Khashoggi and the Crown Prince

by Owen Wilson

  Khashoggi and The Crown Prince: The Secret Files - What Did Khashoggi Know?

  http://www.gibsonsquare.com

  Printed ISBN: 9781783340699

  Ebook ISBN: 9781783340705

  E-book production made by Booqla

  Published by Gibson Square

  Copyright © 2019 by Gibson Square

  The Secret Files

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  Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia or, more popularly, ‘MBS’, used to be of interest only to dedicated Kingdom watchers. He had only popped on the global-news radar a few of times since his appointment on 21 June 2017 – once for imprisoning his relatives in a five-star hotel for a shake-down to fill the royal coffers, and another time for kidnapping the Lebanese Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri and having him beaten. He seemed a colourful, feisty character who didn’t hesitate to pick on people his own size. And then he was also in the news for glad-handing Silicon-valley moguls keen to associate with him.

  Yet this relatively low-key profile changed abruptly in the first week of October 2018 when he suddenly had the international-media spell-bound following a continuous news murder-mystery akin to the dramatic hunt for Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi. Astonishingly, it was his fellow Sunni-Muslim leader, the Turkish President Recep Erdoğan, who launched the opening shot on 6 October. On that day Turkish officials leaked to the press a blunt statement that a Saudi commoner had been murdered on 2 October in the Saudi Embassy in Istanbul. The news ran as a thunder bolt through the global media.

  On that day, Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi national resident in the US in his early sixties, had flown into Istanbul from London – where he had attended a conference and had dinner in a restaurant (just around the corner from where I live) – in order to obtain a marriage license in the Saudi-Arabian consulate in Istanbul.

  Although a commoner and not a royal, Khashoggi belonged to the highest echelons of the Saudi elite that surrounded and served the Saudi royal family. He had started his career as a bookseller and journalist, but by birth he was closely related to the pre-eminent Saudi arms dealer and billionaire Adnan Khashoggi, while Jamal’s grandfather was the private physician to the first King Saud. He was also related to billionaire and former Harrod’s owner Mohammed al-Fayed son Dodi, who died with Princess Diana in Paris.

  Even more significantly, Khashoggi, had been advisor to Prince Turki al-Faisal when he was Saudi Ambassador to the United Kingdom, 2003-5, and to the United States, 2005-7. They had had a long working relationship on Saudi secrets well before that. During Prince Turki’s uninterrupted 22-year reign as head of Saudi intelligence they had worked closely together. While Khashoggi’s uncle Adnan sold guns to the Afghans (doubtless paid for by the Saudis and Americans) to fight Soviet Russia, Khashoggi himself had been the secret Saudi liaison to Osama bin Laden – then still the good guy fighting Russia and not the founder of al-Qaeda.

  On 2 October Khashoggi’s fiancée had alerted Washington Post Istanbul bureau chief Kareem Fahim that Khashoggi had mysteriously disappeared after visiting the Saudi embassy in Istanbul, who duly posted an item on his blog from London.

  It wasn’t much of a news story yet and no one paid much attention. But the allegation that Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader Prince bin Salman – known to the security agencies as MBS – had sent a hit squad to Turkey to dispose of a member of the Saudi secret-intelligence community instantly circulated among se services around the world. Clearly, the CIA, MI6, and the security services of Turkey and Saudi Arabia – not to mention Russia’s FSB and GRU, Mossad, France’s Deuxième Bureau, Germany’s BND and the intelligence services of other countries that sold arms to Saudi Arabia – took a keen interest and began amassing secret files for their governments.

  These top-secret files stayed hermetically shut, however, to prying eyes that might cause unwanted turbulence by casting light on the facts of the mater. Only highly specialised intelligence branches of government have the capability to piece facts together and the experts are bound to complete secrecy by government contracts and criminal law, if not professional pride alone. Many of the ways of gathering this intelligence would be considered illegal in any case. Unless a government had a particular agenda it wanted to achieve, the information in these files would remain under lock and key.

  There was no chance that the media would find out more either on its own as it had in the cases of the excruciating deaths of Alexander Litvinenko from Polonium 210 poisoning in 2006 or Dawn Sturgess’s after the poisoning of Sergei Skripal with a top-secret Soviet nerve agent in 2018.

  Turkey and, even more so, Saudi Arabia are hermetically shut to a free press trying to dig around sensitive subjects. Both countries – like Russia or China, or, for that matter, the world’s other authoritarian regimes – have draconic ways of deterring infractions – whether by a journalist or not – by those who show too much interest in matters that might compromise the state.

  Without a free press being able to do their own investigation, Khashoggi’s enigmatic disappearance would soon be filed away as a loose end rather than a red-hot developing news story. Indeed, given Khashoggi’s measure of criticism of Saudi Arabia in his writings and his last sighting at the Saudi consulate, all that could be said, in the absence of hard facts about the disappearance, was that that this mystery looked like yet another instance of the suppression of dissent by a totalitarian regime.

  Yet 4 days after Khashoggi’s disappearance, instead of vanishing into a news fog, something remarkable happened to the story.

  After initially seeming as bemused as anyone, it was the Turkish government that suddenly lit the blue touch paper on 6 October when the two officials leaked their blunt message to the Washington Post that ‘Mr Khashoggi has been killed at the consulate,’ and, just to twist the knife, the anonymous officials added ‘We believe that the murder was premeditated and the body was subsequently moved out of the consulate.’

  The accusation of premeditated immediately brought Khashoggi and the Crown Prince to the attention of the world. Particularly as the day after the alleged death of Khashoggi, no less a person than the Crown Prince himself had protested innocence of Khashoggi’s whereabouts. ‘We have nothing to hide’ he had said in a Bloomberg blog interview on the evening of 3 October.

  Not known for their love of the free media, the Turkish government subsequently started to leak a steady and grisly stream of detailed information about the events in the Saudi consulate. These nuggets of information started to shape a new reputation of the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia as a ghoulish potentate in the mould of Vladimir Putin, Saddam Hussain, the Assads.

  Fanning the flames further, President Erdoğan signalled in a number of personal statements that he would not stop until he had achieved his objective – whatever that was exactly. Erdoğan (despite his own gloves-off vendetta against over-inquisitive journalists), for example, wrote an opinion piece in the Washington Post on the matter, and called the murder ‘savage’ and ‘planned’ in press conferences. The kingdom still pretended it had no idea what had happened to Khashoggi, but the Turkish drip feed would prove irresistible to keep MBS and Khashoggi’s assassination in the spotlight.

  In the age of blogs, tweets, Wikileaks and online diplomacy, it was now in the interests of all nations involved strategically to assess, like Turkey had, whether to leak their own information where this made sense for political and commercial gain.

  Spooks these days do not go around breaking into safes and photographing top-secret documents with miniature cameras to file away in top-secret folders at their end for her majesty’s eyes only. Instead they comb the internet, hack emails, copy CCTV footage and piece together other scraps of information they ca
n lay their hands to answer the questions that remain in a complex jigsaw puzzle of national and private interests: what did Khashoggi know that made it imperative that he was killed, how is it connected to President Trump; why is Turkey taking such aim at the kingdom, given that the Crown Prince in some ways uses Turkey as a model for reform; how does it relate to Qatar, where the US has its largest base in the Middle East, Iran, Israel etc?

  Every single fact that we know about the Khashoggi case derives entirely from these secret files. This book aims to reconstruct what was in them. Unlike the days before the internet, this reconstruction is now eminently possible. Khashoggi’s Barbaric assassination has pulled away the curtain in one fell swoop from the secretive world of Middle-Eastern power play and not just the fateful and grisly intertwining of the fate of the two men at the heart of it.

  1 Istanbul

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  A private jet with tail markings HZ-SK1 touched down at Istanbul’s Atatürk Airport at 3.13am on 2 October 2018. It had come from Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia. Nine people arrived on this flight. They were members of the Saudi security forces and checked into two Istanbul hotels – the Mövenpick Hotel and the Wyndham Grand where they were caught on in-house cameras passing through security and checking in. From the top-floor windows, the men could almost see the nearby Saudi Arabian consulate, which was tucked away in a quiet street in an Istanbul financial district. Both hotels are just a short drive away.

  Although Saudi Arabia is immensely wealthy from oil money, its consulate in Istanbul is far from impressive. Overshadowed by the towers of Istanbul’s Levent business district, it is a far cry from the modern Saudi Arabia dreamt of by its powerful Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman with his vision of skyscraper cities in the desert. Behind security barriers and razor wire, the consulate is more Fawlty Towers and has the air of a shabby 1970s office building. The ceilings are low and the corridors are harshly lit. Telephone calls are often put through to the wrong person. On the desks, shambolic stacks of paper wait to be rubberstamped, sometimes spilling onto the floor in a jumble of passport photos and visa applications. It is also an unlikely murder scene.

  Saudi Arabian writer and intelligence insider Jamal Khashoggi, a fifty-nine-year-old columnist for the Washington Post and a prominent critic of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, arrived at the consulate at 1.14pm. In self-imposed exile in Virginia, he needed copies of divorce papers prior to this forthcoming marriage to a fourth wife. She was a Turkish national. Consequently he had been directed to pick up the paperwork in Istanbul by MBS’s brother, Prince Khalid bin Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, the Saudi ambassador in Washington, DC. Arranging to collect the documents in Istanbul, he had been assured that he would be safe. He had visited the consulate on Friday, 28 September 2018, but the divorce papers were not ready and he was told to return the following Tuesday, 2 October. Khashoggi flew to London to attend a conference and stayed there for the weekend, returning to the consulate on Tuesday afternoon. He never left.

  The Saudis had had four days to plan how to get rid of Jamal Khashoggi, who was a close friend to high-ranking members of the Saudi royal family and significant enough to be known personally to Crown Prince bin Salman. Sensing that there might be trouble, despite assurances to the contrary, Khashoggi himself was accompanied by his thirty-six-year-old fiancée Hatice Cengiz, a PhD student at university in Istanbul. She especially took a day off class to be with him. She was to wait outside the consulate. He gave her his mobile phone before he went in. If anything went wrong and he did not emerge in an hour, she was to call a friend, a fellow who was an advisor to President Erdoğan himself.

  Khashoggi had reason to be careful. Despite his place in the rarefied Saudi corridors of power, in the late summer of 2017 he had gone into self-imposed exile following a ban from public speaking imposed on him by Saudi Arabia’s government. Remarkably, this ban had little to do with any criticism Khashoggi might have of Saudi politics, but rather with his criticism of president-elect Donald Trump as ‘contradictory’ at an obscure energy conference at The Washington Institute, a think tank, two days after Trump had won the election in 2016. The Saudi government, presumably, saw the vain and volatile billionaire and soon-to-be president as their mark and feared Khashoggi’s views might be seen as those among the royal elite. Or, perhaps, it was the fact that Khashoggi had commented on Trump’s closeness to Russia. Stung like a bee, Saudi Arabia had issued an official press release: ‘The author Jamal Khashoggi does not represent the government of Saudi Arabia or its positions at any level’.

  While in US exile in Virginia, Khashoggi had started writing regular columns for the Washington Post. In his first one he wrote, ‘I have left my home, my family and my job, and I am raising my voice. To do otherwise would betray those who languish in prison. I can speak when so many cannot. I want you to know that Saudi Arabia has not always been as it is now. We Saudis deserve better.’ He also had his own Twitter account, written in Arabic, with 2 million followers. On the whole his Post columns were but mildly critical of the desert-kingdom’s new policies, and indeed occasionally laudatory, though he had also used his column to comment on the Crown Prince, the most powerful man in the oil-rich kingdom after King Salman. He had also continued to criticise Donald Trump by name, lastly in his column of 28 August 2018 on the Muslim Brotherhood, for not correcting ‘Obama’s mistakes.’

  When the door was closed behind him, Khashoggi was ushered to the second floor of the building and into the office of the consul general. This would have befitted someone of Khashoggi’s status in Saudi society. He was a man who had advised senior royals, including the former ambassador to London and Washington, and intelligence chief, Prince Turki, and the ruler of Saudi Arabia until 2015, King Abdullah.

  Khashoggi should have had little reason to fear consul general Mohammed al-Otaibi as he sat down in a guest chair opposite his desk. The consul general had personally called him and invited him back to finalise his papers, after the failed attempt the previous Friday.

  Khashoggi, however, was not the only stranger in the building. A large elite squad of military had been waiting for him, all members of the state’s security apparatus who had arrived earlier in the morning. The hit squad, which had flown in from Riyadh on charters and scheduled flights, some ten hours earlier was drawn from the most elite units of the Saudi security forces. Their fidelity had been repeatedly tested in previous assignments. Among them were major general Maher Abdulaziz Mutreb, an officer who was attached to the Crown Prince’s security detail and well-known to Khashoggi, and Dr Salah Muhammed al-Tubaigy, the head of forensics in the kingdom’s interior ministry. Mutreb and his team had been filmed by a security camera outside the consulate walking towards the door.

  Turkish employees of the consulate had unexpectedly been given the afternoon off on 2 October. Sent home before noon they had been told that an important diplomatic delegation was arriving for a meeting. The loyalties of the Saudis remaining in the building could not be questioned.

  It was a simple matter to disable the consulate’s CCTV. Any record of what happened behind the building’s walls would be taken back to Saudi Arabia. What was about to take place there would never be known to the outside world. Or so the elite Saudi death squad thought.

  But in Turkey, and elsewhere, diplomatic missions sometimes have ears. Unbeknownst to the Saudis, intelligence officials from at least one national spy agency were listening in and hearing every sound and every word spoken during their operation. Just which spy agency and how they managed to get their recording has been the subject of much intrigue throughout intelligence agencies around the world.

  Not long after Khashoggi entered the consul’s office, major general Mutreb entered with three other members of the death squad.

  Surprised to see the familiar face of his former London-embassy colleague, Khashoggi asked what Mutreb was doing here. Mutreb told him curtly that he had to return to Saudi Arabia. Khashoggi refused. There followed seven minutes of quar
relling during which Khashoggi shouted, ‘Release my arm! What do you think you are doing?’ At the same time, there was a heated Skype call to Saud al-Qahtani, one of the Crown Prince’s closest advisors known in dissident circles as the ‘Saudi Steve Bannon’.

  Khashoggi also knew al-Qahtani well. A month after leaving Saudi in 2017, al-Qahtani had called him in Virginia and given praise for his support for the Crown Prince’s decision to let women drive. ‘Keep writing and boasting’, al-Qahtani had added unctuously. This time, al-Qahtani dropped all pretence of charm. Khashoggi was told he was being kidnapped and would be taken back to Saudi Arabia by force.

  ‘You can’t do that,’ Khashoggi replied fearfully, ‘People are waiting outside.’ ‘People’ was a generous term. He was counting on his fiancée to raise the alarm and contact President Erdoğan’s advisor as well as the Turkish authorities if she saw anything suspicious.

  During the following seven horrific minutes, the four men beat and tortured him. Consul general Otaibi asked them to do this outside, fearing that it would get him into trouble. He was told to shut up if he wanted to live when he returned to Saudi Arabia. Meanwhile Khashoggi repeatedly pleaded, ‘I can’t breathe’. These would be the last words he ever spoke.

  Jamal Khashoggi’s grisly fate was played out behind closed doors in a secure building – in a diplomatic mission which is a piece of sovereign territory where the host nation and others are not supposed to pry.

  Yet the information about Khashoggi’s macabre fate would come exclusively, from ‘sources’. That is people who prefer to remain anonymous within the governments of Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Russia, the US, the UK, France, Germany and others, each of whom were towing their own self-interest in leaking the information to the international media. Facts would not be coming from independent press investigations, as it would in countries with a free press.