rendition plot: according to Quartz, “An unnamed National Security Agency official told the … [Observer] that US intelligence had learned that Riyadh ‘had something unpleasant in store for Khashoggi,’ at least a day before Khashoggi went to the embassy in Istanbul,” where he was murdered, in early October 2018. “The ‘threat warning was communicated to the White House through official intelligence channels’ … [but] the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has refused to comment on why Khashoggi was not warned.”)156
In another August 2017 intercept, American intelligence agents hear MBS tell associates—though it is not clear, per the Wall Street Journal, if this is a direct quote or a summary of intelligence collected—that if top MBS aide Saud al-Qahtani and others cannot successfully lure Khashoggi to Saudi Arabia, “we could possibly lure him outside Saudi Arabia and make arrangements.”157
That some of MBS’s ire toward Khashoggi stems from his belief that Saudi journalists should be organs of the royal family is almost certain. The New York Times reports that “prominent Saudi editors and journalists who have accompanied [MBS] on foreign trips have been given up to $100,000 in cash.”158 According to the Times, Saudi journalists living in-country who criticize MBS can see their websites permanently blocked within twenty-four hours, and other “journalists deemed too critical have been quietly silenced through phone calls informing them that they are barred from publishing, and sometimes from traveling abroad.”159 Interestingly, while Khashoggi has already received such a communication from the royal palace, it is because of his criticism of Trump’s foreign policy, not MBS’s, that he is banned from journalism in Saudi Arabia (see chapter 6).
August 2017 also sees Jared Kushner travel to the Middle East to “build on talks with a budding Sunni Arab coalition of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Jordan”—all of the original Red Sea conspirators, except for Bahrain.160 Kushner and his small entourage of Trump loyalists, including former Trump Organization executive vice president and chief legal officer Jason Greenblatt, will come away from their meetings in the Middle East “hopeful that the new generation of Arab leaders is a potential ‘game-changer.’”161 In reporting on Kushner’s multinational tour, the Washington Post notes “Trump’s unusually close relations with both Israel and the Gulf Arabs.”162 The Post notes, too, that Israel and the Sunni Arab Gulf nations are looking for a partner in the Palestinian Authority. It is in this context that the newspaper mentions “Mohammed Dahlan, a Gazan Palestinian now living in the UAE,” as a “key intermediary” between the new Israeli-Arab alliance and the Palestinians, adding that “the plan is to provide economic and social support [to Gazans], through Egypt and with Israel’s blessing, that can weaken the hard-liners’ control” in Gaza.163 The Post concludes its coverage of Kushner’s trip by reporting that “beyond the machinations in Gaza is a larger vision for restarting a Palestinian peace process drawing on the alliance of moderate Sunni leaders. Jordan’s King Abdullah II and Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi already have extensive, friendly relations with Israel. Mohammed bin Zayed, the crown prince and military leader of the UAE, and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed don’t have formal ambassadorial contacts with Israel. But they share a common enemy in Iran.”164
In September 2017, U.S. intelligence receives more intercepts confirming MBS’s intentions with respect to Khashoggi, by now a Washington Post journalist. According to the New York Times, an intercepted MBS conversation from September includes MBS telling a top aide, Turki Aldakhil, that he will use “a bullet” on Khashoggi if the journalist does not, according to the Times report, “return to the kingdom and end his criticism of the Saudi government.”165 The Times cites The Intercept as “detailed evidence … [that] the crown prince considered killing Mr. Khashoggi long before a team of Saudi operatives strangled him inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul and dismembered his body using a bone saw” in October 2018 (see chapter 9). The Times reminds its readers that MBS is “a close ally of the Trump White House—especially Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser.”166
The September 2017 recording is just one audio file from “years of the crown prince’s voice and text communications that the NSA [National Security Agency] routinely intercepted and stored,” according to the Times, which notes that a late 2018 review by the NSA “and other American spy agencies,” which are by then “circulat[ing] intelligence reports [on MBS] to other spy agencies, the White House, and close foreign allies,” will result in the CIA “concluding