Blood and Oil, page 21
And at first the writer was more circumspect. Speaking at a conference in Russia in March of that year, he talked of democracy in the Middle East but said nothing of the Gulf monarchies. Khashoggi was back to striking a careful balance, walking right up to the edge but not crossing it—or at least not by much.
Over time, his comments drifted back into dangerous territory. The problem was that Mohammed bin Salman’s approach to reforming the country was infuriating him. Everything seemed to be done by decree; Mohammed only seemed to be paying attention to different opinions when he was locking up those who expressed them.
Mohammed was trying to open the country up to tourists and clamp down on corruption, but many who questioned his way of doing it were hauled in by state security and ordered to sign a pledge never to criticize the government again. The key lesson for Saudis: You are free only insofar as Mohammed bin Salman decides. On the surface, Saudi Arabia seemed to be reforming. But its underlying problem—the fact that people had no say in their own governance and that their freedom was left to the whim of a single man—was worse.
Ironically, Mohammed encouraged his closest advisors to be brutally honest about projects and ideas, praising effusively those who spoke up about what they considered to be an unwise course for the country, even if they directly contradicted the prince’s own views.
One evening, he got into a heated argument with a minister about the size of government allowances for Saudi government workers. Mohammed thought they should be enlarged in the budget because the 2030 plan wasn’t yet at a stage where it was putting more money into people’s hands, but the minister felt it was financially imprudent to spend money in that manner. Finally, the weary minister told Mohammed that he was the crown prince, and it was up to him to decide.
“If I wanted to use my powers to push the decision through, I wouldn’t have spent three hours trying to convince you, losing my voice,” he said. When the matter was put to a committee vote, the technocrats voted against Mohammed, and the budget item wasn’t increased.
But such debate happened strictly in private meetings. Public dissent was off limits, especially when it came to the key reform plans.
Essam al-Zamil, the jailed economist, was scooped up after tweeting his doubts about the planned Aramco IPO. He said the only way it could achieve Mohammed’s predicted valuation of more than $2 trillion was if Aramco’s oil reserves were included in the sale. Those reserves, he said, belong to the Saudi people, who should have a say in whether they were sold.
Joining Zamil in jail were more than a dozen others who criticized or questioned Mohammed’s plans. Among them were a poet who criticized the Qatar boycott and several clerics, including Ouda. The government accused them of working with foreign powers to undermine Saudi Arabia.
Khashoggi spoke up. “It is absurd,” he told the New York Times. “There was nothing that called for such arrests. They are not the members of a political organization, and they represent different points of view,” he said.
The ongoing public impertinence deeply embarrassed Qahtani, who was tired of Khashoggi’s flying around the world and publicly trashing his government. Qahtani immediately set in motion a plan to end Khashoggi’s career as a commentator of any kind. He cut off travel privileges and banned any public communication, writing, or participation in conferences. Khashoggi would be lucky to take a walk around Jeddah, much less give another one of his speeches about democracy in the Arab world.
But a friend of Khashoggi’s in the government tipped him off to the plan. Old ties ran deep. After a life as a journalist and public speaker, Khashoggi couldn’t imagine becoming an anonymous individual. He packed two suitcases and headed for Washington, DC, where he still had an apartment, just in time to avoid a travel ban. Qahtani was incensed and embarrassed yet again in front of his boss.
Against the odds, Khashoggi still held on to the hope of playing a semi-official role for his homeland. Writing to an aide of Awwad al-Awwad, the minister of culture and information, Khashoggi said “despite all I’m still committed to serve my country by being an independent writer and researcher.”
He attached a proposal for a new US-based think tank, to be called the Saudi Research Center or Saudi Council, that would liaise with Western think tanks and help counter negative news about Saudi Arabia.
Khashoggi quoted Lenin and highlighted the case of Raif Badawi, the young Saudi writer whose website Free Saudi Liberals earned him charges of apostasy, long prison time, and public flogging, but who did not admit to any of the allegations of wrongdoing.
The Badawi case “cost the kingdom a lot and could have been contained early,” he wrote in the proposal expressing his opinion, adding that a special monitoring team at the think tank could monitor news and “work to identify these stories and inform the ministry so they can be addressed early on.”
The think tank would cost between $1 million and $2 million to set up and he suggested the ministry hire him as a consultant.
Those efforts didn’t seem to mitigate the views of Saudi decision-makers. Around the time Khashoggi moved, Mohammed told a deputy he could “use a bullet” on Khashoggi, the New York Times later wrote, citing US intelligence. Discussing how to deal with the prodigal courtier, according to the New York Times, Mohammed told Qahtani he “did not like half measures.”
And that was before Khashoggi’s biggest international insult: Soon after Mohammed’s suggestions of violence, Khashoggi started writing a regular column for the Washington Post. The first column’s headline: “Saudi Arabia Wasn’t Always This Repressive. Now It’s Unbearable.”
“I have left my home, my family, and my job, and I am raising my voice. To do otherwise would betray those who languish in prison. I can speak when so many cannot. I want you to know that Saudi Arabia has not always been as it is now. We Saudis deserve better,” he wrote at the end.
Mohammed told Qahtani that he should bring Khashoggi back to Saudi Arabia, and if efforts failed, they “could possibly lure him outside Saudi Arabia and make arrangements,” according to a CIA assessment later reported by the Wall Street Journal.
Emissaries from the Royal Court kept calling Khashoggi, asking him to tone down his criticism and offering a reconciliation. But he resisted and, in October 2017, made a potentially explosive decision: Khashoggi began talking to an investigator working for American families suing the kingdom over the 9/11 attacks.
The prospect of such a lawsuit was a years-long concern for the royal family. US law makes it difficult to sue foreign governments in American courts, but in 2016 Congress overrode a veto by President Barack Obama to pass a bill making it easier for Americans to sue Saudi Arabia over the 2001 attacks.
The Saudis spent years, and millions of dollars, lobbying against the legislation; Mohammed even sent some of his top ministers to Washington to aid the effort to dissuade Congress. With the bill’s passage, the kingdom faced litigation that could result in a huge financial hit and, potentially, embarrassing leaks of information about relationships between high-ranking Saudis and people associated with the attacks. The potential liability also meant that Aramco couldn’t list its shares on the New York Stock Exchange, as Mohammed wanted, without risking huge lawsuits that could upend his reform agenda by draining the country’s cash cow.
Less than a year later, Catherine Hunt, a former FBI agent working for the attack victims’ lawyers, saw Khashoggi’s first column in the Post. She and the lawyers she worked for became interested in Jamal for all sorts of reasons. He was one of the few people accessible to Westerners who knew both the Al Saud and 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden. As a journalist, Khashoggi had visited bin Laden in Afghanistan when he was leading a jihadists’ war against communists in the 1980s and again in Sudan in 1995. He also worked in the Saudi embassy in Washington in the days after the attack and understood the kingdom’s response. Plus he was close to Turki bin Faisal, who had been the intelligence chief in the years leading up to the attacks.
Just as importantly, Khashoggi could provide a road map to the tangle of family and government relationships in the kingdom. He knew who all the princes were and could point to who supported extremism and who was married to whom. His knowledge wasn’t just from his time as a journalist: his connections to the Al Saud, and the bin Ladens, went back generations.
Khashoggi’s grandfather had been the personal physician of Ibn Saud, the kingdom’s founder; Osama bin Laden’s father had also been close with Ibn Saud, who paid him billions of dollars in oil money to build the modern kingdom and establish the family construction fortune. Hunt hoped Khashoggi could help untangle some of those relationships and assist with determining if people connected to the king or the government had played a role in the attacks.
There was enticing circumstantial information. Though the CIA, FBI, and 9/11 Commission said there was no evidence that the government or senior officials supported the attack, the possibility remained that lower-level officials had assisted, and there was evidence that attackers based in California may have interacted with government employees.
There were also enticing threads leading to King Salman and people close to his family. Back when he was governor of Riyadh, Salman raised money for charities that supported conservative Islamic schools as well as armed militants fighting in places like Afghanistan that became breeding grounds for extremism. More pointedly, two of the 9/11 attackers visited a Florida house whose Saudi owner handled financial matters for King Salman’s oldest son, Fahd, who died just before the attacks. Sources close to King Salman say he did not know the charities were linked to extremism.
Hunt left Khashoggi a voicemail, and a few weeks later Khashoggi surprised her when he called back and said he would meet. Hunt flew from Florida to Washington, DC, days later.
Jamal seemed curious about what the investigator had to say, and initially suggested talking at his home before asking Hunt to meet him at a Paul bakery in the upscale Tysons Corner Galleria. Early that morning, Hunt got a call in her hotel room from an agitated Khashoggi. In their prior conversation he seemed smooth and confident; now he was jittery, and wanted to meet right away.
Hunt found a man who was gracious and polite but clearly upset. His hands were shaking, and he told the investigator that early that morning he had learned that the Saudi government had barred his adult son, Salah, from leaving the kingdom. It was insulting, Khashoggi said, and also unfair: His son worked in banking and had nothing to do with his father’s work. And the young man had two children in Dubai whom he was now unable to see.
More broadly, Khashoggi was dismayed at being punished for being what he called a “loyal objector.” He was supportive of many of Mohammed’s reforms, he said, including the diminishing power of clerics who spread conservative Islam outward from the kingdom. “I can’t believe they’re doing this to me,” he said. “I can’t believe they’re doing this to my son.”
Hunt made her pitch to Khashoggi. The meeting, she told him, was “an overture,” a first connection to see if he’d be willing to help the 9/11 victims. “I do not believe my country is responsible for the attacks,” Khashoggi told Hunt. But then he surprised her. “Is my country responsible for tolerating and even supporting radicalism?” he asked. “Yes, and they must take responsibility for that.” Khashoggi said he’d be willing to help, and would like to add his perspective. He asked if the lawyers were offering him a job, and said he’d have to maintain his independence. They agreed to have further talks in New York, where the Saudi government had fewer eyes.
Later that day, October 26, 2017, Khashoggi received an out-of-the blue call from Mohammed’s younger brother, Khalid, who seemed eager to patch things up. It unsettled him; did the Royal Court know of his contact with Hunt? If so, it could be seen as high treason, punishable by death.
* * *
In late 2017, Khashoggi’s Washington Post column, published in English and Arabic, was also driving Qahtani nuts. Saud’s Twitter flies subjected Khashoggi to an onslaught of abuse, calling him a dog, a cancer, and a disease. “You are a corrupt traitor and a fugitive,” one wrote.
As infuriating as the columns were, Qahtani and his men were becoming even more obsessed with the idea that Khashoggi was engaged in traitorous attacks on his homeland. Using spyware to infiltrate the phone of Omar Abdulaziz, the Canadian dissident whose Twitter account they’d infiltrated, Qahtani’s team realized that Abdulaziz and Khashoggi were working together to coordinate dissidents around the world. Khashoggi was bringing them together, honing their critiques. He’d even discussed a plan with Abdulaziz to harness social media to fight Saud al-Qahtani’s pro-MBS Twitter army. With his huge following, Khashoggi was a social media heavyweight. Unlike the flies on Qahtani’s side, Khashoggi had credibility.
Yet Qahtani stayed in touch with Khashoggi and pretended he had no connection to the flies. On the phone, Qahtani called Khashoggi “Abu Salah,” or father of Salah, an intimate way of addressing another Arab man—and of subtly reminding him that his son Salah was still trapped in the kingdom, under the Royal Court’s control. Qahtani praised some of Khashoggi’s work while calling him an asset to the Saudi state. “Come home,” Qahtani said. “We need your help.” Khashoggi knew better than to take the offer as genuine.
Friends worried about him, given the stories of disappeared princes, but Khashoggi felt Saudi Arabia’s new rulers wouldn’t use violence. The Al Saud tended to pay off would-be enemies or lure them back home, not shoot them. Mohammed seemed to be taking that tack with problem people like the late King Fahd’s famously louche son Abdulaziz, known as Azouz.
The once powerful Azouz—who years earlier was involved in the first kidnapping of Prince Sultan bin Turki II—had himself fallen into physical and moral disrepair. He had gained an improbable amount of weight, traveling the world with escorts and staying in the fanciest hotels. In 2012 a member of his entourage was convicted of raping a woman at the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan. In 2016, the New York Post published a photo of Azouz outside a New York club, wearing sandals, baggy jeans, and a leather jacket and sipping soda from a bendy straw. “This Slob Could Buy You,” an online headline said. Another was a more pointed dig at the kingdom: “Shoddy Arabia.”
In 2017, Mohammed locked him up too. “It’s for his own good,” Mohammed told friends. Saudis and foreigners speculated that Azouz was dead until months later Mohammed had friends put footage on the internet of a slimmer and cleaned up Azouz playing with a young child.
Khashoggi saw the imprisonment of such enemies and knew better than to get on any private planes sent to ferry him to the kingdom. But outside the Gulf, he felt safe enough to travel and appear publicly.
It would prove a tragic miscalculation.
Chapter 13
Davos in the Desert
October 2017
“Everybody,” Andrew Ross Sorkin announced to the audience in a King Abdulaziz Convention Center auditorium on October 25, 2017, “this is Sophia.”
The New York Times columnist sat on stage in a gray suit and maroon tie. At a lectern to his right was a six-foot-tall automaton with the face of a woman and a transparent cranium that revealed a tangle of electrical wiring inside.
“You look happy,” Sorkin told the robot.
“I’m always happy when surrounded by smart people who also happens [sic] to be rich and powerful,” the robot responded.
The android could have been speaking for Mohammed bin Salman, who had invited the journalist, the robot, and hundreds of the world’s most powerful bankers, executives, and politicians to an event he called the Future Investment Initiative. It was intended to showcase the new Saudi Arabia to powerful politicians and financiers.
With promises of a more open kingdom and a less strident version of Saudi Islam, Mohammed seemed to have buy-in from everyone who mattered—even the normally skeptical New York Times, which sponsored the conference. Sorkin, its best-known financial writer, came to Riyadh with the hope of interviewing Softbank’s Masayoshi Son. He ended up getting roped into hosting onstage interviews with Son and others. He didn’t realize the “Sophia” on his list of interviewees was a robot until a friend who saw the agenda pointed it out. Sorkin smiled as he interviewed Sophia while a giddy Yasir al-Rumayyan, the Saudi sovereign wealth fund chief, filmed on his iPhone.
Then Sorkin said he had an announcement: Saudi Arabia had made history by granting citizenship to the robot. It was a jarring publicity stunt in a country that doesn’t grant citizenship to millions of children born on its soil to migrant workers. But that hardly detracted from the positive press. Sorkin, who had learned about the robot’s citizenship shortly before taking the stage, appeared surprised himself.
There was a sense that Mohammed bin Salman’s economic transformation was going to make a lot of people inside and outside the kingdom very rich, and no one wanted to jeopardize that. In the lobbies and hallways of the Ritz, Saudi government officials were in such demand that one of them remarked in private to a friend that it was like being the most popular kid in school.
One of the world’s largest money managers, Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman, was there, along with SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son, former British prime minister Tony Blair, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, and Hollywood kingmaker Ari Emanuel. Foreign media called the event “Davos in the Desert,” a moniker also used in the early 2000s for a World Economic Forum event in Jordan.
Top CEOs, bankers, consultants, and political figures, all of them clamoring for fees or investment, lined up for meetings with Rumayyan and Mohammed. It was a scene rarely found outside gala events in the capitals of global finance. Rumayyan invited luminaries to his house one evening for a lavish buffet, where men like Blair and SoftBank’s Masayoshi milled around chatting about the kingdom’s swift progress.
A who’s who of business, banking, and politics stood beneath the statue of a raging stallion in the Ritz-Carlton lobby. US treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin was there. Private equity tycoon Tom Barrack, a close Trump ally, wandered by. So did BlackRock CEO Larry Fink and Virgin Group founder Richard Branson. Reporters from the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and Bloomberg News tried to break into their conversations—or at least eavesdrop.
