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BEIRUT, Lebanon – Jamal Khashoggi landed in Washington last fall, leaving behind a long list of bad news at home.
After a successful career as an advisor and unofficial spokesman for the royal family of Saudi Arabia, the new Crown Prince had forbidden him to write in the kingdom, even on Twitter. His column in an Arabic newspaper belonging to a Saudi has been canceled. His marriage was falling apart. His relatives had been forbidden to travel in order to pressure him to stop criticizing the rulers of the kingdom.
Then, after arriving in the United States, a wave of arrests put a number of his Saudi friends behind bars and he made his tough decision: it was too dangerous to go home anytime soon – and maybe forever.
Thus, in the United States, he reinvented himself as a critic, contributing columns to the Washington Post and believing he found security in the West.
But as it turned out, the protection of the West has only been extended so far.
Mr. Khashoggi was last seen on October 2 at the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul, where he was to obtain a document for his marriage. According to Turkish officials, a team of Saudi agents killed him and dismembered him.
Saudi officials denied that they had injured Mr. Khashoggi, but nearly two weeks after his disappearance, they failed to provide proof that he had left the consulate and did not submit any account. made credible what had happened to him.
His disappearance has opened a gap between Washington and Saudi Arabia, the main Arab ally of the Trump administration. And this has seriously damaged the reputation of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the 33-year-old power behind the Saudi throne, which this time may have gone too far even for his most fervent Western supporters.
The possibility that the young prince ordered to hit a dissident poses challenges to President Trump and can escalate into a warm relationship. This could convince governments and companies that have neglected the Prince's destructive military campaign in Yemen, his kidnapping of the Lebanese prime minister and his waves of arrests that he is a ruthless autocrat who will stop at nothing to get his enemies.
Although the disappearance shed new light on the Crown Prince, she also drew attention to the tangled sympathies that have marked Mr. Khashoggi's entire career. the Royal family.
His attraction to political Islam helped him forge a personal connection with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who is now asking Saudi Arabia to explain the fate of his friend.
The idea of self-exhumation in the West was a blow to 60-year-old Khashoggi, who had worked as a journalist, commentator and editor-in-chief to become one of the kingdom's best-known personalities. He first attracted international attention for interviewing a young Osama bin Laden, before becoming known as a confidant of kings and princes.
His career has left him extraordinarily well connected. This tall, sociable and easy-going man seemed to know all those who had a connection with Saudi Arabia during the last three decades.
But settling in Washington had advantages. A friend invited him for Thanksgiving last year and he shared a picture of himself at dinner with its 1.7 million subscribers on Twitter, savoring turkey and yam.
When his turn came to share what he was grateful for, he said, "Because I have become free and can write freely."
According to interviews with dozens of people who knew Mr. Khashoggi and his relations with the Saudi leadership, it was his penchant for free writing and his organization to lobby for political reform from abroad that put him in charge. in conflict with the Crown Prince. .
While Saudi Arabia has long been ruled in accordance with the consensus of the great princes, Crown Prince Mohammed dismantled this system, leaving his power largely unchecked. If a decision had been made to silence an alleged traitor, it would probably have been his.
Osama, Adnan and the Muslim Brotherhood
Mr. Khashoggi's first claim was his knowledge of Osama bin Laden. Mr. Khashoggi had stayed in Jidda, the birthplace of bin Laden, and like bin Laden, he belonged to a large non-royal family. Mr. Khashoggi's grandfather was a doctor who had treated the first king of Saudi Arabia. His uncle was Adnan Khashoggi, a famous arms dealer, although Jamal Khashoggi did not take advantage of his uncle's wealth.
Mr. Khashoggi studied at Indiana State University and returned to Saudi Arabia for an English language newspaper. Several of his friends say that very early, Mr. Khashoggi also joined the Muslim Brotherhood.
Although he subsequently stopped attending the meetings of the Brotherhood, he remained aware of the conservative, Islamist and often anti-Western rhetoric that he could deploy or hide, depending on the person with whom he was was trying to become his friend.
His colleagues at the newspaper reminded him as being friendly, thoughtful and devout. He has often led prayers together in the newsroom, recalls Shahid Raza Burney, an Indian publisher who worked with him.
Like many Saudis in the 1980s, Mr. Khashoggi applauded for jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan, which was supported by the IAC and Saudi Arabia. So when he was invited to see him himself from another Saudi boy, Bin Laden, Mr. Khashoggi jumped on the occasion.
In Afghanistan, Mr. Khashoggi wore a local outfit and his picture was taken with an assault rifle, much to the chagrin of his editor. But it does not seem that he actually fought while he was on mission there.
"He was first and foremost a journalist, certainly sympathetic to the Afghan jihad, but most of the Arab journalists of the time – and many Western journalists," said Thomas Hegghammer, a Norwegian researcher who interviewed Mr. Khashoggi at the time. about his words. time in Afghanistan.
His colleagues agreed.
"To say that Jamal was a kind of extremist is a lie," said Mr Burney, now editor of a newspaper in India.
But the failure of the war to put Afghanistan on the ground haunted Mr. Khashoggi, as did Bin Laden's later turn to terrorism.
"He was disappointed that after all this struggle, the Afghans had never assembled," said a Saudi friend of Mr. Khashoggi who spoke under cover of anonymity for fear retaliation.
Mr. Khashoggi's travels in Afghanistan and his relations with Prince Turki al-Faisal, who headed the Saudi intelligence services, reminded some friends of Mr. Khashoggi that he was also spying for the government. Saudi.
Years later, after the killing of bin Laden in Pakistan by American commandos in 2011, Mr. Khashoggi cried his old acquaintance and what he had become.
"I broke down in tears some time ago, heartbroken for you, Abu Abdullah," Khashoggi wrote on Twitter, using bin Laden's nickname. "You have been beautiful and brave on those sunny days in Afghanistan, before going to hatred and passion."
From journalist to royal insider
At the beginning of his career as a journalist, Mr. Khashoggi went to Algeria and went to Kuwait during the first Gulf War. He climbed the ladder of the media world of the kingdom, where princes own their newspapers, their content is censored and their scandals related to royalty are buried.
After the attacks of September 11, 2001, he criticized the current conspiracy theories in the Arab world, saying that hijacked planes "also attacked Islam as a religion and defended the values of tolerance and coexistence preached".
He was appointed editor of the Saudi newspaper Al Watan in 2003, but was fired less than two months later for an article accusing an Islamic scholar deemed to have used teachings to justify attacks against non-Muslims . He was reinstated in 2007 and lasted a little longer during his second term.
He traveled with King Abdullah and was close to Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, the billionaire investor, who was later arrested by Crown Prince Mohammed. Prince Turki, the former head of the intelligence services, hired Mr. Khashoggi as adviser when he was ambassador to Britain and the United States.
It was during his stay there that Mr. Khashoggi bought the condo in McLean, Virginia, where he would live after fleeing the kingdom.
Support uprisings abroad, home reforms
Many friends of Mr. Khashoggi say that throughout his career in the service of the monarchy, he has hidden his personal tendencies for electoral democracy and political Islam in the likeness of the Muslim Brotherhood.
When a military coup in Algeria in 1992 wiped out the hopes of an Islamist political party to gain control of parliament, Mr Khashoggi unknowingly associated him with an Islamist friend in London to create an organization called "The friends of democracy in Algeria ".
Before the parliamentary elections, the group had published advertisements in British newspapers: "When you vote, remember that it is a bonus that many people in the world are denied, including Algerians," he said. recalled his friend Azzam Tamimi, who acted as the public face of the effort and hid the role of Mr. Khashoggi.
By the time he reached middle age, Mr. Khashoggi's relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood was ambiguous. Several Muslim brothers said this week that they had always felt that he was with them. Many of his lay friends would not have believed him.
Mr Khashoggi never called for more than gradual reforms of the Saudi monarchy, ultimately supporting his military interventions to deter what the Saudis viewed Iranian influence in Bahrain and Yemen. But he was excited by the uprisings that erupted in much of the Arab world in 2011.
Like the Afghan jihad before them, however, the Arab Spring movements have disappointed it, while they have collapsed into violence and as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have used their wealth to crush the opposition and strengthen the autocrats.
"He never liked that Saudi Arabia is using their policies to speed up the crackdown in the region," said Sigurd Neubauer, a Middle East analyst in Washington, who knew Mr. Khashoggi.
The kingdom's tolerance of even minimal criticism faded after King Salman ascended to the throne in 2015 and granted extraordinary power to his son, Mohammed, the Crown Prince, known to under the symbol MBS
The young prince announced a program aimed at diversifying the economy and easing social structures, particularly in give women the right to drive.
Mr. Khashoggi applauded these proceedings, but regretted the authoritarian manner in which the prince had power. When Mr. Khashoggi criticized Mr. Trump after his election, for example, Saudi officials forbade him to speak, fearing that it would harm their relations with the new government.
Crown Prince Mohammed has continued his criticism of his power, preventing them from traveling and throwing some into prison. Mr. Khashoggi left the kingdom last year, before dozens of his friends were assembled and hundreds of prominent Saudis were imprisoned in Riyadh Ritz-Carlton on corruption charges. A number of them, including at least two sons of former kings, are still being held.
Mr. Khashoggi began contributing to the Washington Post, comparing Crown Prince Mohammed to Russian President Vladimir V. Putin. Mr. Khashoggi's friends assumed that such writings had put him on the prince's blacklist.
"Mohammed bin Salman had spent millions of dollars to create a certain image of himself and Jamal Khashoggi was destroying everything in a few words," Tamimi said. "The crown prince must have been furious."
But Mr. Khashoggi did not stop.
He planned to create a website to publish translated reports on the economies of Arab countries, particularly in Saudi Arabia, where he felt that many people did not understand the extent of corruption or the limited future of oil wealth.
He also founded an organization called Democracy in the Arab World now, or DAWN, a pressure group. Mr. Khashoggi was trying to secure funding and set up a board of directors when he disappeared, friends said.
In April, receiving an award from the Center for the Study of Islam and Islamist Democracy, Khashoggi said democracy is being attacked in the Arab world by radical Islamists, authoritarians and elites who fear that popular participation will cause chaos. Sharing power, he said, was the only way to stop civil wars and ensure better governance.
Crown Prince Mohammed "is investing hundreds of billions of dollars in future projects based on his ability to judge and the abilities of a small circle of advisers," said Khashoggi. "Is it enough? No, it's not enough.
Since his move to Washington, representatives of Crown Prince Mohammed have contacted him several times, asking him to alleviate his criticism and urging him to return home, he said. friends.
But he was building a new life. He and a Turkish researcher, Hatice Cengiz, had decided to get married and establish a new home in Istanbul.
Maggie Mitchell Salem, a longtime friend, worries about him and asks him to send him a message every time he goes to the Saudi Embassy in Washington.
"He laughed at me," Oh, Maggie, Maggie, you're ridiculous, "she recalls.
Ben Hubbard reported from Beirut and David D. Kirkpatrick from Istanbul. Julian Barnes, Sharon LaFraniere, Edward Wong and Mark Mazzetti contributed to Washington's report and Karam Shoumali from Berlin.
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