BOOK REVIEW: The Killing in the Consulate: Investigating the Life and Death of Jamal Khashoggi
By Jonathan Rugman
Reviewed by Nick Fishwick
Nick Fishwick CMG retired in 2012 after nearly thirty years in the British Foreign Service. He did postings in Lagos, Istanbul and Kabul. His responsibilities in London included director of security and, after returning from Afghanistan in 2007, director for counterterrorism. His final role was as director general for international operations.
A year ago, on October 2, 2018, Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi walked into the consulate of Saudi Arabia in Istanbul. He needed some documents before he could marry his Turkish fiancée, Hatice Cengiz, who was waiting for him outside the consulate. A few days before, he had had friendly meetings in the consulate. This time he was murdered, probably within a few minutes of entering the building.
Jonathan Rugman is a senior correspondent for Britain’s left of center, Channel 4 News. He knows Turkey well, having first reported from there in the 1990s, where I first got to know him. He is not an ‘Arabist’ and does not seem to have been able to visit Saudi Arabia while researching this book. This has not stopped him, however, from producing about as good a book on the Khashoggi killing as possible for a non-insider as the key insiders are keeping quiet.
Rugman’s book deals with two intertwined issues: state killing; and the relationship between Saudi Arabia and the rest of the world.
What’s striking about the Khashoggi killing, as with other state-sponsored murders in recent years, is as much the incompetence as the ruthlessness of the act. It looks as though the Saudis couldn’t believe their luck when Khashoggi walked into their consulate on the 28th of September 2018. No wonder he got a friendly reception. The Saudis seem to have sent a hastily assembled team over to Istanbul for Khashoggi’s projected return on October 2nd. They seem not to have factored in the numerous ways that Turkish Intelligence would be able to discover what they were up to, starting with the most basic Turkish technical coverage of their consulate. The afternoon that Khashoggi was killed, the Saudi team sent out a bizarre Khashoggi double to stroll around the sites of Istanbul, presumably to fool CCTV watchers into thinking that Khashoggi really had left the consulate. As the story unraveled, the Saudis changed their story on what had happened and who was responsible. One has to wonder whether this buffoonery was in part deliberate or whether it was a sign of a hastily and imperfectly organized operation.
Reactions were predictable. For one world leader – already in the international doghouse after his own bungled assassination attempt - the killing seemed good news, so it was no surprise to see Russian President Vladimir Putin high fiving the Saudi crown prince at the G20 meeting that December. It was no surprise either to hear expressions of pious horror from the Iranian government.
It was the west that had a problem. As Mr. Rugman frequently reminds us throughout the book, Saudi Arabia is a massive oil producer, a big market for western arms and an important ally against Islamist terrorism. Despite Saudi Arabia’s messy intervention in Yemen, it is Iran and not Saudi Arabia, that is the great destabilizer in the Middle East in the eyes of the West. Mr. Rugman has few problems making President Trump’s reaction to the killing look distinctly shifty but at heart, the President was being strategically consistent: Iran is our enemy, we need the Saudis and the Khashoggi killing isn’t going to change that. Mr. Trump’s inflated valuing of the Saudi relationship ($450B) was doubtless to keep his domestic base in line over an issue that allies like Senator Lindsay Graham, could have made difficult for him.
What of Khashoggi? Like many other martyrs, he was not a straight-forward character. He had been sort of a regime insider. He liked a drink but seems to have been increasingly sympathetic to the Muslim Brotherhood. He was intelligent and his last articles for the Washington Post were hard-hitting. His private life bewilders. He meets Ms. Cengiz in May, marries an Egyptian air hostess in June, and then goes off and proposes to Ms. Cengiz without mentioning anything to the Egyptian - but each to his own.
A year on, with tensions rising even higher in the gulf, it’s hard to see how a Saudi-West rupture over Khashoggi would look anything other than disastrous. But if justice has not been done, let’s hope a few lessons have been learned in Riyadh.
The Killing in the Consulate: Investigating the Life and Death of Jamal Khashoggi earns a prestigious four out of four trench coats.
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