One year ago, the journalist Jamal Khashoggi walked into the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul and never walked out. In the months that followed, the facts of his disappearance and murder would emerge in fragments: an international high-tech spy game, a diabolical plot, a gruesome killing, and a preposterous cover-up reaching the highest levels of the Saudi government, aided by the indifference and obstinacy of the White House. Eventually those fragments came to comprise a macabre mosaic.
This June, the United Nations special rapporteur for extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions issued a 100-page report detailing the Khashoggi affair. The report, the product of five months of independent investigation spanning six countries, added to the thrum of international indignation about Khashoggi’s murder. But so far it has largely failed to galvanize it into action.
Here is the story, as we know it, illustrated by Chris Koehler and told as a nonfiction narrative by the author Evan Ratliff. This account draws on our own reporting, the UN report, hundreds of news accounts and video interviews — The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The Daily Sabah, a Turkish outlet, in particular — and public testimony.