by Amy Knight
More important, of course, is why Russian authorities would let Tamerlan, in their eyes a possible terrorist, enter their country unimpeded. While we know from the Homeland Security Report on the bombings that U.S. authorities inadvertently let Tamerlan slip through the cracks when he made his trip to Russia and back, it is simply inconceivable that the Russian security services would have allowed him into Russia without conducting extensive interviews with him. Anyone who goes to Russia knows that even with ordinary businesspeople, those visiting families, or tourists, the protocol involves questioning—about the purpose of the visit, financial means, and the length of the planned stay there.
FSB agents knew—because they doubtless were still monitoring Tamerlan’s communications, as well as his postings on social media, and had informants in Boston—that he was a vulnerable, disenchanted school dropout who smoked a lot of pot, with little hope for a successful future in the United States—or anywhere else, for that matter. He was the ideal young man to recruit as a jihadist who would return to his country of residence and commit a terrorist act. In short, a Chechen who would show the world what the Kremlin had been saying all along—that its long and brutal war against Chechen and Dagestani rebels was justified because they are global jihadists.
One crucial fact overlooked by those who have investigated the Boston bombings is that Tamerlan arrived in Moscow in January 2012, but, according to his aunt, Patimat Suleimanova, he did not show up in Makhachkala, where she and the rest of Tamerlan’s extended family lived, until March, and his father, Anzor, only arrived there in May.30 Yet Anzor insisted that he had been together with Tamerlan the entire time the latter stayed in Russia. He told reporters “When he came here [to Makhachkala] he was with me, worked in the apartment, broke concrete walls. We bought an old apartment and did repairs there. He was with me. He did not go anywhere. He did not communicate with anybody.”31
So how do we account for the period between January and March 2012? Akhmed Zakaev insisted to me that the only explanation was that Tamerlan was in Moscow during these two months, doubtless being sustained financially and interviewed continually by the FSB. As Zakaev told me, it is not difficult to see the Russians’ motive, given that they had the upcoming Olympics in Sochi in early 2014 and people were beginning to question the Russians’ ability to keep Sochi secure. With an attack on American soil, the focus would change—to the global problem of terrorism, on which Russia and the U.S. could cooperate.32
Tamerlan and Global Jihad
Once in Dagestan, Tamerlan reportedly often traveled the ninety miles from Makhachkala to the small town of Kizlyar, near the border with Chechnya and—according to Masha Gessen—“a presumed hotspot of insurgent activity in the eyes of Russian authorities.”33 There, Tamerlan met on ten to fifteen occasions with a third cousin, Magomed Kartashov, who was a former policeman and the leader of a non-violent Islamic group called The Union of Just. Kartashov was a well-known activist who spoke frequently at rallies in support of Muslim rights. Thus, the Dagestani branch of the FSB would have been well aware of his contacts with Tamerlan, who stood out as a foreigner, though one of North Caucasian heritage.34
Kartashov, who spoke via Skype more than once with Tamerlan after his return to the United States, was arrested by the FSB at the end of April 2013 for allegedly attacking a policeman. The timing of his arrest, coming so soon after the Boston bombings, was strangely convenient for the FSB. He was subsequently, in early June, interviewed by the FBI, at the FSB’s headquarters in Makhachkala. Kartashov claimed that Tamerlan had already been intent on waging jihad when he arrived in Russia: “He came to Russia with the intention of fighting in the forest. I knew what he was thinking was a dead end.” Kartashov said that he had tried to dissuade Tamerlan, but the latter was “convinced of his way.” When asked how Tamerlan came to develop his extremist views, Kartashov said “I know for a fact that it was the Internet site Kavkaz Center and the lectures of Anwar al-Awlaki [the American jihadist who inspired many to join Al-Qaeda and was killed by a U.S. drone attack in Yemen in 2011].”35
These statements were exactly the message that the FSB wanted to convey. To be sure, Tamerlan is known to have been influenced by al-Awlaki, because his Internet browsing history showed that he had watched many of the latter’s videos. Tamerlan also logged on frequently to the Kavkaz Center, the website of the Caucasian Emirate, a radical North Caucasian group that has taken credit for numerous terrorist attacks in Russia. But the Center (which has been accused by Russian authorities of being financed by the CIA and the U.S. State Department, with the intention of de-stabilizing Russia) immediately denied any connection with the Boston bombings and stressed that it was at war with Russia, not the United States.
As Brian Glyn Williams, a specialist in Islamic history, observed, the Caucasian Emirate viewed the United States as an enemy of Islam, but this was never translated into advocating terrorist attacks on U.S. territory, and the group had at this time declared a moratorium on terrorism against civilians. Williams concluded that “we can thus rule out the idea that Tamerlan was actively recruited and trained to attack the United States by the Dagestani branch of the Caucasian Emirate.”36
There were reports (apparently deliberate leaks from the FSB to the Russian media) that while he was in Dagestan, Tamerlan connected up with the above-mentioned William Plotnikov and one Mahmud Mansur Nidal, both of whom had been drawn into the wider jihadist movement. Nidal was a nineteen-year-old native of Dagestan who was shot to death by Dagestani police in Makhachkala in mid-May 2012. Plotnikov was killed in the forest outside the city by Russian anti-terrorist forces shortly before Tamerlan returned to the United States.37 But these young men were clearly peripheral characters in Tamerlan’s journey to jihad against America. And he may well have never met them.38
Political commentator Maribek Vatchagaev raised important questions about Tamerlan’s sojourn in the North Caucasus:
Why did Tamerlan Tsarnaev … not demand an end to the bloodshed in Dagestan [where his large extended family lived], but was instead interested in what happened in Afghanistan and Iraq? The casualties in Dagestan are quite comparable to the casualties in those countries.… Dagestan was Tamerlan’s homeland on his mother’s side and the place where he lived for one and a half years, in 1999–2001. So why did Dagestan not become important to him?… After the Boston bombings, all Chechens are asking the same question—why did Tamerlan pick the U.S. as the target of the attack? If he wanted to take revenge for Chechnya or Dagestan, he had the ideal opportunity to do so when he was in Dagestan.39
It seems clear that Tamerlan was dissuaded by Kartashov from going “into the forest” in Dagestan, the base of rebels who are fighting what they believe is a life-and-death struggle against Russian aggressors. But Kartashov’s Union of Just, although not espousing violence per se, was an offshoot of Hizb ub-Tahrir, which calls for the creation of an Islamic caliphate as its primary goal. According to one expert: “While HT may not directly engage in violence, it certainly preaches engagement with violence. What HT peddles, in fact, is an escapist romantic fascism of a sort that appeals to members who simply want to be told what to do.”40
While discouraging him from fighting on behalf of local insurgents, Tamerlan’s cousin Kartashov and the Union of Just seem to have instilled in Tamerlan the idea of a wider cause. Significantly, in the spring of 2012, while in Dagestan, Tamerlan sent several email messages to Dzhokhar and to his wife, Katherine, often with links to radical Islamist websites. In an April message to Dzhokhar, he said: “I am educating myself more and more about Islam. We are working on spreading Islam. In order for an Islamic society to emerge, Islamic spirit and thinking must reign amongst the population. And here in the Caucasus there are still very many people who live in jahili [in ignorance]. But it gets better and better.”41
As Brian Glyn Williams noted, the Union of Just proudly burned American flags, and its members “were also known for their globalist rhetoric attacking the United States
for its occupation of the Muslim lands of Iraq and Afghanistan. By the end of his time in Dagestan, Tsarnaev’s interests seemed to have shifted from local insurgency to a more global notion of Islamic struggle—closer to the one espoused by Kartashov’s organization.”42
In the meantime, the FSB must have been closely following Tamerlan’s movements in Dagestan and Chechnya, which he also visited. (His mother, Zubeidat, claimed he was questioned by police in Makhachkala on at least one occasion.)43 The FSB’s Anti-Terrorist Agency has a ubiquitous presence throughout this area. As Vatchagaev observed:
According to experts who visited Dagestan and truly experienced surveillance by the Federal Security Service (FSB), Moscow should have been aware of every step of a young man who came from the U.S. The FSB was certainly aware of all of Tamerlan’s contacts and the details of his stay in the capital of Dagestan.… Knowing of Tamerlan’s suspicious contacts in Dagestan in 2012 and having suspected him as early as 2011, it is unclear what prevented the FSB from seizing him when he was leaving Russia via Moscow’s Sheremetevo Airport. What prevented the FSB from giving this information to the U.S.?44
Back Home
There is no doubt that Tamerlan returned to the U.S. in July a changed person. Secretary of State John Kerry observed shortly after the Boston bombings: “We just had a young person who went to Russia, Chechnya, who blew people up in Boston. So he didn’t stay where he went, but he learned something where he went and he came back with a willingness to kill people.”45 As Janet Reitman noted in a piece for Rolling Stone, “By early summer [2012] Tamerlan was talking about holy war ‘in a global context.’ … Dissuaded from his quest to wage jihad in Dagestan, he apparently turned his gaze upon America, the country that, in his estimation, had caused so much suffering, most of all his own.”46
However extreme Tamerlan’s views might have become in Boston before his Russia trip as a result of people like Misha and others, his acquaintances observed a marked difference after the visit to Russia. This was the impression of Tamerlan from a witness, Robert Barnes, an old school friend of Dzhokar’s, at the latter’s trial. Barnes was sitting in a Boston pizza parlor when he saw Tamerlan walk in, and he invited him to his table. He asked him about his life, his brother Dzhokhar, old friends. Tamerlan said that he could no longer drink or smoke; he was dressed in long clothes and had a beard. His appearance was very different from the last time Barnes had seen him. According to Barnes: “He definitely got into stuff about, you know, foreign policy stuff, American foreign policy stuff, and he had some criticisms of the things, you know, what the United States government does abroad.… He definitely was very passionate about what he was talking about and—yeah, he spoke very emphatically.… I don’t remember him talking about Chechnya.”47 As for Tamerlan’s source of income, his friend Magomed Dolakov told the FBI that when he saw Tamerlan in early 2013 and asked if he was working, Tamerlan “said Allah sent him money.”48
Just a few weeks after he returned from Russia, Tamerlan opened an account on YouTube, where he compiled playlists of jihadi videos. One video was titled “The Emergence of Prophecy: The Black Flags of Khorasan,” about a holy army rising out of Central Asia and sweeping across the Middle East to Jerusalem. Tamerlan also posted songs from a Chechen bard, Timur Mutsurayev, who proclaimed “we will devote our life to the jihad.”49 And in the months immediately preceding the bombings, the Tsarnaev brothers spent several hundred dollars on explosive powder, ammunition, and electronic components for making bombs. They reportedly used instructions from an article called “Make a Bomb in The Kitchen of Your Mom,” from a 2010 issue of an English-language Al-Qaeda publication called Inspire. It is not clear where the brothers got the money for the bomb ingredients, other than from “Allah,” or whether anyone helped them make the devices. According to the prosecutors of Dzhokhar: “These relatively sophisticated devices would have been difficult for the Tsarnaevs to fabricate successfully without training or assistance from others.”50 But no accomplices were ever identified.
Aftermath of the Bombings
The authors of the above-mentioned House Homeland Security report complained that the FBI had not been cooperative in their efforts to learn more about Tamerlan’s history:
For several months the FBI largely denied or ignored the Committee’s requests for assistance. Uncertainty continues to surround the question of which Federal agencies and investigators knew of Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s travel to Russia.… If these agencies had proactively communicated with one another and worked to de-conflict their records, we would have had a more thorough picture of the threat Tamerlan Tsarnaev posed, and it could have presented the opportunity to review his case after his return from Dagestan, Russia.51
But, for all the missteps of the U.S. intelligence community, it was Russian authorities who had hidden the facts surrounding Tamerlan. And these Russian authorities emerged triumphant from the carnage in Boston. On April 25, 2013, at a news conference in Moscow, President Putin asserted that the bombings proved Russia’s long-standing claims—that the rebels in the North Caucasus had a global jihadist agenda: “Common folk in the U.S. are not to be blamed, they don’t understand what is happening. Here I am addressing them and our citizens to say that Russia is a victim of international terrorism too.… I was always appalled when our Western partners and the Western media called the terrorists, who did bloody crimes in our country, ‘insurgents’ and almost never ‘terrorists.’”52
Shortly after the bombings, Putin and Obama had a “very productive” telephone conversation. Both agreed that their two countries should unite in the struggle against global terrorism. And in June 2013 former FSB chief Nikolai Patrushev, head of Putin’s Security Council, was received personally at the White House by President Obama to discuss the importance of cooperation between Russia and the U.S. in fighting terrorism.53 The Boston bombings had proved to the world that North Caucasians were a common enemy, not, as previously assumed, victims of Russian aggression and brutality. Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev were the poster boys for this new image. Unfortunately, with the trial of Dzhokhar, this view has been reinforced. No one, it seems, would like to think the unthinkable—the very real possibility that the two brothers, though of course murderers, were pawns in the hands of the Russian security services.
Interestingly, the Russian propaganda machine put out a message that conflicted with that of President Putin. On April 28, 2013, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, back in Dagestan, was interviewed at length on one of Russia’s main television channels, NTV, which is controlled by the Russian government. She insisted that her sons had been “framed,” with the implication that this had been done by U.S. authorities. Normally in Russia, relatives of suspected terrorists would be treated with derision and not featured sympathetically on television. Yet the FSB went out of its way to protect the Tsarnaevs from unwanted journalists and to arrange their meetings with the press. In the words of one analyst, “the Russian security services appear to be courting the parents instead of persecuting them.”54
Meanwhile, Russia continues to play its double game with terrorism emanating from the North Caucasus. Drawing on its extensive penetration of insurgency groups in that area, the FSB has been encouraging radical Islamists to take their struggle to the Middle East, in particular Syria, where they have joined ISIS in significant numbers. According to one authoritative source, 2,400 Russians, the majority from Chechnya and Dagestan, had joined the Islamic state by September 2015.55 As of 2017, according to Russian officials, 4,000 or more Russian citizens are fighing for ISIS in Syria.56 Michael Weiss explained this phenomenon in the Daily Beast, “The logic is actually straightforward: Better the terrorists go abroad and fight in Syria than blow things up in Russia.”57
An investigation by a Novaia gazeta journalist, cited by Weiss, revealed that the FSB set up a “green corridor,” through which rebels could go first to Turkey and then on to Syria. The exodus to Syria, where radicals from North Caucasus fight against the U.S.-led coalition there, has re
sulted in an estimated 50 percent decline of violence in the North Caucasus. Weiss rightly notes that “penetrating and co-opting terrorism also has a long, well-attested history in the annals of Chekist [a reference to the first security police established in 1917] tradecraft.”58 The case of the Tsarnaev brothers deserves a place in this history.
Boris Nemtsov and Vladimir Kara-Murza, with opposition leaders, March 2012.
(By Lalekseev—Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21961428)
12
ANOTHER DEMOCRAT FALLS VICTIM: THE NEMTSOV MURDER AND ITS AFTERMATH
“If I were afraid of Putin, I wouldn’t be in this line of work.”
Boris Nemtsov, interview with Sobesednik newspaper, February 2015
As far as the crime committed against Boris Efemovich Nemtsov is concerned, I knew him personally and our relationship was not always sour. It was he who chose the path of political struggle, personal attacks and so on. I was used to it and besides, he was not the only one. However, that does not mean you have to kill him.
Vladimir Putin, press conference, December 2015
In early 2015, the Ukrainian conflict, fueled by Russian military backing for separatists in Eastern Ukraine, was showing no sign of abating, despite a new ceasefire agreement. Russia was bolstering the dictatorial regime of Syrian president Bashir al-Assad with military aid and within months would begin air strikes against anti-Assad rebels. Russia’s strategy, of course, was running directly counter to Western government efforts to defeat ISIS and bring about a peaceful settlement to the Syrian crisis. All of this created tensions for the West’s relations with the Kremlin. By the end of the year, in December 2015, the U.S. Treasury would expand its list of sanctions against Russia to include thirty-four more individuals and legal entities, because of Russia’s military aggression in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine. Nonetheless, neither Security Council Chief Nikolai Patrushev nor FSB chief Aleksandr Bortnikov would be among those Russian officials put on the new list, although they were both sanctioned by the Eu and Canada in 2014. As mentioned earlier, Bortnikov was a guest at President Obama’s three-day conference in Washington on “countering violent extremism” in February 2015. Ironically, this was just when the Litvinenko Inquiry was taking place in London—with evidence mounting that the FSB had organized Litvinenko’s murder—and a month before the Dzhokhar Tsarnaev trial began in Boston. Within just days of Bortnikov’s visit to the United States, late on the night of February 27, 2015, liberal Russian politician Boris Nemtsov would be brutally gunned down just outside the Kremlin.
