Blood and Oil, page 30
Another result of the countries’ contrasting political structures is that Turkey’s leaders can’t afford to ignore movements like the Muslim Brotherhood or, on a bigger level, the Arab Spring. Turkey is a democracy; to get reelected, a president like Erdoğan needs to be sensitive to the public will. There was lots of support, at home and abroad, for democratic movements across the Middle East. So Erdoğan supported some democracy movements tied to the Brotherhood, which wanted to elect Islamist politicians, in the early 2010s, and King Abdullah never forgave him. As far as Abdullah was concerned, Erdoğan’s support for democratic movements undermined the Al Saud, and the Turkish president was therefore an enemy. The chill lasted until the old king died.
Though Erdoğan didn’t rally to the side of the Gulf monarchies during the Arab Spring, he didn’t want mutual animosity. When Abdullah died, Erdoğan saw an opportunity for detente. He and King Salman had communicated in the past and seemed to share a mutual respect. Erdoğan met with Salman several times during the king’s first year on the throne and got the sense that he didn’t share Abdullah’s deep skepticism of Turkey. Erdoğan and his advisors were confident that they were entering into a new era of collaboration with the kingdom. In 2017, Saudi Arabia extradited sixteen people to Turkey whom Erdoğan accused of being aligned with Fethullah Gulen, a cleric Turkey alleged to have tried to have Erdoğan assassinated (Gulen has denied the claims).
But in the ensuing months, the Turks discerned an unforeseen problem: the crown prince. Mohammed didn’t seem to have the same tolerance for divergent views that the Turks expected from his father. The tensions came to a head with the Qatar boycott. Qatar and Turkey were long-standing allies, and Erdoğan felt he couldn’t abandon an ally to support the Saudi-led boycott.
“Isolating Qatar in this way will not resolve any problems,” Erdoğan said publicly after the boycott began. “In my view Qatar being portrayed as a terror suspect is a heavy allegation. I know them very well for 15 years.” He questioned the motives behind the action. “There is a different game at play here,” he said. “We have not yet identified who is behind this game.” Erdoğan said he spoke to King Salman and “shared these problems in a heart-to-heart talk.”
Erdoğan still hoped to reach some sort of accord with the Saudis, but when Turkish officials spoke with the Saudis, they were told to either support the Saudi effort or be seen as an enemy. Erdoğan became convinced that Mohammed was an obstacle to better Turkish-Saudi relations.
Chapter 19
Mister Bone Saw
October 2018
Inside the presidential palace in Ankara, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was fuming as he listened to a briefing from Turkish state security. An initial review of recordings from listening devices secretly placed in the embassy before Jamal Khashoggi showed up for his divorce papers on that October day painted a grisly picture of premeditated murder.
An hour before the killing, the cadaver expert described, in starkly objective terms, how difficult it would be to cut Khashoggi’s body into pieces. Then there was the reference to the “sacrificial animal” and the gut-wrenching sound of men hacking a human body apart immediately after Khashoggi was killed.
“Haram,” Erdoğan yelled. This was so heinous it affronted God. Khashoggi was not just a foreign journalist killed in Turkey; Erdoğan had personally met him, and his advisors had sought him out to discuss developments in Saudi Arabia and the broader Arab world.
Compounding Erdoğan’s frustration was Saudi Arabia’s response: The Royal Court was denying it knew anything. Did they think the Turks were stupid?
Erdoğan and his team set in motion a plan to begin drip feeding information about the killing publicly, punishing the Saudi Arabian government and making clear that King Salman needed to send a royal envoy to discuss the next steps. Erdoğan saw this as an opportunity to get a leg up on Mohammed and his antagonistic stance toward Turkey—and perhaps convince Salman to take away some of his son’s foreign policy power.
At first the Saudis either didn’t take the bait or didn’t realize how much information Erdoğan had. Rather than rush to Turkey, Mohammed bin Salman’s team denied any knowledge of the killing and stuck to a script that would only make sense if the Turkish authorities didn’t have definitive proof of the murder.
On the night of the killing, Mohammed conducted a long-planned interview with Bloomberg News that was mostly about economic plans. Reporters asked questions about Khashoggi too. “We hear the rumors about what happened,” Mohammed told the group, his face showing no sign of stress. “He’s a Saudi citizen and we are very keen to know what happened to him. My understanding is he entered and he got out after a few minutes or one hour. I’m not sure. We are investigating this through the foreign ministry to see exactly what happened at that time.”
Mohammed’s younger brother Khalid, ambassador to the United States, tweeted, “I assure you that the reporters that suggest that Jamal Khashoggi went missing in the consulate in Istanbul or that the Kingdom’s authorities have detained him or killed him are absolutely false.”
Hearing the crown prince’s comments and seeing others from the Saudi government, Erdoğan ordered details leaked to the press, including the stunning revelation that one member of the kill team brought a bone saw into the country when he got off the private jet belonging to the Public Investment Fund (PIF). From that point on, Mohammed bin Salman had a new moniker: Mister Bone Saw. That a government would kill a dissident is always shocking, but what turned the Khashoggi murder into a global rallying cry was the bloodcurdling detail of the brutality of the killers, dismembering Khashoggi’s body like butchers. The implausibility of Saudi denials made it all the more disturbing.
Later Mohammed would react with anger that the world was so outraged about one man killed by rogue agents, according to the account he gave to a visitor, but willing to accept bigger, systematic persecutions by China and other countries. In private, Saudis would give a variation of the argument around how the United States dropped bombs on civilians across the Middle East for decades. Why weren’t they judged this harshly?
The Saudi leadership thought it unfair that they were getting so much public criticism for a single death. As details of Khashoggi’s relationship to Qatar trickled out in the months ahead, some of them felt vindicated. He was a turncoat, a saboteur, they’d say, but there was still a note of uncertainty in the protestations. The details were difficult for any human to accept.
With the heat ratcheting up and new revelations coming out about the recordings, Saudi Arabia went into crisis mode. King Salman decided to dispatch Khalid bin Faisal, the seventy-eight-year-old governor of Mecca, to mediate with Erdoğan. As overseer of Mecca with decades of diplomacy under his belt, the prince had special standing in the Islamic world and seemed the best hope for working out a private arrangement with the Turks. The bin Faisals also had a special relationship with the Khashoggi family; Turki bin Faisal had been Khashoggi’s boss for years in London and Washington, DC.
When Khalid arrived, he was struck by Erdoğan’s stridency. No financial commitment from the kingdom was going to sway him from playing his trump card in a bid to unseat Mohammed from the succession plans. “It’s really difficult to get out of this one,” he told relatives afterward, according to the New York Times, which together with the Washington Post and other outlets published daily stories on the Khashoggi affair and turned it into a journalistic campaign. The Times even forensically identified members of the kill team using visual investigation techniques.
Even if the issue had hit a boiling point, Erdoğan and outraged columnists around the world who believed Mohammed would be unseated imminently didn’t grasp just how profoundly the young crown prince had consolidated power. In the old Saudi Arabia, a mistake or indiscretion could lead to a royal’s or courtier’s being swiftly jettisoned from the inner Al Saud power structure or even secreted back to the kingdom. But the consequences were much harsher in this new Saudi Arabia, where power was distilled in the king’s and crown prince’s courts. And who ran the king’s court in addition to his own? Mohammed bin Salman.
He was also buoyed by his relationship to another irascible and powerful supporter, Donald Trump. Mohammed had forged such deep ties with the First Family through his conversations with Jared Kushner, his commitment to hundreds of billions of dollars in deals and agreements advertised by Trump as benefitting the United States, and his demonstrations of appreciation, like the gift of the white-tiger-fur-lined robes when Trump visited, that it would be politically damaging to Trump to throw Mohammed to the wolves. It took Trump several days to make any comment at all.
“I guess you would have to say so far it’s looking a little bit like that and we’re going to have to see,” he told a Fox News reporter in response to a question about whether Khashoggi had been killed in the consulate. “Maybe we’ll be pleasantly surprised but somehow I tend to doubt it,” he told other reporters earlier the same day. A few days later, Trump said he’d consider “severe punishment” if it was proven the Saudi Arabian government was behind the killing.
Saudi Arabia’s provocative response on October 14 seemed certain to hasten a confrontation: “The kingdom affirms its total rejection of any threats and attempts to undermine it, whether by threatening to impose economic sanctions, using political pressures, or repeating false accusations,” the Saudi state news agency said in a statement quoting an unnamed government official. “The kingdom also affirms that if it receives any action it will respond with greater action, and that the kingdom’s economy has an influential and vital role in the global economy.”
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo flew to see Mohammed bin Salman, and by the time he returned, there were signs that a counternarrative was emerging and Trump was carrying water for Mohammed. “I just spoke to the king of Saudi Arabia, who denies any knowledge of what took place with regard to, as he said, his Saudi Arabian citizen,” he said on October 15. “I don’t want to get into his mind, but it sounded to me like maybe these could have been rogue killers. Who knows?… [A]nd it sounded like he, and also the crown prince, had no knowledge.”
A few days later, the Washington Post published Khashoggi’s last column under the title “Jamal Khashoggi: What the Arab World Needs Most Is Free Expression.” It decried how a “state-run narrative dominates the public psyche” in the Arab world, but it also praised how Qatar’s government supported international news coverage. For the Western readers outraged by the Khashoggi murder, it felt like the perfect article from a journalist hero. But many in the Saudi audience saw it as proof that Khashoggi was working for their country’s sworn enemies. In a TV interview, Saudi foreign minister Adel al-Jubeir brought up the United States’ torture of prisoners years earlier in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison.
By Saturday, October 20, the counternarrative—which stripped the crown prince of any culpability—emerged with an account that Saudi agents traveled to Turkey to bring Khashoggi back to Saudi Arabia, but the discussions “escalated negatively” and “led to a fight and then a quarrel between some of them and the citizen.” The “brawl aggravated to lead to his death and their attempt to conceal and cover up what happened.” “The Kingdom expresses its deep regret at the painful developments that have taken place and stresses the commitment of the authorities in the kingdom to bring the facts to the public,” the Foreign Ministry said.
Trump called the statements a “good first step.” King Salman and Mohammed went to see Khashoggi’s son, Salah Khashoggi, in Riyadh. Ashen and severe, he shook hands with the crown prince. King Salman ordered reforms to the intelligence apparatus and changes to ensure all operations complied with human rights treaties and international law; Mohammed was selected as the chairman of the effort, and a US company, DynCorp, sent over a team of consultants to help Saudi Arabia improve its intelligence capabilities, though the US State Department later declined to give the required approval for the DynCorp contract.
Meanwhile, on the same day as the visit to Salah Khashoggi, organizers of the second Future Investment Initiative struggled to banish a funereal atmosphere at the Ritz-Carlton in Riyadh. Some of the big names of the day canceled, including onetime fans of the crown prince like David Petraeus and a lineup of banking luminaries. The New York Times, which sponsored the prior year’s conference, pulled out.
Lubna Olayan, the most famous Saudi businesswoman in the country, told the glum audience of mostly Saudis and a smattering of lower-level executives from abroad, “I want to tell all our foreign guests, for whose presence this morning we are very grateful, that the terrible acts reported in recent weeks are alien to our culture and our DNA.”
Mohammed himself showed up and stated that the “heinous crime cannot be justified,” saying it was “very painful for all Saudis and I believe it is painful to every human in the world.” As if to suggest all the coverage of him had been grossly misrepresented, he gestured to Saad Hariri, the Lebanese prime minister he’d detained against his will a year earlier, who was in attendance. Hariri was clapping. “Prime Minister Hariri will be in town for two more days,” Mohammed said, grinning. “So don’t anyone say he’s been kidnapped.”
With the Khashoggi affair still dominating the news, Joel Rosenberg, a Christian interfaith activist who was born in Israel, wasn’t sure his big meeting was going ahead. He’d been invited by Khalid bin Salman to bring a delegation of Evangelical Christians to Saudi Arabia in a bid by Mohammed bin Salman to speak to a core American demographic but also to begin publicly signaling his openness to be seen in meetings with Israeli-born people, something no previous king or official would do in public. Rosenberg checked in, and his contacts at the embassy said the meeting was still a go. They flew in and arrived in time to see Mohammed bin Salman on November 1. Feeling like they had no choice but to begin with Khashoggi, Rosenberg asked what his response was.
“A terrible mistake happened,” Mohammed told him, with his brother Khalid, Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir, and a top Islamic advisor looking on. “We are holding those responsible accountable. We are waiting for and want all the information from Turkey.… I can promise the people responsible will be held accountable and any problem we have in the system will be addressed.”
Later in the conversation, Mohammed admitted, “[I] may bear some guilt, but not because I authorized the heinous act because I did not, but because I may have caused some of our people to love our Kingdom too much and delegated authority in a way that made it too easy for them to think they would be pleasing us by taking matters into their own hands.” His enemies were exploiting the tragedy for their advantage, he said. “In their shoes, I would probably do the same.”
In a conversation with a Saudi contact after the killing, Mohammed denied ordering it and lamented the damage it was causing to his reputation with Western leaders. “Now they think I’m a journalist killer!” he sputtered in frustration.
The Al Saud seemed to gather together around Mohammed. Prince Ahmed, the uncle who had criticized Mohammed’s and Salman’s bombing of Yemen a month earlier, agreed to come back to Saudi Arabia after the UK government assured him it would ensure his safety.
For weeks, the foreign politicians, businesspeople, and bankers Mohammed had tried to sell on his image as a new kind of Saudi leader distanced themselves. The Bezos appearance at the second Davos in the Desert was called off. Executives and political leaders didn’t want to be seen as allied with a man accused of murdering a writer for expressing his opinions.
Hollywood agent Ari Emanuel canceled the $400 million investment he’d worked hard to get from the kingdom, pledging to return the money and stop dealing with Mohammed. “That guy is an animal,” Emanuel told a friend. Once charmed by the prince, the agent now called him “Jekyll and Hyde.” On October 12 Richard Branson pulled out of the planned $1 billion deal with Saudi Arabia for his space travel company. If Saudi officials were involved in the Khashoggi murder, he said in a prepared statement released by his company at the time, “that would clearly change the ability of any of us in the West to do business with the Saudi government.” Branson also said he would “suspend” his role as a director in two Saudi tourism projects.
Privately, Branson kept up his correspondence with Mohammed. Saudi Arabia represented a big business opportunity, and he counseled the prince on how to reverse some of the damage in the eyes of the West, starting by releasing some of the women activists who were jailed. “If you were to pardon these women and a number of men too, it would show the world the Government is truly moving into the 21st Century,” Branson texted the crown prince in a message that the Wall Street Journal published. “It won’t change what happened in Turkey but it would go a long way to start and change people’s view.”
Other business leaders had similarly ambivalent approaches. SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son, who was managing about $45 billion in Saudi investment, pulled out of the conference but went to Saudi Arabia anyway. Other executives who wanted to avoid public association with the crown prince but maintain the Saudi financial relationship gathered for an opulent roast lamb dinner under purple-lit palm trees at the home of Yasir al-Rumayyan, the man Mohammed put in charge of the sovereign wealth fund investing in Uber and SoftBank. Guests included banker Ken Moelis, Republican congressman-cum-financier Eric Cantor, and a cohort of Silicon Valley notables, including Uber founder Travis Kalanick, venture capitalist Jim Breyer, and a manager working for Peter Thiel’s firm.
For some, the Saudi relationship was too valuable to scrap over a single murder. Bloomberg LP moved ahead with its joint venture with the Salman family’s media company. Jay Penske, whose firm owns Rolling Stone magazine, moved ahead with a $200 million investment from the PIF. An American hedge fund manager named John Burbank, who attended the Rumayyan dinner, put it bluntly in an interview with the Journal. “This whole Khashoggi thing doesn’t mean anything,” he said. “It means much less than the big, sweeping liberalization that’s happening in the kingdom.” When it comes to investing in Saudi Arabia, he added, “one person’s life doesn’t matter unless it’s MBS’s. Khashoggi doesn’t matter.”
