In 2018, Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi entered a consulate in Istanbul and never came out.
His killing triggered global outrage, secret recordings, and a chain of denials from powerful officials.
The story shows how criticism, power, and diplomacy collided in modern Saudi Arabia.
[00:00:00] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today it’s part three of our three-part mini-series on the making of modern Saudi Arabia.
[00:00:29] In case you missed them, part one was on the man behind it all, Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, otherwise known as MBS.
[00:00:38] Part two was on the country’s plan to build a science fiction city of the future, NEOM.
[00:00:45] And today’s episode, part three, will be on a subject that isn’t so rosy; the blood-curdling murder of the Saudi journalist, Jamal Khashoggi.
[00:00:56] I need to mention a couple of things before we start.
[00:00:59] Firstly, there will be a few slightly graphic descriptions in this episode, so it’s probably not one to be listening to with young children or on a delicate stomach.
[00:01:10] And secondly, I will be referring to several events and ideas we talked about in part one, on Mohammed Bin Salman, so if you haven’t listened to that one yet, or you don’t know much about Saudi Arabia, now might be a good time to press pause and go and listen to that.
[00:01:28] OK then, let’s not waste a minute, and get right into it.
[00:01:34] Consulates are often unusual places.
[00:01:38] If you have never spent much time outside your home country, you will probably never set foot in one.
[00:01:45] They exist as these unusual microcosms of your home country, transplanted into the heart of another nation.
[00:01:55] In theory, they are there to serve and protect you. If you get into trouble in another country, you get in touch with the local consulate. If you need to get some sort of official documentation–a new passport, or a replacement birth certificate–your consulate, or embassy, is often your first port of call.
[00:02:18] And on the 28th of September, 2018, one Saudi citizen went to his consulate for exactly this; Jamal Khashoggi needed an official document proving that he was divorced, a document he could show to the Turkish authorities so that he would be able to get married to his Turkish fiancée.
[00:02:43] Khashoggi was older, at 59 to his fiancée’s 36, and he wasn’t wasting any time.
[00:02:52] The pair had met a few months before, had hit it off, and had decided to marry.
[00:02:59] Khashoggi was, of course, not a random, unknown Saudi citizen. He had become a prominent critic of the Saudi regime, as we’ll talk about more in a few minutes.
[00:03:11] And as such, he was a little cautious about going into the consulate.
[00:03:17] Yes, it was in Istanbul, Turkish soil.
[00:03:22] But he knew that setting foot inside the consulate meant opening himself up to the Saudi authorities. And he had plenty of reason to believe that this was a dangerous thing to do.
[00:03:35] So he arrived unannounced, not informing them of his visit beforehand.
[00:03:42] To his surprise, he found the officials he met there to be welcoming and friendly.
[00:03:49] They couldn’t provide the documents there and then; it would take a few days for them to contact the authorities back in Saudi Arabia to prepare the papers, then he would be welcome to come back and collect them.
[00:04:04] To someone fearing that they would be handcuffed and forced to board a plane back to Riyadh, Khashoggi must have breathed a sigh of relief when he was shown the exit, and felt the warm, autumn afternoon Istanbul sunshine on his face.
[00:04:22] Little did he know that his visit had triggered another phone call back to Riyadh, and would set into motion a plan involving a bone saw, a forensic surgeon, and a murder squad with him as their “sacrificial animal”.
[00:04:43] Now, let me return to the man in question, and why he wasn’t simply provided with his divorce papers and allowed to continue his day.
[00:04:53] Jamal Khashoggi had not always been an enemy of the Saudi state.
[00:05:00] In fact, for much of his life, he was part of it.
[00:05:05] He was born in Medina in 1958 into a well-connected family.
[00:05:12] If you are thinking, I’m sure I’ve heard the name Khashoggi here before, you’re right.
[00:05:17] His uncle, Adnan Khashoggi, was the self-declared “richest man in the world”, and one of the most famous arms dealers of the twentieth century, and also the subject of episode number 466, which is a fun one if you haven’t listened to it already.
[00:05:37] Jamal Khashoggi grew up close to the Saudi royal court, educated, privileged, and very much inside the system.
[00:05:47] As a young man, he became a journalist, working for Saudi newspapers and later serving as editor of some of the country’s most important publications. He reported from Afghanistan in the 1980s, where he met figures like Osama bin Laden.
[00:06:04] Now, at the time, this was not unusual.
[00:06:08] This was before Bin Laden became a global pariah, and at a time when Saudi Arabia, the United States, and Islamist fighters were all aligned against a common enemy: the Soviet Union.
[00:06:24] And this was a world in which Khashoggi excelled, a world where politics, religion and power all melt into one.
[00:06:35] So for years, decades even, Khashoggi was what you might call a loyal insider.
[00:06:44] He believed in reform, but reform from within.
[00:06:49] He criticised corruption and incompetence when he saw it, but he did so carefully, always aware of where the red lines lay.
[00:07:00] Or at least, mostly aware.
[00:07:02] He crossed them on several occasions, and paid the price.
[00:07:06] He was fired from editorial positions more than once, only to be quietly reinstated later.
[00:07:13] But this was how the system worked. Punishment, forgiveness, and an understanding that if everyone played by the rules, well, we would all get along just fine.
[00:07:26] But something changed in the mid 2010s.
[00:07:31] When King Salman came to power in 2015, and his young son Mohammed Bin Salman began his rapid ascent, the old balancing act started to collapse.
[00:07:43] Power was centralised. Rivals were sidelined. Critics were no longer managed; they were silenced.
[00:07:53] There was no middle ground; you were either wholeheartedly with MBS’s plan for the new Saudi Arabia, or you were against it.
[00:08:04] At first, however, Khashoggi seemed cautiously optimistic about the prospect of an MBS-led Saudi Arabia.
[00:08:14] He supported some of the early reforms, the promise of economic diversification, the talk of a more open society. After all, this was what he had spent years quietly advocating for.
[00:08:29] But as arrests of clerics, businessmen, intellectuals, and activists began to mount, his optimism turned to disillusionment.
[00:08:41] If he had had some hope to be a sort of regime-friendly critic, those hopes were soon dashed.
[00:08:50] And shortly after the Ritz-Carlton purge in 2017, he left the country.
[00:08:58] But he didn't flee in the middle of the night, and at first he didn't even see himself as an exile.
[00:09:07] He travelled to the United States, settled there, and began writing opinion columns about the Middle East for The Washington Post.
[00:09:16] His columns were measured, thoughtful, and often restrained.
[00:09:22] But he didn’t mince his words; he wasn’t afraid to call a spade a spade, to speak out when he believed it was necessary.
[00:09:31] He criticised the lack of free speech in the Arab world. He condemned the arrests of peaceful activists. He warned that Saudi Arabia was sliding into authoritarianism under the banner of reform.
[00:09:47] For Mohammed Bin Salman, for MBS, this was intolerable.
[00:09:53] Here was a man who knew the system, who spoke its language, who could not easily be dismissed as a foreign agent or an Islamist extremist.
[00:10:03] He was a court insider.
[00:10:06] And worse still, he was listened to.
[00:10:09] In Washington, in Europe, in the very capitals whose support the Crown Prince needed.
[00:10:15] And that’s before considering his almost 2 million Twitter followers, most of whom were Saudis.
[00:10:24] Khashoggi’s was clearly a voice that couldn't be ignored.
[00:10:29] Saudi officials began contacting him.
[00:10:33] Some urged him to come home, promising him that there would be a place for him in MBS’s inner circle.
[00:10:41] Others warned him, less subtly, to be careful. Friends told him his name was being discussed at the highest levels.
[00:10:51] Khashoggi understood the risks, but he believed he had a degree of protection.
[00:10:57] He was well-known. He lived in the United States. He was a high-profile columnist for a newspaper owned by Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, and someone who MBS was actively trying to woo.
[00:11:12] And after all, he was not calling for revolution, for MBS to step down or for the Saudi royal family to be overthrown; he was just asking for some reform.
[00:11:25] And by the autumn of 2018, on a personal level, he was starting a new chapter of life.
[00:11:33] He was in love. He was about to get married. He was thinking about the future.
[00:11:40] And so, on the 2nd of October, a few days after that reassuring first visit, Jamal Khashoggi returned to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.
[00:11:52] He handed his phones to his fiancée. He knew that they would be taken off him when he entered the building, and any half-decent professional could get into them and unearth the details of his communications with journalists and activists both in Saudi Arabia and abroad.
[00:12:11] No, he would go in with the absolute minimum, he told her.
[00:12:16] If she sensed that anything was wrong, he instructed her to call Yasin Aktay, a Turkish friend and journalist, and a close confidant of the Turkish president, Tayyip Erdoğan.
[00:12:31] At 14 minutes past 1, on the 2nd of October, 2018, he walked into the Saudi Consulate, expecting some paperwork.
[00:12:43] As you will probably know, he never walked out.
[00:12:47] A few days before his arrival, preparations had been made for what would go down as one of the most brazen assassinations of a dissident in recent history.
[00:13:01] The Saudi authorities, perfectly reasonably, didn’t particularly trust their Turkish counterparts, and in preparation, had thoroughly swept the consulate for bugs, hidden cameras, and so on.
[00:13:16] They then instructed all the regular staff at the consulate to go home that day – you’ve got the day off, enjoy it.
[00:13:25] That day, the consulate was going to be staffed by some “special guests”, men who had flown over on two Gulfstream jets from Riyadh, jets that were owned by the country’s sovereign wealth fund.
[00:13:41] On board was a squad of 15 agents, including intelligence officers, MBS’s close security detail, and a forensic doctor from the Saudi Interior Ministry.
[00:13:55] They were inside the consulate, waiting for Khashoggi to arrive.
[00:14:01] And if you are wondering how this is public information, well, I said that the consulate had been thoroughly swept for bugs, but it seems that it hadn’t been swept that thoroughly.
[00:14:14] There were several secret listening devices the Turkish authorities had placed inside the consulate that the Saudis didn’t find, and they recorded everything that happened.
[00:14:27] And I’m sorry to say that this is the part where we have to go into some grisly detail.
[00:14:35] As Khashoggi was about to arrive, one of the agents in charge of the operation asked another whether the “sacrificial animal” had arrived yet.
[00:14:47] When he did arrive, he was taken to an upstairs room, and things quickly escalated.
[00:14:55] Khashoggi was told there was an Interpol order for his arrest, and he would need to be brought back to Saudi Arabia.
[00:15:05] Khashoggi asked if he was being kidnapped, then one of the agents brought out a syringe.
[00:15:12] Khashoggi's voice became agitated, and he asked whether he was going to be drugged.
[00:15:19] This was at 1.33 pm, and it was the last thing anyone heard Jamal Khashoggi say.
[00:15:27] It’s thought that he was suffocated with a plastic bag.
[00:15:32] And then the forensic surgeon was put to work, firing up his bone saw and cutting up the body of Saudi Arabia’s most famous dissident. There are differing opinions as to whether Khashoggi was actually dead when the dismembering started. He was certainly dead when it finished.
[00:15:54] Shortly afterwards, a Saudi agent was pictured leaving the consulate, dressed up in Khashoggi’s clothes, complete with his hat and a fake little goatee beard. He went to the famous Blue Mosque, before slipping into the bathroom, changing back into his own clothes and dumping Khashoggi’s.
[00:16:16] As to what happened to Khashoggi’s body, there are only a handful of people who know the truth. Some commentators suggest it was wrapped in plastic and taken out of the consulate in bags, others that it was dissolved in acid in the consulate grounds.
[00:16:36] That very afternoon, when her fiancé failed to come out of the consulate, Khashoggi’s fiancée, Hatice Cengiz immediately called Khashoggi’s Turkish journalist friend, pleading for help.
[00:16:50] Fortunately, this friend, Yasin Aktay, was an aide to President Erdogan, so he was able to get things moving pretty quickly.
[00:17:01] From that moment on, what had been a private disappearance became an international crisis.
[00:17:09] Within hours, Turkish officials were quietly alerted that something was badly wrong.
[00:17:16] CCTV footage showed Jamal Khashoggi entering the consulate, but there was no sign of him leaving.
[00:17:25] And the Turkish police could not simply walk in and search the building.
[00:17:31] Under international law, consulates are protected spaces, and entry requires permission from the country that runs them.
[00:17:41] Saudi officials insisted that Khashoggi had left of his own accord, and that there was nothing to investigate.
[00:17:51] For the first few days, Saudi Arabia stuck rigidly to this line.
[00:17:57] They said Khashoggi had completed his paperwork and walked out.
[00:18:02] Perhaps he might have gone elsewhere in Istanbul. Perhaps he had met someone. Perhaps he had disappeared voluntarily. It was an implausible story, but it was repeated again and again by Saudi officials, almost as if repetition alone might make it true.
[00:18:24] They thought, perhaps perfectly reasonably, that nobody would ever know what had happened in the consulate that day.
[00:18:32] Turkey, meanwhile, chose a different strategy.
[00:18:37] Rather than confronting Saudi Arabia head on, showing its hand, Turkish authorities began to leak information, slowly and deliberately.
[00:18:48] First came confirmation that a team of Saudi officials had flown into Istanbul on the day of the killing. Then CCTV images of the men arriving at the airport. Then hotel records. Then details of the body double wandering through the city dressed as Khashoggi.
[00:19:09] Each leak added another crack to the Saudi story.
[00:19:14] Turkey never held a press conference to announce it had recordings from inside the consulate, nor did it ever publicly release them.
[00:19:23] Instead, in mid-October, it allowed journalists to report that such recordings existed, letting Saudi Arabia realise, slowly and painfully, that every denial had already been contradicted.
[00:19:39] As the days passed, the pressure intensified. Journalists, governments, and human rights groups demanded answers.
[00:19:48] Business leaders began to pull out of Saudi investment conferences. Western politicians spoke of consequences, even if many were careful not to go too far.
[00:20:00] The idea that a man, a public figure, could walk into a consulate and simply vanish was becoming impossible to ignore.
[00:20:11] After more than two weeks of denial, Saudi Arabia finally changed its story.
[00:20:17] On the 20th of October, it admitted that Jamal Khashoggi was dead.
[00:20:23] But the explanation it offered only raised more questions.
[00:20:29] According to the new version, Khashoggi had died during a rogue interrogation that had gone wrong. The operatives involved, Saudi Arabia said, had acted without authorisation. Several officials were arrested. Senior figures were dismissed.
[00:20:49] The Crown Prince, it was stressed, knew nothing about it.
[00:20:54] Few people outside the kingdom believed it.
[00:20:58] A spontaneous interrogation doesn’t normally involve two private jets, a 15-man team, a forensic surgeon, and a carefully planned cover story.
[00:21:10] Intelligence agencies around the world came to the same conclusion: this was not an accident; it was a planned killing, sponsored by none other than the Crown Prince, Mohammed Bin Salman.
[00:21:24] In the months that followed, the fallout continued.
[00:21:28] The CIA concluded that Mohammed Bin Salman had almost certainly approved the operation.
[00:21:35] A United Nations investigator described the murder as an extrajudicial killing for which the Saudi state was responsible.
[00:21:46] In response, Saudi Arabia held secret trials, sentencing some of the men involved to prison, while sparing others who were closer to the centres of power.
[00:21:58] The proceedings were widely dismissed as a whitewash.
[00:22:03] And then, gradually, the world…moved on.
[00:22:07] Strategic interests reasserted themselves. Arms deals resumed. Diplomacy softened.
[00:22:15] The United States, under President Trump, showed no real interest in weighing in.
[00:22:22] Global leaders who had once spoken of pariah status were photographed shaking hands again. A few years later, the same CEOs were back in Riyadh, competing for lucrative NEOM contracts.
[00:22:36] Even Turkey, after years of tension, eventually transferred the remaining legal proceedings to Saudi Arabia, effectively closing the case.
[00:22:47] Jamal Khashoggi’s body was never recovered.
[00:22:51] His fiancée never received the documents he went to collect that day.
[00:22:56] And the message sent by his killing lingered long after the headlines faded. A warning to critics. A demonstration of power.
[00:23:06] A reminder that, in the new Saudi Arabia, there were limits to reform, and crossing them could be fatal: Jamal Khashoggi went to his consulate to collect a document.
[00:23:19] What he exposed instead was the true cost of dissent in the new Saudi Arabia.
[00:23:28] OK, then, that is it for today's episode on the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, and with that comes an end to this three-part mini-series on MBS and the making of modern Saudi Arabia.
[00:23:40] I hope it's been an interesting one and that you've learnt something new.
[00:23:43] As always, I would love to know what you thought of this episode.
[00:23:47] Saudi Arabia is an increasingly popular country for this show, so to the wonderful Saudi listeners, I would especially like to know what you thought about this episode, and of this mini-series in general. What would you like people to know about your country, what changes have you seen in your day-to-day lives, and what are your hopes and dreams for the future?
[00:24:09] The place for that is our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com.
[00:24:15] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:24:20] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:00] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today it’s part three of our three-part mini-series on the making of modern Saudi Arabia.
[00:00:29] In case you missed them, part one was on the man behind it all, Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, otherwise known as MBS.
[00:00:38] Part two was on the country’s plan to build a science fiction city of the future, NEOM.
[00:00:45] And today’s episode, part three, will be on a subject that isn’t so rosy; the blood-curdling murder of the Saudi journalist, Jamal Khashoggi.
[00:00:56] I need to mention a couple of things before we start.
[00:00:59] Firstly, there will be a few slightly graphic descriptions in this episode, so it’s probably not one to be listening to with young children or on a delicate stomach.
[00:01:10] And secondly, I will be referring to several events and ideas we talked about in part one, on Mohammed Bin Salman, so if you haven’t listened to that one yet, or you don’t know much about Saudi Arabia, now might be a good time to press pause and go and listen to that.
[00:01:28] OK then, let’s not waste a minute, and get right into it.
[00:01:34] Consulates are often unusual places.
[00:01:38] If you have never spent much time outside your home country, you will probably never set foot in one.
[00:01:45] They exist as these unusual microcosms of your home country, transplanted into the heart of another nation.
[00:01:55] In theory, they are there to serve and protect you. If you get into trouble in another country, you get in touch with the local consulate. If you need to get some sort of official documentation–a new passport, or a replacement birth certificate–your consulate, or embassy, is often your first port of call.
[00:02:18] And on the 28th of September, 2018, one Saudi citizen went to his consulate for exactly this; Jamal Khashoggi needed an official document proving that he was divorced, a document he could show to the Turkish authorities so that he would be able to get married to his Turkish fiancée.
[00:02:43] Khashoggi was older, at 59 to his fiancée’s 36, and he wasn’t wasting any time.
[00:02:52] The pair had met a few months before, had hit it off, and had decided to marry.
[00:02:59] Khashoggi was, of course, not a random, unknown Saudi citizen. He had become a prominent critic of the Saudi regime, as we’ll talk about more in a few minutes.
[00:03:11] And as such, he was a little cautious about going into the consulate.
[00:03:17] Yes, it was in Istanbul, Turkish soil.
[00:03:22] But he knew that setting foot inside the consulate meant opening himself up to the Saudi authorities. And he had plenty of reason to believe that this was a dangerous thing to do.
[00:03:35] So he arrived unannounced, not informing them of his visit beforehand.
[00:03:42] To his surprise, he found the officials he met there to be welcoming and friendly.
[00:03:49] They couldn’t provide the documents there and then; it would take a few days for them to contact the authorities back in Saudi Arabia to prepare the papers, then he would be welcome to come back and collect them.
[00:04:04] To someone fearing that they would be handcuffed and forced to board a plane back to Riyadh, Khashoggi must have breathed a sigh of relief when he was shown the exit, and felt the warm, autumn afternoon Istanbul sunshine on his face.
[00:04:22] Little did he know that his visit had triggered another phone call back to Riyadh, and would set into motion a plan involving a bone saw, a forensic surgeon, and a murder squad with him as their “sacrificial animal”.
[00:04:43] Now, let me return to the man in question, and why he wasn’t simply provided with his divorce papers and allowed to continue his day.
[00:04:53] Jamal Khashoggi had not always been an enemy of the Saudi state.
[00:05:00] In fact, for much of his life, he was part of it.
[00:05:05] He was born in Medina in 1958 into a well-connected family.
[00:05:12] If you are thinking, I’m sure I’ve heard the name Khashoggi here before, you’re right.
[00:05:17] His uncle, Adnan Khashoggi, was the self-declared “richest man in the world”, and one of the most famous arms dealers of the twentieth century, and also the subject of episode number 466, which is a fun one if you haven’t listened to it already.
[00:05:37] Jamal Khashoggi grew up close to the Saudi royal court, educated, privileged, and very much inside the system.
[00:05:47] As a young man, he became a journalist, working for Saudi newspapers and later serving as editor of some of the country’s most important publications. He reported from Afghanistan in the 1980s, where he met figures like Osama bin Laden.
[00:06:04] Now, at the time, this was not unusual.
[00:06:08] This was before Bin Laden became a global pariah, and at a time when Saudi Arabia, the United States, and Islamist fighters were all aligned against a common enemy: the Soviet Union.
[00:06:24] And this was a world in which Khashoggi excelled, a world where politics, religion and power all melt into one.
[00:06:35] So for years, decades even, Khashoggi was what you might call a loyal insider.
[00:06:44] He believed in reform, but reform from within.
[00:06:49] He criticised corruption and incompetence when he saw it, but he did so carefully, always aware of where the red lines lay.
[00:07:00] Or at least, mostly aware.
[00:07:02] He crossed them on several occasions, and paid the price.
[00:07:06] He was fired from editorial positions more than once, only to be quietly reinstated later.
[00:07:13] But this was how the system worked. Punishment, forgiveness, and an understanding that if everyone played by the rules, well, we would all get along just fine.
[00:07:26] But something changed in the mid 2010s.
[00:07:31] When King Salman came to power in 2015, and his young son Mohammed Bin Salman began his rapid ascent, the old balancing act started to collapse.
[00:07:43] Power was centralised. Rivals were sidelined. Critics were no longer managed; they were silenced.
[00:07:53] There was no middle ground; you were either wholeheartedly with MBS’s plan for the new Saudi Arabia, or you were against it.
[00:08:04] At first, however, Khashoggi seemed cautiously optimistic about the prospect of an MBS-led Saudi Arabia.
[00:08:14] He supported some of the early reforms, the promise of economic diversification, the talk of a more open society. After all, this was what he had spent years quietly advocating for.
[00:08:29] But as arrests of clerics, businessmen, intellectuals, and activists began to mount, his optimism turned to disillusionment.
[00:08:41] If he had had some hope to be a sort of regime-friendly critic, those hopes were soon dashed.
[00:08:50] And shortly after the Ritz-Carlton purge in 2017, he left the country.
[00:08:58] But he didn't flee in the middle of the night, and at first he didn't even see himself as an exile.
[00:09:07] He travelled to the United States, settled there, and began writing opinion columns about the Middle East for The Washington Post.
[00:09:16] His columns were measured, thoughtful, and often restrained.
[00:09:22] But he didn’t mince his words; he wasn’t afraid to call a spade a spade, to speak out when he believed it was necessary.
[00:09:31] He criticised the lack of free speech in the Arab world. He condemned the arrests of peaceful activists. He warned that Saudi Arabia was sliding into authoritarianism under the banner of reform.
[00:09:47] For Mohammed Bin Salman, for MBS, this was intolerable.
[00:09:53] Here was a man who knew the system, who spoke its language, who could not easily be dismissed as a foreign agent or an Islamist extremist.
[00:10:03] He was a court insider.
[00:10:06] And worse still, he was listened to.
[00:10:09] In Washington, in Europe, in the very capitals whose support the Crown Prince needed.
[00:10:15] And that’s before considering his almost 2 million Twitter followers, most of whom were Saudis.
[00:10:24] Khashoggi’s was clearly a voice that couldn't be ignored.
[00:10:29] Saudi officials began contacting him.
[00:10:33] Some urged him to come home, promising him that there would be a place for him in MBS’s inner circle.
[00:10:41] Others warned him, less subtly, to be careful. Friends told him his name was being discussed at the highest levels.
[00:10:51] Khashoggi understood the risks, but he believed he had a degree of protection.
[00:10:57] He was well-known. He lived in the United States. He was a high-profile columnist for a newspaper owned by Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, and someone who MBS was actively trying to woo.
[00:11:12] And after all, he was not calling for revolution, for MBS to step down or for the Saudi royal family to be overthrown; he was just asking for some reform.
[00:11:25] And by the autumn of 2018, on a personal level, he was starting a new chapter of life.
[00:11:33] He was in love. He was about to get married. He was thinking about the future.
[00:11:40] And so, on the 2nd of October, a few days after that reassuring first visit, Jamal Khashoggi returned to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.
[00:11:52] He handed his phones to his fiancée. He knew that they would be taken off him when he entered the building, and any half-decent professional could get into them and unearth the details of his communications with journalists and activists both in Saudi Arabia and abroad.
[00:12:11] No, he would go in with the absolute minimum, he told her.
[00:12:16] If she sensed that anything was wrong, he instructed her to call Yasin Aktay, a Turkish friend and journalist, and a close confidant of the Turkish president, Tayyip Erdoğan.
[00:12:31] At 14 minutes past 1, on the 2nd of October, 2018, he walked into the Saudi Consulate, expecting some paperwork.
[00:12:43] As you will probably know, he never walked out.
[00:12:47] A few days before his arrival, preparations had been made for what would go down as one of the most brazen assassinations of a dissident in recent history.
[00:13:01] The Saudi authorities, perfectly reasonably, didn’t particularly trust their Turkish counterparts, and in preparation, had thoroughly swept the consulate for bugs, hidden cameras, and so on.
[00:13:16] They then instructed all the regular staff at the consulate to go home that day – you’ve got the day off, enjoy it.
[00:13:25] That day, the consulate was going to be staffed by some “special guests”, men who had flown over on two Gulfstream jets from Riyadh, jets that were owned by the country’s sovereign wealth fund.
[00:13:41] On board was a squad of 15 agents, including intelligence officers, MBS’s close security detail, and a forensic doctor from the Saudi Interior Ministry.
[00:13:55] They were inside the consulate, waiting for Khashoggi to arrive.
[00:14:01] And if you are wondering how this is public information, well, I said that the consulate had been thoroughly swept for bugs, but it seems that it hadn’t been swept that thoroughly.
[00:14:14] There were several secret listening devices the Turkish authorities had placed inside the consulate that the Saudis didn’t find, and they recorded everything that happened.
[00:14:27] And I’m sorry to say that this is the part where we have to go into some grisly detail.
[00:14:35] As Khashoggi was about to arrive, one of the agents in charge of the operation asked another whether the “sacrificial animal” had arrived yet.
[00:14:47] When he did arrive, he was taken to an upstairs room, and things quickly escalated.
[00:14:55] Khashoggi was told there was an Interpol order for his arrest, and he would need to be brought back to Saudi Arabia.
[00:15:05] Khashoggi asked if he was being kidnapped, then one of the agents brought out a syringe.
[00:15:12] Khashoggi's voice became agitated, and he asked whether he was going to be drugged.
[00:15:19] This was at 1.33 pm, and it was the last thing anyone heard Jamal Khashoggi say.
[00:15:27] It’s thought that he was suffocated with a plastic bag.
[00:15:32] And then the forensic surgeon was put to work, firing up his bone saw and cutting up the body of Saudi Arabia’s most famous dissident. There are differing opinions as to whether Khashoggi was actually dead when the dismembering started. He was certainly dead when it finished.
[00:15:54] Shortly afterwards, a Saudi agent was pictured leaving the consulate, dressed up in Khashoggi’s clothes, complete with his hat and a fake little goatee beard. He went to the famous Blue Mosque, before slipping into the bathroom, changing back into his own clothes and dumping Khashoggi’s.
[00:16:16] As to what happened to Khashoggi’s body, there are only a handful of people who know the truth. Some commentators suggest it was wrapped in plastic and taken out of the consulate in bags, others that it was dissolved in acid in the consulate grounds.
[00:16:36] That very afternoon, when her fiancé failed to come out of the consulate, Khashoggi’s fiancée, Hatice Cengiz immediately called Khashoggi’s Turkish journalist friend, pleading for help.
[00:16:50] Fortunately, this friend, Yasin Aktay, was an aide to President Erdogan, so he was able to get things moving pretty quickly.
[00:17:01] From that moment on, what had been a private disappearance became an international crisis.
[00:17:09] Within hours, Turkish officials were quietly alerted that something was badly wrong.
[00:17:16] CCTV footage showed Jamal Khashoggi entering the consulate, but there was no sign of him leaving.
[00:17:25] And the Turkish police could not simply walk in and search the building.
[00:17:31] Under international law, consulates are protected spaces, and entry requires permission from the country that runs them.
[00:17:41] Saudi officials insisted that Khashoggi had left of his own accord, and that there was nothing to investigate.
[00:17:51] For the first few days, Saudi Arabia stuck rigidly to this line.
[00:17:57] They said Khashoggi had completed his paperwork and walked out.
[00:18:02] Perhaps he might have gone elsewhere in Istanbul. Perhaps he had met someone. Perhaps he had disappeared voluntarily. It was an implausible story, but it was repeated again and again by Saudi officials, almost as if repetition alone might make it true.
[00:18:24] They thought, perhaps perfectly reasonably, that nobody would ever know what had happened in the consulate that day.
[00:18:32] Turkey, meanwhile, chose a different strategy.
[00:18:37] Rather than confronting Saudi Arabia head on, showing its hand, Turkish authorities began to leak information, slowly and deliberately.
[00:18:48] First came confirmation that a team of Saudi officials had flown into Istanbul on the day of the killing. Then CCTV images of the men arriving at the airport. Then hotel records. Then details of the body double wandering through the city dressed as Khashoggi.
[00:19:09] Each leak added another crack to the Saudi story.
[00:19:14] Turkey never held a press conference to announce it had recordings from inside the consulate, nor did it ever publicly release them.
[00:19:23] Instead, in mid-October, it allowed journalists to report that such recordings existed, letting Saudi Arabia realise, slowly and painfully, that every denial had already been contradicted.
[00:19:39] As the days passed, the pressure intensified. Journalists, governments, and human rights groups demanded answers.
[00:19:48] Business leaders began to pull out of Saudi investment conferences. Western politicians spoke of consequences, even if many were careful not to go too far.
[00:20:00] The idea that a man, a public figure, could walk into a consulate and simply vanish was becoming impossible to ignore.
[00:20:11] After more than two weeks of denial, Saudi Arabia finally changed its story.
[00:20:17] On the 20th of October, it admitted that Jamal Khashoggi was dead.
[00:20:23] But the explanation it offered only raised more questions.
[00:20:29] According to the new version, Khashoggi had died during a rogue interrogation that had gone wrong. The operatives involved, Saudi Arabia said, had acted without authorisation. Several officials were arrested. Senior figures were dismissed.
[00:20:49] The Crown Prince, it was stressed, knew nothing about it.
[00:20:54] Few people outside the kingdom believed it.
[00:20:58] A spontaneous interrogation doesn’t normally involve two private jets, a 15-man team, a forensic surgeon, and a carefully planned cover story.
[00:21:10] Intelligence agencies around the world came to the same conclusion: this was not an accident; it was a planned killing, sponsored by none other than the Crown Prince, Mohammed Bin Salman.
[00:21:24] In the months that followed, the fallout continued.
[00:21:28] The CIA concluded that Mohammed Bin Salman had almost certainly approved the operation.
[00:21:35] A United Nations investigator described the murder as an extrajudicial killing for which the Saudi state was responsible.
[00:21:46] In response, Saudi Arabia held secret trials, sentencing some of the men involved to prison, while sparing others who were closer to the centres of power.
[00:21:58] The proceedings were widely dismissed as a whitewash.
[00:22:03] And then, gradually, the world…moved on.
[00:22:07] Strategic interests reasserted themselves. Arms deals resumed. Diplomacy softened.
[00:22:15] The United States, under President Trump, showed no real interest in weighing in.
[00:22:22] Global leaders who had once spoken of pariah status were photographed shaking hands again. A few years later, the same CEOs were back in Riyadh, competing for lucrative NEOM contracts.
[00:22:36] Even Turkey, after years of tension, eventually transferred the remaining legal proceedings to Saudi Arabia, effectively closing the case.
[00:22:47] Jamal Khashoggi’s body was never recovered.
[00:22:51] His fiancée never received the documents he went to collect that day.
[00:22:56] And the message sent by his killing lingered long after the headlines faded. A warning to critics. A demonstration of power.
[00:23:06] A reminder that, in the new Saudi Arabia, there were limits to reform, and crossing them could be fatal: Jamal Khashoggi went to his consulate to collect a document.
[00:23:19] What he exposed instead was the true cost of dissent in the new Saudi Arabia.
[00:23:28] OK, then, that is it for today's episode on the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, and with that comes an end to this three-part mini-series on MBS and the making of modern Saudi Arabia.
[00:23:40] I hope it's been an interesting one and that you've learnt something new.
[00:23:43] As always, I would love to know what you thought of this episode.
[00:23:47] Saudi Arabia is an increasingly popular country for this show, so to the wonderful Saudi listeners, I would especially like to know what you thought about this episode, and of this mini-series in general. What would you like people to know about your country, what changes have you seen in your day-to-day lives, and what are your hopes and dreams for the future?
[00:24:09] The place for that is our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com.
[00:24:15] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:24:20] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:00] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today it’s part three of our three-part mini-series on the making of modern Saudi Arabia.
[00:00:29] In case you missed them, part one was on the man behind it all, Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, otherwise known as MBS.
[00:00:38] Part two was on the country’s plan to build a science fiction city of the future, NEOM.
[00:00:45] And today’s episode, part three, will be on a subject that isn’t so rosy; the blood-curdling murder of the Saudi journalist, Jamal Khashoggi.
[00:00:56] I need to mention a couple of things before we start.
[00:00:59] Firstly, there will be a few slightly graphic descriptions in this episode, so it’s probably not one to be listening to with young children or on a delicate stomach.
[00:01:10] And secondly, I will be referring to several events and ideas we talked about in part one, on Mohammed Bin Salman, so if you haven’t listened to that one yet, or you don’t know much about Saudi Arabia, now might be a good time to press pause and go and listen to that.
[00:01:28] OK then, let’s not waste a minute, and get right into it.
[00:01:34] Consulates are often unusual places.
[00:01:38] If you have never spent much time outside your home country, you will probably never set foot in one.
[00:01:45] They exist as these unusual microcosms of your home country, transplanted into the heart of another nation.
[00:01:55] In theory, they are there to serve and protect you. If you get into trouble in another country, you get in touch with the local consulate. If you need to get some sort of official documentation–a new passport, or a replacement birth certificate–your consulate, or embassy, is often your first port of call.
[00:02:18] And on the 28th of September, 2018, one Saudi citizen went to his consulate for exactly this; Jamal Khashoggi needed an official document proving that he was divorced, a document he could show to the Turkish authorities so that he would be able to get married to his Turkish fiancée.
[00:02:43] Khashoggi was older, at 59 to his fiancée’s 36, and he wasn’t wasting any time.
[00:02:52] The pair had met a few months before, had hit it off, and had decided to marry.
[00:02:59] Khashoggi was, of course, not a random, unknown Saudi citizen. He had become a prominent critic of the Saudi regime, as we’ll talk about more in a few minutes.
[00:03:11] And as such, he was a little cautious about going into the consulate.
[00:03:17] Yes, it was in Istanbul, Turkish soil.
[00:03:22] But he knew that setting foot inside the consulate meant opening himself up to the Saudi authorities. And he had plenty of reason to believe that this was a dangerous thing to do.
[00:03:35] So he arrived unannounced, not informing them of his visit beforehand.
[00:03:42] To his surprise, he found the officials he met there to be welcoming and friendly.
[00:03:49] They couldn’t provide the documents there and then; it would take a few days for them to contact the authorities back in Saudi Arabia to prepare the papers, then he would be welcome to come back and collect them.
[00:04:04] To someone fearing that they would be handcuffed and forced to board a plane back to Riyadh, Khashoggi must have breathed a sigh of relief when he was shown the exit, and felt the warm, autumn afternoon Istanbul sunshine on his face.
[00:04:22] Little did he know that his visit had triggered another phone call back to Riyadh, and would set into motion a plan involving a bone saw, a forensic surgeon, and a murder squad with him as their “sacrificial animal”.
[00:04:43] Now, let me return to the man in question, and why he wasn’t simply provided with his divorce papers and allowed to continue his day.
[00:04:53] Jamal Khashoggi had not always been an enemy of the Saudi state.
[00:05:00] In fact, for much of his life, he was part of it.
[00:05:05] He was born in Medina in 1958 into a well-connected family.
[00:05:12] If you are thinking, I’m sure I’ve heard the name Khashoggi here before, you’re right.
[00:05:17] His uncle, Adnan Khashoggi, was the self-declared “richest man in the world”, and one of the most famous arms dealers of the twentieth century, and also the subject of episode number 466, which is a fun one if you haven’t listened to it already.
[00:05:37] Jamal Khashoggi grew up close to the Saudi royal court, educated, privileged, and very much inside the system.
[00:05:47] As a young man, he became a journalist, working for Saudi newspapers and later serving as editor of some of the country’s most important publications. He reported from Afghanistan in the 1980s, where he met figures like Osama bin Laden.
[00:06:04] Now, at the time, this was not unusual.
[00:06:08] This was before Bin Laden became a global pariah, and at a time when Saudi Arabia, the United States, and Islamist fighters were all aligned against a common enemy: the Soviet Union.
[00:06:24] And this was a world in which Khashoggi excelled, a world where politics, religion and power all melt into one.
[00:06:35] So for years, decades even, Khashoggi was what you might call a loyal insider.
[00:06:44] He believed in reform, but reform from within.
[00:06:49] He criticised corruption and incompetence when he saw it, but he did so carefully, always aware of where the red lines lay.
[00:07:00] Or at least, mostly aware.
[00:07:02] He crossed them on several occasions, and paid the price.
[00:07:06] He was fired from editorial positions more than once, only to be quietly reinstated later.
[00:07:13] But this was how the system worked. Punishment, forgiveness, and an understanding that if everyone played by the rules, well, we would all get along just fine.
[00:07:26] But something changed in the mid 2010s.
[00:07:31] When King Salman came to power in 2015, and his young son Mohammed Bin Salman began his rapid ascent, the old balancing act started to collapse.
[00:07:43] Power was centralised. Rivals were sidelined. Critics were no longer managed; they were silenced.
[00:07:53] There was no middle ground; you were either wholeheartedly with MBS’s plan for the new Saudi Arabia, or you were against it.
[00:08:04] At first, however, Khashoggi seemed cautiously optimistic about the prospect of an MBS-led Saudi Arabia.
[00:08:14] He supported some of the early reforms, the promise of economic diversification, the talk of a more open society. After all, this was what he had spent years quietly advocating for.
[00:08:29] But as arrests of clerics, businessmen, intellectuals, and activists began to mount, his optimism turned to disillusionment.
[00:08:41] If he had had some hope to be a sort of regime-friendly critic, those hopes were soon dashed.
[00:08:50] And shortly after the Ritz-Carlton purge in 2017, he left the country.
[00:08:58] But he didn't flee in the middle of the night, and at first he didn't even see himself as an exile.
[00:09:07] He travelled to the United States, settled there, and began writing opinion columns about the Middle East for The Washington Post.
[00:09:16] His columns were measured, thoughtful, and often restrained.
[00:09:22] But he didn’t mince his words; he wasn’t afraid to call a spade a spade, to speak out when he believed it was necessary.
[00:09:31] He criticised the lack of free speech in the Arab world. He condemned the arrests of peaceful activists. He warned that Saudi Arabia was sliding into authoritarianism under the banner of reform.
[00:09:47] For Mohammed Bin Salman, for MBS, this was intolerable.
[00:09:53] Here was a man who knew the system, who spoke its language, who could not easily be dismissed as a foreign agent or an Islamist extremist.
[00:10:03] He was a court insider.
[00:10:06] And worse still, he was listened to.
[00:10:09] In Washington, in Europe, in the very capitals whose support the Crown Prince needed.
[00:10:15] And that’s before considering his almost 2 million Twitter followers, most of whom were Saudis.
[00:10:24] Khashoggi’s was clearly a voice that couldn't be ignored.
[00:10:29] Saudi officials began contacting him.
[00:10:33] Some urged him to come home, promising him that there would be a place for him in MBS’s inner circle.
[00:10:41] Others warned him, less subtly, to be careful. Friends told him his name was being discussed at the highest levels.
[00:10:51] Khashoggi understood the risks, but he believed he had a degree of protection.
[00:10:57] He was well-known. He lived in the United States. He was a high-profile columnist for a newspaper owned by Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, and someone who MBS was actively trying to woo.
[00:11:12] And after all, he was not calling for revolution, for MBS to step down or for the Saudi royal family to be overthrown; he was just asking for some reform.
[00:11:25] And by the autumn of 2018, on a personal level, he was starting a new chapter of life.
[00:11:33] He was in love. He was about to get married. He was thinking about the future.
[00:11:40] And so, on the 2nd of October, a few days after that reassuring first visit, Jamal Khashoggi returned to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.
[00:11:52] He handed his phones to his fiancée. He knew that they would be taken off him when he entered the building, and any half-decent professional could get into them and unearth the details of his communications with journalists and activists both in Saudi Arabia and abroad.
[00:12:11] No, he would go in with the absolute minimum, he told her.
[00:12:16] If she sensed that anything was wrong, he instructed her to call Yasin Aktay, a Turkish friend and journalist, and a close confidant of the Turkish president, Tayyip Erdoğan.
[00:12:31] At 14 minutes past 1, on the 2nd of October, 2018, he walked into the Saudi Consulate, expecting some paperwork.
[00:12:43] As you will probably know, he never walked out.
[00:12:47] A few days before his arrival, preparations had been made for what would go down as one of the most brazen assassinations of a dissident in recent history.
[00:13:01] The Saudi authorities, perfectly reasonably, didn’t particularly trust their Turkish counterparts, and in preparation, had thoroughly swept the consulate for bugs, hidden cameras, and so on.
[00:13:16] They then instructed all the regular staff at the consulate to go home that day – you’ve got the day off, enjoy it.
[00:13:25] That day, the consulate was going to be staffed by some “special guests”, men who had flown over on two Gulfstream jets from Riyadh, jets that were owned by the country’s sovereign wealth fund.
[00:13:41] On board was a squad of 15 agents, including intelligence officers, MBS’s close security detail, and a forensic doctor from the Saudi Interior Ministry.
[00:13:55] They were inside the consulate, waiting for Khashoggi to arrive.
[00:14:01] And if you are wondering how this is public information, well, I said that the consulate had been thoroughly swept for bugs, but it seems that it hadn’t been swept that thoroughly.
[00:14:14] There were several secret listening devices the Turkish authorities had placed inside the consulate that the Saudis didn’t find, and they recorded everything that happened.
[00:14:27] And I’m sorry to say that this is the part where we have to go into some grisly detail.
[00:14:35] As Khashoggi was about to arrive, one of the agents in charge of the operation asked another whether the “sacrificial animal” had arrived yet.
[00:14:47] When he did arrive, he was taken to an upstairs room, and things quickly escalated.
[00:14:55] Khashoggi was told there was an Interpol order for his arrest, and he would need to be brought back to Saudi Arabia.
[00:15:05] Khashoggi asked if he was being kidnapped, then one of the agents brought out a syringe.
[00:15:12] Khashoggi's voice became agitated, and he asked whether he was going to be drugged.
[00:15:19] This was at 1.33 pm, and it was the last thing anyone heard Jamal Khashoggi say.
[00:15:27] It’s thought that he was suffocated with a plastic bag.
[00:15:32] And then the forensic surgeon was put to work, firing up his bone saw and cutting up the body of Saudi Arabia’s most famous dissident. There are differing opinions as to whether Khashoggi was actually dead when the dismembering started. He was certainly dead when it finished.
[00:15:54] Shortly afterwards, a Saudi agent was pictured leaving the consulate, dressed up in Khashoggi’s clothes, complete with his hat and a fake little goatee beard. He went to the famous Blue Mosque, before slipping into the bathroom, changing back into his own clothes and dumping Khashoggi’s.
[00:16:16] As to what happened to Khashoggi’s body, there are only a handful of people who know the truth. Some commentators suggest it was wrapped in plastic and taken out of the consulate in bags, others that it was dissolved in acid in the consulate grounds.
[00:16:36] That very afternoon, when her fiancé failed to come out of the consulate, Khashoggi’s fiancée, Hatice Cengiz immediately called Khashoggi’s Turkish journalist friend, pleading for help.
[00:16:50] Fortunately, this friend, Yasin Aktay, was an aide to President Erdogan, so he was able to get things moving pretty quickly.
[00:17:01] From that moment on, what had been a private disappearance became an international crisis.
[00:17:09] Within hours, Turkish officials were quietly alerted that something was badly wrong.
[00:17:16] CCTV footage showed Jamal Khashoggi entering the consulate, but there was no sign of him leaving.
[00:17:25] And the Turkish police could not simply walk in and search the building.
[00:17:31] Under international law, consulates are protected spaces, and entry requires permission from the country that runs them.
[00:17:41] Saudi officials insisted that Khashoggi had left of his own accord, and that there was nothing to investigate.
[00:17:51] For the first few days, Saudi Arabia stuck rigidly to this line.
[00:17:57] They said Khashoggi had completed his paperwork and walked out.
[00:18:02] Perhaps he might have gone elsewhere in Istanbul. Perhaps he had met someone. Perhaps he had disappeared voluntarily. It was an implausible story, but it was repeated again and again by Saudi officials, almost as if repetition alone might make it true.
[00:18:24] They thought, perhaps perfectly reasonably, that nobody would ever know what had happened in the consulate that day.
[00:18:32] Turkey, meanwhile, chose a different strategy.
[00:18:37] Rather than confronting Saudi Arabia head on, showing its hand, Turkish authorities began to leak information, slowly and deliberately.
[00:18:48] First came confirmation that a team of Saudi officials had flown into Istanbul on the day of the killing. Then CCTV images of the men arriving at the airport. Then hotel records. Then details of the body double wandering through the city dressed as Khashoggi.
[00:19:09] Each leak added another crack to the Saudi story.
[00:19:14] Turkey never held a press conference to announce it had recordings from inside the consulate, nor did it ever publicly release them.
[00:19:23] Instead, in mid-October, it allowed journalists to report that such recordings existed, letting Saudi Arabia realise, slowly and painfully, that every denial had already been contradicted.
[00:19:39] As the days passed, the pressure intensified. Journalists, governments, and human rights groups demanded answers.
[00:19:48] Business leaders began to pull out of Saudi investment conferences. Western politicians spoke of consequences, even if many were careful not to go too far.
[00:20:00] The idea that a man, a public figure, could walk into a consulate and simply vanish was becoming impossible to ignore.
[00:20:11] After more than two weeks of denial, Saudi Arabia finally changed its story.
[00:20:17] On the 20th of October, it admitted that Jamal Khashoggi was dead.
[00:20:23] But the explanation it offered only raised more questions.
[00:20:29] According to the new version, Khashoggi had died during a rogue interrogation that had gone wrong. The operatives involved, Saudi Arabia said, had acted without authorisation. Several officials were arrested. Senior figures were dismissed.
[00:20:49] The Crown Prince, it was stressed, knew nothing about it.
[00:20:54] Few people outside the kingdom believed it.
[00:20:58] A spontaneous interrogation doesn’t normally involve two private jets, a 15-man team, a forensic surgeon, and a carefully planned cover story.
[00:21:10] Intelligence agencies around the world came to the same conclusion: this was not an accident; it was a planned killing, sponsored by none other than the Crown Prince, Mohammed Bin Salman.
[00:21:24] In the months that followed, the fallout continued.
[00:21:28] The CIA concluded that Mohammed Bin Salman had almost certainly approved the operation.
[00:21:35] A United Nations investigator described the murder as an extrajudicial killing for which the Saudi state was responsible.
[00:21:46] In response, Saudi Arabia held secret trials, sentencing some of the men involved to prison, while sparing others who were closer to the centres of power.
[00:21:58] The proceedings were widely dismissed as a whitewash.
[00:22:03] And then, gradually, the world…moved on.
[00:22:07] Strategic interests reasserted themselves. Arms deals resumed. Diplomacy softened.
[00:22:15] The United States, under President Trump, showed no real interest in weighing in.
[00:22:22] Global leaders who had once spoken of pariah status were photographed shaking hands again. A few years later, the same CEOs were back in Riyadh, competing for lucrative NEOM contracts.
[00:22:36] Even Turkey, after years of tension, eventually transferred the remaining legal proceedings to Saudi Arabia, effectively closing the case.
[00:22:47] Jamal Khashoggi’s body was never recovered.
[00:22:51] His fiancée never received the documents he went to collect that day.
[00:22:56] And the message sent by his killing lingered long after the headlines faded. A warning to critics. A demonstration of power.
[00:23:06] A reminder that, in the new Saudi Arabia, there were limits to reform, and crossing them could be fatal: Jamal Khashoggi went to his consulate to collect a document.
[00:23:19] What he exposed instead was the true cost of dissent in the new Saudi Arabia.
[00:23:28] OK, then, that is it for today's episode on the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, and with that comes an end to this three-part mini-series on MBS and the making of modern Saudi Arabia.
[00:23:40] I hope it's been an interesting one and that you've learnt something new.
[00:23:43] As always, I would love to know what you thought of this episode.
[00:23:47] Saudi Arabia is an increasingly popular country for this show, so to the wonderful Saudi listeners, I would especially like to know what you thought about this episode, and of this mini-series in general. What would you like people to know about your country, what changes have you seen in your day-to-day lives, and what are your hopes and dreams for the future?
[00:24:09] The place for that is our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com.
[00:24:15] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:24:20] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
