Khashoggi and the Crown Prince

by Owen Wilson

  Official sources in Riyadh enthusiastically leaked further details of the script. Among other things, it was said that the government wanted to convince Khashoggi to return to the kingdom from voluntary exile in America as part of a campaign to prevent Saudi dissidents from being recruited by the country’s enemies. This addressed head on the fact that Khashoggi was a member of the Saudi intelligence community and did sound a lot closer to the truth.

  So, the script went, general Ahmed al-Asiri, put together a fifteen-member team from the intelligence and security forces to go to Istanbul, meet Khashoggi at the consulate and tried to convince him to return to Saudi Arabia.

  ‘There is a standing order to negotiate the return of dissidents peacefully, which gives them the authority to act without going back to the leadership’ the official said, waving a legislative wand to make sense of it all. ‘Asiri is the one who formed the team and asked for an employee who worked with al-Qahtani and who knew Jamal from the time they both worked at the embassy in London.’

  The official said al-Qahtani had sent one of his subordinates to conduct the negotiations. According to the plan, the team would hold Khashoggi for some time in a safe house outside Istanbul, but would release him if he ultimately refused to return to Saudi Arabia.

  Things went wrong from the start as the team overstepped al-Asiri’s and al-Qahtani’s orders and quickly employed violence, the official said. Khashoggi was ushered into the consul general’s office where Maher Mutreb, brigadier general in MBS’s intelligence detail, spoke to him about returning to Saudi Arabia. Khashoggi refused and told Mutreb that someone was waiting outside for him and would contact the Turkish authorities if he did not reappear within an hour. This was his fiancée, Hatice Cengiz and, a telephone call away, Erdoğan’s advisor Aktay.

  According to the official, Khashoggi told Mutreb he was violating diplomatic law and said, ‘What are you going to do with me? Do you intend to kidnap me?’

  Mutreb replied, ‘Yes, we will drug you and kidnap you.’

  The official also observed that Mutreb’s words were an attempt at intimidation that, regrettably, violated the mission’s peaceful objective.

  When Khashoggi raised his voice, the team panicked. They tried to restrain him, placing him in a chokehold and covering his mouth, the official said.

  ‘They tried to prevent him from shouting but he died,’ the government account went on. ‘The intention was not to kill him.’

  Asked if the team had smothered Khashoggi, the official subtly shifted the cause of death on to Khashoggi’s doorstep: ‘If you put someone of Jamal’s age in this position, he would probably die.’ It was all a case of suffocation by age.

  In an attempt to cover up what they had done in a panic, the team had rolled up Khashoggi’s body in a consular rug. Questioned, the Saudi officer would not give the nationality of the local man. And nor did the authorities know what this corpse collector had done with the body.

  Forensic expert Salah al-Tubaigy then tried to remove any trace of the incident inside the consulate.

  Meanwhile, operative Mustafa al-Madani donned Khashoggi’s clothes, spectacles and Apple watch, and left through the back door of the consulate in an attempt to make it look like Khashoggi had walked out of the building.

  The team then wrote a false report for superiors, saying they had allowed Khashoggi to leave once he warned them that Turkish authorities might get involved, and had promptly left the country before they were discovered. This explained the dramatic changes in the Saudi story. The team and three other local employees had been arrested and were under investigation.

  Saudi foreign minister Adel al-Jubeir expressed his condolences to the Khashoggi’s family, saying death was a ‘huge and grave mistake’ and promised ‘to punish those who are responsible for this murder’, although it was difficult to see how that job fall under the ministry of foreign affairs.

  He told Fox News, President Trump’s channel of choice: ‘This operation was a rogue operation, this was an operation where individuals ended up exceeding the authorities and responsibilities they had. They made a mistake when they killed Jamal Khashoggi in the consulate and they have tried to cover up for it. That is unacceptable in any government. We are determined to uncover every stone. We are determined to find out all the facts. And we are determined to punish those who are responsible for this murder. Even the senior leadership of the intelligence service was not aware of this.’

  Tut-tutting the global media’s reaction to Turkey’s leaks of the assassination and Saudi Arabia’s somersault, he described the media outcry over the death of Khashoggi as ‘hysterical’. Nonetheless, this could still be considered an improvement on the word ‘disgusting’.

  The Crown Prince himself called Khashoggi’s oldest son to express his condolences as a sign of respect and who he was dealing with. MBS and King Salman later received Khashoggi’s brother Sahel and son Salah.

  Hatice Cengiz meanwhile complained that the Crown Prince never sent his condolences to her. The Khashoggi family, who claimed not to be aware of the whirlwind love affair, probably didn’t mind.

  ‘This incident, this assassination, took place inside a Saudi diplomatic mission,’ she said. ‘In such circumstances, the Saudi Arabian authorities are responsible for this.’ There were fears for her safety and the Turkish authorities gave her twenty-four-hour police protection.

  Only Egypt backed the new Saudi script. Like MBS, the el-Sisi regime hated the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928 (and whose conservative views had briefly appealed to Khashoggi in his youth). Briefly legalised after the Arabian ‘Spring’ by President Morsi – who owed his election to the brotherhood – it was once again illegal after Morsi’s rule was overthrown a year later amidst popular protests against his attempts to replace the Mubarak era with an islamist one.

  Few other nations found the new Saudi version of events credible, however. Even Donald Trump said he struggled with the Saudis’ account, while the UK, France and Germany issued a joint statement saying there was ‘an urgent need for clarification’ on what happened inside the Istanbul consulate that day.

  It was still the image of the bone saw that stuck in everyone’s mind.

  ‘You don’t bring a bone saw to an accidental fistfight,’ said Ben Sasse, a Republican congressman from Nebraska. ‘The Saudis have said a whole bunch of crap that’s not right, accurate, or true.’

  Democrat Senator Jack Reed agreed across the aisles. ‘This appears to have been a deliberate, planned act followed by a cover-up,’ he said. ‘You don’t bring fifteen men and a bone saw to a fistfight with a sixty-year-old.’

  Turkey wasn’t letting the story peter out either. Turkish prosecutors did not accept the Saudi story. ‘We have clear evidence that what happened in the consulate was planned in advance,’ they said.

  The Saudis had given the Turks details of the fifteen suspects and they had interviewed twenty-five employees of the consulate in Istanbul. However, Saudi Arabia’s justice minister and chairman of its higher judicial council, Waleed al-Samaani, said that those responsible for Khashoggi’s death will be tried inside the kingdom.

  Turkey was seeking the extradition of the hit-squad, but it was now speculated that the hit-squad would simply be beheaded by the Saudis to prevent them from talking.

  President Erdoğan snapped further at the heels of the Crown Prince, asking Saudi Arabia: ‘Who gave the order for fifteen men to come to Turkey?’

  Agnes Callamard, a UN spokeswoman on extra-judicial killings, also said the Saudi explanation was ‘not plausible’. ‘No government should accept it or the pretence at investigation,’ she said.

  Protesting outside the Saudi consulate, Turan Kişlakçi, the head of the Turkish Arab Media Association and a close friend of Khashoggi, summarised all questions that remained unanswered by Saudi Arabia with regards to the ‘rogue’ operation.

  ‘Did they kidnap him? Where did they take him? How did they do this? These questions don’t matter,’
he said. ‘There’s only one thing that matters right now. Give Jamal back to us. Give him back so that we can raise his funeral. Let the whole world watch Jamal Khashoggi’s farewell.’

  On Monday 22 October Turkish state broadcaster TRT aired a new leaked surveillance video showing what Turkish security officials described as suspicious movement in a car park in Istanbul’s Sultangazi neighbourhood. This included the image of a man moving a bag from one vehicle to another.

  Turkish crime-scene investigators went to the car park in and found a grey BMW belonging to the Saudi consulate. It had been parked outside the consulate the day Khashoggi was killed.

  The Saudis tried to prevent the Turkish police searching the diplomatic vehicle. But investigators, pressing ahead regardless, found two suitcases that contained Mr Khashoggi’s personal belongings, including his laptop. They also examined the minivan belonging to the consulate and said they found Khashoggi’s DNA in the back of it.

  It was then suggested that body parts had been found in a twelve-metre well in the garden of the Saudi consul general’s residence. Not only had the body been dismembered, but Khashoggi’s face had been disfigured and the fingers were missing. They were said to have been flown back to Saudi Arabia to be presented to the Crown Prince as proof of the mission’s success.

  Nonetheless, speculation about Khashoggi’s body continued with leaks saying that it had been dissolved in acid, possibly in the consul-general’s garage. Family and friends in Saudi Arabia were still asking for its return so Jamal could be buried properly and they could mourn.

  Sources leaked to the Middle East Eye that Prince Mohammed’s bodyguard and leader of the operation, intelligence officer Maher Mutreb, was thought to have taken part of the journalist’s body out of Turkey in a large bag. He had left on a private jet the day of the murder and his bags were not checked before the plane left Atatürk Airport. It was also revealed that Mutreb placed seven calls to the mobile phone of Bader al-Asaker, manager of the Crown Prince’s private office, on the day of the murder, four times after the murder itself.

  Khashoggi had written a number of articles critical of Saudi Arabia for the Middle East Eye, but not under his own name as he feared for his life. The Middle East Eye revealed that Khashoggi’s assassins were members of a Saudi team of fifty highly-skilled intelligence and military operatives called the Firqat el-Nemr, or Tiger Squad and was well-known to foreign intelligence services. It had been formed more than a year earlier and operated under the guidance and supervision of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

  The Turkish leak that body parts were said to have been found came on the same day as Khashoggi’s brother Sahel and son Salah met King Salman and the Crown Prince at the royal palace. In a tweet, the foreign ministry shared a photograph of the men shaking hands with the caption: ‘King Salman receives Sahel bin Ahmed Khashoggi and Salah bin Jamal Khashoggi in the presence of Crown Prince and share their deepest condolences and sympathy to the family of Jamal Khashoggi, may God rest his soul.’

  However, according to the Guardian: ‘They stared straight at each other, seemingly locked in the moment: the bereaved, Salah Khashoggi, had eyes of cold sorrow while the man offering condolences, Mohammed bin Salman, gazed back at him with steely focus.’

  The meeting took place in the gilded office of the Crown Prince. Salah Khashoggi did not speak as they shook hands. But clearly discussions, though stiff, had been satisfactory for both sides. The ban on Salah, who holds joint US-Saudi citizenship, against leaving Saudi Arabia was lifted. He flew to Washington two days later with his family.

  Meanwhile President Erdoğan stoked the fire once again personally. He reiterated that the hard drive of the consulate’s CCTV system had been removed. Turkish officials had already leaked this information, but Erdoğan revealed that it had been done just before the gruesome murder, showing it was premeditated.

  ‘We have strong signs that the murder was the product of a planned operation,’ he told a rally of fans. ‘This is a political killing.’

  Erdoğan also insisted that the eighteen suspects be tried in Turkish courts. However, that would not be enough.

  ‘Leaving some security and intelligence forces holding the bag will not satisfy us or the international community,’ Erdoğan said in a speech to ruling-party MPs in parliament. Oddly, the autocrat had refrained from such pronouncements in the case the nerve-agent poisoning in Salisbury that had led to the death of Dawn Sturgess and savage incapacitation of Sergei Skripal by Russia’s secret novichok weapon. ‘Saudi Arabia has taken an important step by admitting the murder. As of now we expect of them to openly bring to light those responsible – from the person who gave the order to those who carried it out – and to bring them to justice.’

  He also promised that Turkey would reveal the ‘naked truth’ about Jamal Khashoggi’s death. After all, the existence of a tape had been leaked – but not yet everything that was on it.

  ‘All evidence gathered shows that Jamal Khashoggi was the victim of a savage murder,’ he said. ‘To cover up such a savagery would hurt the human conscience.’

  President Erdoğan was again careful not to mention MBS by name or rank in his speech. But, Abdulkadir Selvi, whose Hurriyet (yet another newspaper of record for the Turkish government) columns were studied for indications of Mr Erdoğan’s thinking, had no such qualms. He wrote, ‘We cannot close this file until the Crown Prince is brought to account and removed from his post.’

  Selvi also offered a new snippet of information from behind the baize door, Khashoggi had been cut into fifteen pieces and strangled slowly.

  Donald Trump called the Saudi story ‘the worst cover-up ever’ and his administration put penalties on the conspirators. Among those sanctioned were Maher Mutreb and his team, but also Saud al-Qahtani, and consul general al-Otaibi. MBS, however, was not named as he was a friend of the administration and of the president’s son-in-law.

  Congress was not having it. MBS must have thought it most bizarre that the state didn’t have the last word.

  ‘We are putting all our weight behind the Global Magnitsky request,’ said a senior Senate aide. ‘We do not want to sanction the low-hanging fruit, we want to go as high as possible.’

  Prime Minister Theresa May followed President Trump’s lead and announced that the Saudi officials suspected of being part of the plot to murder Khashoggi would be barred from entering Britain. Again there was no mention of the Crown Prince whom she had recently met as an honoured guest.

  It was not a very daring move as the men presumably had all been arrested in Saudi Arabia and, if not, would unlikely be allowed to leave the kingdom anytime soon.

  It seemed that, privately, Saudi media were not buying the government’s account of Khashoggi’s death either – though, of course, they wouldn’t make any of their reservations public within the kingdom, least of all go on the record by name.

  ‘People around me are feeling frustrated by this justification of it. They understand and know that everything, no matter how small, is ordered by the government. They don’t buy it,’ said one television journalist who worked for a pro-government station. He had worked alongside Khashoggi when he was a prominent media figure in Riyadh and was still in favour with the regime. Although the journalist had to peddle the official line on air, he said, from his knowledge of the Crown Prince, there is no way he would not have known.

  13 ‘Pre-meditated’

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  When the poorly attended Future Investment Initiative conference – Davos in the desert – kicked off on 23 October with many of the key participants missing, even the Crown Prince was absent from the opening session that morning.

  He did turn up in the afternoon though. Bankers, corporate executives and Saudis stood as one to applaud in the ornate conference room when he finally arrived. But the applause was subdued compared to the thunderous ovation he had received at the Future Investment Initiative a year ago. Prince bin Salman spent only fifteen minutes at the event and left witho
ut giving his planned speech.

  On the second day, he spoke to a packed auditorium, smoothly calling the murder of Khashoggi a ‘heinous crime which cannot be justified’ and vowing to bring the perpetrators to justice. Prince Mohammed called the death of the Washington Post columnist ‘very painful for both the Saudi people and the world’. In an echo of the Bloomberg interview he gave the day after Khashoggi had been quartered and cut into fifteen pieces without mercy, he claimed that the barbaric assassination was being exploited with malice by some to drive a wedge between Saudi Arabia and Turkey.

  ‘I want to send them a message: They will not be able to do that as long as there is a king called King Salman bin Abdulaziz and a crown prince called Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia, and a president in Turkey called Erdoğan,’ he said. ‘Justice will be seen in the end.’

  While MBS said the two countries would work together to bring all the perpetrators to court, he did not address accusations that he ordered the killing of one of his most prominent critics.

  ‘He’s not going to address the humungous elephant in the room, I bet,’ one conference attendee, Financial Times Middle East correspondent Heba Saleh, had speculated before the Crown Prince gave his speech. Stunned silence met the first mention of Khashoggi’s name, and a palpable relief followed. MBS’s remarks received a short burst of applause, though the atmosphere remained subdued.

  Alongside MBS on stage was Lebanese prime minister-designate Saad Hariri. MBS had been accused of kidnapping and roughing up Hariri the previous year, when Hariri didn’t return from an official trip to Riyadh. During the visit former Saudi ally Hariri had then been forced to resign live from Riyadh after falling out over the growing Iranian influence in Lebanon.