CIA evidence connects prince to killing

The CIA has evidence that Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince, communicated repeatedly with a key aide around the time that a team believed to have been under the aide’s command assassinated Jamal Khashoggi, according to former officials familiar with the intelligence.

The adviser, Saud alQahtani, topped the list of Saudis who were targeted by U.S. sanctions last month over their suspected involvement in Khashoggi’s killing. U.S. intelligence agencies have evidence that Crown Prince Mohammed and al-Qahtani had 11 exchanges that roughly coincided with the hit team’s advance into the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, where Khashoggi was murdered.

The exchanges are a key piece of information that helped solidify the CIA’s assessment that the crown prince ordered the killing of Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist and Virginia resident who had been critical of the Saudi government.

“This is the smoking gun, or at least the smoking phone call,” said Bruce Riedel, a former CIA official now at the Brookings Institution. “There is only one thing they could possibly be talking about. This shows that the crown prince was witting of premeditated murder.”

The existence of the intercepts was first reported by the Wall Street Journal, which reviewed a highly classified document on the CIA assessment of Khashoggi’s Oct. 2 killing.

Al-Qahtani began working in the royal court a decade ago, and later emerged as Crown Prince Mohammed’s chief propagandist.