The journey of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi: trips with bin Laden to fighting with princes

BEIRUT – Perhaps nowhere in the world the news of Donald Trump's election to the presidency was greeted with more joy than in Saudi Arabia, whose leaders scoffed at the attachment from his predecessor to Iran, their great enemy, and welcomed the prospect of a Republican President closer to Arabia in thinking.

A Saudi man dissociated himself from overwhelming cheers. Jamal Khashoggi, 59, a veteran journalist and opinion-maker, has expressed doubts about the implications of the Trump presidency for the Middle East. He warned that Trump's anti-Muslim sentiments and apparent proximity to Russian President Vladimir Putin would jeopardize Saudi interests, and thought the royal family's trust in him was misplaced.

For these views, reported in the Washington Post and formulated in tweets and in a Washington think tank, the Saudi authorities ordered him to stop writing and speaking in public, setting off a chain of events. events that could have led to his disappearance and potential death. The consulate of Saudi Arabia in Istanbul last week.

In the summer of 2017, Khashoggi had concluded that if he was to continue to practice his journalistic profession throughout his life, he would have no choice but to leave the company. ;Saudi Arabia. He moved to Washington, where he became an increasingly outspoken critic of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, gaining importance for his opinions in a regular column of the newspaper.

It is now feared that his opinions have cost him his life, or at least his freedom. The Turkish government, according to two people familiar with the investigation, concluded that Khashoggi was killed shortly after his entry on Tuesday at the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul to obtain a document he needed to marry his fiancée in Turkey.

Saudi Arabia denied any involvement, saying Khashoggi had left the consulate this afternoon.

As the days go by without us knowing where it is or where it is going, there is growing fear that a man who has long been a victim of controversy throughout his life has been the victim of the attempt the most controversial ever made by Saudi Arabia to silence a critic.

Khashoggi, cousin of the late billionaire gunman Adnan Khashoggi, can not be considered a true dissident, according to friends and colleagues. They note that he did not oppose the monarchy, did not call for a change of regime, nor even asked for the replacement of Mohammed, the architect of the attempt to l & rsquo; Saudi Arabia to introduce greater social and economic reforms, as well as its severe repression of political freedoms.

However, any of his Post column criticizing Muhammad's methods could have made Khashoggi a target of the royal family's wrath, at a time when Saudi women who saluted the prince's reforms were imprisoned for having dared to ask for new changes.

In September 2017, he described his desperation at the growing oppression in Saudi Arabia, but also his support for Muhammad's attempts to modernize the conservative kingdom.

"My friends and I living abroad feel helpless. We want our country to prosper and the 2030 vision to come true, "he wrote about Mohammed's economic reform program. "We are not opposed to our government and attach great importance to Saudi Arabia. It's the only house we know or want.

Its columns – some of which, including this one, have been translated into Arabic by the Post – have helped to increase its visibility and probably also to the fury of the Saudi royal family, said Hisham Melhem, a colleague of Khashoggi based in Washington which runs a political talk show on the Al Arabiya network, owned by Saudi Arabia.

"It's important because of the platform the Washington Post provides him with," he said. "Other critics do not have that kind of platform and they were very angry at him in Saudi Arabia."

Fred Hiatt, editor of The Post, said that Khashoggi knew he was taking risks in criticizing the Saudi government even though he was abroad.

"But he felt obliged to speak when so many of his compatriots were imprisoned or muzzled. As an experienced and highly qualified journalist with a point of view, he was a natural fit to our list of Global Opinion columnists and we are proud to publish his work, "said Mr. Hiatt.

Even denying Saudi participation in his disappearance, supporters of the Saudi government on Twitter have sought to denigrate, not as a critic of the government, but in favor of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist movement tolerated but now banned in Saudi Arabia as terrorist organization.

This accusation goes back to the beginnings of his career, when he was a journalist covering the war in Afghanistan in the 1980s and 1990s, and especially in the rise of Osama bin Laden, then little known.

Khashoggi was integrated into bin Laden's circle of associates, traveled extensively with al-Qaida's leader in Afghanistan, and wrote one of the first portraits of him for a Saudi magazine in 1988, after having been personally invited by bin Laden to accompany him to Afghanistan, according to the newspaper. Peter Bergen, author of the book "Osama bin Laden I know".

Salameh Nattar, a Jordanian-based journalist based in the United States, who was Khashoggi's colleague and editor-in-chief at Al-Hayat newspaper, remained a lifelong friend, recalling that she was often called on to save Khashoggi from clashes with the authorities because of his suspicions. about his links with his extremists. In the early 2000s, Nattar had to persuade the Jordanian airport authorities not to expel Khashoggi after suspecting links with al-Qaeda.

"He was in trouble all the time because of his dealings with al-Qaeda groups, but he did it as a journalist," Nattar said. "He had very good relationships, to the point that some people suspected he was funding extremist groups. Personally, I was convinced that he was doing his job as a journalist and covering both sides. "

Khashoggi has not at any time expressed support for extremist groups, Nattar said. Rather, he said, "You should treat moderate Islamists as a political reality, otherwise you will have to face the extremists. The inability to deal with traditional Islamists will lead to the support of extreme fanatics, "he said.

"It could be said that he wrote, not justifying the actions of Islamists or extremists, but saying that these people had feelings of grievance, oppression, are the product of violent regimes and measures of repression."

Bergen, who is now an Al-Qaeda expert in the New America think tank, has long questioned Khashoggi about his experiences with bin Laden and concluded that Khashoggi was at least deeply sympathetic to moderate Islamist movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood. But later in his life he evolved to a more liberal and secular point of view, said Bergen.

"At the time, according to Jamal himself, he was religious. He would have spent a lot of time with bin Laden. There was no other way to report. He was almost certainly a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, "he said.

However, over time, Bergen said, Khashoggi "has become increasingly secularized and his critics of the Saudi regime are inscribing themselves in a more liberal perspective. He had gone from someone who, from his point of view, was very religious to a liberal critic. "

By 1999, he had completed his travels and had become a prominent journalist in Saudi Arabia, often the subject of controversy, but still managing to stay in school circles. He was fired twice as editor of the Saudi daily Al Watan. In 2015, an attempt to launch a television network, Al-Arab, was closed for reasons that had never been publicly explained.

In the 2000s, he was close to Prince Turki bin-Faisal, former head of the Saudi intelligence services. During Turki's tenure as ambassador to London and then Washington, between 2003 and 2006, Khashoggi was Turki's advisor and became the de facto spokesman for the Saudi embassy, ​​said Melhem, who invited him several times during his televised interview as a representative of Saudi Arabia. government.

Meanwhile, many members of the international media came to see him as a reliable commentator on Saudi affairs, an insider who could be relied upon to give insight into the opaque monarchy's thinking, but who was frank enough not to to be considered a spokesperson. And he always answered the calls.

"He was so close to the royal family and the makers that he was almost an unofficial spokesperson for quite a while," said Hussein Ibish, a scholar at the Arab Gulf Institute in Washington, who knew Khashoggi. "And then he was separated."

At a meeting in Washington last December, Khashoggi spoke of the huge personal price he had paid for his decision to exile to continue expressing himself. His wife had filed for divorce, many members of his family had avoided him and he had lost his home and belongings.

When he entered the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul last week, he was rebuilding his life. He had met and was engaged to Hatice Cengiz, and was looking for a document required by Turkish law confirming that he was not legally married elsewhere. They had planned to get married soon, say friends.

In the absence of conclusive evidence as to where he is, it is impossible to know what happened to him, Nattar said. But he fears that Khashoggi's visit to the consulate has offered the Saudi authorities an opportunity to silence his voice.

"Jamal's critics were too dangerous for them because they undermined the Saudi's relationship with the United States," he said. "Maybe the Saudis thought the time was right to silence him, that he was kidnapped or killed."

Khashoggi, in his column a year ago, described his determination to continue to be heard. "To do otherwise would betray those who languish in prison," he wrote. "I can talk when many can not."

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