The book ‘Blood and oil’ portrays Mohammed bin Salmán, the prince of excesses and repression

The life of Mohammed bin Salmán has inspired the book blood and oilwritten by Justin Scheck and Bradley Hope, journalists from Wall Street Journal. The title just went on sale.

He is 37 years old, they call him MBS and his full name is Mohammed bin Salman, Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. His billionaire life, marked by abundance, black gold, messianic aspirations and oppression, is marked by the gruesome murder of Jamal Khashoggi. The dissident journalist who was executed, as the CIA considered, by the espionage services of Bin Salmán himself. This dark episode, in 2018, is collected in the book blood and oil (Peninsula). The text is signed by economic journalists from The Wall Street Journal Justin Scheck and Bradley Hope.

Bin Salmán’s story begins in 2017, when he rose to power after having exposed his uncle Ahmed Bin Abdulaziz and his cousin, Mohamed Bin Nayef, whom he accused of high treason. In his rise, MBS strove to surprise the world with an image of new modernity and reform, as a counterpart to the absolutism of his predecessors. However, he is nothing further from the truth. It is the portrait that Scheck and Hope draw in their book.

If Boston or London were academic destinations for other members of the Saudi house, the young Bin Salmán gave up an international degree and decided that he would study at King Saud University.

With a ‘Blade Runner’ vocation

MBS promoted the Vision 2030 project, its fanciful modernization plan for the country. To make it visible, he ordered the construction of a new urban center in Riyadh, known as the Mukaab, a cube 400 meters high and reminiscent of the sacred Kaaba in Mecca. Thousands of residents live in this heart of the capital and there are exclusive luxury hotels and art galleries. The ambitious Mukaab is a natural consequence of Neom, destined to become the great metropolis of the desert and also a technological hub in the style of Silicon Valley. Neom, with a vocation to Blade Runner, would provide accommodation for 9 million people, who would travel in flying taxis. The taxi thing is not important, if we take into account that Bin Salmán fabulated with creating several moons a day or, in a delusion, slipped that he would live 300 years.

High-tech is thus presented as the Saudi plan b in a world that will eventually run out of fossil fuels. In other words, oil (the goose that lays the golden eggs of Arabia). Hence his determination in this Neom.

As for real estate, he owns the castle of Louis XIV in Versailles equipped with full home automation and valued at 300 million; or the mini Buckingham, the London mansion in Regent’s Park that is now being sold for 282 million euros, according to the Financial Times.

Six minutes of torture

The Khashoggi case is one of the central episodes of the book. The Washington Post reporter found his death in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul one day in October 2018 when he went to pick up some papers to marry his girlfriend, Hatice Cengiz. He never got out of there. After the trial, in Turkey, it was concluded that Jamal was tortured (his fingers were cut off) and “brutally” murdered at the hands of fifteen intelligence agents sent from Riyadh. His body was dismembered. In a scene of horrendous screams, the prisoner was administered a narcotic. It was six minutes of torture. The coroner who carried out the butchery ordered coffee and put on headphones with music to avoid hearing the noise of the saw. Although the CIA looked to MBS as a thinking mind, he denied ordering any plan. According to the authors of the book, it would have been a reckoning between the Saudi royal family and Jamal, before he trusted him and later, a critical voice.