by Owen Wilson
But 6 October was the day on which all of a sudden a torrent of 20/20 factual information on the fateful last hours of Khashoggi after he entered the consulate at 1:14pm on 2 October was to be leaked.
Given its uninformed statements over the previous days, where did the Turkish government get all this new eye-watering detail from on what had happened inside the consulate? If MIT, the Turkish intelligence service, already knew what had really happened to Khashoggi President Erdoğan would not seem so clueless with hindsight. Turkey had been blamed for Khashoggi’s disappearance by MBS. Erdoğan had been played.
The detailed information certainly did not come to Turkey from the Americans. The US government had sailed into risky territory by not warning Khashoggi of the widely circulated intel that Saudi Arabia was about to move against him. That decision to keep lethal information from a US resident would look very suspiciously like tit for tat if it was widely known that on the very same day of Khashoggi’s assassination Trump had started to shake down the kingdom for US protection money. In the light of murder, even the fact that Khashoggi had been told in Washington to go to Istanbul to complete marriage formalities, would look suspiciously as if the US had known enough to warn Saudi Arabia not to try and capture Khashoggi anywhere on US soil. The US government had everything to gain from letting sleeping dogs lie.
Under oath, government officials would defend themselves with the paper-thin argument that it wasn’t clear whether Khashoggi would be lawfully arrested or illegally detained or killed.
The argument itself was very plausible in the case of a disappearance. In case of a lawful arrest, there was in any case no duty on the US intelligence services to pre-warn a US resident. But in the case of an assassination, the same argument would look like incompetence at best and tacit cooperation in the killing of a US journalist by the US government at the worst.
The US knew that something was afoot and undoubtedly knew exactly, like the Russians, what took place on 2 October. But there was no upside in embarrassing MBS, an otherwise enthusiastic ally of their commander in chief, Donald Trump, who himself had his business future after his presidency to consider.
There was also another fact. Although Erdoğan was an autocrat after Trump’s heart, he had seriously irked Trump by not releasing Andrew Brunson, the US pastor Turkey held captive since the putsch against Erdoğan in the summer of 2016. Following Trump’s angry tweets against Turkey on the subject of Brunson, there was little love lost in Washington for the truculent Erdoğan.
Who, then, benefited from leaking detailed information about the murder, and pulling the rug from underneath the ‘disappearance’ story? Karl Marx used to ask the question, ‘who benefits?’, to reconstruct who was behind events.
One has to look no further than the words of Vladimir Putin at the Valdai Discussion conference of 18 October in the Black-sea beach resort Sochi to see who benefitted most from ending the disappearance speculation by leaking the blow-by-blow detail of Khashoggi’s killing.
Echoing Donald Trump’s official response, on that day Putin declined action against Saudi Arabia on account of the Khashoggi affair. He whole-heartedly agreed that more facts were needed about Saudi governmental involvement before taking measures against the kingdom as a whole. ‘We first need to wait for the results of the investigation’ who is behind the assassination, Putin said. ‘How can we, as Russia, start to harm our relationship with Saudi Arabia without knowing what really happened?’
Then followed the rub. Gleefully, Putin drew a comparison between Khashoggi and the poisoning in Salisbury with novichok, the state-of-the-art Russian nerve agent, of Sergei Skripal, his daughter, Det. Sgt Nick Bailey, Charley Rowley, as well as the agonising death of Dawn Sturgess a little over two months earlier in Britain.
Complaining bitterly about US and European sanctions against Russia over the novichok attack in Salisbury he pointed out ‘There’s no proof with regards to Russia, but steps are taken.’ The facts in Khashoggi’s case were no different, he claimed. ‘Here, people say that a murder happened in Istanbul, but no steps are taken [against Saudi Arabia]. People need to figure out a single approach to these kinds of problems.’ The novichok furore was, in other words, incredibly unfair on Russia.
In a further dig at the US, Putin also leaked information from Russian intelligence files when he said, that ‘the US bears a certain responsibility’. Certainly Trump’s public criticism and demand for more Saudi money couldn’t have been better timed than on the day Khashoggi entered the Istanbul consulate never to return. Putin added as an aside, ‘we can see that complicated processes are also taking place within the US elites. I hope America will not go as far as Saudi Arabia did.’ Keen to taunt the US, Putin had ended up seemingly cryptically to confirm that Russian intelligence knew exactly what Saudi Arabia had done, and more.
Other countries without a free media formed a chorus line behind Putin. A Chinese media outlet helpfully connected the dots made by him. Eager to make clear that citizens’ rights were no more than a cudgel for the West to bully other countries with, the Chinese outlet commented sourly that it ‘shows that there are double, even multiple standards for the West’s human rights diplomacy’.
Having excellent relations with President Erdoğan, and detailed knowledge of anything that goes on in Turkey and Istanbul in particular, is crucially important to Russia – much more so than for the US with whom Turkey is a NATO ally. Russia’s one and only warm-water shipping and naval route runs from the Black Sea through the Bosphorus to the Mediterranean. This route is so important that when the EU looked close to wooing Ukraine into its fold, Vladimir Putin didn’t think twice about occupying the Crimea and its Black-Sea ports for both commercial and military reasons.
Putin, like the US, had the intelligence about Khashoggi’s fate. But unlike the US it had an excellent reason for sharing it with Turkey.
On 6 October, the Turkish police thus suddenly changed tack. They were now claiming that Khashoggi wasn’t missing but had been murdered in the Saudi consulate.
‘The initial assessment of the Turkish police is that Mr Khashoggi has been killed at the consulate of Saudi Arabia in Istanbul,’ two Turkish officials said off the record. ‘We believe that the murder was premeditated and the body was subsequently moved out of the consulate.’
Suddenly the fact that Turkey thought (and therefore had miraculously obtained precise information) that Khashoggi’s fate was premeditated murder hit the international media like a thunderbolt. In countries with a free press it was stop-the-press news because they were appalled. In the ones without, it was front-page news because it was an excellent object lesson for those with ideas.
The official leaks gained momentum.
Yasi Aktay, advisor to President Erdoğan, thundered on CNN to the Saudis: ‘There is concrete information; it will not remain an unsolved case. If they consider Turkey to be as it was in the 1990s, they are mistaken.’
He said it was clear that a team of fifteen Saudis who had arrived on 2 October had been sent there to kill him, Kişlakçi said. The government in Riyadh knew that he would be there then as he had been told to return the consulate on Tuesday when he had visited on the 28th.
Khashoggi’s media friend Kişlakçi had been given some more colour by officials: ‘They followed the cars, and they know what happened. We have all the details, and he was killed.’
Ms Cengiz was aghast and found the new twist to the story hard to believe. She tweeted: ‘Jamal was not killed and I cannot believe he was killed!’ She later added that she was waiting for official confirmation from the Turkish government of the leaks by its officials.
Others still agreed with her. ‘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,’ said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director of Human Rights Watch. ‘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.’
The Washington Post gave the report credence though. ‘If the reports of Jamal’s murder are true, it is a monstrous and unfathomable act,’ said Fred Hiatt, the Washington Post’s editorial page editor. ‘Jamal was – or, as we hope, is – a committed, courageous journalist. He writes out of a sense of love for his country and deep faith in human dignity and freedom.’
Over the course of the day, Saudi Arabia was all of a sudden on the backfoot. Officials continued to claim that Khashoggi entered the consulate but left shortly afterwards. But they released no CCTV footage to back up the claim – for the obvious reason that there was none. The Saudis still hoped that there was no real proof against their version of events.
President Erdoğan himself also still hedged his bets, although he now knew what had happened to his ‘friend’: ‘I hope we will not be faced with a situation that we do not want,’ he said, describing the veteran commentator as ‘a friend’ and ‘a journalist I have known for a long time’ – a rather dubious epithet coming from the president, but a word that was catnip to the Western media. Behind the scenes, Erdoğan was now hoping to leverage a deal based on the intelligence that had suddenly come into his possession.
His advisor Yasin Aktay signalled what was going to be Turkey’s new line by going on the record with the new line: ‘My sense is that he has been killed. The Saudis are saying we can come investigate, but they have of course disposed of the body.’
Leaks to Khashoggi’s friend Turan Kişlakçi drove the point home further what Turkey’s new intelligence entailed.
‘It is certain that he was killed,’ he said, claiming that authorities had evidence (that is to say, had leaked to him) that he had been killed in a ‘barbaric’ way.
The Turkish authorities had not yet produced any proof to support claims that Khashoggi had been murdered, saying only in measured words that details would be made public in the days ahead. Nor had President Erdoğan publicly challenged Riyadh because officials were trying to keep the diplomatic fallout ‘under control’ – a polite way of saying that he was offering the Saudis a horse trade to keep his intel under lock and key.
Meanwhile prosecutors were investigating and the police had helpfully made the connection between Khashoggi’s disappearance and the fifteen Saudis who had flown into Istanbul that day and paid a flying visit to the consulate.
‘Based on their initial findings, the police believe that the journalist was killed by a team especially sent to Istanbul and who left the same day,’ an official leaked.
Ömer Çelik, a spokesman for the ruling Justice and Development (AK) Party, snapped further at the heels of Saudi Arabia: ‘A journalist disappearing like this in a secure country like the Republic of Turkey is something that will be followed up with sensitivity.’
MBS was not in the mood for a horse trade and publicly protested the accusations resulting from the Turkish leaks, insisting that Khashoggi had left the consulate after his appointment and that claims of his murder were ‘baseless’.
Although the Turkish officials had not yet been given the promised access to investigate the consulate forensically (because ‘we have nothing to hide’ in MBS’s words), the Saudi consul general in Istanbul, Mohammed al-Otaibi, had invited Reuters on a tour of the six-storey premises on 6 October.
‘We are worried about him,’ Mohammed al-Otaibi said on camera. But giving away the lie that was on his mind, he looked like a gruesome Mr Bean while opening cupboards, filing cabinets and wooden panels covering air conditioning units of his consulate on TV in an attempt to show that there was no sign of Khashoggi there. ‘But look, he is not here’, he tried to reassure the journalists.
While the consulate was equipped with security cameras, Mr al-Otaibi said that they could not provide images of the Khashoggi leaving. But the suggestion that he had been abducted in the building was ‘disgusting’ and based on ‘rumours that have no proof’. A review of CCTV footage of the outside of the building by Turkish authorities, however, had already concluded that he had not left.
The matter could easily be resolved. Fred Hiatt at the Post said: ‘If the story that was told about the murder is true, the Turks must have information and videotape and other documents to back it up. If the story the Saudis are telling, that he just walked out… after half an hour, if that’s true, they ought to have facts and documents and evidence and tapes to back that up.’
It was a fair point, but whether Turkey would do so was another.
With the Turkish economy wilting the increasingly strained relations with the US and Donald Trump in particular weren’t helping. The tapes were a golden opportunity for Erdoğan to pivot things around with some effective arm-twisting behind the scenes.
6 Pastor Brunson
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The fate of pastor Andrew Brunson was like a buoy floating on the surface, tethered to discussions between the autocrats involved. The Turkish economy, once seemingly unstoppable, was sagging and Erdoğan needed to nurture a flow of US money (or Saudi money or Russian money, preferably all three to remain independent). The Khashoggi-assassination had finally landed Turkey the upper hand in this endeavour.
For the US, the incarceration of pastor Brunson had been one of the reasons they had put their NATO ally in the diplomatic deep freeze. Brunson’s incarceration had been a November 2016-election rallying cry for Trump’s evangelical voters for whom Mike Pence was the Brunson-cause célèbre’s poster child. Despite persistent pressure from the US, where the Christian conservative lobby relentlessly agitated for his release, and where Trump regularly tweeted about this ‘great Christian’ whose release was a 2016 election promise, Erdoğan stubbornly refused to release the pastor. This was in itself curious as Brunson had had a flock of no more than 24 congregants. But for Turkey, Brunson was symbolically connected with the man whom Erdoğan blamed for the 15 July 2016 coup against him. This man, Fethullah Gülen, lived in longstanding exile in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania, protected by the US from extradition.
‘Working very hard on Pastor Brunson!’ Trump excitedly tweeted on the Friday, 3 days after Khashoggi’s assassination.
Indeed, all of a sudden, Turkey decided to drop its intransigence and to release Brunson within a week, leading to a triumphant photo opportunity for Trump on 13 October in the White House with the now free Brunson tearfully praying for Trump to have ‘supernatural wisdom’ – a fervent wish that made sense given Donald Trump’s disinterest in Christian or any other doctrine. (Other collateral damage of the 2016 coup, such as a number of US consulate workers and the holidaying NASA scientist Serkan Golge, had no such publicity value and these people were not so lucky. They remained locked up – in the case of Golge in solitary confinement.) Another, four weeks later, more evidence of the sudden thaw in the relations would emerge when both Turkey and the US shortly after one another started ‘unilaterally’ to roll back sanctions against black-listed government officials.
It is clear what Turkey had to gain, and would promise – no US embarrassment – but what exactly Turkey had on the US that brought its government to the negotiation table is a lot less clear.
However, with a script agreed between the US and Turkey and tokens of goodwill accepted and exchanged, Turkey was now free to pursue Saudi Arabia with the same tactic by adding a notch.
The facts surrounding Khashoggi’s death started swirling around at a rapid pace in the Turkish media and from there on the world media. Photographs of the fifteen-men hit squad were published and detailed flight information and CCTV coverage of their movements suddenly became available. Turkish reports were now published and leaked that Khashoggi had been dismembered and removed from the consulate in several parts inside body bags, fuelling further shock, embellishment and still some scepticism in the absence of physical proof.
‘Turkish sources insist that Jamal Khashoggi was tortured, then killed and his body cut up,’ tweeted Saudi whistleblower Mujtahidd, who had more than
two million followers. ‘All this was filmed and the video was sent to Mohammed bin Salman so he could enjoy the scene. If this is confirmed, then it seems like the news that he was removed from Turkey and has arrived in Saudi Arabia isn’t true. Tomorrow Turkey should announce full details.’
The Turkish police did not go quite that far in public. However, a senior police officer leaked to the Qatari-funded news outlet Middle East Eye – for whom Khashoggi had written – that he was ‘brutally tortured, killed and cut into pieces’ inside the building. The source added that the attack was filmed in order to prove the mission had been accomplished.
Answers were required. Yasin Aktay told Qatari broadcaster Al-Jazeera: ‘We demand a convincing clarification from Saudi Arabia, and what the Crown Prince offered is not convincing.’
Mainstream Turkish daily newspaper Hurriyet also suggested that the Saudis had taken Khashoggi out of the building by cutting his body to pieces. The government mouthpiece Sabah offered further detail: ‘The black minibus will explain the riddle of the Saudi journalist.… [It] left the building two hours after Khashoggi entered the mission.’ This raised suspicions and the police were looking for it.
The waters soon got murkier with the Iranian channel IRTV1 (Iran is a close ally of Russia) reporting that Khashoggi’s corpse had been found in a neighbourhood in Istanbul five days after he had disappeared.
Khashoggi’s friend and Erdoğan adviser Yasin Aktay wrote in his column in Yeni Safak, another government mouthpiece: ‘Although we are still trying to maintain optimism, we were not able to prevent the abduction or brutal killing of Khashoggi, whose ideas and stance I have followed with great appreciation and approval.… I know that all precautions have been taken.’
‘We never had the opportunity to protect him, to do something when he was still alive,’ he said. He and Khashoggi had talked the month before about the possible targeting of Saudi citizens. ‘He voiced his concern about possible operations against Saudi citizens.… He was confident they couldn’t conduct such operations in Turkey.’