Jamal Khashoggi, his Apple Watch, government headfakes and.. climate change
External CCTV shows Jamal Khashoggi walking into the Saudi consulate in Turkey on 2 October 2018, 13:14. (The red border has been added around the time.) He hasn’t been seen since.
The disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi after entering the Saudi consulate in Turkey — where he had gone on an appointment on Wednesday 3 October to get divorce papers, while his new fiancee waited outside with his phone — has set off a diplomatic firestorm unlike anything we’ve seen around Saudi Arabia in years, perhaps decades.
Stalin’s comment* that “one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic” is shown to be truer than ever: while there have been political noises and the occasional chinstroking comment piece about the Saudi involvement in the war in Yemen, where huge numbers have been displaced by years of fighting amid allegations of war crimes, it took one man’s innocent trip to turn into something much grimmer to spark boycotts and very public withdrawals from prestigious events.
This, of course, is how news works: we find it easier to empathise with a one person or a handful we can recognise, identify with, find some common ground with, than a mass movement of thousands of people displaced by shelling and gunfire. It’s why plays aren’t about millions of people, but a few: because that’s how we remember stories.
So where is Khashoggi? There’s an independent (ie not Saudi-controlled) CCTV picture of him entering the consulate. There is independent CCTV ranged on the front and back of the consulate, though it can’t see what happens in the car park. It sees cars entering and exiting there, but not who’s in them. There’s no CCTV showing him exiting. (One pro-Saudi account on Twitter did try putting out a Photoshopped picture of him “leaving”, which simply took the “entering” photo, magic-lassoed Khashoggi, and flipped him. Voila! Walking out! The picture was so hilariously bad it was soon deleted.)
Let’s do the simple questions first. If Khashoggi is alive, where is he?
Two alternatives:
(1) not under the control of the Saudi government, ie roaming about;
or (2) under the Saudi government’s control.
If the former, why hasn’t he made himself known? I think we can rule that one out. If the latter, why doesn’t the Saudi government show him? Sure, it might have to do some fancy footwork to explain why it has kept him hidden for more than a week. But it wouldn’t be accused of extrajudicial murder. The fact that it hasn’t suggests to me that he isn’t alive.
Dead to the world
So if he’s dead, where was he killed? All the information points to him having been killed inside the consulate. Flight data shows a group arriving on two flights from Riyadh the night before and checking in to a hotel. (Hit squads’ Achilles heel: it’s always hotels.) They then left the next evening — hours after Khashoggi had walked in.
Turkey has all but accused the Saudis of executing Khashoggi inside the consulate; the Saudis, who had ordered local workers not to come in on that Wednesday, and later said that the internal CCTV seemed not to have been working, deny it.
The most intriguing wrinkle in all this has been the claim, floated on social media apparently (because I haven’t seen it in any sensible news outlet) that Khashoggi’s Apple Watch is the source of Turkey’s knowledge about what happened to him.
Because Turkey’s intelligence and/or police agencies seem to have been leaking aplenty. This Washington Post story contains this passage:
The Turkish government has told U.S. officials that it has audio and video recordings that prove Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi was killed inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul this month, according to U.S. and Turkish officials.
The recordings show that a Saudi security team detained Khashoggi in the consulate after he walked in Oct. 2 to obtain an official document before his upcoming wedding, then killed him and dismembered his body, the officials said.
The audio recording in particular provides some of the most persuasive and gruesome evidence that the Saudi team is responsible for Khashoggi’s death, the officials said.
“The voice recording from inside the embassy lays out what happened to Jamal after he entered,” said one person with knowledge of the recording who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss highly sensitive intelligence.
“You can hear his voice and the voices of men speaking Arabic,” this person said. “You can hear how he was interrogated, tortured and then murdered.”
Watch and learn?
Because Khashoggi wore an Apple Watch, and because there’s this talk about recording, some people have concluded that the recordings come from the Watch.
I’d say: not so fast. First of all, we don’t know what model of Watch it was. If it wasn’t a Series 3, and if it wasn’t hooked up to either a cellular (for Series 3) or a Wi-Fi (anything earlier) connection, then it wouldn’t have been able to send any information anywhere. Anything it recorded would have stayed on the Watch. And I think it’s a safe bet that any kill squad would have taken his Watch with them. No messy leftovers.
Second, it’s not easy to record stuff on a Watch. There is an app which can do it, but it has a key limitation:
Even if your iPhone is somewhere else, you can record audio from Apple Watch. When the two devices are connected again, the recording will automatically transfer to your iPhone and then sync to iCloud Drive.
OK, now we need him to have begun pressing Record on his Watch, to have had a Watch that was either connected to the Wi-Fi or had a cell connection. He had intentionally left his phone outside, with his fiancee (standard practice in consulates: in general you’re not allowed to take phones inside, and he might also have been being cautious, not wanting the Saudis to get any chance of accessing his contacts).
Another alternative some might offer: he had the Walkie-Talkie function on, and was doing this with his fiancée. (It would have to go to her phone.)
Though I’d love to be wrong, I don’t think this scenario pans out. As much as anything, it requires his Watch’s cell connection to be dramatically good inside a building, which tends not to be the case for any phone. The Wi-Fi scenario doesn’t work unless he’d previously joined the Wi-Fi there, and I don’t think they would offer that.
Most of all, though, this scenario — him recording his killing on his Apple Watch — doesn’t ring true for me because it would mean his fiancee would have been able to access it. If she were the one who had these recordings, don’t you think she’d be raising absolute hell? They’d be all over the net by now. She’s well-connected in Turkish political circles. I’m fairly sure that all she’s got is the last known location of his Watch: inside the Saudi consulate.
So while it would be nice to think that Khashoggi’s Watch will indict his killers, it’s probably not the source of these claimed recordings. As much as anything, ask yourself this: if he really was worried that he was going to be attacked by someone inside the consulate, why go in at all?
The headfake dance
Instead, Turkey is trying to dance around the fact that it has either bugged or hacked the consulate’s internal CCTV systems, and/or has installed its own bugs (I wonder if local workers might have been involved?). To be safe, it’s probably done both. You’d expect nothing less from any decent intelligence service which is trying to get a handle on the thinking of a major trade partner which has a new ruler and a proclivity to enter into regional wars. (Another possibility: they got the information from their own internal human sources. But since “local workers” were carefully sent home at the start of the day — the Saudis had told Khashoggi he had to come in that specific day to get the documents he needed — who would that be?)
But of course the intelligence agencies can’t say that. They can’t say, Cluedo-style,“it was Suspect 13, in the Consul’s Office, with a bone saw.” They can’t release the video footage because that would give away their bugs and their bugging. They can’t release the audio because it would show how much they’re able to monitor.
At the same time, though, they have made public plenty of detail about the Saudi killers, rather like the UK government with the GRU buffoons: enough to make it crystal clear to the Saudis that they know exactly what went down, and how, and by who. This is how governments put pressure on other governments in diplomatic incidents like this: by showing enough of their cards to make it clear they can make things very difficult if they choose. (The endstage of that would be releasing the tapes.)
Hold out your arms (contracts)
Yet for all the noise — and man, there’s been a lot — around Khashoggi’s disappearance (hell: let’s just call it killing), there’s also a suspicion that this might not quite be the watershed it had looked at first. The prince’s PR handlers are probably suggesting he just wait the media storm out, don’t hold any big events for a little while, see how things go. Trump’s bluster notwithstanding, it’s not clear the US is going to do anything because of the carrot, as Trump sees it, of gigantic arms contracts.
You could wonder why Saudi Arabia needs $100bn of arms — indeed, why it has the world’s third-biggest defence budget, behind the US and China (even though there’s a note that “The figures for Saudi Arabia include expenditure for public order and safety and might be slightly overestimated” — look, it’s a non-nuclear state which spends more than Russia.) I think Trump’s response gives you the answer: buying arms keeps quiet those who might otherwise disagree more strongly with its suppression of women’s rights, free speech and democracy. Parades of national leaders have plighted their troth to Saudi leaders down the years in the hope of getting some military spending largesse; the quid pro quo about not mentioning the women and the democracy stuff seems as well understood as it is with China’s manufacturing and its ongoing human rights abuses.
Yet the Khashoggi case threatens to undermine that, because it’s not about arms sales, or what Saudi Arabia does abroad; it’s about what it does to its own citizens on foreign soil (even if consulates count as “home soil” for diplomatic purposes), and an individual who was known in the West, and who had previously been a supporter of the Saudis but became a critic. (Ignore, by the way, the chaff about Khashoggi palling around with Osama bin Laden in the 1980s, as put about by Sean Davis of the idiotically right-wing Federalist, among others. In the 1980s bin Laden was funded by the US, as he was one of the mujahideen fighting the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. Davis seems very keen to question whether we should really care about Khashoggi. One wonders — since The Federalist doesn’t reveal who funds it — whether it is funded wholly or in part by Saudi money? I think we should be told.)
What the calculus of criticism-while-keeping-those-sweet-arms-deals reveals though is how urgently we need to move away from our reliance on oil. It’s that which props up the Saudi economy, and allows it to ignore the real needs of its populace, because it’s a sort of capitalistic end-state — ownership is concentrated in a few hands, and so is power.
Change this climate
With the news this week that we need to take urgent action to ease the damage that climate change will do, there’s never been a better time to think about energy diversification. Not relying on oil would mean we weren’t damaging the planet; it would mean too that places like Saudi Arabia might have to think of democracy and diversity.
Sure, they’ll probably put a gazillion solar panels into the desert — how fortunate to have both the energy reserves for the 20th and 21st century — but the transition won’t be so simple. And hell, we’ll always have the wind. Either way, it’s better use less oil, both for the climate and for our conscience.
So, are you outraged by Jamal Khashoggi’s brutal killing in a Saudi consulate? Then switch to a green energy supplier. Pick a car with higher mileage, or even a hybrid. Insulate your home. Sounds crazy that that would have an impact on an authoritarian oil regime, but it’s the little things that count — because in the end, they add up. One death is a tragedy. But a million carefully made choices are much more than a statistic.
(*Yes, Stalin was a monster. He also understood how people think. And he might not actually have said that quote, but lots of people seem to have done, in one way or another.)
If you’ve found this piece useful/interesting, I do a daily list of links at The Overspill, with brief roundups and commentary about technology, science and sometimes their intersection with politics. Sign up for the email, which will find your inbox at about 0800 GMT (or BST = GMT+1 in summer) each day.
