by Owen Wilson
Worryingly, Khashoggi seemed on the verge of suddenly creating a new family in Turkey, buying an apartment in Istanbul and nurturing a personal friendship with President Erdoğan, Saudi-Arabia’s arch rival for Middle Eastern leadership among Sunni nations. After a year in exile, Khashoggi had become an intelligence liability that had to be neutralised.
The secrets Khashoggi was and had been privy to were on the verge of drifting away from the Saudi sphere of influence into rival territory. He was increasingly seen as a loose end by MBS and his advisors. If his new friends were able to play him – a possibility given that his soon-to-be much younger wife was Turkish – he possessed sensitive information that could fall into the wrong hands.
When Mutreb yelled ‘traitor’ while his former colleague was being dismembered on video, he dropped an unmistakable clue as to what was really behind the brutal killing.
Khashoggi’s importance was not lost either on Vladimir Putin, another world leader who viciously hunted down journalists inside his own country, but who only took lethal aim at intelligence risks beyond Russia’s borders.
President Putin would take the opportunity to offer his personal response to the Khashoggi murder on 18 October at a conference in Sochi (the Valdai Discussion Club, Russia’s state of the union for top officials and oligarchs). Leaking what was in Russia’s intelligence files, he pointedly said about Khashoggi’s curriculum vitae, ‘As far as I can judge this man to a certain extent part of the Saudi elite. In some way or other he was connected to certain circles in power’. Discounting the fact that Khashoggi was also a writer, Putin observed, ‘It is hard to say, what is going on there.’
In an even more significant hint of the extent of Russian intelligence, Putin had publicly brought up the subject of ‘traitors’ on 3 October – the day after the brutal, torture and assassination of Khashoggi, and on the same day on which MBS was to protest publicly and in person his innocence of Khashoggi’s fate to Bloomberg in the evening.
Putin was taking part in a midday Q&A sesssion at the Russian Energy Week conference in Moscow, but he had mysteriously veered off the topic into a vitriolic broadside against former-GRU spy Sergei Skripal. It seemed so random at the time that his outburst made the world news. But, speaking at an energy conference, meant that it was in any case guaranteed to be relayed back word for word to Riyadh. Also, seated next to Vladimir Putin at the Q&A session was Khalid al-Failih, MBS’s Saudi energy minister and the former CEO of Aramco. He would be able to convey first-hand Putin’s passionate view on ‘traitors’ and what any country should do with them. This message could not have been misunderstood by MBS.
‘Imagine’ Putin fumed, pulling a disgusted face, ‘suddenly someone goes and betrays your country. What do you think about him? ... He’s just a scumbag, and that’s it.’ The Russian word Putin spat out at the conference attended by oil and gas state ministers and CEOs of oil companies was ‘poldonok’, a vulgar swear word.
Bizarrely Putin had also added that some ‘are pushing forward the theory that Mr Skripal is almost some kind of human rights defender.’
It was an odd straw man to knock down, unless of course the president was talking about a ‘traitor’ who both possessed national secrets he was taking away from his country as well as being a public defender of human rights. Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, with a two million Twitter feed, could definitely be crowned a human rights defender by the free press. Khashoggi was also a long-standing member of the Saudi intelligence community and privy to secrets of the highest circles of the Saudi royal family and who had been silenced after he spoke out on President Donald Trump. But Sergei Skripal was a retired mid-ranking spy living in very modest circumstances in sleepy Salisbury who had never gone on the record for anything, let alone human rights.
Turkey and the international media still imagined at this point that Khashoggi was alive, but Riyadh knew better. It would not have escaped notice that Putin’s words applied within an inch to the events in the Saudi consulate. Not only that, they knew that Putin would high-five their operation.
Few, apart from the Saudi team around MBS, would have guessed at this connection to ‘traitor’ Jamal Khashoggi. To Western eyes Khashoggi’s profile had always looked more far more like that of a writer than that of a power broker who could betray his country as a ‘traitor’.
The son of a merchant, Jamal Khashoggi was born in Medina on 13 October 1958 to a well-connected family. Their roots were Turkish and their name means ‘spice maker’. His grandfather Mohammed Khaled Khashoggi had moved from the city of Kayseri, in Anatolia, to the Hejaz region of the Arabian peninsula when both were still under Ottoman rule. He became personal physician to King Ibn Saud the founder of Saudi Arabia, a status that allowed his family to achieve prominence. Mohammed was father of late billionaire arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, the middleman in the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s. Adnan was also once neighbour of Donald Trump and sold him a $200-million yacht. Khashoggi’s aunt was Samira, who married Mohamed al-Fayed, the former Egyptian owner of Harrods who had been refused a UK passport on account of not being ‘a fit and proper person’.
After receiving his primary and secondary education in Medina, Jamal Khashoggi went to the US to study business administration, at Indiana State University, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 1982. His first wife was Rawia al-Tunisi. They had two sons, Salah and Abdullah, and two daughters, Noha and Razan. They were all educated in America and three of them took US citizenship. At the time, of his assassination Khashoggi’s sons were banned from leaving Saudi Arabia.
After graduating, Khashoggi returned to Saudi Arabia where his first job was as the manager of a group of bookshops. By the mid-1980s, however, he was writing for English-language newspapers such as the Saudi Gazette and Arab News. From 1991 to 1999, he worked as a foreign correspondent in such countries as Afghanistan, Algeria, Kuwait, Sudan, and in the Middle East, reporting on the First Gulf War. To the outside world became well-known for his interviews with Osama bin Laden, who had been a prominent member of the mujahideen resistance against Soviet-Russia’s push in Afghanistan, much of it funded by the Saudis and Americans – spear-headed by the Bush family – then perturbed by the spread of Communism. (It was only after the Russian withdrawal from Afghanistan that bin Laden turned on his American backers through forming al-Qaeda.)
It was as foreign correspondent that Khashoggi had become a trusted asset for Saudi intelligence and later a confidant of powerful Saudi royals such as longstanding intelligence chief Prince Turki al-Faisal. During his time in Afghanistan, Khashoggi came to know Osama bin Laden well, interviewing him at his hideout in the Tora Bora mountains, then later in Sudan. He was one of the few links (if not the only one) to bin Laden that the Saudi and US intelligence services had until then.
According to fellow Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, ‘Khashoggi couldn’t have travelled with the mujahideen that way without tacit support from Saudi intelligence, which was co-ordinating aid to the fighters as part of its co-operation with the CIA against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.’ At the time Khashoggi criticised Prince Salman, MBS’s father, then head of the Saudi committee for support to the Afghan mujahideen, for funding Salafist extremist groups that were undermining the efforts of the other guerillas.
Even before his friendship with bin Laden, Khashoggi had had a personal interest in political Islam. After the Iranian revolution in 1979 and the rise to power of Ayatollah Khomeini, he began attending Islamic conferences and meetings in Indiana and became very religious. Khashoggi admitted that as a young man he had joined the Muslim Brotherhood, the reformist movement begun in Egypt in the 1920s and which was then supported by Saudi Arabia. He since renounced it and many of his writings revealed sympathy for a more secular and religiously pluralist kingdom. Given Saudi Arabia’s strict adherence to Wahhabism, with which Khashoggi had no problem as such, he was not much of a political dissident (if he ever was one).
Khashoggi had first met b
in Laden, who was Saudi by birth, in Jeddah in the early 1980s. They were the same age.
‘Osama was just like many of us who became part of the Brotherhood movement in Saudi Arabia,’ Khashoggi said. ‘The only difference that set him apart from others, and me, he was more religious. More religious, more literal, more fundamentalist. For example, he would not listen to music. He would not shake hands with a woman. He would not smoke. He would not watch television, unless it was news. He wouldn’t play cards. He would not put a picture on his wall. But more than that, there was also a harsh or radical side in his life. I’m sure you have some people like that in your culture. For example, even though he comes from a rich family, he lives in a very simple house.’
In Afghanistan he got to know bin Laden better. He was impressed with his enthusiasm and devotion. In 1987, this gave him a scoop.
‘I interviewed Osama – a gentle, enthusiastic young man of few words who didn’t raise his voice while talking,’ he said. They discussed the condition of the mujahideen and what bin Laden was doing to help them. ‘I did not know him thoroughly enough to judge him or expect any other thing from him. His behaviour at that time left no impression that he would become what he has become.’
Al-Qaeda was founded in 1988 as the Soviets were withdrawing from Afghanistan. Bin Laden talked of spreading jihad through central Asia. There was no talk of attacking the United States or Europe. Bin Laden and Khashoggi had met for the last time in the Sudan in 1995.
‘Osama was almost about to change his mind and reconcile and come back to Saudi Arabia,’ he said. ‘It was a lost opportunity.’
Although Khashoggi was asked to try to persuade bin Laden to renounce violence and failed, he retained the ear of powerful members of the ruling house. Khashoggi was surprised when bin Laden announced he was declaring war on America in 1997 and shocked by the attacks on 9/11. He gave up the idea of creating an Islamic state in Saudi Arabia. ‘I think we must find a way where we can accommodate secularism and Islam, something like what they have in Turkey,’ he said.
When bin Laden was killed in 2011, Khashoggi wrote on Twitter: ‘I collapsed crying a while ago, heartbroken for you Abu Abdullah [bin Laden’s nickname]. You were beautiful and brave in those beautiful days in Afghanistan, before you surrendered to hatred and passion.’
The rewards for loyalty to the Saudi royal family during the turbulence in Afghanistan were great. In 1991, Khashoggi had become editor of al-Madina, one of Jeddah’s oldest newspapers, and in 1999, Khashoggi rose further to become the deputy editor-in-chief on Arab News, the biggest English language daily in the kingdom, and a key interlocutor for western journalists with the Saudi royal family, whose formal apparatus was often impenetrable to the outside world. He was also a valuable source for foreign journalists trying to understand the rise of Islamism.
Four years later he became the editor-in-chief of the Saudi Arabian daily al-Watan. But here he fell foul of Saudi Arabia’s deeply conservative religious sectarianism. After less than two months, he was dismissed by the Saudi Arabian Ministry of Information because he had allowed a columnist to question the fourteen-century Islamic scholar Ibn Taymiyyah, who was the founding father of Wahhabism, the ultra-conservative form of Sunni Islam which is the state religion of Saudi Arabia. Such rebuffs from religious conservatives were to mark the remainder of his career.
He went into voluntary exile in London by becoming media adviser to the urbane Prince Turki al-Faisal, grandson of Saudi Arabia’s founder, now ambassador in London after having been the head of the Saudi intelligence from 1977 to 2001 during the Soviet-Afghanistan crisis. Khashoggi was permitted in 2007 to return to al-Watan as editor but was dismissed a second time three years later, this time for himself criticising the kingdom’s harsh Islamic rules.
‘The clergy. They didn’t like me,’ he said. ‘They didn’t like the way I ran the paper. Totally lobbied against me and they got me out. I miss journalism and I think it’s a very interesting time in my country. I see change, and I would like to be part of that change.’
Khashoggi continued to contribute regularly to the media, including foreign broadcasters, building up his nearly two million followers on Twitter. In 2015 he agreed to become editor-in-chief of a new news channel based in Bahrain, Al-Arab. Backed by Saudi Arabian billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal and partnered with US financial news channel Bloomberg Television, it was meant to be a rival to al-Jazeera, which is supported by Qatar. However, it was closed down by the Bahraini government on its first day after interviewing a member of the opposition. Alwaleed bin Talal was detained by MBS during his shakedown in 2017.
He continued working as a political commentator for Saudi Arabian and international channels, including MBC, BBC, al-Jazeera, and Dubai TV. Between June 2012 and September 2016, his opinion columns were regularly broadcast by al-Arabiya.This looked like, but was not quite, a Western style journalism career. His position was akin to that of Turki Aldakhil, who ran the Saudi-owned pan-Arab news channel al-Arabiya as MBS was establishing his power as the new crown prince (imprisoning senior royals and high officials at the Riyadh Ritz Carlton). The Saudi media were a primary means of the Saudi royal family to maintain control. Privy to everything that must remain secret, their role was akin to that of a government department. On 8 February 2019, for example, the CIA would leak an intercept of a top secret conversation in 2017 between Aldakhil and MBS. During this conversation, MBS, the CIA source alleged, had said he would go after Khashoggi ‘with a bullet’.
Khashoggi was critical of the conduct of the war in Yemen (no doubt voicing the opinions of other high-level Saudis who had previously held the reigns of power) and found himself at odds with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, particularly over his crackdown on dissent.
Interestingly and possibly crucially, Khashoggi was only barred by the Saudi authorities from publishing or appearing on television when he criticised U.S. president-elect Donald Trump during the think-tank event in Washington, DC.
He published three books, including in 2016 a study of the Arab Spring. In June 2017, after a series of arrests, Khashoggi fled Saudi Arabia with only two suitcases and found refuge in the US where he wrote a monthly column for the Washington Post and was heralded as the most famous political pundit in the Arab world.
In his column, he continued his worrying criticism of President Trump, as well as repressive Arab regimes and particularly MBS, who was concerned by the fact that Khashoggi knew intimately the inner workings and political alignments of the secretive Saudi royal family. That rare understanding alone was of a strategic importance to the kingdom and MBS’s adversaries.
The fact that he was associated with positions ideologically close to the Muslim Brotherhood, which the Crown Prince hated with a passion, made things worse. Khashoggi rejected the term dissident, but his decision to write for the Washington Post must have also been considered an insult. The fact that the paper began translating his pieces into Arabic would have no doubt riled him.
MBS was also concerned about the pro-Qatari line Khashoggi had been taking in recent columns in the Washington Post and he was to have been a guest speaker at the Gulf International Form’s inaugural conference at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, on 16 October, which was funded by the Qataris.
The Crown Prince made a traditional tribal offer of reconciliation – offering him a place as an adviser if he returned to the kingdom. Khashoggi had declined because of moral and religious principles, and, perhaps more to the point, valuing his own safety. He told the BBC that he was ‘worried for my country, my children and grandchildren – one-man rule is always bad, in any country’.
He was also in danger because he had helped established a new political party in the US called Democracy for the Arab World Now, which would support Islamist gains in democratic elections throughout the region. He was also planning a campaign and a ‘cyberwar’ against the Saudi regime.
Khashoggi had been married and divorced three times. At the time of hi
s death, he had just got engaged. His fiancée was thirty-six-year-old Hatice Cengiz, a PhD student at university in Istanbul. The two of them had met at a conference in May, where he gave a speech. She knew who he was and followed his work. Afterwards she asked him a question and the two of them soon got talking. A relationship developed and they soon got engaged, planning to marry on his sixtieth birthday. Her father opposed the match as Khashoggi was fifty-nine. He thought the age gap was too great, but eventually relented. Ms Cengiz said her fiancé had had to choose between returning to Saudi Arabia or visiting one of the consulates for the necessary papers after they decided to marry.
‘When we first went on 28 September, Jamal was worried that something could go wrong. But when he entered the consulate on 28 September, everything went OK and the atmosphere was comfortable,’ she said. There were no problems, even though they knew who he was. They had been lulled into a false sense of security.
The following day, Khashoggi attended a conference in London where he criticised Saudi Arabia. At the event, he told BBC Newshour: ‘An event like that would be difficult to hold today in the Arab world because we are retreating from freedom in most of the Arab countries. Most of the Arab world is currently collapsing, for example in Libya, Syria and Yemen and has no interest in discussing Palestine because they have miseries of their own. Then in countries like Saudi Arabia, my country, or in Egypt, they have no interest in those kinds of issues that motivate and rally the people because they want to subdue them instead.’
That evening he had dinner with Daud Abdullah, a former editor and translator at the Abul Qasim Publishing House in Jeddah, and other colleagues and guests who attended the conference in a Turkish restaurant in Bloomsbury. Two days later, he flew back to Istanbul.
4 Dead End
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