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Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has ordered an operation to return Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi to Saudi Arabia from his home in Virginia and to detain him, according to intelligence sources. Saudi intelligence services.
Intelligence, described by US officials who know him well, is another piece of evidence implicating the Saudi regime in the disappearance of Khashoggi last week after he entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. Turkish officials said that a Saudi security team was waiting for the journalist and killed him.
Khashoggi was a prominent critic of the Saudi government and Mohammed in particular. Several of Khashoggi's friends said that during the last four months senior Saudi officials close to the crown prince had called Khashoggi to offer him protection or even a high-level position in the service of the government, he said. returned to his native country.
Khashoggi, however, was skeptical of the offers. He told a friend that the Saudi government would never deliver on promises not to harm him.
[Saudis are said to have lain in wait for Jamal Khashoggi]
"He said," Are you kidding? I absolutely do not trust them, "said Khaled Saffuri, an Arab-American political activist, recounting a conversation he had with Khashoggi in May, moments after Khashoggi received a call from Saud al-Qahtani, counselor at the royal court. .
Intelligence agencies reporting a Khashoggi detention project in Saudi Arabia have fueled speculation by officials and analysts in several countries that the consulate has resorted to a rescue plan to capture Khashoggi that could have gone wrong.
A former US intelligence official – who, like others, spoke on condition of anonymity to address a sensitive topic – said the details of the operation, which involved sending two teams totaling 15 men , in two private planes arriving and departing from Turkey at times, bore the marks of a "restitution", in which someone is extralegalally distant from one country and deposed for questioning in another.
But Turkish officials concluded that, regardless of the intention of the operation, Khashoggi was killed inside the consulate. The investigators did not find his body, but Turkish officials published a video surveillance footage of Khashoggi entering the consulate in the afternoon of 2 October. There is no video footage showing him leaving, they said.
Information about Saudi Arabia's earlier plans to detain Khashoggi has raised questions about whether the Trump administration should have warned the journalist that he might be in danger.
Intelligence agencies have the "duty to warn" people who may be kidnapped, seriously injured or killed, according to a directive signed in 2015. This obligation applies whether the person is a US citizen or not. Khashoggi was an American resident.
[[[[The fiancée of the disappeared journalist asks to know: "Where is Jamal?"]
"The duty of caution applies if harm is to an individual," said a former intelligence official. But this duty also depends on whether the information made it clear that Khashoggi was in danger, said the former official.
"Capturing him, which could have been interpreted as an arrest, would not have triggered the duty of caution," said the former official. "If anything in the reported interception indicated that the violence was planned, then, yes, he should have been warned."
The office of the national intelligence director, who oversees the warning process, declined to say whether Khashoggi had been contacted.
Officials did not comment on the intelligence reports that showed a Saudi project to attract Khashoggi.
"Although I can not comment on intelligence matters, I can definitely say that the United States had no prior knowledge of [Khashoggi’s] disappearance, "Robert Palladino, a spokesman for the US State Department, told reporters on Wednesday. Asked that the US government would have had the duty to warn Khashoggi when he had information that he was in danger, Palladino refused to answer what he called. a "hypothetical question".
Officials who knew the intelligence services did not know if the Saudis would have discussed harming Khashoggi as part of the plan to detain him in Saudi Arabia.
But the information had been scattered throughout the US government and appeared in reports regularly made available to people working on US policy towards Saudi Arabia or related issues, said a US official. .
The intelligence poses a political problem to the Trump administration because it involves Mohammed, who is particularly close to Jared Kushner, President Trump's son-in-law and senior advisor.
On Wednesday, Kushner and National Security Adviser John Bolton spoke by phone with the Crown Prince, but White House officials said the Saudis were providing little information.
Trump became frustrated, two officials said after slowly reacting to Khashoggi's disappearance. Earlier this week, he said he had no information about what had happened to the reporter.
White House officials began discussing how to force Saudi Arabia to provide answers and determine the punishment that could be imposed if the government were held responsible.
Legislators in Capitol Hill reacted strongly to the disappearance. On Wednesday, a group of bipartisan senators called on Trump to impose sanctions on anyone found responsible for Khashoggi's disappearance, including Saudi leaders.
Senator Lindsey O. Graham (RS.C.), perhaps the closest ally of the Speaker to the Senate, invoked a "bipartisan tsunami" if the Saudis were involved and said that Khashoggi's death could change the nature of relations between the two countries. .
Kushner's relationship with Mohammed, known to national security agencies as MBS, has long been the subject of suspicion by some US intelligence officials.
Kushner and Mohammed had private and personal calls that were not always configured by normal channels so that conversations could be memorized and Kushner could be properly informed.
Despite all his criticisms of the Saudi regime, Khashoggi was not always opposed to Mohammed's policy. Khashoggi credited the young leader for what he saw as positive changes, including the relaxation of Saudi cultural restrictions.
Khashoggi often expressed his affection for his homeland, while saying that he did not think it was safe for him. A person in contact with the Crown Prince, speaking under the guise of anonymity to preserve the relationship, said Khashoggi last year, asking him to give a message to Mohammed telling him that he needed someone like Khashoggi as a counselor.
When he conveyed the message, the Crown Prince stated that Khashoggi was linked to the Saudi Brotherhood and Qatar, two Saudi opponents, and that the arrangement would never take place.
Two other friends of Khashoggi said that at least twice, he had received cordial phone calls from Qahtani, the prince's advisor, transmitting friendly messages on his behalf.
In one of the appeals, in September 2017, Qahtani said that Mohammed had been "very happy" to see Khashoggi issue a message praising the kingdom after the government announced that it was raising the ban on driving women, according to one of the friends. was with Khashoggi at the time. The tone of the appeal was pleasant, but Khashoggi also told Qahtani that he would praise the government when there would be "positive developments." When there are bad things, I will speak.
He spent the rest of the appeal pleading in favor of several recently imprisoned regime critics.
A friend also said that Khashoggi had told him that he had been approached several times by a businessman close to the Saudi ruling family. The businessman, whom Khashoggi did not name, seemed to "want" to see him every time he went to Washington and told him that he would work with the Saudi authorities to organize his return, said the friend.
Kareem Fahim and Loveday Morris in Istanbul and Josh Dawsey, Karoun Demirjian, Karen DeYoung and Carol Morello in Washington contributed to the writing of this report.
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