The Brothers (22 page)

The prosecution stressed that Kair was facing up to twenty-eight years in prison—eight for lying and twenty for obstructing justice—and this made him a flight risk. Kair speaks seven languages and has “significant ties outside the country,” making it even more likely that he would flee, argued Assistant U.S. Attorney Scott Riley. Plus, he said, the defendant would probably be deported if convicted—all the more reason to try to leave the country before trial if he were released on bail.

The judge noted that Kair could not actually be deported to his country of origin because the United States had granted him political asylum. At least one of the prosecutor’s arguments was thus rejected out of hand. It began to seem possible that this was that rare—perhaps unique—occasion when a noncitizen in a terrorism case would be released on bail. Maybe all the defense attorney had to do now was ask for it.

“At this point I cannot find reason to argue against detention,” said Hayden instead. “I don’t see any place for him to go.” Kair had been behind bars for less than a week, but his life had fallen apart: his landlord had already evicted him and his employer had fired him, revoking his lease on the cab. With no home, no job, and no family in the United States, Kair was now committed to “voluntary detention without prejudice” in county jail.

In a few weeks, the women of the Free Jahar movement organized a place for Kair to stay in the Boston area—and if the judge would allow him to leave the district, Elena Teyer had volunteered to house him in Savannah indefinitely. But the judge rejected this proposal, and Kair’s detention stopped being “voluntary.” He was scheduled to face trial no sooner than the summer of 2015.

WHAT WILL WE KNOW?

W
hy are you writing this book?” Mohammed Gadzhiev, Tamerlan’s friend and deputy head of the Union of the Just, asked me. We had spent most of a day talking, and the conversation had taken a few twists. Gadzhiev had been by turns condescending, engaged, and intimidating. Now, in the evening, we were drinking black tea at a large wooden table outdoors at a roadside café on the outskirts of Makhachkala, and Gadzhiev signaled it was time I came clean about my agenda. Specifically, he wanted to know why I had asked comparatively few questions about the celebrity martyrs whom Tamerlan had been rumored to have tried to contact in Dagestan. Because, I said, I saw no credence to the rumors—an impression my interlocutor clearly shared. I had asked him many detailed questions about his own time with Tamerlan and conversations they had had, and what he was asking me now was this: If I was not chasing the story of the great Dagestan-based terrorist conspiracy that radicalized Tamerlan Tsarnaev, then what story was I writing?

I told him I had been a reporter at both of the wars in Chechnya and had covered their aftermath, and he was mildly impressed. I told him that a few years back I had spent time at a university studying with people who strove to understand the nature of terrorism. I told him that I had been a teenage Russian-speaking immigrant in Boston—and at this point I sensed that Gadzhiev had lost interest.

“So you are one of those people who think social injustice is to blame,” he said, his voice brittle with disappointment. “Why can’t you believe that he simply objected to U.S. foreign policy and that’s why he did it?”

In fact, I can and do believe that not only Tamerlan but Jahar as well could have made a rational choice—that is, a choice consistent with their values and their understanding of causal relationships—and, as a result of that choice, set off bombs that killed three people and injured at least 264. The story I was trying to tell was not one of big conspiracies or even giant examples of injustice. The people in key roles in this story are few, the ideas they hold are uncomplicated, and the plans they conjure are anything but far-reaching. It was the hardest and most frightening kind of story to believe.

The dominant understanding of terrorism in American culture, which has driven both media coverage of terrorism and law enforcement response to it, rests on the concept of “radicalization.” Radicalization theory has its roots much more in the FBI, whose staff psychologists and behavior specialists have developed it, than in the academic study of terrorism, whose representatives briefly became talking heads on American television after September 11 and still stalwartly try—and fail—to explain to the civilian branches of government what they have learned. According to radicalization theory, a person becomes a terrorist by way of identifiable stages of adopting increasingly radical ideas, until he or she is finally radicalized into terrorist action. This theory has shaped policy, behavior, and lives, though it remains highly controversial among terrorism scholars. Common sense and human experience show that only a small minority of people who subscribe to radical ideas—even the kinds of radical ideas that justify and promote violence—actually engage in violence. Research also shows that some terrorists do not hold strong political or ideological beliefs. In other words, knowing what someone believes can help neither to predict terrorism nor to explain it. Still, the bulk of the FBI’s efforts in the War on Terror have concentrated on tracking routes to presumed radicalization, ferreting out ostensibly radicalized individuals, and cracking down on networks that supposedly facilitate radicalization. At first it was assumed that where there is radicalization, there is a network, but in recent years the FBI has been proposing the “lone wolf” terrorist model to explain the apparent absence of such networks in some cases. The radicalization hypothesis itself, on the other hand, has held steady in the face of a glaring lack of evidence.

In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing, both law enforcement and the American press corps focused their efforts on finding out who radicalized Tamerlan or both of the Tsarnaev brothers, and when and where. The possibility that their actions were driven by simple ideas acquired without any concerted outside help, that, as Gadzhiev said, Tamerlan “simply objected to U.S. foreign policy” like hundreds of thousands of other people but, unlike the overwhelming majority of them, decided to use a bomb to express his opposition—this terrifyingly simple idea was never on the table.

For anyone inclined to feel sympathy for the brothers, or at least to attempt to understand them—that is, for their friends and family, and the friends and family of anyone caught up in the investigation—Gadzhiev’s simple explanation is also too painful and counterintuitive to entertain. The fallout that has so direly affected this group seems to demand a larger, more dramatic explanation. So people as different in background, social status, and relationship to the events as Zubeidat, Amir, and some of the Tsarnaevs’ American friends have come to subscribe to one of any number of variants of a single conspiracy theory.

•   •   •

THE FIRST COHERENT
conspiracy theory took shape within a month of the marathon bombing. In May 2013, in London, I met with Akhmed Zakayev, the last surviving member of the 1990s pro-independence Chechen leadership who was still fighting that fight. He had no doubt that the bombing had been organized by the FSB, the Russian secret police. “Putin and his cohorts are the only ones who benefited from this bombing,” he said. How? Russia was preparing to host the Olympic Games in Sochi in 2014. Some politicians and media in the West had questioned the wisdom of giving the Olympics to Russia, because Putin’s law enforcement could not be trusted to ensure the safety of visiting athletes, dignitaries, and the public. Russia had seen dozens of terrorist attacks every year of the past decade—suicide bombings, car bombs, and several hostage-takings—so many, in fact, that they drew public attention, even inside Russia, only when the attacks occurred outside the embattled regions of the North Caucasus. In November 2009, a high-speed train going from Moscow to Saint Petersburg crashed, killing twenty-eight people and injuring more than ninety; law enforcement classified the disaster as a terrorist attack. In March 2010, two explosions in the Moscow Metro killed forty people and injured more than a hundred; a pan-Caucasian insurgent organization with roots in Chechnya claimed credit. In January 2011, a bomb went off in the arrivals hall of a Moscow airport, killing thirty-seven people and wounding 180. Add to this history the many attacks, large and small, in and around Chechnya and Dagestan; the fact that Sochi is geographically close to the region; and the Olympic Games’ unfortunate history as a terrorist target: the 1972 hostage-taking at the Munich Olympics, where eleven members of the Israeli team, one German policeman, and five of the terrorists were killed after a long standoff and a bungled rescue, was one of the attacks that launched the current era of international terrorism.

According to Zakayev’s logic, Putin and his secret police, faced with growing concern about Russia’s ability to provide adequate security during the Olympics—and knowing just how well-founded this concern was—hatched a paradoxical plot. They enticed two Chechen-Americans, the Tsarnaev brothers, to set off bombs at the Boston Marathon. This would reposition Chechen terrorism as an international threat—something Russia had long claimed but lacked evidence to back up—as well as shore up American support for a continued Russian crackdown in the Caucasus and preemptively disarm any critics of what might prove to be an imperfect security effort in Sochi. After all, events would have ostensibly shown, the Americans had proved unable to protect their own sporting events against the Chechens.

Zakayev based his arguments on the known facts. By this time the FBI had acknowledged that back in 2011 the FSB had alerted it to Tamerlan’s existence, as part of a regular exchange of information on suspected terrorists. In Zakayev’s view, this showed that the FSB was already tracking Tamerlan. When Tamerlan traveled to Dagestan in 2012, Zakayev was convinced, it was at the FSB’s instigation. Once the young man was indoctrinated and trained, the FSB sent him back to the United States with instructions to set off a bomb at the next big sporting event.

No wonder Putin was uncharacteristically fast to react to the Boston bombing, becoming one of the first world leaders to express his condolences and stress the importance of international cooperation in the fight against terrorism. The Russian president, reasoned Zakayev, had planned the tragedy—and the reaction—himself.

Then there was the opposite theory, or perhaps the same theory but with a different cast of characters. A number of people, many of them far outside the usual-suspect circles of conspiracy theorists, became convinced that the FBI was behind the bombings. The FBI certainly had greater opportunity to commit the crime than did the FSB. The FBI had access to Tamerlan, it had had Tamerlan on its radar at least since the FSB alerted it to his existence in early 2011, and the FBI has been known to engage people in elaborate imaginary terrorist plots in order to identify potential attackers. But what would have been the FBI’s motive? This is the weak part of the theory: most of the proponents to whom I have spoken suggest that the FBI enticed Tamerlan Tsarnaev to bomb the Boston Marathon in order to test the agency’s ability to impose martial law in America.

Part of what has kept people engaged with the FBI-conspiracy theory, and has even kept new adherents streaming in, is the impressive list of inconsistencies a slew of self-styled investigators have identified in the law enforcement narrative of the bombing. Many of the criticisms of the FBI story are nitpicky and hardly bear repeating, and some are imaginary, but a few seem significant enough to consider. Any conspiracy theorist, for example, will tell you about the backpack: in the available photographs of Jahar taken at the marathon, he is seen walking in the crowd, carrying a gray backpack easily on one shoulder. Another set of pictures shows a backpack that has been ripped apart by the device that exploded inside it. The backpack in the second set of photos is black. Of course, the most likely explanation for the discrepancy is that there were two backpacks, a gray one carried by Jahar and a black one carried by Tamerlan. But the indictment in Jahar’s case says that both bombs were concealed inside black backpacks. And the conspiracy theorists also have pictures of a third person—someone whose general demeanor and outfit make the theorists believe he is an officer of some sort of military or militarized organization—with just that kind of black backpack with a white square on its handle that can also be seen in the second set of photographs. (In the available photos of Tamerlan, he is carrying a black backpack, but one without a white square on the handle.)

There may be a variety of explanations for this—two people at the giant event could have had the same backpack, or any or all of the photographs may be inauthentic—but the conspiracy theorists point to other holes in the story: Danny, the owner of the hijacked SUV, made contradictory statements about the timing and sequence of events; police officers’ accounts of the manhunt and the shoot-out are full of incredible assertions—cars turning around on a dime on narrow streets; individual cops being in three places at once, or on what appear to be thirty-six-hour shifts, or both—and the explosive device that was supposedly thrown by one of the brothers in the middle of a tiny residential street harmed no one and damaged nothing.

The inconsistencies in stories told by police officers are likely to have logical explanations, paramount among them the fact that the police were sleep-deprived, scared, and genuinely confused by the disarray in the ranks of law enforcement. The general human tendency to misremember details would have been exacerbated. If any of them had things to conceal, these probably concerned matters peripheral to the question of whether the brothers were guilty of the bombing. But they serve as a reminder to consider what evidence was available when American public opinion convicted the brothers, long before any proof was presented in a court of law.

Members of the investigative team originally picked out Jahar and Tamerlan on surveillance videos because their behavior appeared different from that of the rest of the marathon spectators. When the first blast sounded, the two did not panic or run. By all accounts, before the FBI released the surveillance photos and asked for help identifying the suspects, the brothers acted normal, showing no signs of distress or intention to escape—until they became the objects of a manhunt. At that point the very fact that they were running away served as affirmation of their guilt.

Later, other evidence was said to emerge. A few days after Jahar was captured, Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick and several media outlets citing sources in law enforcement said that there existed another video, in which Jahar could be seen setting his backpack down on the ground at the spot where the second explosion occurred. Then, according to these sources, he could be seen walking away—and acting calm when the first explosion sounded. The video was not released to the public.

While Jahar was hiding in the boat, he scrawled a note on its interior wall. It was quoted in the grand jury indictment, and later a larger portion was included in one of the prosecution’s filings in the case:

I’m jealous of my brother who ha[s] [re]ceived the reward of jannutul Firdaus
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(inshallah) before me. I do not mourn because his soul is very much alive. God has a plan for each person. Mine was to hide in this boat and shed some light on our actions. I ask Allah to make me a shahied (iA)
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to allow me to return to him and be among all the righteous people in the highest levels of heaven. He who Allah guides no one can misguide. A[llah Ak]bar!

The US Government is killing our innocent civilians but most of you already know that. As a [illegible] I can’t stand to see such evil go unpunished, we Muslims are one body, you hurt one you hurt us all. Well at least that’s how muhhammad (pbuh
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) wanted it to be [for]ever, the ummah
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is beginning to rise/[illegible] has awoken the mujahideen, know you are fighting men who look into the barrel of your gun and see heaven, now how can you compete with that. We are promised victory and we will surely get it. Now I don’t like killing innocent people it is forbidden in Islam but due to said [illegible] it is allowed. All credit goes [illegible].