SEPTEMBER 2019 VANITY FAIR 123
recycled nylon, a sustainable update on an
iconic piece of Prada’s DNA. In May, Prada
Group ple dged to go f ur-f ree by 2020. “It’s
very important that everyone seriously tries
to do his best when it’s possible,” Prada says.
She looks a little tired, but also determined.
“It’s a process.”
As our time comes to a close, I ask what
she does to de-stress from the work—from
the designing, the artistic endeavors, the
shows, the parties. She makes that face again.
De-stress? “I like what I do,” she says. “The
problem is only to have enough great ideas to
be able to interpret the world, to be forwardthinking, to create something new, interest-
ing, to go to the next step.” But does she mind
the constancy of it, the relentlessness of the
fashion calendar, the press commitments,
all the travel? She thinks. “I hate jet lag,” she
says. “Of course, anytime you go somewhere,
you learn something.”Kyrie remem-
bered the pri nce turning red with rage, his
body sunken into the arms of his captors.
Kyrie and Blake said the remaining pas-
sengers were stripped of their phones, pass-
ports, and laptops, and taken to the Ritz-
Carlton in Riyadh. The following day, the
members of the entourage were escorted one
by one to a conference room and ordered to
sign what amounted to nondisclosure agree-
ments, promisi ng never to discuss what hap-
pened on the flight. They were held for three
days before being driven to the airport and
flown out of the country.
Also in the room at the Ritz, they recalled,
was a clean-shaven, unarmed individual
dressed in a traditional white thobe and ghu-
tra, the red-and-white headdress favored
by Saudi men. Kyrie and Adrienne told me
that the man was, in fact, Saud al-Qahtani:
Both were able to identify him two years
later when, after Khashoggi’s murder, they
recognized his face from news reports. Since
then, neither the three Americans on board,
nor the Saudi insiders I have spoken with,
know bin Turki’s whereabouts.
Like bin Turki, two other notable princ-
es, both living in Europe, were si milarl y
kidnapped. Prince Saud Saif al-Nasr, while
residing in France, tweeted a message pub-
licly endorsing a 2015 letter by activists calling
for a coup. He would mysteriously disappear.
One exiled Saudi friend of his told me that he
believes the prince had been lured into partic-
ipating in a dubious business project that was
actually a ruse meant to force him to come to
the kingdom against his will. A second prince,
Turki bin Bandar—a senior officer in the Sau-
di police force who had fled to Paris—used his
YouTube channel to demand political change
back home. He even recorded and posted a
phone conversation in which a Saudi official
could be heard trying to tempt him to come
home. In 2015, however, he was stopped at an
airport in Morocco on what Rabat authorities
claimed was an Interpol warrant and forcibly
transferred to Saudi Arabia.
Prince Salman bin Abdul Aziz bin Salman
was nabbed on his home turf. A high-profile
royal married to the daughter of the late
King Abdullah, he moved with ease among
American politicians and European royals,
and, according to a palace insider who knows
him well, was a critic of M.B.S. Last year,
bin Salman—who just days before Trump’s
election had met with Democratic donors
and Schiff, a Trump nemesis—disappeared
after being summoned to one of the royal pal-
aces in Riyadh. While the prince was initially
held for “disrupting the peace,” according to
a Saudi statement, he was never charged with
a crime and remains in detention, along with
his father, who had lobbied for his release.
One of the few semi-official statements ever
made about the royals abducted from Europe
came in 2017 from the former head of Saudi
Arabia’s foreign intelligence service, Prince
Turki al-Faisal, who dismissed the “so-called
princes” as “criminals.” Said al-Faisal: “We
don’t like to publicize these things because we
consider them our domestic affairs. Of course,
there were people who worked to bring them
back. [The men] are here; they didn’t disap-
pear. They are seeing their families.”
Regardless of the credibility of al-Faisal’s
statements, well-heeled princes are not the
only targets of the long arm of the regime. So,
too, have been a variety of others, including
businessmen, academics, artists, Islamists
critical of the regime, and, according to
Reporters Without Borders, 30 journalists
who are currently in detention.NO ONE IS SAFENawaf al-Rasheed, a poet, is a descendent
of a prominent tribe that has had historical
claims to the Saudi throne. While he was not a
political figure and rarely made public appear-
ances or statements, his lineage, according to
expert s and relatives, was enough for M.B.S.
to consider him a threat—someone in exile
who, theoretically, could be recruited to help
cultivate a rival clan with the aim of deposing
the House of Saud. On a trip to neighboring
Kuwait last year, al-Rasheed was stopped at
the airport as he tri ed to leave the country
and was forcibly returned to Saudi Arabia.
Held incommunicado for 12 months, he was
never charged with a crime. Though hewas purportedly released earlier this year,
these same sources say that repeated attempts
to contact him have been unsuccessful.
Advisers to royal courtiers have been
nabbed as well. Faisal al-Jarba was an aide
and confidant of Prince Turki bin Abdullah al-
Saud, a potential M.B.S. rival. In 2018, al-Jarba
was at his fa mily home in Amman when Jor-
danian securi ty forces ente red the premises,
guns drawn and faces covered, and whisked
him away. According to family members who
have strong ties to the country’s leadership, he
was taken to the Saudi Embassy in Amman,
then driven under the cover of darkness to the
border and handed over to Saudi authorities.
Also at risk, according to academic and dip-
lo mat ic sources, are Saudi foreign exchange
students. Some who have been vocal about the
kingdom’s human rights record have suddenly
had their financial aid suspended. One gradu-
ate student—as revealed in emails obtained
from the Saudi Embassy in Washington, DC—
was informed that the only way to resolve an
impending suspension would be to immedi-
ately return to Saudi Arabia to file an appeal.
The case of Abdul Rahman al-Sadhan is
part icularly troublesome. A Saudi citizen—
and the son of an American—al-Sadhan was
a 2013 graduate of Notre Dame de Namur Uni-
versity in Belmont, California. After earning
his degree, he returned to the kingdom to be
part of what he thought would be a chang-
ing nation. He worked for five years in the
Saudi Red Crescent Society, a humanitar-
ian organization. Then, on March 12, 2018,
uniformed men showed up at his office, say-
ing he was wanted for questioning. He le ft
with the authorities and, according to his
U.S.-based mother and si ster, would never
be heard from again. His relatives believe
his forced disappearance may have been
prompted by his online activity, including
social media posts that were often critical of
the state. But they can’t prove anything; al-
Sadhan has never been charged with a crime.
The day after al-Sadhan disappeared,
another student, Loujain al-Hathloul, van-
ished as well. Enrolled at Abu Dhabi’s Sor-
bonne University campus, she got into her
car after a brief meeting, never to reappear
at school. A prominent activist among Saudi
feminists, al-Hathloul had decried how her
country, despite recent reforms, continued to
discriminate against women. Ironically, her
vision for modernization, in many ways, mir-
rored the rhetoric of the crown prince, whoSaudi Disappeared