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Attempts to distract the world’s attention from Khashoggi’s murder were thwarted when President Erdoğan confirmed that recordings of the journalist’s torture had finally been released to the UK, US, Germany, France and Saudi Arabia. It was another shrewdly calculated move to manipulate events in his favour. Like all authoritarian leaders, Erdoğan understood the incomparable power of the media as a herd management tool and was expertly skilled in stirring its cauldron.
For weeks, Turkey had been shelling Saudi Arabia’s government with sickening snippets of its behaviour. Unlike Britain –supposedly a master in the art of diplomacy, Erdoğan had successfully forced the hand of MBS and made him look ridiculous. By handing over the recordings (though it was not clear whether all or just edited excerpts) he broadened the line of pressure on MBS. Landing a hot potato into the laps of the intelligence services of free-media countries, he ensured that the well-chewed out tape retained its media mystique and that it ended up in the hands of those who wouldn’t be able to ignore it. They would now be giving their individual responses to the recording, keeping up the pressure on MBS.
President Erdoğan said: ‘We played them to all who wanted them including the Saudis, the US, France, Canada, Germany, Britain. The recordings are really appalling. Indeed when the Saudi intelligence officer listened to the recordings he was so shocked he said: “This one must have taken heroin, only someone who takes who heroin would do this”.’
He also called on Saudi Arabia to identify the actual killer from among the fifteen-man team who had arrived in Istanbul before the murder.
‘There’s no need to distort this issue, they know for certain that the killer, or the killers, is among these fifteen people,’ he said.
President Erdoğan, furthermore, put forward his preferred method of achieving this, ‘Saudi Arabia’s government can disclose this by making these fifteen people talk.’
Inevitably more detail of the assassination was leaked. Turkish newspaper of government record, Sabah, said it had heard the tapes and claimed that Khashoggi’s words at the beginning of torturing him were: ‘I’m suffocating … Take this bag off my head, I’m claustrophobic.’
Donald Trump confirmed that the US had the tape, but expressed little interest in listening to it.
‘We have the tape, I don’t want to hear the tape. There’s no reason for me to hear the tape,’ he said. ‘Because it’s a suffering tape, it’s a terrible tape. I’ve been fully briefed on it, there’s no reason for me to hear it. I was told I really shouldn’t. It was very violent, very vicious and terrible.’
Others did listen to the tape and once again its contents began to leak. It was said that, soon after Khashoggi entered the consulate, he could be heard saying at the beginning of the altercation: ‘Let go of my arm. Who do you think you are? Why are you doing this?’
‘It was premeditated murder,’ Turkey’s foreign minister Mevlut Cavusoglu told Germany’s Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper.
‘It can be heard how the forensics expert instructs the others they should listen to music while he cuts up the body. One notices how he enjoys it. He likes to cut up people. It is disgusting.’
He added that the Saudi Crown Prince ‘said he wanted the journalist silenced’ – over 384 Turkish journalists in gaol or under criminal investigation saw their own reflection – and confirmed that Khashoggi was dead within seven minutes.
President Erdoğan said again that it was clear the murder had been planned and that the order had come from the top level of Saudi authorities. He also said could not think such a thing of King Salman, for whom he has ‘limitless respect’.
On the day of the Khashoggi-sons’ conciliation meeting with King Salman in October, the Turkish head of state had also gone out of his way not to embarrass the head of state of Saudi Arabia, his peer, and instead lauded King Salman’s ‘sincerity’. This was despite the fact that he had billed his speech on the day as the moment he would reveal ‘the naked truth’. Erdoğan’s speech didn’t even confirm the existence of the murder-tapes, whose contents had already been widely leaked by then by Turkish officials.
It had been a diplomatic dance that was plainly aimed at unseating MBS (with whom both Jared Kushner and Donald Trump had exceptionally warm relations) from his all-powerful role in the kingdom, while not blaming Saudi Arabia as a country.
But on 13 November, for the first time, Erdoğan criticised MBS directly: ‘The Crown Prince says “I will clarify the matter, I will do what is necessary”. We are waiting patiently’. ‘It must be revealed who gave them the order to murder.’
Foreign minister Cavusoglu revealed that the Crown Prince has asked to meet President Erdoğan at the forthcoming G20 meeting in Buenos Aires.
‘At the moment there is no reason not to meet with the Crown Prince,’ Mr Cavusoglu snapped. He added that Riyadh had offered to send identikit photos of local helpers who assisted in the cover-up.
‘Why identikit pictures? The Saudis know the names,’ he said. Indeed the names of most of the collaborators had of course already been leaked to the world by the Turkish government.
Others began putting the pressure on, too, for something to give.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo phoned MBS to tell him that the US would ‘hold all of those involved in the killing of Jamal Khashoggi accountable, and that Saudi Arabia must do the same’, while British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt brought the matter up with King Salman during a visit to Saudi Arabia. Saudi prosecutor general Saud al-Mujeb revealed that by now twenty one ‘conspirators’ were in custody – although it was not possible to verify what this meant in actual fact, given the prohibition of a free press in Saudi Arabia.
The prosecutor general now told a rare press conference in Riyadh that killers had set their plans in motion on 29 September, three days before Khashoggi was murdered and the day after he had first visited the kingdom’s consulate in Istanbul. The deputy chief of Saudi Arabia’s intelligence, general Ahmed al-Asiri, gave the order to repatriate Khashoggi, while the head of ‘the negotiating team’ brigadier general Mutreb that flew to the Istanbul consulate had ordered his killing.
‘After surveying the consulate, the head of the negotiation team concluded that it would not be possible to transfer the victim by force to the safe location in case the negotiations with him to return failed,’ the prosecutor said. ‘The head of the negotiation team decided to murder the victim if the negotiations failed.’
Prosecutor general Saud al-Mujeb went on to absolve MBS, insisting that the crown prince had nothing to do with the operational cockup that led to Khashoggi’s death. Everything had been done and dusted at the speed of a Saudi quill, and no wonder that King Salman duly praised the Saudi judiciary for exonerating his son.
However, the game of leaks to the media continued.
The New York Times reported that shortly after the assassination a member of the kill team said, in a hacked phone call – clearly not hacked by The New York Times itself but leaked – to his superior: ‘The deed is done – tell your boss.’ The words were uttered by hit-squad leader Mutreb and it was added that American intelligence officials believe ‘your boss’ was Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
While Mutreb’s former colleague was being slaughtered alive, at least three outside calls were placed by Mutreb and during the last one he said calmly ‘Tell yours, the thing is done, it’s done.’ The word ‘yours’ in Arabic is taken to mean a senior or a boss. In addition to the videotaping of the whole thing so that Riyadh had proof that orders had been carried out correctly, Khashoggi’s fingers would also be delivered as concurrent proof for al-Qhatani’s chief that all had gone well.
While Mutreb’s former colleague Khashoggi was being slaughtered alive, at least three outside calls were placed by Mutreb and during the last one he said calmly.
A Turkish newspaper also published leaked x-ray scans of the team’s luggage, which included walkie-talkies, a signal jammer, electro-shock devices, scalpel blades, staple guns, long scissors and syringes. The bags were not opened due to diplomatic immunity, it said.
On 16 November the Washington Post report that the CIA had concluded that Crown Prince bin Salman ordered the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. It was later leaked that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman sent at least eleven messages to Saud al-Qahtani, who was overseeing the operation, in the hours surrounding the murder. Qahtani was one of the officials who was sacked as part of the investigation by the Saudi public prosecutor and one of seventeen people sanctioned by the US Treasury Department who the US had linked to the killing. Again Saudi officials repeatedly denied that Mohammed bin Salman had any involvement.
Unofficially, a CIA official, however, told the Post: ‘The accepted position is there is no way this happened without his being aware or involved.’
The agency had reached its conclusions after examining multiple sources of intelligence, including a phone call that the prince’s brother, Khalid bin Salman, the Saudi ambassador to the United States, had with Khashoggi.
Khalid tweeted back furiously: ‘I never talked to him by phone and certainly never suggested he go to Turkey for any reason. I ask the US government to release any information regarding this claim.’
Writing in Hurriyet – one of the Turkish newspapers to which Erdoğan’s government preferred to leak – Abdulkadir Selvi also reported leaked information that the CIA had a recording of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman giving instructions to ‘silence Jamal Khashoggi as soon as possible’ as the result of US wiretap. The Crown Prince and his brother Khalid were reportedly heard discussing the ‘discomfort’ created by Khashoggi’s public criticism of the kingdom’s administration.
How a Turkish paper would obtain CIA information was not at all clear, unless the CIA had leaked this titbit as a gesture of the new détente to the Turkish government and as a way to squeeze more money out of Saudi Arabia as Donald Trump had vowed in Mississippi on the day of Khashoggi’s torture and dismemberment.
The Turkish newspaper also raised a new mystery: ‘The hit squad, which was composed of close aides of Crown Prince Mohammed, told Khashoggi to send a message to his son, otherwise he “would be brought to Saudi Arabia.” It suddenly hinted again at what Turkish ultra-nationalist Aydinlik newspaper had leaked in the early days: that Khashoggi was a spy and had brought ‘significant documents’ from Saudi Arabia.
Heightening the mystery, Hurriyet did not spell out what that message might be. Instead it merely stated that Khashoggi heroically rejected it, protecting his son, which ‘led to the quarrel that ended with his killing by strangulation with a rope or plastic bag.’ Completing the picture he had painted, Selvi wrote: ‘The subsequent murder is the ultimate confirmation of this instruction.’
Despite the CIA’s conclusions, President Trump himself refused to accept that the Crown Prince knew anything about the murder. No other president would similarly question his own government intelligence, but Donald Trump’s presidency had started to depend on habitually undercutting executive parts of his administration.
‘He told me he had nothing to do with it,’ Trump argued with an eye on the long game of discrediting national security institutions. ‘He told me that, I would say, maybe five times. He did certainly have people that were reasonably close to him and close to him that were probably involved.… But at the same time we do have an ally and I want to stick with an ally that in many ways has been very good.’
However, it was clear that, if the operation was sanctions by the Saudi government, MBS must have known about it. A western diplomat in Riyadh told the Sunday Times: ‘He is the only real centre of power in the kingdom. There’s no one that is seriously challenging him. And that also means there is no one else that could have ordered the murder.’
The US grew anxious about the growing gulf between Turkey and Saudi Arabia, both important allies. It floated the rumour via the foreign press on 15 November that it was examining ways to expel Turkish cleric Fethullah Gülen, who Ankara says was behind a failed coup two years earlier, if Turkey toned down its criticism of the Saudi Crown Prince.
Throwing Gülen under the bus was the kind of proposal a reality show host might have come up with. The very last thing Turkey wanted was to have in its own backyard a widely-revered martyr who had triggered a recent coup. It would spell civil war. Holed up where he currently was in Pennsylvania, Gülen had become the Turkish poster child of US involvement in the coup. Erdoğan instantly squashed this cheap Big-Brother turn on the day.
Mourners gathered in mosques in Mecca and Istanbul though still no body had been produced and there was nothing to bury.
The mystery concerning its whereabouts deepened when this time one of Turkey’s most senior politicians, defence minister Hulusi Akar, took up the matter and speculated that the killers may have taken the body parts out of Turkey.
‘One probability is that they left the country three to four hours after committing the murder. They may have taken out Khashoggi’s dismembered corpse inside luggage without facing problems due to their diplomatic immunity,’ he said. If that is what Turkey knew for a fact, Akar came within an inch of telling Saudi Arabia what other information would be leaked in the future.
While the CIA said that MBS was behind the murder of Khashoggi, President Trump maintained that the jury was still out.
‘Our intelligence agencies continue to assess all information, but it could very well be that the Crown Prince had knowledge of this tragic event,’ he said. In a sly sideways move (perhaps in a stroke of Brunson’s ‘superhuman intelligence’) he equivocated not on the facts known to the CIA, but rather on their sum total. He doubted whether these facts merited the CIA’s conclusion beyond reasonable doubt: ‘Maybe he did and maybe he didn’t!… We may never know all of the facts.’
Having given his piece, Trump agreed to meet MBS at the upcoming G20 meeting in Buenos Aires, a city overlooked by a Trump hotel in Punta del Este. He was duly praised by MBS’s friends in the Gulf States for his loyalty to the Crown Prince.
However, two senior senators again wielded the Global Magnitsky Act in an attempt to order the president to determine whether the prince was involved in the columnist’s death.
‘In light of recent developments, including the Saudi government’s acknowledgement that Saudi officials killed Mr Khashoggi in its Istanbul consulate, we request that your determination specifically address whether Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is responsible,’ they wrote.
‘I disagree with the president’s assessment. It’s inconsistent… with the intelligence I’ve seen… The intelligence I’ve seen suggests that this was ordered by the Crown Prince,’ Republican senator Mike Lee said on NBC’s Meet the Press. Plainly he felt President Trump’s assertion was at odds with the evidence.
‘It is not in our national security interests to look the other way when it comes to the brutal murder of Mr Jamal Khashoggi,’ Republican senator and former presidential rival Lindsey Graham concurred. ‘Mr Trump has betrayed American values in service to what already was a bad bet on the thirty-three-year-old prince.’
Writing on Twitter, Bob Corker, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee added witheringly: ‘I never thought I’d see the day a White House would moonlight as a public relations firm for the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia.’
While Donald Trump continued to insist that the CIA had not found Prince Mohammed responsible and had come to no conclusion, Jack Reed, the senior Democrat on the senate armed services committee, put it more bluntly and said yes that the President was ‘lying’, foregoing the usual media euphemisms ‘false statements’.
‘The CIA concluded that the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia was directly involved in the assassination of Khashoggi,’ he said. Not only that, Reed added the CIA had ‘high confidence’ in its assessment.
‘It’s based on facts, it’s based on analysis,’ he said. ‘The notion that they didn’t reach a conclusion is just unsubstantiated. The CIA has made that clear.’
The unanimous US senate resolution stated that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was responsible for Khashoggi’s murder and it formally withdrew US support for the Saudi war in Yemen (that MBS had started).
In response to this senate resolution, the Saudi foreign ministry released a statement saying: ‘The recent position of the United States, which has been built on baseless allegations and accusations, includes blatant interference in its internal affairs and the role of the kingdom at the regional and international level. The kingdom has previously asserted that the murder of Saudi citizen Jamal Khashoggi is a deplorable crime that does not reflect the kingdom’s policy, nor its institutions, and reaffirms its rejection of any attempts to take the case out of the path of justice in the kingdom.
‘The kingdom hopes that it is not drawn into domestic political debates in the United States to avoid any ramifications on the ties between the two countries that could have significant negative impacts on this important strategic relationship.’
Though he would have been even more plain if not crude, Vladimir Putin couldn’t have improved upon this statement.
Mevlut Cavusoglu, the Turkish foreign minister, summarised the situation saying that Trump was turning a blind eye to the murder. He then lashed out at the EU’s response, which he complained was no more than ‘cosmetic’. Given Turkey’s own free-press record, he was more used to having to defend himself.
Emboldened by the senate’s accusation of MBS as the assassination’s king pin, Erdoğan said, ‘We have learned this from the audio recordings: of those who arrive, those closest to the Crown Prince played the most active role,’ said President. ‘The perpetrators are clear to me.’
Citing Nikki Haley, outgoing US envoy to the United Nations, taking the same line as the senate, President Erdoğan said, ‘She openly named people’. He couldn’t believe his luck with the democratic US, ‘This shows something. Now, the whole incident is fully resurfacing.’
He added: ‘It’s clear where this business will end up.’ Though it wasn’t entirely clear where ‘where’ was.
It was a small wonder that, two weeks later, government-mouthpiece newspaper Safak would on 31 December 2018 crown President Erdoğan ‘the world’s most prominent leader’ for its Turkish readers.