Todashev’s death almost certainly resulted from a combination of incompetence and fear. The FBI found Todashev terrifying. This comes across in the testimony of individual agents as well as in the institution’s very approach to him: it sent seven armed officers to tackle Todashev in order to conduct its first “voluntary interview” with him. For his last interview, Todashev was to face four officers—the Orlando and Boston FBI agents and the two Massachusetts state troopers. One of the members of this team dropped out when the officers discovered that Todashev was not alone; the Orlando agent stayed in the parking lot with Khusein Taramov. Then the interview seemed to go much better than expected, the officers felt happy, lost vigilance, and one of the state troopers stepped outside, leaving only two armed men with the frightening martial artist, who was sitting on a mattress on the floor writing a confession. Whatever Todashev did when he stopped writing—whether he threw the coffee table, ran to the kitchen to rummage for a knife, grabbed a stick, or did all of these things—reminded the officers that they were facing a dangerously and perhaps superhumanly strong man. The fear caused the trooper to fumble with his holster and the FBI agent to shoot to kill. FBI agents are not generally instructed to try to make sure that an aggressive suspect survives, and the agency has exonerated its officers in every single internal investigation into such shootings, so there was no institutional incentive for Agent Aaron McFarlane to try to keep Todashev alive. His death virtually guarantees that we will never know who killed the three men in Waltham, and why.
The other mystery of the narrative of the Boston Marathon bombing is the buried lead of the story, the gaping hole in the investigation. Where did the bombs come from? The grand jury indictment postulates that the brothers read a bomb-making recipe in the al-Qaida–affiliated Inspire magazine and built them at home using pressure cookers, gunpowder from fireworks, and other materials. The Boston Globe exposé repeats this simple narrative:
One article that both the Tsarnaev brothers apparently read closely, which appeared in the summer 2010 issue of Inspire, Al Qaeda’s online English-language journal, was called “Make a Bomb in The Kitchen of Your Mom.” The article provided detailed instruction on how to make a bomb in a pressure cooker using easily obtained flammable materials and shrapnel. The bomb is then attached to an electrical source with “the wires sticking out of the hole in the lid of the cooker.” The article offers several final safety tips, including this: “Put your trust in Allah and pray for the success of your operation. This is the most important rule.”
And then the bomb is ready to go.
I talked to several explosives experts who assured me that “making a bomb in the kitchen of your mom” was probably an impossible proposition. In May 2014, after the initial and even the secondary wave of media attention had died down, U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz filed a motion that contained the following passage:
The Marathon bombs were constructed using improvised fuses made from Christmas lights and improvised, remote-control detonators fashioned from model car parts. These relatively sophisticated devices would have been difficult for the Tsarnaevs to fabricate successfully without training or assistance from others.
The Tsarnaevs also appeared to have crushed and emptied hundreds of individual fireworks containing black powder in order to obtain explosive fuel for the bombs. The black powder used in fireworks is extremely fine; it was therefore reasonable to expect that if the Tsarnaevs had crushed the fireworks and built the bombs all by themselves, traces of black powder would be found wherever they had done the work. Yet searches of the Tsarnaevs’ residences, three vehicles, and other locations associated with them yielded virtually no traces of black powder, again strongly suggesting that others had built, or at least helped the Tsarnaevs build, the bombs, and thus might have built more.
Of the five hundred people tried for terrorism and related offenses in U.S. courts in the past dozen years, Jahar Tsarnaev is the first to have set off a real bomb rather than a fake explosive provided by the FBI—and going into his trial, there was no indication that the FBI knew where and how the bombs had been made and whether anyone had helped make them. If someone had, it was not the young men who had been convicted as Jahar’s accomplices.
THE STORY OF THE BOMBS, if it is ever known, may turn out to involve more people, and people with bigger ideas than the people named in this book—or it may not. As for the brothers themselves, theirs remains a small story, in which nothing extraordinary happens—or, rather, no extraordinary event is necessary to explain what happened. One had only to be born in the wrong place at the wrong time, as many people are, to never feel that one belongs, to see every opportunity, even those that seem within reach, pass one by—until the opportunity to be somebody finally, almost accidentally, presents itself. This is where the small story of the Tsarnaevs joins the large story of the War on Terror.
“The War Against Terror is another moment in this continuing saga of our species toward an unpredictable somewhere between All against All and One World,” writes Scott Atran, attempting to place terrorism in the context of the evolution of human identities.
While economic globalization has steamrolled or left aside large chunks of humankind, political globalization actively engages people of all societies and walks of life—even the global economy’s driftwood: refugees, migrants, marginals, and those most frustrated in their aspirations. For there is, together with a flat and fluid world, a more tribal, fragmented, and divisive world, as people unmoored from millennial traditions and cultures flail about in search of a social identity that is at once individual and intimate but with a greater sense of purpose and possibility of survival than the sorrow of here today, gone tomorrow…. Jihad offers the group pride of great achievements for the underachieving.
The rhetoric and actions of the U.S. government and its agents, in their outsize response and their targeting of specific communities, have probably done as much to create an imagined worldwide community of jihadists as have the efforts of al-Qaida and its allies. For Tamerlan, this vision offered a truer—and more realistic—path to greatness than boxing or keyboards could. And while Jahar may have envied his brother his place in heaven, he himself was getting ready to stand trial for doing exactly what he and his brother had wanted to do: for declaring war on a great power.
EPILOGUE
The winter of 2014–2015 in Boston was the coldest and whitest on record. One record-breaking blizzard accompanied by blistering cold was followed by another and then another, and then by the coldest days in living memory. Photographs of Bostonians skiing down once lively streets circulated in the papers and on the Internet, while in the city itself people watched life grind to a halt. Public transportation was suspended for days at a time, and then did not work with any regularity. Schools piled up snow days, stranding parents at home with children. At universities, some spring-semester classes never started. The roofs of dozens of businesses collapsed, and even where they remained intact, businesses lost money because neither workers nor customers could make their way through the snow. Ice dams formed when household heat melted rooftop snow, which instantly snapped frozen in the frigid air, making houses look like the Snow Queen’s palace. “But for those of us living here, it’s not a pretty picture,” Cambridge journalist E. J. Graff wrote in The New York Times in February. “We are being devastated by a slow-motion disaster of historic proportions.” The worst thing to happen to Boston since the Marathon bombing was in many ways its opposite: it was slow and quiet, and the full extent of the damage would be unclear for a long time. “Where are the federal disaster funds, the presidential visit, Anderson Cooper interviewing victims, volunteers flying in?” wrote Graff. “The pictures may be pretty. But we need help, now.”