Blood and Oil, page 29
Saudi-Canadian relations would soon deteriorate further. That summer, Mohammed was moving ahead full speed with social and foreign policy initiatives, with no tolerance for any person or country that got in the way. That’s when his aides floated a plan to build a canal that would separate Qatar from the rest of the Arabian Peninsula, turning the smaller country into an island. Then, on August 3, Canada’s government sent out a tweet decrying Saudi Arabia’s treatment of dissidents and “urg[ing] the Saudi authorities to immediately release” civil society and women’s activists it had jailed.
Mohammed’s men responded immediately. They told Ambassador Dennis Horak, who was on vacation in Toronto, that he wasn’t welcome back. Then they canceled trade deals with Canada, withdrew Saudi students studying there, and publicly accused Canada of meddling in local affairs.
Controversy continued to surround Mohammed and his initiatives through the summer of 2018. In August, Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted that he was considering taking the company private and later said that he was discussing the deal with the Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF). Federal officials suspected Musk was trying to juice his company’s stock price, and the US Department of Justice called in PIF chief Yasir al-Rumayyan for an interview. At first the Saudi government tried to keep Rumayyan away from prosecutors, arguing he had diplomatic immunity. A Saudi official tried to convince then–attorney general Jeff Sessions that Rumayyan shouldn’t have to sit for the interview since he might have state secrets. But after prosecutors pointed out that Rumayyan was not a diplomat, he agreed to be questioned. His American lawyer suggested prosecutors call him “your excellency” (they declined). Rumayyan told them that he hadn’t agreed to a deal with Musk to take Tesla private. Musk denied trying to inflate Tesla’s stock price, but subsequently settled an SEC case with the government.
In September, King Salman’s full brother Ahmed made a surprising public appearance. Prince Ahmed was a potentially troubling figure for Mohammed, an uncle around whom royal family members skeptical of Saudi Arabia’s new direction had rallied. For a time after Salman became king, the government restricted Ahmed’s travel. He eventually went to London, where protesters gathered outside his home to mount demonstrations against the kingdom’s bombing in Yemen.
Ahmed confronted the protesters in an exchange caught on video. He told them not to blame all the Al Saud. The family wanted the war over right away. The only two people responsible for the bombing were King Salman and his son Mohammed. It was a rare airing of dissent by one of the few royal family members who could make a legitimate claim to power—by convention, Ahmed was supposed to be chief of the Allegiance Council, the body that determines the line of succession.
At the same time, Saudi agents were conducting surveillance in Canada that would have dire consequences. Omar Abdulaziz, the dissident whose Twitter account had been hacked by the Royal Court’s moles, had been attacked in a different way, using the phone-hacking software the Saudis had bought. By infiltrating his phone, Mohammed’s men were able to read Omar’s texts with the dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi. The two were pulling together a group of Mohammed’s critics into an organized opposition the kingdom had never before experienced.
Around this time Mohammed began striking visitors as a touch unhinged. He summoned people—some of them former Ritz detainees—to see him on the Serene off the coast of what he hoped would someday be NEOM. He excitedly referred to Tiran Island, where the robotic dinosaurs would roam. A year earlier, Egypt’s president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi had ceded Tiran and another island, Sanafir, to Saudi Arabia. He’d handed over the strategically important islands to gain favor with Mohammed, arguing they were always meant to be part of Saudi Arabia in the first place, even though Egyptian courts ruled otherwise.
Wearing an open-necked shirt, Mohammed referred to advances in medicine that could make it possible for NEOM residents to live much longer than anyone in history. He might live hundreds of years, he said, explaining that he’d already begun investing in longevity research. One guest was unnerved: Did he think he would be ruler of Saudi Arabia until he was in his three hundreds? Was this the most powerful man in the Middle East?
Chapter 18
Cold Blood
October 2, 2018
As Jamal Khashoggi landed in Istanbul just before 4 a.m., the fifteen-man kill team was already getting into place.
Zipping through customs, Khashoggi made his way to his new apartment in Zeytinburnu, on the European side of the city. The plan was to take a nap at what was to become his marital home with fiancée Hatice Cengiz before grabbing a quick meal nearby. It was a big day for the new couple. They’d met at a conference a few months earlier and hit it off immediately.
Following a bruising two years of speaking out against Mohammed bin Salman, Khashoggi was lonely after his most recent divorce and feeling distant from his children back in Saudi Arabia. This was meant to be the start of a happier, fulfilling period after months of soul-searching in Washington, DC, where he was making a name for himself with strident and incisive critiques of Mohammed.
He’d always been a bit of a maverick, but this phase was different; he was living the life of a full-fledged dissident, something unthinkable only years before. Old friends were cautious about communicating with him, much less meeting. So Khashoggi was sad and sought a partner to soothe him and share his burdens. At fifty-nine years old, he’d been married at least three times—sometimes, in the Saudi tradition, to more than one woman at once—and was embarking on a new chapter of his life. Hatice was thirty-six, a bookish woman working on a PhD. She was deeply in love with Khashoggi, a bespectacled teddy bear of a man with a gruff voice and a romantic flair.
After breakfast, the plan was for Khashoggi to go to the Saudi consulate to get papers proving he was divorced and had no other wives back in the kingdom, a prerequisite for Hatice’s father and the Turkish authorities before they could get legally married. He’d visited the consulate weeks earlier with trepidation but found the officials there friendly and accommodating after a few minutes of banter. It would take a few days to prepare the documents and liaise with the proper authorities back in Riyadh, they told him. Unbeknownst to him, his surprise visit triggered a phone call to intelligence officials in Riyadh, who set in motion a deadly plan to silence their most famous critic.
Walking up to the secluded consulate compound, he was careful. In Washington, DC, he’d visited the embassy on several occasions and always been treated well. The ambassador and full brother of Mohammed, Khalid bin Salman, had even asked to meet with him and spoke to him respectfully. But he knew cybersecurity was an issue. His friends had already been hacked by malware sent in the form of banal links. On his two phones were communications with journalists from around the world, fellow dissidents and friends who could really stoke the flames back home. So he turned to Hatice and handed her his phones quickly, saying he’d be back in half an hour or so. If he didn’t come out, he instructed her, she should call his friend Yasin.
Yasin was Yasin Aktay, the Turkish politician close to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and a friend of Khashoggi’s since the Arab Spring.
Security footage shows Khashoggi walking calmly into the building, wearing a dark blazer and grey trousers. At that moment, Aktay was in his office, working furiously on a newspaper column due later that night.
Within minutes of his 1:15 p.m. arrival, Khashoggi realized something was terribly wrong. He must have recognized a dour-looking intelligence official named Maher Abdulaziz Mutreb, whom he knew from the London consulate years before.
* * *
Over the course of three years, Khashoggi had gone from an influential, if occasionally critical, supporter of the royal family to a grave national security threat in the eyes of the Royal Court. That change had less to do with what Khashoggi said or wrote in his columns in the Washington Post opinion section than with a perception by Mohammed bin Salman’s security advisors that he was becoming a great unifier of Saudis opposing MBS’s reforms and style of running the country. Khashoggi’s ties to Turkish politicians close to Erdoğan were evidence to some of Mohammed’s allies that the writer was working with foreign powers to undermine Saudi Arabia. His close friendship with Maggie Mitchell Salem, who worked as executive director of the Qatar Foundation International and helped him write and edit his columns, was seen as direct evidence of his having flipped to work for his country’s sworn enemies.
The once moderate critic of his homeland had also become a clearinghouse for information showing the negative side of Mohammed’s way of wielding power, whether it was poor economic results or a rumor about an excessive purchase or an angry encounter with a staffer. He was cofounding a new group, Democracy for the Arab World Now, or DAWN, a highly provocative move. The very name was reminiscent of the Arab Spring. Perhaps nothing was more problematic for the Al Saud than an influential Saudi calling for democracy in the kingdom.
Khashoggi also undertook smaller provocations, undermining Mohammed’s attempt to cast himself as a visionary. “In my career as a journalist, an editor, I called for everything Mohammed bin Salman is doing right now,” Khashoggi said during a November 2017 speech in Washington at a think tank linked to Qatar. “He is doing what we demanded of him to do. So why am I being critical? Simply because he is doing the right things the wrong way, very wrong way.”
Just a few days before his return trip to Turkey, Khashoggi appeared on the BBC. Before the interview officially started, he gave a candid view of the crown prince that captured the kind of things he’d been saying all over Washington, DC, and beyond. The BBC later released the recording. “The prince supplies us, every couple of weeks or couple of months, with a huge multi-billion-dollar project that wasn’t discussed in parliament or newspapers. The people will clap and say ‘Hey, great, let’s have more of those.’ It doesn’t work that way,” Khashoggi said. “I don’t think I will be able to go home again. When I hear of an arrest of a friend who did nothing worth being arrested, make me feel I shouldn’t go.”
Saud al-Qahtani, Mohammed’s deputy who had been dogging Khashoggi for years, kept asking him to come back to Saudi Arabia, offering to bring the critic back into the fold. But Khashoggi worried that Saud’s entreaties were a trap. Khashoggi’s “betrayals” were especially personal for Qahtani because he’d failed to stop Khashoggi when he had a chance.
For more than three years, Qahtani had been trying to neutralize critics by attacking them with his Twitter army or hacking their phones or kidnapping them and bringing them back to Saudi Arabia. On Twitter he frequently declared his allegiance to Mohammed, and Qahtani tried publicly to make clear that he had an intimate relationship with the prince. It gave the impression that Saud was in charge of ensuring Mohammed’s wishes were carried out.
In April 2018, Saud wrote an op-ed on the website of Al Arabiya about his relationship with Mohammed. “He told me very politely that he wants me to conduct a research, one that I conduct myself, not assigning someone else to do it,” Qahtani wrote. “The research was about strategic planning. ‘I want you to completely devote yourself for this task,’ that’s what he said when I was about to tell him that I was too busy doing more important things. He made me feel that it is a huge classified task.”
Qahtani had kept track of Khashoggi in the weeks leading up to his first visit to the embassy in Istanbul, and officials there had briefed him that Khashoggi would be returning. Seeing a chance to intercept the dissident, Qahtani had his dark-arts team kick into gear. A group of technical officers flew to Istanbul to sweep the consulate for bugs and recording devices they suspected the Turkish government had planted; they found none, or rather, they missed all of them.
Qahtani’s Center for Studies and Media Affairs was central command for secret renditions. The security officers who carried out the missions were called the Saudi Rapid Intervention Group. Their commander was the security officer and former intelligence official that Khashoggi had known back in London, Maher Mutreb, who only a few months earlier had been photographed with Mohammed during his multiweek tour of the United States.
Maher brought along an assortment of security personnel and Lieutenant Colonel Salah Muhammad al-Tubaigy, a doctor at the Ministry of Interior and chairman of the Scientific Council of Forensic Medicine in Riyadh. Tubaigy’s role would later indicate that murder was in the plans from the outset. Nervously waiting for Khashoggi, he explained to the men how he listened to music and drank coffee when cutting up cadavers, according to Turkish intercepts from within the consulate.
Staff at the consulate were told not to show up the day Khashoggi was planning to get his divorce paperwork, and workers at the consul general’s nearby home were also told to stay home because of ongoing engineering works. Minutes before Khashoggi arrived, Maher asked, “Has the sacrificial animal arrived yet?”
In the consulate, it didn’t take long for things to escalate. Members of the receiving party brought Khashoggi upstairs to the consul general’s office. “We will have to take you back,” Mutreb told Khashoggi as he was pulled into an office moments after arriving at the consulate. “There is an order from Interpol. Interpol requested you be sent back. We are coming to get you. Why don’t you go back?”
“Why wouldn’t I want to go back to my own country? Inshallah I will eventually go back,” Khashoggi responded.
“Interpol is coming, so we have to hold you until they come,” Mutreb said.
“This is against all kind of laws. I am being kidnapped!” Khashoggi said.
“We will take you back to Saudi Arabia and if you don’t help us, you know what will happen in the end,” one of them said.
Khashoggi pushed back.
“Let’s make it short,” another man said.
They pulled out a syringe.
“Are you going to give me drugs?” Khashoggi asked at 1:33 p.m.
And that was it. Over the next five minutes, Khashoggi was sedated and suffocated. At 1:39 p.m., the corpse-dismemberment expert could be heard sawing the journalist’s body into pieces.
The task wasn’t complete. One team member, a heavyset intelligence operative named Mustafa al-Madani with a build similar to Khashoggi’s, put on Khashoggi’s clothing and glasses and a fake beard and walked out the back door of the embassy. His job was to give any investigators a false lead and shift inquiries away from Saudi Arabia. He took a taxi to the Blue Mosque with another member of the team, walked around for a few hours, had a tea, and then threw away the clothing before heading to the airport, where the men flew home on two private jets ultimately owned by Mohammed bin Salman’s newly empowered Public Investment Fund.
What the assassins didn’t count on was Hatice waiting outside and their own inability to do a proper bug sweep of the embassy. Turkish intelligence had clear recordings of every terrifying sound of the murder.
After waiting for more than three hours, Hatice called Khashoggi’s emergency contact, Yasin Aktay, at 4:41 p.m. in the afternoon. He didn’t answer at first, believing it was a simple social call, but when Khashoggi’s number flashed on his phone again, he picked up. It was Hatice. Khashoggi hadn’t come out, she told the Turkish politician. Could he help?
Aktay was concerned. He understood the risks for Khashoggi and told Hatice he would get in touch with state security. His first call was to Turkey’s intelligence chief, Hakan Fidan. When Fidan didn’t answer his phone immediately, Aktay called one of the intelligence chief’s deputies.
“We have a serious problem,” Aktay told him. Khashoggi had gone to the consulate on routine business and hadn’t come out.
“It is very dangerous for him,” the deputy replied. “Why did he go in?” He promised to get back to Aktay as soon as he learned anything.
Then Aktay called Erdoğan’s office and told the president’s secretary what was happening. Erdoğan’s staff put the security and intelligence services on alert. Aktay called Hatice back and told her they’d just have to wait. The Turks didn’t know yet that Khashoggi was dead.
The Khashoggi killing would turn Turkey and Saudi Arabia into public antagonists in a way that neither Mohammed nor Erdoğan had really wanted. They shared mutual interests—most importantly, defeating Islamic State terrorists in Syria—and had little to gain from all-out hostility.
But the relationship between the two countries had been beset by friction in recent years and weighed down by the long history between the Turks and the Gulf Arabs. Much of today’s Saudi Arabia used to be part of the Ottoman Empire; the Turks ruled as a colonial power, with the Arabs as their subjects. Mohammed’s grandfather, Ibn Saud, had defeated the Ottomans as part of his quest to establish the Saudi kingdom.
Just over a century later, the Saudis ruled most of the Arabian Peninsula and, thanks to oil, had much more money than the Turks. Importantly, the Saudis also controlled the two holy cities, Mecca and Medina. To fulfill their religious duty to visit Mecca as pilgrims, Muslim Turks needed the permission of their former subjects. Mohammed still viewed the Turks as haughty erstwhile colonists who looked down on the Arabs.
Turkey couldn’t rival the Saudis’ spending power. But the Turks had a different advantage. Their country has long-established government institutions that transcend changes in political leadership. For better or worse, power in Turkey has, in recent history, been held by institutions and the large number of bureaucrats who run them. As a result, the military and intelligence arms of government have continuity in their priorities, structures, and cultures and a deep well of highly trained officials from the highest ranks to the lowest.
In Saudi Arabia, institutional power is almost nonexistent outside Aramco. Authority in the kingdom is held by individuals from the royal family, the king, and the select few princes he appoints to key roles. When those princes change, loyalists are promoted and those loyal to the prior prince moved aside. Those changes can bring wholesale shifts in governance, military, and intelligence structures.
