Saudi Arabia’s Murderous Crown Prince Discusses Which Journalists Are Worth Killing With The Atlantic

FAYEZ NURELDINE/AFP via Getty Images

The Atlantic’s Graeme Wood and editor-in-chief Jefferey Goldberg spoke with Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who whined that the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi “hurt me a lot.”

Wood, who wrote the article, notes right away that the CIA issued a report saying MBS ordered Khashoggi’s brutal murder and that even “Saudi Arabia’s own prosecutors found that it had been conducted by some of the crown prince’s closest aides.”

Wood’s article, published Thursday, is the first published interview with MBS since the pandemic began and is clearly an attempt by MBS to try and whitewash, or at least move on from, the brutal 2018 killing of the Washington Post columnist in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.

“For about two years, MBS hid from public view, as if hoping the Khashoggi murder would be forgotten. It hasn’t been,” writes Wood. “But the crown prince still wants to convince the world that he is saving his country, not holding it hostage—which is why he met twice in recent months with me and the editor in chief of this magazine, Jeffrey Goldberg.”

While Wood takes a critical tone in his piece, MBS is allowed to air plenty of his own grievances and even tries to paint himself as the victim.

“When we asked if he had ordered the killing of Khashoggi, he said it was ‘obvious’ that he had not. ‘It hurt me a lot,’ he said. ‘It hurt me and it hurt Saudi Arabia, from a feelings perspective,” Wood writes.

“From a feelings perspective?” Wood then asks MBS.

“I understand the anger, especially among journalists. I respect their feelings. But we also have feelings here, pain here,” MBS replied, according to Wood.

He goes on to write that MBS said “the Khashoggi incident was the worst thing ever to happen to me, because it could have ruined all of my plans” to modernize Saudi Arabia.

MBS even goes on to say that the Khashoggi affair, which ended with investigators alleging that a Saudi hit squad dismembered Khashoggi and destroyed his body, actually violated his own human rights.

Wood writes:

“In our Riyadh interview, the crown prince said that his own rights had been violated in the Khashoggi affair. ‘I feel that human-rights law wasn’t applied to me,’ he said. ‘Article XI of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that any person is innocent until proven guilty.’

MBS attempts to offer evidence that he didn’t kill Khashoggi, alleging that if he were in the journalist-murdering business, he would choose more high-profile targets and better assassins:

The crown prince defended himself in part by asserting that Khashoggi was not important enough to kill. “I never read a Khashoggi article in my life,” he said. To our astonishment, he added that if he were to send a kill squad, he’d choose a more valuable target, and more competent assassins. “If that’s the way we did things”—murdering authors of critical op-eds—“Khashoggi would not even be among the top 1,000 people on the list. If you’re going to go for another operation like that, for another person, it’s got to be professional and it’s got to be one of the top 1,000.” Apparently, he had a hypothetical hit list, ready to go. Nevertheless, he maintained that the Khashoggi killing was a “huge mistake.”

Wood ends the article with the chilling prediction that “the madness of King Mohammed” could go one of two ways: “a slow and graceful renunciation of power” or  an “ever more violent exercise of it.”