The Dissident tells the true story of Jamal Khashoggi’s murder
The Oscar-winning director of Icarus has switched his gaze to the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi and seeks to show the man for who he really was, not as Saudi Arabia would like to paint him, writes Stephen Applebaum
When you become a dissident, “it's never a normal life for you any more”, says Omar Abdulaziz. Speaking over Zoom from Montreal, Canada, where he has been in exile since claiming political asylum in 2014, the plucky and voluble 29-year-old Saudi activist says he wakes up each morning not knowing what to expect. “Every day, you're learning that one of your friends is missing because he’s been jailed. Maybe it’s one of your relatives who is jailed. Or there is an assassination team coming after you. This is my daily life.”
Today, he logged-on 30-minutes late for our interview because a dissident friend (later reported as Ahmed Abdullah al-Harbi), who'd mysteriously vanished during a visit to the Saudi embassy in Ottawa, had reappeared suddenly in Saudi Arabia. “He recorded a video of himself there,” says Abdulaziz. “We're worried, because when he went to the embassy he called me and other friends, and said: 'They threatened me and my family members. Guys, please help me.' And then he disappeared. Anybody can go back to the country, but he was a political refugee. He was granted asylum here in Canada. And for the Saudis to be in touch or to drag somebody to the Saudi embassy, that means something fishy is happening.”
Attempts were made to pressure Abdulaziz to go to the embassy in 2018, but on the advice of his friend and ally, the exiled Saudi Washington Post journalistJamal Khashoggi, he had resisted. Ironically, and fatally, a few months later, Khashoggi would attend an appointment at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to collect documents allowing him to marry his Turkish fiancee, Hatice Cengiz, and walk straight into the murderous trap of a Saudi hit squad.
Abdulaziz and Cengiz are now key figures in The Dissident, an explosive and chilling feature documentary about the Khashoggi murder directed by Bryan Fogel, who won an Oscar in 2018 for his debut documentary, Icarus. In that, Fogel, an amateur cyclist, had set out to prove how easy it was to evade cycling's drug testing system, and through contact with Grigory Rodchenkov, the director of Moscow's anti-doping centre, ended up exposing Russia's decades-long Olympic doping programme.
After working with Rodchenkov, who'd risked his life by becoming a whistleblower, and “fighting against false truths and political propaganda” for three-and-a-half-years, on a project with far-reaching and still-developing consequences, Fogel tells me he felt “enraged”, but also “engaged”.
“[Now] I want to try to tell stories that can have a meaningful impact and change the world,” he says. “And the idea of having the ability to tell these stories and take on these things really feels a burden to me, in a positive sense.”
When he eventually surfaced from publicising Icarus, and had time to start thinking about his next project, while he didn't yet have a specific story in mind, Fogel knew that he wanted to touch on human rights and freedom of the press, as well as take risks and “shine a light on a story that might otherwise not have had that light shone”. After Khashoggi disappeared on 2 October 2018, only for the facts of his grisly fate to emerge as the Saudis' denials and outrageous fabrications unravelled, Fogel's “ears perked up”.
As the filmmaker dug into Khashoggi's background and body of work, he noticed that attempts were being made in some quarters – usually conservative, pro-Trump/Maga ones, on Twitter, in the press, and on Fox News, reported Vanity Fair at the time – to smear the late journalist.
“What was being painted,” he says, “is that Jamal was a supporter of Isis. That he was Muslim Brotherhood. That he is an enemy of Saudi Arabia. Yet, if you read his writings in the Washington Post, if you spoke to his friends that knew him, if you scratched beneath the surface, you saw that this man was a moderate, and that what he was doing was advocating for freedom of the press, freedom of opinion, and for human rights in his country.
In an early scene in the documentary, Abdulaziz receives a message on his phone, sent from inside Canada, telling him that an assassination team is looking for him
“And that is what inspired me to take on the story, because I saw that there was a very strong chance that the narrative coming from Saudi and all of their lobbying firms would ultimately discredit Jamal, and try to present him as someone that he was not, and is not.“
However, the story of the killing had already gone global. In order to craft something that was “far outside the pages of the news, or far outside what you were going to see on the BBC, or read about in The Independent or Financial Times”, he realised that he'd need access to Abdulaziz, whom he had read about in the New York Times, Cengiz, and the Turkish government. This meant courting them at a time when emotions were still achingly raw.
Thus, when Fogel first contacted Cengiz, just a month after Khashoggi's murder, “she had no interest in participating in a film about this,” he admits. “She was grieving. She was in the centre of a media storm.” Acknowledging her pain, he told her: “Look, I promise you that my intentions are to do everything that I can to not only protect you [something he'd succeeded in doing for Rodchenckov] but to help Jamal's legacy.” Cengiz invited him to meet her in Istanbul and he spent five weeks there, not filming but building trust with her as she grieved. “That began what was the next year-and-a-half,” he says.
Abdulaziz was also suffering. Traumatised by events, he had been moved from his home into a secure room in a hotel for his protection by the Canadian authorities, and “was in no place to be considering a film,” says Fogel, “let alone the engagement that was involved.”
Abdulaziz remembers it well. “By that time, I had no trust in anyone, honestly,” he says. “So, when Bryan contacted me, I said, 'Maybe this American, he is working with the Saudis.' I had no idea. After we talked for a while, I said, 'Okay, I will work with you. I am going to let you film me, but I'm going to keep the video cards.' It sounds strange but it was the only way to protect myself. And by that time, honestly, I was kind of lost, I was hurt, [because of everything that had happened].”
Filming together would prove difficult. In an early scene in the documentary, Abdulaziz receives a message on his phone, sent from inside Canada, telling him that an assassination team is looking for him. There were many more threats than shown in the film, says Fogel, and their frequency meant that “we were constantly in a day-to-day variable of whether or not we could shoot because of risk and threat assessments on his life. And the situation was unfolding in real time. And what we were capturing was happening in real time.”
Despite the Canadians' belief that he needed to be placed in a safe location, Abdulaziz and his friends thought that after the Kashoggi murder, the details of which only came to light because the Turks had bugged the Saudi consulate, the Saudis wouldn't “do anything stupid again”. They were wrong.
“A few months ago, we learned that the Saudi government sent another team to Canada a few days after the death of Jamal Kashoggi. Imagine...,” he says, his voice briefly tapering to silence, as if he still can't believe it himself.
“Some of them were going to Montreal, some were going to Ottawa, and the rest of them to Toronto. Saad al-Jabri [a former Saudi intelligence official who has filed a complaint against the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman in a federal court in Washington DC] lives in Toronto. The embassy is in Ottawa. And guess who lives in Montreal.”
How does he live with the constant threats?
“You become thick-skinned,” he replies bluntly. “You're able to tolerate what's really happening, and that gives you the ability to fight back.”
Abdulaziz has been speaking out for years, but the stakes were never quite as high as they are today under King Salman and the power-hungry MBS. “Saudi Arabia is Saudi Arabia, and no one would claim it [was ever] a democracy,” he says. However, when he was commenting on politics under King Abdullah, who died in January 2015, “there was a limit. With MBS, there is no such limit.”
In the past, political activists and human rights campaigners were often jailed, or, in a country where a large proportion of the population is on Twitter, forced to close their Twitter accounts in an attempt to silence them. “But they would not kill someone in an embassy or a consulate just because he was writing about them. They would not torture someone's family because he's not there and they couldn't reach him. They would not go and torture female activists, women's rights activists, and waterboard them and sexually harass them just to get some information. Yes, it wasn't a democracy. But nothing is worse than MBS and his administration.”
“He's following the authoritarian playbook rather than having regard for not only human rights but for international relations or policies that don't suit his agenda,” claims Fogel. “And I think what these authoritarians have learned, and Litvinenko and his murder being kind of the starting off point, is, in my opinion, ‘OK, what are you going to do? Start a war with us? Not take our money?’ While there can be outrage, it's very unlikely that real action, or anything meaningful, occurs in the light of these human rights violations.”
Two weeks after my interview with Fogel, the Biden administration released a declassified intelligence report which assessed that MBS had approved the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. At the time of writing this article, 76 Saudis had been sanctioned for targeting dissidents and journalists, but no action had been taken against the Crown Prince himself.
The murder of Jamal ... shows the power and ruthlessness of a leader who is willing to take any action against anyone who speaks out against him
The Dissident leaves you in no doubt where it thinks the guilt for Khashoggi's murder lays. I tell Fogel that to me it unfolds like an angry j'accuse. “I think I see the film as showing the true reality of the situation,” he says. “And with the murder of Jamal, I think it shows the power and ruthlessness of a leader who is willing to take any action against anyone who speaks out against him.”
For 30 years, Khashoggi was an insider, with close ties to the Saudi ruling elite. Cracks began to appear, though, when he criticised the regime's Middle East policy in response to the Arab Spring. Later, he questioned MBS's quashing of dissent at the same time as he was introducing reforms, and accused the Crown Prince's supporter, Donald Trump, of milking the kingdom. He was told to stop writing, stop tweeting, and shut up. Feeling, he said, “suffocated”, and possibly fearing arrest, Khashoggi fled abroad, leaving behind a wife and children.
Regarded as a loyalist for decades by Riyadh, he was now branded a traitor – a sentiment that only grew stronger as he found himself exhilaratingly unshackled in America, and able to speak freely.
In 2017, soon after arriving in the US, Khashoggi contacted Abdulaziz in a bid to connect with younger activists. By that time, the indefatigable critic had amassed a large following on Twitter, and was popular on YouTube. In the documentary, Abdulaziz says that while he welcomed Khashoggi's call, because he felt the journalist was “different”, other activists weren't as quick to trust him. I ask why he didn't share their caution.
“I'm always telling my friends that we're not doing something secret; that we're not like an underground organisation,” he explains. “In September 2017, I tweeted, 'Guys, whether you like it or not, Jamal Khashoggi today is the best when it comes to criticising the Saudi regime.' And imagine what: so many people criticised me because of that tweet. They said, 'Okay, you're a fool. He's going to fool you. Don't trust him. He worked for three decades for the Saudi regime. He's spying.' I said, 'Guys, come on. Am I building a nuclear bomb in my basement? Spying on what?' I said, 'We cannot see what's in people's hearts, but we can definitely see their actions, their behaviour. And that's why I am telling you, Jamal Khashoggi is doing the best work.'”
Abdulaziz pledged to support Khashoggi. The journalist was happy with that, he recalls, because “he felt lonely”. Once the ultimate insider, he was now adrift, and looking for a home. “The dissidents community didn't want to have him; and the pro-government people, they felt that he's a traitor. So, this is the irony.”
The year or so leading up to Khashoggi's murder was full of sinister and surreal twists and turns. In one incident in May 2018, Abdulaziz found himself visited in Montreal by a Saudi lawyer and a TV show host, who arrived with one of his two younger brothers, Ahmad, in tow, to try to convince him to return to Saudi Arabia, under the royal protection, they said, of MBS himself. Abdulaziz recorded their conversations, which appear in The Dissident among a vast array of material garnered by Fogel that also includes recorded declarations of love from Khashoggi to Cengiz, intimate photographs of the couple, police transcripts, and crime scene and CCTV footage.
When the emissaries's attempts to lure the activist back fail, it's then that they suggest he at least visit the embassy to renew his Saudi passport. Again, he refuses. After all, he was a Canadian citizen. Finally, he is sent an emotional message by his brother, who begs him to stop talking or he will be arrested and jailed – a threat the Saudis eventually followed through on.
Around the same time, Khashoggi was despairing at the amount of hate and intimidation that his work and tweets were attracting online. It felt like everyone in Saudi Arabia had turned on him. Abdulaziz explained that he was, in fact, a victim of what Saudi dissidents call the “flies”: an army of trolls and bots built by MBS's former adviser, Saud al-Qahtani, to swarm on and bury negative opinions with pro-government propaganda. “MBS is using Twitter to control the local narrative,” says Abdulaziz. “He's controlling everything, and he's telling people, 'I'm in charge’.”
For the activist, knowing what's going on behind the curtain is crucial: “In Saudi we don't have a parliament, we have Twitter. So, if anyone would take away my parliament, I have to fight them back. I have to see what they're really doing and what's their behaviour and their actions, and how they're dealing with things. So, I knew the game.
“But Jamal Khashoggi, he was surprised when he saw that. And he was shocked, because he felt the whole country was against him.”
Together, they formulated a plan to retaliate using their own army of online warriors, equipped with phones and untraceable SIM cards from the US and Canada, who they dubbed “Bees”. (Fogel thrillingly dramatises the two sides going to war with animation.) Khashoggi secretly poured some of his own money into the project, which is still active, says Abdulaziz, and “growing day-by-day ... But, it's really difficult to compete because we don't have a similar budget. If I'm going to hire someone, Mohammad bin Salman would have the ability to hire a thousand.”
Unknown to Abdulaziz, while they were plotting their fightback, the Saudis hacked his phone. He realised something was wrong at the beginning of August 2018, when his brothers and 23 friends were arrested in Saudi Arabia. Around 7 August, he received a call from someone at the Citizen Lab, a research unit specialising in cybersecurity issues and tracking online threats to dissidents, activists, journalists and democratic organisations, asking to meet him. They examined his phone and, the day before Khashoggi was murdered, published a report saying they had “high confidence” Abdulaziz's mobile had been hijacked months earlier by the Saudis, using Israeli NSO Pegasus software. Not only did this allow them to view the entire contents of Abdulaziz's phone and monitor his calls, it also gave them control of the device's microphone and camera, turning it into a bug.
According to a Sky News report from December 2018, Abdulaziz had already told Khashoggi in August that he believed he'd been hacked, to which the journalist had written back, “God help us.” Why, then, did Kashoggi still go to the consulate in Istanbul?
Tragically, Khashoggi may have trusted the men who confronted him in the consulate because he knew one of them
“Here's the thing,” says Abdulaziz. “We never thought that the Saudi government would do such a thing. If you would ask Jamal Khashoggi, like a thousand times, ‘Would you go to the Saudi embassy?’ he would say, ‘Why would they do such a crazy thing to me?’ .... I wouldn't say he was naïve, but he trusted them.” His voice begins to crack with emotion. “I'm really sorry,” he says. “I've repeated this story of Jamal Khashoggi and my brothers like a thousand times, but every time I'm repeating this, it really hurts.”
Tragically, Khashoggi may have trusted the men who confronted him in the consulate because he knew one of them. “Some reports are saying he had a relationship with Maher Mutreb [a Saudi intelligence officer who sickeningly referred to Khashoggi as “the sacrificial animal” before his arrival], who was one of those who were there when he was assassinated. I'm really sorry about that,” Abdulaziz says sadly.
Fogel deals with the murder, and the subsequent dismemberment of Khashoggi's body with a bone saw, by highlighting lines from a transcript – given to him by the Turkish police, in full, a year into filming – of a recording of conversations before, during and after the killing. He was also offered the audio, but declined. “To me it felt exploitative. Instead we focused on the transcript and how we could bring that to life in a Hitchcockian way using light and visualisation and sound, rather than needing to hear the screams of a dying man.”
The horror of the words is also communicated via interviews with the Istanbul chief prosecutor and Agnes Callamard, the Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council. When the US released its report last week, she called on the US “to now take the lead in ensuring accountability for this crime and for setting in place the international mechanisms to prevent and punish such acts in the future”.
When we spoke, Fogel believed that “an actual prosecution against MBS is very unlikely . . . Is he going to be tried in The Hague or extradited to Turkey or the US to stand trial? I don't believe that for a second. So, I think it's about how do you change the narrative moving forward so that there's enough pressure put in place to advocate for change and for the freeing of human rights activists or political prisoners?”
Abdulaziz would like to see sanctions applied to MBS personally, and fears for the future of Saudi Arabia and the region if he becomes king. He will carry on fighting for freedom of expression and human rights, despite the imprisonment of people connected to him (now around 100, and rising), and refuses to give in to intimidation.
He is hopeful that the times are changing. Whereas he and other activists were “once just a bunch of mad and crazy invididuals”, last September saw a group of them pull together to launch The National Assembly Party – the first political party to emerge under King Salman's rule. Dedicated to ushering in democracy, “it's official, and has an office in the UK in London,” he says brightly.
The agony of knowing that his silence could possibly end his brothers's suffering is evident, but Abdulaziz is concentrating on the bigger picture. “I do believe that what we are doing right now, it’s not only for us. It’s not only for my brothers and friends, it’s for the sake of the country. For the sake of the nation. For the sake of the generation to come.
“Maybe people will say [about me], 'No, you're trying to whitewash your image.' But, at the end of the day, I didn't kill anyone. I didn't steal anything. I haven't butchered anyone. I haven't tortured anyone. I'm just a simple guy who wants to live a simple life and speak freely. And that's coming soon, whether they like it or not.”
‘The Dissident’ will have its UK premiere online at Glasgow Film Festival on 6 March, and Irish premiere online at the Virgin Media Dublin International Film Festival on 11 March
For more information visit www.thedissident.film