepid

Standing on the side of a hill under an unforgiving Libyan summer sun, I held a pad of paper and pencil in my hands, wondering where on earth to begin. In front of me were between a dozen and two dozen gravestones. Some were chipped and split in pieces. A few names were legible, others obscured by layers of dust deposited across decades or centuries of hot desert wind — the khamseen. While the diminutive cemetery was encircled by a 10-food mud-brick wall, the gradient of the hill allowed one to see out, past the wall to an expanse of cerulean sea, devoid of any markers that would anchor one in either time or place: no cruise ships, no schooners, no water scooters, no para-sailers, no oil tankers.

***

Within weeks of my landing at the US Liaison Office (neither a consulate nor an embassy— more of a diplomatic placeholder) in Tripoli, Libya, in September 2004, a cable arrived from the Department of Defense. It directed the newly established American mission – “with all due haste” to locate a “missing” cemetery where American military personnel were believed to be interred.

With all the other affairs of state requiring urgent attention at the time, the request seemed incongruous. What would be gained by finding this missing piece of real estate quickly, after a 20+ year American absence? And how, exactly, does a cemetery go missing?

“Once found”, the orders read, “make sure the premises (and their occupants) have not been disturbed.”

As the junior officer in the group, it fell to me to do the finding, and to fulfill the other terms of the request, which included providing a detailed sketch of the gravestones, the lettering on them, and the crypts' positions relative to one another. Perhaps, I thought, the sketch was a precaution to avoid the Libyan security services’ (mukhabarat) blanket prohibition of photographs on sensitive sites? But that would require a degree of hyper-situational awareness whoever wrote this cable likely did not have.

Who were these missing Americans? And where to start? The sole clue given was the fact that the cemetery had been known to the last American diplomats in Libya in the late 1970s as the “Protestant Cemetery.” As it turned out, asking a taxi driver to take me to the “maqbara brotestantiyya” (Protestant Cemetery) was all it took.

Built into the wall was a large metal door, latched to the frame by two monstrous locks. I spent twenty minutes wandering the surrounding narrow streets in search of a someone who help me gain accesss. The area popped with color from electric-red and purple bougainvillea that hugged the sides of the local two-story houses.

A small crowd gathered, and a summons was issued. A few minutes later, an elderly man in a white Jalabiyya and skull cap emerged and introduced himself to me as the cemetery caretaker. Once he understood what I was after — access to the site — and seeing the official letter in Arabic that I had brought with me from the Libyan equivalent of a Ministry of Foreign Affairs — he excused himself.

Ten minutes later he returned with a metal ring, on which hung three or four massive steel keys, which looked like they might have been twice his age. He led me back to the enclosure and opened the gate.

The Protestant Cemetery, Tripoli (possible photo credit: Dan Silva)

Despite the mutual enmity that had existed between Gaddafi and the United States -- (Ronald Reagan famously called Gaddafi the Mad Dog of the Middle East; Gaddafi responded with a litany of far more creative epithets) the cemetery had been minimally tended to. While the crypts showed their age, there were few weeds, and no sign of vandalism.

Something about the site’s positioning on the hillside, and the height of the walls, seemed to create an acoustic bubble: Once inside, I could no longer hear the incessant barking of local dogs, nor the sound of distant surf, nor the screeches of stray seagulls, nor cars honking. In that enclosure, everything was bright, everything was silent, and the sea stretched to infinity.

From the inscriptions on stone, it seemed the deceased were indeed foreigners – and from a number of countries, not just the United States. One was a minister. The next, apparently, his wife. Another had been a Danish diplomat.

Several stones carried a footer: “from the crew of the USS Intrepid,” and the date, 1804. I suspected that these were the ones for whom I was sent to account, and that they were likely connected to the Barbary Wars in the late 1700s, early 1800s. Right place, right time period. Why hadn’t I been told what or who I was looking for?

***

less than an hour later, I returned the keys to the caretaker waiting for me outside. A diplomatic car returned me to the Corinthia hotel in which the American diplomats lived at the time (the Corinthia was rumored, whether correctly or not, to have been constructed on the remains of a Jewish cemetery — a typically Gaddafi move). By now extremely curious, I looked up the names I had uncovered through a glacial Internet connection. And that is how I learned of the dramatic events described in the previous post.

The Intrepid was a converted sailboat, a ‘ketch’, some source say first constructed for Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt, before the Karamanli pirates took it as a prize. It had been captured by the Americans, and used successfully to set fire to the USS Philadelphia, a 36-gun frigate that in 1803 hit a reef while enforcing an American blockade against Tripoli harbor and its penned-in pirates. The Philadelphia’s 300-odd man crew was captured and taken hostage by Yusuf Karamanli, the local ruler, or “Bey”. The ignition of its magazine created a blast that was heard – and seen — for miles away on a moon-less night.

A year later, The Intrepid was repurposed for a second mission — this time as a floating bomb to be ignited in the middle of Tripoli harbor, with the hopes of destroying much of the enemy fleet. But the ordinance caught fire before the crew could position her. Intrepid’s commander Lieutenant Richard Somers and his crew of 12 were likely killed instantly. Their bodies washed up on a narrow beach near the Bey’s castle a few days later. They were desecrated, “fed to the dogs”, and dragged through the streets of Old Tripoli.

Some of those men whose tombstones I had sketched had been on the Intrepid.

And all of this was part of the backdrop to the exploits of William Eaton, who devised a plan to release the captives, avenge the crew of the Intrepid, and end once and for all the pirate depredations against Americans in the Mediterranean.

As recounted in the previous post, several years earlier Eaton had been the American Consul in the neighboring emirate of Tunis, where Eaton had befriended Yusuf’s deposed and exiled younger brother Ahmed (known to the Americans as “Hamet”). Eaton’s plan to return Hamet to the throne involved traveling from Valetta, Malta, to Cairo, Egypt — finding “Hamet”, and then traveling with a small contingent of US marines and sundry mercenaries across more than 500 miles of scorching desert to capture the Eastern Libyan town of Derna. There, Eaton would prepare to raise a second army to march on Tripoli, more than 800 miles to the West. These exploits would be memorialized in the famous line of the Marine Hymn: “From the Halls of Montezuma to the Shores of Tripoli…”.

Eaton had taken Derna and was ready to march on Tripoli and depose Yusuf when he was instructed to retreat on orders from Washington. The imminent threat he had created had managed to elicit concessions from the desperate Bey — and Washington was ready to accept, rather than risk the potential consequences of a direct engagement by Eaton and his men. Ruing the lost opportunity, and his lost men, Eaton could see that caution and expediency would not only not produce peace, but would guarantee a restart of the war.

****

As a side-note, a group, including descendants of Commander Somers, had lobbied DOD to repatriate the Intrepid crew to the US, a practice that was contrary to US policy at that time. There seemed to have been movement to make this happen just before the US intervention in Libya in 2011. But given the violence that ensued, it’s unclear what happened next.

The Middle East-Told Slant offers a non-partisan, practitioner's perspective on Middle East politics, conflict, and culture. Written by a former US diplomat, Senior Middle East Analyst, and author of "Benghazi: A New History" (Hachette, 2022) and the forthcoming "Red Sea: A History of the World's Most Volatile Waterway." To receive weekly posts and support this project, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. I offer paid subscribers a complimentary copy of any of my books in print (equivalent to the cost of the subscription — DM me to redeem).