The Brothers (24 page)

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THIS PART OF THE STORY
begins in March 2011, when the Russian FSB sent the FBI a letter alerting the agency to the existence of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, a Chechen from Dagestan living in the Boston area who, the FSB claimed, had become radicalized. The FSB’s approach to identifying suspected radicals abroad, for the purposes of continued cooperation with the FBI in the War on Terror, is exactly the same as at home: it considers all urban young Muslim men to be radical—and to be especially radical if they are of Chechen descent. The FSB’s counterparts in the FBI know this and talk about the Russians “playing whack-a-mole” instead of fighting terror. They knew that they had received Tamerlan’s name simply because the FSB happened to find it—and that happened probably because when Zubeidat and Anzor renewed their Russian passports, they had to put down the names and addresses of their children. Still, though the FBI knew that the FSB’s intelligence on suspected Islamic radicals was generally useless, it had its own use for the name: Tamerlan fit perfectly the FBI’s “investigative profile.” He was young, an immigrant, lacked a steady income, and, as a Russian-speaking Muslim in Boston, was an outsider among outsiders. In fact, the FBI had followed this logic earlier, all on its own: the first time an agent came to Norfolk Street to interview Zubeidat was in 2002, the year the family arrived in the United States. The agency’s visits were roughly annual after that—a perfectly ordinary occurrence for people from places the United States views with suspicion (my own first FBI interview, with the Boston field office, took place when I was sixteen; the agents did not bother to seek my parents’ presence or permission)—but the FSB alert prompted the FBI to intensify its efforts.

In the spring and summer of 2011, FBI field agents interviewed Tamerlan at least three times, came to the house on Norfolk Street, and talked to members of the Tsarnaev household. Zubeidat says that the agents tried to recruit Tamerlan. After the bombing, FBI director James Comey, in response to a series of questions from Senate Judiciary Committee member Charles Grassley, a Republican from Iowa, denied that the agency had tried to recruit Tamerlan, but declined to elaborate.

In September 2011, Mess, Weissman, and Teken were killed. There are at least three possible explanations for why law enforcement failed to investigate the gruesome—and unusual—murders: (1) Tamerlan committed the murders, but he was already informing for the FBI or being recruited into one of its terrorist plots, and the FBI protected him from scrutiny as it had done with Whitey Bulger when he murdered people; (2) Tamerlan committed the murders, but he did so either on orders from or in cooperation with the Watertown police, which had its own long-standing interests in the local drug market; (3) the murders were committed by the cops themselves, which is one explanation for the similarity to the later killing of former policewoman Gail Miles.

In January 2012, Tamerlan traveled to Dagestan. The explanation given to Joanna Herlihy and others—that he was going there to renew his Russian passport—was a lie. At least by the time Tamerlan arrived in Dagestan, he had no Russian passport to renew. (Zubeidat told Joanna that he lost all his Russian documents when he got there, but it is unclear how he could have had a Russian passport at all, having lived in the United States for longer than one could have been valid.) He was going back for the same reason any of the Tsarnaevs ever went anywhere: to find a better place to be. He found it. But after six months, someone called him back to the United States urgently. He told people it had something to do with his documents, and this was probably true. Political asylees who do not yet have their U.S. passports are typically advised not to travel to their countries of origin; the very fact of such travel throws doubt on their claim that they face danger at home. In truth, though, people do it all the time and rarely get caught—but when they are caught, they may not be allowed to reenter the United States. It seems that Tamerlan rushed back to America because someone warned him—or, more accurately, threatened him—that he would not be allowed back in. Such a warning could have come only from the FBI. Either Tamerlan had been gone too long for the tastes of the agents to whom he had promised his services as an informant, or the agents had decided that it was time to use a threat to cement or jump-start the recruitment effort. Tamerlan hurried back to Cambridge, where he was a househusband with only the siren call of the FBI informant or recruiter and his friends in now faraway Dagestan for intellectual company. What happened then was most predictable.

The history of terrorism is full of recruits gone rogue—it is dominated by groups that switched or abandoned loyalties. Perhaps the only surprising aspect of the FBI’s list of manufactured terrorist plots of the past dozen years is that all of them appear to have remained in the agency’s hands. Until Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who had, from all available information, hardly given jihad a thought before being fingered by the FSB and targeted by the FBI, went rogue. And, in the way of many modern terrorists, teamed up with his brother.

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ACCORDING TO FBI REPRESENTATIVES
who have spoken publicly about the case, members of the investigative team first focused on the images of the brothers about thirty-six hours before they released the photographs—and the decision to release them was prompted by the threat of a media leak. So the agency called a press conference, showed the images, and asked for the public’s help in identifying the suspects. The FBI could not use its facial-recognition software for the purpose because the surveillance camera that shot the video was mounted well above people’s heads, distorting the angle. All the pictures shown at the press conference were indeed made by cameras looking down on the subjects. While that may work as a technical explanation, it cannot explain how members of the Joint Terrorism Task Force had failed to recognize an individual they had interviewed and had under surveillance just two years earlier—and whose entire family had been tracked by the FBI for more than a decade. One conceivable reason is incompetence: it is theoretically possible that agents who pinpointed the brothers on the surveillance video failed to take the obvious step of showing the pictures to every local agent who had recently interviewed people suspected of links to terrorist organizations. A more logical explanation is that the person or persons who were in a position to recognize the brothers were consciously concealing this fact in order to protect their own or the agency’s reputation—either because it would look like the FBI had fumbled a solid investigative lead, causing tragedy, or worse, because the FBI had considered Tamerlan an informant.

Many people who recognized the brothers on television chose not to call the FBI hotline; but there were those who did call. At least one former high school classmate of Jahar’s who had been on the wrestling team with him called. Maret Tsarnaeva, the brothers’ aunt, called as well. By the time she talked to journalists, nearly twenty-four hours later, no one had contacted her in response to her call. Both of these calls appear to have been made before the MIT police officer was killed on Thursday evening.

In an October 2013 letter to FBI director Comey, Senator Grassley pointed to another odd set of circumstances:

My office has been made aware of another instance following the bombing in which it appears that information was not shared. In the hours leading up to the shooting of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Police Officer Sean Collier and the death of the older suspect involved in the bombing, sources revealed that uniformed Cambridge Police Department officers encountered multiple teams of FBI employees conducting surveillance in the area of Central Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It is unclear who the FBI was watching, but these sources allege that the Cambridge Police Department, including its representation at the JTTF, was not previously made aware of the FBI’s activity in Cambridge.

Several months later, Boston reporters talked to a Cambridge police officer who described the town swarming with FBI that evening and concluded that the agency had been laying siege to the neighborhood in order to capture the brothers. By the time Senator Grassley’s office released the letter, in October, both the head of the FBI’s Boston operation, Richard DesLauriers, and Boston’s police commissioner had resigned, but three days after the letter appeared, the FBI field office in Boston, the Massachusetts State Police, and the Boston police (but not the Cambridge police, which is separate) issued a joint statement denying that the FBI was watching the Tsarnaevs before the Sean Collier murder, or even the shoot-out in Watertown:

Members of the Joint Terrorism Task Force did not know their identities until shortly after Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s death when they fingerprinted his corpse. Nor did the Joint Terrorism Task Force have the Tsarnaevs under surveillance at any time after the assessment of Tamerlan Tsarnaev was closed in 2011. The Joint Terrorism Task Force was at M.I.T., located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on April 18, 2013, on a matter unrelated to the Tsarnaev brothers. Additionally, the Tsarnaev brothers were never sources for the FBI nor did the FBI attempt to recruit them as sources. . . . To be absolutely clear: No one was surveilling the Tsarnaevs, and they were not identified until after the shootout. Any claims to the contrary are false.

Here, an explanation of incompetence strains the imagination: the FBI is claiming that it failed to follow up on leads identifying someone who was once considered a terrorism risk, even though these leads came in to its tip line set up specifically for this purpose, and in one instance from a woman—a lawyer—who claimed to have identified her own nephews in the pictures. It is also, bizarrely, claiming to have deployed personnel to pursue an unrelated matter in Cambridge on the Thursday after the bombing, despite an all-hands-on-deck order from the FBI director at the time, Robert Mueller. Another explanation in this instance makes infinitely more sense: The FBI was setting up an operation without notifying its local partners because it needed to ensure that no other law enforcement got to Tamerlan Tsarnaev before the FBI had captured—or killed—him. In other words, the explanation that best fits the facts is a cover-up.

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TWO MYSTERIES REMAIN.
Why did Ibragim Todashev die? Are Elena Teyer and Boston conspiracy theorists right to believe that his killing was planned—and if it was, then why did law enforcement want him dead? Logically, the assumption that Todashev was not involved in the triple murder in Waltham is at odds with the proposition that he was killed intentionally. If he knew nothing, there was no reason to get rid of him. If he did know something about the murder, it is still difficult to see why anyone would have needed him to die when he was already writing a confession. Of course, the confession is full of inaccuracies, but that in itself is neither unusual nor suggestive of Todashev’s innocence. After all, Robel Phillipos signed an outrageously inaccurate confession describing actions he had actually witnessed or taken, and the FBI had no issue with presenting it as evidence in court. The court, in turn, found Phillipos guilty. Todashev’s case, involving a Chechen immigrant with a criminal record, would have been even easier to prosecute, so the FBI had little reason to worry about the quality of its evidence.

Todashev’s death almost certainly resulted from a combination of incompetence and fear. The FBI found Todashev terrifying. This comes across in the testimony of individual agents as well as in the institution’s very approach to him: it sent seven armed officers to tackle Todashev in order to conduct its first “voluntary interview” with him. For his last interview, Todashev was to face four officers—the Orlando and Boston FBI agents and the two Massachusetts state troopers. One of the members of this team dropped out when the officers discovered that Todashev was not alone; the Orlando agent stayed in the parking lot with Khusein Taramov. Then the interview seemed to go much better than expected, the officers felt happy, lost vigilance, and one of the state troopers stepped outside, leaving only two armed men with the frightening martial artist, who was sitting on a mattress on the floor writing a confession. Whatever Todashev did when he stopped writing—whether he threw the coffee table, ran to the kitchen to rummage for a knife, grabbed a stick, or did all of these things—reminded the officers that they were facing a dangerously and perhaps superhumanly strong man. The fear caused the trooper to fumble with his holster and the FBI agent to shoot to kill. FBI agents are not generally instructed to try to make sure that an aggressive suspect survives, and the agency has exonerated its officers in every single internal investigation into such shootings, so there was no institutional incentive for Agent Aaron McFarlane to try to keep Todashev alive. His death virtually guarantees that we will never know who killed the three men in Waltham, and why.

The other mystery of the narrative of the Boston Marathon bombing is the buried lead of the story, the gaping hole in the investigation. Where did the bombs come from? The grand jury indictment postulates that the brothers read a bomb-making recipe in the al-Qaida–affiliated
Inspire
magazine and built them at home using pressure cookers, gunpowder from fireworks, and other materials. The
Boston Globe
exposé repeats this simple narrative:

One article that both the Tsarnaev brothers apparently read closely, which appeared in the summer 2010 issue of
Inspire
, Al Qaeda’s online English-language journal, was called “Make a Bomb in The Kitchen of Your Mom.” The article provided detailed instruction on how to make a bomb in a pressure cooker using easily obtained flammable materials and shrapnel. The bomb is then attached to an electrical source with “the wires sticking out of the hole in the lid of the cooker.” The article offers several final safety tips, including this: “Put your trust in Allah and pray for the success of your operation. This is the most important rule.”

And then the bomb is ready to go.

I talked to several explosives experts who assured me that “making a bomb in the kitchen of your mom” was probably an impossible proposition. In May 2014, after the initial and even the secondary wave of media attention had died down, U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz filed a motion that contained the following passage: