The Killing in the Consulate

"The reason I picked this one is related to the reason I wrote a book on assassination in the first place. Long before Jamal Khashoggi was killed, I wrote some very critical things about Mohammed bin Salman in The Times , saying that his various projects, like NEOM, the high tech city in the desert , were a crock of shit. I ended one of these articles by saying that maybe it would be a good idea if King Salman changed the line of succession. The next thing I get is a lot of death threats on my then Twitter account in Arabic, with my byline picture helpfully attached. The next development after that was that one day WhatsApp on my phone goes off and there’s a message from the Saudi embassy with a link enclosed in it. About a fortnight before this happened, I’d read about a Saudi dissident in Canada who had had a similar link sent to him. It was Israel’s NSO supplied software, which took over his phone, turned on the microphones, cameras and drained all the contacts. So I didn’t open it and deleted it. I’m not on WhatsApp anymore. Anyway, I thought I’d had enough of this. Then they killed Khashoggi. At that point, I wrote a huge piece in the Daily Mail , which I believe had the headline—I don’t write the headlines—‘Muhammad, the Murderer’. By that time, I’d decided I was going to write a book about assassination. As far as Khashoggi goes, Jonathan Rugman, who’s a very good Channel 4 reporter, got there first, and wrote a very detailed account of what happened in the consulate, where, of course, Turkey’s MIT intelligence service had bugged the entire building. Although the Saudis had swept it for bugs and found many of them, they hadn’t found the ones built into the walls. So you have a blow-by-blow audio account of what happened to Khashoggi when he got into the consulate to have his marital status sorted out. And the Turks had all this information, and very cleverly dripped it out to the media, forcing the Saudis to change their initial account of what had happened to him, putting all the onus on the Saudis to admit eventually what had happened. And then they said that it was rogue elements who had rocked up in Istanbul and murdered this man, which is preposterous, of course. And then they had to organise a pseudo trial. All this is brilliantly chronicled by Jonathan Rugman in this book, and he also covers the international responses to it—President Trump doing his best to pretend that nothing out of the ordinary has happened, that he knew his friend, MBS, would never, ever countenance this sort of thing. It’s part of a pattern of where domestic lawlessness is projected out. If you think of the disgraceful hostage-taking of 250 very wealthy leading Saudis in the ballroom of the Ritz Carlton, one of whom died of a heart attack when he was being beaten up, and the rest clearly put under all sorts of duress—attacked and threatened—to write out big checks, allegedly because they’re corrupt. Some of these people are still being held in Saudi Arabia. If their adult children are allowed to travel abroad, they’re terrified of being watched, and their phones being mucked around with. They’re not allowed to take their children with them. They’re basically hostages. So it’s a very repressive, unpleasant regime. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . I’m very interested in that. And if that starts becoming catching—Putin getting away with murdering journalists, which his regime has certainly done, and then the Saudis start doing it—when does this stop? Anybody could get killed. There’s a very good Russian film, which I strongly recommend, called Leviathan . It’s about a rather rackety alcoholic old bloke who has a nice clapperboard house on the Barents Sea. The local oligarch wants the beachfront to build luxury condominiums. So he uses the courts and the Orthodox Church to wreck this man’s life. In the end, they shoot him. They just destroy his life. People talk very facilely about the rule of law . But imagine that you or I were driving through a country road in a bashed up Volvo and the son and daughter of an oligarch sped by and hit our car. First of all the bodyguards would get out and beat you up. You’d say, ‘Well, this is outrageous, I’ll call the police.’ The police would turn up and they would laugh at you, and then arrest you for assaulting the bodyguards. That’s what the absence of the rule of law really means. And I think it’s incumbent on all of us to keep that very much in mind and to make that point as often and as loudly as we possibly can. Otherwise people will be knocked off all over the place. Of course. I wouldn’t like to be an investigative blogger or journalist in Malta right now, having seen what was done to Daphne Caruana Galizia, who was blown up in her car a year before Khashoggi was killed. We all know Malta is a terribly corrupt place. But what’s interesting is the way the government then hired a PR agency in London to smear her and the former head of Luxembourg’s intelligence service to lay a trail saying the killing was done by Azeris, because of some link with Azerbaijan. This smearing and cover-up stuff comes from here in the UK. Likewise, when Khashoggi was killed—I won’t name any names—the Saudis invested a lot of money in PR companies here and in Washington DC. It didn’t take long for all sorts of slightly unpleasant articles to appear in certain newspapers saying that he was an active member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Well, he wasn’t. This all happens here. We can’t pretend it’s just all ‘over there’. And that really does bother me in quite a fundamental way."