Jamal Khashoggi had been in the United States for only a few months when the forces he had fled in Saudi Arabia made clear that he would never fully escape.
He was at a friend's home in suburban Virginia in October 2017 when his phone lit up with an incoming call from Riyadh. On the line was Saud al-Qahtani, a feared lieutenant of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
The royal heir and his henchman were at that point in the early stages of a brutal crackdown in the kingdom - arresting rivals, torturing enemies and silencing critics. Khashoggi had previously been banned from writing or even tweeting, but fear that worse could be in store had prompted him to seek refuge in the United States.
Qahtani was uncharacteristically amiable on the call. He told Khashoggi that public comments praising Saudi reforms, including a decision to allow women to drive, had pleased the crown prince. He urged Khashoggi to "keep writing and boasting" about Mohammed's achievements. While the conversation was cordial, the subtext was clear: Khashoggi no longer lived under Saudi rule, but the country's most powerful royal was monitoring his every word.
Khashoggi reacted with a combination of the nerve and trepidation that would define the remaining months of his life. He challenged Qahtani about the plight of activists he knew had been imprisoned in the kingdom, according to a friend who witnessed the exchange. But even as he did so, the friend said, "I saw how Jamal's hand was shaking while holding the phone."
A year later, Khashoggi, 59, would be dead, and Mohammed and Qahtani would be implicated by U.S. intelligence agencies in his killing, which was carried out by a team of assassins dispatched from Riyadh.
The crime has roiled relations between the United States and Saudi Arabia, exposed the ruthless side of a crown prince who was supposed to represent the kingdom's enlightened future, and revealed the extent to which the Trump administration prioritizes protecting an oil-rich ally over humanitarian concerns.
The case has also taken on the dimensions of a global cause. Khashoggi, a contributing columnist for The Washington Post, was a writer of modest influence beyond the Middle East when he was alive. In death, he has become a symbol of a broader struggle for human rights, as well as a chilling example of the savagery with which autocratic regimes silence voices of dissent.
Jamal Khashoggi has praised Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's reforms, including a decision to allow women to drive.
Khashoggi's life and work, particularly in his final year, were inevitably more complicated than can be captured in that idealized frame. The complete truth about his fate remains elusive in large measure because of a determined Saudi effort to obscure events - an effort that included relaying false information to executives at The Post in the days after Khashoggi's death.
This account of his final 18 months, which reveals new details about Khashoggi's interactions with Saudi officials, his activities over the last year of his life as an exile and his killing, is based on interviews with dozens of associates, friends and officials from countries including Saudi Arabia and the United States as well as Turkey, where Khashoggi was killed and dismembered inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2.
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Khashoggi was an advocate for reform in his country, but neither saw himself as a dissident nor believed in bringing radical change to a nation that has operated for the past eight decades as an absolute monarchy.
He relished his newfound freedoms in the United States, and the attention his writing got from a Western audience, but often resisted appeals from associates to be more forceful in his criticism of the kingdom. He was by many accounts depressed by the separation from his country and the strain that his departure and work placed on his family.
Even in exile, Khashoggi remained loyal to Saudi Arabia and reluctant to sever ties to the royal court. In September 2017, at the same time he was embarking on a new role as opinion columnist for The Washington Post, he was pursuing up to $2 million in funding from the Saudi government for a think tank that he proposed to run in Washington, according to documents reviewed by the paper that appear to be part of a proposal he submitted to the Saudi ministry of information.
Khashoggi also sent messages to the Saudi ambassador to the United States, Khaled bin Salman - the brother of the crown prince - expressing his loyalty to the kingdom and reporting on some of his activities in the United States, according to copies reviewed by The Post.
In one case, Khashoggi told the ambassador that he had been contacted by a former FBI agent working on behalf of families of victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks - in which 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi. He said he would to go forward with the meeting and emphasize "the innocence of my country and its leadership."
But in the conspiracy-driven climate of Middle East politics, Khashoggi came under mounting suspicion because of his writing as well as associations he cultivated over many years with perceived enemies of Riyadh.
Among Khashoggi's friends in the United States were individuals with real or imagined affiliations with the Islamist group the Muslim Brotherhood, and an Islamic advocacy organization, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, regarded warily for its support of the public uprisings of the Arab Spring. Khashoggi cultivated ties with senior officials in the Turkish government, also viewed with deep distrust by the rulers in Saudi Arabia.
After leaving the kingdom, Khashoggi sought to secure funding and support for an assortment of ideas that likely would have riled Middle East monarchs, including plans to create an organization that would publicly rank Arab nations each year by how they performed against basic metrics of freedom and democracy.
Perhaps most problematic for Khashoggi were his connections to an organization funded by Saudi Arabia's regional nemesis, Qatar. Text messages between Khashoggi and an executive at Qatar Foundation International show that the executive, Maggie Mitchell Salem, at times shaped the columns he submitted to The Washington Post, proposing topics, drafting material and prodding him to take a harder line against the Saudi government. Khashoggi also appears to have relied on a researcher and translator affiliated with the organization, which promotes Arabic-language education in the United States.
Editors at The Washington Post's opinion section, which is separate from the newsroom, said they were unaware of these arrangements, or his effort to secure Saudi funding for a think tank. "The proof of Jamal's independence is in his journalism," Fred Hiatt, editorial page editor of the Post, said in a statement. "Jamal had every opportunity to curry favor and to make life more comfortable for himself, but he chose exile and - as anyone reading his work can see - could not be tempted or corrupted."
A former U.S. diplomat who had known Khashoggi since 2002, Salem said that any assistance she provided Khashoggi was from a friend who sought to help him succeed in the United States. She noted that Khashoggi's English abilities were limited, and said that the foundation did not pay Khashoggi nor seek to influence him on behalf of Qatar.
"He and I talked about issues of the day as people who had come together, caring about the same part of the world," Salem said. "Jamal was never an employee, never a consultant, never anything to [the foundation]. Never."
It is not clear that the Saudi government knew of Khashoggi's ties to the Qatar foundation, although the kingdom routinely engages in surveillance of dissidents abroad.
To friends and family members, Khashoggi's connections were indicative of his intellectual curiosity and disregard for rigid national, religious and ideological boundaries. He traveled constantly, attended dozens of conferences each year, and developed long-standing friendships with people whose opinions were at odds with his own.
Nevertheless, Khashoggi knew that his writings and associations carried risks. He told friends and colleagues repeatedly that he would be imprisoned if he ever reentered Saudi Arabia, and spoke often of his concern for his four children, including a son who remained in the kingdom and had faced intermittent harassment from the authorities there.
In the end, Khashoggi underestimated what Saudi Arabia was capable of as he entered the consulate in Istanbul to collect paperwork needed to remarry and begin rebuilding a personal life that had experienced some turmoil during his exile.
"His biggest fear was being imprisoned but not being killed," said the friend who witnessed the Qahtani call, who requested anonymity for his own security. "He had never thought of that."
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The October 2017 phone call was part of a long series of interactions between the Saudi columnist and Qahtani, a 40-year-old veteran of the Saudi Air Force who emerged from a decade of maneuvering in the royal court as one of the crown prince's closest advisers.
Qahtani was given broad authority to protect the image of the crown prince, widely known by his initials, "MBS." It was an assignment that involved flooding social media platforms with propaganda and using espionage capabilities to monitor critics. At times it also meant banning those perceived as being disloyal - including Khashoggi - from writing or posting comments online. Under Mohammed and Qahtani, many activists have also been imprisoned for their dissent.
With more than a million followers on Twitter, Qahtani is derisively known as "Lord of the Flies," a reference to the swarms of social media operatives - "electronic flies" - that descend on perceived adversaries of the kingdom and Mohammed.
Even before Mohammed began making his move to claim the title of crown prince, Qahtani was scouring the private sector for tools that could aide him in his efforts of suppression. Emails released by WikiLeaks show that someone using Qahtani's identity pursued spyware capabilities from an Italian company as early as 2012.
A lawsuit filed last month by a Saudi exile in Canada, Omar Abdulaziz, accused the Saudi government of monitoring his text message exchanges with Khashoggi by using Israeli software designed to secretly control an ordinary smartphone, turning it into a surveillance device against its owner.
Qahtani was working to mute Khashoggi's voice as early as 2016.
The journalist, a native of Medina, had an eventful but often bumpy career over several decades in Saudi Arabia. Drawn to radical causes in his early years, Khashoggi traveled to Afghanistan in the 1980s as a correspondent where he interviewed Osama bin Laden and posed for a picture holding a military rifle.
Khashoggi was fired twice as editor of Saudi Arabia's Al-Watan newspaper because he was seen as agitating against the government. But he was also an insider in the royal court. In between those editing stints, Khashoggi worked as an adviser to Prince Turki Al-Faisal, the former head of Saudi intelligence, when the prince served as ambassador to the United Kingdom and then the United States.
The first major clash between Qahtani and Kashoggi came in late 2016, when the writer was working as a columnist for the London-based Al-Hayat newspaper. At a time when Mohammed and others were celebrating the election of Donald Trump, who promised a far warmer relationship with Riyadh than President Barack Obama had pursued, Khashoggi was more cautious, warning in mid-November 2016 on Twitter that the Saudis should be wary of the untested American president.
Shortly thereafter, while Khashoggi was attending a conference in Qatar, Qahtani called to inform him that he was "not allowed to tweet, not allowed to write, not allowed to talk," said a Khashoggi associate who, like others, also requested anonymity for security reasons.
Qahtani added, "You can't do anything anymore - you're done."
Khashoggi's ban over the ensuing eight months coincided with a period of intense intrigue in Riyadh. As Mohammed maneuvered to consolidate power, his enforcer began building his capabilities, including so-called "tiger teams" tasked with carrying out overseas abductions and the interrogation of prisoners. It was hard to reconcile such operations with the innocuous name of Qahtani's department: the Center for Studies and Media Affairs.
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In April 2017, Khashoggi left Saudi Arabia for three weeks to stay in London with a Saudi businessman and fellow former adviser to Prince Turki, Nawaf Obaid, who had had his own falling out with the royal court. The two talked about Khashoggi's desire to move to the United States, according to a person familiar with their discussions.
But Qahtani surfaced again, calling Khashoggi in London to tell him that all would be forgiven if he returned to Riyadh. It was part of Qahtani's "hot-cold" handling of Khashoggi, the person said, alternating between being menacing and reassuring.
In June 2017, Mohammed and his supporters carried out an extraordinary power grab, detaining the designated crown prince Mohammed bin Nayef, a 57-year-old grandson of the founding Saudi monarch. He emerged from his detainment to issue a humiliating public pledge of loyalty to his much younger cousin, Mohammed, relinquishing the title of crown prince.
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