The Biden Administration turns the tide on relations with Saudi Arabia

Saudi Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman in a file image.Susan Walsh / AP

The Joe Biden Administration is preparing this Thursday to release a US intelligence report that concludes that the Saudi crown prince and de facto leader, Mohamed bin Salmán, approved in 2018 the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a journalist critical of the Riyadh regime , at the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul.

The conclusions of the report, of which the CIA was the main author, were already advanced by various means in the months after the crime.

But its publication, which Trump repeatedly resisted, symbolically opens an announced new stage in relations between Washington and Riyadh, and represents a clear break with the lukewarmness exhibited by the Trump Administration in the face of the brutal dismemberment of a journalist collaborating with

and resident in the United States.

President Biden, who confirmed that he had read the report, was scheduled to have a telephone conversation yesterday with King Salman, 85, and not with Mohamed bin Salman.

The change of interlocutor is a clear gesture: while the Trump Administration dealt with the crown prince, Biden has chosen to consider that the king continues to be the leader of the country and that the official communication of his son, as Minister of Defense, It must be with the head of the Pentagon.

Members of his Democratic Administration, however, assure that they maintain contacts with other levels of the Saudi regime.

The White House has explained that the new Democratic Administration is preparing to "recalibrate" its relationship with the Arab ally, a major oil producer, which in the past has been tolerated behavior that is not respectful of human rights.

Biden has publicly expressed his commitment to Saudi Arabia and its defensive needs in the region, but earlier this month he already announced that the United States will stop supporting the Saudi military offensive in the Yemeni war, a conflict that he described as a "humanitarian and strategic catastrophe." .

During her recent confirmation hearing in Congress, the new director of National Security, Avril Haines, pledged to comply with a 2019 law that requires the Office of the National Intelligence Directorate to disseminate the declassified report within 30 days. Khashoggi's murder.

Biden was tough on Riyadh during the election campaign.

He criticized the royal family and said he would make the Saudis treated "like the pariahs that they are."

Now, already in the White House since January 20, he has on the table his own electoral promises, about the limitation of the sale of arms to the country and the demand for accounts on the murder of the journalist.

In this context, the call with King Salmán is framed, in which he plans, according to Administration sources cited by

warn him of the imminent publication of the intelligence report.

On October 2, 2018, Khashoggi, a 59-year-old Saudi citizen living in Virginia (United States), a columnist for

was tricked into going to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to carry out some formalities.

There he was assassinated by a team of operatives with ties to the crown prince.

His body was dismembered with forensic tools and his remains were never found.

The Saudi government initially denied any involvement in the murder, but later changed its version and claimed that the journalist died accidentally while trying to extradite him by force.

They maintain that the team posted to the consulate acted on its own account.

Eight people were convicted in a trial that international observers called a sham.

Their sentences, five of them to death, were commuted to 20 years in prison, after receiving pardon from Khashoggi's own family.

Court documents related to a lawsuit filed in Canada against Mohamed bin Salmán, cited by CNN, reveal that the two private planes in which the squad traveled to assassinate Khashoggi belonged to a company that the crown prince had seized a year earlier. Saudi.

UN investigators spoke of "an extrajudicial assassination for which Saudi Arabia is responsible under international law," and the CIA itself presented its findings to the White House in 2018. But none of that altered Trump's good relations with Bin Salmán.

The Trump Administration imposed sanctions on 17 Saudi individuals, but refused to release the report and the president resisted criticizing the crown prince.

In 2019, the then president even bragged, in his taped interviews with journalist Bob Woodward for his latest book, that he had saved the crown prince from an investigation in Congress.

"I saved his ass," he told her.