In another, less chaotic era, the stunning leak of C.I.A. intercepts fingering Mohammed bin Salman for the plot to murder Jamal Khashoggi would have been a scandal, itself. And yet, to many in the intelligence community, the potential disclosure of sources and methods used to ascertain the Saudi crown prince’s culpability was merely the natural progression in the Khashoggi affair, which has pitted President Donald Trump against the U.S. intelligence apparatus. “Somebody wanted this information to come out, obviously. I think there is, inside the American national security bureaucracy, a fair number of people who have been warning for some time that Mohammed bin Salman is a dangerous, reckless, impulsive person and they weren’t getting any attention. And now they have proof positive of how dangerous and reckless he is,” Bruce Riedel, a former C.I.A. official, told me. “In Washington, the way you say, ‘I told you so,’ is to leak something.”

While the Trump administration races to repair its bond with Riyadh, the West Wing and Langley are once again at cross purposes. “I can’t imagine it’s going well,” one former administration official quipped. “At this point, I’m not sure there’s much left to salvage.”

Tensions between Trump and the C.I.A. had been building since Khashoggi’s disappearance in early October, when the president first endorsed the explanation offered by M.B.S., as the young crown prince is known, in contravention of intelligence assessments suggesting the de facto Saudi leader had orchestrated the Khashoggi plot. Those frustrations boiled over at the end of November, when Trump effectively rebuked the C.I.A. in a stunning statement smearing Khashoggi as an “enemy of the state” and—not for the first time—doubting U.S. intelligence. “King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman vigorously deny any knowledge of the planning or execution of the murder of Mr. Khashoggi,” Trump wrote. “Our intelligence agencies continue to assess all information, but it could very well be that the crown prince had knowledge of this tragic event—maybe he did and maybe he didn’t!”

To the intelligence community, a gauntlet had been thrown down. “That amounts to saying that unless there is complete certainty there is no knowledge,” said Steven Aftergood, the director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, “And that is a repudiation of both the mission of intelligence and the competence of U.S. intelligence agencies. Their whole domain is the area of what is uncertain. If we knew it for a fact, then it wouldn’t be intelligence,” he told me.

Under those circumstances, a leak was perhaps predictable. On Saturday, The Wall Street Journal reported that it had reviewed excerpts of the C.I.A. assessment that M.B.S. messaged his top aide tasked with overseeing the 15-man team, Saud al-Qahtani, 11 times in the hours before and after Khashoggi was killed and dismembered in the Saudi consulate. The content and form of the messages was not disclosed, but as Riedel explained, the details are immaterial given the timing. “You don’t really need to know the content of these reports, it is self-evident. Fifteen people don’t get on an airplane and fly to Istanbul for a day trip and fly back having murdered someone and then made phone calls from the scene of the crime back to the crown prince’s office,” he said. “You are not talking about the weather.”

Whatever its motivation or source, the leak is a dangerous escalation. “It is pretty clear to experts or anyone that spent time in the region or who knows the players what happens here and so it is always nice to see the truth prevail and come out. But as a person who has consumed intelligence, I am just horrified at the leak . . . It puts people on notice about what we have access to, it diminishes our ability to know things in the future,” a former U.S. official told me. “The specificity is just very chilling, and I imagine for the people who felt that preserving the M.B.S. [relationship] was the right path—and I am not one of those people—but for the people who felt that, that just went out of the window.”