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.
The friends with whom Tamerlan dealt and smoked pot lived in Watertown—indeed, Tamerlan’s stories about the town’s crooked cops left an impression on his friend Mohammed Gadzhiev in Dagestan. Brendan Mess was almost undoubtedly connected to the Watertown drug ring. The murder of Mess, Erik Weissman, and Raphael Teken, which was never fully investigated, had been handled by the office of the Middlesex County district attorney, at the time Gerard Leone; Leone had also judged the Golden Gloves amateur boxing competition in Lowell that Tamerlan had won.
The list of coincidences continues. Less than three months after the Waltham triple murder, another person in the Boston area was killed in the same bizarre and barbaric manner, by having her throat slashed with such force that she was nearly decapitated. Sixty-year-old Gail Miles was found killed in her Roxbury apartment on December 3, 2011. Miles was a former Watertown police officer: she had made history by becoming the first black woman on the force, and then made history again sixteen years later, in 2000, when she sued the department for racial and gender discrimination. One of the men she accused of harassment was Jeff Pugliese, the officer who would later engage Tamerlan in the one-on-one firefight on Laurel Street in Watertown. No one was ever charged in her murder, and the crime itself has not surfaced significantly in the Boston media since the initial few days of coverage—a highly unusual lack of profile for the killing of a former police officer.
And then there are the CIA coincidences. Anzor’s former sister-in-law Samantha Fuller, his brother Ruslan’s first wife, was the daughter of Graham Fuller, a former highly placed CIA official whose areas of specialization included Russia and Islamic countries and communities. Both Samantha and Ruslan worked for U.S. government–funded programs in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, programs widely believed to have ties to the CIA. So in some conspiracy theories, it is the CIA connection that brings the Tsarnaevs to the United States in the first place.
There are enough connections and coincidences to spin any number of narratives that explain not only how the Tsarnaevs got to America but also who is responsible for the Waltham triple murder, why it was not investigated, how the brothers got the idea to bomb the marathon, and why a Boston FBI agent killed Ibragim Todashev. Most likely all of these theories are wrong. The bulk of the contradictions and inconsistencies in this story can be explained by things much more pervasive and also often more dangerous than conspiracies: incompetence, ignorance, and fear. But some of these connections provide useful leads. Indeed, using only the known facts, it is possible to construct a plausible theory of what happened with the Tsarnaev brothers—and to point to the gaping holes that the investigation into the attack had, at least by the time Jahar’s trial began, failed to answer.
THIS PART OF THE STORY begins in March 2011, when the Russian FSB sent the FBI a letter alerting the agency to the existence of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, a Chechen from Dagestan living in the Boston area who, the FSB claimed, had become radicalized. The FSB’s approach to identifying suspected radicals abroad, for the purposes of continued cooperation with the FBI in the War on Terror, is exactly the same as at home: it considers all urban young Muslim men to be radical—and to be especially radical if they are of Chechen descent. The FSB’s counterparts in the FBI know this and talk about the Russians “playing whack-a-mole” instead of fighting terror. They knew that they had received Tamerlan’s name simply because the FSB happened to find it—and that happened probably because when Zubeidat and Anzor renewed their Russian passports, they had to put down the names and addresses of their children. Still, though the FBI knew that the FSB’s intelligence on suspected Islamic radicals was generally useless, it had its own use for the name: Tamerlan fit perfectly the FBI’s “investigative profile.” He was young, an immigrant, lacked a steady income, and, as a Russian-speaking Muslim in Boston, was an outsider among outsiders. In fact, the FBI had followed this logic earlier, all on its own: the first time an agent came to Norfolk Street to interview Zubeidat was in 2002, the year the family arrived in the United States. The agency’s visits were roughly annual after that—a perfectly ordinary occurrence for people from places the United States views with suspicion (my own first FBI interview, with the Boston field office, took place when I was sixteen; the agents did not bother to seek my parents’ presence or permission)—but the FSB alert prompted the FBI to intensify its efforts.
In the spring and summer of 2011, FBI field agents interviewed Tamerlan at least three times, came to the house on Norfolk Street, and talked to members of the Tsarnaev household. Zubeidat says that the agents tried to recruit Tamerlan. After the bombing, FBI director James Comey, in response to a series of questions from Senate Judiciary Committee member Charles Grassley, a Republican from Iowa, denied that the agency had tried to recruit Tamerlan, but declined to elaborate.
In September 2011, Mess, Weissman, and Teken were killed. There are at least three possible explanations for why law enforcement failed to investigate the gruesome—and unusual—murders: (1) Tamerlan committed the murders, but he was already informing for the FBI or being recruited into one of its terrorist plots, and the FBI protected him from scrutiny as it had done with Whitey Bulger when he murdered people; (2) Tamerlan committed the murders, but he did so either on orders from or in cooperation with the Watertown police, which had its own long-standing interests in the local drug market; (3) the murders were committed by the cops themselves, which is one explanation for the similarity to the later killing of former policewoman Gail Miles.
In January 2012, Tamerlan traveled to Dagestan. The explanation given to Joanna Herlihy and others—that he was going there to renew his Russian passport—was a lie. At least by the time Tamerlan arrived in Dagestan, he had no Russian passport to renew. (Zubeidat told Joanna that he lost all his Russian documents when he got there, but it is unclear how he could have had a Russian passport at all, having lived in the United States for longer than one could have been valid.) He was going back for the same reason any of the Tsarnaevs ever went anywhere: to find a better place to be. He found it. But after six months, someone called him back to the United States urgently. He told people it had something to do with his documents, and this was probably true. Political asylees who do not yet have their U.S. passports are typically advised not to travel to their countries of origin; the very fact of such travel throws doubt on their claim that they face danger at home. In truth, though, people do it all the time and rarely get caught—but when they are caught, they may not be allowed to reenter the United States. It seems that Tamerlan rushed back to America because someone warned him—or, more accurately, threatened him—that he would not be allowed back in. Such a warning could have come only from the FBI. Either Tamerlan had been gone too long for the tastes of the agents to whom he had promised his services as an informant, or the agents had decided that it was time to use a threat to cement or jump-start the recruitment effort. Tamerlan hurried back to Cambridge, where he was a househusband with only the siren call of the FBI informant or recruiter and his friends in now faraway Dagestan for intellectual company. What happened then was most predictable.