As a Presidential candidate, Joe Biden called Saudi Arabia a “pariah” state with a government of “no redeeming social value.” He even charged that the kingdom’s flashy Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, had masterminded the murder and gruesome dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi, a longtime Saudi insider and journalist who had fled to Washington in fear of the Crown Prince’s vindictive wrath. Khashoggi became a highly visible voice of the Saudi opposition in a column for the Washington Post. In 2018, he was reportedly instructed by the Crown Prince’s brother, then the Ambassador to Washington, to go to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to get papers so that he could marry his Turkish fiancée. He obeyed. Khashoggi’s last words were uttered in the consulate, as he desperately appealed to members of a fifteen-man Saudi hit squad as they covered his mouth, then pulled a plastic bag over his head. “I have asthma,” he gasped, according to a tape recording later leaked by Turkish intelligence. “You will suffocate me.” Twenty-five minutes later, a bone saw was heard on the tape as his captors began to chop up Khashoggi’s body, which has never been recovered. The hit squad acted “on the order of the Crown Prince,” Biden said, during a Democratic primary debate. “They have to be held accountable.” Biden vowed, if elected, not to sell more weapons to the Saudis. “We are going to make them pay the price and make them, in fact, the pariah that they are.”
Or maybe not. On Friday, the Biden Administration released a classified U.S. intelligence report on the murder of Khashoggi, which President Trump had long suppressed. To no one’s surprise, the C.I.A. analysis confirmed that M.B.S., as he’s widely known, had “approved” Khashoggi’s murder. “Since 2017, the Crown Prince has had absolute control of the Kingdom’s security and intelligence organizations, making it highly unlikely that Saudi officials would have carried out an operation of this nature without the Crown Prince’s authorization,” the report said. It also noted that seven of the fifteen members of the hit squad were part of M.B.S.’s élite personal protective detail, known as the Rapid Intervention Force (R.I.F.), or the Tiger Squad. Some were photographed accompanying the Crown Prince when he was fêted by the Trump Administration (and Oprah, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, Bill Clinton, Michael Douglas, and other celebrities) during a nationwide U.S. tour, in 2018. “The RIF—a subset of the Saudi Royal Guard—exists to defend the Crown Prince, answers only to him, and had directly participated in earlier dissident suppression operations in the Kingdom and abroad at the Crown Prince’s direction,” the report concluded.
Yet Biden has done nothing to punish M.B.S. Absolutely nothing—to the astonishment of human-rights groups, foreign-policy experts, Saudi activists, and even some on his own staff. For days, the Administration had pledged that Biden, unlike Trump, would both take punitive measures and recalibrate the relationship. Biden’s response would symbolize his tough stance on human rights globally, the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, said, last week. “He will not hold back, and he will speak out when there are concerns he has about human-rights abuses, about the lack of freedom of speech or the lack of freedom of media and expression,” Psaki told journalists. But the Administration didn’t even mention M.B.S.’s name in the punitive sanctions that it announced after releasing the intelligence report. On Saturday, Biden refused to answer questions shouted by the press pool about whether he intended to punish the Saudi royal.
Instead, the Treasury Department sanctioned only the Rapid Intervention Force and Ahmad al-Asiri, the former deputy head of the General Intelligence Presidency, who the U.S. identified as the ringleader of the Khashoggi assassination. The State Department also announced a new category of sanctions—dubbed the “Khashoggi ban”—which will ban visas to anyone linked to state-sponsored repression or the detention of dissidents and journalists worldwide. As a starter, the department identified seventy-six Saudis who will be barred from the United States. M.B.S. was not among them. And cutting off visas is not much of a punishment for murder.
In the end, Biden personally decided that he did not want to nuke ties with a ruler who is still only in his mid-thirties and could lead the oil-rich kingdom for the next three to four decades, U.S. officials said. Washington, they added defensively, has rarely sanctioned a head of state: not autocrats like Russia’s Vladimir Putin, who was accused of ordering the use of chemical weapons in an assassination plot against Alexei Navalny, his main political challenger; nor Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, who is blamed for the death of up to half a million people during the country’s decade-long civil war; nor North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, who rules the most repressive regime on earth and reportedly ordered the murder of a half-brother and an uncle. What no U.S. official is willing to add is the economic subtext—that Saudi Arabia is the world’s largest purchaser of American weaponry. Biden does not want to endanger—“rupture” was the word U.S. officials kept using in interviews with me and others—his ties with M.B.S.
“This is a completely flawed argument,” Bruce Riedel, a former C.I.A. official who also worked at the National Security Council and the Pentagon, told me. Biden’s decision will have a sweeping impact on the world’s perception of the new President and his pledge to stand up for American values. He instead signalled a willingness to look the other way when dictators threaten or kill dissidents. “The bad boys will now feel they can get away with anything,” Riedel added. “When push comes to shove, there will be the Khashoggi rule: the infantry will get punished if you get caught, but you will still be free and can keep your château in France.”
In a statement, Secretary of State Antony Blinken admonished the kingdom to now stop the “extraterritorial threats and assaults” against activists, dissidents, and journalists. Yet he, too, gave M.B.S. and the Khashoggi murder a pass. The Saudis simply rejected “the negative, false and unacceptable assessment in the report pertaining to the Kingdom’s leadership,” in a statement from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. And, meanwhile, M.B.S. continues to target and attack activists, including Saad al-Jabri, a former senior intelligence official who is often described as the Crown Prince’s next target after Khashoggi. “The notion that Biden is sending M.B.S. ‘a message’ by sanctioning his underlings is laughable,” Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of Democracy for the Arab World Now, or DAWN, a group founded by Khashoggi shortly before his death to promote political reforms across the Middle East, told me. Biden’s failure to hold M.B.S. personally accountable for Khashoggi’s murder “sends a warm and comforting message to despots around the world: carry on, nothing to see here, folks, murder and chop up your perceived enemies as you see fit, anywhere you like.” Putin, Kim, Assad, and the world’s other autocrats will think they can do as they please, even if U.S. intelligence publicly assesses that they’re guilty of atrocities.
After the report’s release, I tracked down Jabri’s family. He had worked for then Crown Prince Nayef and became a powerful intermediary on counterterrorism during the George W. Bush and Obama Administrations. He played a key role in the crackdown on Al Qaeda after the 9/11 attacks. But, in 2017, Jabri fled to Canada in fear for his life, shortly before M.B.S. deposed Nayef. Two of Jabri’s children, Sarah and Omar, both students, were soon banned from leaving the kingdom; M.B.S. offered to let them go if Jabri returned, the family told me. Jabri opted to stay away; his kids, now in their early twenties, were arrested a year ago. In November, they were tried in secret on charges of trying to escape and money laundering; Omar was sentenced to nine years and Sarah to almost seven years, the family told me. In a letter to Trump in support of Jabri, four U.S. senators, including both Democrats and Republicans, said that the United States had “a moral obligation to do what it can to assist in securing his children’s freedom.”
Last year, Jabri filed a federal suit against the kingdom in a Washington, D.C., court, accusing M.B.S. of taking his children hostage and trying to assassinate him in Canada in 2018, within weeks of Khashoggi’s murder. Canadian customs officials stopped the Tiger Squad team as they entered Canada and found two bags of “forensic tools” that could be used to dismember a body. Jabri now lives under the protection of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
The Jabri family welcomed Biden’s release of the intelligence report on Khashoggi’s murder but fears that the lack of accountabiility will only empower M.B.S. “This is transparency but not accountability—and not enough to insure that M.B.S. doesn’t do it again,” Khalid al-Jabri, one of the former intelligence official’s sons, told me. “You can’t just convict somebody of murder and then tell him that he can walk out the front door free.” The message this sends, he added, is that the Crown Prince just has to work harder not to get caught.
More broadly, experts say, the Biden Administration has fundamentally misread the kingdom—and may be making a bad strategic bet. M.B.S. is not as strong as he appears, even though, since becoming Crown Prince, he has consolidated his hold on the kingdom’s five centers of power—the military, the economy, the royal court, the clergy, and internal security. “M.B.S. has an abundance of enemies,” Riedel, who wrote an authoritative book on U.S.-Saudi relations since 1945, said. For almost ninety years, the kingdom was ruled by family consensus, with branches of government headed by various brothers, sons, and cousins, and all of them had input. No longer. M.B.S. has alienated entire wings of the massive royal family since he changed the line of succession, which was created by the country’s founder through his forty-three sons. Among those marginalized—and angry—are the family of Prince Nayef, who is now in prison, and the former King Abdullah’s family, which traditionally controlled the powerful National Guard.
Since 2015, the Crown Prince has also got the country bogged down in a costly and unwinnable war in Yemen, which has spawned the world’s largest humanitarian disaster. And now he has disrupted the kingdom’s relationship with the United States, its most important ally. The Biden Administration has notified the kingdom that it will no longer provide offensive military equipment to pursue the war in Yemen, although it has vowed to continue selling weapons to defend the kingdom. This weekend, after the Saudi military intercepted a missile attack near the capital and bomb-laden drones in the south, both launched by Houthi rebels in Yemen, the State Department reaffirmed its “longstanding partnership” to protect the kingdom. Yet experts say that Saudi Arabia needs the United States far more than Washington needs Riyadh. “We have total and absolute leverage over the Saudi military,” Riedel said.
At least Biden has stopped the “grotesque” coddling of Saudi Arabia practiced by President Trump’s Administration, the Washington Post editorial board wrote, on Friday. The board urged, at minimum, a travel ban that precludes the Crown Prince from more image-boosting tours, as well as a freeze on his immediate family’s financial assets in the United States. Biden’s decision not to pursue that course “suggests that the ‘fundamental’ change he promised in U.S.-Saudi relations will not deter MBS from further criminal behavior.” The U.S.-Saudi relationship under Mr. Biden may look no different than it has in the past, the Post warned.
The intelligence report offered no new details of the Saudi operation that killed Khashoggi, and, for his family, no answers on what happened to his body. “I am [more] devastated than ever before,” Hatice Cengiz, the Saudi journalist’s fiancée, told CNN, in an emotional phone call on Friday. She had waited hours for Khashoggi outside the Istanbul consulate, after he went in to get the papers so that they could marry later that week. She never saw him again. “Now I believe he will never come back.”
