The history of terrorism is full of recruits gone rogue—it is dominated by groups that switched or abandoned loyalties. Perhaps the only surprising aspect of the FBI’s list of manufactured terrorist plots of the past dozen years is that all of them appear to have remained in the agency’s hands. Until Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who had, from all available information, hardly given jihad a thought before being fingered by the FSB and targeted by the FBI, went rogue. And, in the way of many modern terrorists, teamed up with his brother.
ACCORDING TO FBI REPRESENTATIVES who have spoken publicly about the case, members of the investigative team first focused on the images of the brothers about thirty-six hours before they released the photographs—and the decision to release them was prompted by the threat of a media leak. So the agency called a press conference, showed the images, and asked for the public’s help in identifying the suspects. The FBI could not use its facial-recognition software for the purpose because the surveillance camera that shot the video was mounted well above people’s heads, distorting the angle. All the pictures shown at the press conference were indeed made by cameras looking down on the subjects. While that may work as a technical explanation, it cannot explain how members of the Joint Terrorism Task Force had failed to recognize an individual they had interviewed and had under surveillance just two years earlier—and whose entire family had been tracked by the FBI for more than a decade. One conceivable reason is incompetence: it is theoretically possible that agents who pinpointed the brothers on the surveillance video failed to take the obvious step of showing the pictures to every local agent who had recently interviewed people suspected of links to terrorist organizations. A more logical explanation is that the person or persons who were in a position to recognize the brothers were consciously concealing this fact in order to protect their own or the agency’s reputation—either because it would look like the FBI had fumbled a solid investigative lead, causing tragedy, or worse, because the FBI had considered Tamerlan an informant.
Many people who recognized the brothers on television chose not to call the FBI hotline; but there were those who did call. At least one former high school classmate of Jahar’s who had been on the wrestling team with him called. Maret Tsarnaeva, the brothers’ aunt, called as well. By the time she talked to journalists, nearly twenty-four hours later, no one had contacted her in response to her call. Both of these calls appear to have been made before the MIT police officer was killed on Thursday evening.
In an October 2013 letter to FBI director Comey, Senator Grassley pointed to another odd set of circumstances:
My office has been made aware of another instance following the bombing in which it appears that information was not shared. In the hours leading up to the shooting of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Police Officer Sean Collier and the death of the older suspect involved in the bombing, sources revealed that uniformed Cambridge Police Department officers encountered multiple teams of FBI employees conducting surveillance in the area of Central Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It is unclear who the FBI was watching, but these sources allege that the Cambridge Police Department, including its representation at the JTTF, was not previously made aware of the FBI’s activity in Cambridge.
Several months later, Boston reporters talked to a Cambridge police officer who described the town swarming with FBI that evening and concluded that the agency had been laying siege to the neighborhood in order to capture the brothers. By the time Senator Grassley’s office released the letter, in October, both the head of the FBI’s Boston operation, Richard DesLauriers, and Boston’s police commissioner had resigned, but three days after the letter appeared, the FBI field office in Boston, the Massachusetts State Police, and the Boston police (but not the Cambridge police, which is separate) issued a joint statement denying that the FBI was watching the Tsarnaevs before the Sean Collier murder, or even the shoot-out in Watertown:
Members of the Joint Terrorism Task Force did not know their identities until shortly after Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s death when they fingerprinted his corpse. Nor did the Joint Terrorism Task Force have the Tsarnaevs under surveillance at any time after the assessment of Tamerlan Tsarnaev was closed in 2011. The Joint Terrorism Task Force was at M.I.T., located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on April 18, 2013, on a matter unrelated to the Tsarnaev brothers. Additionally, the Tsarnaev brothers were never sources for the FBI nor did the FBI attempt to recruit them as sources…. To be absolutely clear: No one was surveilling the Tsarnaevs, and they were not identified until after the shootout. Any claims to the contrary are false.
Here, an explanation of incompetence strains the imagination: the FBI is claiming that it failed to follow up on leads identifying someone who was once considered a terrorism risk, even though these leads came in to its tip line set up specifically for this purpose, and in one instance from a woman—a lawyer—who claimed to have identified her own nephews in the pictures. It is also, bizarrely, claiming to have deployed personnel to pursue an unrelated matter in Cambridge on the Thursday after the bombing, despite an all-hands-on-deck order from the FBI director at the time, Robert Mueller. Another explanation in this instance makes infinitely more sense: The FBI was setting up an operation without notifying its local partners because it needed to ensure that no other law enforcement got to Tamerlan Tsarnaev before the FBI had captured—or killed—him. In other words, the explanation that best fits the facts is a cover-up.
TWO MYSTERIES REMAIN. Why did Ibragim Todashev die? Are Elena Teyer and Boston conspiracy theorists right to believe that his killing was planned—and if it was, then why did law enforcement want him dead? Logically, the assumption that Todashev was not involved in the triple murder in Waltham is at odds with the proposition that he was killed intentionally. If he knew nothing, there was no reason to get rid of him. If he did know something about the murder, it is still difficult to see why anyone would have needed him to die when he was already writing a confession. Of course, the confession is full of inaccuracies, but that in itself is neither unusual nor suggestive of Todashev’s innocence. After all, Robel Phillipos signed an outrageously inaccurate confession describing actions he had actually witnessed or taken, and the FBI had no issue with presenting it as evidence in court. The court, in turn, found Phillipos guilty. Todashev’s case, involving a Chechen immigrant with a criminal record, would have been even easier to prosecute, so the FBI had little reason to worry about the quality of its evidence.