Prior to his murder, Jamal Khashoggi offered to help 9/11 victims suing Saudi Arabia
The meeting was rushed and, for Jamal Khashoggi, as risky as they come. The famed Saudi journalist, living in exile in the suburbs of northern Virginia, was furious with his government. He had just learned that it had imposed a travel ban on his adult son, blocking him from leaving Saudi Arabia — a clear punishment for Khashoggi’s increasingly forceful criticisms of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
And so, on the morning of Oct. 26, 2017, an agitated
Khashoggi did something that for him would have been unthinkable only a few
years earlier. He called a former FBI agent working for the families of 9/11
victims who were suing his government and asked to get together right away to
discuss how he could help them.
Khashoggi’s rendezvous that morning with ex-agent Catherine
Hunt at a northern Virginia coffee shop has long been a subject of mystery and
intrigue. Why would Khashoggi — once a Saudi spin doctor who vigorously
defended his country over the events of 9/11 — want to talk to a representative
of the lawyers seeking to hold his government accountable for the terrorist
attack? And even more significant, did senior Saudi officials know what he was
up to that morning? And if they did know, did that play a role in his brutal
slaughter inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul less than a year later?
In a special bonus episode of the Yahoo News podcast
"Conspiracyland," Hunt — a veteran agent who worked counterterrorism
and counterintelligence cases from Los Angeles to Baghdad — provides an
exclusive account of her strange encounter with the Saudi journalist. It comes
at a time when the lawyers for the victims’ families are entering a new and
crucial phase of their case, having recently deposed three of their most
important witnesses: a former Saudi Embassy official, a reputed Saudi
intelligence operative and a radical imam at a Saudi-government-funded mosque,
all of whom were suspected for years by the FBI of having provided assistance
to two of the al-Qaida hijackers in the run-up to 9/11.
How strong a case the families have against the Saudi
government remains far from clear, given that those and other depositions
remain covered by a court-imposed gag order as well as a “state secrets”
privilege imposed by former Attorney General William Barr that has blocked key
details about the FBI investigation into the Saudi role in 9/11 from becoming
public.
But either way, Khashoggi’s meeting with Hunt stands out. It
represents a tantalizing moment when the 9/11 families and their legal team, at
least for a brief moment, seemed on the verge of getting the cooperation of a
well-connected Saudi insider with intimate knowledge of his country’s
interactions with al-Qaida.
In fact, it was Khashoggi’s unique background — as a onetime
friend of Osama bin Laden who was later hired as the media adviser to a
powerful Saudi prince and former chief of Saudi intelligence — that had
prompted Hunt to reach out to him in the first place, about two weeks prior to
their meeting.
“If you look back on the history of his career, he had a
tremendous amount of connections and access to information,” Hunt said. “So he
really was in a position to potentially be very helpful to us.”
When she first talked to Khashoggi, he was — according to
Hunt — “very interested” in getting together, and they began discussing setting
up a meeting. And then, early on the morning of Oct. 26, Khashoggi called her
and wanted to move the meeting up, telling her he had urgent business to attend
to and wanted to see her right away. She rushed over to the coffee shop in the
Tysons Corner shopping mall that Khashoggi suggested. When she got there, she
says, he was “very upset” that his son had been barred from leaving Saudi
Arabia by authorities there. It had happened, as Khashoggi explained it, only
because he was “being targeted by the regime.”
At that point, Hunt said, “he started to instruct me a lot
about the Ministry of Islamic Affairs, and that they were charged with the
responsibility of spreading Islam throughout the world. He explained that
really, it was a fundamentalist version of Islam that was being propagated, and
that the current government was trying to reform that position.
“He said it more in a question: ‘Is my country responsible
for tolerating and even supporting radicalism? Yes. And they must take
responsibility for that.’"
Even that relatively small concession, Hunt thought, was
“golden.” Here was a prominent Saudi apparently prepared to say his country
should be held accountable for the spread of radical Islam — and the ensuing
acts of terrorism it caused. But then Khashoggi said something even more
surprising. He asked if the New York-based law firm Hunt was working for,
Kreindler & Kreindler, was prepared to offer him a job as a consultant to
the 9/11 families' legal team. If so, he emphasized, they would have to be
secretive about it. No more get-togethers in the Washington, D.C., area, where
the Saudi presence was extensive.
“He was very interested in talking about it,” Hunt said. “He
wanted to have the next meeting in New York, not the D.C. area.
“I was excited,” she added. “I was thrilled that he was so
positive about it. I think he could have added a tremendous amount.” As to
Khashoggi’s motivation in making such an offer, Hunt said: “Here he was, he
found himself in exile. And I think working with the law firm would have given
him a chip in the game, if you will.”
But Hunt never heard from Khashoggi again — and the full
significance of their meeting didn’t hit home until more than a year later, in
the weeks after his murder inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2,
2018. The Washington Post had reported that the then Saudi ambassador to the
United States, Khalid bin Salman (or KBS, the brother of Mohammed bin Salman),
might have played a role in luring Khashoggi to Istanbul. The ambassador
responded in a tweet that he'd had no contact with Khashoggi since they
communicated via text on Oct. 26, 2017 — the same day as the meeting with Hunt.
What Khashoggi and KBS (now the country’s deputy defense
minister, who met with Biden administration officials this week during a trip
to Washington) texted or communicated about that day remains unknown. But Jim
Kreindler, the lead lawyer for the 9/11 families, said he is convinced
Khashoggi sought to use the meeting with Hunt as leverage with the Saudi
ambassador to help his son.
“There isn't a doubt in my mind that after speaking to
Catherine, he called KBS and said, ‘Hey, the plaintiffs' lawyers had an FBI
agent talking to me. I didn't give them anything yet, but, you know, you mess
with my son and I'm going to spill the beans.’"
To be sure, Kreindler has no hard evidence to support his
speculation. But the curious timing of Khashoggi’s meeting with Hunt — on the
same day he was communicating with the Saudi ambassador to the United States —
adds one more mystery to the many surrounding the last year of the journalist’s
life before the Saudi team of assassins injected him with a lethal dose of
drugs, suffocated him and then carved up his body inside the consulate in
Istanbul.
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