The Brothers

by Masha Gessen

  The Florida report included a screenshot of the trooper’s phone with the text messages, but the messages following his warning one—“Be on guard”—were redacted, covered with rectangular bars applied to the graphic. A blogger then did what most people with a computer could do: he removed the bars to reveal the messages. (Several journalists successfully repeated the trick.) The next message the trooper sent to his fellow officers—the other trooper and the Massachusetts FBI agent—went out the evening of May 22, nineteen hours after Ibragim died:

  “Well done this week man well done joy some time at home and in will talk soon.”

  A minute later: “That was supposed to say well done men we all got through it and are now heading home. Great work.”

  The un-redacting of the report also revealed the name of the FBI agent who shot Ibragim—and The Boston Globe then meticulously verified his identity. He was Aaron McFarlane, he was forty-one years old, and he had been with the FBI since 2008. Before that, he had been a police officer in Oakland, California. While there, he was accused of falsifying a police report, and the Oakland Police Department was sued twice by former suspects who claimed he had physically assaulted them. The Oakland police settled each of the lawsuits for $32,500, and McFarlane left in 2004, with a lifetime annual pension of $52,000.

  • • •

  OF COURSE they sent a killer to interview Ibragim, thought Elena. And look at those text messages in which they congratulate each other for killing him! Her view of America had changed radically in the months that passed between Ibragim’s death and the publication of the text messages and information about FBI Agent McFarlane.

  Elena returned to Fort Stewart in late June 2013, after Reni finally left for Chechnya with Ibragim’s body: Elena’s emergency leave had lasted a month. On June 26, she told me, she was at a doctor’s appointment on base when two sergeants from her unit came to fetch her. “They took me somewhere. A woman came out and, without introducing herself, started to search me and told me to hand over my phone and keys. She said, ‘You can’t take anything with you if you are going inside.’ I said, ‘I’m not planning to go anywhere, at least not alone.’ One of the escorts, a female sergeant, said she’d go in with me, so she was also frisked. When we went in, I saw one of the agents who came to my house before. He said, ‘We have received information that you are planning to buy a gun and shoot FBI agents.’ I said, ‘Tell me, is it illegal to have a gun in the house?’—‘No.’—‘Okay, that’s the only question I have for you, and I have no answers for you anyway.’” The agent did not try to keep her in the room.

  Elena told me she had never owned a gun and had no desire to have one.

  Three weeks later, the agent called again. Elena hung up as soon as he introduced himself, then recorded his number in her phone as “Terrorist.” He did not call again, though.

  In another month, Elena’s commanding officer summoned her to inform her, apologetically, that the FBI had flagged her as being under investigation. As she understood, that essentially meant she was being placed on indefinite paid leave: she could neither carry out her work duties in the military nor be reassigned or promoted as long as she was so “flagged.” The next day, Elena accepted a medical discharge from the Army. She was now forty-four, retired, and, she felt, a lot wiser than she had been a few months earlier.

  America’s promise of fairness, openness, and honesty had turned out to be a ruse, she concluded. It was not a better country than Russia; it was just a better liar. Elena had grown up and begun raising her own children in a country that was capable of anything: bombing its own cities out of existence, as it did with Grozny in 1995 and 1999; blowing up more than three hundred people in order to secure an election, as it did in 1999; killing its own citizens abroad and endangering dozens of lives in the process, as it did with a former secret agent in London in 2006. America had said it would be different—its laws were firm, its courts were fair, and its respect for human life was absolute. Nothing in Elena’s lived experience had taught her that a country could really be like that, but as both an immigrant and a new Army recruit, she had accepted the premise enthusiastically.

  But the minute she heard her daughter screaming into the phone—“Mama, they killed him!”—she knew she had been fooled. The same rules applied in this country as in the old one. The secret police killed people when they wanted to; a reason could always be found later. The secret police could and would engineer tragedies to their own ends, or to the government’s; someone to blame could always be found later.

  In May 2013, someone who claimed to be a resident of the Watertown neighborhood where the gun battle between law enforcement and the Tsarnaev brothers occurred posted a video on YouTube that, he wrote, showed the apprehension of Tamerlan—alive—by the police and his saying “podstava,” the Russian word for “setup,” as he was detained. I watched the video several times—it was darkness, flashing lights, sirens—but I was unable to discern someone being detained or to hear anyone say “podstava.” If Tamerlan had indeed said that word at any point, it could have meant anything from “I was set up” to simply a rueful interjection, as though life itself had engineered the setup. But the interpretation of the video became gospel among followers of the numerous “Free Jahar” groups on social networks: here was evidence that the brothers themselves believed they had been set up.

  Elena became part of the online community of Jahar’s defenders. The many online groups, with a combined membership in the thousands, were an odd conglomeration of left-wing doubters, right-wing conspiracy theorists, young women with crushes on Jahar, and middle-aged women aghast at the too-apparent barbarity of keeping a young man alive in order to kill him after a trial the outcome of which was preordained. Early on, the movement had been dominated by energetic young people intent on exposing a truth that departed dramatically from the official version of events. In the summer of 2013, for example, I interviewed a thirty-one-year-old Truther with a shaved head and tattoos on most of his exposed skin who had moved to Boston from Las Vegas to conduct his own investigation. Over time, men like him switched their focus to other government conspiracies, and middle-aged women driven primarily by compassion gradually took over. Elena fit in well among them, and the story of the killing of Ibragim naturally became the centerpiece of the movement’s narrative of the obstruction of truth and the lack of justice. Elena now devoted herself to the movement fully.

  In December 2014, she flew to Boston, barely scraping together enough money for the ticket and one night in a hotel, to attend Jahar’s final pretrial hearing—the first time he would be brought to court since pleading not guilty in July 2013. As the brief proceedings were wrapping up, she shouted out in Russian: “Dzhokhar, there are people here who love you! We pray for you and support you! We know you are innocent!” She told me later she had decided ahead of time she would scream in Russian “so he would know it wasn’t someone mocking him.” As the U.S. marshals moved in to usher Elena out of the courtroom, she screamed at them, too: “I am an American citizen and I have the right to say what I think!”

  Eleven

  EVERYONE IS GOING TO JAIL

  After he pulled off his shirt, as instructed, outside the apartment door, Azamat was frisked, handcuffed, shackled, walked a few paces through a thicket of men in SWAT gear, and shoved into the backseat of a police car. A few moments later a man in civilian clothes thrust his head into the car. He was in his forties, broad-shouldered, with close-cropped gray hair and plain white good looks.

  “Where the fuck is Jahar?” he shouted.

  “I don’t know,” said Azamat. “The news says he is in Watertown.”

  “Don’t you fucking lie to me!” barked the agent. Afterward, he shouted something else about Jahar’s life being over and Azamat’s being in danger.

  After about an hour just sitting in the cruiser while men in SWAT gear ran around and in and out of the building, shouting and radioing, Azamat was
driven a short distance in New Bedford. He no longer knew where Dias and Bayan were. An officer got him out of the car, unshackled him, and told him to stand next to the vehicle. Azamat stood. People in uniform and in civilian clothes continued to run in and out of the building. They had arrived at the state police barracks, where the FBI had temporarily set up shop that afternoon, nearly certain that Jahar would be captured at the Carriage Drive apartment. It was another hour before someone led Azamat into the building, into a tiny, windowless room that was almost completely empty—even the shelves against one of the walls were barren, save for a recording device that sat on one of them. The device, however, would not be used, because the FBI records interviews only with subjects who are in custody, which Azamat was not.

  There were two agents in the room, an olive-skinned man and a pale woman. They were both small—they did not tower over Azamat like the man who had shouted at him. Although Azamat was still handcuffed and shirtless, he must have felt a bit less scared—Special Agent Sara Wood later testified that he was relaxed and smiling. He asked to go to the bathroom. The agents said he could not, just yet. He said he was bursting and would go in his shorts if they did not let him use the bathroom. One of the agents said that he could go if he signed a form first. The form said that Azamat was agreeing to talk to the FBI voluntarily and was waiving his right to an attorney. Azamat signed—he would have signed that anyway—and then Special Agent Farbod Azad, the olive-skinned man, took him to the bathroom.

  When Agent Azad brought Azamat back, they began talking. It was just before eight on Friday evening. It was almost half past four in the morning on Saturday when Azamat got home. In the intervening hours, Agent Wood, the pale woman, asked most of the questions, and Agent Azad took notes. Azamat answered questions about Jahar, who not long after the questioning began was found in the boat in Watertown, though Azamat would not know about this until later. Sometimes one of the agents would leave the room for a while. At one point Azamat was so cold that he begged the agents to find him a shirt. Agent Wood went to look for one but returned empty-handed. Apparently, in the entire police barracks filled with people many of whom had come in from other cities (Agent Wood herself had driven up from New York that morning), no one had a spare shirt, T-shirt, sweater, or jacket to lend to Azamat. Agent Wood later testified that Azamat shook violently but not from the cold: it was nerves. She said that the shakes began when the questioning brought them to Thursday night and the friends’ visit to Jahar’s dorm room. Azamat told the agents that they had taken a computer, his own Beats headphones, and a backpack. He also told them that in the morning, once he learned that Jahar had been identified as one of the bombers, he had told Dias that he needed to remember where he had disposed of the backpack.

  “Why?” asked Agent Wood. She later testified that Azamat shrugged in response.

  “Why did you throw out the backpack?”

  “I don’t know.” In Russian, even more than in American culture, “I don’t know” can mean many things other than simply pleading ignorance—including “I don’t know what to say” and “I don’t know how to explain it to you.”

  “Between his shaking and indicating that they threw the backpack out, it was clear we weren’t getting the full story,” Agent Wood later told a jury in federal court. “As I began to confront him, he continued to say, ‘I don’t know.’ Finally, he didn’t respond, but his shoulders slumped and his body language changed. I lowered my voice and leaned across the table. ‘What was in the backpack?’ He responded, ‘The stuff you use on New Year’s.’”

  Agent Wood did not understand.

  “Petarda,” said Azamat, trying a Russian word. No match.

  He tried to use a translation app on his iPhone, as he had several times during the conversation, but it did not know the word, either. He gestured with his hands and tried to imitate the sound of fireworks: “Wee, wee, wee, boom!” Agent Wood finally got it.

  On the fourth iteration, Azamat’s list of things removed from Jahar’s room included: the laptop, the headphones, the backpack with hollow fireworks, and a brown ashtray, which he also had not mentioned earlier. He succeeded in omitting what he most wanted to conceal, which was the bag of marijuana. And he still did not know where Dias had thrown the backpack.

  Before Azamat mentioned the fireworks, but after he had handed the agents his phone and told them the password and gone through and translated for them the text messages he had exchanged with Dias, he asked if he should speak to his consulate. Agent Wood got the number of the Kazakh consulate and let Azamat use the landline, but it was half past ten at night and he got voice mail.

  A bit after midnight, the agents told Azamat that he was free to go. He had no idea how to get home: Dias had also been taken into custody, and at any rate, Azamat had no phone service. He put his head on the lone desk in the little room and fell asleep.

  The person who roused him was the big man from the previous afternoon. He was Agent John Walker, and he was directing this part of the investigation.

  “I’m beginning to think I am being held here against my will,” said Azamat.

  Agent Walker told him it was nothing like that—he was free to go. In fact, Agent Walker would drive him. When they arrived at Carriage Drive, Dias was there with two other FBI agents. They assembled around the table—the one at which Dias, Azamat, and Bayan had sat twelve hours earlier waiting for the FBI. Now it was the FBI, Dias, and Azamat, standing. The laptop, the ashtray, and the baseball hat sat on the table. One of the agents spotted the red hat.

  “Is that Jahar’s?” he asked.

  The boys nodded.

  “We want that hat,” said the agent.

  “I don’t know, I kind of like the way it looks on me,” said Dias, grabbing the hat and putting it on his head.

  Azamat quickly tore the hat off his friend’s head and handed it to the agent.

  The agents searched the apartment—Azamat had signed a consent form for that, too—and left, taking with them what they had found of Jahar’s stuff. When they were gone, Azamat asked Dias where he had thrown out the backpack.

  “In the dumpster,” said Dias.

  “You idiot,” said Azamat.

  • • •

  ROBEL DID NOT SEE the men in SWAT gear lay siege to 69A Carriage Drive, and he did not see his friends being led out of the building at gunpoint, in handcuffs and shackles. He had known to get as far away as possible from that place. After Azamat drove him to campus so he could dump his bag with the marijuana in it and they returned to Carriage Drive, Robel said, “The media are going to be here soon,” and got to work finding a ride out of New Bedford. He got hold of Quan Le Phan, a former roommate. He probably did not have to explain why he had to get away from the Kazakhs’ apartment: by this time, all of UMass knew that Jahar had been identified as one of the bombers. Quan had to leave campus anyway because the dorms were being evacuated, but Robel bombarded him with messages urging him to hurry until, less than half an hour later, Quan took Robel with him to his parents’ house in Worcester, about seventy miles to the northwest.

  Just after three in the afternoon, Robel got a text from Azamat: “Policemen are coming to our apartment . . .” and less then a minute later: “They are looking for you . . .” Robel responded, “Tell them we left because of campus lockdown and are coming back when they tell us to.”

  Robel’s strategy must have been to try to make himself invisible while also appearing cooperative. He knew the police would come to Carriage Drive, but he figured that if he avoided being spotted by them and especially if he made it inconvenient enough to try to get him, maybe the police would forget about him. There is, however, no such thing as being too inconveniently located for FBI agents conducting an investigation. Two officers—an FBI agent named Dwight Schwader and a county police detective named David Earle, who was also assigned to the Joint Terrorism Task Force, one of a hundred such interagency gro
ups run by FBI offices around the country—drove to Worcester. They asked Robel, Quan, and Quan’s roommate Jim Li, who had gone with Quan and Robel to Quan’s house from Dartmouth, to meet in the Price Chopper parking lot. The boys came and then took turns walking across the lot from their car to the officers’ SUV, getting in, and answering questions. Before letting them into the vehicle, the officers, who were wearing SWAT gear, stood each of the boys against the SUV and patted them down thoroughly.

  Robel’s interview lasted a couple of hours, and just another two hours later, he was already feeling cavalier about it.

  “It was kind of funny,” he texted at 1:53 in the morning to a friend named Elohe Dereje, an aspiring actress and model in Maryland. “They asked me what I was doing all day when I was hanging out with people. I told them smoking on so many occasions that they just started to laugh.”

  A minute later, he added, “They grilled me for 2 hours straight.”

  Elohe responded:

  LMAOO WHAT?? YOU DID NOTTT . . .

  LIKE WHERE THEY INTERROGATE YOU?

  THEY HAD TO TAKE YOU?

  I’M NOT PLAYING, THEY INTERROGATED

  ME IN A PARKING LOT IN THEIR CAR

  THESE GUYS ONLY CARED FOR

  THE BOMBS AND GUNS

  WOW, SO DID YOU FIND OUT

  WHY THEY DID WHAT THEY DID?

  WHY HIS BROTHER BOMBED

  THE MARATHON?

  NOPE, NOTHING SO FAR.

  THEY SAID IF THE GUY DOESN’T TRY

  TO PLEAD NOT GUILTY MORE PEOPLE

  WON’T INTERROGATE ME

  It was less than twenty-four hours since the brothers had been identified, but the narrative had already taken hold: it was the older brother who had bombed the marathon.