Saturday October 27, 2018
KRISHNADEV CALAMUR
The Saudi narrative explaining the death of Jamal Khashoggi has sought to protect the reputation of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.FAISAL AL NASSER / REUTERS
What is strange about Riyadh’s version of events is how poorly it concealed what happened to the journalist.
First they said he left unharmed. Then that he had disappeared. Then that he died accidentally in a fistfight. Now, Saudi authorities say that Jamal Khashoggi was killed—and that his death was premeditated.
The changing narratives, complemented by the steady drip of leaks about the killing from Turkish officials, have succeeded in keeping the Khashoggi story in the news weeks after the journalist’s disappearance. The sharply differing stories suggest two alternatives: that officials in Riyadh do not have control over what happens at their consulate in Istanbul, or that they wantonly put out misinformation.
Saudi Arabia is hardly alone in the way it wields misinformation (nor is dissembling by governments a new phenomenon): The Nixon administration misled the public about progress in the Vietnam War; Russia has rejected any role in the attempted assassination of a former spy, not to mention the shooting down of a Malaysia Airlines plane by pro-Moscow rebels in Ukraine; and President Donald Trump’s Twitter feed is the stuff of “alternate facts.”
What is strange about the Saudi version of events is how poorly it concealed what happened to Khashoggi. Why did Riyadh even bother? Simple: to control the domestic discourse, muddy the waters of international opinion, and protect the carefully cultivated image of the country and its ruler.
A recent parallel to the Khashoggi case came this year with the attempted poisoning of Sergei Skripal, the former Russian intelligence agent, and his daughter in the U.K. They survived the use of a deadly nerve agent, but a British woman died after accidentally coming in contact with it. London has pointed the finger squarely at Moscow. Russia, like Saudi Arabia, denied it had anything to do with the attempt.
In the face of evidence to the contrary, the Kremlin said the two alleged assassins sent to Britain to kill Skripal were actually tourists on a weekend trip to the cathedral city of Salisbury. That explanation provided fodder for internet memes in the West, but it apparently persuaded the Russian public that the pair had nothing to do with the attempted killing: A recent poll suggests only 3 percent of Russians believe Moscow was behind the attack.
This is not to say Saudi propaganda efforts are of poor quality. Far from it. In recent years, not just Saudi Arabia, but its allies and its adversaries have undertaken sophisticated campaigns to bolster their own reputations and tarnish those of their rivals. Even during the Khashoggi case, as the kingdom’s public response looked hapless, it was carrying out a high-tech campaign online to stifle domestic and regional dissent about the killing.
Marc Owen Jones, an assistant professor at Exeter University in the U.K. who researches Arab propaganda and Twitter bots, told me that after analyzing a month’s worth of tweets in Arabic that used the “Jamal Khashoggi” hashtag, he found most of those tweets were pro-Saudi. This narrative was boosted by certain specific accounts, as well as bots.
“I don’t think many people believe what the Saudi narrative says,” he said. “Yet on Twitter, it certainly seems the dominant message.”
Jones said the point wasn’t necessarily to persuade people about the Saudi narrative. “The point is to drown out other negative information on alternate narratives to muddy the discourse,” he said. “Because even muddying waters, adding that slight bit of ambiguity, even if it's such a preposterous story, is sometimes enough to say, ‘there’s two sides to the story.’ ”
Saudi Arabia’s image abroad had seen a marked improvement since the ascent of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in June 2017. The kingdom’s public relations machine has presented a picture of a modernizing country. The campaign was so effective that coverage of the kingdom focused on reforms promoted by the prince, who is known as MbS. Regionally, Riyadh took on a more muscular posture to counter Iran’s growing influence.
The Khashoggi killing caught that machine completely off-guard. At least three American firms representing Saudi Arabia parted ways with the kingdom in recent weeks.
“As an agency, you couldn’t justify murder, could you?” Steve Barrett, the executive editor of PR Week, which covers the industry, told me.
Although countries hire Western public relations firms to burnish their image and further their interests abroad, many of these companies back out of contracts when faced with scrutiny.
Ketchum, which began working with Russia when it was still viewed in the West as a democracy, ended its contract with Moscow after the invasion of Ukraine. Similarly, Weber Shandwick cut ties with Egypt following scrutiny in The Atlantic of its work with that country’s notorious intelligence services; it now declines to perform political work for foreign governments. Bell Pottinger, the famed British company, had to close entirely because of its controversial, racially tinged campaign in South Africa.
Having said that, any firm that represented Saudi Arabia, as it was ascendant under MbS, could hardly have foreseen the international fallout from Khashoggi’s killing. Now, they face an entirely different problem: How do they repair Saudi Arabia’s reputation?
“There’s now such deep skepticism about the Saudi PR machine, that whatever they come up with, whatever they position, I think it’s going to be continuously challenged,” Neil Quilliam, who is an expert on the region at Chatham House, a U.K. think tank, told me. “It’s almost like game over. It’s incredible. It’s such a massive shot in the foot. It’s staggering.”