Report: Saudi prince OK’d killing
Journalist critical of the kingdom was dismembered in ’18
Journalist critical of the kingdom was dismembered in ’18.
WASHINGTON — Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia approved the plan for operatives to assassinate journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, according to a previously classified intelligence report released Friday by the Biden administration.
Much of the evidence the CIA used to draw that conclusion remains classified, including recordings of Khashoggi’s killing and dismemberment at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul that were obtained by Turkish intelligence. But the report does outline who carried out the killing, describe what Crown Prince Mohammed knew about the operation and lay out how the CIA concluded that he ordered it and bears responsibility for Khashoggi’s death.
The release of the report also signaled that President Joe Biden, unlike his predecessor, would not set aside the killing of Khashoggi and that his administration intended to attempt to isolate the crown prince, although it will avoid any measures that would threaten ties to the kingdom. Administration officials said their goal was a recalibration, not a rupture, of the relationship.
The report’s disclosure was the first time the U.S. intelligence community has made its conclusions public, and the declassified document is a powerful rebuke of Crown Prince Mohammed, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia and a close ally of the Trump administration, whose continued support of him after Khashoggi’s killing prompted international outrage.
“We assess that Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman approved an operation in Istanbul, Turkey to capture or kill Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi,” said the report, issued by Biden’s director of national intelligence, Avril Haines.
The four-page report contained few previously undisclosed major facts. It reiterated the CIA’s conclusion from the fall of 2018 that Crown Prince Mohammed ordered the killing of Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist and legal permanent resident of Virginia who was critical of the Saudi government. The report was written a year ago after Congress, which had been briefed on the underlying findings, passed a law mandating intelligence agencies’ conclusions be declassified and released.
But the declassified report still has the power to shock given the brutality of the assassination. Saudi officials lured Khashoggi to the consulate, where they killed him and were said to use a bone saw to dismember his body.
Crown Prince Mohammed viewed Khashoggi as a threat and “broadly supported using violent measures if necessary to silence him,” the intelligence report concluded. U.S. intelligence agencies learned that Saudi officials had planned an unspecified operation against Khashoggi, but the report said the United States has not learned when Saudi officials decided to harm him.
No single piece of evidence outlined in the report points to Crown Prince Mohammed’s guilt. Instead, intelligence officials have long said, smaller pieces of evidence, combined with the CIA’s understanding of the prince’s control of the kingdom, led them to a high confidence conclusion of his culpability.
According to the report, Crown Prince Mohammed “fostered an environment” in which his aides feared that any failure to follow his orders could result in their arrest. “This suggests that the aides were unlikely to question Mohammed bin Salman’s orders or undertake sensitive actions without his consent,” the report said.
In addition to outlining Crown Prince Mohammed’s culpability, the report lists 21 others involved in the killing of Khashoggi.
They included members of a hit team that had flown from Saudi Arabia to Turkey, where they killed and dismembered him Oct. 2, 2018, after Saudi officials lured Khashoggi, who was seeking paperwork to marry his Turkish fiancee, into the kingdom’s consulate in Istanbul. His body was never found.
The hit team worked for the Saudi Center for Studies and Media Affairs, at the time led by Saud al-Qahtani, a close adviser of the crown prince. The report noted that al-Qahtani had said publicly that he did not make decisions without Crown Prince Mohammed’s approval.
Even before the hit team — called the Saudi Rapid Intervention Force in the report — killed Khashoggi, Crown Prince Mohammed authorized a secret campaign to silence dissenters.
Seven members of that unit were on the 15-person team sent after Khashoggi in Istanbul, according to the report. The involvement of the unit was a key piece of evidence implicating Crown Prince Mohammed, the report said.
The unit, according to the report, “exists to defend the crown prince, answers only to him, and had directly participated in earlier dissident suppression operations” at the direction of Crown Prince Mohammed. “We judge that members of the RIF would not have participated in the operation against Khashoggi without Muhammad bin Salman’s approval,” the report said.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Crystal Deck was opening presents on Christmas morning at her brother’s home when she heard the news that an enormous explosion had ripped through the historic heart of Nashville.
She knew instantly that the bomber was her dearest friend, Anthony Warner, and quickly began fitting together clues that he had dropped, including a series of peculiar episodes she had dismissed as inconsequential, but which proved to be central to his suicidal plot.
Deck had, weeks earlier, found him fiddling with a prerecorded female voice on his laptop. And he had played her the 1964 Petula Clark hit “Downtown,” praising the song’s “significant spirit.” Both became eerie elements of the bombing.
Warner had even cautioned her that he was hatching something that would bring the police to her door, yet until that moment she had not understood the magnitude of his plan.
Though Warner’s motive remains shrouded, false information and outlandish tales had poisoned his mind, apparently driving him to spectacular violence. This mindset has become alarmingly familiar to law enforcement officials now reckoning with the destructive force of conspiracy theories that mutate endlessly online and played a role in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Warner, who was 63 when he died, was not among the angry QAnon followers who came to believe the unlikely theory that former President Donald Trump would hold onto power and defeat a satanic cabal. He was a computer specialist with a deep distrust of government, according to his own writings and to those who knew him. A loner, he had made at least one female friend feel manipulated and frightened. And he had cultivated a bizarre obsession with shape-shifting alien lizards and a dense thicket of other peculiar ideas.
As Warner’s best friend in his final months, Deck believes that some combination of a fatal cancer diagnosis salted with a belief in conspiracy theories led Warner to kill himself in such a brutally spectacular manner.
“He was trying to escape,” said Deck, who is not considered a suspect. “He talked about going out on his own terms.”
Warner, authorities said, drove his booby-trapped white recreational vehicle to Second Avenue North in the predawn hours. The detonation damaged some 50 buildings, collapsing a few and shearing the antique brick facades off others that will require years and tens of millions of dollars to restore. Two months later, the blast area remains a confused, desolate patchwork of boarded-up buildings, chain-link fencing and uneven reconstruction efforts.
The explosion, in front of an AT&T hub, crippled cellular, internet and cable service across several states for two days and underscored the vulnerability of such common yet unprotected facilities.
The FBI and other federal and local law enforcement agencies investigating the bombing have not made any findings public, although officials said they expect a report by early March.
Whatever else might have been on Warner’s mind in the period leading up to his death, he had been fixated for years on the notion that alien reptiles who inhabited underground tunnels controlled the Earth, a fantasy spread by a notorious British serial conspiracy theorist. The giant lizards, Warner said, appeared among us as humans.
By the summer of 2019, he was making a friend, Pamela Perry, increasingly anxious, according to Raymond Throckmorton III, a Nashville lawyer who had represented both Perry and Warner on various matters.
“Pam Perry had had numerous contacts with me where she was just emotionally distraught and had been just really whipped into a frenzy of emotion by apparently crazy things or threatening or unusual things that Tony had said to her,” Throckmorton said. “I think he just sensed that she was at a weak point in her life and it was somebody he could dominate, manipulate or control.”
In August 2019, Perry told police that she believed Warner was building bombs in the RV parked outside his house on Bakertown Lane, and Throckmorton told the police that Warner was capable of building explosives. Officers went to his home but neither the Nashville police nor the FBI pursued an investigation. A police and municipal review committee is now scrutinizing why.
Perry, through lawyers, declined to comment.
Deck, 44, first met Warner several months later, when he came into the South Nashville Waffle House where she worked. “The first time I met him, I just thought his cornbread wasn’t really done in the middle and he was off a little bit,” she said.
Now, in retrospect, Deck dredges her memory for clues of what was to come.
By the time she met him,
Warner was clearly preparing for a transition. He had largely emptied his house, save for an air mattress and a computer in the living room.
He hinted that he had been told he had cancer, but she did not pry.
In early December, he sent a letter to his IT clients, telling them that he was retiring. He deeded his house to the daughter of a former girlfriend. Deck saw him last on Dec. 17, when he showed up at the Waffle House to give her his car, a white 2007 Pontiac Vibe, along with the jacket and gloves he used to wear when he walked her dog.
He implied that he had little time left.
On Christmas morning in downtown Nashville, several residents who were awakened around 4:30 a.m. by what sounded like loud, rapid bursts of gunfire phoned the police. The officers who responded found no indication of shots fired, and Deck said that Warner used gunfire noises as a ring tone on his cellphone.
He apparently used the sound that morning to attract attention, because a computerized, female voice — the voice Deck had heard him manipulating weeks earlier — soon began emanating from the vehicle, saying, “Stay clear of this vehicle, evacuate now. Do not approach this vehicle!” The police evacuated as many residents as they could.
The voice, more insistent, announced that the vehicle would detonate. It began a 15-minute countdown, interspersed with continued warnings to evacuate as well as snippets from the song “Downtown.”
“When you’re alone and life is making you lonely, you can always go downtown.”
At 6:30 a.m., surveillance video showed, a giant fireball erupted around the RV and the resulting concussion rocked the neighborhood.
Warner was the only person killed.