The last time I spoke with Jamal Khashoggi, in August, he was worried about his life. The Saudi dissident, a fifty-nine-year-old former editor and government adviser, was convinced that the kingdom’s new leadership wanted to kill him. “Of course they’d like to see me out of the picture,” he said. He’d said it to me before, but by then he had been in exile, in Washington, for more than a year, so I thought he was exaggerating the dangers. Maybe not. Khashoggi hasn’t been seen since he went into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, on Tuesday, to get papers verifying his divorce so that he could remarry. His fiancée, who waited outside for eleven hours, said he never emerged.
Five days have passed, with no proof of life, and international human-rights groups now allege that Khashoggi has been abducted. On Sunday, Yasin Aktay, an adviser to Turkish President Tayyip Recep Erdoğan, told Reuters that Turkey believes Khashoggi was murdered in the Saudi consulate, adding that fifteen Saudis were allegedly involved in Khashoggi’s disappearance. Erdoğan told reporters that his government is investigating the event. “Entries and exits into the embassy, airport transits, and all camera records are being looked at and followed,” he told reporters. “We want to swiftly get results.” The U.S. State Department also said it is closely following the case. A Turkish colleague of Khashoggi’s told journalists, on Sunday, that the Turkish government advised him to “make your funeral preparation.” Khashoggi had been killed “in a barbaric way” and then dismembered, Turan Kışlakçı, who heads the Turkish-Arab Media Association, told the Associated Press. Another report claimed that his body had been taken back to Saudi Arabia.
Khashoggi has long been an important voice in the kingdom. I’ve known him for decades. He had been loyal to the royals, and, for many foreign journalists and experts, he was always a good place to start to understand the monarchy’s thinking. Khashoggi served as the editor of the Saudi daily newspaper Al Watan and headed a television station. But he became increasingly critical of the government and, in June, 2017, decided to leave. Even in exile, he still influenced the debate about the kingdom’s future, with almost 1.7 million followers on Twitter, a Global Opinions column in the Washington Post, and regular appearances on international television.
The bizarre mystery surrounding Khashoggi’s disappearance is part of a broader trend since the appointment, in June of last year, of the young Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, who is more commonly known by his initials, M.B.S. The thirty-three-year-old has pledged sweeping reforms, but his rule has been increasingly ruthless, with mass arrests of businessmen, and even other princes, and death sentences meted out, this year, to a women’s-rights activist and also to moderate clerics who have preached against extremism. “Above and beyond the persecution of activists, writers, clerics, scholars, and businessmen inside Saudi, where the Saudis could claim some kind of ‘process,’ the apparent kidnapping of Khashoggi is now a pattern of attacks where the Saudis don’t even make a pretense of legality,” Sarah Leah Whitson, the executive director of Human Rights Watch’s Middle East division, told me on Sunday.
The growing campaign of intimidation, she noted, includes the arrest, in May, of Loujain al-Hathloul, a women’s-rights activist who once ranked third among the Arab world’s hundred most powerful women—even as the kingdom said that it was opening up opportunities for women by allowing them to drive, an issue that Hathloul had championed. Another is what Whitson called the “goonish assault” on Ghanem al-Dosari, who is famed for his satirical YouTube videos criticizing the Saudi royal family, by Saudi agents in London. Three Saudi princes have been abducted since King Salman, M.B.S.’s father, became king, in 2015, the BBC reported. Taken together, Whitson said, all of these acts “reflect the brazen, crude, Qaddafi-like nature of the Saudi crown prince, and, above all, his message to Saudis inside and outside the country: you better shut up. You are not safe. There is no law that can protect you.”
In an interview with Bloomberg this past Wednesday, the crown prince dismissed reports of Khashoggi’s abduction as unfounded “rumors,” and vowed to probe the case alongside Turkish authorities. “My understanding is he entered and he got out after a few minutes or one hour. I’m not sure,” M.B.S. said. “We are ready to welcome the Turkish government to go and search our premises. The premises are sovereign territory, but we will allow them to enter and search and do whatever they want to do. We have nothing to hide.”
On Saturday, four days after Khashoggi’s disappearance, the Saudi consul-general in Istanbul, Mohammed al-Otaibi, took Reuters journalists on a tour of the six-story consulate, opening cupboards and doors to prove that Khashoggi was not there. On Sunday, I e-mailed Adel al-Jubeir, the Saudi foreign minister (and a former neighbor of mine, when he lived in Washington as a young diplomat), asking about Khashoggi’s status. He did not reply.
But experts on Saudi Arabia suspect a more ominous pattern. “The crocodile tears of the crown prince and other Saudi officials are probably for deception and prevarication,” Bruce Riedel, a former C.I.A., Pentagon, and National Security Council staffer who is now at the Brookings Institution, told me. “The disappearance of Jamal fits with a pattern of crude intimidation and the silencing of criticism and dissent.”
In words that now haunt his own case, Khashoggi told me, in August, that the crown prince has “no tolerance or willingness to accommodate critics.” Although he is technically next in line to the throne, M.B.S. acts as the country’s de-facto leader, Khashoggi said, and has already become more autocratic than any of the previous six kings who have ruled since the death of Ibn Saud, the founder of modern Saudi Arabia, in 1953.
When we spoke last November, Khashoggi compared the Saudi monarchy to the Iranian theocracy. “M.B.S. is now becoming the supreme leader,” he said, a reference to Iran’s top authority, who has veto power over every branch of the government. Since his father became king, in 2015, M.B.S. has consolidated his hold on the five major sectors of power, serving as minister of defense, head of a new economic council, and chief of the royal court. “He is very autocratic and totally illiberal,” Khashoggi told me in August. “I worked for the government for four or five years. I never thought I’d be arrested, but then I thought I might. That’s why I left.” Khashoggi’s status became ever more precarious as his critiques of the monarchy sharpened in recent months.
In a statement on Sunday, the Washington Post called Khashoggi a “committed, courageous journalist.” Fred Hiatt, the Post’s editorial-page editor, said, “He writes out of a sense of love for his country and deep faith in human dignity and freedom. We have been enormously proud to publish his writing.” Hiatt called reports of Khashoggi’s murder “a monstrous and unfathomable act.”
Amnesty International called reports of Khashoggi’s assassination “an abysmal new low. Such an assassination within the grounds of the consulate, which is territory under Saudi Arabian jurisdiction, would amount to an extrajudicial execution. This case sends a shockwave among Saudi Arabian human rights defenders and dissidents everywhere, eroding any notion of seeking safe haven abroad.”
In one of his early columns for the Post, in September, 2017, Khashoggi said it had taken a long time for him to reach the point of challenging his own government. “It was painful for me several years ago when several friends were arrested. I said nothing. I didn’t want to lose my job or my freedom. I worried about my family,” he wrote. “I have made a different choice now. I have left my home, my family and my job, and I am raising my voice. To do otherwise would betray those who languish in prison. I can speak when so many cannot. I want you to know that Saudi Arabia has not always been as it is now. We Saudis deserve better.”
They certainly do.
