by Owen Wilson
‘Instead, these actions may trigger condemnation quickly followed by silence’, the column continued. ‘As a result, Arab governments have been given free rein to continue silencing the media at an increasing rate.…
‘The Arab world is facing its own version of an Iron Curtain, imposed not by external actors but through domestic forces vying for power. The Arab world needs a modern version of the old transnational media so citizens can be informed about global events. More important, we need to provide a platform for Arab voices.…’
‘We suffer from poverty, mismanagement and poor education,’ he wrote. ‘Through the creation of an independent international forum, isolated from the influence of nationalist governments spreading hate through propaganda, ordinary people in the Arab world would be able to address the structural problems their societies face.’
With the US and Saudi script looking shaky on account of the bone saw, suddenly more names from Turkish flight data started circulating on the hitherto unidentified members of the fifteen-strong assassination squad, leading to more background information on the team.
It became embarrassingly clear that almost all members were intimately connected with MBS’s personal security and intelligence team. Among the new names was that of Abdulaziz Mohammed al-Hawsawi. A French colleague of his who had worked with the Saudi royal family told The New York Times that al-Hawsawi was a member of the security team that travelled with the Crown Prince.
Thaar Ghaleb al-Harbi was mentioned in Saudi media in 2017, when he was promoted lieutenant in the Saudi royal guard, apparently for his bravery defending the Crown Prince’s palace in Jeddah during an attack.
Then there was Mohammed Saad al-Zahrani. A 2017 video by the Saudi-owned TV channel al-Ekhbariya published on YouTube showed a man wearing a royal-guard uniform and name tag standing next to the Crown Prince. At one, time he had also been on the embassy staff in London. A user with the same name on the Saudi phone-number app Menom3ay was listed as a member of the royal guard. A reporter from the Washington Post called the number and the man who answered denied having been in Turkey.
Walid Abdullah al-Shihri Shihri had been promoted major general in 2017 according to Saudi media. Middle East Eye had seen a document from the Saudi interior ministry listing him as a member of the Crown Prince’s special security force.
Middle East Eye also identified Badr Lafi al-Otaibi as a colonel in the Crown Prince’s entourage, who travelled with MBS to France in 2018, along with major Nayif Hasan al-Arifi, a security and protection support officer for the Crown Prince. On the number-sharing app, he identified himself as an ‘employee of the Crown Prince’s office’. A document seen by Middle East Eye also listed Mansour Othman Abahussain as a support officer for the Crown Prince. He was a brigadier.
Brigadier Abahussain, major al-Arifi and officer al-Zahrani were the three Wyndham Grand Saudis who had arrived after Khashoggi’s assassination on the second private Gulfstream at 4:29pm. They seemed to be the sweep team, inspecting that every last detail had been attended to and charged with reporting back to Riyadh. They were to stay in Istanbul for as long as forensic crime expert Dr al-Tubaigy did and flew back with him on the Gulfstream that left Atatürk Airport at 9:45pm.
Fahad al-Balawi was listed as a member of the royal guard by two users on Menom3ay, while seven Menom3ay users identified Saif al-Qahtani as an employee of the Crown Prince. Khalid al-Otaibi also identified himself as a member of the royal guard. He travelled to the United States at the same time as official visits by members of the Saudi royal family. Hit-squad member Waleed al-Sehri was identified as an air force officer from an online video, while the facebook profile of Meshal al-Bostani said he was an air force lieutenant who lived in Jeddah and had studied at the University of Louisville, Kentucky. He died in a traffic accident at about this time and it immediately raised suspicions that he had been silenced by the Saudi regime in the crackdown on the team that had loyally executed the assassination order. Born in 1961 Mustafa al-Madani, Khashoggi’s body double, was by some way the oldest of the group.
No information had been unearthed regarding the two other men who entered and left Turkey on 2 October. But they were now identified on new passenger lists by Turkish officials. They were Khalid al-Taibi and Turki al-Serei and were thought to have links to the Crown Prince, too.
At least three of the suspects – first lieutenant Dhaar al-Harbi, sergeant major Walid al-Shihri and Abdul al-Hawsawi – had been part of the MBS’s entourage when he made a three-day visit to London in March 2018, where he met the Queen and Prime Minister Theresa May. Assassination squad leader, major general Maher Mutreb, was also seen emerging from a car in Downing Street during the visit.
Despite the mounting weight of circumstantial evidence, MBS still denied ordering the killing.
However, his officials were said to have privately conceded that Khashoggi died in the building at the hands of a rogue unit when ‘an interrogation went wrong’. Who, then, was the culprit?
The prime suspect emerged as a two-star general new to intelligence work. He was going to be the designated fall guy in the latest Saudi script. According to the Washington Post, this was general Ahmed al-Asiri, deputy head of Saudi general intelligence directorate and one of the Crown Prince’s right-hand men after MBS was made defence minister when his father came to power as king. A graduate of Sandhurst, West Point in the US, and St Cyr Academy in France, al-Asiri was a career air-force officer who came to prominence as spokesman for the Saudi-led coalition fighting in Yemen that had been unleashed by the Crown Prince as one of his first acts as Saudi defence minister.
In March 2017, al-Asiri was filmed sticking his middle finger up at protesters in London. This did not seem to damage his standing with the Crown Prince at the time.
Although he had no training in intelligence – to bolster the new cock-up script – it was said that he won the prince’s permission to interrogate Khashoggi on the suspicion that Khashoggi was part of the dreaded Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist political faction whose rise during the Arab Spring worried the Saudis and their allies in the United Arab Emirates. The Saudis also wanted to intimidate Khashoggi for taking money from Qatar. According to the Daily Beast, ‘the over-eager general exceeded bin Salman’s intentions. He improvised a rendition to send Khashoggi from Turkey back to Saudi Arabia – and botched it, killing him. Then he lied to his Saudi superiors about what happened.’
How plausible was the new story?
‘It’s not going to wash,’ said Bruce Riedel, a former CIA official and the Gulf expert at the Brookings Institution. ‘It’s ludicrous in the extreme. Saudi Arabia doesn’t work that way. They don’t do freelance operations.’
‘If this is a rogue operation, the rogue is MBS,’ said Barbara Bodine, a retired US ambassador to Yemen, knowing that if she said that as a Saudi citizen she would have signed her death warrant.
The Saudis must have been frustrated by the fact that people could freely talk back at the state, even if they had been former officials.
And then, of course, there was still the bone saw.
11 Technology
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Saudi Arabia officially admitted that Khashoggi was dead. Khashoggi had indeed died in a fight in the Istanbul consulate, but it was all a terrible mistake. In a statement on state TV the country’s public prosecutor said that the fifteen-man squad confronted Mr Khashoggi when he entered the consulate and the brawl broke out.
To give the new script some teeth the public prosecutor said that eighteen people had been arrested in connection with his death.
The Saudi statement said: ‘In implementation to the directives of the leadership of the need to clearly know the truth and declare it transparently whatever, the preliminary investigations conducted by the Public Prosecution showed that the suspects had travelled to Istanbul to meet with the citizen Jamal Khashoggi as there were indications of the possibility of his returning back to the country.’ The phrase ‘indications of the possibili
ty of his returning’ was mysterious. The public prosecutor probably meant what usually results when a gun is put to someone’s forehead and he is asked to return to Saudi Arabia.
‘The results of the preliminary investigations also revealed that the discussions that took place with the citizen Jamal Khashoggi during his presence in the Consulate of the Kingdom in Istanbul by the suspects did not go as required and developed in a negative way, this led to a fight and a quarrel between some of them and the citizen Jamal Khashoggi, yet the brawl aggravated to lead to his death and their attempt to conceal and cover what happened.’
All fifteen men in the hit squad were arrested along with two consular staff and a driver. Saudi Arabia said the eighteen would be tried in Saudi courts. They had previously been described as tourists, though Saudi Arabia now conceded they were soldiers and intelligence operatives.
As if a legal wand had been waved, it was also revealed at the same time that the death penalty would be sought against five of the eighteen. No individual names, however, were given. And since the kingdom is hermetically sealed to the free press, there was no way of checking whether anyone had actually been arrested.
Furthermore, four other intelligence officials were also sacked, including general Ahmed al-Asiri, the deputy intelligence chief, and Saud al-Qahtani, MBS’s Steve Bannon. Qahtani was viewed as Prince Mohammed’s enforcer and had been considered untouchable by many Saudis. He was the one who had praised Khashoggi on the phone in his home in Virginia in 2017 for supporting MBS’s initiative to let women drive, purring ‘keep writing and boasting’.
Information was now leaked that a Skype call from Saudi Arabia to the consulate in Istanbul was made on 2 October after Khashoggi entered the building. During that call MBS adviser Saud al-Qahtani had begun to hurl insults at Khashoggi over the phone. According to the Arab and Turkish sources, Khashoggi answered Qahtani’s insults with his own. Qahtani told his men to dispose of Khashoggi.
‘Bring me the head of the dog,’ he told them, though it remained unclear whether they did so apart from Khashoggi’s fingers.
Critics of Saudi Arabia’s new script pointed to several tweets by al-Qahtani as evidence that the Crown Prince was fully aware of the orders his aide was executing. In one 2017 tweet, al-Qahtani said: ‘Do you think I make decisions without guidance? I am an employee and a faithful executor of the orders of my lord the King and my lord the faithful Crown Prince.’ On the same day he warned a Saudi dissident living in London that the ‘assassination file has been reopened’. Even after being sacked, al-Qahtani tweeted: ‘I express my gratitude to the King and the Crown Prince for the great confidence they have given me and for providing me with the great opportunity to serve my nation over the past years.’ He added: ‘I will always be a loyal servant of my country.’
King Salman ordered MBS to head a committee to restructure the intelligence services within thirty days, either suggesting that the Crown Prince had been absolved of blame or that there was further covering up to be done.
‘The kingdom has taken the necessary procedures to find out the truth,’ the state news agency said, adding that the country’s leadership had stressed ‘the importance of knowing the truth clearly and announcing it transparently, whatever it is’.
Former MI6 chief Sir John Sawers said: ‘All the evidence points to it being ordered and carried out by people close to Mohammed bin Salman.’
Pointing the finger at the US Sir John believed that MBS thought he had a ‘licence’ from Donald Trump, who frequently condemned journalists as the ‘enemy of the people’, even praising Republican Congressman Greg Gianforte for body-slamming Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs, saying ‘he’s my kind of guy’.
‘I don’t think he would have done this if he hadn’t thought he had licence from the US administration to frankly behave as he wished to do so,’ said Sir John. ‘I think President Trump and his ministerial team are waking up to just how dangerous it is to have people acting with a sense that they have impunity in their relationship with the United States.’
Smoothly papering over the fact that Turkey seemed clueless on 2 October, former Whitehall mandarin Sir John also had his own theory as to where the tape the Turks had come from.
The theory didn’t include Russia. Instead Sir opined, ‘There has been such tension between Turkey and Saudi Arabia over the last ten years or so they would have been monitoring very carefully what goes on inside Saudi offices.’
‘They could well have had the consulate general bugged in some way or there may have been other devices carried by the squad which carried out the assassination which they were able to intercept.’ Anything is possible, but Sir John’s smooth theory wasn’t corroborated by the facts. For four days, Turkey had been in the dark about Khashoggi’s fate.
Another senior security ‘source’ chipped in to kill any further speculation about the loose end of the audio tape and video: ‘Turkey launched a large-scale surveillance operation. Many in the intelligence community believe the consul was bugged, and this Saudi team was followed.’
Turkey, the ‘source’ suggested, had been taken by surprise. ‘Turkey was expecting a rendition attempt, which they could interdict, rescuing Khashoggi. Instead, they witnessed a murder,’ the source said. ‘The uncomfortable truth may emerge one day that the hit team was listened to live as they killed Khashoggi, but [Turkey] was powerless to do anything about it.’
What was curious about the security ‘source’s’ speculation was that it spectacularly failed to add up to the facts.
If Turkey had been listening in on what was happening in the consulate, it would have swung into action the moment Khashoggi’s death throttle was heard while Dr al-Tubaigy wielded his bone saw and said he was decapitating and dismembering the corpse. Turkish authorities would have grounded the two private jets, searched every inch of them as they lacked diplomatic status, and prevented the fifteen strong team from leaving Turkey, arresting all those who did not have diplomatic immunity and searching their luggage with a toothcomb and luminol. It would have given anything to thwart the success of the brazen assassination scheme by an arch-rival on Turkish soil. Anything less and the Turkish government would look foolish in the eyes of the world in general, and its Middle-Eastern neighbours in particular – the disrespect MBS had shown Erdoğan by capturing a friend was beyond staggering.
The team and their luggage with sawn-off fingers, perhaps a head, and audio and video tapes would have been in Turkish hands without the world knowing what had happened. With the shoe firmly on the other foot, Erdoğan’s leverage on Saudi Arabia would have been incalculable.
Quite apart from Turkish questionable intel prowess, it is inconceivable that the Turkish secret service listened in on the noisy assassination of a friend of their president’s yet didn’t act like lightening to control such an impudent operation once its perpetrators were outside the consulate.
Russian intelligence, however, does have the same technological capability and manpower as the US (as does China for that matter) to pick up chatter. If one looks at the 2016 US elections and UK Brexit Referendum, Russia’s deployment of technology may, in fact, be far superior. Unlike Turkey, where security-forces coups are common, it is also a country without divisive government factions that compete with one another. The Russian state used to be unified behind one holistic ideology but under Putin it is unified by the holistic pursuit of money. Furthermore, given Istanbul’s vital importance to Russia’s sea traffic, there is probably as much Russian-spyware cabling underneath its pavements as in Moscow.
Providing further padding to the script, Saudi officials also revealed that the kingdom had a general order on its books – presumably issued by no one else but MBS himself as crown prince – for Saudi dissidents to return home. The overly-keen general al-Asiri had wanted to impress MBS and acted on his own to plan an operation to capture Mr Khashoggi in Turkey, or so the story ran.
‘There were no orders for them to kill him or even specifically kidnap hi
m,’ a Saudi official said for the avoidance of doubt that this was a white wash. ‘Crown Prince Mohammed had no knowledge of this specific operation and certainly did not order a kidnapping or murder of anybody. He will have been aware of the general instruction to tell people to come back.’
It was just odd that the Crown Prince hadn’t thought of mentioning this order in his Bloomberg interview on 3 October when asked whether Khashoggi was ‘facing charges’.
Though of course, the word ‘order to return’ – if indeed that order had been ‘general’ – would likely have been misinterpreted by the six Bloomberg journalists who interviewed MBS.
12 ‘Physical Condition’
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While the blame game was being played out, Turkish authorities continued to expand their search for Khashoggi’s remains. They claimed that ‘after being loaded with several pieces of luggage, a minibus with the license plate 34 CC 1865 parked within the consulate grounds left the building around 3pm… for the consul’s residence and believed that the bags held the remains of Khashoggi’s dismembered corpse.
Using CCTV footage, they tracked hit-squad vehicles to the Belgrade Forest (a news outlet by Russia’s ally Iran had already pointed in this direction), a large park on the city’s northern outskirts, and to farmlands in Yalova Province about fifty miles from Istanbul on the other side of the Mamara Sea. A woman who lived there said that there had been more traffic than usual on the night of 2 October.
There were also calls for the Saudis to hand over the body, if they still had it.
The official Saudi script, however, now was that it had been carried out of the building by the rogue team. In an Agatha Christie Murder-in-Istanbul, they concealed it in a rug and had handed to a ‘local collaborator’ to dispose of, as if corpses were postage parcels to eternity. Even bad guys in movies about wartime Istanbul weren’t that careless.