Assassination of Jamal Khashoggi

Based on Wikipedia: Assassination of Jamal Khashoggi

The Saudi consulate in Istanbul had been bugged. Turkish intelligence knew this. The Saudis, apparently, did not. So when Jamal Khashoggi walked through the consulate's front door on October 2nd, 2018, seeking paperwork for his upcoming wedding, his final moments were captured in exquisite, horrifying detail.

What the recordings revealed was the premeditated murder of a journalist by his own government—carried out on foreign soil, inside an embassy, by a fifteen-person team that had flown in on private jets just hours earlier.

The body was dismembered. Where the remains ended up, no one has ever publicly confirmed.

The Man They Came to Kill

Jamal Khashoggi was not some fringe provocateur. He had been a consummate Saudi insider—a media advisor to the royal court, editor of major newspapers, general manager of a news channel. He knew the Saudi system intimately because he had helped build it.

That made his transformation all the more threatening.

In June 2017, Khashoggi fled Saudi Arabia and settled in Virginia. By September, he was writing columns for The Washington Post. His criticism was measured but persistent. He questioned Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's consolidation of power. He opposed the Saudi-led war in Yemen. He called for reform.

In his final column, published posthumously, he wrote that "what the Arab world needs most is free expression."

For a regime built on absolute control of information, these were dangerous words from a man with credibility. Unlike anonymous dissidents or foreign critics, Khashoggi could not be easily dismissed. He had been one of them.

The Digital Noose

Before they killed him in person, they surveilled him through his friends.

Omar Abdulaziz was a Saudi dissident blogger living in exile, one of the most visible critics of the regime. He and Khashoggi had been collaborating on projects to counter regime propaganda. They communicated freely, or so they thought.

In the summer of 2018, Abdulaziz's phone was infected with Pegasus—a sophisticated spyware tool made by the Israeli company NSO Group. Pegasus is not your ordinary malware. It can turn a smartphone into a surveillance device without the user ever clicking a suspicious link. It copies messages, records calls, activates cameras. Saudi Arabia had become one of NSO Group's biggest customers.

Through Abdulaziz's compromised phone, the Saudi regime gained what Abdulaziz later described as "a direct line into Khashoggi's private thoughts." They could read every text, hear every conversation.

"Jamal was very polite in public," Abdulaziz recalled. "But in private, he spoke more freely—he was very, very critical of the crown prince."

The regime wasn't just listening. They were also attacking. After Khashoggi began writing for the Post, swarms of pro-regime trolls and bot accounts harassed him on Twitter. The campaign was reportedly orchestrated by Saud al-Qahtani, a royal advisor tasked by bin Salman with crushing dissent on social media.

Qahtani would later be implicated in the murder itself.

The Lure

Throughout 2017, the Saudi government had been urging Khashoggi to return to Riyadh. Come back, they said. Resume your position as a media advisor. All is forgiven.

Khashoggi refused. He suspected it was a trap—that returning meant imprisonment or worse.

But then life intervened in an unexpected way. Khashoggi fell in love.

Hatice Cengiz was Turkish, and to marry her, Khashoggi needed documentation proving his divorce from his first wife, who had remained in Saudi Arabia. He tried to complete the paperwork entirely in the United States, visiting the Saudi embassy in Washington. But the officials there told him he would need to visit the consulate in Istanbul.

On September 28th, 2018, Khashoggi made his first visit to the Istanbul consulate, showing up unannounced. He was nervous. Before going in, he sought assurances from friends about his safety and instructed his fiancée to contact Turkish authorities if he failed to emerge.

To his surprise and relief, the reception was warm. Officials treated him with hospitality. They told him to return on October 2nd to pick up his documents.

"He was very pleased with their nice treatment," Cengiz later said.

It was all theater.

The Team

While Khashoggi was in London on September 29th, speaking at a conference, preparations were underway in Istanbul.

A three-person advance team arrived on a scheduled flight, checked into hotels, and visited the consulate. Another group conducted what Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan later described as a "reconnaissance trip"—traveling to a forest on Istanbul's outskirts and to the nearby city of Yalova.

According to Erdoğan, this is when "a road map" for the killing was finalized in Saudi Arabia.

The night before Khashoggi's scheduled appointment, fifteen operatives flew in from Riyadh on two private Gulfstream jets. Several were later identified as members of bin Salman's personal security detail. One was a forensic doctor who specialized in autopsies.

They brought bone saws.

October 2nd, 2018

Security cameras captured the suspected agents entering the consulate around noon.

Khashoggi arrived about an hour later, accompanied by Cengiz. He handed her his two cell phones—standard protocol when entering a secure facility—and told her to wait outside. She watched him walk through the main entrance at 1:14 in the afternoon.

The consulate's working hours ended at 3:30. By four o'clock, Khashoggi had not emerged.

Cengiz began making calls. She reached Yasin Aktay, an advisor to Erdoğan and a friend of Khashoggi's. He was not coming out, she told him. Something was wrong. The police began an investigation.

The Saudi government claimed Khashoggi had left through a back entrance.

But a security camera at a preschool opposite that rear exit showed no one leaving. The camera at the front entrance showed Khashoggi going in.

He was never shown coming out.

The Audio

Because Turkish intelligence had bugged the consulate, the world eventually learned what happened inside.

Khashoggi was ambushed. He was strangled. His body was dismembered.

The audio recordings—and transcripts that were later made public—revealed a killing carried out with efficiency and apparent premeditation. This was not a confrontation that spiraled out of control. A forensic doctor does not travel internationally with bone saws for contingency purposes.

The existence of these recordings would prove crucial to the investigation. Without them, the Saudi government's shifting cover stories might have held.

The Cover-Up Collapses

For weeks, Saudi Arabia denied any involvement. Khashoggi left the consulate alive, they insisted. We don't know what happened to him.

But the story kept falling apart.

By October 16th, separate investigations by Turkish officials and The New York Times had concluded that the murder was premeditated and that members of the hit team were closely connected to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

The Saudi account shifted repeatedly. First, nothing happened. Then, there was a fight. Then, it was an accident. Finally, on October 25th, the government admitted Khashoggi had been killed in a premeditated murder—while still denying that bin Salman had ordered it.

The New York Times later reported that Saudi Arabia engaged in "an extensive effort to cover up the killing, including destroying evidence."

Bin Salman himself addressed the killing publicly, saying he accepted responsibility "because it happened under my watch"—a careful formulation that acknowledged oversight failure without admitting culpability.

"I did not order it," he maintained.

The American Failure

Here is where the story takes an uncomfortable turn for the United States.

Khashoggi was not just any journalist. He was a legal resident of the United States. He had obtained what's called an O visa—sometimes known as the "genius visa," reserved for individuals of extraordinary ability. He had bought a home in McLean, Virginia. He had applied for permanent residency. Three of his children were American citizens.

And critically: American intelligence knew he was in danger.

The Washington Post reported that U.S. intelligence had intercepted communications of Saudi officials discussing a plan, ordered by bin Salman, to capture Khashoggi from his Virginia home. Under a directive adopted in 2015, the U.S. intelligence community has what's called a "duty to warn"—an obligation to notify people, including non-citizens, when they face imminent threat of kidnapping or death.

Jamal Khashoggi was never warned.

According to National Security Agency officials, the White House was informed of the threat through official intelligence channels. Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats declined to explain why Khashoggi received no warning. Fifty-five members of Congress demanded answers in a formal letter.

By November, the Central Intelligence Agency concluded what everyone already suspected: Mohammed bin Salman had ordered the murder.

President Donald Trump disputed this assessment. He expressed support for bin Salman and announced that the United States would "remain a steadfast partner of Saudi Arabia to ensure the interests of our country, Israel and all other partners in the region."

The United States imposed sanctions on seventeen Saudis connected to the killing.

Bin Salman himself was not among them.

The Trials

Saudi Arabia conducted its own prosecution—a process that was, in the words of one observer, less a trial than a performance.

Proceedings were secretive. In December 2019, results were announced: three defendants acquitted, five sentenced to death, three sentenced to prison.

The pattern was instructive. The two highest-ranking officials implicated—Saud al-Qahtani, the social media enforcer, and Ahmed al-Asiri, a senior security official—were among those acquitted.

The five men sentenced to death were low-level participants. Foot soldiers.

In May 2020, even these death sentences were vacated. Khashoggi's children, still living in Saudi Arabia, announced they had "pardoned" the killers. Human rights observers noted the coercive circumstances: the children were hardly free agents.

Agnès Callamard, the United Nations special rapporteur who investigated the murder, condemned the verdicts. "The five hitmen are but pawns," she said. "The masterminds are not only free, they have barely been touched by the investigation."

International Response

The killing prompted what diplomats call "intense global scrutiny."

In June 2019, Callamard released a United Nations report concluding that Khashoggi's murder was premeditated and calling for a criminal investigation by the UN and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Saudi prosecutors rejected these findings.

Canada opened an investigation into the malicious cyberattacks connected to the case—the Pegasus spyware that had been used to monitor dissidents like Omar Abdulaziz.

When the Biden administration took office in 2021, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines declassified a four-page report that formally blamed bin Salman for the murder. This was what the CIA had concluded years earlier, now made public.

New sanctions were announced against several Saudis involved in the killing.

Bin Salman, again, was not sanctioned.

Exiled Saudi dissidents responded with alarm. The message, they said, was clear: the crown prince could order the murder of a journalist on foreign soil, in a diplomatic facility, and the most powerful nation on earth would decline to hold him personally accountable.

"We have been put in greater danger," they said.

The Diplomatic Trap

For Turkey, the killing presented what one journalist called "a sharp diplomatic challenge."

On one hand, Turkish intelligence had the evidence. They knew what happened. They had the audio. On the other hand, Turkey and Saudi Arabia maintained important economic and diplomatic ties. A full public confrontation would be costly.

Turkish authorities tried to "walk a fine line," according to reports at the time, releasing information strategically rather than all at once, applying pressure without causing a complete rupture.

The consulate, after all, was Saudi sovereign territory under international law. What happened there was supposed to be inviolable. The murder tested the limits of diplomatic immunity in ways that made governments everywhere uncomfortable.

If Saudi Arabia could kill a journalist in a consulate in Istanbul, what did that mean for dissidents everywhere? What did it mean for the assumption that embassies and consulates were safe spaces?

The Bees

Eleven days before he was killed, Khashoggi made a small gesture that, in retrospect, seems both brave and heartbreaking.

Omar Abdulaziz had been organizing an online resistance movement called "The Bees Army"—a play on the swarms of Saudi bot accounts that attacked dissidents. The Bees would fight back, countering regime propaganda with truth.

On September 21st, Khashoggi publicly declared his support. Using the movement's hashtag—"what do you know about bees?"—he tweeted: "They love their home country and defend it with truth and rights."

Two weeks later, he was dead.

The regime he had once served, that he still loved in his complicated way, had sent fifteen men to kill him over wedding paperwork in a bugged consulate while his fiancée waited outside, holding his phones, watching the door.

What Remains

Jamal Khashoggi's body has never been found.

The men who killed him have been pardoned. The man who ordered the killing remains crown prince of Saudi Arabia, next in line to the throne. The spyware used to surveil him and his collaborators is still sold by NSO Group to governments around the world.

The Wilson Center in Washington had offered Khashoggi a fellowship at their International Center for Scholars. He never took it up.

His fiancée had been waiting to marry him.

In the weeks after his disappearance, analysts noticed a massive surge in pro-regime Twitter activity—an explosion of bot accounts praising the crown prince. Marc Owen Jones, a professor who studies Arab propaganda, called it "absurd." The regime's first instinct, even as evidence of the murder mounted, was to deploy the same digital weapons it had used against Khashoggi in life.

The last column Khashoggi filed, the one published after his death, argued for free expression in the Arab world. He wrote about the importance of independent voices, of journalists who could tell uncomfortable truths.

He wrote it knowing the risks. He had already been told, through intercepted communications, through the behavior of officials, through the harassment on social media, that the regime considered him a threat worth eliminating.

He kept writing anyway.

That is what made him dangerous. Not his audience—though that was substantial. Not his connections—though those were extensive. But his refusal to be silenced, even when silence would have been so much safer.

In the end, they silenced him anyway. But not before the whole world heard what they did.