It seemed an especially macabre, 21st-century touch in the killing of Jamal Khashoggi: the suggestion that he had recorded his own murder on his Apple Watch, thus providing the source of the much-talked-about, still-unheard tape of Khashoggi’s death. The fact that the Apple Watch angle—reported by a pro-government Turkish newspaper—is almost certainly false doesn’t make the ploy any less interesting, though, especially to veterans of the American intelligence community. “The Turks were floating this trial balloon that Khashoggi recorded his own death to play with an alibi that would distance themselves ever so slightly,” says Ned Price, a former Central Intelligence Agency analyst and a National Security Council staffer in the Obama administration. “It certainly sounds like they have in their possession sensitive collection from a Saudi diplomatic facility on their territory. To put it bluntly, they were spying on the Saudi consulate, and doing so quite effectively. It puts the Turks in a tough situation.”

The watch subterfuge also hints at the complex dynamics set in motion by Khashoggi’s killing. The aftermath is rippling through intelligence circles in ways that could take years to fully play out, with particular consequences for American counterterrorism efforts. One impact is internal, and it is compounded by Trump’s previous hostility toward the intelligence community’s work on Russian election interference and on Iran’s compliance with the nuclear-weapons deal. “The chances are that the White House has been told from the very beginning that this situation was not as the Saudis described it,” says Cindy Otis, a former C.I.A. analyst who served in the Middle East and Europe. “So there’s been a willful ignoring of the I.C. and an attempt to find anything to defend the White House’s position on this. . . . The backbone of the agency is a hardened bunch. But it’s really a demoralizing thing.”

Trump seems to finally be absorbing his own intelligence community’s findings—sort of, and perversely, with his recent criticism of the Saudis for poorly executing the execution of Khashoggi. That shift in tone coincided with the C.I.A. director, Gina Haspel, flying to Ankara, in part to assess the evidence the Turks say they have developed. “Remember the anonymous op-ed that said there are two tracks of national security? I think that’s what we’re seeing here,” says Juliette Kayyem, a Homeland Security assistant secretary in the Obama administration. “For the first weeks, I kept saying, ‘Where is Haspel? Where is Dan Coats?’ They clearly knew that whatever was being said publicly by the administration was not accurate. It’s good they are out there now. . . . The adults are running the response, and the unsophisticated president is being ignored.”

Haspel also needs to grapple with larger issues radiating from recent events in the region. Last year, Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince, pushed aside Mohammed bin Nayef, the heir apparent to the throne, who for years had been one of the most important Middle East counterterrorism officials and who had worked closely with the United States. “The problem is that we are now taking an approach to foreign policy that focuses on personalities and not principles,” says Colin Clarke, a Middle East expert at the Soufan Center and the author of After the Caliphate. “Personalities leading these countries came and went, but as long as we knew what we stood for, we were O.K. Now we’re working through Jared Kushner, and we bet on M.B.S. big time, who is turning out not to be the liberal reformer he promised he’d be. Huge surprise, right?”