Praying for Jamal KhashoggiPraying for Jamal Khashoggi

Last Nov. 7, I wrote a column about the new Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman. It ended this way: “As a veteran Saudi journalist remarked to me of M.B.S.: ‘This guy saved Saudi Arabia from a slow death, but he needs to broaden his base. It is good that he is freeing the house of Saud of the influence of the clergy, but he is also not allowing any second opinion of his political and economic decisions.’”

I don’t think that Saudi journalist, who was also a friend, would mind if I now identified him. His name was Jamal Khashoggi.

Jamal had come to my office a few days earlier for a long talk about Saudi Arabia and M.B.S. My views on Saudi Arabia are my own, but Jamal had a big impact on them. He had been inside the government. He understood that perfect was never on the menu there; you had to work with what you had. He loved his country and wanted to see it succeed, and believed that M.B.S. could shake things up and make the needed radical reforms — but also believed that M.B.S. needed a lot of coaching, because he had a dark side and was too isolated inside a small ruling circle.

As the year went on, Jamal came to believe that M.B.S.’s dark side was completely taking over. When we last spoke in August — thanks to a chance encounter at 17th and K Streets in Washington — he told me that he was getting married to a Turkish woman, and could not go back to Saudi Arabia right now and that I must ring an alarm bell about the increasingly harsh crackdowns and the arrests of critics — left, right and center — in Saudi Arabia by M.B.S.

And so on Sept. 4 I wrote a column that doubled down on the view of Saudi Arabia and M.B.S. that I had been making for the past year. It said: