Owen Wilson - Khashoggi and the Crown Prince: The Secret Files. What Did Khashoggi Know?

http://www.gibsonsquare.com

Printed ISBN: 9781783340699

Ebook ISBN: 9781783340705

E-book production made by Booqla

Published by Gibson Square

Copyright 2019 by Gibson Square

Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia or, more popularly, MBS, used to be of interest only to dedicated Kingdom watchers. He had only popped on the global-news radar a few of times since his appointment on 21 June 2017 once for imprisoning his relatives in a five-star hotel for a shake-down to fill the royal coffers, and another time for kidnapping the Lebanese Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri and having him beaten. He seemed a colourful, feisty character who didnt hesitate to pick on people his own size. And then he was also in the news for glad-handing Silicon-valley moguls keen to associate with him.

Yet this relatively low-key profile changed abruptly in the first week of October 2018 when he suddenly had the international-media spell-bound following a continuous news murder-mystery akin to the dramatic hunt for Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi. Astonishingly, it was his fellow Sunni-Muslim leader, the Turkish President Recep Erdoan, who launched the opening shot on 6 October. On that day Turkish officials leaked to the press a blunt statement that a Saudi commoner had been murdered on 2 October in the Saudi Embassy in Istanbul. The news ran as a thunder bolt through the global media.

On that day, Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi national resident in the US in his early sixties, had flown into Istanbul from London where he had attended a conference and had dinner in a restaurant (just around the corner from where I live) in order to obtain a marriage license in the Saudi-Arabian consulate in Istanbul.

Although a commoner and not a royal, Khashoggi belonged to the highest echelons of the Saudi elite that surrounded and served the Saudi royal family. He had started his career as a bookseller and journalist, but by birth he was closely related to the pre-eminent Saudi arms dealer and billionaire Adnan Khashoggi, while Jamals grandfather was the private physician to the first King Saud. He was also related to billionaire and former Harrods owner Mohammed al-Fayed son Dodi, who died with Princess Diana in Paris.

Even more significantly, Khashoggi, had been advisor to Prince Turki al-Faisal when he was Saudi Ambassador to the United Kingdom, 2003-5, and to the United States, 2005-7. They had had a long working relationship on Saudi secrets well before that. During Prince Turkis uninterrupted 22-year reign as head of Saudi intelligence they had worked closely together. While Khashoggis uncle Adnan sold guns to the Afghans (doubtless paid for by the Saudis and Americans) to fight Soviet Russia, Khashoggi himself had been the secret Saudi liaison to Osama bin Laden then still the good guy fighting Russia and not the founder of al-Qaeda.

On 2 October Khashoggis fiance had alerted Washington Post Istanbul bureau chief Kareem Fahim that Khashoggi had mysteriously disappeared after visiting the Saudi embassy in Istanbul, who duly posted an item on his blog from London.

It wasnt much of a news story yet and no one paid much attention. But the allegation that Saudi Arabias de facto leader Prince bin Salman known to the security agencies as MBS had sent a hit squad to Turkey to dispose of a member of the Saudi secret-intelligence community instantly circulated among se services around the world. Clearly, the CIA, MI6, and the security services of Turkey and Saudi Arabia not to mention Russias FSB and GRU, Mossad, Frances Deuxime Bureau, Germanys BND and the intelligence services of other countries that sold arms to Saudi Arabia took a keen interest and began amassing secret files for their governments.

These top-secret files stayed hermetically shut, however, to prying eyes that might cause unwanted turbulence by casting light on the facts of the mater. Only highly specialised intelligence branches of government have the capability to piece facts together and the experts are bound to complete secrecy by government contracts and criminal law, if not professional pride alone. Many of the ways of gathering this intelligence would be considered illegal in any case. Unless a government had a particular agenda it wanted to achieve, the information in these files would remain under lock and key.

There was no chance that the media would find out more either on its own as it had in the cases of the excruciating deaths of Alexander Litvinenko from Polonium 210 poisoning in 2006 or Dawn Sturgesss after the poisoning of Sergei Skripal with a top-secret Soviet nerve agent in 2018.

Turkey and, even more so, Saudi Arabia are hermetically shut to a free press trying to dig around sensitive subjects. Both countries like Russia or China, or, for that matter, the worlds other authoritarian regimes have draconic ways of deterring infractions whether by a journalist or not by those who show too much interest in matters that might compromise the state.

Without a free press being able to do their own investigation, Khashoggis enigmatic disappearance would soon be filed away as a loose end rather than a red-hot developing news story. Indeed, given Khashoggis measure of criticism of Saudi Arabia in his writings and his last sighting at the Saudi consulate, all that could be said, in the absence of hard facts about the disappearance, was that that this mystery looked like yet another instance of the suppression of dissent by a totalitarian regime.

Yet 4 days after Khashoggis disappearance, instead of vanishing into a news fog, something remarkable happened to the story.

After initially seeming as bemused as anyone, it was the Turkish government that suddenly lit the blue touch paper on 6 October when the two officials leaked their blunt message to the Washington Post that Mr Khashoggi has been killed at the consulate, and, just to twist the knife, the anonymous officials added We believe that the murder was premeditated and the body was subsequently moved out of the consulate.

The accusation of premeditated immediately brought Khashoggi and the Crown Prince to the attention of the world. Particularly as the day after the alleged death of Khashoggi, no less a person than the Crown Prince himself had protested innocence of Khashoggis whereabouts. We have nothing to hide he had said in a Bloomberg blog interview on the evening of 3 October.

Not known for their love of the free media, the Turkish government subsequently started to leak a steady and grisly stream of detailed information about the events in the Saudi consulate. These nuggets of information started to shape a new reputation of the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia as a ghoulish potentate in the mould of Vladimir Putin, Saddam Hussain, the Assads.

Fanning the flames further, President Erdoan signalled in a number of personal statements that he would not stop until he had achieved his objective whatever that was exactly. Erdoan (despite his own gloves-off vendetta against over-inquisitive journalists), for example, wrote an opinion piece in the Washington Post on the matter, and called the murder savage and planned in press conferences. The kingdom still pretended it had no idea what had happened to Khashoggi, but the Turkish drip feed would prove irresistible to keep MBS and Khashoggis assassination in the spotlight.

In the age of blogs, tweets, Wikileaks and online diplomacy, it was now in the interests of all nations involved strategically to assess, like Turkey had, whether to leak their own information where this made sense for political and commercial gain.