Mr. Khashoggi was suffocated and dismembered with a bone saw inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2, 2018. The 15 killers included seven members of the elite personal protective detail of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known as MBS, who, according to the US intelligence community, “approved an operation” to “capture or kill” Khashoggi. His body has never been found.
The murder was at least partly retribution against Khashoggi for comments in The Post in which he had called for a freer Arab world and a more open and tolerant Saudi Arabia — and in which he criticized MBS’s dictatorial ways. President Donald Trump and his secretary of state reacted to the murder by protecting the Saudi despot, refusing to impose serious penalties against the kingdom, ignoring a congressional resolution calling for sanctions, and seeking to refurbish MBS’s standing. Mr. Pompeo makes no secret of his admiration, saying MBS is “leading the greatest cultural reform in the kingdom’s history” and is “a truly historic figure on the world stage.”
Mr. Pompeo reveals that, in private, he and Mr. Trump felt they rescued the crown prince from disrepute. He recalls that the then-president asked him to go to Saudi Arabia, and that he was the first Western official to see MBS since Khashoggi’s murder. “In some ways I think the president was envious that I was the one who gave the middle finger to The Washington Post, the New York Times and the other bed-wetters who didn’t have a grip on reality,” Mr. Pompeo writes . “He said, ‘Hey Mike, go and have a good time. Tell him he owes us.’”
This is the language of a street tough, not the leader of a nation based on rule of law. Mr. Pompeo offers the lame and ignorant excuse that the Middle East is a tough neighborhood. “The episode was ugly, but it wasn’t surprising — not to me anyway,” he writes of the killing, because “this kind of ruthlessness was all too routine in this part of the world.” Mr. Pompeo salutes Mr. Trump’s decision not to punish the crown prince, saying “it wasn’t a close call.” He then goes on to smear the murdered Khashoggi as an “activist” and not a journalist, claiming he “had supported the losing team in a recent fight for the throne.”
Khashoggi’s journalism, including his criticism of the Saudi despot, was in the best tradition of American values of free expression, shining a light on dark corners of the world. Mr. Pompeo reveals that he is estranged from these principles.