Khashoggi and the Crown Prince

by Owen Wilson

  Some two hours after Khashoggi had entered the consulate, six vehicles left. Two arrived at the residence of Mohammed al-Otaibi, the Saudi consul general who lived five hundred yards away at 3.09pm. It was an imposing building crowned with the Saudi emblem of golden crossed swords and a palm tree. A Saudi flag flew outside. Here too Turkish employees at the residence had hastily been told to immediately to take the day off. One of the vehicles, a Mercedes Vito van with tinted windows, pulled into the garage there. Neighbours of the consul general’s residence, which is situated next to a popular restaurant, reported that for the first time ever there had been a barbecue that afternoon next to the pool in the large fenced-in garden of the residence. The neighbours had speculated what the barbecue was for, it was reported.

  At 6.20pm the second jet took off heading for Cairo. After spending twenty-five hours on the ground there, it flew on to Riyadh. The Saudi men from the first flight were seen leaving their hotels around 8pm that evening. The first plane left Istanbul at 10.35pm. It made a stop about 170 miles to the east in Nallihan, Turkey. It then skirted the border between Iraq and Iran, favouring the Iraqi side, and crossed the Persian Gulf, landing in Dubai at 2.30am. The following morning, it flew on to Riyadh. Thirteen passengers departed on these flights – six in one group, seven in the second.

  Khashoggi’s fiancée had left waiting outside the consulate which closed at 3.30p. At 4pm, she alerted the Turkish authorities. She was still seen waiting outside the consulate forlornly at 5.33pm. Neither she, nor anyone else, would ever see Jamal Khashoggi alive again.

  The disappearance of the high-ranking writer had, in principle, been pulled off like clock-work by a practised team of highly skilled men. The Saudis were adept at disappearing people and no more should have been heard of it.

  Then everything began to go wrong, not least of all for the man who ordered the assassination.

  2 The Crown Prince

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  Until the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman or MBS had been the darling of the West where he was seen by pundits and governments alike as a desperately-needed reformer in a country stuck in the Middle Ages and run in increasingly geriatric succession by the sons of King Ibn Saud. MBS had opened cinemas and restricted the powers of the religious police. Women were allowed to drive and visit sports stadiums. The first public concert featuring a female singer had been held. His shakedown of the starchy generation of older princes was understandable as the Kingdom was suffering from the low oil prices.

  Dynamic MBS planned to diversify the economy, moving Saudi Arabia away from its slavish dependence on oil. He also spent an awful lot of money buying Western arms. Tantalisingly, he also toyed with idea of privatising the state oil company Saudi Aramco, the world’s most profitable company, in order the plug the gaping hole in the royal coffers of the desert kingdom. Although it would only be 5% of the company, the West (that is US oil companies Texaco, Exxon, Mobil) had been excluded from owning part of the company ever since nationalisation in the seventies.

  But by the normal rules, MBS should not have been in a position of power at all. Saudi Arabia was founded in 1932 under King Ibn Saud. After he died in 1953, he was supposed to be succeeded in turn by all his surviving sons (he had forty five at the time of his death, thirty six of whom survived their father) and six of them would indeed become king. When the sixth one, King Salman, ascended the throne in 2015, his younger brother the septuagenarian Prince Muqrin duly became the next Crown Prince and First Deputy Prime Minister. But after just three months, King Salman replaced him with his nephew Prince bin Nayef, making him first in line to the throne. However, in June 2017, this prince was also sacked by royal decree and replaced by Salman’s own son Mohammed bin Salman or MBS.

  Born in 1985, MBS was the eldest child of King Salman’s third wife Fahda bint Falah bin Sultan bin Hathleen. Several of King Salman’s other sons, who studied overseas to perfect foreign languages and earn advanced degrees, built impressive résumés. One became the first Arab astronaut, another a deputy oil minister, yet another the governor of Medina Province.

  But MBS stayed in Saudi Arabia and does not speak English fluently, although he appears to understand it. Rachid Sekkai, who taught him English and later worked for the BBC, said he toyed with a walkie-talkie in class and was more interested in playing in the garden and cracking jokes with his brothers and the guards. When the chance came to visit America, he refused to go to the US Embassy for a visa, to be finger-printed ‘like some criminal’, according to a State Department cable.

  While his father was still governor of Riyadh Province, MBS was brought up in a palace that was built like a fortress. After a private education, he studied law at King Saud University in Riyadh, graduating fourth in his class. Another prince of the same generation said he had gotten to know him during high school when one of their uncles held regular dinners for the younger princes at his palace. He recalled MBS being one of the crowd, saying he liked to play bridge and admired Margaret Thatcher.

  At the age of twenty four, MBS became an advisor to his father prince Salman. Other political appointments followed and when his father became second deputy prime minister and defence minister, MBS remained in post as his father’s private advisor. Prince Salman became crown prince in 2012, then king in January 2015, naming MBS as Deputy Crown Prince and minister of defence. This gave him a lot of sway in the West with arms procurements.

  It was in his new capacity as minister of defence that MBS first wielded power.

  In neighbouring Yemen, the rebel Houthi militia of the Shiite Zaidi sect and forces loyal to the former president Ali Abdullah Saleh, who had been ousted in 2012, took the capital city Sana’a in 21 March 2015 and proclaimed themselves the official government of Yemen. They left Saleh’s Sunni successor Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi in power in the principal port of Aden, however, while Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant also gained control of parts of Yemen. The Houthi then marched on Aden and ‘President’ Hadi fled on the 25th, finding refuge in Riyadh, where he is understood to be languishing under house arrest.

  In retaliation, MBS organised a Sunni coalition of the Gulf states and began air strikes on Houthi positions and imposed a naval blockade. Peremptorily, he did not even bother to inform the head of the National Guard, prince Mutaib din Abdullah, when the first air strikes went in.

  Having total command of Yemeni airspace, MBS expected a quick victory over the Houthi and, consequently, the restoration of the Hadi regime which he then could take credit for. At the start of the war, he was often photographed visiting troops and meeting with military leaders. But as the campaign stalemated and dragged on into a war of attrition, his appearances grew rare. When The Economist dubbed him the ‘architect of the war in Yemen’, MBS’s response was that he was waging war on Islamic terrorism. As a military leader, MBS had no experience and took frequent holidays, putting himself out of contact for days on end.

  Instead of a quick victory, war dragged on and civilian casualties mounted, and MBS drew growing criticism from human rights groups, while diplomats pointed out that the death toll for Saudi troops was higher than the government acknowledged publicly. The prolonged war and the Saudi-led blockade also led to a famine. Half of the war-torn country’s population – fourteen million people – were on the brink of starvation and it is estimated that 85,000 children died from malnutrition. (In order to counter these headlines, MBS established the Centre for Studies and Media Affairs to propagate a positive spin on the Yemen war in Washington and he hired numerous Washington lobbying and public relations firms to assist in the PR campaign.)

  While oil prices were dropping, MBS paid for the costly war by slashing the state budget, freezing government contracts and reducing the pay of civil employees in the name of austerity. For himself, however, he could not resist buying a 440-foot yacht from a Russian vodka tycoon for $500 million. Fearing assassination with so many enemies, he is said to sleep on b
oard.

  He also bought Château Louis XIV near Versailles, France, the world’s most expensive home with a $300 million price tag. This modern palace was built by Saudi property developer Emad Khashoggi, a cousin of Jamal. The Leonardo da Vinci painting ‘Salvador del Mundo’ cost him $450 million in the most expensive art sale in history. And before the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, MBS was planning a £4 billion takeover bid for Manchester United, though the Glazer family said they had no immediate intention of selling the club.

  Even before he became crown prince, it quickly became clear that MBS was easing aside Crown Prince bin Nayef who, as long-time counterterrorist prince, had good connections in Washington and the support of many of the older royals. The White House saw an early sign of the ambition of the young prince, however, in late 2015, when – breaking protocol – MBS delivered a soliloquy about the failures of American foreign policy during a meeting between his father King Salman and President Obama.

  Given Saudi Arabia’s crusty echelons of power and the Saudi crown cascading down aging and infirm brothers, many young Saudis admired MBS as a dynamic representative of their generation who addressed some of the kingdom’s problems in a forthright manner. The country’s controlled news media lent a helping hand by building up his image as a hardworking, business-like leader less concerned with the trappings of royalty than his predecessors – his profligacy was not covered in the Saudi media. But the old guard among the royal family saw him as a power-hungry inexperienced upstart who didn’t understand the consequences of impulsive change.

  Early in 2016, the Crown Prince bin Nayef retired to his villa in Algeria. Previously he had taken hunting holidays there, but this time it was different. He stayed away for weeks and was often incommunicado. Even CIA Director John Brennan, who had known him for decades, had trouble reaching him. A diabetic, bin Nayef was also suffering from the prolonged effects of injuries from an assassination attempt where an Al-Qaeda suicide bomber detonated a bomb surgically implanted in his rectum. Bin Nayef was avoiding the predations of MBS, who had his eye on the royal succession.

  King Salman had already united his court with that of his son, making MBS Chief of the Royal Court which gave him control of access to the king. King Salman also made MBS head of the lucrative Saudi Aramco, the chief engine of the economy. In addition, MBS himself announced the formation of a military alliance of (Sunni) Islamic countries to fight terrorism. This had long been the province of Prince bin Nayef, but the new alliance gave no role to him or bin Nayef’s Interior Ministry. When MBS listed the countries of the alliance, a number of them said they knew nothing about it, or were waiting for information before deciding to join.

  In April 2016, MBS launched his ambitious plan for the future of the kingdom, called Vision 2030. This sought to increase employment and improve education, healthcare and other government services. A National Transformation Plan, laying out targets for improving government ministries, came shortly after. It also called for transparency and accountability, tacitly admitting that they had been missing before.

  A luxury beach resort was planned for the Red Sea coast where women would be allowed to wear bikinis in the pool and beach areas. Over $2 billion was invested in an entertainment authority MBS established. This staged live music concerts, comedy shows, wrestling matches and monster truck rallies. A large sports, culture and entertainment complex was to be built, along with a theme park. Meanwhile MBS made continued calls for fiscal responsibility.

  Any criticism of the relentless rise of MBS was silenced by phone calls to Saudi journalists telling them they had been barred from publishing, and sometimes from travelling abroad. One Saudi journalist published an article about MBS on his website, the Riyadh Post, where he said that the prince’s popularity was based on a ‘sweeping desire for great change’ and the hope that he would ‘turn their dreams into reality’. But he said: ‘If you fail, this love withers quickly, as if it never existed, and is replaced by a deep feeling of frustration and hatred.’ The website was blocked the next day – QED.

  Deputy Crown Prince MBS made well-publicised foreign trips to Europe, the Middle East and Washington, where he stayed at the Georgetown home of Secretary of State John Kerry. In September 2015, dinner at Mr Kerry’s house ended with Prince bin Salman playing Beethoven on the piano for his host and the other guests. He attended the G20 summit in November 2015, leading commentators to speculate that Crown Prince bin Nayef would be ousted. Then in May 2016, Secretary Kerry was a guest on MBS’s yacht, the Serene, and in June 2016, the two men shared an iftar dinner, breaking the Ramadan fast.

  His influence in Washington was aided by prince Mohammed Bin Zayed al-Nahyan, the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and deputy supreme commander of the United Arab Emirates Armed Forces, who was a favourite in the Obama administration and a respected voice in the Sunni world. Both princes shared an innate hostility to Shia Iran and al-Nahyan also had a personal antipathy toward prince bin Nayef.

  MBS had to work quickly to establish his power base due to his eighty-one-year-old father’s deteriorating health. King Salman had a stroke from which he had not fully recovered before he ascended the throne and was suffering from Alzheimer’s. The king had already issued a decree restructuring Saudi Arabia’s system for prosecutions that stripped Crown Prince bin Nayef of his long-standing powers of overseeing criminal investigations. Then the king met alone with Crown Prince bin Nayef and asked him to step down, ostensibly because of his addiction to painkilling drugs.

  In a final humiliation of bin Nayef, he was forced to pledge loyalty to his successor MBS. He was then under placed under house arrest, while those loyal to him were purged. When MBS became Crown Prince on 21 June 2017, Donald Trump phoned to congratulate him.

  In November 2017, MBS made his next move against his aged adversaries. He ordered some two hundred wealthy businessmen, princes and government officials to be detained in Riyadh’s palatial Ritz-Carlton hotel. They were only released after they gave up billions of dollars to a new anti-corruption committee set up by the Crown Prince. Bank accounts were frozen and the hotel’s internet and telephone lines were disconnected while they remained under house arrest. Those who did not pay up remained in custody. Among those arrested and removed from office was Prince Mutaib bin Abdullah, leader of the Saudi National Guard who enjoyed the support of many fellow princes.

  Senior royals meanwhile bitterly complained that MBS used his power as Chief of the Royal Court to curtail their access to King Salman. Ostensibly with the encouragement of his father, MBS then set about restructuring the intelligence agencies, another Saudi power base sceptical of him.

  Outside the kingdom, MBS started to throw his weight around in the first month of his appointment as Crown Prince. He led a blockade of Qatar in 2017, alleging that the Gulf state was supporting Shia terrorism from Iran. Qatar denied this, admitting that it had provided assistance to some Islamist groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood, but not militant groups linked to al-Qaeda or the Islamic State.

  Like the war against Shia-governed Yemen, the Qatar blockade has continued, and is only mitigated by imports from Iran, Qatar’s neighbour across the Persian Gulf, and Turkey. Turkey’s support for Qatar, against Saudi Arabia, marked a sudden chill in the relations between the two nations. Although 70% Sunni, Turkey has both resisted Saudi Wahhabism for centuries and ignored the Shia-Sunni divide in its foreign policy, striking a pragmatic rather than dogmatic course.

  Early in 2018, given the gathering headlines against him, MBS decided to brush up his overseas image with a lavish tour projecting a youthful image rather than the usual one in traditional Saudi gold trimmed robes. In the UK, he met Prime Minister Theresa May, Queen Elizabeth and Prince William. Then he flew on to the US where he visited Washington, Hollywood and Silicon Valley, meeting President Trump, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Henry Kissinger, Michael Bloomberg, George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Oprah Winfrey, Rupert Murdoch, Richard Branson, Mayor Eric Garcetti of Los Angele
s, Michael Douglas, Morgan Freeman and Dwayne Johnson. He also met with prominent Jewish groups and garnered almost universal praise.

  However, there was one critic writing from the Washington Post who sounded a more reserved note – Jamal Khashoggi. Six months later he was dead and world opinion would once again swing against MBS with a vengeance.

  3 The ‘Traitor’

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  Jamal Ahmad Khashoggi was in many ways an unlikely dissident. In fact, those who knew him said he was not a dissident at all. He loved his country and, as an exile in the US, he missed his friends and family there if not his life in the highest royal circles. He was at best a lukewarm critic of the kingdom. Before he was forced to flee he had been extremely close to the Saudi regime, even being an advisor to King Salman’s predecessor. If anything he was a Saudi grandee and more a writer and commentator than a journalist; and he continued to be privy to secret information through his exceptional contacts and close friendships within the stratosphere of the Saudi royal family.

  It was this closeness to Saudi secrets that, together with the criticism of then president-elect Trump, fuelled the theory that he knew something so extremely damaging if not explosive. It was not necessarily just that he had a column in one of Trump-pet figures of hate, the Washington Post, and a 2 million Twitter feed. Khashoggi was also a power broker. He had, for example, been given $100,000 on 2 December 2009, when he was advisor to King Abdullah, to help create the elaborate smokescreen of high-level Saudi respectability surrounding the 1DMB, sovereign-wealth fraud. Khashoggi himself wasn’t aware of the fraud, but it would ensnare Goldman Sachs with a 6 billion dollar law suit and implode the Malaysian ruling party in 2018, car-crashing its uninterrupted rule since 1957.