The World

If he needed any lessons in policing a royal family, a young Kim provided them. When Kim Jong-Il, seventy, died of a heart attack in December 2011, he was declared immortal and his untried son, Kim Jong-Un, twenty-seven, had succeeded him. Now, In February 2017, two women, recruited by a TV station to take part in a reality-show prank, an irresistible temptation to many, approached a plump, scruffy eastern man at Kuala Lumpur airport and sprayed him in the face. Minutes later, poisoned with the nerve agent VX and with his organs closing down, Kim Jong-nam, exiled eldest son of Kim Jong-il and once crown prince of North Korea, was dead, his assassination ordered by his younger half-brother, Kim Jong-un. Rapidly promoting himself to marshal, Kim Jong-un, the image of his grandfather and father, orchestrated the killings of his powerful uncle and family, messily shredded by firing squads of anti-aircraft guns. He had targeted his brother, who, after losing his rank for trying to escape to Japan, had been allowed to live quietly in China, because he talked to journalists. ‘Without reforms,’ Kim Jong-nam had said, ‘North Korea will collapse.’ Now that problem was solved.

Closely advised by his younger sister Kim Yo-jong, the Marshal tested a hydrogen bomb, defying America. After trading insults – Trump was ‘the insane dotard’, Kim ‘little Rocket Man’ (a reference to the song by the president’s favourite singer, Elton John) – the two met as equals in Singapore, confirming the kudos of nuclear weapons. ‘I don’t think I have to prepare very much,’ boasted Trump, but Kim gave up no Bombs, indulging instead in a correspondence that the president compared to ‘love letters’.

‘Even now I can’t forget the moment I held your excellency’s hand,’ wrote Kim to Trump on 25 December 2018, remembering their meeting as being ‘like the scene in a fantasy film’. It was a fantasy. While Rocket Man returned home triumphant, Father of the Bullet was targeting his own difficult insider.

In October 2018, members of MBS’s secret retinue, known as the Saudi Rapid Intervention Group, arrived on a private jet in Istanbul. The Group was the vanguard of MBS’s Centre for Studies and Media Affairs that dealt with special tasks. A first unit swept the consulate for bugs, finding none – even though it was riddled with Turkish listening devices. The staff were given a day off. Then fifteen retainers arrived, led by an intelligence officer who travelled with MBS in America and an Interior Ministry forensic surgeon, Colonel-Doctor Salah al-Tubaigy, with a bone saw in his luggage. While they waited tensely, the doctor told his colleagues that when dissecting bodies ‘I listen to music – you should do that too.’ Finally the chief myrmidon looked at his watch.

‘Has the sacrificial animal arrived yet?’ he asked.

Moments later, a sturdy man wearing a blazer and grey trousers entered the Saudi consulate, with an appointment to get papers so that he could marry his fiancée. Jamal Khashoggi was a journalist but also a court insider who believed he would be safe, unaware that all his digital communications were watched by MBS’s team. He had hesitated to enter Saudi territory, arranging for his fiancée to wait outside, but he was not as suspicious as he should have been. This was because Khashoggi was a member of the Saudi elite, grandson of King Abdulaziz’s doctor, nephew of the billionaire fixer Adnan Khashoggi and a journalist, writing Janus-like in the Washington Post embracing western pluralism and in the Arabic press criticizing the Saudi–American alliance. By bugging his telephones, MBS learned that Khashoggi was rallying dissidents. For MBS too was Janus-like, embracing western reforms yet tolerating no opposition.

In June 2017, he had seized his cousin Muhammad bin Nayef, fifty-seven, forcing him to cede his title, crown prince. He had kidnapped the Lebanese premier for getting too close to Iran-backed Hezbollah, hard to avoid in a Lebanon dominated by the Shia militia. He had blockaded Qatar. He had ordered the kidnap of the female activist and filmmaker Loujain al-Hathloul, who was tortured. He paid particular attention to criticism on Twitter, where Khashoggi had millions of followers, infiltrating Twitter itself to find out the details of critical accounts while investigating corruption in the royal family. ‘You have a body that has cancer everywhere, the cancer of corruption,’ he explained. ‘You need the shock of chemo or the cancer will eat the body.’

In November 2017, MBS arrested a constellation of princes and billionaires including five bin Ladens, who were imprisoned in the Ritz-Carlton in Riyadh and forced to pay billions in fines. Soon afterwards MBS himself spent $300 million on a new yacht, $50 million on a holiday in the Maldives and then $400 million on a Leonardo da Vinci painting, Salvator Mundi.

As soon as he entered the consulate, Khashoggi was taken upstairs and must have seen the team waiting for him.