his Saudi companions. He recorded their conversations. He
decided to turn down their offer. But his choice, he acknowl-
edged, came with a heavy price. When his brother returned to
the kingdom, according to Abdulaziz, he was put in jail, where
he supposedly remains to this day. A month after his brother’s
visit—and four months before Khashoggi’s murder—Abdulaziz
discovered that his phone had been hacked, compromising
sensitive plans he had been developing with Khashoggi.
Saudi officials did not answer Vanity Fair’s questions about
whether the kingdom attempted to forcibly repatriate Omar
Abdulaziz and several others mentioned in this report. More-
over, neither the Saudi government nor the Saudi Embassy
in Washington, DC, responded to multiple requests for com-
ment about the disappearance and detention of various Saudi
citizens referred to herein.
AL-TAIFY
ahya Assiri didn’t make much of it when the phone rang
that morning in 2008. It was a high-ranking military offi-
cer summoning him to an urgent meeting at his office at the al-
Taif Air Force base. Such calls were common for Assiri, a trust-
ed logistics and supply specialist in the Royal Saudi Air Force.
Assiri, though stationed at al-Taif, had made a habit of
venturing off base to visit the nearby markets and meet local
farmers and traders who, like their ancestors, savored the tem-
perate climate of their village, nestled in the slopes of the Sar-
awat Mountains. His sojourns, however, had also opened his
eyes to the country’s rampant poverty. And Assiri, troubled
by the economic hardship and disparity around him, began to
spend his evenings signing into online chat rooms. He would
post his evolving beliefs about social injustice, government
corruption, and the harsh realities of life under the rule of
the Saudi royal family.
Visiting chat rooms was not forbidden at the time. Social
media was still in its infancy in much of the Arab world, and
citizens sought out such forums as a way to carve out a space
for public discourse, an avenue that was unavailable through
state-controlled TV or radio. In the chat rooms, Assiri met
other like-minded Saudis and, on occasion, they moved their
friendships and their dissident views offline, meeting at each
other’s houses and forging deep bonds—far from the watchful
eye of the state. Or so they thought.
The day his superior called him to his office, Assiri dutifully
donned his military fatigues and went over to base headquar-
ters. “Yahya!” the general said as Assiri arrived. “Have a seat.”
He did so, but not before stealing a quick glance at the gener-
al’s desk and spotting a classified folder labeled “ABU FARES.”
The general asked him, pointedly, “Do you know how to use
the internet well?”
“I don’t at all, sir,” Assiri shot back. “You don’t use the inter-
net?” the general asked again.
“My wife occasionally uses it for recipes, but for the most
part I don’t know how.”
The general grabbed the folder and began to thumb through it.
“I received this file from the General Investigations Office, and
it contains a lot of posts and online articles written by someone
with the username Abu Fares. He is criticizing the kingdom.
They told me they suspect that you are the one writing these
articles.” He asked him, point-blank: “Are you Abu Fares?”
Assiri vehemently denied he was the author, but the gen-
eral continued interrogating him. After a while, he backed
off, seemingly persuaded of Assiri’s innocence. Al-Taif ’s top
brass, Assiri later learned, apparently believed the denials as
well. As he left the office that day, he set a plan in motion. He
applied for a military training program in London. He stashed
away personal savings. And he submitted his resignation from
the Air Force—a rarity, given the stature and income afforded
military officers in Saudi society. Within 12 months of that fate-
ful meeting, Assiri and his wife would leave their parents and
siblings behind and depart for England, where he began a new
life. He may have been 3,000 miles from Riyadh, but he was
not beyond the kingdom’s reach.THE DRAGNETT
he prince, the activist, and the officer are the lucky ones.
They are merely three examples of the untold number
of dissidents who have become entangled in a far-reaching
dragnet the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia uses to coerce, bribe,
and entrap its critics. Sometimes the Saudi enforcers send
operatives to foreign countries to silence or neutralize their
perceived foes. Of those who are caught and detained, many
end up “disappeared”—a phrase popularized in Latin America
during the deadly roundups of the 1970s and ’80s. Some are
imprisoned; others are never heard from again. While the first
known Saudi abduction occurred in 1979 (when a prominent
dissident vanished in Beirut), the practice has only escalated
on M.B.S.’s watch.
The targets tend to be those whom the Saudi leadership con-
sider to be working against the interests of the state: dissidents,
students, rogue royals, prominent businessmen, and M.B.S.’s
personal enemies in nearly a dozen countries, including the
U.S., Canada, the U.K., France, Switzerland, Germany, Jor-
dan, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Morocco, and China.
Saudi Arabian residents, of course, are not immune. This past
April, 37 Saudis accused of insurgent views, including a man
who was a minor when taking part in student demonstrations,
were executed. And two years ago, M.B.S., as part of a “corrup-
tion purge,” converted the Ritz-Carlton Riyadh into a gilded
gulag, ordering the detention and imprisonment of nearly 400
Saudi princes, moguls, and government officials. The supposed
crackdown, however, was also a shakedown: Many were let
go only after the government reportedly strong-armed them
into turning over more than $100 billion in assets. The where-
abouts of 64 of those detainees remains unclear.
Through interviews on three continents with more than
30 individuals—activists, national security experts, relatives
of the forcibly disappeared, and American, European, and
Middle Eastern government officials—a clearer picture has
emerged about the extent to which Saudi authorities have gone
to imprison, repatriate, and even murder countrymen who dare
to protest the kingdom’s policies or somehow malign the image
of the nation. On these pages are the stories of eight recent
abductees—and those of four others who managed to elude
capture—part of a systematic program that goes far beyond
the killing of Jamal Khashoggi. The Saudi campaign is ruthless
and relentless. And it has more similarities with, say, the codes
of a crime syndicate than it does with those of a traditional,
modern-era ally of the United States of America.