MBS

A ROLE FOR JOURNALISM

SOON AFTER MOHAMMED bin Salman released his vision for the future of Saudi Arabia, he held a private reception for the leading lights of Saudi society. They broke down into two groups. First were the clerics, but not the stuffy, elderly scholars whom young Saudis mocked for their fatwas condemning Pokémon or forbidding photos with cats. These were younger, tech-savvy clerics whose moves young Saudis tracked like Western kids followed Hollywood stars. One hosted a popular television show. Another had been the first black man to lead prayers at the Grand Mosque in Mecca. Yet another was referred to as the Brad Pitt of Saudi clerics because of his luscious lips.

They had not always had easy relationships with the authorities. One was the same cleric King Abdullah had fired for criticizing his co-ed university. Others had been thrown in prison, kicked off of television, or put under house arrest for preaching that strayed outside of the ever-shifting red lines. But the assets they brought to the meeting were clear: millions of followers on Twitter, Snapchat, and other social media platforms. MBS knew well that no other group of Saudis could so easily land Vision 2030 on the screens of so many cellphones across the kingdom.

The other group were intellectuals and journalists who played a role in shaping Saudi public opinion by telegraphing the kingdom’s views and letting the people know how their leaders viewed regional and international issues. Among them was a large, mild-mannered journalist named Jamal Khashoggi, the same man who had briefed the American diplomat years before on the looming challenge to the monarchy.

Khashoggi was in his late fifties, and his life had traversed the most significant social trends in Saudi Arabia. He would end up playing a larger role in MBS’s trajectory than anyone else in the room that day.

He was born in the holy city of Medina to an elite family in the Hejaz region of western Saudi Arabia. His grandfather was a doctor who had treated MBS’s grandfather. Another relative was the famous arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, whose lavish, billionaire lifestyle had filled magazine spreads.

He did not share his uncle’s wealth, but he grew up comfortably in Jeddah, whose historic role as a transit point for pilgrims heading to Mecca made it the kingdom’s most cosmopolitan city. He had gone to the United States for college, earning a degree in business administration from Indiana State University in 1983. It was there that he became active in the Muslim Brotherhood, the international Islamist organization that seeks to embed its version of Islam in the lives of its followers—and in the states where they live.

Khashoggi was devout and joined an usra, or “family,” the basic unit of Brotherhood life that operated like a Bible study, combining religious and social activities. It was not uncommon at the time for young Saudis to fall in with the Brotherhood while abroad. They were prominent in Muslim student associations across the United States, including the Muslim Arab Youth Association that Khashoggi joined. And he would have found their style familiar, since Brotherhood members had played a large role in building the Saudi education system. One year, he ran the book fair at the association’s U.S. national conference.

After university, Khashoggi worked as a journalist for Arab News, an English-language newspaper in Jeddah, and other publications, which gave him an opportunity to cover the biggest international story of the day for Saudi Arabia: the Afghan jihad.

The Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan, and the United States and Saudi Arabia had intervened to push it back, each for its own reasons. The United States saw Afghanistan as a new front in the Cold War, while Saudi Arabia and others in the Muslim world considered the Soviet invasion an infidel attack on a Muslim land. So the two countries joined forces, the CIA working with Saudi intelligence to fund and arm the holy warriors, or mujahideen.

The Afghan jihad stirred the passions of young men across the Arab world in the same way the Spanish Civil War had inspired Westerners such as Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell. Saudi royals paid for young Saudis to join the fight, and Khashoggi rode the wave as a journalist. During reporting trips to Afghanistan, he donned local clothes and traveled with Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian Islamic scholar and theorist of jihad. Once, he sat next to him in the crowded backseat of a car to protect the famous cleric from potential attacks. He had his photo taken holding a Kalashnikov (to the consternation of his editor back home). There is no record of Khashoggi fighting, but his sympathy for the cause was clear and won him an invitation from another young Saudi who was making a name for himself in Afghanistan: Osama bin Laden.

Bin Laden had also grown up in Jeddah, a son of a wealthy contractor who had built much of the kingdom’s infrastructure, including many royal palaces and the compounds around the holy sites. Instead of seeking a role in the family business, bin Laden had used his wealth to set up a training camp in Afghanistan for the so-called “Afghan Arabs” flocking to join the jihad. Bin Laden wanted to spread the word, and invited Khashoggi to write about the place. In an article for Arab News in 1988, Khashoggi trumpeted its transnational Islamic identity:

Maasadat Al-Ansar, Afghanistan—Muslims are one nation. Despite geographical barriers, political squabbles and differences in color and language, they consider themselves brothers. This unique brotherhood is clearly manifested in the attitude of those Arab youths who have joined the Afghan Mujahedeen in their indefatigable struggle against the Communist forces.

Khashoggi described bin Laden as “a famous Saudi contractor” who had become “one of the foremost leaders of the Arab muhahedeen in Afghanistan” and quoted him describing glorious battles.

“We sometimes spent the whole day in the trenches or in the caves until our ears could no longer bear the sound of the explosions all around us,” bin Laden told him. “War planes continually shrieked by us and their crazy song of death echoed endlessly. We spent the days praying to God Almighty.”

Khashoggi also spoke with Jalaluddin Haqqani, who laid out the idea of transnational jihad that would later drive both Al Qaeda and the Islamic State.

“We are proud of these Arab youths,” Haqqani said of the camp’s recruits. “These Arabs now know the requirements of mujahedeen and will serve as ambassadors of jihad in their own countries when they return.”

Bin Laden, of course, would go on to found Al Qaeda and plot catastrophic attacks in the United States and elsewhere, while Haqqani would head the Haqqani Network, a designated terrorist organization associated with Al Qaeda. But in the late 1980s, the two men were seen as Muslim folk heroes, taking up arms against injustice.

But as the war descended into factional fighting and warlordism, Khashoggi’s dream that the Afghan jihad would improve life in the country collapsed.

“He was disappointed that after all the struggle that happened, the Afghans never got it together,” a Saudi colleague recalled. “The infighting, he always talked about that.”

When American commandos killed bin Laden in Pakistan in 2011, Khashoggi mourned, not for bin Laden, but for the dashed hope he had once embodied.

“I collapsed into tears a while ago, heartbroken for you Abu Abdullah,” Khashoggi wrote on Twitter, using a nickname for bin Laden. “You were beautiful and brave in those beautiful days in Afghanistan, before you surrendered to hatred and rage.”

The failure of the Afghan jihad was the first of several political heartbreaks for Khashoggi.

KHASHOGGI RETURNED TO Saudi Arabia and kept writing, a cordial, devout man who led prayers in the office at Arab News. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, Khashoggi drove through the desert to cover the war, running into fleeing Kuwaiti forces who almost shot him before realizing he was Saudi.

He was promoted to editor, which pushed him into a higher level of society, attending private meetings with officials and royals and traveling with the king. But while serving the monarchy, he kept in touch with Islamists around the Arab world and pushed for another private passion: democracy.

In 1992, the Algerian military barred an Islamist party that had won parliamentary elections from taking power, another political heartbreak for Khashoggi. So he and a friend from the Muslim Brotherhood, Azzam Tamimi, founded a group called “Friends of Democracy in Algeria,” which placed ads in British newspapers promoting its cause. The group later broadened its mandate to promoting human rights around the Middle East. Tamimi was its public face, while Khashoggi raised funds behind the scenes.

Khashoggi developed a close relationship with Prince Turki al-Faisal, a son of Saudi Arabia’s third king, who headed the kingdom’s intelligence agency. That relationship, and Khashoggi’s trips to Afghanistan, fueled speculation that Khashoggi was an intelligence agent operating under journalistic cover. Prince Turki and Khashoggi’s friends denied it, but several acknowledged that he did favors for the Saudis. In 2005, for instance, a group of Western officials met in Beirut with leaders from Hamas, the Palestinian militant movement, and the Saudis sent Khashoggi to be their eyes in the meeting. There was nothing suspicious about it at the time, because most Arab Islamists did not consider Saudi Arabia a hostile power.

Despite his early admiration for bin Laden, Khashoggi was ahead of many in the kingdom in recognizing the danger of Al Qaeda and how Saudi Arabia’s intolerance had contributed to the weaponization of Islam. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Saudi officials denied that Saudi citizens had led the plot and conspiracy theories coursed through the kingdom that “the Jews” were behind it. Khashoggi never bought them, placing the blame squarely on those he accused of perverting Islam.

“Osama bin Laden’s hijacked planes not only attacked New York and Washington, they also attacked Islam as a faith and the values of tolerance and coexistence that it preaches,” he wrote.

Over the next decade, debates on social issues raged between liberals and conservatives inside the kingdom, and Khashoggi was a staunch campaigner for the reformist camp. He was appointed editor of Al Watan newspaper and used it to push for women’s rights while criticizing the power of the religious establishment. He didn’t last long. After Al Qaeda bombings killed twenty-five people in Riyadh in 2003, Khashoggi penned an editorial attacking not only the terrorists, but the clerics who gave them cover.

“Those who committed yesterday’s crime, which will have a painful impact on the peaceful nature of our nation, are not only the suicide bombers,’’ he wrote, “but also everyone who instigated or justified the attacks, everyone who called them mujahideen.”

He was fired after less than two months. He received death threats, so Prince Turki, who had been named ambassador to the United Kingdom, took Khashoggi along as a media adviser. A few years later, Turki was named ambassador to Washington, and Khashoggi followed him there, too. Those two jobs helped Khashoggi build a network of contacts among Western journalists and officials he would keep in touch with over the years. While in the United States, he bought a condo near Tysons Corner in Virginia, where he would seek refuge later in life.

He returned home in 2007, where tempers had cooled since his last attempt at domestic journalism. He got his old job back at Al Watan and resumed the reformist fight. To expose what he saw as the backwardness of the kingdom’s education system, he published a question from a government textbook—“How can you identify a woman who can breed more children?”—and solicited answers from “experts” to show the question’s absurdity.

He was an early advocate for women driving, a topic so hot that he could not address it directly in the newspaper. So he did it obliquely, publishing an article that imagined a girl riding a camel to the university and the chaos that ensued. There was no place for her to park, the police weren’t sure how to react, and neither were Saudi drivers, since—as with driving—there was no law that explicitly prohibited girls from riding camels. In subsequent weeks, he published similar articles, imagining a girl riding a bicycle, then a donkey. The articles provoked controversy, and Khashoggi got fired again.

His career broadened out. He became a regular commentator on Saudi and Arab talk shows and published widely, writing a column for Al Hayat, an international Arabic newspaper based in London. Along the way, he maintained his ties to the Saudi power structure and communicated the kingdom’s views to the world.

For most of his career, he was not a reporter in the Western sense, as in a journalist who dug up facts to hold reluctant powers accountable. More accurately, he was an i’laami, Arabic for a “media figure,” who wrote, ran newspapers, and appeared on television as much to transmit the government’s views as to promote his own. Sometimes, that meant writing for cash, as when a contact wired him $100,000 in 2009 to do a sympathetic interview with Prime Minister Najib Razak of Malaysia.

At times, his own views diverged from those of the Saudi leadership, especially after the Arab Spring uprisings spread across the Middle East in 2011. Khashoggi was moved by the story of Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian fruit vendor who had set himself on fire after a confrontation with the police, becoming a symbol of how repressive regimes dashed the hopes of young Arabs. As the uprisings spread, Khashoggi was optimistic that the protests in Tunisia, Egypt, and Syria would pave the way for democracy.

But he maintained a Saudi view of other uprisings. He opposed protests against Bahrain’s Sunni monarchy by the island nation’s Shiite majority, and he supported the Saudi military intervention in Yemen as necessary to check Iran’s ambitions.

The Arab Spring ran off course—another heartbreak for Khashoggi. Egypt collapsed into chaos followed by a military coup, Yemen fell apart, and the Islamic State rose in Iraq and Syria.

It was during this period that I got to know Khashoggi. He was in his mid-fifties then, a tall, rotund man with droopy eyes and an easy manner who cared deeply about the region, liked to discuss ideas, and seemingly never got angry. His media prominence had made him a household name in the Arab world, and he seemed to live on airplanes, traipsing between foreign capitals for meetings and conferences while juggling multiple cellphones that never stopped ringing. Like other foreign journalists working in the region, I took to phoning him regularly to get his thoughts, knowing that, unlike other prominent Saudis, he usually answered his phone.

I kept track of his views. When the Islamic State was at its peak, he spoke of how its ideology overlapped with the kingdom’s.

“Islam itself is in crisis today,” he told me in 2014. “We thought we had settled the issues of modernization, relations with the West, the world, women, democracy, and elections. But they are back again and open for debate, and it is ISIS who has brought them back.”

Along the way, he served as an adviser to Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, the flamboyant billionaire investor who shared Khashoggi’s desire for social reform in the kingdom. The prince funded a new Arabic television station and tapped Khashoggi to run it. But the project didn’t work out. In February 2015, Alarab television went live with a talk show on which a prominent member of Bahrain’s opposition criticized the island kingdom’s royal family. Within hours, it was off the air.

After Salman became king, Khashoggi lauded him as a strong leader and argued that the Arabs should rely less on the United States for security. He penned a widely read column called “The Salman Doctrine” that laid out the new king’s foreign policy, criticizing what he saw as American resistance to acknowledge the threat posed by Iran.