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 counterfactuaclass="underline" 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.