that Prince Mohammed had ordered” Khashoggi’s murder.167
Indeed, MBS’s communications from September 2017, taken in full, reveal that by ninety days into his reign as de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, the crown prince and other top Saudi officials were growing “increasingly alarmed about Mr. Khashoggi’s criticisms of the Saudi government.”168 American intelligence analysts have concluded that, by that September, MBS “had every intention of killing the journalist if he did not return to Saudi Arabia.”169 One tape analyst’s review finds MBS opining to Saud al-Qahtani that “Khashoggi had grown too influential … and [his] articles and Twitter posts were tarnishing the crown prince’s image as a forward-thinking reformer”; when al-Qahtani warns the crown prince to avoid “any move” against Khashoggi because it would be “risky” and could cause “an international uproar,” MBS replies, as summarized by the Times, that “Saudi Arabia should not care about international reaction to how it handles its own citizens” and that he “did not like half-measures—he never liked them and did not believe in them.”170 Al-Qahtani, who will in late fall 2018 be implicated in Khashoggi’s murder, calls Khashoggi in September 2017 to praise his writings about MBS as part of an attempt to lure Khashoggi into a false sense of security—even as he knows MBS’s designs on the journalist involve, at a minimum, his arrest and detention.171
By fall 2017, Khashoggi is living in the United States, with no plans to return to Saudi Arabia.172 He has left Saudi Arabia still a nominal supporter of MBS’s vision of the kingdom, but the events of October and November 2017 will cause him to realize it is “time to speak” against the new regime in Riyadh.173 As Khashoggi will later tell Vanity Fair, “The people MBS arrested [in October and November 2017] were not radicals. The majority were reformers for women’s rights and open society. He arrested them to spread fear.”174 Vanity Fair will also speak to an adviser to a Saudi businessman who agrees with Khashoggi’s fall 2017 assessment, telling the magazine that by late 2017 Saudi Arabia had become “a bit of a police state.”175
* * *
In early October 2017, as MBS is tightening his grip on Saudi Arabia and just weeks before a surprise visit to Riyadh by Jared Kushner, King Salman, MBS’s father, becomes the first ruling monarch in the history of the kingdom to visit Moscow. At the airport in Moscow, bin Salman deplanes via a golden escalator similar to the one Donald Trump descended before announcing his presidential run in June 2015—with the difference that the former’s escalator breaks as he is using it, forcing the Saudi king to descend the stairway to an eagerly awaiting Kremlin delegation the old-fashioned way.176
King Salman’s visit to Russia is hailed as a “turning point in Middle East politics” (the Guardian), a “signal[] [of] a new era of cooperation with Russia” by the Saudi government (the Guardian), a “new qualitative level” for Russian-Saudi relations (Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov), “an historical moment” (Lavrov), and a “landmark event” (Putin).177 While he is in Moscow, MBS’s father signs billions of dollars’ worth of energy, military, and technological agreements with Putin and announces that in the view of the royal family Russia is now a “friendly country,” making clear that one of the things he wants in return is an end to the Syrian conflict that unifies rather than divides that war-torn Arab nation. As part of his own commitment on this score he declines, for the first time, to call for the removal of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad from power, previously a sticking point in Russian-Saudi diplomatic engagements.178 According to the Guardian, the visit and its accompanying international business transactions signal that while Saudi Arabia has “traditionally seen the United States as its chief—if not exclusive—foreign policy partner … changes inside the Saudi regime … have left the kingdom looking to diversify into a wider set of alliances.”179
Given that, per the Guardian, King Salman’s Moscow visit “has been in the works for months, if not years,” and that, as the Independent notes, the trip “comes at the end of several years of [Saudi-Russian] courtship,” by far the most interesting member of the Saudi delegation to Moscow is a Maltese professor by the name of Joseph Mifsud.180 Mifsud is just days away from being outed by special counsel Robert Mueller as the Kremlin agent who acted as Trump adviser and self-described Kremlin “intermediary” George Papadopoulos’s contact with Putin’s government during the 2016 presidential campaign.181 Mifsud’s role as a