Blood and Oil, page 31
While the financial world was moving past its concerns, intelligence agencies and a United Nations official who investigates extrajudicial killings by governments were all trying to figure out what really happened to Khashoggi in Istanbul. Within weeks, the CIA determined that Mohammed sent Saud al-Qahtani at least eleven messages around the time of the killing. And two months before the killing, the CIA found, Mohammed had told people close to him that if he couldn’t convince Khashoggi to come back to the kingdom on his own, “we could possibly lure him outside Saudi Arabia and make arrangements.” The agency concluded that Mohammed “probably ordered his death.”
The Saudi government announced it had charged eleven people in the death, though Qahtani wasn’t one of them. He continued to be a presence around the Royal Court. He did face punishment, though, by the US Treasury Department. It sanctioned Qahtani and sixteen others, preventing them from interacting with the US financial system.
In the meantime, the Turks were using their recordings to put pressure on the kingdom, hoping King Salman might take away some of Mohammed’s power and give foreign policy responsibility to someone else.
Turkish leaders aided the inquiry of Agnes Callamard, a French human rights investigator affiliated with Columbia University, who serves as the United Nations’ special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings. A few months after Khashoggi’s murder, she flew to Turkey with a team of colleagues. Traveling around Ankara, the Turkish capital, she and her staffers could easily see that they were being followed by intelligence agents. Even in a café, “when you were trying to have a conversation there was always some strange person sitting next to you,” she recalls.
Turkish intelligence chief Hakan Fidan greeted Callamard and her team at the government’s heavily fortified intelligence offices. A wily former army officer educated at the University of Maryland whom Erdoğan once called “my secret keeper,” Fidan was an expert at using the intelligence apparatus to help further his boss’s political aims. He’d provided information on Israeli operatives to Iran and at the same time remained a valued connection for US intelligence, appearing in White House photos with President Barack Obama and Erdoğan in 2013.
Fidan met Callamard in a ground-floor room in the fortresslike intelligence headquarters. After some brief conversation, he told Callamard his people would play recordings from the Khashoggi killing for her. She and her staff were to listen and not take notes. Fidan said he wouldn’t stick around to hear the recordings. “It’s bad for my soul,” he said.
Once Fidan left, his staff played audio files for Callamard and her team, which included a translator. Callamard’s staff members took turns distracting the intelligence officials present so their colleagues could secretly take notes. After hearing the recordings, and consulting with special operations experts, she hypothesized that the Saudis’ initial plan may have been to kidnap Khashoggi. But sometime in the two days before he got to the embassy, the team realized that would be too hard and decided on the murder.
The recordings were disturbing—the team could hear the fear building in Khashoggi’s voice as his killing neared—and ultimately dissatisfying. The Turks had seven hours of recordings but only played forty-five minutes’ worth. There were no transcripts. They remain private. “As long as the tapes have not been released, there will always be questions,” Callamard says. She says the opaque Saudi legal process, the apparent focus of the Saudi investigation on the killers—rather than those who may have authorized them—and the refusal by US authorities to make intelligence documents public keep the full story hidden.
Chapter 20
Unstoppable
December 2018
For most big, prosperous cities, a Formula E race wouldn’t be a marquee event. But for Riyadh, where most public entertainment had been banned for four decades, the electric-race-car circuit’s arrival for its first-ever race in Saudi Arabia might have been the biggest international sporting event the city had ever seen.
Just over two months had passed since the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, and Mohammed wanted the event to prove that the world hadn’t turned its back on Saudi Arabia. International sports were supposed to be a pillar of his reinvention of Saudi society and economy, and electric vehicles played a big role in his plans. So Mohammed turned the race into a spectacle. He invited dozens of celebrities from the entertainment and business worlds and made sure their attendance was well publicized. Enrique Iglesias played a concert as part of the festivities, and English soccer star Wayne Rooney flew in to attend.
The track, festooned with “Vision 2030” banners, wound through Diriyah, a historic village on the outskirts of Riyadh whose mud-walled palaces were an early seat of Al Saud power. Above the track, on a VIP viewing platform, was a collection of Saudi Arabia’s most powerful figures. Adel al-Jubeir, the foreign minister, was there. So was Minister of State Mohammed Al Shaikh, who years earlier, as a securities regulator, confronted a young Mohammed about stock manipulation. Energy minister and Aramco chairman Khalid al-Falih and Reema bint Bandar, who would soon become the first woman to serve as ambassador to the United States, made small talk as the race cars zipped by, their battery-powered engines almost silent. And then there was Mohammed, in a thobe and red-and-white checked shemagh, accompanied by a bodyguard in a business suit and his brother Khalid bin Salman, the former ambassador to the United States. Abu Dhabi’s de facto leader, Mohammed bin Zayed, was also in attendance.
Joining them were members of the dwindling ranks of powerful Westerners willing to publicly associate with Mohammed in the wake of the Khashoggi murder, including former Dow Chemical CEO Andrew Liveris, ex–CIA official Norman Roule, and billionaire American natural-resources investor Tom Kaplan. Former Kardashian reality show producer Carla DiBello was milling around the event. PBS Frontline’s intrepid correspondent Martin Smith recorded the gathering by edging past security guards and falling in with a group of caterers filing upstairs to the VIP box, where he walked up to Prince Mohammed and asked to bring in his camera man.
Each of the attendees had his or her own reason to maintain the Saudi relationship at a tense time. Liveris was working for Mohammed, advising the Public Investment Fund (PIF) in its attempt to invest tens of billions of dollars worldwide. Roule, who consults with foreign companies on how to work in the kingdom, attends such gatherings to keep up his knowledge of regional happenings. But he and Kaplan were at the race with hopes of seeing through a quixotic plan to get Emirati and Saudi authorities to help save endangered Arabian leopards, perhaps even airlifting some from zoos in war-ravaged Yemen. DiBello was making a Saudi-supported documentary on the race and solidifying relationships in the kingdom—including with the PIF—to build her own business facilitating access to companies looking for Saudi investment.
These business contacts didn’t see the Khashoggi killing as permanently tainting Mohammed. Rather, they shared a viewpoint with the prince: His power stemmed from his family, not an electorate. It didn’t depend on his reelection or even the approval of leaders of other countries. And he was so young, he could rule Saudi Arabia for another fifty years—or longer, if his investments in longevity research panned out. They took the view that the Khashoggi killing would go down as a misstep, a blip early in his career washed away by bigger news down the road.
It was a very different atmosphere than Mohammed had faced less than two weeks before, at a G-20 gathering in Buenos Aires. A camera there caught a tense moment when French president Emmanuel Macron, who had been wrangling with Mohammed since the detention of Lebanon’s prime minister in 2017, confronted the prince about the Khashoggi killing. Mohammed, towering over Macron in a white bisht and red-checked shemagh on the margin of the large meeting room, seemed defensive.
“Don’t worry,” he told Macron.
“I do worry,” Macron replied, unaware a microphone was recording him. “I am worried.”
They went back and forth, Macron accusing Mohammed of not following his advice. “You never listen to me,” he said.
In the eyes of Western leaders and human rights activists, the Saudi government’s response to the Khashoggi killing was entirely inadequate. Saudi Arabia kept a trial of the men alleged to have participated in the killing closed off from the public, so there was little information about what kind of evidence prosecutors were presenting. Saud al-Qahtani was sometimes seen meeting with people in Mohammed’s inner circle. At one point, a song celebrating his innocence was circulated by Turki Al Sheikh, suggesting there were attempts by the Saudi leadership to rehabilitate Qahtani’s image, at least domestically.
King Salman had done little, if anything, to rein in Mohammed’s more aggressive foreign policy tendencies. Ibrahim al-Assaf, a septuagenarian former finance minister who was briefly locked up in the Ritz, was appointed foreign minister, but he was in no position to sway Mohammed on matters of substance.
In June, Agnes Callamard, the UN investigator, released her report on the Khashoggi killing. It was scathing. She called it a “deliberate premeditated execution” that Mohammed either ordered or condoned, citing, among many other facts, the seemingly damning detail that the team at the embassy in Turkey called Khashoggi a “sacrificial animal” on the secret recordings and discussed cutting him into pieces thirteen minutes before he even entered the embassy.
Still, Mohammed’s most important initiatives continued. His military kept bombing Yemen, and his men moved ahead with the planned IPO of Aramco, the state oil company. Mohammed moved aside Aramco’s chairman, Energy Minister Khalid al-Falih, one of the kingdom’s most experienced executives and a steady, wise voice in the Royal Court. He had opposed the IPO. Now he was being put out to pasture. Mohammed replaced him as oil minister with an older brother by his father’s first wife, Abdulaziz bin Salman. The new Aramco chairman would be Yasir al-Rumayyan, the PIF chief closely aligned with Mohammed.
Wounded reputationally by the Khashoggi murder and with advisors warning against an international listing for legal reasons, Mohammed ordered that the IPO be held on the Saudi stock exchange instead. Finally, on December 11, 2019, Aramco shares began trading on the Tadawul. The subscribers to the offering were nearly all regional and local investors—some of them buying shares after pressure from the Royal Court—but the government was able to raise $25.6 billion at a valuation of $1.7 trillion. Mohammed bin Salman didn’t get to ring the bell at the New York Stock Exchange, but he managed to pull off the biggest IPO of any company in history. Undeterred, he ordered the IPO team to begin preparations for an international listing a year later—detractors be damned.
Despite disappointing news about the $45 billion SoftBank investment, which inflated a bubble by pouring billions of dollars into nontech companies posing as innovators, including WeWork, dog-walking app Wag, and a construction company called Katerra, PIF chief Rumayyan was discussing putting more money into a new SoftBank fund. He was also working with a previously little-known figure in the kingdom, ex–reality TV producer DiBello, who seemed to appear in Saudi Arabia out of nowhere and was showing up at major events around Mohammed and other senior leaders. Her rise was a perfect illustration of Saudi Arabia’s strange workings and the way that maverick characters continued to dominate how things were done there, no matter how much Mohammed tried to reform its institutions. It was still about the connections.
Outwardly polished, with flawless dyed-blonde hair, blemish-free skin, and impeccably composed outfits, Carla DiBello at first glance gave little indication of her scrappy and resourceful approach to business. With no college education or specialized finance expertise, she’d taken an unlikely path from Florida to the inner circle of Saudi leadership.
DiBello got her first exposure to well-connected Saudis as a teenager in the late 1990s, when she became friendly with a neighbor in Sarasota named Anoud Ghazzawi. Anoud lived with her husband and twin babies in a house owned by her father, Esam Ghazzawi. He managed money for some of King Salman’s clan, including Mohammed’s oldest half brother.
Anoud and her husband left Florida abruptly in 2001, and FBI reports unearthed years later by a local investigative reporting operation, the Florida Bulldog, revealed that two 9/11 attackers spent time at the Ghazzawi home.
In the ensuing years, Anoud and DiBello both made their way to Dubai. Anoud became a designer of custom-made abayas. DiBello moved west, working for a producer in LA and casino magnate Steve Wynn in Las Vegas before getting a production job with a Kardashian reality show. Soon she was referring to herself as one of Kim Kardashian’s best friends. In a sign that DiBello was fully ensconced in Hollywood, in 2011 she publicly denied having an affair with Kobe Bryant.
A couple years later, DiBello moved to Dubai and started a business connecting American entertainers with opportunities in the Gulf, marketing herself with the Kardashian connection. A few years after that she began showing up in Saudi Arabia at events including the first Davos in the Desert conference.
Members of the PIF’s investment teams were surprised when she arrived for a meeting in early 2019. It’s still rare to see women in Saudi offices (one big innovation of Mohammed’s was to put a ladies’ room in the Royal Diwan, where court business is done; until recently, a guard stood sentry outside a men’s room whenever a woman needed to use the bathroom). And it wasn’t clear to the investment analysts why their boss told them to meet her.
It turned out DiBello had a big pitch: PIF should buy a majority stake in an English Premier League soccer team, Newcastle United. It wasn’t a ridiculous idea—the Qataris and Emiratis already had soccer teams, and PIF had considered buying one. But they didn’t need DiBello to do it. Saudi Arabia was perhaps the world’s most prominent potential buyer of a soccer team. It could call any team it might want and make an offer with no need for an intermediary. And DiBello and a partner wanted an ownership stake and ongoing management payments, though neither had experience managing a soccer team. DiBello couldn’t provide basic answers about deal details. But Rumayyan decided to move ahead with the deal anyway.
DiBello was involved in other PIF-related matters. She helped a junior executive at e-cigarette maker Juul Labs get an in-person meeting with Rumayyan. Another company she offered to connect with Rumayyan for a fee got scared—paying to meet a foreign-government official can be considered a bribe under US law. The company sought legal advice and turned her down. Mohammed was trying to get rid of Saudi Arabia’s old pay-to-play system, but DiBello’s presence made it seem like the same game was being played by a new cast of characters. These types of people were reassuring to Mohammed—rich, nonjudgmental, and appreciative of the opportunity he was bringing to his country, the region, and their own bank accounts.
And then, in September, potential disaster struck. Drones and missiles supposedly controlled by the Houthi rebels in Yemen blew up key pieces of equipment at a facility called Abqaiq that processes much of Saudi Arabia’s crude oil for shipping. It was something the Al Saud had long feared.
“The most vulnerable point and the most spectacular target in the Saudi oil system is the Abqaiq complex,” wrote Robert Baer, a former CIA official, in a 2003 article in the Atlantic about dangers to the Al Saud’s hold on power. Others, including Saudi scholar Simon Henderson in 2006 and the Center for Strategic and International Studies in August 2019, published papers reiterating that point. And for decades, the US government had been urging the Saudis to use some of the money they spent on glitzy new projects like King Abdullah Economic City and Mohammed’s NEOM to improve basic security for their oil infrastructure. Abqaiq and other crucial facilities are in easy missile range of Iran, potentially threatening not just Saudi stability but world oil markets.
Securing the oil fields wasn’t simply a matter of getting the right equipment or expertise. The big problem was built into the way the Al Saud historically balanced power among different factions by splitting up military power. The Ministry of Interior and its armed forces, historically under the command of King Salman’s brother Prince Nayef and later his son, Mohammed bin Nayef, was responsible for guarding oil installations. But warding off aerial attacks would require using US-made Patriot missiles controlled by the Ministry of Defense, which was historically overseen by another Salman brother, Prince Sultan, and his clan. The intelligence agencies responsible for gathering information on potential oilfield threats had other chains of command.
Since the princes in charge of the different factions were competing for the throne, there was always suspicion and a lack of information sharing. Mohammed, in theory, eliminated those divisions, removing Mohammed bin Nayef from the Interior Ministry and taking over the Ministry of Defense himself. But in practice they remained siloed in mid-September 2019, when missiles and drones attacked Abqaiq.
It was shocking, and the United States and Saudi Arabia quickly concluded that the Houthis couldn’t have done it alone. Iran had to have overseen the attack. “Whoever planned it had a world-class understanding of how oil facilities work,” said an aerial-attack expert who visited Abqaiq for the Saudi government in the ensuing days.
It was a strange scene. Many of Abqaiq’s pipes, towers, and crucial infrastructure for separating out impurities from crude oil remained untouched. But several so-called spheroid modules, which look like squashed metal domes and separate gasses from oil, were seriously damaged. It was clear to officials from Aramco and the government what the attackers had done: Using accurate mapping and pinpoint targeting technology, they’d hit only components that could be fixed quickly. The attack was a warning volley, not a kill shot, to show the Saudis what Iran could do, intelligence officials concluded. And it took “seventeen minutes and less than $2 million” worth of cruise missiles and drones, the aerial-attack expert found.
