Without Trump’s protection, will the Saudis finally face the consequences of Jamal Khashoggi murder?
Walking into the Saudi consulate where he would meet his horrific end, Jamal Khashoggi knew he was in danger. So why did he do it? The full nightmarish picture has begun to emerge.
The Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi was smiling as he made his way towards his country’s consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, on the afternoon of October 2, 2018. He was happy. He was in love. He was planning a wedding. Khashoggi, 59, and his Turkish fiancee, Hatice Cengiz, were looking forward to shopping that afternoon to furnish a new flat in which they would begin their life together. They planned to buy food for their wedding party, too, and Khashoggi wanted to find a dinner jacket.
“We felt blessed and happy,” Cengiz, 40, tells me over the phone from Istanbul. “Everyone has a right to feel like that once in their life.” Khashoggi, who was divorced, had gone to the consulate to pick up a document that would prove he was free to wed. “It was an overcast day,” she recalls. “Then I saw a bit of sunshine and I thought to myself, ‘Sunny days are just ahead of you,’ as I was waiting for him to come out of that building.” He never did.
The smile would not have lingered long on Khashoggi’s face when he saw who was there to meet him inside the consulate – a 15-member hit squad of Saudi government agents who had flown in from Riyadh the previous day on two Gulfstream jets, some of them on diplomatic passports. After they suffocated their victim, a government physician dismembered him with a bone saw in the consulate “media room”. His remains have never been found. “I still can’t believe it’s happened, that he’s really gone. I’m still trying to grasp the reality,” Cengiz says.
It was a horrific crime, but Saudi Arabia and the senior officials who ordered the killing have yet to be held to account for it. Khashoggi had fallen out with his country’s rulers in 2017, critical of the war they were waging in Yemen and disillusioned with their empty promises about democratising the kingdom. He had moved to Washington, where he wrote for The Washington Post. In his first column he said he had fled because he feared being arrested in a crackdown on dissent that was being overseen by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, or “MBS”, Saudi Arabia’s 35-year-old de facto ruler.
Khashoggi had met Cengiz, an academic, at aconference on the Middle East in Istanbul, and returned there to propose to her. He knew there were dangers, but not in his worst nightmares could he have imagined he would end up being dismembered there on the Saudi consul’s conference table. His gruesome fate might never have come to light were the Turks not eavesdropping on the consulate: a bug in the media room recorded every horrifying detail of the killing, from Khashoggi’s grunts and pleas as he was smothered to his last words – “I can’t breathe” – and the sound of the bone saw cutting him up after he died. Turkey released the harrowing transcript to western intelligence agencies. Parts of it eventually appeared in the press.
The murder provoked international uproar, but little in the way of action. In November 2018 the CIA reported that MBS had ordered the killing as part of his crackdown on dissent. Yet Donald Trump, a key ally of the crown prince, seemed eager to excuse him, claiming (wrongly) that the CIA had never reached any conclusion. In June 2019 the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights issued a report holding Saudi Arabia responsible for the “premeditated extrajudicial execution”. The UN rapporteur for extrajudicial killings, Agnès Callamard, recommended that MBS – who since 2015 has been steadily consolidating his power – be investigated. Her suggestion has been ignored.
That may be about to change. While the US stayed on close terms with the Saudis under Trump, new president Joe Biden has promised a reappraisal of relations with the kingdom. A film about the murder, by US director Bryan Fogel – the film-maker who exposed Russia’s secret sports doping program in the Oscar-winning documentary Icarus – is sure to reignite public outrage. The Dissident reveals stomach-turning details about the execution as well as what may have led to it.
Mercifully the film does not play the full audio of the killing. But it does include hitherto unseen police footage showing trails of Khashoggi’s blood snaking in all directions across the media room floor. And Turkey’s chief prosecutor, Irfan Fidan, reveals that it took more than seven minutes for Khashoggi to die – suffocated, possibly with a plastic bag over his head. Later, in a sequence befitting some cheap horror script, Fidan states that the Saudi consulate ordered 32kg of meat from a well-known Istanbul restaurant in order to “mask the smell of a burning corpse” in the tandoori oven at the consul’s nearby residence.
Cengiz, who appears in the film, is hoping that those responsible will one day face justice. “Nothing can bring back Jamal. But I’m waiting for the UK and other countries to do something to show these people that you can’t just kill someone like that without there being repercussions,” she says.
Khashoggi knew that going to the consulate was risky. Tales abound of critics of the regime disappearing without trace, or being kidnapped abroad. One famous victim was Prince Sultan bin Turki, a grandson of King Abdulaziz Ibn Saud, the country’s founder, who fell out with his royal relations over their corruption. He was drugged and secretly flown out of Switzerland in 2003 to Saudi Arabia, where he spent years under house arrest.
Khashoggi took the risk because he needed that document to move on with his life. He had visited the consulate, unannounced, a few days previously to set the process in motion. To his relief it went well. “He was really worried that first time,” Cengiz recalls. “I could see it on his face. ‘It’s possible they’ll interrogate me,’ he said. He thought he could be detained, that they could confiscate his passport. But he never said the word ‘murder’. They wouldn’t dare.” Not only did the first visit go well, Khashoggi had enjoyed it. “It was a very warm reception,” says Cengiz. “They gave him coffee, tea, he was really happy when he came out, saying all his fears were unfounded. They were, after all, his people. And he missed his country a lot. He had enjoyed talking to them.”
As soon as he left the building, though, the consul made a phone call to Riyadh. Turkish transcripts showed that the Saudis could not believe their luck: Khashoggi had agreed to return in four days to pick up his paperwork. It gave them ample time to hatch a plan to deal with the “traitor”.
According to friends, Khashoggi’s flight into exile in September 2017, after falling out of favour with the regime, was considered a betrayal because of his family’s roots in the royal court and knowledge of its inner workings. Jamal’s grandfather had been a personal physician to King Ibn Saud. He was a nephew of the high-profile arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi and a first cousin of Dodi Fayed, the boyfriend of Diana, Princess of Wales. He had once served as an adviser to Prince Turki al-Faisal, the former Saudi intelligence chief.
Despite having become a critic of the regime and a champion of free expression, Khashoggi had an insider status that made other exiles wary of befriending him when he arrived in the US; by the time he met Cengiz in Istanbul in May 2018, friends say he was feeling isolated and worried that leaving Saudi Arabia had been a mistake.
Cengiz had asked him for an interview after participating in a panel discussion with him. She was “a wide-eyed researcher”, she says. “When we met I thought how lonely he looked. I had no idea this would be the start of a romantic relationship.” She had grown up in a conservative middle-class family, and had done two years of Arabic studies in Egypt and a stint in Oman researching for a master’s thesis. She never published her interview, but they began corresponding by email. Khashoggi was going through a wrenching break-up with his home country after long being a supporter of the Saudi monarchy; he was appalled by the imprisonment of many of his friends. Cengiz was impressed by his determination to raise his voice on their behalf. “He was very courageous,” she says.
Two months later he returned to Istanbul and proposed. Her father was concerned about the 19-year age gap, but did not object. Khashoggi bought a flat in the city; they slept there together for the first time on the night before he was murdered. “We had a great time in the morning. I was talking about food for the wedding, the cake. I wanted everything to be amazing,” she says.
They planned to marry that week if Khashoggi managed to get the document. They took a taxi to the consulate. “Wait here, I’ll be out soon,” he told Cengiz, handing her his two mobile phones – phones were not permitted inside the building. CCTV footage shows him being welcomed in at 1.14pm. “He was smiling,” she recalls. The double door was closed swiftly behind him.
The Turkish transcript appears to show beyond doubt a premeditated assassination: “Has the sacrificial victim arrived?” one of the visitors from Riyadh is heard asking. “Yes,” someone answers. “Thank God,” comes the reply.
What follows is excruciating: the consul confronts Khashoggi, demanding that he send his family a dictated text. He refuses. “Don’t do this,” Khashoggi can be heard shouting as his killers grab hold of him. He asks if they intend to anaesthetise him. Instead they begin to smother him, apparently placing a bag over his head. He gasps, complaining he has asthma, pleading for them to stop. When he is dead, one of the killers shouts, “Clothes, clothes!” apparently ordering them to be removed. They were given to a decoy to wear – he was recorded on CCTV leaving the consulate by the back door, in an attempt to make Turkish police think Khashoggi had left the building.
Then Salah Mohammed Abdah Tubaigy, a forensic doctor specialising in autopsies – one of the 15 officials who had flown in to carry out the killing – is heard discussing the size of the body parts as he dissects them with a bone saw. The hands and head may have ended up in the “diplomatic pouch” sent back to Riyadh the next day as proof of identity, according to Turkish police. They have airport security footage of Saudi officials carrying a diplomatic bag weighing roughly the same as an average human head and hands.
There is, apparently, a long gap in the transcript after the dismemberment begins. This has prompted speculation that Turkey may be holding back crucial evidence as leverage against Saudi Arabia: did senior officials dial in from Riyadh to watch the dismemberment? Among those present was Maher Abdulaziz Mutreb, a close aide to MBS. According to the transcripts he made multiple calls during the ordeal, possibly to royal adviser Saud bin Abdullah al-Qahtani, who was suspected of overseeing clandestine operations against dissidents; and possibly to MBS himself. In the audio Mutreb, well known in diplomatic circles, can be heard leaving a chilling message: “Tell yours: the thing is done. It’s done.”
By the time the consulate closed at 3.30pm, Khashoggi still had not come out and Cengiz was worried. She called one of his friends, an adviser to Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish president. Khashoggi had told her to do this in case of an emergency. At 1am she was still outside the consulate waiting for news, and returned later that morning when she still had heard nothing.
Turkish police were not taken in by the decoy – they had found Khashoggi’s clothes dumped in a public lavatory down the road from the consulate. They insisted he had not left the building. Even so, Cengiz could not bring herself to believe that he might be dead. Even when, two days later, Turkey said it had evidence that Khashoggi had been killed in the consulate, Cengiz found it hard to imagine. “It never crossed my mind that they could kill someone in the consulate. And I thought that the people who believed this were being ridiculous. I didn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe it.”
She was not the only one. A Turkish press adviser to Erdogan says he had trouble leaking the news because nobody would believe it; it was too “outlandish” a story. For more than two weeks Saudi Arabia denied any knowledge of the journalist’s fate. The crown prince claimed Khashoggi had left the consulate “after a few minutes or one hour”, adding: “We have nothing to hide.” Then, in a bizarre sequence of contradictory claims, the Saudis announced variously that Khashoggi had accidentally suffocated, died in a fistfight or had been administered a drug that had a negative effect. Only much later would they admit to an intentional killing, but claimed it was carried out by a “rogue team” without state backing. MBS eventually accepted “responsibility” for the murder, with the proviso that this was because it had happened on his watch and “it was committed by individuals working for the Saudi government”.
In December 2019 Saudi state TV reported that al-Qahtani, the royal adviser, had been investigated for his role in the murder but was cleared of any charges as there was no proof. According to the CIA he had exchanged 11 messages with MBS in the hours immediately before and after the killing. Eight other unidentified suspects have been jailed by Saudi Arabia in what was described by the UN rapporteur Callamard as “a parody of justice” that spared “high-level” plotters.
Turkey, for its part, is trying several Saudi officials in absentia for the killing, including al‑Qahtani. Turkish police have concluded the remains will never be found. After the killing they were taken in bags down the road to the consul’s residence, police believe. CCTV footage shows a man carrying what looks like rubbish bags into the house. After two weeks the police finally were allowed to inspect the scene of the crime as well as the consul’s residence. There they found a sunken tandoori oven where they believe most of the body was incinerated. “The blaze would have destroyed any DNA,” a Turkish police officer says in the film. This appeared to confirm a story that had appeared in a Turkish newspaper two weeks after the killing. It quoted a neighbour describing the aroma of “a barbecue party” in the consul’s garden on the night of the murder. The neighbour thought it odd – it was the first time the consul had held a barbecue.
What sort of regime commits such atrocities? Human rights activists say that while allowing some social liberties, the monarchy is crushing political dissent more harshly than ever, with arrests and executions rising sharply in recent years.
Omar Abdulaziz al-Zahrani, a fellow dissident in exile, says Khashoggi was too trusting of the Saudis. What makes it worse for al-Zahrani, who lives in Canada, is that he thinks he may have been partly responsible. He and Khashoggi were setting up an opposition newspaper and website dedicated to political prisoners. Khashoggi was also helping to finance a more risky scheme: he had sent $5000 to al-Zahrani to help undermine the government on Twitter – the idea was to buy SIM cards for exiles, who could then tweet under multiple identities to create an anti-government “swarm”. This, al-Zahrani says, was in response to Saudi government-run “internet farms” that churn out tweets day and night praising MBS and cursing his opponents. “MBS is obsessed with Twitter, he uses it to control the local narrative,” al-Zahrani says from Montreal. He later discovered that his phone, and that of Khashoggi, had been hacked by the regime.
By giving money to the opposition, Khashoggi, in the eyes of the regime, was no longer just a critic, he was a dangerous rebel. Al-Zahrani, 30, who broadcasts opposition videos on social media, believes he is lucky to have escaped the same fate as Khashoggi. He described how, in May 2018, two royal aides arrived in Canada with a message from the crown prince. In a series of meetings in public places they urged him to stop his activism and return home. They wanted him to come to the Saudi consulate to renew his passport. Al-Zahrani called Khashoggi for advice. “He warned me not to go, fearing it was a trap – so I didn’t,” he says. He will always be baffled why his friend fell into the same deception. Al-Zahrani had another narrow escape a few days after Khashoggi’s murder: an anonymous caller warned him his life was in danger and urged him to flee. He quickly moved into a hotel and later heard that a large group of Saudis had been denied entry to Canada on suspicion of being a “hit squad” targeting exiles.
Al-Zahrani hopes President Biden will help to hold Saudi Arabia to account. Biden has vowed to take away what he refers to as the “dangerous blank cheque” that Trump had allowed MBS. His administration plans to declassify the US intelligence report into the murder, which could pave the way to the Americans officially blaming MBS. According to al-Zahrani, “MBS is scared now... Trump’s no longer there to save his arse.”
Fogel, the documentary-maker, was appalled by the way the US and others turned a blind eye to Khashoggi’s murder. “I was confronted with this staggering amount of evidence,” he says, “and not a single nation willing to stand up to the money behind this absolute monarchy.” The director has experienced first-hand how the West puts business above ethics – he decries the “cowardice” of some big companies that he claims refused to distribute his film for fear of annoying the Saudis.
In his last Washington Post column, submitted by his translator the day after he went missing, Khashoggi mentioned fellow Saudi writer Saleh al-Shehi, who was jailed for “supposed comments contrary to the Saudi establishment” and died in mysterious circumstances last year. Khashoggi warned: “Such actions no longer carry the consequence of a backlash from the international community.” Instead, “condemnation was quickly followed by silence”.
The Dissident is available to stream: visit thedissident.film for details.