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Turkish intelligence reportedly said that the CIA had listened to a phone call in which Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had called on Jamal Khashoggi to silence "as soon as possible".
The news, circulated via a column of the Turkish news website Hürriyet, comes just after President Donald Trump issued a frantic proclamation claiming that the United States would support Saudi Arabia, despite the real possibility that Crown Prince Mohammed ordered the murder.
The leak of Turkish intelligence services follows a long-standing pattern that Ankara has published information from the ongoing Khashoggi investigation at a slow and steady pace, with increasingly gruesome and overwhelming details.
But beyond the constant and anonymous claims that implicate the Saudi prince as the architect of Khashoggi's murder, this leak claims to expose the United States to spy on its ally, especially the Saudi royals, and to ignore the evidence potentially consequential to a murder.
Read more: "Saudi Arabia first, not America first": even the biggest allies of Trump in the GOP protest against his defense of Saudi Arabia for murder brutal Khashoggi
Abdulkadir Selvi, an editorialist from Hürriyet, quoted by anonymous Turkish intelligence officials, was quoted as saying on Thursday that the CIA had recorded a tape of Crown Prince Mohammed telling his brother Khaled bin Salman, Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the states. States, that Khashoggi should be immediately silenced.
Selvi wrote: "It is said that the Crown Prince has instructed to silence Jamal Khashoggi as soon as possible and that this instruction was captured during the CIA phone tapping." The ensuing murder is the ultimate confirmation of this instruction. . " He called the tape "smoking gun".
Selvi then called for an international investigation that "could reveal more breathtaking evidence, as the CIA has more phone tapping phone calls than the public knows".
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has served all the critics of the army, press and intelligence, depriving them of their independence.
Experts had previously told Business Insider that leaks in Turkey could be seen as an intelligence or information warfare campaign by the Turkish government in an effort to force the US to reconsider its links with Turkey. Saudi Arabia.
America first?
The Trump administration sanctioned Saudi nationals in response to Khashoggi's murder and suppressed support for the kingdom's war in Yemen.
But Trump refused to blame Crown Prince Mohammed for the murder, saying that it was not in the US interest to publicly break with the 33-year-old monarch called to rule the kingdom. ally of the United States for the next four or five decades.
Read more: Trump's manic statement that frees Saudi Arabia for Khashoggi reveals a dark American secret
It is important to note that, even though the Turkish intelligence services and even Erdogan have repeatedly implicated the Saudi prince in the murder of Khashoggi, and he now holds this "ultimate confirmation" of his role in the killing, Ankara does not did not directly blame him.
In fact, no country has been declared against Crown Prince Mohammed.
But regular leaks in the Turkish media, over which Erdogan has almost total control after making his country the first jailer of journalists, have done incredible damage to the kingdom's public relations and US support for it.
By unveiling a CIA spying charge on Saudi Arabia and calling for an international investigation to reveal more presumed CIA surveillance, Turkish intelligence, media and government have clearly lined up on a line of prolonged attack that obviously seeks to harm the United States.
