“I was the last person to see the terrorist!” he texted a friend in Ethiopia. “I got questioned by the FBI detectives and I got followed for a day.”
“Are you lying??? Did you know him personally?? they didn’t hurt you or anything?” The friend was suitably impressed and worried. And a few minutes later the friend texted again: “Did he ever say anything to you about it?”
“He was one of my oldest friends,” was all Robel would say.
Then the FBI wanted to talk to him again. Robel made childish excuses on the phone: he did not have a good way of getting to downtown Boston (a twenty-minute subway ride from Cambridge). The FBI sent a car.
At eleven in the morning on April 26, Robel was delivered to a Homeland Security office in Boston. It was another windowless room, barely large enough for the desk and two chairs that were there. This time Robel talked to Special Agent Michael Delapena, a twenty-four-year veteran of the FBI who favored what he called “building rapport” over yelling and threatening as interviewing techniques. He asked about Robel’s drug use, his classes, his family: he learned that Robel had been raised by his mother, an Ethiopian immigrant, and had never known his father. He established that they, Robel and Agent Delapena, were both Americans, and he said, “We have been attacked.”
At first Robel insisted that he remembered getting Dias’s text—“Come to Jahar’s!”—and nothing after that. Agent Delapena told him he needed to choose sides: “You need to be part of Team America.” The other guys were playing for the other team, he said, and as long as Robel could not remember anything about being in the room, Delapena said, he was “on the bench.” He then instructed Robel to close his eyes and imagine being in the room—as a mental exercise, to try to break through the amnesia. Robel said he still could not remember. “That’s not an answer,” said Delapena.
A couple of hours into the interview, Robel remembered being in the room and seeing Jahar’s roommate there. Delapena stepped out of the room—to brief other agents on the progress he had just made, but also perhaps to let Robel’s distress intensify. When he returned, Robel was terrified. Was he going to be arrested? Were the other agents, whom he had glimpsed outside, going to be mad that he had not told them what he was telling Delapena now?
“There are wolves out there,” confirmed Delapena. Then he got up and locked the door. “It’s just you and me in here.” All Robel had to do to enjoy Delapena’s continued protection was produce a written statement.
The resulting document, a bit more than one single-spaced page, eventually became evidence in the case against Robel.
On Thursday, April 18th, at approximately 9 pm, I received a text from my friend Dias. The text asked me to go to Jahar’s room. As requested, I went to the room, where Dias and Azamat were waiting in front of the door.
The timing of the text message is off by an hour, but that is understandable. More important, according to the testimony of at least three other people—Lino Rosas, in whose room Robel and Azamat were playing FIFA when the message arrived; Azamat; and Andrew Dwinells—Dias had entered the room first and had been rummaging through Jahar’s things for about ten minutes by the time Robel and Azamat arrived, together.
Dias has free access into the room unless the door is locked, which it was not.
Robel had lived in the same dorm, so he knew that the door locked automatically when closed and required a key card to open.
One of the items was a dark backpack, possibly with one red stripe.
It was a plain black backpack.
He opened the bag, at which point I observed approximately seven red tubular fireworks, approximately 6 to 8 inches in length.
None of the fireworks was red.
I know that Jahar has a black SONY laptop, but I do not recall Dias taking it. It is possible that it was in the backpack.
The statement contains no other references to the laptop. Why would Robel include the assertion of lacking any recollection of a fact that was probably relayed by the interviewing agent? Something similar happens at the end of the penultimate paragraph:
At one point that evening, around 11:00 pm, the three of us had a discussion about what to do with the backpack and fireworks. Dias asked, in words I can’t exactly recall, if he should get rid of the “stuff”, which I took to mean the backpack. I said in response, “do what you have to do.” I was concerned how it would look if the Police found us (Jahar’s friends) with a backpack with fireworks, given what had happened. I took a two hour nap, and when I awoke, the backpack was gone. I do not know for sure who took it from the apartment. I am aware that there is a dumpster about 80 or 90 yards from their apartment.
The statement hardly reads like a spontaneously produced recollection of the facts known to Robel. It reads rather like it was dictated or even written by someone else and then given to Robel to sign. The last paragraph reads:
In retrospect, I should have notified the Police once I knew Jahar was the bomber. Further, I should have turned over the backpack to the authorities. I regret these decisions. I make this statement without any threats or promises made to me.
The charges proposed in the criminal complaint against Azamat and Dias added up to a maximum sentence of twenty-five years—five for conspiracy and twenty for obstruction of justice—but Robel, who would now be accused of lying to investigators, was looking at a maximum of sixteen. And because Robel was a United States citizen, he spent less than two weeks wearing an orange jumpsuit: on May 6, he was released on bail.
AZAMAT AND DIAS left county jail, too: they were transferred to a federal facility and placed in solitary. They saw each other again after a few weeks, when they, Robel, and all of their lawyers came together in a large conference room with the prosecution’s team and Bayan and her lawyer. They were there to videotape Bayan’s deposition before she left for Kazakhstan. Such were the terms of her immunity deaclass="underline" she would tell the truth, and she would leave the United States. The story she told was essentially similar to what Dias and Azamat had by now told the investigators; she even admitted to being the one who demanded that the backpack be removed from the apartment. But she told the story first.
“Bayan’s father was the smart one,” Amir admitted later, during Azamat’s trial. “He got a lawyer right away.”
ABOUT HALFWAY THROUGH Azamat’s trial, Amir asked me over a lunch of oysters at a waterfront restaurant near the courthouse, “Do you think our lawyers are talking too fast? Is the jury having trouble following them?” It was July 2014. Amir had been living in the Boston area since he flew in at the end of April the previous year—he had gone back to Kazakhstan only once, for a month, to renew his visa. Azamat’s mother and toddler sister had temporarily moved to Boston as well. Amir wanted his other son, who was a year younger than Azamat, to come join the support team, too, but the young man’s application for a visa was rejected. Amir had even yanked him out of Cambridge University to intern at Chevron’s Kazakhstan operation for half a year—he had figured a recommendation from an American employer would get his son a visa. He figured wrong.
Living in America was hard. Amir started out driving the boys’ BMW, the one he had paid for, but every few days he would be chased by several unmarked cars at once, stopped with great fanfare, made to get out of the car and submit to a search, so that each time it was a couple of hours before he was allowed to continue on his way. After a few weeks, with no sign that this pointless ritual was going to end, Amir ditched the BMW and started alternating between cabs and rental cars. Then there was the issue of housing: Amir had to change apartments every month or two, because every renewable short-term furnished-apartment lease had a way of becoming not so renewable once the landlord learned why Amir’s family was in Boston. Arkady Bukh’s people would find Amir a new place, negotiate the option of renewing the contract every few months—and in a few weeks the cycle would be repeated. Amir racked up more than half a dozen Boston neighborhoods in just over a year.