Similar threats have surfaced in Canada (as described above)
and Europe. In April, Iyad el-Baghdadi, an exiled Arab activist
living in Oslo, was surprised when Norwegian security officials
came to his apartment. According to el-Baghdadi, they told
him they had received intelligence, passed along from a West-
ern country, that suggested he was in danger. El-Baghdadi,
who is Palestinian, had been a close associate of Khashoggi’s.
In the months before Khashoggi’s murder, the two men, along
with an American colleague, were developing a watchdog
group to track false or manipulated messages
being pushed out across social media and press
outlets by Saudi authorities and their proxies.
El-Baghdadi had been warned that M.B.S.’s
leadership considered him an enemy of the
state. In fact, according to el-Baghdadi, just
weeks before the Norwegian officials paid him
a visit, he had been helping Amazon determine
that its CEO, Jeff Bezos, had been the subject
of a Saudi hack-and-extortion plot. The Nor-
wegians were not taking any chances, as el-
Baghdadi recalled; they whisked him and his
family to a safe house.
Some of these missions to silence or harm
Saudi critics have occurred in countries closely
allied to Riyadh. One brazen operation in France,
for example, involved Prince Sultan bin Turki,
who had lived in Europe for years. A grandson
of King Ibn Saud, the kingdom’s founder, the prince had a
longtime feud with powerful members of the monarchy, hav-
ing accused them of corruption. In 2003, according to a com-
plaint filed with Swiss prosecutors by a Geneva-based counsel
working with bin Turki’s American lawyer Clyde Bergstresser,
the prince had been drugged and secretly flown out of Switzer-
land to Saudi Arabia. For almost a decade, he was in and out of
house arrest and prohibited from leaving the country.
Over time, the prince’s health deteriorated and he sought
critical medical care in the U.S. He made a request to travel to
the States, which was granted, and, after receiving treatment,
he recovered to the point that he felt emboldened enough to
strike back at his former captors, filing a lawsuit in 2014 against
the regime, seeking formal criminal charges against Saudi
leaders and monetary damages for the kidnapping. Though the
suit went nowhere, such a move was unprecedented: a Saudi
royal pursuing a legal complaint in a foreign court against his
own family. Bergstresser told me he warned the prince that
such an action could trigger an even more severe response
from the kingdom than the 2003 abduction. “They came after
you once,” he told his client. “Why wouldn’t they do it again?”
For the rest of the story, I turned to three American members
of the prince’s entourage—whom I will call Kyrie, Adrienne,
and Blake, to protect their identities. In January 2016, the trio,
along with medical caretakers and friends, arrived at Le Bour-
get Airport, outside Paris, to board the prince’s private char-
ter jet that was scheduled to fly from France to Egypt. Upon
arriving, however, they saw a much larger plane, a Boeing 737-
900ER, on the tarmac. (The three Americans remembered
that their group was led to believe that the aircraft had been
provided as a courtesy from the Saudi Embassy in Paris.)
A photograph of the plane, provided to Vanity Fair and
revealed here for the first time, shows the words “Kingdom of
Saudi Arabia” emblazoned on the hull. The tail bears the coun-
try’s iconic emblem: a palm tree cradled between two swords.
The tail number, HZ-MF6, according to online database reg-
istries, identifies the aircraft as being owned by the Saudi gov-
ernment. Moreover, these records denoted, the plane’s owner
had requested that no public tracking of the jet be made avail-
able on the flight-tracking website FlightAware.
Upon boarding the plane, the security team noticed that
all of the flight attendants were male. While this seemed odd,
the prince and his entourage took their seats nonetheless, and
settled in for the ride. The jet took off at 7:30 p.m. for Cairo. A
few hours into the flight, the cabin lights and in-flight monitors
were suddenly turned off. The plane was redirected to Riyadh.
Upon landing, Kyrie recalled, armed security forces came
aboard and physically removed bin Turki from the plane. As
he was dragged to the tarmac, he shouted a single name over
and over: “Al-Qahtani! Al-Qahtani!”
ROGUE OP
The Saudi 737
that carried
Prince Sultan
bin Turki,
on a tarmac in
France.
CONTINUED ON PAGE 123
DISSIDENT
PRINCE
Khaled bin
Farhan
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expat royal, in
Germany.
ABDUCTED
ACTIVIST
Feminist
Loujain
al-Hathloul,
now
imprisoned.
SEPTEMBER 2019 VANITY FAIR 91
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