The damning and timely inside story of Jamal Khashoggi’s murder
The Dissident
119 mins
The release of The Dissident, Bryan Fogel’s intrepid documentary about the 2018 murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi journalist, is well timed. A report by the CIA and other US intelligence agencies was declassified this week, which directly tied the operation that planned Khashoggi’s killing in Istanbul to Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (hereafter MBS).
The Washington Post, which employed Khashoggi as a columnist, has been dismayed by the response of the US government, which imposed visa restrictions and financial sanctions on 76 individuals said to be involved, but not the Crown Prince himself.
The Dissident advocates a much firmer reckoning, and assembles its case against MBS and his officials with simmering skill and damning cumulative power – so much so that it’s been too hot to handle for Netflix and other high-profile distributors, who (it appears) were too afraid to risk financial interests by angering the Saudi state.
It relates the sequence of events both up to and after the moment of Khashoggi’s death in the Saudi consulate, using transcripts of covert recordings made by the Turkish intelligence services. It also follows two figures especially affected by his murder: Khashoggi’s fiancée Hatice Cengiz, whose battle for justice dominates the current headlines, and his close friend Omar Abdulaziz, a 30-year-old, Montreal-based vlogger and activist who has amassed more than half a million Twitter followers.
After Khashoggi entered the consulate to gather the paperwork for his impending marriage, Abdulaziz (in touch from Canada) became puzzled by some unreturned
texts, and Cengiz (outside the building) by the hours her fiancé had been inside. Thanks to Turkish surveillance, we know the treatment Khashoggi underwent. He was offered a cup of tea, before being drugged, suffocated and dismembered. His body was covertly transported to the home of the Saudi consul-general, where it was incinerated in a tandoor oven dug into the ground. A 70lb shipment of meat from a local restaurant was hastily delivered, according to Turkish investigators, to cover up the smell.
As a filmmaker, Fogel has form in understanding high-level conspiracies. He won the Best Documentary Oscar for Icarus (2017), an exposé of the Russian doping scandal in athletics, which began with his own experiment: he tried, as an amateur cyclist, to gain an edge using the methods of doping mastermind-turned-whistle blower Grigory Rodchenkov. The function of Abdulaziz as a sympathetic defector and enemy of the state in The Dissident mirrors that of Rodchenkov in Icarus: both fear openly that MBS and Putin want them dead.
Fogel also deals with the cyberwarfare and phone hacking techniques which Saudi intelligence officers used to gain information and stifle critics. It’s alleged not only Abdulaziz and Khashoggi but also Jeff
Bezos, the journalist’s paymaster at The Washington Post, fell victim at roughly the same time to having their phones hacked. Meanwhile, thousands of fake Twitter accounts, known to opposition activists as “the flies”, have been shut down for contravening the platform’s rules about using it as a state-farmed propaganda machine.
What with all this material, and the focus on Abdulaziz and Cengiz as key players in the story, The Dissident has a lot to juggle. We can forgive Fogel if the portrait of Khashoggi seems a touch incomplete: with its restless style of activism, the film builds on his legacy better than it would have done as a work of retrospective biography. For several years, since Abdulaziz’s rising prominence as an exiled voice against the regime, his two youngest brothers have been detained in Jeddah’s Dhahban Central Prison, along with 22 or more of his friends.
You might sit down to The Dissident with one view on the finessing of diplomatic relations, but after learning how a blind eye to such reprisals is part of the package, it’s hard not to feel differently by the time the credits roll.
Premiering in the UK at the Glasgow Film Festival tomorrow. Info: glasgowfilm.org