by Owen Wilson
Before Jamal Khashoggi returned to the consulate in Istanbul on 2 October, US intelligence intercepted communications of Saudi officials discussing a plan to capture him. This intelligence had been disseminated throughout the U.S. government and was contained in reports that are routinely available to people working on U.S. policy toward Saudi Arabia. It was not clear whether the Saudis intended to arrest, or to kidnap, torture and interrogate Khashoggi, or to kill him. Khashoggi was a US resident and, under internal government order ICD19-‘Duty to Warn’, US intelligence services were under a duty to warn him of potential kidnapping or murder.
Nonetheless, the decision was taken not to warn Khashoggi of the Saudi plans.
Not that Khashoggi himself trusted the Saudi government. According to his friend and fellow member of the Turkish Arab Media Association Turan Kişlakçi, Khashoggi was nervous about returning to the consulate. He left his laptop, mobile phone and other valuables with his fiancée before he went in.
‘He told her if he didn’t show up after a few hours, call the Turkish Arab Media Centre and Turkish authorities,’ said Kişlakçi the following day, 3 October. ‘We believe he’s still inside. There was no sign that he was taken out in a black car or something. Maybe they are interrogating him.’
But Khashoggi had also told Kişlakçi that he had no fear: ‘I’m not afraid, because there is no official investigation against me. On the contrary, recently, [Crown Prince] Mohammed bin Salman asked me to be his adviser, and I refused, saying this is against my country and region’s interests.… The most they can do is interrogate me. And I can give them answers, I have nothing to hide.’ In fact, on 3 October, asked by Bloomberg ‘Is he facing any charges in Saudi Arabia?’, MBS was evasive. Pressed by Bloomberg, ‘So he might be facing charges in Saudi Arabia?’, MBS ignored the question and repeated what he had said before, ‘If he’s in Saudi Arabia I would know that’.
According to Kişlakçi: ‘His fiancée’s father pressured him to get the relevant documents to initiate the official marriage process in Turkey. His trusted Saudi friends in the US gave him assurance. He was confident in what he was doing.’
Doubtless he felt that, in particular, that his growing closeness to President Erdoğan worked in his favour. Over breakfast that morning, he told Hatice he thought it unlikely that Saudi officials would risk angering Turkey by detaining him. In fact, it was like a red flag to a bull.
‘Jamal said to me: they can’t do something like that in Turkey,’ she said. But at the same time he was anxious, even though he was not aware of any criminal charges against him.
‘He didn’t want to go,’ she said. ‘He was nervous that something could happen.’
They agreed that Ms Cengiz should skip classes that day to accompany him. While he went into the consulate, she waited outside a nearby supermarket.
‘I waited a really long time,’ she said. ‘I thought they must be sorting the papers. At 3.30pm the staff went home. I realised that something strange had happened.’
Ms Cengiz went the consulate to find out where her fiancé was. She said a man came to the entrance who told her that there was no one inside, so she called Yasin Aktay, a Turkish journalist who was a close friend of Khashoggi’s and an adviser to Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. She also informed the police. Meanwhile, she hung on outside the consulate, hoping against hope, for eleven hours.
The day after Khashoggi visited the consulate, Al-Jazeera, the TV station based in Qatar and a Saudi bane, was reporting that he had been abducted. Some seventy thousand tweets were discussing his disappearance – though many said they doubted Saudi involvement, alleging a conspiracy between Turkey and the Muslim Brotherhood – deemed a terrorist organisation in Saudi Arabia – to defame the kingdom.
Others, though, were already pointing the finger at MBS. One commentator wrote: ‘If news of abducting Jamal Khashoggi is true, it will be one of the biggest follies of Mohammed bin Salman. The man has an international standing and reputation. It will not go unnoticed.’
Another, quoting a source who claimed to be close to the Royal Court, said that Khashoggi had indeed been abducted and was smuggled into Saudi Arabia arriving there in the early hours.
‘If it is true, it is would be difficult to imagine Turkey standing idly by while Mohammed bin Salman is playing with its sovereignty before the world,’ the tweet thundered.
Ms Cenzig was now beside herself with worry.
‘I don’t know what has happened to him,’ she said. ‘I can’t even guess how such a thing can happen to him. There is no law or lawsuit against him. He is not a suspect, he has not been convicted. There is nothing against him. He is just a man whose country doesn’t like his writings or his opinions.’
The Turkish government still had no idea what had happened with Khashoggi either. A Turkish security official was quoted saying they were in discussion with the Saudis and believed that Khashoggi was still being held in the consulate.
Turkey’s misunderstanding of what had happened in the consulate was confirmed by President Erdoğan himself. ‘According to the information that we have, this Saudi citizen is still in the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul,’ said Ibrahim Kalin, Turkey’s presidential spokesperson.
‘We don’t have any information to the contrary. We continue to follow this issue closely.’
However, echoing MBS’s statement to Bloomberg on 3 October, Saudi authorities issued a statement flatly denying he was being detained, and claiming that Khashoggi ‘visited the consulate and exited shortly thereafter’.
That very week, economist Essam al-Zamil, a friend of Khashoggi’s and critic of the Crown Prince’s selling part of Aramco, was charged with joining the Muslim Brotherhood, providing in information to foreign diplomats and inciting protests. Meanwhile the Washington Post issued a statement concerning the fate of its columnist.
‘We have been unable to reach Jamal today and are very concerned about where he may be,’ said Eli Lopez, the newspaper’s international opinions editor. ‘It would be unfair and outrageous if he has been detained for his work as a journalist and commentator.’
Calls and emails to Saudi missions in London, Washington, and Istanbul yielded no further information about Khashoggi. The Turkish newspaper and government-mouthpiece Milliyet was reporting on 3 October what Erdoğan’s spokesperson had said: ‘The Saudi journalist could not leave the consulate building.’
In the dark, the Turkish government applied diplomatic pressure. The Saudi ambassador in Ankara was summoned to the Turkish Foreign Ministry to clear up the matter. He told the Turkish deputy foreign minister that he had no information about the missing journalist.
‘We are investigating,’ he said. ‘I will convey any information we get.’ It was the diplomatic equivalent of saying ‘don’t hold your breath on our account.’
The Saudis used the situation to cause further confusion with some Saudi officials saying that Khashoggi never entered the consulate and others saying he entered and then left. In effect, they were implying that Ms Cenzig, who had dropped him off at the embassy, was a liar.
The police were also at work on the case. ‘The missing persons department has launched works upon the application of Jamal Khashoggi’s family,’ reported the nationalist opposition newspaper Sözcü. ‘Police teams have launched a broad investigation to find Khashoggi, primarily analysing city surveillance footage.’
The story from Saudi Arabia itself was different, with the state-run Saudi Press Agency reporting on 4 October, the now official version: ‘The consulate has confirmed that it is co-ordinating with the brotherly local Turkish authorities in the follow-up procedures to reveal the circumstances surrounding the disappearance of citizen Jamal Khashoggi after having left the consulate building.’
The ostensible promise of sweeping access to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul was sanctioned by Riyadh. In the wide-ranging Bloomberg interview on many topics on the night of 3 October MBS had already given his personal promise to allow th
e same thing. Of Khashoggi, whom he called ‘Jamal’ to indicate his friendship and personal investment in the matter, MBS said, ‘Yes, he’s not inside.’ This was, by this time, 100 per cent true and there was no risk when he said the ‘premises are sovereign territory’ and he would ‘allow [the Turkish government] to enter and search and do whatever they want to do.’
Nonetheless, social media users were not convinced and continued to say that Khashoggi was being held at the Saudi consulate. Others speculated he had been smuggled back into Saudi Arabia. Khashoggi’s personal website bore a banner headline saying: ‘Jamal has been arrested at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul!’ Again the Saudi Arabian authorities issued a statement denying he was being detained, safe in the knowledge that this was true. Supporters of MBS continued arguing that the whole story had been made up to smear the kingdom.
Turkey was still entirely in the dark and a spokesman for Turkey’s President Erdoğan said: ‘According to information we have, this individual who is a Saudi national is still at the Istanbul consulate of Saudi Arabia.’ Turkey’s government was in the dark what had happened to Khashoggi inside the consulate. It only knew that he had gone in and had not left the building. It had, at this point, no more information than what his fiancée and media friends had.
And his fiancée was adamant, saying: ‘We want to know his whereabouts. Where is Jamal? We want him to come out of the consulate safe and sound.’
She subscribed to the theory that he had been kidnapped. ‘If that’s not what happened, where is Jamal?’ she asked. ‘Right now we have no information. As a missing person, he is in danger.’
She said that the Turkish authorities were working hard to locate her fiancé and wanted to believe that he had not been smuggled out of the country.
‘I want to be positive, I want to be hopeful,’ she said. ‘I hope that Jamal is in Istanbul.’
Karen Attiah, Khashoggi’s editor at the Washington Post, said the newspaper had still not been able to reach him.
‘We have inquired about Jamal’s whereabouts, and expressed our deep concern, to both Turkish and Saudi officials,’ she said.
On Friday 5 October, the Post printed left his column blank to show solidarity with their missing columnist. It bore Khashoggi’s byline and photograph, and was headlined: ‘A missing voice.’
A note from the editor read: ‘Jamal Khashoggi is a Saudi journalist and author, and a columnist for Washington Post Global Opinions. Khashoggi’s words should appear in the space above, but he has not been heard from since he entered a Saudi consulate in Istanbul for a routine consular matter on Tuesday afternoon.’
Clutching at straws given Turkey’s and Saudi-Arabia’s antipathy to investigative journalism, the Post called on the Crown Prince to ‘do everything in his power to ensure that Mr Khashoggi is free and able to continue his work’.
In an editorial, the newspaper said: ‘Mr Khashoggi is not just any commentator. Over a long career, he has had close contact with Saudi royalty and knows more than most about how they think and function. His criticism, voiced over the past year, most surely rankles Mohammed bin Salman, who was elevated to crown prince last year and has carried out a wide-ranging campaign to silence dissent while trying to modernize the kingdom. Among those in his prisons for political speech are clerics, bloggers, journalists and activists. He imprisoned women who agitated for the right to drive, a right that was granted even as they were punished.’
The Post’s editorial board also made a direct appeal to MBS: ‘The Crown Prince has been all over the United States preaching his vision of a more modern Saudi society, breaking out of the stale old religious codes and practices, opening up to foreign entertainment and investment. If he is truly committed to this, he will welcome constructive criticism from patriots such as Mr Khashoggi.’
Journalists from the Turkish Arab Media Association meanwhile staged a protest outside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.
‘We demand the immediate release of Jamal Khashoggi, who we think is being ‘hosted’ at the consulate building in Istanbul, or the revealing of his whereabouts,’ said Turan Kişlakçi, the association’s president. ‘If they do not release him we will stand here for weeks and months. We will stage the same demonstrations of solidarity not just here but everywhere in the world.’
The New York-based group Human Rights Watch took a keen interest. Middle East director Sarah Leah Whitson said: ‘If Saudi authorities surreptitiously detained Khashoggi it would be yet another escalation of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s reign of repression against peaceful dissidents and critics. The burden of proof is on Saudi Arabia to produce evidence for its claim that Khashoggi left the consulate alone, and that Saudi agents have not detained him.’
MBS seemed to hold all the cards. Without further facts the storm would soon die out.
5 Thunderbolt
ℭ
In the 3 October Wednesday-night interview with Bloomberg, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had volunteered extremely definitive information on Khashoggi’s whereabouts. The detail was such that, if untrue, his words would come straight back to haunt him.
‘If he’s in Saudi Arabia, I would know that,’ MBS had answered confidently.
Given his insistence, there is no reason to assume that the hit squad had repatriated Khashoggi’s remains to Saudi Arabia. No one on the Saudi side could care less where the ‘traitor’ would be disposed of.
Contradicting the words of Khashoggi’s fiancée who had been waiting outside the consulate’s front door, MBS also volunteered, ‘My understanding is he entered and he got out after a few minutes or one hour’.
But with the far easier question – as with the equally easy Bloomberg question whether there were any charges against Khashoggi’s – MBS’s claimed to be unsure and added words to fuel the uncertainty. ‘I’m not sure. We are investigating this through the foreign ministry to see exactly what happened at that time.’
Amiably, he had also directed subtle blame regarding the fate of his ‘friend’ Jamal at his totalitarian neighbour President Erdoğan. ‘We hear the rumours about what happened,’ said MBS. ‘He’s a Saudi citizen and we are very keen to know what happened to him. And we will continue our dialogue with the Turkish government to see what happened to Jamal there.’
The Crown Prince had elegantly used the rest of the Bloomberg interview both to brandish his profile as a new broom and as a conservative while dispatching any criticism of him personally as a consequence of the machinations of the kingdom’s enemies.
‘I didn’t call myself a reformer of Saudi Arabia,’ he said. ‘I am the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia and I am trying to do the best that I can do through my position.’
He addressed the arrest of women’s rights activists in his kingdom and accused them of espionage. It was the same blame-the-enemy strategy that his supporters on social media used.
‘They have connections with agencies of other countries,’ he said, naming Iran and Qatar. ‘They have a network, connection with government people, leaking information for the sake these other governments.’
The activists, who had been calling for women’s right to drive, had not been formally charged and were denied contact with their families since they were arrested five months earlier.
Interestingly he also addressed Donald Trump, casting light on the reasons why Khashoggi had been muzzled two days after Trump had won the election. On exactly the same day Khashoggi had been assassinated, the US president had in an extraordinary statement said at a political rally in Mississippi: ‘We protect Saudi Arabia. Would you say they’re rich? And I love the King, King Salman. But I said “King – we’re protecting you – you might not be there for two weeks without us – you have to pay for your military”.’ Donald Trump’s statement was so unusual that it became instant global news, though only the intelligence services in the know were aware how timely the seemingly random demand for money was.
MBS was adamant that the Saudi royal family were no puppets w
ho were in power merely hiding behind the skirts of the US akin to the Shah of Persia. He smoothly brushed off Trump’s comment.
‘We believe that all the armaments we have from the United States of America are paid for, it’s not free armament,’ said MBS, focusing on Trump’s clumsy suggestion that the US paid the Saudi military. ‘So ever since the relationship started between Saudi Arabia and the United States of America, we’ve bought everything with money.’
Money was one thing Saudi Arabia had plenty of. Warmly MBS went on to signal his delight with fellow billionaire Donald Trump, who had registered eight companies in the Saudi beach resort Jeddah shortly after launching his presidential campaign in order to expand his business interests. Trump already had a hotel bearing his name in neighbouring UAE, MBS closest regional ally.
‘I love working with him,’ MBS gushed. ‘You know, you have to accept that any friend will say good things and bad things. If you look at the picture overall, you have 99 per cent of good things and one bad issue.’
Then, on Saturday 6 October, everything changed.
Suddenly real information it had not previously possessed had come into the hands of the Turkish government.
A leak to a respected US-based academic summarised what Turkey knew from its own surveillance up to now.
Whatever had happened to Jamal Khashoggi, it was not good – ‘and by not good, I mean terrible,’ Washington-based Turkish scholar Selim Sazak said that a senior Turkish official had leaked to him.
‘They don’t know that Jamal Khashoggi was murdered,’ Sazak said. ‘They know that he came in, didn’t come out. They saw unusual personnel activity, including uncredentialled personnel, coming to the embassy almost immediately after Jamal Khashoggi’s first visit so they think they were dispatched from Riyadh, and they speak of an unknown staffer, acting like he was moving out the embassy, packing stuff into his trunk, and leaving at the end of business the day Jamal Khashoggi disappeared. So they add up the pieces to infer that Jamal Khashoggi was incapacitated and spirited away.’