The Murder of Jamal Khashoggi

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, No, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie Sober.

He's going to tell you the truth.

How do I present this with any class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

Yeah.

Aka Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

This is Jeff Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic.

The murder of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi has shocked the world.

Even in the Middle East, where viciousness is too often the norm, the Gothic horror of this murder at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2nd has left people aghast and wondering if Saudi Arabia should be considered a rogue state.

Khashoggi was often a critic of Saudi Arabia's all-powerful crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, and in his columns for The Washington Post, Khashoggi had pointed out the hypocrisies and flaws in the Crown Prince's approach to governance.

This week, in what could be seen as a too obvious attempt to distance himself from Khashoggi's demise, the Crown Prince called the killing a, quote, heinous crime and staged a forced handshake with Khashoggi's grieving son.

Matt and Alex are away this week, so I sat down for a one-on-one conversation with the editorial page editor of the Washington Post and Jamal Khashoggi's former boss about where things stand and what comes next.

This is Radio Atlantic.

Fred Hyatt, thank you for being on the podcast.

Thanks for having me.

Fred, you're the editorial page editor of the Washington Post.

For the last three weeks, you've really been engaged in only one issue.

There's a million things going on, but there's one big thing for you all,

and that is the first the disappearance and then what we now know to be the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, who was an opinion columnist

on contract, I guess, with you.

I want to start

at the beginning.

We'll move toward a discussion of the geopolitical ramifications of this, and they are huge.

But let's start at the beginning.

Talk about Jamal and how he came to the post in the first place.

Well, thanks for having me on.

As you say, this is sort of the only subject for us at the moment, and

it's been gratifying that it's almost the only subject for a lot of other people, too.

I think it's just such an unspeakable thing that

people are not going to let it go and shouldn't let it go.

He came about a year ago.

You know, he very reluctantly

decided to leave Saudi Arabia because he realized that he was not going to be allowed to write or

encourage the kind of debate that he thought his country and his region needed.

And what he said to us, and his main point of contact was Karen Atiyah, who's our global opinions editor, was,

you know, there are people in Saudi Arabia who can't speak.

Some of them are in prison.

A lot more of them are muzzled.

And so I have a responsibility to

try and say some of the things that they can't say.

And that's how it began.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Right.

One of the,

and I say this as a member of another journalism organization, one of the things that has been very noble about the Washington Post here is that he's not an employee.

He's a part-time columnist, I guess.

You've really made this

your own.

Tell me a little bit about

the moment you learned that he went missing and how, when you took this to the rest of the people in your organization,

how they reacted to this and how decisions were made about the response.

So I'll answer your question, but I just want to say on this making it a cause that's our own, I think it's really important to remember that this is a monstrous crime against freedom of expression, and we would be feeling that no matter who he worked for.

Aaron Powell, it's a monstrous crime also against, and we'll get to this, but it's also a monstrous crime against the notion of diplomacy and consulates and

how you treat your citizens when they come to a government installation.

There are many aspects of this that are broke and horrible, and I think it would have gotten attention.

And a monstrous crime against basic humanity.

Basic humanity.

But I also also do think that, and I'm trying to be very practical about this, I do think that the Washington Post,

almost single-handedly in the first days, drove this story to become the preeminent story in the world.

And it really hasn't stopped being the preeminent, most urgent story in the world, which is kind of remarkable.

Well, I appreciate it.

Tuesday night, October 2nd, Karen said that she had heard from Hatiche,

Jamal's fiancé in Turkey, that he had entered the consulate and hadn't come back out.

You know, and our first reaction, my first reaction was, okay, well, there's going to be some confusion, and he'll show up.

And then the next morning, he still hadn't shown up.

And

so we kind of went into overdrive of trying to get in touch with anybody who could help find him.

You know, because at that point, my

guess was the worst possible thing you could imagine was that Saudi Arabia was trying to somehow kidnap him and get him back to Saudi Arabia, and that, you know, before we knew it, he'd show up there on TV confessing to some phony crime, and then we'd never get him out.

And so it was like, who can we find to try and make sure that

if he's still in Turkey, he stays in Turkey.

Did you reach Saudi officials, American officials, both?

We

and Turkish officials.

We tried all all three, yeah.

And, you know, the Saudi ambassador told us flatly, oh, no, he left the consulate half an hour after he came in.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: And let's note for the record that the Saudi ambassador,

Khaled, Prince Khaled, is the brother of Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince.

Correct.

Was the ambassador lying, or did the ambassador not know, do you think?

Well, I haven't used the word lie for the reason that I can't prove

whether he knew or had been misinformed.

Fair enough.

Was the Trump administration, the State Department, useful to you in this, in the first days?

As long as we thought there was a chance that Jamal was alive, we reached out to anybody we could.

But

obviously, in the end, nobody could be helpful.

And in the event, I didn't think the President was sufficiently concerned.

And that sets a tone for the government.

Right.

I mean,

it's a fairly obvious question to ask.

Do you think that a different administration would have reacted differently?

A president who was committed to American values in the way that I think a president should be would have immediately said, this is alarming, would not have started putting out theories about maybe it was a rogue operator.

You know, the

right response would be, this is alarming.

We need to know immediately where he is.

And as soon as they knew that he'd been the victim of foul play, the response should have been, we need to know exactly what happened.

Tell me about how this has affected the Washington Post and the people you work with.

Well, you know, it's some of the people on our staff

were close to Jamal.

I mean, as you know, as somebody who's

written about the Middle East for a long time, he knew a lot of people who covered that region, and he'd been helpful to a lot of people and always,

you know, in a warm, generous way.

All through the newsroom, people took it hard in the sense that

if this can happen to Jamal,

who is safe and

what kind of world are we living in?

So in that sense, yeah,

it was personal and difficult.

I have to ask this, and maybe there is no

adequate response to this, but

the general climate, one that, to be sure, is being set and molded by a president who's ostentatiously anti-press.

And we're talking about a global climate.

Obviously, one of the ironies or small ironies of this crime is that it was a crime against a reporter committed by his own government.

But in a country which has a tremendous number of journalists in prison,

Turkey,

there is a general anti-press climate across much of the world.

Do you think that the Saudis believed that they can get away with something because journalists are so unpopular?

Do you think a climate has been set by Donald Trump and by others that allows people to think that this is a plausible thing to do?

So I think, first of all,

for this crime, there are criminals who are responsible.

And they're the people who murdered Jamal and the people who, or person who gave the order that he be murdered.

And

those people should be brought to justice.

And I don't think there should be any confusion about

shared responsibility.

This was a crime.

There are people responsible.

The perpetrators are guilty.

On another level,

Has the Saudi regime been given reason to think that the United States would be more tolerant of reckless actions than past administrations might have been?

The answer is yes.

They triggered this division with gutter and it was applauded.

They entered Yemen and it's been mostly encouraged.

Just a couple weeks ago, the State Department certified that Saudi Arabia,

per congressional

instruction, they had to certify yes or no.

Is Saudi Arabia taking good care to avoid civilian casualties in Yemen?

And all the evidence says no, but the State Department said yes.

Then, you know, the kidnapping of the Lebanese prime minister, and not to mention all the terrible abuses against Saudi citizens in Saudi Arabia and having been kidnapped from other countries.

So

not only with no response from the United States, with encouragement from the United States.

So that's number two.

And then Number three,

and I really, you know, again, I want to stress this is not,

I'm not saying this is why Jamal was killed.

But if you look at the world

and you see a world where Putin thinks he can go to Britain and poison his enemies, and China thinks it can go into Hong Kong and Thailand and kidnap people who displease the Communist Party, and they all get away with it, and the United States doesn't have much to say about it.

Yeah,

you're encouraging a different kind of world order or world disorder where

you're going to get more of that.

All right, we're going to take a short break now.

We'll have more with Fred Hyatt in a moment.

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Welcome back.

I'm sitting down with Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hyatt discussing the murder of the Saudi journalist and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.

The United States has been allied with Saudi Arabia since World War II.

The Saudis, and again, this is our common experience, I think,

before this horrible thing happened, we were not under any illusions that Saudi Arabia was a benevolent democratic regime

run by a happy-go-lucky of liberal,

a happy family of liberals.

Why this incident?

This is a country that beheads people, crucifies people.

It's an absolute monarchy.

When I interviewed Mohammed bin Salman in May, the crown prince,

I said,

you talk about reform, but you're an absolute monarchy.

And his response was, literally, he said in English, he says, you talk about absolute monarchy like it's a threat.

These guys are these guys.

15 Saudis, same number, weirdly,

that formed the backbone of the hijacking operation that led to 9-11.

We have a lot of experience understanding Saudi Arabia's role in the world.

Why this?

There is something particularly heinous about

a sovereign government luring deliberately one of its own citizens onto its own diplomatic property, which we all understand to be a place where you're supposed to have a sense of safety and security, and then

allegedly, you know, chopping him up and disposing of the body.

I mean, it's just...

And

on top of that, the idea that the person they saw as a threat

was somebody who, you know, he's a 59-year-old

genial patriot of Saudi Arabia.

I mean, he...

He's done nothing in his life except write about things, covered stories.

Yeah, he's a journalist, and he really honestly believed that what he was doing was not only in the interest of his country, but he was actually trying to help the Crown Prince.

I mean,

he believed in a lot of what the Crown Prince said he wants to do in terms of reforming this country and modernizing it and pushing back against the more extreme

religious elements of the religious establishment.

And his argument was,

I'm helping if I can help him understand that he's not going to get to modernizing if he shuts out every voice but his own.

So the idea that

the regime could see this as an enemy, I think, sort of brought home,

wow, this isn't the.

I mean, of course, we knew it was still a dictatorship, but this isn't the kind of modernizing, somewhat tolerant new face that it was presenting itself to be.

When MBS, the initials of Mohammed Minsalman, Minsalman, when MBS came through the United States a few months ago, I saw him, you saw him, everybody saw him.

Did you believe it when you listened to him?

You know, he came to the Post and had an editorial board.

It was mostly off the record.

We pushed the embassy, can't we make it on the record?

They said, well, he wants to speak English.

He'll be more comfortable if it's off the record.

But

we finally came to an agreement that you could, some of it, you know, and could could be on the record.

And so my colleagues on the news side did a story about it.

And

he was mostly impressive.

There were a couple of chilling moments, I would say,

when

even then

his attitude toward the proper role of the press kind of came through.

So, and I would say, as an editorial page, we were not,

my colleague Jackson Deal, who writes a lot of these editorials, has been warning for quite a long time that MBS seems to be a reckless actor, that the Yemen was not going to be a two-week little adventure, as they were saying.

But I don't judge as harshly as some people do now, in hindsight, the people who wanted to give the Crown Prince a chance.

I mean, the idea that,

you know,

look, the Arab Spring had failed, and maybe this was a different road to modernization, and maybe he really did want to diversify the economy.

And,

you know, it's, I mean, he had.

He came out against political jihad.

He came out for Arab-Israeli peace.

Right.

And he

the rhetoric was there.

The rhetoric was there.

He promised he was going to eventually get rid of the guardianship system so that women could have more of a role.

And so, you know, I don't think it was unreasonable for

journalists or anybody else to say, well, let's see how this turns out and let's see if he means it.

But what Jamal understood is you're not going to get there if the only voice you're listening to is your own or a few psychophants around you.

Aaron Trevor Brandon.

There is

an assumption on the part of a lot of people, some of whom should know better, that

this is going to this incident is going to permanently alter Saudi Arabia's relationship with the United States and maybe with other Western democracies.

I say maybe they should know better because my,

sorry to say, cynical belief is that eventually people will understand the indispensability of Saudi Arabia to the energy economy, to the world economy.

And assuming that MBS stays in the role, becomes king,

they'll have to deal with them.

Am I wrong in my cynicism?

I think you're getting ahead of where I think we should be at the moment.

I think we should be saying, as we've been saying since October 2nd, that we need a full accounting of what happened and then we need full accountability for the perpetrators.

And until we have that, there can't be business as usual with this regime.

Now

I'm a believer, as you are, that the U.S.-Saudi alliance is important.

And I would never say that we have to cut off all ties.

But on the contrary, I think if you're a believer in the alliance and you want it to evolve in a constructive way, the message that the Saudis have to get is if there is a murderer at the top of their regime, it's not going to be good for the alliance.

And that's not the best way forward.

And so,

you know, let's not get ahead of ourselves, but

let's insist on full accountability.

Let's find out what happened.

You know, if the evidence shows that this was a rogue operation, I mean, even that is kind of stunning when you think that these were people so close to the Crown Prince.

So the official story now is that his closest security people committed a monstrous crime against his will or knowledge.

Not a good

leadership lesson there.

Not a good leadership lesson, but

there are a lot of people who are skeptical of that story, who say...

It's also absurd, but let's

this could not have happened without his knowledge.

And so, you know, I think

the position should be: let's find out what happened.

And if he's responsible, you know, there should be consequences.

There's the Magnitsky Act, there's sanctions, there's all kinds of things which could affect the relationship.

And even that isn't saying that the U.S.

and Saudi will not have ties.

Of course, they will.

Well, I mean, let me buttress my cynicism here,

despite your desire otherwise, by just noting that right now, as we speak, thousands of Western investors, including many Americans, are in Saudi Arabia for that investment conference.

Some people did drop out, obviously.

So it's not as if the world is shunning this family.

But let me go to this word murderer for a minute, because you've editorialized about Yemen well before the murder of Khashoggi.

What's a murderer

in this context?

We know that...

Saudi Arabia drops munitions on Yemeni civilians.

We know that Saudi Arabia does all kinds of, and they're not alone in this, obviously, in their heinous behavior, but we know that they commit all sorts of state-sanctioned violence.

What's the difference between killing

children who happen to be in the way of your bombs in Yemen and luring someone into your consulate and then killing him?

What's the moral difference here?

You know,

I think

it's not a terribly productive question.

You know,

the United Nations has looked at Saudi Arabia's actions in Yemen and has said they believe some of them rise to the level or sink to the level of crimes against humanity.

And

in an ideal world, I think that should be something that the United Nations took seriously and

that the United States took seriously.

And there should be consequences,

starting with statecraft in terms of cutting off support for that operation, which the United States is still providing.

So it's a terrible thing.

But

what we're dealing with right here is the deliberate luring of one of your own citizens onto a diplomatic compound for the free expression of his views and

his dismemberment.

And that's something different.

And I think we should just be able to keep in our heads that that's a monstrous thing, and let's let's deal with it.

Right.

Talk a little bit about the

self-inflicted wound on Saudi statecraft, if you will.

And again, I think we're, you, the both of us are more or less in the camp that

believes that Iran, Saudi Arabia's ardent foe in the Middle East,

is a malevolent player.

They were on the Obama administration, state sponsor of terror list, not just the Trump administration, state sponsor of terror list.

We know

all of the terrible things that Iran has done in Syria, in Lebanon, and elsewhere.

Give us your assessment of what this case means for the struggle by the West against Iran, against its military expansion, against its sponsorship of terrorism, against its eventual assume restarted nuclear program.

Talk about this in the largest sense of how this changes things.

Well,

you know, I could start by giving you one data point, which is we had a visit to the editorial board, I guess, last week from Senator Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia, who's running for reelection, and

asked him about it, and he said, you know, first of all, He said, I don't think the United States needs Saudi Arabia the way it used to.

Obviously, we've become much more of an energy producer.

And second of all, he said, why are we allowing ourselves to get in the middle of a Sunni-Shia internecine war inside Islam?

Why is that in the U.S.

interest?

It's a direct echo of President Obama.

Yeah.

And

I think

part of the purpose of President Obama's diplomacy to get the Iran Treaty was to allow the United States to pull itself out of that and eventually to play a role that would say, look, both Saudi Arabia and Iran, and for that matter, Turkey, are going to be in the region.

And the U.S.

interest in the long term should be to foster some mutual ability to live together, not to take one side or the other.

This administration obviously has gone all in on one side.

And

I'm really reluctant to get into the whole statecraft consequences because I think our focus really needs to be on accountability for this crime.

But inevitably, one consequence is going to be more and more people saying, wait, why are these the good guys and only Iran is the bad guys?

And why is the United States allowing Saudi Arabia to dictate what our policy should be?

Aaron Powell, could you bear down?

We can come back to geopolitics in a second, but bear down on this issue of accountability, because I'm very curious about it.

Accountability for individuals who kill somebody is one thing.

Let us assume, for the purposes of this conversation, that MBS had a direct role.

We know his people had a direct role in this.

MBS had a direct role in this, but he is the crown prince of this large country and he stands to become king unless something dramatic happens and people in his family decide that he's not viable to be king.

Just cast your mind down the road.

What would his reign look like if we were holding him as a civilization personally accountable for this terrible thing that happened.

We're in really interesting new territory in a kind of way.

Right.

And, you know, at the moment,

we can't even get

I mean, supposedly there's an audio tape of what happened in that consulate.

None of us have heard it.

Why?

And and and so

you know, if I mean, Turkey credit them for letting some of this information come out, but

at this point,

you know, there has to be some nervousness when Erdogan came out yesterday and said, I'm going to reveal the full naked truth and didn't.

Is he trying to play this for advantage?

And

if so,

what does that mean to the possibility of the truth coming out?

So,

you know, I think, okay,

Let's insist that the truth come out.

If the United States won't insist,

then the United Nations should initiate an investigation and all the countries who know something about it should be pressed to participate.

I mean, Erdogan himself yesterday said he wants an impartial investigation.

Let's have it.

And,

you know,

I mean, these hypotheticals are challenging, but I continue to believe that

You know, if,

as the Crown Prince says, he's innocent and he he regrets this horrible crime, it's in his interest to have this investigation.

And if he, in fact, gave the orders, I don't think the world will

be able to live with him in this role.

We live with Putin.

We live with Putin.

I mean,

you know, let's see what happens.

I think it's, you know, you're right, there are people at this conference, but there are a lot of people who didn't go.

There's a lot of people in Silicon Valley who are being pressed, you know, by their employees, probably by their kids at the breakfast table of, you know, are you really going to take money from this guy?

Hollywood as well.

Hollywood as well.

That's not going to go away.

You wrote an amazing column about this, and it was a column not directed.

You weren't directing your anger at the Saudis.

You were directing your anger at people who

work for the Saudis, people here who work for the Saudis.

We live in a city.

You know, this is where I don't disagree with the swamp designation.

There are a lot of people we know personally who have made and continue to make a lot of money on the Saudi account,

PR, legal work, investment work, and so on.

I guess maybe you're a glass half-full kind of guy.

Nobody's actually ever said that about you before.

And maybe I'm being excessively glass half-empty, but I see this conference taking place with actual Americans attending and think,

how do you do this?

Your column, I mean, you're basically saying you're asking people in Washington who have benefited materially from their relationship with Saudi Arabia to say, how much is your soul worth?

How much of your own morality is worth

giving up in order to get rich working for murderers?

Can you?

talk a little bit about what motivated that column and if you think something in our culture in the Washington sort of the lobbying PR industrial complex is going to change?

You know,

one thing that sparked it was in the first days after Jamal's disappearance, we thought, oh, it'd be interesting to get an op-ed from somebody who'd been working in the intelligence world, in the United States, you know, X-CIA or whatever.

This was at a time when the U.S.

government was saying we don't know anything about what happened.

I was looking for somebody who could write an op-ed for us that would just say, here's what you could expect U.S.

intelligence agencies to know at a moment like this, and here's the questions they could be asking, and here's what then they could be expected to find out.

And

what was striking was as I started calling people,

how many said, oh, that's a good idea.

I wish I could write that piece, but I can't.

I'm conflicted.

And, you know, it just brought home how much of this town, especially, as you know,

people who worked for Central Command, people who were in the American Embassy in Saudi Arabia, when they get out, many of them go to work in one way or another for the Saudis.

And, you know, I wasn't saying that that had been an evil choice up to then.

I don't think it was.

I mean, obviously the Saudis have tried to

shape the debate, but

there are no two sides to this story.

And so I was just saying, okay, are you really going to be comfortable working for somebody who can do this?

I once asked somebody who worked for a heinous government why he did it, and he said his wife wanted a new kitchen.

Made me feel really good about choosing Washington as a home, by the way.

You've been writing about the Middle East for a long time, America's relationship with Middle Eastern countries for a long time.

Have you learned something new out of this case?

You know,

I don't think it's so much about the region.

I think it's something that we learn and then we relearn,

which is about the nature of absolute power and autocracy.

And

it can be Stalin.

It can be

Idiomin.

The fact that it's Arab or Jewish or Chinese, that's not the issue.

The issue is when...

a monarch or young ruler or whatever begins to believe that he has all the answers.

And when he squelches every voice that might warn him against doing bad things,

bad things can happen.

And,

you know, again, I don't want to get ahead of us, but it looks very much like this is that very sad, familiar story.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: Is there a way that this case, if it doesn't reach

justice in some way or another, that it makes the world a day more dangerous place for journalists generally

you know i i think um you could look at this two ways if you know if a government um feels like it can get away with something like this at no cost then

um

yeah i'm sure you increase the risk of it's happening i i

you know not to accept your accusation of me being glass half full but i would say so far

If other people are watching what's the reaction to this, they're looking and they're saying, this wasn't a smart move.

This hasn't been good for Saudi Arabia or for the Crown Prince.

And I think we have to do everything we can so that in the end, the lesson anybody takes is

this isn't just wrong.

It's stupid.

And we're not going to go down that road.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: The question is, though, and I didn't mean to go down this road, but you raised something for me.

Maybe this wasn't stupid.

Maybe we just don't understand Middle Eastern rules, which is to say the following.

There are many, many Saudis who are displeased with aspects of MBS's rule who now have come to understand, quite possibly, whether the proof is entirely there yet, they've come to understand that dissent has enormous and terrible consequences.

You know,

I agree with you from a Western perspective, this is not only brutal, but incredibly stupid.

For one thing, you don't kill somebody in the one place where you have no deniability, except if the point is to kill somebody in the place where you have no deniability.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Yeah.

You know, I mean, I think it's true that sometimes we assume that a dictator's interest is the national interest.

And we look and we say, Putin, why would he do this?

This is bad for Russia.

And

his first concern is not what's good for Russia or bad for Russia.

It's what...

guarantees his survival in office and the preservation of his wealth.

And that, you know, may be true for for the Crown Prince too.

But I think anybody looking at it who believes even 10%

that the Crown Prince had a goal of modernization and bringing the young people along,

integrating Saudi Arabia into the world, would have to see

this wasn't a smart move.

Well, Fred,

I hope on a personal level and an institutional level that the Washington Post never lets up until some kind of justice is served, until you find out the truth of what happened.

And from what I can see, there are very few people in our industry who want to let up either.

So I hope you're right.

I hope that

people come to understand that it can't be business as usual.

Well, a crime like this goes unpunished.

It's not good for

democracy.

It's not good for the press.

It's not good for civilized people anywhere.

So thank you very much for pushing on this, and I hope that you push on it for as long as it takes.

Thanks for having me on.

That's it for this week of Radio Atlantic.

My thanks again to Fred Hyatt of The Washington Post.

Thanks also to Kevin Townsend for producing and editing this episode, and to Catherine Wells, the executive producer of Atlantic Podcasts.

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