Jamal Khashoggi’s Murder Haunts Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince
The cold-blooded killing of Khashoggi, a journalist and Saudi critic, has intensified doubts in Congress about Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman.
Photograph by Bulent Kilic / AFP / Getty
Twelve minutes before Jamal Khashoggi arrived at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, a year ago today, two men in a fifteen-member government hit squad discussed the mechanics of dismembering a body.
“Is it possible to put the body in a bag?” Maher Mutreb, an intelligence aide to a senior adviser of the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, asked the others.
“No. Too heavy, very tall, too,” Salah al-Tubaigy, a forensic chief at the Saudi Interior Ministry, replied. “Actually, I’ve always worked on cadavers. I know how to cut very well. I have never worked on a warm body though, but I’ll also manage that easily. I normally put on my earphones and listen to music when I cut cadavers. In the meantime, I sip on my coffee and smoke. After I dismember it, you will wrap the parts into plastic bags, put them in suitcases and take them out.”
A few minutes later, according to an audio recording made by Turkish intelligence, Mutreb asked if the “animal to be sacrificed” had shown up. He had. Khashoggi, a Saudi exile who criticized the kingdom’s crown prince in his columns for the Washington Post, had come to visit the consul-general and get papers that he needed to marry his Turkish fiancée. He was instead escorted into a side room, informed that he was being whisked off to Saudi Arabia, and ordered to e-mail his son, telling him not to worry if he couldn’t reach his father. Khashoggi refused.“If you don’t help us, you know what will happen eventually,” Mutreb told him.
“There is a towel there,” Khashoggi said. “Will you have me drugged?”
“We will put you to sleep,” Tubaigy replied.
As he was being drugged, Khashoggi pleaded, “Do not keep my mouth closed. I have asthma. You will suffocate me.” They were his last words, according to a transcript of the recording released last month by Sabah, a Turkish newspaper.
The audio indicates that Khashoggi struggled as a plastic bag was put over his head. Members of the hit squad barked orders, in Arabic. “He’s raising his head.” “Keep pushing.”
Twenty-five minutes after Khashoggi arrived at the consulate, as his fiancée waited for him outside, Tubaigy turned on his cadaver saw. The dismemberment of Khashoggi’s body took thirty minutes, according to two Sabah journalists who chronicled the grisly execution in their book, “Diplomatic Atrocity: The Dark Secrets of the Jamal Khashoggi Murder.” They reported that his body was taken out of the building in five suitcases.
A year later, the body still has not been recovered. Nor has justice been served. After a growing global outcry, eleven Saudis were charged; five face the death penalty. But the kingdom has never published their names. The trial in Saudi Arabia is not open to the public or the press. Saud al-Qahtani, the crown prince’s right-hand man and the alleged mastermind of the murder, was not charged. He was fired—or so the crown prince’s government claimed—but he has otherwise disappeared. The kingdom refused to coöperate with a six-month United Nations investigation of the case, led by Agnès Callamard, of France. Despite the conclusion by the C.I.A. that bin Salman had a role in the murder, the crown prince still has the full support of the Trump Administration and a host of foreign leaders, from Russia to Japan, as he continues to consolidate the powers of the Saudi state, military, intelligence agencies, economy, and royal court.
In recent interviews, the crown prince has issued a buck-stops-here kind of mea culpa for the murder, while still denying that he had any advance knowledge or other role in it. Asked if he ordered the hit, he told CBS’s “60 Minutes,” “Absolutely not. This was a heinous crime. But I take full responsibility as a leader in Saudi Arabia, especially since it was committed by individuals working for the Saudi government. And I must take all actions to avoid such a thing in the future.”
The crown prince’s denial was dismissed by human-rights groups and many who track the kingdom. “Let’s assume it was a rogue operation. He has all the rogues. And they know where the body is,” Bruce Riedel, a former C.I.A. analyst and the author of “Kings and Presidents: Saudi Arabia and the United States since FDR,” told me. “He lied—straight-faced.” Human Rights Watch said that, instead of providing transparency in the crime or the judicial process, “Saudi authorities are doubling down on repression and continuing to silence independent Saudi voices that Khashoggi sought to defend.”
The U.N. report, issued in June, called the extrajudicial execution “an international crime” over which “other States should claim universal jurisdiction”— potentially taking the case beyond Saudi Arabia and the eleven men who have currently been charged. The report concluded that “every expert consulted finds it inconceivable that an operation of this scale could be implemented without the Crown Prince being aware, at a minimum, that some sort of mission of a criminal nature, directed at Mr. Khashoggi, was being launched.”
Yet Khashoggi’s execution has taken a toll on the ambitious crown prince, who recently turned thirty-four. “Jamal did not die in vain,” Riedel said. “His ghost haunts the royal palace.” This week, memorial vigils are being held near Saudi diplomatic posts around the world, from Washington and London to Istanbul. Social media has been abuzz with reminders of the murder and memories of Khashoggi, who had evolved from a government spokesman into the most prominent critic of the crown prince. At a conference in London last December, Callamard, the U.N. rapporteur, reflected, “The fact that the killing of Jamal Khashoggi is still making the news, that needs to continue, because that’s what is going to annoy the hell out of them and be the mosquito in the tent that they can’t ever get rid of.”
In the past year, Saudi Arabia’s image has suffered, at a moment when the kingdom needs allies to sell it arms and investors to modernize its oil-centric economy. Bin Salman’s “Vision 2030” plan, which calls for the creation of new robot-run cities and industries, does not yet have the necessary funds. Among the kingdom’s illusions are plans, announced last month, to convert one of the hottest and most desolate terrains on earth into one of the world’s top-five tourist attractions. The crown prince’s plan to generate cash by launching an I.P.O. for Aramco, the world’s largest oil company, has been repeatedly delayed. Meanwhile, despite its oil resources, Saudi Arabia faces high youth unemployment, the very condition that has fuelled extremism across the Middle East.
Riedel told me that Khashoggi’s murder may have cost the kingdom most in Washington. “For seventy-five years, the Saudis did everything they could to maintain bipartisan support in Washington—and now they’ve lost that,” he said. “The crown prince has lost not only the Democrats but also a significant number of Republicans.”
Khashoggi’s cold-blooded killing and the kingdom’s troubled war in Yemen have intensified doubts in Congress about Saudi Arabia. An attack last month on two Saudi oil installations, which temporarily crippled half the country’s petroleum production, did little to generate sympathy, even after the United States and Europe blamed Iran for the nighttime air strikes. After a trip to the kingdom last month, Senator Todd Young, an Indiana Republican, said, “Saudi Arabia is an important strategic partner, but not one we will support at any cost.” He and Senator Angus King, an Independent of Maine, met with the young Saudi leader. “As we told the Crown Prince, public actions, not private assurances, will show that the Saudi Arabia is interested in seriously addressing the trust deficit between the Kingdom and the United States Congress,” King said, in a statement.
The Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, chastised President Trump for fawning over the crown prince. “They’re sitting across from the person who chopped up a reporter and dissolved his remains in chemicals,” she said. “I don’t see any responsibility for us to protect and defend Saudi Arabia.”
In the traumatic last seconds of his life, Khashoggi probably never imagined the rippling impact that his death would have across the globe. Whatever else the crown prince does in the decades ahead, the murder of his most articulate critic will forever define his legacy—with lingering impact on his kingdom, too.