Ben Hubbard delivers a fine account of the crown princeās rise ā and how the murder of a journalist did not bring him downIn 2015, the veteran New York Times columnist Tom Friedman wrote a āLetter from Saudi Arabiaā in which he extolled a younger generation of Saudi royals and gushed that Mohammed bin Salman, five years later crown prince of the desert kingdom, brimmed with fresh ideas.Come 2017, Friedman announced: āOnly a fool would predict [the] success [of Saudi reform] ā but only a fool would not root for it.āIn between the two columns, Prince Mohammed had embarked on an iron-fisted anti-corruption drive or purge, reportedly engineered the temporary detention and resignation of Saad Hariri, Lebanonās prime minister, and openly backed a bloody civil war in Yemen against Iran and its proxies.Then, on 2 October 2018, Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi dissident and journalist resident in the US and writing for the Washington Post, was murdered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, reportedly at ...