Khashoggi’s death diminishes Saudi Arabia and its crown prince

It is clear that whatever deliberative process a small group of Saudis undertook that led to the decision to confront journalist and Saudi insider Jamal Khashoggi when he entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul was, to put it mildly, defective. Based on news reports that relied primarily on information from the Turkish government, it appears the team that awaited Khashoggi inside the modest consular outpost were prepared to confront him physically and ensure his return to the kingdom. Whether the plan was to return him alive or dead remains to be clarified.  

What went into the Saudi calculations? For those of us who have operated in the nether regions of national security, an early test of a hotly-debated proposal is whether it passes “the NYTtest”:  if the details of the operation were published on the front page of the New York Times, could the administration live with any fallout, and would most readers accept that the program had been in the best interests of the nation? Even within a parochial Saudi context, the Khashoggi operation was a huge miscalculation.

{mosads}How could the Saudis have been confident that either forcibly detaining Khashoggi and conveying him back to the kingdom or, worse, making an “example” out of him through death would not reverberate and cause embarrassment, diplomatic estrangement and global opprobrium?  

First, the Saudis sensed, as many of us have, that over the past few years the “rules of the game” have changed. The Russians have killed dissidents and spies inside Russia and on foreign soil.  There have been a few sanctions, affecting the Russians financially and diplomatically, but those actions have not diminished the power of Vladimir Putin domestically or, one could argue, internationally.  

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un most probably ordered the murder of his half-brother while the other Kim was in a transit lounge in Kuala Lumpur. All that move did was more firmly entrench Kim Jong Un as an unchallenged leader and apparently it played no role in the U.S. calculation to engage Kim in talks at the head-of-government level, as the United States seeks to control or eliminate North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.  

Iran — Saudi Arabia’s sworn enemy and regional nemesis — has silenced critics at home and abroad with little fanfare. Such moves have not affected the standing of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei or President Hassan Rouhani.

The Chinese, now giants on the global stage, have conducted purges unheard of since the Cultural Revolution, and have incarcerated up to 1 million Uighur Muslims in “re-education and vocational training” camps. Has this impinged on the power of President Xi Jinping? Hardly.

Former National Security Agency and CIA Director Michael Hayden often speaks about intelligence professionals “getting chalk on their cleats” as they play close to the line for what is acceptable in a legal and normative sense. What he makes clear, however, is that you can’t cross that line. With the Khashoggi operation, the Saudis ran out of bounds and left the stadium. Even with a wider field courtesy of the Russians, North Koreans, Iranians and Chinese, the Saudis misread latitude.

At the height of the Cold War, the “rules of the game” were fairly well understood. In the spy game, we didn’t kill each other’s officers or agents. Lethal operations against “the main enemy” were forbidden. Were there proxy wars in various parts of the world? Yes. Disinformation and influence operations? Yes. As adversarial as our relationship was in the context of global competition, I never went to bed at night wondering if a KGB officer in town was putting together a hit team to kill me on my way to work. That is not how we played the game.  

When terrorists began playing a larger role in the global sandbox, however, those nicely demarcated lines began to blur and shift. Aggressive operations found more purchase following the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Africa, and after 9/11.

Something else changed after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union.  The Cold War, and the overhang of possible nuclear annihilation, was for all the marbles in a binary world. No American president or Soviet premier wanted to deal with an espionage or active measure raising the temperature leading to crisis; the stakes were too high.

In the late teens of the 21st century, there are still two superpowers, but one of them is not named Russia. Significant regional powers vie for influence, to include Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia — all cheek by jowl. Terrorist and criminal enterprises flourish in the Middle East, parts of Southeast Asia and Latin America. Democratic nations and the concept of liberal capitalist societies — supposedly the hands-down winners of the Cold War — face competing constructs that promote centralized control by unchallenged elites or autocrats as more efficient and stable polities. In that context, it is easier for the despots of the world to get away with changing the rules of the game.

In that larger context, complete with contemporary examples of little accountability for governments and leaders suppressing dissent and violently confronting those opposed to them, the Saudis made their decision. Another crucial dynamic probably was at play: reports indicate Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman relies on a small coterie of advisers and is not overly enamored with the idea of listening to strong voices offering differing opinions.

All governments are necessarily secretive. When it comes to national security decisions, they become more so. Adding the dynamic of considering a risky operation and the need for compartmentation and secrecy reduces the number of those with a “need to know” even further.  Whoever made the final decision to confront Khashoggi in Istanbul would have benefitted from counsel by someone outside the coterie’s cacophony of sycophancy. “Don’t do it,” would have been such counsel. “Doesn’t pass the smell test.”

Khashoggi was well-connected and somewhat influential, but his bully pulpit at the Washington Post could never be more than an inconvenient irritant to the crown prince and Saudi Arabia. Outside counsel would have advised to fight him word for word, pointing out that Khashoggi’s pet cause — support for the Muslim Brotherhood — was fraught with internal contradictions. Khashoggi would have been nothing more than a gnat in the eye of a powerful leader. Instead, his demise has diminished the crown prince, his father King Salman, and Saudi Arabia. Iran, radical Islamists, and those opposed to liberalization within the kingdom all stand to gain.  

In this instance, the Saudis chose to lie down with the forces that have made violence and oppression more acceptable. If anything good comes from Khashoggi’s disturbing death, let it be that lasting victories are the result of the power of our ideas and not of our swords.

Mark S. Sparkman is a 30-year veteran of the CIA. He is president of Veretus Group, an investigations and strategic intelligence firm in Washington, D.C.