by Masha Gessen
18. On Wednesday, April 17, 2013, Matanov called Dzhokhar Tsarnaev at approximately 5:04 p.m., but did not connect. Within a minute or so, Matanov called Tamerlan Tsarnaev and talked for almost one-and-a-half minutes. He then placed a call to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev around 5:35 p.m. that did not connect. At around 6:53 p.m. Matanov called Tamerlan Tsarnaev again, and talked for about a minute. Matanov made another call to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev that did not connect on April 17, 2013, a few minutes later, around 6:57 p.m. At some point later that night, Matanov visited Tamerlan Tsarnaev at his residence in Cambridge, MA. Around 9:35 p.m. the same night, Matanov made another call to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev that did not connect.
Paragraphs nineteen and twenty describe the release of the suspects’ photographs by the FBI. According to the indictment, Kair looked at the pictures shortly after they were released by going to the CNN website on his laptop. At 8:16 in the evening he called Jahar’s cell phone and did not get an answer. New, higher-resolution pictures were released at two in the morning, and Kair looked at them again shortly afterward. At 7:17 in the morning he called Jahar’s cell phone again and did not get an answer.
The next section of the indictment is called “Matanov’s Cover-Up.”
Early in the morning on Friday, April 19, Matanov, visibly upset, woke up Witness 1. When Witness 1 asked Matanov why he appeared upset, Matanov answered that pictures of the bombers had been released and he knew the bombers.
In other words, Kair had gone through the same process as Dias, Azamat, and several others: the knowing and not knowing, going back and staring at the grainy photos over and over, then knowing and not believing, and finally being unable to maintain denial once the bombers had been named—and going into a panic. So what did he cover up? “Matanov falsely told Witness 1 that he did not know whether Tamerlan Tsarnaev held any extremist views,” states the indictment.
It is not illegal to lie to one’s friends or roommate—and judging from the fact that Kair talked to Witness 1 when he returned from dinner and that he woke up Witness 1 early in the morning, Witness 1 was probably his roommate. By seven in the morning Kair was in his cab, driving a regular client, and telling him that the person they were talking about on the radio was someone he knew—and that he even recognized the address the reporter mentioned. The client, referred to in the indictment as Witness 2, asked whether Kair had visited the place on Norfolk Street, and “Matanov falsely claimed that it had been a while, when in fact he had been at Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s apartment less than 2 days previously.” This lie did not break any laws, either. The episode itself hardly qualifies to be included in the section of the indictment called “Matanov’s Cover-Up”: if he was covering up, he was not doing a very good job.
After dropping off his client, Kair went to see Witness 3, whom he had once introduced to Tamerlan.
Matanov then asked Witness 3 to take some cellphones which were in Matanov’s possession because, Matanov said, they were illegal and might be found if the FBI searched his apartment.
What he was covering up here was the possession of either contraband or stolen cell phones, much as Robel and the others had tried to cover up their marijuana use.
It was still Friday morning. Kair picked up Witness 2, his regular client, again and, it would appear, asked him for advice on the best way to report to the authorities his relationship with the Tsarnaev brothers. He was under no legal obligation to do this: even though the FBI was imploring anyone with information about the brothers to come forward, such cooperation with the authorities is voluntary and failure to heed such calls cannot be punished. Witness 2 tried dialing a police officer acquaintance on Kair’s behalf, and when he could not reach him, the two—the cabbie and his client—went to the nearest police station together. This happened to be in Braintree, a suburb on the opposite side of Boston from where the brothers had lived and staged their bungled escape.
Kair was interviewed by a Braintree police officer—and, according to the indictment, though he gave the officer some information about the brothers, including their phone numbers, he also told some lies. He said, for example, that he had not seen photographs of the brothers released by the FBI: he was apparently trying to justify not having gone to the police earlier, most likely because he did not realize that the law did not require him to.
Matanov also told the detective that he mostly knew the Tsarnaevs through a common place of worship and through playing soccer, which Matanov intended to be false, misleading, and to conceal the fact that Matanov was Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s friend and had seen him twice that week on occasions unconnected with soccer and worship.
There is no indication, however, that the detective asked Kair when or under what circumstances he had last seen Tamerlan. In fact, when Kair’s defense attorney got a transcript of this interview, he discovered that the detective had interrupted Kair’s story of his relationship with Tamerlan.
Matanov also told the detective that he knew that Tamerlan Tsarnaev had a wife and daughter but claimed not to know whether they lived with Tamerlan, which Matanov intended to be false, misleading, and to conceal the fact that Matanov knew that Tamerlan Tsarnaev lived with his wife and daughter and that Matanov had even exchanged greetings with Tsarnaev’s wife and played with his daughter while he visited the Tsarnaevs’ residence less than two days previous.
In fact, as defense attorney Edward Hayden pointed out in court a few days after the indictment was filed, the transcript shows Kair saying that he was not sure that Tamerlan’s wife and daughter would still be at Norfolk Street now that Tamerlan was dead.
Matanov also told the detective that he had not “participate[d] with” Tamerlan Tsarnaev at a house of worship since 2011, which Matanov intended to be false, misleading, and to conceal the fact that Matanov had been at a house of worship with Tamerlan at least as recently as August 2012.
That is the last of the lies Kair ostensibly told the Braintree police officer. Then he went home and asked Witness 1 to take some of the illegal cell phones off his hands. The person refused. Then Kair deleted most of the video files he had on his laptop as well as its Internet cache. By doing so, claimed the indictment:
Matanov obstructed the FBI’s determination of his Internet activity during the night of April 18 and the day of April 19, 2013, and the extent to which he shared the suspected bomber’s philosophical justification for violence, among other topics of interest.
There is no allegation in the indictment that Kair was in any way involved with organizing the bombing or with trying to help the brothers evade law enforcement—or that he knew anything that might have altered, influenced, or sped up the investigation. Sharing violent beliefs is not a crime, and neither is trying to hide one’s beliefs. It is also possible that Kair was trying to cover up the fact that he, like most Russian speakers on the planet, watched pirated video.
The FBI did not contact Kair until Saturday afternoon. Over the course of several interviews he told the FBI everything he could recall, including the contents of his conversation with the brothers over dinner the evening of the bombing. Tamerlan had pointed out that no one had taken responsibility for the bombing and this probably meant that it was not al-Qaida, which always made its claim of responsibility within two hours of the act—a patently false assertion. The indictment accused Kair of making a series of contradictory statements in his conversations with the FBI: he had at first omitted the fact that he drove the brothers to the restaurant that night, though he admitted right away that dinner had been his treat. He also made muddled statements about when he finally and fully realized that the Tsarnaevs were the suspects, but the grand jury was certain that he knew when he first looked at the pictures on Thursday evening.
In sum, Kair’s crime appears to amount to having been confused and perhaps scared, and trying to conceal his own petty illegal activity—after voluntarily going to the police with information about the brothers.
• • •
He was wearing an orange jumpsuit when he was led into a courtroom at the federal courthouse in Boston for his detention hearing and arraignment on June 4, 2014. A bailiff removed Kair’s handcuffs once he had waddled over to the defense table; the shackles stayed on. His court-appointed defense lawyer, Edward Hayden, ran through the indictment, pointing out the inconsistencies, the absurdities, and most important, the absence of a description of anything that could be construed as a crime.
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.
Twelve
WHAT WILL WE KNOW?
Why 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 t
heory.
• • •
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.
