OUT OF SIGHT, NOT OUT OF REACH The Global Scale and Scope of Transnational Repression efforts. This escalation also coincides with a purge against members of the royal family, government ministers, and businessmen that bin Salman launched soon after assuming the role of Crown Prince.209 Five of the 10 physical cases of Saudi transnational repression documented by Freedom House were carried out against former insiders. In addition to the Khashoggi assassination, two princes were rendered from France and the aide to a rival prince was rendered from Jordan. One of the princes disappeared after voicing support for a coup in a social media post; the other, Prince Sultan bin Turki II, was seeking reconciliation with bin Salman after suing the royal family for kidnapping him in the early 2000s. Bin Turki boarded a plane provided by the royal family in France, thinking he was heading to Cairo for a meeting; he was instead drugged and flown to Riyadh, and has not been been heard from since.210 Five of the 10 physical cases of Saudi transnational repression documented by Freedom House were carried out against former insiders. As in other cases Freedom House has studied, the physical campaign against former insiders is built on indirect and nonphysical means of repression. In August 2020, former Saudi intelligence officer Saad al-Jabri, who lives in Canada, brought a lawsuit against bin Salman and others, alleging the Saudi government deployed spyware against him, plotted to kill him, and detained his family members in an effort to coerce him into returning to Saudi Arabia. In his lawsuit, al-Jabri alleges that a group of Saudi nationals stopped at the Canadian border were carrying the equipment needed to dismember a corpse.211 Al-Jabri’s allegations represent a familiar pattern of escalatory targeting, involving multiple means of repression against a single person. There is ample evidence that Jamal Khashoggi’s murder was the culmination of a longer process of escalating attacks against multiple targets. The mobile phone of Omar Abdulaziz, an activist and confidante of Khashoggi, was infected with Pegasus spyware, and one of his brothers was apparently coerced into asking Abdulaziz to cease his activism 32 @FreedomHouse and return to Saudi Arabia. Abdulaziz did not comply, and two of his brothers were subsequently imprisoned along with several friends.212 Khashoggi himself was subjected to serious harassment on Twitter. His son, who lived in Saudi Arabia, was issued a travel ban that would have been lifted upon Khashoggi’s return to the country.213 Khashoggi asked his fiancée to await him outside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul when he visited to procure marriage documents, to ensure that someone could alert the Turkish government if he did not return. He was murdered while she waited outside.214 Further intertwining the escalatory targeting of Abdulaziz and Khashoggi, details extracted from the former’s mobile phone may have played a role in the plot against the latter.215 At the time, the two critics were collaborating to combat the notorious mass of government-directed inauthentic accounts on Twitter.216 The Saudi regime closely controls expression within the country, and pays special attention to dissident activity on Twitter. Saud al-Qahtani, a royal court adviser, oversaw Saudi Arabia’s “electronic army” or “electronic flies.”217 In an unprecedented tactic that displays the country’s wealth, and willingness to go to extreme ends, Saudi Arabian authorities even bribed two Saudi Twitter employees to assist in the surveillance of critics using the platform.218 Despite clear evidence of high-level government involvement in the targeting of Saudi nationals abroad, the international response has been muted, effectively sending a message of impunity to Saudi officials and others around the world. Within weeks of Khashoggi’s murder, the CIA confirmed that bin Salman ordered the assassination himself.219 Saudi Arabia’s democratic partners failed to hold the Saudi government or bin Salman to account, however. US president Donald Trump famously strayed from the conclusions of the American intelligence community, defending bin Salman.220 “I saved his ass,” Trump told a reporter. “I was able to get Congress to leave him alone. I was able to get them to stop.”221 The United States implemented Global Magnitsky sanctions against 17 Saudi nationals for their role in killing Khashoggi, but bin Salman was not on the list.222 In July 2020, the UK implemented similar targeted sanctions against 20 Saudi officials involved in the assassination, including al-Qahtani, who intelligence agencies agree was central to orchestrating the operation,223 but not bin Salman. Saudi Arabian courts sentenced five people to death for their role. The government dismissed–but did not try or convict– al-Qahtani from his media advisory role.224 Meanwhile, Saudi #TransnationalRepression