Today, Explained - Consequences

Episode Date: October 18, 2018

It is now almost certain that journalist Jamal Khashoggi was brutally murdered at the hands of the Saudi government. As more and more gruesome details emerge, things get worse and worse for Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Early on in this episode, you're going to hear about some graphic violence. If that sort of thing is too much for you, skip ahead to about minute two after the theme music. Thanks. There's supposedly audio from inside the Saudi consulate building, which proves that Khashoggi was interrogated, tortured and murdered by this alleged Saudi hit squad that had been sent from Riyadh. Khashoggi showed up for his appointment at 1pm

on the day he disappeared. He was invited into the consul general's office, but while he was in there, he was basically assaulted by various members of this team. Very difficult to verify this stuff, but the gist of it seems to be that he was beaten and tortured. His fingers might have been cut off before he was actually killed. He may have been drugged and then a forensics doctor who was part of this supposed hit squad then dismembered his body

on a table in the Consul General's study. Those body parts were removed from the consulate in diplomatic bags and driven from the consulate around the corner to the Consul General's house. All of the speculation is from what is probably a Turkish surveillance device planted in the Consul General's office. The Turks have been very wary about releasing this tape and the fact that they've been spying

on a country that is a regional rival, but they're allied on many issues. They say they've played this tape to their American counterparts, to American diplomats. As far as I can tell, anyone who's listened to it is pretty shaken by it. It's very gruesome and it would be very hard to see how this is anything other than a premeditated murder from actually listening to this tape. Turkey knows that if it releases this,

then there's no way the Saudis can kind of backtrack on these consistent denials, that they know anything that happened there. We told you the story of Jamal Khashoggi's disappearance last week. It looked like he was probably dead and that he died at the hands of the Saudi Arabian government. Since then, it's become all but certain. The only thing missing is his body. But along with that certainty has come consequences. We're so used to seeing powerful men get away with just about everything in this world, but this time might be different. Today, the U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin backed out of a big investor conference in Saudi Arabia.

The U.K. and France are backing out too. No one wants to be near the crown prince of Saudi Arabia right now. And some people think MBS, one of the most powerful autocrats in the world, might even have to step down. Bethan McKernan has been covering the story and the consequences for The Guardian. She's on the ground in Turkey. The Turkish government is usually loathe to talk to journalists. It doesn't really leak anything. It treats local and international media alike with a lot of suspicion. But on this story, there's been a very controlled, very centralized sort of study, drip, drip, drip of information leaked to news outlets. And that kind of coordination is really unusual, but they're doing it because they're

afraid of actually giving their version of events through official channels. The Turkish government is definitely driving this narrative, but they're doing it in a very specific way where nothing is actually attributable yet to any official. And that's partly why there's so much, you know, international intrigue around this story. The last time we checked in, the story was still sort of developing. We had heard that the Turkish government said that Jamal was brutally murdered in the Saudi consulate, but we hadn't heard much from the Saudis other than, you know, a sort of blanket denial. Can you take us through what's happened in the past week or so and how this story has developed? The big kind of development in the investigation came when the Saudis agreed to let Turkish investigators search both the consulate, which is where Khashoggi was allegedly murdered,

and the consul general's house, which is around the corner, and is where allegedly his body was taken and disposed of. A search went ahead on Monday of the consulate. This is something the Turks have been asking for from the very beginning. Initially, the Saudis said that they were okay with it. Then they appeared to change their mind. It took nine hours. The forensic team didn't come out

until the early hours of the morning. Erdogan himself said that some surfaces inside the building had been freshly painted and that toxic substances was the phrase he used were discovered by the investigations team and are being you know now looked at the key unanswered question that we're looking at is if Khashoggi was murdered where is his body? Investigators are looking at the garage under the Saudi Consul General's house because that's where several diplomatic cars spent several hours in the hours after Khashoggi disappeared after they allegedly drove his body there. Turkish investigators

were allowed into the Consul General's house for the first time on Wednesday night. A caravan of Turkish forensics teams descended on the Saudi consul's residence today, gloves and hazmat suits on, ready to conduct their first search of the property since Jamal Khashoggi's disappearance more than two weeks ago. That investigation is going to be ongoing. There's probably going to be more than one search, but I'd be very surprised if they didn't emerge from that initial search with smoking gun kind of evidence that Khashoggi's body had been disposed of there. The question is what they do with that information and when they choose to release it. And so far, we've seen they've been very careful to control that drip feed of information.

Saudi Arabia could make this whole scandal go away instantly if they could just produce evidence that Khashoggi left the consulate, whether there was a video of that from CCTV or whether he was spotted somewhere else. But it's been 15 days now and they've not been able to do that. So the Turkish government says that they have this video and it seems likely that they bugged the Saudi consulate. Are they going to face repercussions for spying on Saudi Arabia this whole time? They claim to have evidence, but they don't say where the evidence is from, which is where you get this theory about Khashoggi's Apple Watch. Investigators were trying to work out whether an Apple Watch that Jamal Khashoggi may have been wearing when he walked into the Saudi consulate here might have been able to

transmit some valuable information to an iPhone in the possession of his fiancee, who of course was standing outside the consulate waiting for him to return. Most tech experts think that that isn't possible. The watch was too far away from the phone for those devices to sync, which kind of leaves this one explanation that all the details that we're hearing are coming from this audio device that was planted in the consul general's office by the Turks. So then where does that leave the Turkish government? It's a difficult position for the Turks. If they release this evidence, they're basically admitting that they were spying on the Saudi diplomatic mission in Istanbul. proof in the public domain that a man, that a citizen was murdered within their consulate when he was, when he had an appointment to pick up papers he needed to get married. I mean,

that's unprecedented. Ankara is not backing down on this and is pushing the Saudis to provide evidence, which suggests that maybe any kind of deals that were being struck or understandings that were being reached behind the scenes maybe fell through. President Trump might have had something to do with that when he gave that interview saying that maybe rogue killers were to blame for what happened. But even if that was the line that Ankara and Washington and Riyadh had agreed to go with, Trump kind of jumped the gun a bit by, he almost said it too early because it embarrassed Erdogan that his investigators would look like

they hadn't done their jobs properly. I mean, at that time, they were still searching the consulate building. It felt, I think, to Erdogan like he was losing control of that narrative. So he sort of pushed it back again. Who does the Turkish government think is behind this? There was this thing about this 15-person hit squad.

Is that still the theory? And if so, have any of those members of this supposed hit squad been identified? All 15 of them were captured on CCTV in Istanbul's airport. They were identified by the Turkish media. At least three or four of them are thought to be members of Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince, members of his personal security detail. According to a source, Turkish authorities are now investigating Meher Abdelaziz Mutrib, a member of the elite protection brigade tasked with guarding the Saudi crown prince. The forensics doctor, Mohamed Al-Tabaigi, is very high ranking within Saudi establishment circles. He holds a position within the interior ministry.

These are people who are definitely a part of the Saudi elite. These guys have also been ID'd by Saudi media as wrongly accused tourists who just happened to be visiting, arriving on private jets and leaving on private jets. Those travellers were in Turkey as regular tourists, but were accused of being related to Khashoggi's disappearance with no sufficient evidence. Which is clearly bullshit, given that flight logs showed that most of the men arrived on a private charter plane at 3.13am and that all of them departed the same day they arrived. The circle's tightening, right? The Turks have this evidence. The Saudis know that Turks have this evidence. And if they don't offer somebody up as the fall guy or as the scapegoat, people want answers.

And the Turks are tightening, you know, they're very much upping the ante and they're very much continuing to pile on that pressure to get the Saudis to actually say something about what happened in the consulate that day. Given all of this, why do we think the Saudis are now cooperating with the Turkish government? The Saudis had this kind of two-week interim period where apparently surfaces were painted over in the consulate before the Turks were allowed in. Cleaners were actually seen entering the consulate building a couple of hours before investigators were let in. And, you know, I'm not saying that the cleaners were allowed back in to spray some disinfectant and mop the floors and they got rid of all the evidence of an international kind of crime scene. But it's not a good look. Coming up, the consequences.

This is Today Explained. Bethan, how does this look for Saudi Arabia internationally right now? It looks really bad. It's an unprecedented situation. I mean, Saudi Arabia has carried out renditions of dissident princes from a couple of different countries before in the last decade or so. In a sense, this is business as usual for them. The issue is that they got caught. France and the UK and the G7 as a group have all sort of issue statements that they're very worried about Khashoggi's disappearance. The U.S., on the other hand, appears to be quite reassured by these promises from Riyadh

that they're going to conduct a thorough investigation and they're really going to get to the bottom of what happened. It's almost like other parts of the US and other industries are kind of taking more of a lead on showing their displeasure in this case. I mean, there's this international investment conference in Riyadh next week. Some people are calling the Davos of the desert, which the House of Saud really needs to go well. The Saudis have been courting a lot of American industries, particularly Silicon Valley and the entertainment industry, basically since Mohammed bin Salman became crown prince. There's been jitters about how he has handled himself as crown prince so far. There have been signs that his behavior is impulsive and erratic and quite dangerous. And each incident seems to have, you know, been slightly worse than the last. Last year, he kidnapped the Prime Minister of

Lebanon for two weeks, Saad Hariri. It was a really big deal. And the markets sort of freaked out then that maybe this guy isn't the reformer that he promised to be. They did it again when he arrested, I think it was over 200 people who were very well-connected and wealthy within the kingdom. He locked them all up in the Ritz-Carlton last November. And investors were sort of becoming wary about whether this is a crown prince that they want to place their bets on. So this investment conference next week, lots of prominent business world figures have pulled out. Christine Lagarde from the IMF, Jamie Dimon from JPMorgan Chase, Danny Minton-Beddoes, who's the editor of The Economist, you know, sponsors are pulling out left, right and centre. Even the CEO of Uber,

which is a company that has a lot of significant Saudi investment in it, has said that he's not going. And while business leaders and governments are pulling out of this investment conference, including Steven Mnuchin, the president's still backing his boy MBS? Trump was really slow to respond on this. He spent the first few days of this crisis not really saying anything at all. Then he came out and said that he thought the case was shocking and horrendous and there needed to be severe consequences and punishments for anybody who was found to have disappeared or killed Khashoggi. And then he spoke to King Salman. He was basically parroting what King Salman told him, which was that rogue killers could have been behind this alleged murder. And when Mike Pompeo was in Saudi Arabia

on Tuesday, Trump was patched into a phone call with Mohammed bin Salman that evening and promptly tweeted right after he got off the phone that Saudi Arabia, you know, had again strenuously denied these allegations. And he even made a comparison to Brett Kavanaugh saying that this was another rush to judgment, another case of someone or someone's being deemed guilty before being proven innocent. It's really a remarkable comparison for the president to take. How often does a murderer confess when someone just says, hey, did you murder that person? And yeah, Mohammed bin Salman said, no, no, we didn't murder that person. And Trump has basically gone, oh, OK, I believe you. Cool. And that's sort of the end of it. How out of step is President Trump with the rest of the world at this point?

Very. I mean, that's no surprise to anyone, I think, who's watched his relationships with other kind of strong men around the world since he became president, right? I mean, Putin said the same thing earlier this year. Trump asked him, did you medal in the 2016 election? And Putin said, no, we didn't. And then Trump went, see, they didn't medal in the 2016 election. He has a real affinity for people he perceives as strong leaders. And Mohammed bin Salman, he's definitely a strong leader. He's the de facto ruler of an absolute monarchy. You can't help but suspect this goes deeper than Trump's admiration for strongmen. How deep does the Saudi money relationship with the United States go?

Oh, I mean, it's decades and decades old. Those ties, mostly because of oil, go back a very long way. Saudi spends annually billions in property investments. It's the single biggest source of funding for Silicon Valley now, which is astonishing. There's also a lot of cultural programs and universities that take Saudi money. It's a really uncomfortable position for anyone, you know, any US institution that has Saudi money, and there's a lot of them. But Saudi Arabia has always had a very patchy human rights record. It's been waging the war in Yemen for the last three and a half years. People were willing to take that money then.

If their consciences are sort of coming back to haunt them now, then I think that was written on the wall a while ago. Apparently, thousands of civilian deaths have not been enough to sway politicians in the U.S. that you shouldn't be selling arms to Riyadh. So if the death of one journalist suddenly became the catalyst for that, I'd be really surprised. How involved is Trump's own business here? Are there personal Trump business decisions on the line here? Well, Trump tweeted that he doesn't have any investments in Saudi Arabia. And as far as we know, that's true.

But it's also true that the Saudis have given him a lot of money over the years. They own the 45th floor of Trump Tower. They've bought various other real estate projects from Trump over the years. I mean, he boasted about it during his election campaign. You know, he said, I'm friends with the Saudis. They give me a lot of money. You know, what am I supposed to do? Not like them. Trump has done personal business deals with the Saudis,

but there is a real argument there that if you were to alienate or cut off the Saudis over this affair, you'd be endangering a lot of other efforts that Trump really needs Saudi Arabia to make work. If the Saudis aren't behind the peace plan for Israel and maybe a state of Palestine, then they're in trouble. I mean, they'd be the main sponsors of anything like that. They need Saudi Arabia to counter Iran's influence in the region. They need Saudi Arabian money to stabilize parts of Syria that the two kind of have the same interest in. These relationships are quite old and they're deep and they involve vast, vast amounts of money.

If Trump faces pressure, if he has to do something about this, get his hands dirty, what's going to happen to the crown prince? Will MBS go down? One option is that Mohammed bin Salman himself could take the fall over this. He has a lot of internal enemies, especially in the branches of the royal family that he kind of sidelined in his quest to kind of consolidate his position. They would happily clamour for his removal as the next in line to the throne if it became clear that that was what the international community was demanding. I mean, if this could actually remove Mohammed bin Salman from the position of Crown Prince, that would be absolutely huge.

King Salman has many other sons, many other brothers who would willingly take his place. So what Trump does in the next couple of days regarding his allies is really quite crucially important, I think. But as with everything with his presidency so far, it's quite unpredictable. Bethan McKernan covers the Middle East for The Guardian. I'm Sean Ramos-Virham. This is Today Explained.