the two crews tasked with covering up Khashoggi’s kidnapping, torture, dismemberment, assassination, dissolution, and incineration.131 According to the Turkish media outlet, Dahlan’s team spent three nights in Istanbul, and was captured on surveillance footage seized by the Turkish government in the wake of Khashoggi’s disappearance.132 The Middle East Monitor not only re-reports the Yeni Safak story but notes that Dahlan’s team “used fake passports to travel and carried tools and chemicals.”133 The UAE, through its minister of state for foreign affairs, will accuse Yeni Safak of making up the story that Dahlan was involved in Khashoggi’s murder, an allegation that Dahlan himself also denies—though how convincingly, given his other activities in the Middle East, is another matter.134
According to Jordanian news outlet Al Bawaba, by November 2018 Dahlan has earned the nicknames “The Hitman” and “The Strongman” for his years of work on behalf of MBZ.135 The Jordanian journalists, in re-reporting the Yeni Safak article on Dahlan’s alleged assassination squad in Istanbul—a significant fact, given Jordan’s uneasy alliance with the Saudis and Emiratis (in contrast to Turkey’s top-line hostility to both)—further accuse Dahlan of “spying for Israel” and orchestrating assassinations in countries other than Yemen, including Jordan.136 Al Bawaba also closes the circle between two Red Sea conspirators, MBZ and el-Sisi, by accusing Dahlan of being “involved in forming a counter-revolution[ary] movement supported by the UAE to curb the … consequences [of the 2011 Egyptian revolution]” in a way that made substantially more likely the nation’s 2013 military coup—in which el-Sisi participated as minister of defense—and el-Sisi’s subsequent mid-2014 “election” (with 97 percent of the vote) as Egypt’s president.137
If all of these allegations are true, Dahlan not only was involved in Jamal Khashoggi’s murder as an accessory alongside one Red Sea conspirator—MBS—but works for another conspirator (MBZ), helped put a third conspirator into power (el-Sisi), is MBZ’s chief conduit to an out-of-region co-conspirator (Putin), and is both accused of spying for, and using the spyware of, a military run by yet another co-conspirator (Netanyahu). Dahlan’s meeting in the Seychelles in January 2017—a meeting at least two Trump advisers, Erik Prince and George Nader, attended, with the apparent knowledge of Steve Bannon, Jared Kushner, and Michael Flynn—could thus be seen as a meeting of agents of the Red Sea Conspiracy nations, given that the event was also attended by a top Kremlin agent and the head of the Emirates’ security services. That the UAE, Israel, Egypt, and Jordan—with the assent of Saudi Arabia, if history is any guide—also sought to put Dahlan in charge of the Palestinian Authority in spring 2016 only underscores the Palestinian exile’s seeming centrality to the Red Sea Conspiracy.138
Throughout the atrocities in Yemen and Istanbul, writes the Atlantic, “Saudi and Emirati leaders … have been emboldened by the Trump administration’s unconditional support.”139 The Saudis receiving this level of support for such a brutal course of conduct would be not just improbable but politically impossible were MBS not such close friends with both Jared Kushner and his father-in-law—and would be unlikely to be a political risk worth taking for either Trump or Kushner if they had not received substantial benefit from the Saudis and their allies in turn. As the Atlantic concludes, “Trump has shown little sign of pressuring his Saudi and Emirati allies, least of all over Yemen. The only realistic check left is in Congress, where more voices are asking why the world’s most powerful country is helping to perpetuate the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.”140
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At the beginning of 2019, Trump makes an unusual statement that suggests, not for the first time, his inexplicably enhanced access to—and susceptibility to—obscure Kremlin talking points. The Russian propaganda Trump publicly parrots, which prompts MSNBC to report that Trump is “curiously well-versed in specific Russian talking points,” consists of two false claims the president makes on January 2, 2019: first, that Soviet military involvement in Afghanistan in the 1980s caused the downfall of the Soviet Union; second, that the Soviets’ military engagement with Afghanistan was necessitated by the presence of “terrorists” in the latter country.141 The Washington Post will note that the second statement is so beyond the pale in international diplomacy that “the most shameless Soviet propagandist … [would] never claim [it]. You can read all Soviet media in the 1980s and never find anything this ridiculous.”142 Moreover, despite the fact that the United States effectively was fighting a proxy war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan—by way of arming Russia’s adversaries, the muhjahideen—Trump will say that the Soviets