THE FINAL JOURNEY
Istanbul, 2 October 2018
Hatice Cengiz didn’t mind being woken by her alarm at 3.45 in the morning. She was meeting her fiancé, a Saudi journalist named Jamal Khashoggi, off his plane at Istanbul’s Atatürk airport. She wanted to surprise him, to show him how much she cared, to see his careworn, bearded face beaming down at her affectionately again. Within a week or so, they would be married, although they hadn’t chosen a firm date. What was the point of sleeping on a day which promised such happiness?
Khashoggi was flying back to her overnight, business class, on Turkish Airlines from London Heathrow. The sixty-year-old was one of the Arab world’s best-known journalists, with over 1.5 million followers on Twitter and a column in the ‘global opinions’ section of the Washington Post. For more than a year, he had been living in lonely exile in the United States, wretched at his separation from his family, his stinging criticism of his homeland in his newspaper articles rendering his safe return there impossible. Istanbul, and Hatice Cengiz, augured happier times ahead.
Later that day, he planned to visit the Saudi consulate, to collect a copy of his birth certificate and a ‘single status’ document, confirming he was divorced; and then he would be free to marry her.
Earnest, bookish and religiously devout, Cengiz spoke fluent Arabic and was studying for a PhD in Gulf studies. She was also twenty-four years younger than he was. They had known each other for barely five months, having met at an academic conference in Istanbul earlier that year.
While she was dressing, Khashoggi texted her to say his plane had landed early. By 4.07 a.m., he had cleared passport control. She was just putting on her shoes when he phoned her to say he’d collected his luggage and she needn’t come to the airport. He was already on his way.1
Long before the sun had risen over the mosques and minarets of the former Ottoman capital, he took one of the city’s yellow taxis to the apartment the couple had bought only the previous week.
At 3.13 a.m., a privately hired Gulfstream jet from Saudi Arabia had touched down at the same airport carrying nine men. Its registration was marked on its twin engines as HZ-SK2 and the flight plan it filed before take-off from Riyadh showed it had official diplomatic clearance. The plane’s passengers were less than an hour ahead of their prey.
All of them worked for what the CIA would later euphemistically call the ‘Saudi Rapid Intervention Group’, drawn from the ranks of the kingdom’s military and intelligence services. One, Lieutenant Colonel Salah Mohammed al-Tubaigy, was a 47-year-old doctor at the Ministry of Interior and chairman of the Scientific Council of Forensic Medicine in Riyadh. His area of expertise was autopsy, the post-mortem examination of corpses to determine the cause of death.
The commander of the group was a brigadier general named Maher Abdulaziz Mutreb. Only six months earlier, he’d been photographed in the security detail of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the heir to the Saudi throne, on his official visit to Britain and the United States. Fifteen years earlier, he had worked at the Saudi embassy in London at the same time as Jamal Khashoggi himself. In fact, they had taken tea together in Mayfair. Now Mutreb was passing through Istanbul airport on a diplomatic passport, only twenty-nine minutes ahead of his former colleague.
‘He always looked grumpy, like he was on the dark side,’ a European surveillance expert who knew him said later.
The 47-year-old brigadier general was the most sombrely dressed, wearing a dark-grey jacket with a black T-shirt beneath it. His colleagues wore T-shirts and backpacks, with earphones draped around their necks, like tourists come to visit Istanbul’s sights. Their hotel, the Mövenpick, was nowhere near the city’s famous mosques and bazaars, but in the modern commercial district, only five minutes’ drive away from the Saudi consulate. The men would not be sleeping much and once their business was over, they would not be staying long.
While Mutreb and his fellow Saudis were checking into their hotel, Jamal Khashoggi’s taxi was taking him to his new home. The ‘Europe Apartments’ is a gated community of brand new flats near the E5 highway in Zeytinburnu, on the European side of this city of around 15 million people, as its name suggests.
When Khashoggi arrived, the guard on duty wouldn’t let him past the security barrier without a key card, which had been issued to residents while he was away. As the journalist could not speak Turkish to explain himself, he called his fiancée for help. Hatice Cengiz, her head covered as usual in an Islamic headscarf, arrived with the key card just before 5 a.m.
Once they were inside what was due to be their first married home, Khashoggi said he was tired from his overnight journey and went to bed. Cengiz unpacked items she had bought to furnish the flat. The previous week, they had shopped for sofas and he had chosen a chair in which to write and watch television.
A refrigerator, washing machine and tumble dryer were also on order, though Khashoggi had texted her on the way to Heathrow to say that maybe a different model of fridge would fit the kitchen better.
When he woke up, they had breakfast together in a nearby café to discuss the day. They agreed to cancel the fridge; they would visit the shop later and choose a replacement: it was the kind of domestic dilemma any engaged couple might face – on one level, trivial; but on another, a nest-making ritual, the furnishing of their first home a statement of marital intent before the wedding day itself.
Khashoggi believed the final obstacle to their marriage could only be lifted if he visited the Saudi consulate to collect his documents. The journalist had been married at least three times, and his prospective Turkish father-in-law, who worried about the match, was insisting that he demonstrate on paper that he was now single. The marriage registry office required the documents, too: polygamy is illegal in Turkey, unlike in Saudi Arabia, where sharia law allows men to take up to four wives.
In a phone call before his flight from London, Khashoggi had told Cengiz that a friend would accompany him to the consulate, as he knew she had PhD classes to attend every Tuesday. Yet when she asked him over breakfast which friend he had in mind, he fell silent. She says that was his diffident way of requesting her company, without actually asking for it; and if this dangerously forthright critic of the Saudi kingdom was nervous about visiting its sovereign diplomatic territory, he certainly didn’t show it.
‘Okay. I’m not going to college, I’m coming with you,’ she told him firmly.
‘He wasn’t tense,’ she told me later. ‘I wasn’t tense. I thought: he’ll get the paper. He’ll come out. That would be it.’
At 9.55 a.m., Maher Abdulaziz Mutreb, the Rapid Intervention Group’s commander, walked into the Saudi consulate. He was now wearing an open-necked white shirt and dark suit and holding his mobile phone. Discerning his state of mind from the security camera that filmed his entry is virtually impossible, but his attire was certainly businesslike, his jaw firmly set, and three other men followed in behind him.
That April, Mutreb had accompanied Crown Prince Mohammed to America, when he was visiting the rebuilding effort after Hurricane Harvey in Texas. He’d been standing at the back of the prince’s entourage, keeping guard, sporting on the lapel of his suit a badge showing the US and Saudi flags intertwined. The month before that, he’d been photographed emerging from an official car in Downing Street, as part of the prince’s delegation during his meeting with Britain’s then prime minister, Theresa May.
Istanbul was different; a below-the-radar operation, while the prince was in his palace 1,500 miles away. Today, in his mind at least, Mutreb was on the defensive against an enemy of the state who had blackened the prince’s reputation, though the boundaries between defence and attack had become blurred. Between 10.11 and 11.03 a.m., more of the Intervention Group arrived. The fifteen-man team had split into two groups: ten to the consulate, five to the residence nearby. The consulate team included Mustafa Mohammed al-Madani. At the age of fifty-seven, he was the oldest. In fact, his age and looks had helped him secure his place in the squad. Although he listed himself merely as a government employee on his Facebook page, he had been in New York just ahead of the crown prince’s arrival there in March and was also a brigadier general in Saudi intelligence.
All the men entered the consulate’s dull-grey metal front doors – the same doors that Jamal Khashoggi would disappear inside just over two hours later.
The consul general had earlier ordered any non-Saudi staff either to go home at noon or not to report for work at all. The Saudi staff who remained were called into an unscheduled meeting, which lasted for about an hour. In the meantime, those working at the consul’s official residence, which is two minutes’ drive away, were told they could not enter or leave because an engineer was coming to make repairs.
While the consulate’s staff were in their meeting, three of the Saudi squad were in another room discussing what would happen next. Brigadier General Mutreb and Dr Salah al-Tubaigy did most of the talking.
The third Saudi present was believed by Turkish intelligence to be Thaar Ghaleb al-Harbi, a 39-year-old lieutenant in the Saudi Royal Guard. A year earlier, he had been promoted for his bravery in responding to a gunman who opened fire near the outer wall of the crown prince’s al-Salam royal palace in Jeddah. The guardsman had visited the US in 2015, just ahead of Prince Mohammed’s meeting with President Obama at his Camp David retreat.
The conversation began at 1.02 p.m.:
DR TUBAIGY: It will be easy hopefully.
MUTREB: Yes. (He is heard yawning.)
DR TUBAIGY: Joints will be separated. It is not a problem.
MUTREB: Will it be possible to put the body and hips into a bag this way?
DR TUBAIGY: No, too heavy. Jamal is tall, about 1.8 metres. He is very big. He has got buttocks like a horse. If we package as two plastic bags, it will be finished without leaving a sense of anything. We will wrap each of them.
A discussion about the use of ‘leather bags’ followed. The doctor complained that more information should have been provided ahead of a secret mission. He was also unhappy with the conditions in which he was expected to dismember a corpse – apparently on the floor:
DR TUBAIGY: This is the first time in my life that I will cut into pieces on the ground. Even if a butcher wants to cut, he hangs an animal up.
Dr Tubaigy’s nerves were on edge. He told Brigadier General Mutreb how perilous this mission could be:
DR TUBAIGY: You are my manager. You have to protect me. There is nobody to protect me! I mean, Abdulaziz, they don’t look after you!
Tubaigy had earned his Master’s degree in forensic medicine at Glasgow University in 2004. In 2015, he spent three months in Australia as a visiting pathologist at the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine. The trip was paid for by the Saudi government. There’s a photograph of him wearing green medical scrubs and rubber gloves in the institute’s annual report, which proclaimed that ‘death and injury investigations lie at the heart of any fair justice system’.
Today’s assignment was unusual, to say the least, as Dr Tubaigy’s speciality was determining the cause of death in mass-casualty accidents. In fact, he’d helped design an 18-metre-long mobile trailer which pathologists could use to examine bodies retrieved from fires, stampedes or terrorist attacks at Saudi Arabia’s holy sites. In 2014, an Arabic newspaper described the scientist as a lieutenant colonel and claimed that he could perform an autopsy at a crime scene in no more than seven minutes.
Only one casualty was expected at the consulate that Tuesday, but maybe the doctor’s speed explained why he had been chosen. At any rate, he was trying to put a brave face on his unexpected trip to Istanbul:
DR TUBAIGY: This is fun. Give me my headphones so I can forget myself while cutting. Normally, I would put my headphones on and listen to music. I’d also drink coffee and smoke my cigarette.
Perhaps the doctor’s banter was meant to relax his fellow team members as Jamal Khashoggi’s taxi approached. Perhaps he was merely revealing his own state of agitation. Or was he rendering the target of this operation already dead in his mind, like a corpse he would usually encounter in a morgue, so he could steel himself for what was to follow?
Time: 1.13 p.m.
MUTREB: Has the sacrificial animal arrived yet?
A VOICE: He has arrived.
In the Koran, Abraham is told by God to kill his son as a human sacrifice, as a test of his faith. He holds the blade of a knife to his son’s neck, until an angel tells him he has already demonstrated his love for God, and so an animal can be substituted for sacrifice instead. There would be no substitution in Istanbul, no act of mercy, no sudden moment of reprieve. Four days of planning were about to reach their finale, even if their visitor’s taxi was running slightly late for his appointment.
At 11.50 that morning, Khashoggi telephoned the Saudi consulate to tell them he was coming. A consular official told him they would call back. Forty minutes later, he was informed that his paperwork would be ready for 1 p.m.
At 12.42 p.m., he and his fiancée walked out of their apartment building into the street. A security camera filmed them, hand in hand, before he hailed the pair a cab. Their journey to the consulate was for the most part along multi-lane highways, through the ugly urban sprawl of the city’s outskirts. Perhaps the journalist caught a glimpse, through the right-hand window of his taxi, of the gates of the old Byzantine city walls. The crumbling fortifications were flying red Turkish flags in celebration of Constantinople’s conquest by the Ottomans over 500 years before.
It was here that Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror first entered the city in 1453. Khashoggi, a keen historian and of Ottoman descent himself, had visited Sultan Mehmet’s tomb only the previous month. ‘If I die now, would they bury me here?’ he had joked afterwards.2
Their taxi crossed the Golden Horn waterway, its hills graced by the magnificent silhouettes of some of the finest mosques ever built. He told her about the warm weather he had left behind in England the previous day. However, the future, not the past, was for the most part on Jamal Khashoggi’s mind that Tuesday. Once again, the couple discussed which fridge to buy. He responded to messages on his mobile phone.
The temperature in Istanbul on that afternoon of 2 October was in the low twenties and it was only partly sunny. The city’s annual battle between the seasons had begun – its Mediterranean summer climate beginning to give way to the colder, northern climes of Asia. Istanbul’s confluence of cultures, its peerless position as the crossroads between East and West, was mirrored in its weather that day.
It was a city which the journalist believed suited him perfectly; not just because of his relationship with Hatice Cengiz, but as a Western-educated writer who had fled from Saudi Arabia, a Muslim cast adrift from the country he loved, still looking for somewhere he could call home.
The taxi passed the tall office blocks of banks and telecoms companies. It passed the Wyndham Grand hotel, where six more members of the Intervention Group had spent the previous night. Three of them had arrived from Riyadh on a scheduled Saudi Arabian Airlines flight at around 4 p.m. the day before. A further three had arrived on Turkish Airlines at 1.40 a.m., while Khashoggi was himself still in the air.
The Saudi consulate is a two-storey building in Akasyali street, opposite a supermarket and a tennis club, down a relatively quiet hill. It is ochre-coloured and overlooked by fir trees. The green Saudi flag flies from its roof. Security cameras are mounted along its walls and there are two booths for the security guards stationed outside.
‘See you soon, wait for me here,’ Khashoggi told Hatice Cengiz.
‘Inshallah, bring me good news,’ his fiancée replied. She was wearing a purple headscarf and she looked up at his face for what neither of them knew would be the last time.
He handed her his two mobile phones and approached the consulate’s outer ring of metal barricades. Exposing his paunch, he raised his arms in the air for a brief inspection by plainclothes security men.
At 1.13 p.m., Brigadier General Mutreb received a text on his mobile phone, informing him that the journalist had arrived.
Khashoggi then walked towards the building, his long strides betraying no hesitation or fear. At 1.14 p.m., a Turkish guard standing outside the building bowed his head in greeting. The grey consulate doors swung outwards to receive Jamal Khashoggi; and, as they did so, the golden swords embossed across them divided in two, before closing firmly behind him. His fiancée would never see him emerge as she’d expected, joyfully waving at her the document they needed to get married. In fact, she would never see him again.