by Owen Wilson
While Mutreb’s former colleague Khashoggi was being slaughtered alive, at least three outside calls were placed by Mutreb and during the last one he said calmly.
A Turkish newspaper also published leaked x-ray scans of the team’s luggage, which included walkie-talkies, a signal jammer, electro-shock devices, scalpel blades, staple guns, long scissors and syringes. The bags were not opened due to diplomatic immunity, it said.
On 16 November the Washington Post report that the CIA had concluded that Crown Prince bin Salman ordered the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. It was later leaked that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman sent at least eleven messages to Saud al-Qahtani, who was overseeing the operation, in the hours surrounding the murder. Qahtani was one of the officials who was sacked as part of the investigation by the Saudi public prosecutor and one of seventeen people sanctioned by the US Treasury Department who the US had linked to the killing. Again Saudi officials repeatedly denied that Mohammed bin Salman had any involvement.
Unofficially, a CIA official, however, told the Post: ‘The accepted position is there is no way this happened without his being aware or involved.’
The agency had reached its conclusions after examining multiple sources of intelligence, including a phone call that the prince’s brother, Khalid bin Salman, the Saudi ambassador to the United States, had with Khashoggi.
Khalid tweeted back furiously: ‘I never talked to him by phone and certainly never suggested he go to Turkey for any reason. I ask the US government to release any information regarding this claim.’
Writing in Hurriyet – one of the Turkish newspapers to which Erdoğan’s government preferred to leak – Abdulkadir Selvi also reported leaked information that the CIA had a recording of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman giving instructions to ‘silence Jamal Khashoggi as soon as possible’ as the result of US wiretap. The Crown Prince and his brother Khalid were reportedly heard discussing the ‘discomfort’ created by Khashoggi’s public criticism of the kingdom’s administration.
How a Turkish paper would obtain CIA information was not at all clear, unless the CIA had leaked this titbit as a gesture of the new détente to the Turkish government and as a way to squeeze more money out of Saudi Arabia as Donald Trump had vowed in Mississippi on the day of Khashoggi’s torture and dismemberment.
The Turkish newspaper also raised a new mystery: ‘The hit squad, which was composed of close aides of Crown Prince Mohammed, told Khashoggi to send a message to his son, otherwise he “would be brought to Saudi Arabia.” It suddenly hinted again at what Turkish ultra-nationalist Aydinlik newspaper had leaked in the early days: that Khashoggi was a spy and had brought ‘significant documents’ from Saudi Arabia.
Heightening the mystery, Hurriyet did not spell out what that message might be. Instead it merely stated that Khashoggi heroically rejected it, protecting his son, which ‘led to the quarrel that ended with his killing by strangulation with a rope or plastic bag.’ Completing the picture he had painted, Selvi wrote: ‘The subsequent murder is the ultimate confirmation of this instruction.’
Despite the CIA’s conclusions, President Trump himself refused to accept that the Crown Prince knew anything about the murder. No other president would similarly question his own government intelligence, but Donald Trump’s presidency had started to depend on habitually undercutting executive parts of his administration.
‘He told me he had nothing to do with it,’ Trump argued with an eye on the long game of discrediting national security institutions. ‘He told me that, I would say, maybe five times. He did certainly have people that were reasonably close to him and close to him that were probably involved.… But at the same time we do have an ally and I want to stick with an ally that in many ways has been very good.’
However, it was clear that, if the operation was sanctions by the Saudi government, MBS must have known about it. A western diplomat in Riyadh told the Sunday Times: ‘He is the only real centre of power in the kingdom. There’s no one that is seriously challenging him. And that also means there is no one else that could have ordered the murder.’
The US grew anxious about the growing gulf between Turkey and Saudi Arabia, both important allies. It floated the rumour via the foreign press on 15 November that it was examining ways to expel Turkish cleric Fethullah Gülen, who Ankara says was behind a failed coup two years earlier, if Turkey toned down its criticism of the Saudi Crown Prince.
Throwing Gülen under the bus was the kind of proposal a reality show host might have come up with. The very last thing Turkey wanted was to have in its own backyard a widely-revered martyr who had triggered a recent coup. It would spell civil war. Holed up where he currently was in Pennsylvania, Gülen had become the Turkish poster child of US involvement in the coup. Erdoğan instantly squashed this cheap Big-Brother turn on the day.
Mourners gathered in mosques in Mecca and Istanbul though still no body had been produced and there was nothing to bury.
The mystery concerning its whereabouts deepened when this time one of Turkey’s most senior politicians, defence minister Hulusi Akar, took up the matter and speculated that the killers may have taken the body parts out of Turkey.
‘One probability is that they left the country three to four hours after committing the murder. They may have taken out Khashoggi’s dismembered corpse inside luggage without facing problems due to their diplomatic immunity,’ he said. If that is what Turkey knew for a fact, Akar came within an inch of telling Saudi Arabia what other information would be leaked in the future.
While the CIA said that MBS was behind the murder of Khashoggi, President Trump maintained that the jury was still out.
‘Our intelligence agencies continue to assess all information, but it could very well be that the Crown Prince had knowledge of this tragic event,’ he said. In a sly sideways move (perhaps in a stroke of Brunson’s ‘superhuman intelligence’) he equivocated not on the facts known to the CIA, but rather on their sum total. He doubted whether these facts merited the CIA’s conclusion beyond reasonable doubt: ‘Maybe he did and maybe he didn’t!… We may never know all of the facts.’
Having given his piece, Trump agreed to meet MBS at the upcoming G20 meeting in Buenos Aires, a city overlooked by a Trump hotel in Punta del Este. He was duly praised by MBS’s friends in the Gulf States for his loyalty to the Crown Prince.
However, two senior senators again wielded the Global Magnitsky Act in an attempt to order the president to determine whether the prince was involved in the columnist’s death.
‘In light of recent developments, including the Saudi government’s acknowledgement that Saudi officials killed Mr Khashoggi in its Istanbul consulate, we request that your determination specifically address whether Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is responsible,’ they wrote.
‘I disagree with the president’s assessment. It’s inconsistent… with the intelligence I’ve seen… The intelligence I’ve seen suggests that this was ordered by the Crown Prince,’ Republican senator Mike Lee said on NBC’s Meet the Press. Plainly he felt President Trump’s assertion was at odds with the evidence.
‘It is not in our national security interests to look the other way when it comes to the brutal murder of Mr Jamal Khashoggi,’ Republican senator and former presidential rival Lindsey Graham concurred. ‘Mr Trump has betrayed American values in service to what already was a bad bet on the thirty-three-year-old prince.’
Writing on Twitter, Bob Corker, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee added witheringly: ‘I never thought I’d see the day a White House would moonlight as a public relations firm for the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia.’
While Donald Trump continued to insist that the CIA had not found Prince Mohammed responsible and had come to no conclusion, Jack Reed, the senior Democrat on the senate armed services committee, put it more bluntly and said yes that the President was ‘lying’, foregoing the usual media euphemisms ‘false statements’.
‘The CIA conclu
ded that the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia was directly involved in the assassination of Khashoggi,’ he said. Not only that, Reed added the CIA had ‘high confidence’ in its assessment.
‘It’s based on facts, it’s based on analysis,’ he said. ‘The notion that they didn’t reach a conclusion is just unsubstantiated. The CIA has made that clear.’
The unanimous US senate resolution stated that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was responsible for Khashoggi’s murder and it formally withdrew US support for the Saudi war in Yemen (that MBS had started).
In response to this senate resolution, the Saudi foreign ministry released a statement saying: ‘The recent position of the United States, which has been built on baseless allegations and accusations, includes blatant interference in its internal affairs and the role of the kingdom at the regional and international level. The kingdom has previously asserted that the murder of Saudi citizen Jamal Khashoggi is a deplorable crime that does not reflect the kingdom’s policy, nor its institutions, and reaffirms its rejection of any attempts to take the case out of the path of justice in the kingdom.
‘The kingdom hopes that it is not drawn into domestic political debates in the United States to avoid any ramifications on the ties between the two countries that could have significant negative impacts on this important strategic relationship.’
Though he would have been even more plain if not crude, Vladimir Putin couldn’t have improved upon this statement.
Mevlut Cavusoglu, the Turkish foreign minister, summarised the situation saying that Trump was turning a blind eye to the murder. He then lashed out at the EU’s response, which he complained was no more than ‘cosmetic’. Given Turkey’s own free-press record, he was more used to having to defend himself.
Emboldened by the senate’s accusation of MBS as the assassination’s king pin, Erdoğan said, ‘We have learned this from the audio recordings: of those who arrive, those closest to the Crown Prince played the most active role,’ said President. ‘The perpetrators are clear to me.’
Citing Nikki Haley, outgoing US envoy to the United Nations, taking the same line as the senate, President Erdoğan said, ‘She openly named people’. He couldn’t believe his luck with the democratic US, ‘This shows something. Now, the whole incident is fully resurfacing.’
He added: ‘It’s clear where this business will end up.’ Though it wasn’t entirely clear where ‘where’ was.
It was a small wonder that, two weeks later, government-mouthpiece newspaper Safak would on 31 December 2018 crown President Erdoğan ‘the world’s most prominent leader’ for its Turkish readers.
15 High-fives in Buenos Aires
ℭ
Before travelling to the G20 in Argentina on 30 November, MBS visited the United Arab Emirates, where he met his closest ally, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed of Abu Dhabi, the country’s de facto ruler. He would go on to Gulf state Bahrain, Egypt and Tunisia, all thought to be friendly allies sponsored by Saudi Arabia, on his way to Buenos Aires. The tour sent a clear message to the world that the Crown Prince’s position remained unassailable in the kingdom. It was King Salman’s equivalent of saying, I am not considering to install any rival in the royal family as crown prince, and it is safe for MBS to be out of the country.
Nonetheless, when MBS landed in Tunisia there were popular protests. A large banner hanging from the headquarters of the Tunisian journalists’ union showed the prince wielding a chain saw – a reference to the dismemberment of Khashoggi’s corpse. Demonstrators carried placards saying, ‘The murderer is not welcome’ and ‘Go away assassin’, while some held up hacksaws.
‘It’s inhuman to see an Arab leader killing his brothers in Yemen, and the murder of a journalist is the icing on the cake,’ said Basma Rezgui, a teacher brandishing a red-stained bone saw.
‘He’s a very dangerous person because he doesn’t seem to understand politics or respect his own people or other people,’ said Radwan Masmoudi, president of Tunisia’s Centre for the Study of Islam and Democracy, who was among those protesting MBS’s visit. ‘There’s no way he’ll bring stability. His actions speak louder than his words.’
Meanwhile, the location of Khashoggi’s body remained an unresolved topic and a fertile source for creating new headlines. Despite earlier unofficial reports that Khashoggi’s body parts had been found in the garden of the Saudi consul general’s garden, the Turkish police now also searched a palatial villa the size of MBS’s own French chateau near the town of Termal in the Yalova province near Istanbul.
It belonged to Mohammed al-Fawzan, a Saudi businessman close to MBS. On 26 November, Istanbul’s chief prosecutor had added his name to the roster of the Saudi hit squad, saying al-Fawzan had spoken on 1 October to Mansour Abahussain who was on the three-strong sweep team that arrived on the second plane after Khashoggi’s assassination.
‘The chief prosecutor’s office believes that this phone call was about disappearing or hiding the body parts of the murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi,’ the official press statement said. Mr al-Fawzan was not in Turkey when Mr Khashoggi was killed, but Turkish investigators believed he may have let the hit squad use his property – though there was no suggestion that al-Fawzan personally knew of the assassination or that the hit squad might try to hide the body at his property. Large photographs of King Salman and the Crown Prince adorned the walls inside the villa.
Investigators clad in white suits with blue gloves and show covers took a particular interest in a well on the grounds of the villa, which they drained and in which they said they found traces of chemicals. They used drones and dogs in the ten-hour search, which covered the grounds of a neighbouring property. The prosecutor said al-Fawzan, codenamed ‘Ghozan’, had been called by Mansour Abahussain, the Saudi officer of the Crown Prince’s security detail who had been arrested by Saudi authorities along with other members of the hit squad.
‘Jamal Khashoggi’s body was cut into pieces and dissolved after his murder in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul,’ said the prosecutor’s press release. ‘As a part of the ongoing investigation, it has been detected that the day before suspect Mansour Othman got in touch with Saudi citizen Mohammed Ahmed in Yalova. It is assumed that their conversation is connected to the Khashoggi murder, and the dissolving and hiding of his body.’
The prosecutor also noted that a man named Fawzan Mohammed Ahmed al-Fawzan had been appointed head of a Saudi company shortly after the Crown Prince seized control of it from one of the rich Saudis he imprisoned on corruption charges at the 2017 Riyadh Ritz Carlton shakedown.
In Buenos Aires, Human Rights Watch submitted papers calling on Argentina to use a clause in its constitution to prosecute MBS for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi and war crimes in Yemen if he attended the G20. A file containing details of Khashoggi’s slaying and other cases of torture was sent to the prosecutor’s office. Argentina’s constitution recognises universal jurisdiction for war crimes and torture. This means the authorities can investigate and prosecute those crimes no matter where they were committed. The Argentine prosecutor did accept the request to prosecute Mohammed bin Salman, but when MBS arrived in Argentina, he was warmly received by government officials nonetheless.
On the brink of the summit, the US senate had reached for a new measure to overrule President Trump’s foreign policy. They voted to end their support for Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen in response to the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. The move, significantly, was not partisan and had the support of both Republicans and Democrats. Following a briefing by CIA director Gina Haspel, leading senators also said plainly that the Saudi Crown Prince was ‘complicit’ in the killing of Jamal Khashoggi.
Senate foreign relations committee chairperson Bob Corker told reporters: ‘I have zero questions in my mind that the Crown Prince directed the murder… If he was in front of a jury he would be convicted in thirty minutes. Guilty. So, the question is what do we do about that.’
Senator Lindsey Graham, concurred, saying: ‘There’s not a
smoking gun, there’s a smoking saw. You have to be wilfully blind not to come to the conclusion that this was orchestrated and organised by people under the command of MBS and that he was intricately involved in the demise of Mr Khashoggi. I think he is complicit in the murder of Mr Khashoggi to the highest level possible. I cannot support arm sales to Saudi Arabia as long as he’s in charge.’
When the G20 summit opened in Buenos Aires on 30 November, Prime Minister Theresa May said she would confront the Crown Prince about the killing of Jamal Khashoggi. They shook hands, at any rate, in a firm and steady way. A Downing Street spokesman said: ‘The Prime Minister stressed the importance of ensuring that those responsible for the appalling murder of Jamal Khashoggi are held to account, and that Saudi Arabia takes action to build confidence that such a deplorable incident could not happen again.’
French President Emmanuel Macron also had a word. MBS told him not to worry about the Khashoggi murder.
‘I am worried,’ Macron had replied. ‘You never listen to me.’
‘I will listen, of course,’ MBS replied. ‘It’s OK. I can deal with it.’
But the most significant meeting was between President Putin and MBS.
Putin had grown up in Soviet Russia at the height of its power and had been stationed in as Komissariat-5 KGB officer in East Germany where the Stasi held files on over one third of the total population. MBS, unlike most Saudi royals, had never lived abroad. Both authoritarians shared the view (with Erdoğan) that the national media was merely a crowd-management tool of the population at large. The point of a free press was entirely incomprehensible to both men, who merely saw it as an irritant that got in the way of their will.