Two weeks after the disappearance of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo held a cursory meeting, on Tuesday, with Saudi Arabia’s King Salman—it lasted some fifteen minutes—and then had a longer session with his headstrong young son Mohammed, the crown prince. The meetings seemed jovial. America’s top diplomat and the crown prince laughed together during a photo opportunity, a striking display of camaraderie amid increasingly gruesome stories about Khashoggi’s death—and reported dismemberment—in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. In yet another bizarre twist, the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said, on Tuesday, that surfaces in the consulate had been repainted shortly after Khashoggi disappeared.
In Riyadh, the crown prince tried to paper over the crisis. “We are strong and old allies,” he told Pompeo, with reporters as witnesses. “We face our challenges together—the past, the day of, tomorrow.”
“Absolutely,” Pompeo replied.
President Trump seems ready, even eager, to embrace the Saudi version of events—or at least the kingdom’s pledge to investigate the saga, after it abruptly abandoned its claim that Khashoggi had exited the consulate alive. He condemned criticism of the monarchy. “Here you go again with ‘You’re guilty until proven innocent,’” he told the Associated Press in an interview. “I don't like that. We just went through that with Justice Kavanaugh and he was innocent all the way as far as I'm concerned. So we have to find out what happened."
In an e-mail statement, Pompeo thanked the king for “Saudi Arabia’s strong partnership with the United States.” “My assessment from these meetings is that there is serious commitment to determine all the facts and ensure accountability, including accountability for Saudi Arabia’s senior leaders or senior officials.”
The Administration’s apparent willingness to accept the Saudi excuse—purportedly that Khashoggi died in a rogue operation—is being widely scorned.
“Hogwash,” Bruce Riedel, a career U.S. intelligence analyst and the author of “Kings and Presidents: Saudi Arabia and the United States since FDR,” told me. “The members of the interrogation-murder squad included several members of the Royal Guard, which is a regiment under the personal command of the crown prince. They don’t do anything without his direct oversight and approval. The notion that this is a rogue operation is preposterous.”
“I don’t think it’s going to work,” he added. “It may pass muster with Trump but not with the Washington Post.”
Turkish officials claim that fifteen Saudi officials, including a forensic expert, flew to Istanbul on two private jets on October 2nd, the day Khashoggi disappeared, and flew out after spending a few hours at the consulate and the consul’s residence. Four of the fifteen were close to the Saudi crown prince, the Times reported, on Tuesday. One of the men, Maher Abdulaziz Mutreb, was photographed with M.B.S. during his U.S. tour, and in Paris and Madrid this spring. After nine hours of searching the consulate Monday, Turkey said it will also search the consul’s residence for “toxic materials.”
The kingdom, and in particular the crown prince, who is known as M.B.S., after his initials, is beginning to pay a price—in public relations if not yet in practice. “I’m not going back to Saudi Arabia as long as this guy is in charge,” Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican, said on “Fox and Friends,” on Tuesday. “I’ve been their biggest defender on the floor of the United States Senate. This guy is a wrecking ball.” Graham said nothing happens in Saudi Arabia without M.B.S.’s knowledge. “He had [Khashoggi] murdered in a consulate in Turkey and to expect me to ignore it, I feel used and abused. The M.B.S. figure is to me toxic. He can never be a world leader on the world stage.” Pressed on what the U.S. should do about the alleged killing of a journalist by a long-standing ally, Graham said he intends to lead an effort in the Senate to “sanction the hell out of Saudi Arabia.”
Trump is now on the defensive about his ties to the desert kingdom, which date back more than two decades in various business deals. The Saudis are also now central to his foreign policy. On Tuesday, Trump tweeted, “For the record, I have no financial interests in Saudi Arabia (or Russia, for that matter). Any suggestion that I have is just more FAKE NEWS (of which there is plenty)!” Three years ago, as he announced his candidacy, Trump boasted, “Saudi Arabia, I get along with all of them. They buy apartments from me. They spend forty million dollars, fifty million dollars. Am I supposed to dislike them? I like them very much."
But other Republicans are scathing over Saudi Arabia’s explanation, delivered long after the fact. “Where’s the body?” Florida Senator Marco Rubio, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, asked on CNN. “Why not notify the family? Why have they spent the better part of eight or nine days saying you didn’t know anything about it?” He described the bungling as a “catastrophe” for the Saudis—with rippling repercussions for the Trump Administration. “This would really blow apart our Middle Eastern strategy, and it’s something we have to address from a human-rights standpoint," Rubio said. “Just because a country we’re working with did it doesn't mean the United States can just shrug its shoulders and say ‘nothing happened here.’ ”
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin faces growing pressure to back out of M.B.S.’s annual investment conference this month—billed as “Davos in the Desert”—to signal U.S. alarm. “America’s basic and fundamental values demand a suspension of arms sales to Saudi Arabia,” the Indiana Republican Todd Young, another member of the Foreign Relations Committee, tweeted on Tuesday. “I continue to believe that Secretary Mnuchin should not attend the investment conference in Riyadh next week.” Several big names in technology, business, and finance have withdrawn, including J.P. Morgan Chase, Ford, Mastercard, and Blackrock.
The Saudis again tried to downplay the setbacks. “Whilst it is disappointing that some speakers and partners have pulled out, we are looking forward to welcoming thousands of speakers, moderators and guests from all over the world to Riyadh from October 23 to 25,” a spokesperson for the Future Investment Initiative conference said in a statement.
The crisis is generating domestic political fallout too, with the midterm elections approaching. On the Hill, Democrats chastised the President for broadcasting the Saudi version of events, which he first mentioned out of the blue to reporters, on Monday. “Been hearing the ridiculous ‘rogue killers’ theory was where the Saudis would go with this,” the Connecticut Democrat Christopher Murphy, another member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, tweeted. “Absolutely extraordinary they were able to enlist the President of the United States as their PR agent to float it.”
Yet the full story still seemed elusive after Pompeo’s hastily organized trip to the kingdom. All he got were some vague promises about finding justice in a country famed for abuses of its citizens, long before Jamal Khashoggi’s disappearance.
