Jamal Khashoggi juggled a secret wife in the U.S. and a fiancée in Turkey
In the early months of 2018, Jamal Khashoggi was living in exile in the United States — lonely, sad and bewildered as he grew ever more estranged from the Saudi kingdom he had served faithfully for many decades.
But then, there was a bright spot. He fell in love. Or at
least, he certainly appeared to.
“You will be the happiest bride,” he wrote Hanan El-Atr, an
Egyptian flight attendant for Emirates airline, to whom he proposed, in a text
message that spring. And in another: “I throw myself at you, kiss you and
delight you. I take out a watch or a necklace or perfume I bought for you to
delight you.”
Khashoggi’s relationship with El-Atr has always been awkward
for his friends and allies. His grisly murder inside the Saudi Consulate in
Istanbul on Oct. 2, 2018, took place on a day he had gone there to get divorce
records proving he was no longer married to his wife back in Saudi Arabia —
documents he needed so he could marry another woman, Hatice Cengiz, a Turkish
graduate student.
Yet exactly four months before his assassination, on June 2,
2018, Khashoggi had married El-Atr in an Islamic ceremony performed by an imam
in a northern Virginia mosque, according to court records reviewed by Yahoo
News. The couple never got a civil marriage license that would have made their
union official. But the groom plunked down $2,000 for two rings for his Islamic
bride — the receipts from a local jewelry store El-Atr proudly displays as
further proof of their union.
And yet, Khashoggi never mentioned the religious marriage to
many of his closest friends at the time. It’s an example, says one of those
friends, of his penchant to be secretive about much of his life.
“If somebody sits across from you when you’re interviewing
people about Jamal and tells you that Jamal told them everything, they are 100
percent lying to you,” says Mohammed Soltan, the Egyptian American human rights
activist who collaborated with Khashoggi during this time. “Jamal
compartmentalized, he told different people certain things about his life. He
gave nobody a full view of his life. He kept all of it with himself, and he
gave different people the things that they needed to know. So, I had no idea
about Hanan.”
The story of Khashoggi’s complicated personal life during
the last year of his life is the subject of “A Tale of Two Women,” Episode 7 in
the new season of Yahoo News’ “Conspiracyland” podcast, “The Secret Lives and
Brutal Death of Jamal Khashoggi.” It is a story that overlaps with a period in
which Khashoggi, as a columnist for the Washington Post, was becoming ever more
forceful in his criticisms of the harsh crackdowns of Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler,
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, even comparing him at one point to Russian
President Vladimir Putin.
It is also a period in which Saudi electronic surveillance
of critics of Crown Prince Mohammed, also known as MBS, became ever more
pervasive and oppressive. And, as “Conspiracyland” reveals, that surveillance
even extended to Khashoggi’s love life, revealing vulnerabilities that MBS’s
operatives were only too happy to exploit.
Atr, in an extensive and at times emotional interview with
“Conspiracyland,” recounts the story of their relationship: They had met nine
years earlier while Khashoggi was in Dubai for a conference. A tall and
reserved woman, Atr said they had swapped phone numbers and stayed in touch,
exchanging funny videos and messages about their favorite lines of Arabic
poetry. But by the early months of 2018, with Khashoggi living in the
Washington area and Hanan having twice-a-month flights there, they became
something of an item. Khashoggi took her as his date to a birthday dinner for
him that March (although there is some confusion as to the actual date of his
birthday). A couple of weeks later, he proposed marriage.
“He said, ‘You sure you want to be with me?’” said Atr,
recounting Khashoggi’s proposal. “He said, ‘Because I have heavy luggage, I
don’t have a stable life.’”
And Atr’s response: “I’m with you, Jamal, I believe in you
and love you because [of] the way you are.”
It is perhaps understandable that Khashoggi — repeatedly
harassed online by his Saudi tormentors — wanted to keep his private life
exactly that: private. That could well explain his failure to tell many of his
U.S. friends about his relationship with Atr. But as she explains it, the
Saudis, and their close allies in the United Arab Emirates, apparently did know
about it, resulting in a harrowing experience when she flew back to Dubai.
In early May, just weeks after Khashoggi’s marriage
proposal, Atr says that Emirati security forces pulled her aside at the
airport. “They took all [my] devices. They came to my house. They searched
[it],” she recalls. “Then they start to talk about Jamal.”
Atr says she was detained for 10 days while the Emirati
security agents grilled her time and again about her relationship with
Khashoggi.
But as they were doing so, Khashoggi was attending another
conference in Istanbul, and starting a relationship with another woman, Hatice
Cengiz. As she recalls it, she approached him at the conference and asked for
an interview. When he agreed, she was thrilled. “He’s the most important
journalist and name and thinker in the region,” says Cengiz. It was, she added,
the start of a “very special relationship” between them.
Khashoggi left Istanbul but began exchanging messages with
Cengiz. He flew back to Istanbul again that spring, got together with Cengiz
and soon thereafter flew back yet again, this time with a birthday present for
her — a necklace and earrings. By the summer, she says, they were talking
“every day, more than two or three or four times.” Soon enough, Khashoggi was
talking about getting an apartment and moving to Istanbul. And he proposed
marriage again — this time to Cengiz.
But there was a bit of a problem, to say the least: He had
told Cengiz nothing about Atr. Nor, for that matter, had he told Atr anything
about Cengiz. “My sister is here in Istanbul,” he texted Atr in mid-July,
apparently attempting to explain the extra time he was spending in Istanbul.
Things got more than a little awkward when Khashoggi met
with Cengiz’s father, a businessman, who began grilling him about his
intentions and his background, especially about whether he had any other wives.
“My father knows very well the Arabs get married more than
[once] at the same time,” says Cengiz. “And then he asked him, ‘Are you sure
you’re not married?’ It’s a little bit of a sensitive point for my father.”
Khashoggi responded: “I’m not married. I’m divorced,”
recalls Cengiz. “Jamal doesn’t need to lie to anyone.”
Had Khashoggi ever mentioned to her the other wife he had
married in the United States in June? she was asked.
“He told me when he proposed to me, there is no one in his
life,” she replied.
But even as Khashoggi was carrying on his double life, the
Saudi surveillance overseen by MBS’s right-hand man, Saud al-Qahtani, was
intensifying. The Saudis had bought a sophisticated form of spyware called
Pegasus from an Israeli company, NSO Group. That spyware allowed them to
penetrate the iPhones of regime critics, reading their messages in real time.
One of those targeted was Omar Abdulaziz, the dissident
living in Montreal whose personal data had been stolen by Saudi spies at
Twitter. Abdulaziz was by then swapping messages with Khashoggi about a scheme
to counter Saudi disinformation, sending SIM cards to regime critics so they
could post anonymously on social media without al-Qahtani’s snoops knowing who
they were.
But that summer, Abdulaziz was tipped off to the Pegasus
penetration of his phone by investigators at Citizen Lab, a University of
Toronto affiliated group. As soon as he learned about it, he called Khashoggi.
“Oh gosh,” Khashoggi replied. “May God help us.”
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