A thumbnail history of the dysfunctional relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia, Rick Rowley’s documentary “Kingdom of Silence” deserves watching already for the briskly authoritative way with which it tells that story. But the two nations’ sordid decades-long exchange of oil, weaponry, and silent treatment of human rights abuses is only the backdrop for Rowley’s real story: the arc from idealist to nationalist to exiled crusader of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, murdered by his government in Istanbul for speaking his mind about the royal family.
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As presented here by Rowley and a clutch of his friends and fellow journalists (more than one of whom tears up here at his memory), Khashoggi was a romantic who fell in love fast and hard, not just with women but with causes. Like many other young Saudi men, he became enamored of the mujahideen, the Islamist guerrillas who waged jihad against the Soviets after they invaded Afghanistan in 1979. Unlike many others, though, Khashoggi became a battlefield journalist and befriended Osama bin Laden. After helping to build the bin Laden mythology, though, he became disenchanted with the ugly civil war that ripped apart Afghanistan after the Soviets and Americans lost interest in their proxy war and left a country filled with hardened religious warriors and mountains of weaponry to figure things out for itself.
Also like many Saudi men, Khashoggi went to work for his government. He was an official spokesman in London and booster of the Iraq invasion. Somewhat less predictably, he was horrified by the 9/11 attacks and thought it was “a lie” that the Saudi hijackers were “martyrs.” As he fully turned on bin Laden, his former hero turned on him, just one of many powerful enemies he would later accrue.
When the Arab Spring swept across the Middle East and Africa in 2011, Khashoggi again turned to the romantic upswell promising freedom in an autocrat-stifled region. But unlike his journalism which promoted bin Laden’s anti-Soviet jihad (which was funded largely by rich Saudis with the approval of the Saud royal family), his writing cheering the populist overthrow of Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak (an uprising bloodily reversed by the Egyptian military with Saudi backing) made him enemies in Riyadh. Just after the much-ballyhooed launch of the Al-Arab news channel in 2015, where Khashoggi was general manager and which was meant to symbolize the opening of press freedom in the Saudi kingdom, the whole outfit was unceremoniously shut down. Not long after, Khashoggi went into self-imposed exile in America, where his lacerating Washington Post columns about the sclerotic corruption and oppression of Saudi Arabia got him branded a traitor by his former patrons.
Rowley, a veteran director and producer of PBS documentaries, jolts his story along with crisp editing and a dense lattice of in-the-know interviewees, from former White House security advisors Richard Clarke and Ben Rhodes to Khashoggi friend and general journalistic All-Star Lawrence Wright and FBI counterterrorism expert Ali Soufan (heavily featured in Wright’s 9/11 book and the mini-series “The Looming Tower”). While Khashoggi’s presence brings an unusually impactful human touch—particularly the aching style of his writing, read in soulful beats during a few more mournful segments that seem to carry in them all the tragedy and thwarted promise of the modern Middle East—where “Kingdom of Silence” is most effective is using his story as a personal mirror to the geopolitical dramas that crash all through this movie.
By the time Rowley winds his story into its spiraling conclusion, he has clearly illustrated the moral and strategic compromises made by Washington to ensure that Riyadh kept the oil spigot gushing. He has also laid the groundwork for the final act, in which we see just what fruits are borne of what Wright terms a “toxic relationship.” In the movie’s final chilling minutes, Rowley shows a transcript of a recording from a listening device planted by Turkish authorities in the Istanbul Saudi consulate which Khashoggi entered in October 2018. It reads, “sound of saw begins.” What stays with you after “Kingdom of Silence” ends, however, is not the horrifying details of Khashoggi’s killing but rather the chilling silence that followed. [B+]