It's been about six months since our Washington Post colleague Jamal Khashoggi
was murdered in Istanbul. In that time,
the U.S.-Saudi relationship has been rocked, and many aspects of that
relationship are on hold pending answers from Riyadh, from the government
headed by Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince,
that still haven't come.
What I found in my reporting was that some members of the team that was sent to Istanbul
to kidnap and then to kill Khashoggi were trained in the United States.
Not trained to do this operation but trained in special operations and other skills.
I found that our intelligence agencies have put out a warning that some of this
training may have been done by an Arkansas-based company called Tier 1 Group.
I found that another company called Culpepper National Security
Solutions, which is owned by a larger company called DynCorp, which in turn is
owned by a larger company called Cerberus Capital Management, has been
working for the last several years to develop a program to train and modernize
the Saudi intelligence service. That project was put on hold. The person who
had been chairman of Culpepper, Michael Morell, a former acting director of the
C.I.A., withdrew from the project within days after Khashoggi's death because of his questions
about the course of Saudi Arabia.
This is an incestuous world.
The co-chief executive of Cerberus Capital Management is a man named Stephen Feinberg,
who is also, in his spare time, the chairman of the President's
Intelligence Advisory Board, which is the most senior oversight and counseling
body that looks at all the activities of U.S. intelligence. I was told that Feinberg
had divested all of his interests in companies owned by Cerberus that are
involved in defense or intelligence matters before the Khashoggi killing.
There's no connection there, but his role in this raises interesting questions
about how our intelligence agencies are overseen. The idea of training the Saudis
makes sense. This is a country that faces serious terrorism threats. It's been an
ally of the United States for 75 years. The issue that my reporting raises is that
when we try to help allies deal with real problems, sometimes the technologies
and training that we provide are misused.
The final thing that I found in my reporting
was I was able to draw a clearer picture than we've had before of what happened
when my colleague Jamal Khashoggi walked into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on
October 2nd.
The transcript of the recording of the audio that was captured
by a bug placed inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul by Turkish
intelligence was read by two sources I talked to. One, a Saudi source, gave me a
detailed reconstruction of what that transcript says. This source believes
that the transcript shows that this began as a kidnapping attempt. Khashoggi
walked into the consulate and he was immediately confronted by the leader of
the team a colonel in Saudi intelligence named Maher Mutreb, who he'd known from the
time in the early 2000s when they were both stationed at the Saudi embassy in
London.
Mutreb, according to the transcript, said, "You're coming back with us."
Khashoggi responded, "No I'm not!" and resisted.
There was a squabble. At some point, the transcript says, Khashoggi was
injected with something. A bag was then placed over Khashoggi's head and
Khashoggi screamed, "I can't breathe! I have asthma! Don't do this!"
Those were essentially his last words.
What caused his death, whether
it was an overdose of the sedative, whether it was asphyxiation and choking, the
transcript doesn't say and we don't know.
You later hear the sound of buzzing in
what people have speculated was an electric saw as the pieces of our
colleague's body were dismembered in the consulate and then later disposed in
ways that we still don't understand.
These were the last moments of somebody
who bravely had tried to speak the truth about the leadership of his country
Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince,
and paid a terrible price.