In June 2015, Wikileaks dumped a new motherload of secret documents, more than 60,000 cables from inside the Saudi foreign ministry.

These cables, declared Wikileaks founder Julian Assange,

lift the lid on an increasingly erratic and secretive dictatorship that has not only celebrated its 100th beheading this year,

but which has also become a menace to its neighbors and itself.

The Saudi cables didn't make the biggest media splash at the time.

Much of what they revealed was pretty much assumed throughout the world that Saudi leaders were nervous about pro-democracy street protests during the Arab Spring,

that they feared their mortal enemies in Tehran, and that the Saudi regime tried to co-op the Arab media by purchasing mass subscriptions to publications in Beirut, Damascus, Abu Dhabi, and elsewhere.

A way to make them de facto investors and influence their content.

But one of those cables has eerie new relevance in light of the disclosures about what happened to Jamal Kashoggi,

the dissonant Saudi journalist who was murdered inside the Saudi consulate after rebupping earlier efforts to persuade him to return to the kingdom.

The cable involved another prominent US-based Saudi dissonant named Ali Ahmed.

It directed that Saudi embassy officials in Washington conduct surveillance of Ahmed, and a think tanky, it started, called the Institute for Gulf Affairs.

It turns out that was only one element in a years long campaign by Saudi officials to neutralize Ahmed, arresting members of his family,

stripping him of his passport, spying on him at events in Washington, and denouncing him as a terrorist after he, too, turned down efforts to lure him back to the kingdom.

He's our guest on today's buried treasure.

I'm Michael Isakov, Chief Investigative correspondent for Yahoo News.

And I'm Dan Clydeman, Editor in Chief of Yahoo News.

Ali Ahmed is a guy I've known for years. He's very typical of a lot of people you meet in Washington, an exiled dissident from authoritarian governments overseas, who shows up, but think tank panels get squoted in newspaper articles, but doesn't get a lot of attention in Washington.

But back home in their home countries, people are paying close attention to what Ali Ahmed and his fellow dissidents are saying in Washington.

And we sometimes lose track of just how closely these people are feeling the heat from their home governments.

I think it's a lesson we're all being reminded of in light of the Jamal Khashoggi murder.

I've run into so many of these kinds of characters in DC at think tank events and conferences, and you never realize that a lot of them are essentially hunted by the governments of the countries where they've had to flee from.

...