Sent in yesterday as a comment [American Partisan] On 2 OCT 2018, Washington Post journalist and middle eastern political activist Jamal Khashoggi went missing after entering the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul, Turkey. Some in the course of the last news cycle has alleged this to be a much deeper incident than it appears on the surface; a vanished journalist, murder, international intrigue, a Saudi administration in conflict with Turkey; both jockeying for power in a region bound for widespread war in the coming years. Over a year post-living in exile after being banned from the Kingdom of al Saud, Khashoggi returned to the assumed security of the nation of his familial ancestry while continuing a career of revolutionary praxis through media in the mideast region. Needing a legal certificate of divorce from the Saudi government, Khashoggi felt safe approaching the embassy- in and out, no harm, no foul.
How wrong he was.
Embassies and consulates are nerve centers for declared spooks of a nation. Formal intelligence officers working in a nation must be declared. Journalists, on the other hand, can get placed into positions of unique access and are often conduits for sensitive information. In any country where intelligence operations are being run (and that’s all of them) a nation’s embassy serves as the hot spot for intelligence and in turn, counterintelligence. With Khashoggi, we find an example of split loyalty divided between revolutionary Marxism and a convenient ally found in the politics of revolutionary Islam. Possibly best examining this juxtaposition is his quote from a WaPo piece in late August: