Saudi Arabia's leader charmed US while cracking down on opponents
Joseph Westphal was wowed from the start. As President Barack Obama's ambassador to Saudi Arabia in 2015, Westphal started paying regular visits to the rising new power in the royal court: the country's new defense minister, Mohammed bin Salman, favored son of King Salman.
As Westphal recalls his visits with the prince, they struck up a warm friendship from the start. "First of all, we shared a really nice sense of humor," said Westphal. "I mean we, we laughed, we joked around . ... It was just laughing about life, and talking about things that maybe happened to me or happened to him."
More important, Prince Mohammed, who is known as MBS, was pledging to start to rein in the country's religious police and grant greater rights to Saudi women - steps that U.S. officials had long been calling for. "Yes, absolutely," Westphal replied when asked if he viewed MBS at the time as an agent of change.
"From the very beginning. Absolutely." Saudi Arabia's newly appointed King Salman, left, shakes hands with the U.S ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Joseph Westphal, at a meeting with then-President Barack Obama, right, in Riyadh in 2015. Westphal's relationship with the young Saudi prince is one glimpse into a much broader and, from today's perspective, unsettling phenomenon: the strange and successful courtship by MBS of America's foreign policy and corporate elite, presenting himself as a cultured reformer who was positioned to revolutionize his rigidly conservative country.
The story of that courtship - and its embarrassing aftermath, as MBS's ruthless crackdowns on dissent and his bloody military adventure in Yemen became ever more apparent is the subject of "The Rise of the Bullet Guy," Episode 5 in Yahoo News' "Conspiracyland" podcast: "The Secret Lives and Brutal Death of Jamal Khashoggi."
It is a courtship that came to a final, crashing and ignominious end when, in October 2018, a so-called Tiger Team of Saudi assassins brutally murdered the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi - drugging him with illicit narcotics brought from Cairo, suffocating him and then carving up his body with a bone saw and depositing his body parts in plastic bags.
It was a crime that the CIA soon concluded had been authorized by the crown prince himself, noting - among other factors - that MBS's right-hand man had met with the team before they left to kill Khashoggi in Istanbul, and that seven members of the hit squad were part of MBS's personal security detail, answerable only to him.
And yet the shocking nature of Khashoggi's murder has tended to obscure the preceding years, when at first top Obama administration officials, and then President Donald Trump and his influential son-in-law, Jared Kushner, embraced MBS with few reservations and extolled his supposed virtues.
"He's the only person I've met in 30 years of my involvement or more with Saudi Arabia who has put that kind of a vision on the table for the transformation of the country," said John Kerry, Obama's secretary of state, in an interview for "Conspiracyland" about his assessment of MBS at the time.
Kerry's Georgetown home was the setting for perhaps the most iconic moment in MBS's courtship of the U.S. government. It was in June 2016, and the new Saudi defense minister, during a trip to the United States, was invited to a Ramadan dinner at Kerry's house.
As he entered, MBS spotted the grand piano in the living room, promptly sat down and started to play Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata."
John Kerry, then U.S. secretary of state, left, greets Saudi Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman outside Kerry's Washington, D.C., residence, before a meeting with him in June 2016. Secretary of State John Kerry greets Saudi Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman outside Kerry's Washington, D.C., home in 2016.