Saudi assassins picked up illicit drugs in Cairo to kill Jamal Khashoggi

Early on the morning of Oct. 2, 2018, a Gulfstream jet carrying a team of Saudi assassins on its way to Istanbul made a quick stopover in Cairo. The purpose: to pick up a lethal dose of “illegal” narcotics that was injected a few hours later into the left arm of Jamal Khashoggi, killing the Washington Post columnist within a matter of minutes, according to notes that summarize secret Saudi interrogations of the murderers.

What the drugs were — and who provided them in the middle of the night at Cairo’s airport — remains a mystery. But the previously undisclosed Cairo connection points for the first time to the possible existence of Egyptian accomplices in Khashoggi’s death. It also provides compelling new evidence of what the Saudi government had long denied: that the hit team, dispatched by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, or MBS, intended to kill the journalist before the plane ever took off from Riyadh and well before Khashoggi walked into the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul later that day.

The delivery of lethal drugs in Cairo to effectively poison Khashoggi is among a number of damning new details about the journalist’s grisly murder that are revealed in a new eight-episode season of Yahoo News’ "Conspiracyland" podcast being released this week, titled “The Secret Lives and Brutal Death of Jamal Khashoggi.” 

"Conspiracyland" traces the arc of Khashoggi’s career — from his days as a close friend of Osama bin Laden during the U.S. and Saudi government-backed war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan to his time as a media spokesman and spin doctor for the Saudi government that involved, according to one of his colleagues, being dispatched on “secret missions” by the Saudi ambassador to London, a former chief of Saudi intelligence.

By the end of his life, however, Khashoggi had become a fierce and unrelenting critic of the crown prince’s harsh crackdowns on internal dissent. "Conspiracyland" presents new details of how MBS, even while being hailed as a reformer by U.S. officials, played a direct role in supervising that crackdown: He allegedly oversaw an espionage scheme targeting the San Francisco headquarters of Twitter in which two Saudi spies stole cellphone numbers, private email accounts, direct messages and other personal information of Saudi government critics, including a close associate of Khashoggi’s.

“It was us. We did that. We have our guy at Twitter,” MBS told a former top Saudi counterterrorism official, Saad Aljabri, according to an account provided by Aljabri’s son Khalid on the "Conspiracyland" podcast.

MBS even went on to brag that “we paid” 1 million Saudi riyals to one of the spies, according to Khalid Aljabri’s account of the conversation. That amount roughly corresponds to the nearly $300,000 that federal prosecutors have alleged in an indictment that one of the spies received in payment from the Saudi government.

The pending Justice Department indictment of the two spies charges them with wire fraud, money laundering and acting as unregistered agents of the Saudi government. It refers to MBS as “Saudi Royal Family 1” and his personal secretary, Bader al-Asaker, who allegedly recruited the Twitter moles, as “Foreign Official 1.”

“There's a direct trail of blood drops from this hack to the murder of Jamal Khashoggi,” said Mark Kleiman, a lawyer representing Omar Abdulaziz, a Canadian-based Saudi dissident and collaborator of Khashoggi’s whose personal information was allegedly stolen by the Saudi spies and whose phone was later infected by Saudi-directed spyware. (A Twitter spokesman said the company has fully cooperated with the investigations into the spy plot and, since being informed of the plot, has taken steps to shut down hundreds of Saudi government troll accounts on its platform.)

Khashoggi was assassinated — and his body dismembered with what U.S. intelligence officials believe was a bone saw — shortly after he entered the consulate hoping to pick up records showing he was divorced from his wife in Saudi Arabia, thereby allowing him to marry his Turkish fiancée. A report released by President Biden’s director of national intelligence, Avril Haines, in February concluded that the crown prince approved an operation to “capture or kill” Khashoggi that was carried out by a 15-member Saudi hit team, seven of whom were assigned to the Saudi royal’s personal security detail.

After entering the consulate at 1:13 on the afternoon of Oct. 2, Khashoggi quickly realized he was to be forcibly drugged and “tried to run away,” according to the notes of comments made by Saudi prosecutors during a closed-door trial of Khashoggi’s killers. The notes indicate that the prosecutors’ statements were based on secret Saudi interrogations of the suspects.

Three members of a Saudi hit squad then pinned Khashoggi to a chair inside the office of the Saudi consular general, the notes show. As they did so, Dr. Salah Tubaigy, a forensic doctor from the Saudi Ministry of Interior, “injected Khashoggi in his left arm [with] a drug whose sale is illegal and which he brought from Cairo in high dosage that would be enough to kill him,” the notes read.

Plane Finder, an app that tracks the course of flights by their tail numbers, shows that the Gulfstream jet that took off from Riyadh carrying the Saudi hit team on the evening of Oct. 1 made a stopover in Cairo before landing in Istanbul at 3:30 a.m. on Oct. 2. U.S. intelligence officials declined to comment on what the CIA may have known about the Cairo connection or who in the Egyptian capital would have furnished the Saudis with the illegal narcotics.

But Richard Clarke, a White House counterterrorism adviser under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush who now serves as chair of the Middle East Institute, a Washington think tank, said the “most likely” explanation for the Cairo stopover is that Egyptian intelligence, with whom the Saudis have a close working relationship, provided the drugs that were used to kill Khashoggi.

“There’s a hell of a lot of Saudi government money that goes into propping up” the Egyptian government of President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, Clarke said in an interview. “And you can get a lot in return for that money. I don't think they had to reveal the target. Just like, ‘Hey, you've got this stuff in your inventory. We ran out. Can we stop by and get a few sticks of butter?’ I think that the answer for the Egyptians, that's a no-brainer.”