A WOMAN IN ISTANBUL
‘Mr Khashoggi was a complex man . . . his was a compartmentalised life, perhaps necessarily so, and no one claims to have known him in all of his life’s dimensions.’
– Agnes Callamard, UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, June 2019
On 10 September 2018, in the month before he disappeared, the Saudi journalist flew to Istanbul, where he would stay for over two weeks. Before the flight, he met his friend Nihad Awad at a coffee shop in Virginia to discuss their joint project – a new human rights organisation called Democracy for the Arab World Now, known as DAWN.
Awad was the founder of the Council on American–Islamic Relations, which worked to combat prejudice and discrimination against Muslims in the United States; Khashoggi’s idea was to establish a similar organisation that focused on reporting human rights abuses in the Middle East.
‘The Washington Post was not enough for him,’ Awad told me. ‘I was astonished by the amount of energy he had . . . he had more energy to effect change in Saudi Arabia and the Arab world.’
Awad had started paying Khashoggi to raise funds and find volunteers, but although the pair met to discuss the new venture two or three times a week, the journalist was struggling to drum up financial support. The plan was to give the project a soft launch upon his return from Istanbul; it would be necessarily low-key, because they expected the Saudi government and its allies to discredit the organisation with personal attacks on Khashoggi himself, which it was feared could in turn increase political pressure on his son, Salah, living in Jeddah.
The two had discussed the journalist’s personal safety in a ‘brainstorming session’ on the potential obstacles DAWN might face. Physical harm was at the bottom of their list of concerns. ‘You work for the Washington Post, you are a resident of Virginia and you are not violent,’ Awad had told him. ‘Why should anyone harm you physically? They try to drown your voice with smear campaigns and put pressure on your family, but you are under the protection of the United States. God forbid if anything happened to you, the world would be turned upside down.’
‘Yeah, yeah, that makes sense,’ Khashoggi had replied. The subject was dropped.
The journalist told him he would be flying to Istanbul to ‘settle for a bit’, to be closer to his family. ‘Whenever family issues were mentioned, he was very sad,’ Awad said. ‘Many times, I would see tears in his eyes.’
He was an Arab intellectual living in exile; his wife had divorced him and both she and his eldest son were banned from leaving Saudi Arabia. In the meantime, some of his friends were in prison, his royal sponsors had deserted him and a vicious online trolling operation was blackening his reputation in response to his columns in the Washington Post. Khashoggi hoped that Istanbul, the gateway between East and West, might ease his sense of homelessness and provide a path to greater happiness. He checked into the Grand Hyatt hotel, on top of a hill on the European shore overlooking the Bosporus Strait, and began making arrangements to get married.
He had met Hatice Cengiz, a Turkish woman twenty-four years his junior, at a conference in the city four months earlier, on 6 May. The event was organised by the Al Sharq Forum, a think-tank backed by Qatari money with offices in London and Istanbul. Entitled ‘Towards New Security Arrangements for the Middle East and North Africa Region’, it was the kind of event Khashoggi had been attending for years in his capacity as an expert on the Gulf, and he was a speaker in the opening panel discussion.
When she met him, Cengiz was a 36-year-old academic, working on her doctorate in Gulf studies. A fluent Arabic speaker, she had obtained Khashoggi’s phone number from a mutual friend, a Turkish journalist, and then asked him for an interview. ‘He was a bit surprised by a Turk interested in Gulf countries,’ she told me when we met less than four months after Khashoggi’s disappearance. ‘I knew he was a well-connected journalist. I did not know anything about his private life.’
Cengiz speaks Turkish quickly and there is a bookish intensity about her. Her desire to speak about her fiancé is occasionally held in check by an understandable suspicion of journalists prying into the details of what was her private life, before it fell apart. She did not choose to become the face of a campaign for justice and she’s wary of the publicity. She wears a headscarf and wide-rimmed spectacles and the venue she has chosen for our meeting is the upstairs room of an empty café in Istanbul. For her safety, she declined to give me the address until the night beforehand and she’s accompanied by Ahmet, a plainclothes Turkish police guard, assigned to her in the aftermath of the disappearance of the man she had been about to marry. She is both the guardian of Khashoggi’s memory and, as with others close to him, possibly a potential target herself.
Cengiz had grown up as one of five children, the daughter of a successful self-made businessman who ran a bakery and imported cutlery. Her family is from Erzurum, a religiously conservative town near Turkey’s far-eastern border. She was sent to a religious school in the town of Bursa. Her mother is, she says, a housewife. Cengiz herself comes across as a far more liberated woman than her family background might suggest.
She studied social sciences at Istanbul University and learned Arabic in Cairo, also studying in Jordan. She researched how the Sunni–Shia sectarian divide helped create ISIS and al-Qaeda; she was interested, too, in the role of the Gulf states in either encouraging or thwarting the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011; and she wrote her thesis on whether the Sultanate of Oman and its tradition of religious tolerance could serve as a role model for the Muslim world.
Khashoggi’s age, sixty, what she calls his ‘maturity’, was part of what made him attractive to her. She says she was wary of conventional marriages and she liked the fact that he was welltravelled and well-read. Like the journalist himself, she was trying to find a balance between Western liberal ideas and her devout Muslim faith. To her, Khashoggi’s defining characteristics seemed to be his open-heartedness and warmth, and his expressions of loneliness made her feel sorry for him.
At their first meeting at the academic conference in Istanbul, Khashoggi had not held back in his criticism of Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince.
‘He thinks he is the only person who can save Saudi Arabia from this ignorance and backwardness,’ he told her. ‘The prince never lends an ear to others. He thinks he is the only one who has the magic recipe to govern the country.’
She asked him if he had a plan to return to Saudi Arabia.
‘No, I just want to speak my mind freely,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen what happened to most of my friends. They are in jail. I don’t want the same fate as them.’
‘Will your prince soon be king?’
‘Yes, and he will rule the country for fifty years.’1
After interviewing him at the conference, they began exchanging text messages and emails. In mid-July she called Turan Kişlakçi, the Turkish journalist who had given her his phone number, with a request: the Saudi was returning to Istanbul to see her. She wanted them both to be invited to a concert of Turkish and Arabic traditional songs on a Friday night the following month. It would be their first date.
‘He started to tell me how he was alone and how he was unhappy,’ she said. ‘I was very surprised. Suddenly I saw a completely different human being, and then a special, direct dialogue began.’2
The Saudi told friends in the middle of August that he wanted to marry her, but he also knew that a three-times-divorced Arab journalist who could no longer return home safely to Saudi Arabia – and who had known her just a few months – might have a problem gaining her Turkish father’s consent.
‘You have to talk with her father,’ Khashoggi told Turan Kişlakçi, who agreed to host in his office and act as translator for the Saudi’s first meeting with Mr Cengiz in Istanbul in mid-September. When Khashoggi asked for his daughter’s hand in marriage, he encountered resistance.
‘Hatice’s father asked me many times if Jamal was married or not,’ Kişlakçi recalls. ‘Jamal told me he wasn’t married. But the father said, “I know Arabs. I visited Saudi Arabia many times. Arabs cannot live with one woman. They must have two or three.” ’
After that initial meeting, Kişlakçi says Cengiz’s father was still resisting his daughter’s choice. He called Kişlakçi, the go-between, to a private discussion about Khashoggi’s suitability as a husband. ‘He is an old man, my daughter is in her thirties, how is this going to work?’ Kişlakçi recalls the father saying.
‘Hatice loves him – and he loves her,’ the Turkish journalist replied. ‘So you can’t do anything.’
Four days later, Mr Cengiz requested another meeting in a café. According to Kişlakçi’s account, it was also attended by Hatice’s brother and lasted for four hours. Mr Cengiz was demanding further financial guarantees for his daughter, beyond Khashoggi’s pledge to buy a home in Istanbul. ‘Leave the other things for Hatice and Jamal to decide, not you,’ Kişlakçi said.
‘She cannot think about the future herself because she is in love,’ her father replied.
It was pointed out to Mr Cengiz that, as Khashoggi was living in exile, his new wife would not be permitted by the Saudi authorities to visit the holy sites at Mecca and Medina. This was not what worried him: what naturally concerned him was whether his daughter would be well looked after. The Turkish journalist tried to end the meeting by reading the Fatiha, the opening verses of the Koran, intended to mark the start of a new chapter in the couple’s life together, but Mr Cengiz again objected.
Kişlakçi says it was first and foremost Hatice’s father who demanded proof in writing of Khashoggi’s divorce. He also says Khashoggi asked his fiancée to persuade her father to drop this requirement of proof, but that she ‘shared her father’s concern’. The Turkish journalist had no idea his friend would take the risk of going to the Saudi consulate to collect the paperwork required. ‘If he had told me, I wouldn’t have allowed him to go,’ Kişlakçi said.
In the midst of these marriage negotiations, Khashoggi’s youngest son, Abdullah, came to stay with his father for a week in Istanbul. Cengiz had been nagging her future husband to tell Abdullah about the marriage beforehand but Khashoggi had refused, telling her, ‘At my age, I don’t tell my family details about my private life.’
When Abdullah arrived, his father introduced his prospective new bride and the three of them went sightseeing. ‘Maybe marrying a Turk was a bit strange for Abdullah,’ Cengiz told me. ‘But he welcomed it. I told him we would be like brother and sister because our ages are close. I really liked him very much.’
The couple were keen to marry quickly, though no date had been set. ‘He was sixty years old . . . he had very limited time,’ Cengiz said later. Both of them wanted children and he saw the marriage as a new beginning, a break with the most troubled period of his life.
‘I miss my country very much,’ he had told her. ‘I miss my friends and family very much. I feel this pain every single moment.’
Her father’s concern about multiple wives was more prescient than Mr Cengiz or his lovestruck daughter could know. For it turned out that Jamal Khashoggi had, in fact, married for a fourth time only a few months earlier. His love life was far more complicated than this Turkish family could have imagined.
On 2 June 2018, a month after he first met Hatice Cengiz, Jamal Khashoggi had got married in an Islamic wedding ceremony in Alexandria, Virginia, not far from his home in the suburbs of Washington DC. Earlier that morning he had given a wedding ring to a fifty-year-old woman he met off a plane at the city’s Dulles airport. He had known Hanan el-Atr, who was Egyptian, for the past decade, and although she was now working as an air stewardess, she had formerly been a trainee on an Arab newspaper. El-Atr still counted several prominent Arab journalists as friends, many of whom were friends of Khashoggi too.
El-Atr told me the couple’s friendship intensified after November 2016, when Khashoggi was living in Jeddah under virtual house arrest: he had been ordered by the crown prince’s media adviser not to talk or write. The Egyptian phoned and texted him from her travels in the hope of providing emotional support.
The following year, Khashoggi flew to attend a conference in the United Arab Emirates but was denied entry to the country. The UAE is Saudi Arabia’s closest ally and the ban was interpreted by friends, including el-Atr, as a final warning that maybe it was safest if he left the kingdom. In el-Atr’s account, Khashoggi had been suffering from depression for several years, to the point of seeking professional help in London. His flight to America in the summer of 2017 liberated him as a journalist, but it also took an enormous toll on his mental health.
‘His body was in America but his mind and heart were in Saudi Arabia,’ el-Atr said, recalling that she would often call him from the Middle East at 7 a.m., Washington time. ‘My job was to wake him up, to encourage him and to motivate him,’ she told me.
In March 2018, el-Atr flew to Washington to attend a dinner thrown by friends in honour of Khashoggi’s sixtieth birthday. A friend took a photograph of the couple smiling as they sat behind a large chocolate birthday cake. The following month she visited him for another two days and she says that this was when he asked her to marry him. However, a close friend of Khashoggi’s told me he may have married her out of a sense of responsibility for what had befallen her: el-Atr had been questioned by the security service of a Middle Eastern country for ten days, because of her friendship with the dissident journalist. ‘He was really upset and concerned for her,’ the friend said. ‘I think he married her out of respect and out of guilt.’
The question of where they would live was certainly left unanswered. The Egyptian didn’t want to leave her job in the Middle East and had speculated about relocating to Qatar or Oman, but he told her that if he returned to live in the Gulf, it could anger Saudi Arabia and possibly lead to his forcible repatriation there.
El-Atr, like Hatice Cengiz a few months later, wanted to be sure Khashoggi was really single before she married him. ‘I asked him, “Is it clear that you have no other woman?” ’ she told me. ‘ “No, it is only you, Hanan,” he said.’
One of the witnesses to the marriage was Khaled Saffuri. He says he had lined up two imams to conduct the ceremony but that Khashoggi rejected them both, because they insisted he attend marriage preparation classes first. ‘Jamal said, “I don’t want this headache, I want someone to do it quickly,” ’ Saffuri recalled.
The ceremony itself was kept secret. El-Atr says this was because she feared reprisals against her family for marrying the controversial Saudi journalist. The union was never legally registered with a certificate – and Saffuri says Khashoggi was in no hurry to sort out the paperwork.
Photographs taken on 2 June show the happy couple in Virginia beaming for the camera, el-Atr dressed and veiled in white, holding a bouquet of white flowers. Khashoggi’s youngest son, Abdullah, did meet Hanan el-Atr after the journalist’s death, when she informed him that she had married him; but the Khashoggi family have not formally recognised the Egyptian as his last wife.
The last time el-Atr says she saw him was an overnight stay in a hotel in New York on 6 September, less than a month before he disappeared. He had told her he was planning to buy a house in Turkey, in case he ever needed a Turkish passport; but he never told the Egyptian he was engaged to be married to a Turk. ‘Jamal did not tell me about another woman,’ she said. ‘I felt he was hiding something. He believed in many wives – he was a Muslim, Saudi man.’ Although el-Atr vehemently denies it, Khashoggi’s friends claim he may have told her he was divorcing her during that final meeting in New York.
On 25 September, she called him to say she expected to be in Washington in about a month – she says Khashoggi agreed to meet her then. On 30 September, during his last weekend in London before he was killed, Khashoggi left two messages on her phone, wishing her a happy birthday, and it was the last she heard from him.
She learned about his disappearance in Istanbul from her Twitter feed two days later. ‘I hope he went quickly, without any pain,’ she told me, holding back the tears. ‘Jamal never even put the security chain on the back of the door before we went to sleep. He used to laugh and say, “Why would they harm me here?” ’
Hatice Cengiz knew nothing about el-Atr and neither did many of Khashoggi’s friends. ‘What does she want?’ the Turkish fiancée asked the Washington Post later. ‘I suspect that this is an attempt to discredit him and hurt his reputation.’
However, there was no doubt the Saudi had concealed a really important truth from his wife-to-be. His fourth marriage, to an Egyptian, risked making a mockery of what Khashoggi had told the Turk. ‘Dear Hatice, I have my health and everything else, but I have nobody to share life with.’3 It is possible, as several of Khashoggi’s friends claimed, that he stumbled into the marriage with el-Atr in desperate need of company, and then told her he was divorcing her after his romance with Cengiz had made some progress; it is also possible that he considered living parallel lives in Washington and Istanbul.
Khashoggi’s friend, the Palestinian journalist Azzam Tamimi, said it was common for Arabs to ‘have a second wife and a third wife and the first wife doesn’t know’.
‘He didn’t need to lie. He wasn’t the type,’ Cengiz told me. ‘I think he would have divorced her.’
If the Saudi journalist wasn’t living an emotional double life in his final months in Washington and Istanbul, he was certainly searching for rapid solutions to his loneliness. He had careered into one marriage so quickly that it was never legally certified, though Cengiz was certain that his subsequent engagement to her was serious for both of them. To use her own word, Khashoggi was ‘broken’, living in exile apart from his family, with the jailing of Saudi activists weighing increasingly on his mind.
‘He was having nightmares,’ his fiancée said, ‘they were full of their voices and silhouettes. At times he couldn’t sleep so he was taking pills, a sedative, because he was worried about what was happening to his country.’
Another question, apart from the divorce papers, was where the newlyweds were going to live. He told her he had applied for US citizenship, that he wanted to feel the world’s political pulse from Washington DC, to become an influential journalist there. He had begun sending her his draft articles for the Washington Post and she would call him back with her thoughts.
Cengiz had never been to America and was only in her first year of her doctorate at Fatih Sultan Mehmet University in Istanbul; her father suggested they should stay in Turkey for the time being; but Khashoggi was planning to return to Virginia soon after the marriage.
‘I told him to come and work with us on radio and television stations in Turkey,’ said Turan Kişlakçi. ‘He said we wouldn’t pay him enough money, that he didn’t want to leave the Washington Post.’
Fulfilling the wishes of his future father-in-law, he bought a flat in the ‘Europe Apartments’, a new luxury development close to the E5 highway on Istanbul’s European side. It had a glass-fronted balcony overlooking a series of water fountains, with pass-only access for pedestrians, and a manned checkpoint for cars. By about 26 September, the paperwork was complete and they had begun to move basic furniture into the flat. ‘Jamal thought this was a win-win for him,’ Cengiz said. ‘If he had a place, people from Saudi Arabia could come and visit him. He was feeling very, very safe in Turkey.’
The two discussed how they would obtain the documentation confirming his divorce from his ex-wife in Saudi Arabia. She asked him if he had been threatened since he had fled to America: he told her the relationship with his home country was not one of hatred, that if he was in serious trouble, his government pension would have been cut. It had not been. He had stayed away from Qatar since the summer of 2017, precisely to avoid allegations of complicity with a foreign power. She asked him if the Turkish politicians he knew could help obtain the paperwork. He said he didn’t want to bother anyone with his private affairs.
‘Could the Saudi ambassador in Ankara help?’ she suggested.
‘The ambassador is a friend of mine and we are from the same city,’ Khashoggi told her. ‘But I don’t want to put him in a situation where he’d be under strain, or where he would have to say no.’4
Their first visit to a registry office in Istanbul’s Fatih district was on 28 September, the last day of what had been an eighteen-day visit. Cengiz acted as his Turkish translator. She recalls his concern when a Turkish official asked him about his marital status. He enquired whether it would be easier if they married abroad but was told the same documents would be required from the Saudi authorities, wherever their union was registered. The meeting only lasted a few minutes. Closed-circuit television camera footage, leaked to the Turkish press, later showed them holding hands as they left.
‘He was a bit tense about it,’ she said. ‘He saw that this visit to the consulate was the only way to get married. He turned around and said, “What shall we do?” ’
‘You know best what to do,’ she replied.
‘Shall we try it?’ he then asked her.
He had tried to obtain the necessary paperwork online and in the United States. This was now his only option. Spontaneously, with no appointment or phone call to say they were coming, they took a taxi to the Saudi consulate, arriving at 11.50 a.m. ‘Let’s have a go,’ he said, ‘and, inshallah, nothing bad will happen and they will say it is not going to be a problem.’
Cengiz recalls no fear in him, just mild concern. He had on previous occasions talked about the possibility of being interrogated or detained, but she also knew him to be prone to emotional outbursts which quickly passed; in calmer moments, he had told her he did not fear for himself and claimed he did not fear the Saudi crown prince either.
‘When I am not in my country, I don’t think there’s that kind of threat,’ he told her. He added that he always felt he was in ‘direct contact’ with Saudi Arabia. ‘Maybe it was wishful thinking,’ she said, ‘but he thought he had an open channel.’
That first Friday, 28 September, he left his two phones with her as he felt uncomfortable about handing them over to Saudi security inside. His personal safety was not his concern. She waited for him on the pavement and soon began to worry. She feared he might miss his plane to London and was on the point of asking a security guard where he was. It was forty-five minutes to one hour before Khashoggi emerged, safe and well. The Saudi staff had, he later told friends, ‘panicked initially but they turned out to be very friendly. They promised to help me.’
He had enjoyed talking to his fellow countrymen, who recognised him as a Saudi media personality and told him they followed his posts on Twitter. It was agreed he should return the following Tuesday, when his paperwork would be ready.
Recordings of phone traffic between Riyadh and Istanbul show that the plot against Khashoggi began soon after he left the building, while he was waiting to board a 2.40 p.m. flight to London for the weekend.
‘The enemy they had been looking for had arrived by foot,’ Yasin Aktay, Khashoggi’s friend and an adviser to President Erdoğan, explained to me. ‘And then they started to plan.’
In at least two phone calls between Riyadh and the consulate that Friday, the future commander of the operation, Brigadier General Maher Abdulaziz Mutreb, spoke to a Saudi intelligence attaché in Istanbul, a man we will name ‘SA’. We don’t know who the ‘Hatim’ referred to here is:
Time: 2.22 p.m., Friday 28 September 2018
SA: I informed the communications office about the information that Hatim gave.
MUTREB: Did you inform the communications office?
SA: Yes, I conveyed everything together with the videos.
MUTREB: Can you make sure it is closed, as normal? Don’t let anybody read it.
SA: Okay.
MUTREB: Thank you.
SA: Goodbye.
Turkish Intelligence, who recorded this conversation, are certain that the ‘videos’ SA referred to and sent back to Riyadh were the closed-circuit camera footage of Khashoggi saying goodbye to Cengiz and then entering the consulate earlier that day. They would provide confirmation of the journalist’s appearance and identity.
SA talked about the ‘communications office’ again in a second call. This is possibly a reference to the Saudi royal court’s media department – the so-called Centre for Studies and Media Affairs, known as CSMARC. This was where Saud al-Qahtani worked – the senior adviser to the crown prince who had banned Khashoggi from writing and whom the journalist accused of intimidating the prince’s critics.
In this call, the intelligence officer at the consulate was beginning to sound anxious. Perhaps he was frightened of getting involved in a clandestine operation against a fellow countryman and media personality he had just enjoyed talking to minutes earlier. SA needed to know whether Khashoggi was a wanted man or not (‘sought after’):
SA: I talked to the communications office. He didn’t want to give me full information. Do you understand me? I have not hidden it from you. He does not want to give me full information. Do you understand me?
MUTREB: Yes.
SA: Of course, I didn’t tell him that I forwarded the letter. I just want to ask you a question.
MUTREB: Go ahead.
SA: Is Jamal, our brother who has just come to us, among the people sought by you?
MUTREB: There is nothing official, but it is known that he is among the people sought after.
SA: Though we did not receive any letter from our service regarding whether there is any problem or not on him.
MUTREB: What I mean is, even if you are going to chop off his head, he is not going to say anything.
SA: Yes, I have no doubt about it.
‘Chop off his head’: Brigadier General Mutreb had just made the shocking admission that there was carte blanche to do whatever they wanted with Khashoggi, even kill him. We don’t know who the ‘he’ referred to in the next part of the conversation is:
MUTREB: But he is aware that he will come? Everything depends on time.
SA: What do you mean? I don’t know that.
MUTREB: I am asking if he is aware that Khashoggi will reapply to the consulate on Tuesday?
SA: Oh, definitely. We are all shocked. I just spoke with him [Khashoggi]. I said ‘How are you?’
MUTREB: Did you inform him at the time?
SA: Absolutely.
MUTREB: Did you give him information that Khashoggi will come back to the consulate on Tuesday?
SA: Yes, Tuesday . . . we received information that Khashoggi will come on Tuesday. I gave the intelligence office the information that Khashoggi will come on Tuesday. In addition to this information, I added the videos.
MUTREB: May Allah be pleased.
SA: May Allah be pleased.
In a third call that Friday, a man we shall name AS, believed to be a senior official at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Riyadh, talked to the consul general, Mohammed al-Otaibi, in Istanbul:
Time: 7.08 p.m.
AS: I will tell you something. The head of state security called me.
AL-OTAIBI: Yes?
AS: They have got an assignment. I suppose they are asking for someone to be assigned from your delegation for a special issue – someone from your protocol staff.
Various names were then discussed for this special mission. They included the consulate’s deputy head, a Saudi intelligence officer. The conversation continued:
AS: He wants him in Riyadh on Sunday or tomorrow. We are asking for the person responsible for your special and top-secret mission.
AL-OTAIBI: Our brother is trusted. No problem. Yes, sir.
AS: Send me his number now. I can send it to them an hour later so that they can call him. They will make the arrangements. Let him buy his ticket. Let him arrange it. Because there is a holiday, there is no time for correspondence. Otherwise this will drag on.
AL-OTAIBI: If this assignment is security-related, we have AR. Is he not useful?
AS: Yes, the assignment is security-related. The mission is a national duty. He is asking for him for just four to five days. It will remain between us. Both you and I will keep quiet for the sake of the consulate. Tell him that you gave me his number.
AL-OTAIBI: But the man’s wife and children are here. Will it be a problem?
AS: How?
At 8.04 p.m., the consul general, Mohammed al-Otaibi, was heard talking to an intelligence officer we shall name AMA, one of his staff now being assigned the mission to fly to Riyadh. He was still concerned that his colleague might be exposed or compromised by leaving family members behind in Istanbul:
AMA: Is there anything?
AL-OTAIBI: Yes, there is an urgent training in Riyadh. They called me from Riyadh. They told me they asked for an official from protocol who was reliable and nationalist. The issue is very important. It is being developed rapidly . . . but the issue is top secret. Nobody should know at all. Even none of your friends will be informed.
Then later:
AL-OTAIBI: The best is you buy a ticket for yourself and family . . . the issue is top secret. Nobody should know at all, it is almost five days.
The Saudis had been given an unexpected opportunity to move against Jamal Khashoggi; but somebody who could be trusted was required to fly to the Saudi capital to help coordinate the operation, before the journalist returned to the consulate four days later. Blinded by love and desperate to get married, he was about to fall into their lap.