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 theory.
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.
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.