by Masha Gessen
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 Firdaus1 (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)2 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 (pbuh3) wanted it to be [for]ever, the ummah4 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].
Stop killing our innocent people and we will stop.
At some point someone managed to snap a picture of the note—or a picture was leaked by law enforcement—and ABC News published it. It appears to show that the quoted version in the filing omits the following sentences: “I bear witness that there is no God but Allah and that Muhammad is his messenger. [bullet hole] actions come with a [me]ssage and that is [bullet hole], in’shallah.”
This note, which the media often called a confession, certainly makes it seem that the brothers were the marathon bombers, but it does not say it—at least the portion known to the public does not. It contains no information on where, when, or how the brothers made the pressure-cooker bombs and whether anyone helped them, how and when they transported them to Boylston Street in Bost
on, where and when they planted them, and who detonated them. In other words, it contains none of the kinds of specific information that generally constitutes a confession. If the court of public opinion could be held to the standard of reasonable doubt, then someone would have to ask its jury this question: Is it conceivable that the Tsarnaev brothers were not the marathon bombers but, once they knew they were the suspects, they decided to run? The answer would have to be, Yes, it is conceivable. The evidence available to the public before the trial began in January 2015 included nothing that directly linked the Tsarnaev brothers to the bombing or explained its mechanics or the brothers’ motivation.
• • •
THIS BOOK is not an impartial jury. Like the American public, it assumes from the start that Tamerlan and Jahar Tsarnaev are the Boston Marathon bombers. The difficulty with making sense of their story occurs sometime before Jahar’s non-confession confession and has only a little to do with the lack of a clear picture of the steps they took to manufacture and plant the bombs. What is truly lacking from the story is a clear and accessible explanation for how two young men who appear to be very much like hundreds of thousands of other young men came to cause carnage in the center of their own city.
On the Friday after the bombing, when Tamerlan was already dead but Jahar was still on the loose, Maret Tsarnaeva, Anzor’s older sister, spoke to reporters in Toronto. Soon after, she would tell people that she was certain the bombing was a secret-police plot and that she was in danger. And then she would disappear—American friends assumed that she moved back to Chechnya. But that day, she was still seeking to make herself heard, in fluent, idiomatic, if heavily accented, English. “For me to be convinced that these two nephews of mine did this cannot be taken lightly,” she said. Journalists shouted questions, struggling to be heard over one another’s voices and the incessant clicking of shutters. “Why are you asking question, ‘Do you believe?’” Maret finally snapped. “If they have done this, I have to believe.”
It was just very difficult to believe. Friends and other relatives argued that it was impossible: the brothers were normal, acted normal, and loved their friends and family. But terrorists are normal. As far back as 1981, Martha Crenshaw, a pioneer in the study of modern terrorism, wrote, “The outstanding common characteristic of terrorists is their normality.” This observation has since been echoed and further substantiated. Scott Atran, an anthropologist who has traveled the world talking to current and perhaps future members of jihadi groups, has identified several other characteristics that his subjects seem to share. They are usually in their early twenties, they are often immigrants, they have usually been educated in secular schools, often with an emphasis on science, they are usually married, and their socioeconomic background is usually middle-class but marginalized. They tend to form most of their connections in small circles of family and friends; they socialize within them, marry within them, and their terrorist networks are for the most part limited to them.
Crenshaw points to political conditions that enable terrorism—a group has to be excluded from the political process. And she suggests one other personality trait required of a terrorist: a high tolerance for risk. Growing up in and around war zones and in high-crime environments will inure a person to risk and violence. So the Tsarnaev brothers fit the profile perfectly. But most disaffected immigrants from unstable countries, most immigrants who never make it out of the struggling lower rung of the middle class and beyond the bounds of a suffocating social circle, even most angry Muslim young men without a religious education but with a high tolerance for danger, do not build bombs and kill people.
The imagination demands something distinct, huge, and immediately recognizable to explain the leap between an ordinary life and the path of a terrorist. In December 2013, The Boston Globe published a near-book-length exposé based on almost eight months of reporting by a team of journalists, and this team’s conclusion was that Tamerlan suffered from schizophrenia. He apparently heard voices that told him to do terrible things. The evidence for this newspaper diagnosis was this: it would seem that Zubeidat once said something about Tamerlan’s “voices” to Max Mazaev’s wife, who, years later—after the bombing—relayed the conversation to her husband, who, in turn, mentioned it in a telephone conversation with a psychiatrist who had once treated Anzor but had never met Tamerlan—and the psychiatrist may have said the word “schizophrenia,” among others. The diagnosis not only was based on ephemeral evidence but was actually counterfactual: terrorism experts broadly agree that a firm grip on reality is required to carry out a secret plot of any complexity. As for the “voices,” Zubeidat most likely meant an inner voice that she felt, at that moment, was leading her teenage son astray.
But if it was not a giant mental disorder, was there a huge conspiracy that led Tamerlan and Jahar astray? Most of the media coverage hewed to the FBI’s radicalization theory, and proposed a variety of characters suspected of having indoctrinated Tamerlan: first a man named Misha, who turned out to be a soft-spoken Armenian-born Muslim convert living in Rhode Island who had not seen Tamerlan in three years; then the Russian-Canadian Dagestani insurgent William Plotnikov and the teenage Dagestani fighter Mahmud Nidal; and, finally, Magomed Kartashov’s Union of the Just. The problem with these theories is that either the supposed villains have no evident relationship to an armed struggle, as in the cases of Misha and Kartashov, or there is no evidence that Tamerlan ever met them, as in the cases of Plotnikov and Nidal.
• • •
SINCE SEPTEMBER 2001, U.S. courts have taken up an average of forty terrorism-related cases a year. More than five hundred people have been charged, and virtually all of them have been convicted and sentenced. Dozens of bombing plots have been revealed. In 2014, Human Rights Watch released a report that analyzed many of those cases. The researchers concluded that “all of the high-profile domestic terrorism plots of the last decade, with four exceptions, were actually FBI sting operations—plots conducted with the direct involvement of law enforcement informants or agents, including plots that were proposed or led by informants.”
Since 9/11, the bulk of the FBI’s efforts have centered on fighting terrorism, which became its top institutional priority and consumes forty percent of the agency’s operating budget. Between 2001 and 2013, the number of terrorist attacks carried out on American soil by people connected to Islamic organizations numbered zero, but trumped-up terrorist plots numbered in the dozens, and the people who went to jail because of them in the hundreds. The Human Rights Watch report describes the work of the FBI (initially quoting from a former FBI agent, Michael German):
“Today’s terrorism sting operations reflect a significant departure from past practice. When the FBI undercover agent or informant is the only purported link to a real terrorist group, supplies the motive, designs the plot and provides all the weapons, one has to question whether they are combatting terrorism or creating it. . . .” In many of the sting operations we examined, informants and undercover agents carefully laid out an ideological basis for a proposed terrorist attack, and then provided investigative targets with a range of options and the weapons necessary to carry out the attack. Instead of beginning a sting at the point where the target had expressed an interest in engaging in illegal conduct, many terrorism sting operations that we investigated facilitated or invented the target’s willingness to act before presenting the tangible opportunity to do so. In this way, the FBI may have created terrorists out of law-abiding individuals. In these cases, the informants and agents often seemed to choose targets based on their religious or political beliefs. They often chose targets who were particularly vulnerable—whether because of mental disability, or because they were indigent and needed money that the government offered them.
In one case, it was the FBI informant who suggested detonating a bomb near a synagogue in the Bronx and using Stinger missiles to attack airplanes taking off from Stewart Air National Guard Base near Newburgh, New York
. The informant assembled the group for the planned attacks and procured the weapons. Then the four men the informant had recruited were arrested. Federal judge Colleen McMahon, who heard the case in Manhattan in 2010–2011, said, “The essence of what occurred here is that a government, understandably zealous to protect its citizens from terrorists, came upon a man both bigoted and suggestible, one who was incapable of committing an act of terrorism on his own.” The judge was referring to the alleged leader of the Newburgh Four, James Cromitie. “Only the government could have made a terrorist out of Mr. Cromitie, whose buffoonery is positively Shakespearean in scope,” said Judge McMahon, and sentenced the defendants to twenty-five years behind bars, in accordance with mandatory-sentencing guidelines.
Most of the people I have heard arguing that the FBI was responsible for the Boston Marathon bombing were unaware of the agency’s recent pattern of hatching terrorism plots. Some of them were basing their impression on their personal experience: “I am used to being set up,” said Maret Tsarnaeva, referring to the life of a Chechen in the former Soviet Union. Others drew inferences from their knowledge of the Boston FBI office’s track record.
When Jahar was indicted in federal court in Boston in July 2013, a major trial was under way in the courtroom next door: the notorious gangster James “Whitey” Bulger, captured after sixteen years on the run, was being tried for racketeering. Files made public during the Bulger trial showed that for at least fifteen years, the mobster had fed the FBI information about both rivals and associates, using the agency to eliminate obstacles and advance his business while the FBI ignored his crimes, which included numerous murders, in exchange for information and a cut of the proceeds.
Two years earlier, another high-profile case that was heard at the same courthouse brought to light what had long been rumored: a Watertown- and Waltham-based drug ring had for years, and to the tune of millions of dollars, enjoyed the protection of one or more members of the Watertown Police Department, who helped them avoid investigations and raids. The possible connection between this case and Tamerlan gave rise to some of the more complicated—and convincing—Boston-grown conspiracy theories.
