1958–2018
The Washington Post | Istanbul, Turkey | October 2, 2018 | Age 59
His four decades of proximity to Saudi power gave him a reporter’s view that few could match. And when he chose, in the last year of his life, to write plainly about what he saw, the kingdom sent a team to silence him.
The Journalist
Jamal Ahmad Khashoggi grew up knowing the Saudi state from the inside. His grandfather had served as a prominent physician who served King Abdulaziz ibn Saud, the kingdom’s founder, and that proximity to power shaped Khashoggi’s early understanding of how Saudi Arabia functioned.
He left for the United States in the late 1970s to study business administration at Indiana State University, graduating in 1983. He began his journalism career at the Saudi Gazette and Asharq Al-Awsat, where he became among the first prominent Arab journalists to cover the Arab volunteers fighting alongside the Afghan mujahideen against Soviet forces. It was in Afghanistan that Khashoggi first encountered Osama bin Laden. He returned to interview him multiple times through the 1980s and 1990s, including in Sudan in 1995, producing some of the earliest serious documentation of bin Laden’s ideology and ambitions.
The Work
By the 1990s, Khashoggi had established himself as one of the most widely read journalists in the Arab world. In 1991, he became managing editor and then acting editor-in-chief of Al-Madina, Saudi Arabia’s oldest daily. Between journalism posts, he served as a media adviser to Prince Turki al-Faisal: first when al-Faisal headed Saudi intelligence, and later when he served as Saudi ambassador to Britain and the United States.
In 2003, he was given the editorship of Al-Watan, a progressive-leaning Saudi daily. Two months later, the Ministry of Information removed him. He had allowed a columnist to criticize Ibn Taymiyyah, the medieval Islamic scholar whose work is foundational to Wahhabism, the strict Islam-inspired policy in Saudi Arabia. The government treated that as a firing offense.
Khashoggi spent the years that followed trying to work within those constraints. He returned to Al-Watan around 2010, writing for regional outlets while remaining just on the edges of Saudi officialdom. But Mohammed bin Salman’s (MBS) consolidation of power from 2017 made that balance increasingly untenable. He detained his rivals and arrested activists, all but eliminating whatever space had existed for commentary that wasn’t explicitly favorable to the government. Feeling increasingly muzzled, Khashoggi left Saudi Arabia in 2017.
That September, he began writing a column for The Washington Post, under Global Opinions editor Karen Attiah. The columns, aside from being pointed and specific, stood out for being fully grounded in decades of direct observation. He wrote about the Saudi-led war in Yemen and the humanitarian crisis it produced, he criticized the blockade of Qatar, and he documented the arrest of women’s rights activists who had campaigned for years for the right to drive. He named what he saw.
SAUDI MEDIA AND THE RISE OF MOHAMMED BIN SALMAN
Saudi Arabia has ranked among the world’s most restrictive press environments for decades, with the country’s media outlets operating under state control or ownership by royally connected businessmen. Reporters Without Borders consistently places Saudi Arabia near the bottom of its World Press Freedom Index. When Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) emerged as Crown Prince and began consolidating authority beginning in 2017, those constraints intensified. In November 2017, hundreds of princes, officials, and businessmen were detained at the Ritz-Carlton in Riyadh in a purge that the government described as an anti-corruption campaign. By late 2018, Saudi intelligence was monitoring critics overseas through digital surveillance and informant networks. The apparatus for identifying and tracking dissidents abroad was well established long before Khashoggi walked into the Istanbul consulate.
The Final Story
In October 2018, Khashoggi became engaged to Hatice Cengiz, a Turkish academic and researcher. To marry her, he needed official documentation certifying his previous divorce. The Saudi consulate in Istanbul was the only place to obtain it.
He had gone there in late September but was told by Saudi officials to return when the documents would be ready. Before going back, he asked Cengiz to wait outside and hold his phones. She agreed.
At 1:14 in the afternoon on October 2, 2018, Khashoggi entered the building. He was killed shortly after entering, by a fifteen-person team that had flown in from Riyadh specifically for the operation. His body was dismembered inside the consulate and his remains were never recovered.
Cengiz waited for hours. When the consulate’s working hours ended without him emerging, she called Turkish authorities. The Saudi government, confronted by Turkish investigators and an international press demanding answers, offered a series of contradictory explanations over the weeks that followed: he had left the building; he had died in an accidental fight; rogue operatives had acted without authorization. U.S. intelligence agencies, including the CIA, assessed with high confidence that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had personally ordered the killing. A UN special rapporteur called it a premeditated extrajudicial execution.
A Turkish court convicted several Saudi nationals in absentia. In Saudi Arabia, five men received death sentences that were later commuted to twenty-year prison terms. Those who planned and ordered the operation were never tried.
“As a result, Arabs living in these countries are either uninformed or misinformed. They are unable to adequately address, much less publicly discuss, matters that affect the region and their day-to-day lives.”
— from “What the Arab world needs most is free expression,” his final column, submitted to The Washington Post shortly before his death and published posthumously on October 17, 2018
The Legacy
Khashoggi’s death produced an immediate international response that included a bevvy of congressional resolutions, targeted sanctions against Saudi officials, and even a diplomatic rupture between Riyadh and Western governments. But within months the geopolitical calculus reasserted itself. The Crown Prince remained in power and Saudi Arabia remained a strategic partner for the United States. Accountability, for those who ordered the killing, never arrived.
What persisted was the organization Khashoggi had quietly helped establish before his death. Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN) was founded to promote democratic reform and press freedom across the region. After October 2, his colleagues formalized it in his name; it continues to document rights abuses and work on behalf of the journalists and dissidents imprisoned throughout the Arab world.
He was not naive about the risks. He had spent his career inside Saudi media, close to the royal court, and understood precisely how the government dealt with critics. He went to the consulate on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon to obtain a piece of paper. He was killed not for what he was doing that day, but for what he had spent the previous year writing.
This profile is part of the Fallen Journalists Memorial, honoring those who sacrificed their lives in service to press freedom and democratic values.
Content included in this publication was generously provided by the Freedom Forum’s Journalists Memorial through a partnership with the Fallen Journalists Memorial Foundation.