“You Challenge Them, You Might End Up In Prison”

Last spring, the journalist JAMAL KHASHOGGI spoke in secret to Rula Jebreal for a Newsweek cover story on Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The interview— published here now—offers disturbing insight into a brutal regime.

- Rula Jebreal

THE SAUDI JOURNALIST JAMAL Khashoggi told me he feared for his life. I was reporting Newsweek’s July 9 cover story on Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and we were speaking off the record: That’s one reason I haven’t allowed this transcript to be published until now. The other reason is I hoped Khashoggi was still alive. Despite ample signs of the extreme brutality of the crown prince’s regime, I never imagined we would soon be reflecting on the journalist’s horrifying death at the hands of a group of Saudi agents in their country’s consulate in Istanbul on October 2.

Khashoggi was calm and deliberate as we spoke about Saudi Arabia’s future and its recent past. “I don’t see myself as an opposition,” he said. He wanted only reform; he wanted “a better Saudi Arabia.” He confessed how he had tried, in vain, to advise the young crown prince, known as MBS, to choose a different path and open up Saudi civil society. He maintained a sliver of hope that MBS, despite being “an old-fashioned tribal leader,” could yet be steered toward reason. But he spoke frankly to me about the “thuggish” men that surround him. “You challenge them, you might end up in prison,” he said.

As someone who had been close to the Saudi royal court for decades, Khashoggi instinctively understood the limits of reform. He was described as a dissident in the weeks following his death, but until 18 months ago he had been loyal to the official Saudi line on every major issue, from Yemen to Syria to state-sanctioned sectarianism inside the kingdom. Such loyalty did not spare him the fate—according to Turkish officials—of being tortured, dismembered and murdered.