On October 2, 2018, Jamal Khashoggi, a prominent Saudi writer, entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to obtain paperwork so that he could marry his Turkish fiancée, Hatice Cengiz, who was waiting for him outside the building. A contributor to the Washington Post, Khashoggi, age fifty-nine, was a critic of the Saudi regime and was living in self-imposed exile in the United States. Khashoggi felt comfortable in Turkey; after all, he was friendly with the powerful Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and although he was certainly a critic of MBS, he was not a typical dissident as he had served as an adviser to a key member of the royal family, Prince Turki al-Faisal, when the prince was the Saudi ambassador first to the United Kingdom and then to the United States.
It was Khashoggi’s second visit to the Istanbul consulate to obtain the papers for his forthcoming marriage. On the first visit, consular officials had told him to come back to pick up the paperwork. In the meantime, a fifteen-man team of Saudi intelligence agents, military officers, and members of the royal guard who protected MBS had arrived in Istanbul from Riyadh on private jets. Their plan was to remove Khashoggi by force to Riyadh or murder him if he put up resistance. Recording devices deployed in or near the consulate by the Turkish government picked up their plans.
“First we will tell him ‘We are taking you to Riyadh.’ If he doesn’t come, we will kill him here and get rid of the body,” said one of the members of the team.
A key team member was Salah Mohammed Tubaigy, a leading Saudi forensic pathologist who specialized in autopsies, who had brought an electric autopsy saw to the consulate. Tubaigy told the team, “I have never worked on a warm body until now, but I can handle that easily. Normally while working on a cadaver, I put on my headphones and listen to music. And I drink my coffee and smoke my cigarette.”
Greeting Khashoggi when he entered the consulate was Saudi colonel Maher Abdulaziz Mutreb, who was part of MBS’s security detail and had known Khashoggi when they both had worked at the Saudi embassy in London.
Mutreb told Khashoggi, “We came to take you to Riyadh.”
“I won’t go,” Khashoggi replied.
Saudi agents then set upon Khashoggi, pulling a plastic bag over his head to asphyxiate him. Khashoggi exclaimed, “Don’t cover my mouth. I have asthma! Don’t, you will strangle me!”
Ten minutes after he had entered the consulate, Khashoggi was dead. The sound of the buzzing of Tubaigy’s autopsy saw could be heard on the audio recovered from the consulate. Chunks of Khashoggi’s body were then put in small suitcases and members of the team rolled them out of the building. Khashoggi’s remains were never found, which was a particularly grave sin in Islam, a religion that puts a great premium on the swift burial of the body.
The Saudi hit team gathered up Khashoggi’s clothes. One of the team, who was around the same height and build as Khashoggi, put Khashoggi’s clothes on and exited the consulate through a back door, making sure that he was recorded by surveillance cameras around Istanbul in a clumsy effort to pretend that Khashoggi had abandoned his fiancée, who was still waiting for him outside the front of the consulate.
A member of the hit squad called a superior and said “tell your boss” that the operation was completed. The call was intercepted by Turkish intelligence, which shared it with the CIA. The “boss” was believed by the Turks to be MBS.
A day after Khashoggi’s murder, MBS told Bloomberg News that Khashoggi had left the consulate unmolested. The Saudi ambassador to the United States, Prince Khalid bin Salman, who is MBS’s brother, said claims that Khashoggi had been killed in Istanbul were “absolutely false, and baseless.”
This was the first of a series of lies, cover stories, and rationalizations that the Saudi government told about Khashoggi’s murder. It was a textbook case of how to keep a damaging story alive by not admitting enough of the facts as soon as feasible. Instead, the Saudis prevaricated for weeks as more and more details about the murder were dribbled out to the media by the Turkish government, which reveled in the chance to embarrass the Saudis, their regional rival.
The Saudis floated a story that the murder was the result of “rogue killers” who had had an argument with Khashoggi that got out of hand and had degenerated into a fistfight in which he was accidentally killed. This story was undercut by the fact that the hit team included a forensic pathologist with an autopsy saw, which suggested a high degree of premeditation. And it defied common sense that MBS, who ran the kingdom as a dictatorship, wasn’t generally aware of the operation to silence Khashoggi in which members of his own security detail played a key role. However, there was no definitive proof linking MBS to the murder.
Another line of attack pursued by the Saudis was to blame the victim. Days after the murder, MBS told Kushner and Trump’s national security adviser John Bolton in a phone call that Khashoggi was a dangerous Islamist and a longtime member of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist movement that the Saudi government labeled a terrorist group. Trump administration officials had also long contemplated designating the Brotherhood as a terrorist organization. In fact, the Brotherhood is a political movement with considerable popularity and legitimacy in the Middle East.
Trump’s allies also adopted the line that there was something shady about Khashoggi. Corey Stewart, the Republican nominee for a Senate seat in Virginia in 2018, appeared on CNN and told Anderson Cooper that Khashoggi was “a mystery guy. He’s a mystery figure. There are a lot of things that say he was a bad guy . . . there’s a lot of reports out there that he was connected to the Muslim Brotherhood, reports that he was connected to Osama bin Laden.”
It was true that as young men, Khashoggi and bin Laden had known each other because Khashoggi was the first journalist from a major Arab news organization to profile bin Laden when he was fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan in the late 1980s. Both men were idealistic and religious and were opposed to the communist invasion of a Muslim country and the brutal tactics of the Soviet military, and both were members of the Muslim Brotherhood. On May 4, 1988, Khashoggi wrote a story for Arab News that quoted bin Laden as saying, “It was God alone who protected us from the Russians during their offensive last year. Reliance upon God is the main source of our strength.” Seven years later, when bin Laden was based in Sudan, Khashoggi visited him there. Bin Laden told his old friend that he was thinking of returning to Saudi Arabia and renouncing his war against the Saudi regime. That, of course, didn’t happen—and in 1996 bin Laden moved to Afghanistan, where he launched his war against the United States.
While bin Laden became the world’s most wanted terrorist, Khashoggi went on to have a distinguished career as a writer and editor and the adviser to Prince Turki. Khashoggi also steadily moved away from his earlier Islamism and instead embraced a more liberal political vision. Long before Khashoggi’s views were a matter of controversy, in 2005 he told a journalist, “Right now I don’t believe that we must create an Islamic state. I think an Islamic state would be a burden, maybe would fail, and people will have a big disappointment. Maybe it would shake our belief in the faith if we insist on establishing an Islamic state. What if the Islamic state failed? Like in Iran. Then we are going to doubt the religion itself. The Quran stresses that it is prohibited to force the religion on others. ‘There is no compulsion in religion.’ It’s a matter of choice.”
Saudi officials and their close allies the Emiratis told their White House counterparts that Khashoggi’s murder was variously a Turkish plot or that Qatar had arranged it. With each evolving, implausible explanation, White House officials would tell them, “No, that’s bullshit. Go back again. Come back with something else.”
After Khashoggi’s murder, Trump was on the phone regularly with Saudi king Salman, who genuinely seemed to know absolutely nothing about the plot. Contrary to reports that Salman, who was in his eighties, was out of it, the soft-spoken monarch was quite lucid and focused on the Khashoggi issue. The king’s attitude was, this can’t possibly be true. We would not have done this. No one in my family or my regime would have done this.
The conversations between Trump and King Salman and MBS were kept very secret. Typically, there would be several senior officials listening in to a call with an important foreign leader and then a transcript of the call would be circulated to those officials. To prevent leaks, no transcript was made of Trump’s calls with King Salman or with MBS, and only Pompeo or Bolton would be in the room for them.
In public Trump was defending the Saudis, but when he spoke to King Salman he was blunt, saying, “This is a huge problem. Where’s the body? We’ve got to resolve this. We’ve got to get his body back to his family. Wouldn’t you want that? Did you know anything about it? Did your son know anything about it?” Salman always denied any knowledge of the murder plot.
Trump also spoke to MBS separately, asking him, “Did you know anything about this? Did you have any role? Mohammed, I need to know. Was there a bone saw? Because if there was a bone saw, that changes everything. I mean, I’ve been in some pretty tough negotiations. I’ve never had to take a bone saw with me.”
MBS told the president, “I don’t know. We’re trying to find out. Where the body is, we don’t know. We know it was given to a Syrian.”
Trump asked the crown prince quizzically, “Just a random Syrian walking around in Turkey?”
MBS replied, “Well, we don’t know. We’re trying to find out. It was given to a Syrian living in Turkey, and we don’t know where he took the body.”
Trump said, “Okay. Well, keep us updated. We got to know. We got to know.”
Trump added, “You know, we’re sticking by you. This is an important relationship, but you guys have to get to the bottom of this.”
White House officials believed that the amateur nature of the murder plot meant that it was likely not undertaken as an official matter by the Saudi intelligence services. An officially sanctioned assassination by a professional intelligence service would have not been so messy; Khashoggi would have died in a mysterious car crash or taken a nasty accidental fall from a building and it would all be plausibly deniable. The Khashoggi murder was certainly none of that.
White House officials blamed Saud al-Qahtani for the murder plot. Qahtani was MBS’s closest adviser and he also played a key role in deploying sophisticated technologies to monitor any whiff of dissent in the kingdom. Qahtani also tracked any threats against MBS from other members of the royal family. MBS believed it was Qahtani who kept him safe. Trump administration officials tagged Qahtani, whom they referred to as “Rasputin,” with playing a key role in all of MBS’s flawed decisions, such as targeting civilians in the ham-handed conduct of the war in Yemen and the decision to kidnap the Lebanese prime minister, as well as overseeing the interrogations of the businessmen and royals who were held at the Ritz.
“You name some dumb shit they’ve done, and Saud Qahtani is there. It’s like your drunk fraternity buddy,” said a Trump administration official.
Trump officials knew that MBS could be in power for the next fifty years, so they wanted smart advisers around him. Their advice was to get rid of Qahtani, and he subsequently dropped out of sight, but like so many things in the opaque kingdom, it wasn’t clear if Qahtani was still advising MBS or was even charged with any role in Khashoggi’s murder.
Six weeks after Khashoggi’s murder, the Treasury Department sanctioned Qahtani and sixteen other Saudi officials believed to have had a role in the assassination.
On CBS’s 60 Minutes on October 13, 2018, Trump promised “severe punishment” for the Saudis if it was proven that they had murdered Khashoggi. Khashoggi, after all, was both a legal resident of the United States and a journalist who was contributing regularly to a major American media institution. He also had two children with US passports. Trump, however, also told 60 Minutes “we would be punishing ourselves” to jeopardize American arms sales to Saudi Arabia, deals that he frequently trumpeted as amounting to more than $100 billion. This was an excellent example of falling into the trap of believing your own propaganda: as of when Trump talked to 60 Minutes, only $4 billion of new arms sales to the Saudis had been approved by the State Department following Trump’s Riyadh visit.
A month later, Trump repeated his claim about huge arms sales to the Saudis when he told reporters, “I’m not going to destroy our economy by being foolish with Saudi Arabia. . . . It’s ‘America First’ for me. It’s all about ‘America First.’ We’re not going to give up hundreds of billions of dollars in orders, and let Russia, China, and everybody else have them.”
Trump also told Fox News, “Will anybody really know?” if MBS had ordered the Khashoggi hit. Trump said that the crown prince had told him “maybe five times at different points” and “as recently as a few days ago” that he had nothing to do with the murder.
The Turks provided the audio of Khashoggi’s murder to the CIA director Gina Haspel, which she listened to. Trump said he would skip hearing the audio of the murder because “it’s a suffering tape, it’s a terrible tape.”
Trump’s defense of MBS was of a piece with his repeated defenses of Vladimir Putin’s efforts to swing the 2016 American presidential election against Hillary Clinton and his praise for the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, whom Trump said that he had “fallen in love with.” The CIA concluded with a “medium to high” degree of confidence that the Khashoggi hit was ordered by MBS.
Up until Khashoggi’s murder, it was possible to emphasize the positive case for MBS, that he was genuinely reforming Saudi Arabia’s society and economy. In March 2018, MBS had even visited Hollywood and Silicon Valley, where he ditched his Arab robes in favor of a suit and where he was feted as a reformer by film stars and tech industry heavyweights. But after the murder of Khashoggi, the positive case was largely glossed over in the West where MBS was increasingly viewed as an impetuous autocrat.
Even reliable Trump allies in Congress were outraged by the Khashoggi murder. Senator Lindsey Graham told Fox News that MBS was “toxic” and “has got to go.” As Stalin once observed, “One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic.” Tens of thousands of civilians had died during the Saudi-led war in Yemen, but it was Khashoggi’s murder and dismemberment by Saudi agents that proved to be a tipping point for Congress.
In Congress, members who were concerned by the Saudi conduct of the war in Yemen started calling to end American intelligence support to the Saudis, and to end US refueling for Saudi aircraft involved in the conflict. Mattis preempted some of these calls by announcing on November 11, 2018, that American aircraft would no longer refuel Saudi planes. The skepticism about the Saudis was now bipartisan; a group of Republican senators asked Trump to suspend negotiations over a US-Saudi civil nuclear agreement because of concerns about the conduct of the war in Yemen and the murder of Khashoggi.
Trump was really big on getting the Saudis to “buy American” for their civilian nuclear program. The American civil nuclear industry was in poor shape and a big Saudi buy could help revive it. The Chinese were also angling to sell the Saudis their civilian nuclear technology and Trump was keen to block that, but he also understood that, for the moment, Congress would nix the Saudi purchase of nuclear technology because of concerns about how that technology could be weaponized.
Trump called King Salman and told him, “Look, Saudi nuclear. Commercial nuclear technology, we support it, but it’s not the right time for it. We just know Congress won’t allow it, and you guys will get in a lot of trouble internationally. You just shouldn’t be pursuing this right now.”
After Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan officially confirmed that the Saudis had murdered Khashoggi, the Trump administration signaled that its long acquiescence in the conduct of the Saudi-led war in Yemen had finally evaporated. Mattis called for a cease-fire in Yemen, as did Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
The Saudis consistently denied that MBS had any role in Khashoggi’s murder and instead ascribed it to a rogue operation by overzealous retainers. They charged eleven of them, five of whom faced a possible death penalty, although who exactly was charged and why wasn’t clear given the opaque nature of the Saudi legal system.
What was clear was that MBS was going to remain the real power in Saudi Arabia, and the Trump administration was intent on maintaining close ties with the crown prince. In March 2018, the Senate voted to end any American support for the war in Yemen, and the House approved a similar resolution a month later. To no one’s great surprise, Trump vetoed the resolution on April 16, 2019. A month later, against considerable congressional opposition, Trump pushed through $3 billion of arms sales to the Saudis, citing purported national security concerns. The alliance between the House of Trump and the House of Saud would hold.