NEIL MACKAY'S BIG READ: Filming murder - the inside story of an assassination that shook the world

Oscar winner Fogel believes the regime exerted influence on major film distributors, like Netflix, to not show the documentary globally. 

The kingdom’s intelligence services also used their infamous troll army to attack the film – which investigates how the Crown Prince of Saudi orchestrated the murder of dissident journalist Khashoggi – on online movie review sites to damage its credibility and turn audiences away.

The release of the film – which has its UK premiere at the Glasgow Film Festival this weekend – comes as America imposes sanctions on Saudis connected to the murder. The

CIA has concluded that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman – known as MBS – approved the assassination of Khasshoggi. 
The journalist was killed and dismembered inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018.

Washington stopped short of imposing sanctions on MBS, the future Saudi king, although several members of the hit squad which killed Khashoggi were targeted. Pressure is now mounting on the UK to end unrestricted arms sales to Saudi. 

President Joe Biden’s administration has promised a halt in arms sales to Riyadh, which could be used in the long-running war in Yemen. Britain is among Saudi’s closest allies – and is the world’s second-largest arms exporter to the kingdom.

As The Dissident premiers in Scotland this weekend, director Bryan Fogel – who won an Oscar for his last documentary, Icarus, about the Russian “Olympic doping” scandal – sat down with The Herald on Sunday, from his Californian beachside home, to discuss the assassination of Khashoggi, the lethal power of Saudi, and the need for democracy to stand up to tyranny.

The film
FOGEL’S film, stylish and horrifying in equal measure, is one of the slickest, most powerful documentaries of recent years. Essentially, viewers learn this: Jamal Khashoggi was a Saudi insider who became one of the most influential journalists in the kingdom.

However, he was also a reformer who became increasingly critical of the regime.

Eventually, seen as a dissident, he fled the country for America where he worked for The Washington Post, and continued highlighting Saudi’s repression of freedom and abuses of human rights.

As an indicator of “justice” in Saudi, in one day alone in 2019, the kingdom carried out mass beheadings of 37 citizens – mostly from the Shia minority – convicted of terrorism in trials which Amnesty International branded a “sham” based on confessions extracted under torture. One man’s severed head and body were pinned to a pole as a warning. Support from Donald Trump emboldened the kingdom. He took no action following the assassination of Khashoggi.

In 2018, Khashoggi needed paperwork from the Saudi consulate in Turkey to marry his fiancee Hatice Cengiz. 

The film reveals how a plot was hatched by Saudi officials to murder him on arrival. An audio recording was made of the assassination and excerpts show the killers joking about Khashoggi as a “sacrificial victim”.

Khashoggi was overpowered, injected and suffocated. His body was dismembered with a bone saw and burned in an oven. A hit team was flown in to Istanbul to carry out the murder – with some using diplomatic passports and jets to travel. One of the team was a trained medic skilled in autopsies. 

It is even believed there was a line open to Saudi Arabia in the “murder room” so that someone – perhaps MBS – could watch and give instructions.
The film also uncovers how other dissidents around the world live in terror of Saudi reprisals. One friend of Khashoggi, Omar Abdulaziz Alzahrani, an exile in Canada, reveals how his relatives were arrested and tortured because he has spoken out against the regime. 

Fogel also reveals how Saudi troll armies are used to attack dissidents around the world. 

Khashoggi was targeted before his death in these cyber operations, as was Alzahrani – whose phone was hacked and all data drawn from it to monitor him. Saudi cyber operations can turn phones into a 24/7 bugs able to surveil targets via microphones and cameras.

Attack the messenger
A DOCUMENTARY by an Oscar winner like Fogel – especially one as powerful as The Dissident – should have had distributors clambering over each other to air it. But that’s not the case.

Fogel has struggled to get the film shown. The behaviour of Netflix – which gained an Oscar through Fogel’s Icarus – is especially curious: the global entertainment company didn’t even bid for The Dissident. Netflix hasn’t commented directly, though it has pointed to a number of political documentaries it made recently such as Edge Of Democracy about the authoritarian Brazilian leader Jair Bolsonaro.

On the issue of whether there’s been an attempt to silence the film with pressure exerted behind the scenes by the wealthy Saudi state, Fogel says: “I couldn’t tell you if it’s soft pressure or direct pressure … actions ultimately speak louder than words, and the fact the film doesn’t have a single global distributor, the path the film is being forced or pushed to take on the distribution side … it’s just the way the world works … It just speaks to where we are as a society.”

The film has, however, been picked up by Amazon in the UK and Ireland, Fogel says. That gives him some hope. It’s worth pointing out that Jeff Bezos –Amazon owner, world’s richest man and publisher of The Washington Post which employed Khashoggi – also appears in the film.

Claims are made that MBS had Bezos’s personal phone hacked. Smear stories later appeared about the tycoon in US tabloids.

Saudi’s troll army – known as “The Flies” because of the swarm effect they create in an attempt to change online narratives in a way favourable to MBS and the kingdom – also attacked Fogel’s documentary through online review sites, subjecting it to mass negative comments.

“It’s par for the course,” Fogel says. “You just kind of go ‘well, of course that’s going to be the reaction, of course that’s going to happen’. Why would I think that they wouldn’t do this when you have an entire film showing the extent to which they’ll go to suppress freedom of thought and opinion – even hacking a journalist to pieces with a bone saw in their own consulate. I can’t be shocked by it.”

The optimistic approach, Fogel agrees, is to stick to the mindset that if Saudi is trying to silence or undermine the film, then – as the old journalistic adage goes – “he must be doing something right”.

So far, though, there’s been no direct threats to his personal safety, despite the violence the kingdom is capable of unleashing against its perceived enemies. He has, however, “developed cyber protocols” to protect against hacking by Saudi. All good journalists, he says, go into stories like the Khashoggi assassination with their eyes open and aware of the risks. Regardless of the threat, Fogel felt compelled to take the story on as he “was horrified by the murder of Jamal … I was worried that the full story wasn’t going to be told”.

The film, he says, was a journalistic “labour of love”.

Fogel adds that despite the risks which taking on the project entailed, he was given courage by Khashoggi’s fiancee Hatice, and the Saudi journalist’s fellow dissident and friend Omar Abdulaziz Alzahraini. Omar, he says, had a terrible bargain to make: to continue to speak out against Saudi or risk the safety of his loved ones already in jail in the kingdom. 

“Here’s this guy, he’s basically living all alone in self-exile. He hasn’t seen his family in 10 years. He wakes up every day not only under fear of his life, but knowing that his brothers and friends are in prison because of the work that he’s doing. He wakes up every day and is faced with this decision: ‘do I silence myself and make a declaration of silence in the hope that those I love go free, or do I continue my work because despite these people that are close to me in jail, there are tens of thousands – countless others – who need their voices heard and I’m going to fight for them’. When I meet people like Omar it inspires me on a pure human level that I can possibly make a change, help shine a light on atrocities in this world and the struggles other people are facing. That drives me.”

What next for Saudi?
FOGEL says he didn’t want the film coming out while Donald Trump was still in office. Given the former president’s support for MBS and Saudi, Fogel believed there would “be no possibility that any change would come during the Trump administration”.

Fogel adds: “As Biden came to office there was a real reason to feel hopeful that things were going to change.” The declassification of the CIA report naming MBS as central to the assassination marked a step change in US diplomacy towards Saudi, as did its limited use of sanctions and the suspension of arms sales.

However, Fogel says: “To do all that and then say, well, I’m not going to sanction a world leader [MBS] … is meaningless … It’s sending a message to the world that not only will crimes like this be tolerated [but] there’s no price to pay.”

In “a perfect world”, Fogel says, justice would mean that MBS “can’t fly anywhere. Anywhere he lands his plane, there’s an Interpol arrest warrant for him and he’s extradited to stand trial in Istanbul or he’s extradited to the United States or he’s sent to the Hague [site of the International Criminal Court] ... or there’s massive sanctions placed on Saudi Arabia, so stifling to the country that they’re forced to free thousands and thousands of their political activists, and change policy in regards to their human rights violations. That would be great”.

He adds: “But the reality of those things happening are slim to none because there’s just too much money, too much business interest. There’s too many weapons to be sold and investments to make … It’s incredibly disappointing to have this [CIA] report come out and believe that the new American administration was going to really do something and then see all this was just smoke and mirrors – literally.” 

On the issue of how the UK should respond to Saudi in light of what the world now knows of the murder of Khashoggi, Fogel says: “It’s very easy for a citizen to look at something and go, ‘something has to be done’, versus the actual financial stakes in that.

“What we’ve seen in the United States, and obviously in the UK, is you’re going ‘okay, they’re doing billions of pounds of business with our country every year – investing in our country, purchasing our real estate, buying our commercial buildings, buying our weapons, investing in UK companies – do we want to put all that on the line for human-rights abuses? Do we want to put all that on the line because there were hundreds of beheadings? 

“Many of these people were beheaded literally for sending a tweet. Do we want to put this on the line because they murdered and dismembered a journalist in their own consulate, or locked up a women’s human-rights campaigner who at the time was 28 years old and her biggest crime was saying women should be able to leave their home without the permission of an 18-year-old male guardian? Each country is faced with those decisions.

"Ultimately, I think what we’re seeing over and over again is the answer is: the money is too big, the relationship is too important.”

The attitude from Western powers, says Fogel, is: “This is a terrible crime that you’ve committed, it’s terrible what you’ve done, but at the end of the day, we’re going to let you get away with it.”

The Crown Prince
FOGEL is realistic enough to accept that in the final analysis, MBS will pay little or no price for his crimes – for “Jamal being brutally murdered for voicing an opinion”. 

There’s speculation MBS watched the horrific assassination of Khashoggi in a secure audio-visual link from the consulate in Turkey. 

Fogel says: “I heard many times that it’s believed a call was made back to the kingdom either during or immediately following Jamal’s murder. There’s a portion of the transcript right after he’s murdered which Turkey didn’t provide me. I certainly heard rumours that during that time there was a call made back to the kingdom. 

“It’s hard to know what happened but I think it’s a safe assumption knowing the nature of this crime and who ordered it that there was communication back to Riyadh to prove and to know that Jamal had been murdered – that he was gone. At this point, nothing would surprise me.” Although a number of low-level unnamed individuals, described as being part of a “rogue operation”, were said, by Saudi authorities, to have been tried for the murder, there is suspicion this was a show trial which served no justice at all. 

“Everything regarding that trial has been hidden from public view,” says Fogel. The world, he says, has only “Saudi Arabia’s word they’ve been punished”. MBS has always denied having anything to do with the murder.

Filmmaker or activist?
FOGEL has now taken the unusual step of personally campaigning against the Saudi regime – leaving the objectivity of conventional journalism behind. “There’s different kinds of perspectives in documentary making,” he says. “One is I’m going to be a fly on the wall. I’m going to have my camera there in a conflict zone. I’m going to have my camera there as the lion eats the impala. 

“My job is just purely to observe and report.

“I will do nothing to change what is the course of nature, or to change the outcome or series of events that are going to happen … Most journalism or documentaries takes that approach.”

However, after his Oscar-winner Icarus – which saw Fogel help the doping whistleblower Grigory Rodchenkov go into hiding – the filmmaker says “my perspective changed. I don’t want to be a fly on the wall”. Fogel says that with Rodchenkov: “I essentially helped to protect his life and bring him into [protection] and worked with him to get lawyers”.

So, in The Dissident, “just being a fly on the wall isn’t enough when the people you’re working with are in these real-world conflicts and [experiencing] real-world trauma. If I can, through my work or connections, make a change or a difference, I’m going to try to do that”.

The big question is: can The Dissident have as big an international impact as Icarus given its distribution problems? “Icarus has been seen by hundreds of millions of people around the world. I think what Russia did – that scale of cheating – isn’t going to happen again because of the awareness that came from Icarus. 

“So, in the case of The Dissident, I’m hoping that it’ll find homes all over the world on platforms where people will have easy access to it and word of mouth will spread, and that there can be a social movement – whether that’s on Twitter or Facebook – sharing the film and sharing the concept of justice for Jamal. What that justice ultimately ends up being or entailing, though, is something that I don’t have control over.”

• The Dissident screens at the Glasgow Film Festival until March 9. Tickets can be bought at athome.glasgowfilm.org/film/the-dissident-n-c-15 For more information visit glasgowfilm.org/glasgow-film-festival/shows/the-dissident-n-c-12 or www.thedissident.film