On March 22, the final day of Mohammed bin Salman’s tour of Washington, D.C., an important leg of his reciprocal ring-kissing excursions through the great American industrial metropolises—Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Seattle, Manhattan—he paid a visit to The Washington Post at One Franklin Square. The meeting had been arranged by the Post’s editorial board, which invited some reporters and editors to sit in and ask questions of the putative millennial reformist, heir to the Saudi throne, for some 75 minutes. The conversation was designated as off the record, but the Saudi Embassy agreed to make several portions usable for a Post news story, presumably to help facilitate a favorable perception of M.B.S., who was concurrently waging a chilling war against Yemen and had recently imprisoned a couple hundred countrymen (and family members) in a Riyadh hotel. As would appear to be the case with his performance before moguls from Michael Bloomberg to Jeff Bezos, the Post’s owner, the charm offensive was productive. “Mohammed was animated and engaged,” reporter Karen DeYoung wrote, “fielding questions on a range of topics, from the war in Yemen to the Middle East peace process, Iran, his domestic reform agenda, human rights, and Saudi Arabia’s nuclear plans.”

Seven months later, and two weeks after the disappearance of Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, the Post finds itself at the center of a dizzyingly complex international crisis that it is both covering and mourning in real time. Khashoggi, who walked into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2 and hasn’t been seen since, has been a contributor since last September, writing for the Post’s Global Opinions section, which was created in 2016 as part of the ongoing Bezos revival. Khashoggi’s likely death marks the second major international incident involving a Post journalist since 2015, when Tehran bureau chief Jason Rezaian was convicted and imprisoned by the Iranian government in a sham espionage trial. Rezaian, who was released in January 2016, also now writes for Global Opinions and knew Khashoggi, and he has been speaking about his colleague in press interviews.

Khashoggi, as a contributing columnist who had only been writing for a year, didn’t have extensive ties or relationships throughout the newsroom, which operates separately from the opinion side. But his fate—the gruesome reports of what happened to him, the international implications, and what it means for a free press—has subsequently set the Post into a frenzy. Staffers told me that the newsroom feels like it is pursuing an important and difficult story about one of its own. “That’s definitely been an animating force,” one person involved in the coverage said. “People are concerned because he’s our colleague, but we’re also just very focused on figuring out what the real story is.” A substantial team of reporters and editors scattered between Washington and Istanbul has been working voraciously to advance the story—including a quadruple-bylined piece connecting a member of M.B.S.’s entourage to Khashoggi’s suspected murder.

Within the newsroom, colleagues regularly see the journalists assigned to the sprawling story huddling around one reporter’s desk or another, or assembled in some breakout room. The Istanbul crew has been working around the clock given the time difference. The video team pulled an all-nighter last week producing a segment about key surveillance footage that the Post obtained, purporting to show a chain of events leading up to Khashoggi’s disappearance. “Even people who aren’t involved in the coverage are all talking about it,” a Post journalist told me. “How’s the administration gonna respond? What does this mean for our other overseas journalists? It’s definitely the driving thing—the primary narrative that everyone is driving at right now.” This person said the only other story where he’d seen that “level of intensity” in recent times was the early days of the Russia probe, when it seemed like the Post and The New York Times were dropping bombshell scoops almost every single night, setting an ominous tone for the dawn of the Trump presidency.