The Brothers (11 page)

The Union of the Just, as it was called, was commonly known to be allied with Hizb ut-Tahrir, one of the largest Islamic organizations in the world. Hizb ut-Tahrir proclaims the goal of creating a caliphate that would unite the Muslim lands of the world. This pan-Islamic state should be created by peaceful means, through political and philosophical struggle only. Hizb ut-Tahrir has consistently condemned acts of terror, including the September 11 attacks and the July 2005 bombings in London, but some analysts in both the United States and the United Kingdom have cast doubt on the sincerity of these statements. More to the point, Hizb ut-Tahrir is often viewed as a gateway organization that facilitates young Muslims’ passage from peaceful civilians to jihadis. In Russia, as in a number of other countries, Hizb ut-Tahrir is banned, which is why the Union of the Just kept its affiliation with the group quiet.

Kartashov had launched the Union of the Just a few months before Tamerlan arrived back in Dagestan. In August 2011, Kartashov was one of the organizers of a protest against detentions carried out by law enforcement in and around Kizlyar. By the time he organized his second such protest, in November, his organization had a name and, apparently, a structure: Kartashov was chairman. In addition to protesting detentions, the Union of the Just claimed to address issues of social inequality and injustice in Dagestan—and, depending on whom I talked to, seemed either to have the financial resources to undertake a project of that magnitude or to be financially strapped and full of hot air. One impression local journalists consistently had of the group was that it had a complicated relationship with law enforcement. The head of the Kizlyar police, on one hand, expressed undisguised hatred for his former officer Kartashov; on the other hand, the Union of the Just had a way of learning about detentions before they became public knowledge—suggesting that it had a mole in law enforcement. Then again, as one of Kartashov’s defense lawyers would tell me later, long after his client had been sent to serve time in a prison colony thousands of miles away, “Law enforcement and the insurgents are all equally dumb, uneducated, and all affected by the same virus,” meaning the infectious desire to engage in permanent warfare. He then told me what he thought should be done to solve this conundrum, but he asked me not to print it; his solution was bitter and brutal and desperate.

In all, the Union of the Just, to which Tamerlan discovered he belonged virtually by birthright, was a quintessential Dagestan organization: a group of self-important young men who trafficked mostly in words and yet balanced unmistakably at the edge of constant and extreme danger.

The man with whom Tamerlan connected most closely was not his cousin Magomed Kartashov but Kartashov’s Union of the Just deputy Mohammed Gadzhiev (the two men had the same first name, but Gadzhiev preferred the less Russian-sounding, more Arabic pronunciation). Gadzhiev lived in Makhachkala, where Tamerlan felt much more comfortable than in dangerous, backwater Kizlyar. Gadzhiev was Tamerlan’s age; he was a snappy dresser, though not as flashy as Tamerlan; he had about him the confidence of an extremely good-looking and remarkably well-spoken man: he and Tamerlan were of a kind, and they hit it off instantly when Kartashov introduced them at a friend’s wedding in the spring of 2012. “Meet my American relative,” he said to Gadzhiev, and from that point on the two men saw each other several times a week.

They talked. Tamerlan had things to tell Mohammed about America. He said it was a racist country and a deeply divided one: there was a giant gap between rich and poor. Foreign policy was as xenophobic and as shortsighted as Mohammed had suspected—as bad, in fact, as what he had heard on Russian television, which could be presumed to lie about everything except this. Morally, too, America was in decline. Mohammed had suspected as much, but he was pleased to have his general impressions confirmed and elaborated—and Tamerlan turned out to be a good storyteller, capable of supporting his passionate generalizations with carefully drawn detail. He described his friends, their struggles, the crooked cops of Watertown—he talked so much about this town that Gadzhiev was sure that was where he lived—and, for the first time in his life, Tamerlan got to feel like an expert. Gadzhiev could ask questions for hours, and his interest and trust in Tamerlan’s knowledge never wavered. He even accepted the positive things Tamerlan had to say about America. Tamerlan said there was freedom of speech, it really was a country open to all sorts of people—and it would even give them an education, such as the one Tamerlan’s beloved younger brother was now obtaining, thanks to a city scholarship.

They talked about Russia as well, and concluded that its racism, religious persecution, and propensity for manufacturing criminal charges against undesirables made the two countries substantially similar. Russia’s foreign policy was better—at least it did not support either Israel or the secular forces in the Arab world—but the deep-rooted corruption inside the country more than made up for this comparative advantage over the United States. “I refuse to choose between two kinds of fecal matter,” Gadzhiev concluded. “Both taste like shit.” Tamerlan concurred.

On topics other than the United States, Tamerlan got little credit. Gadzhiev found his knowledge of the Koran cursory at best. He appreciated that Tamerlan claimed being a Muslim as his primary identity, but criticized him for vague statements and uncertain ideas. “If your goal is to fight injustice and promote God’s law in the world, then you have to achieve clarity,” Gadzhiev would say. “As long as your ideas are hard to comprehend, your actions, too, will be dispersed. You have to be specific.” Gadzhiev introduced Tamerlan to the concept of intention, essential to the interpretation of the Koran. “You must know that your actions are right even if you will never see the results of your actions—then you must trust that one of your descendants will see them in the future.” Tamerlan listened.

Gadzhiev saw his friend as a bit of a baby. Tamerlan stood out in Makhachkala. Some days he wore a long Arabic-style shirt of the sort rarely seen in Dagestan, slicked his hair back with peanut oil, and lined his eyes with kohl. Other days, he put on regular trousers with brightly colored sneakers, and this looked as foreign as his ersatz Middle Eastern getup. Gadzhiev himself dressed stylishly, but in keeping with the understated ways of local men: he wore dark-colored T-shirts and trousers over neutral flip-flops. When Gadzhiev reprimanded Tamerlan for sticking out too conspicuously, his American friend seemed to take it as a compliment. Indeed, he regarded all expressions of interest as both complimentary and wondrous. One time a girl at a party slipped him a scrap of paper with her phone number written on it and he showed it around to his friends, asking aloud what it was they thought she wanted. Gadzhiev and others found this indiscretion both regrettable and endearing: Tamerlan’s cockiness had a way of coming off as innocent, and in his friends it produced a feeling of benign condescension.

•   •   •

AFTER THE BOSTON MARATHON BOMBING,
there would be much speculation about whether Tamerlan had been “radicalized” in Dagestan. The question was not unreasonable. Dagestan presented many opportunities for a young man in search of a radical future. He could have joined the struggle in Syria; dozens and possibly hundreds of men were recruited in Dagestan around the time he was there. If he was a budding jihadist opposed to U.S. foreign policy, the Syrian opportunity would have seemed perfect—but Tamerlan did not take it. Even more obvious, he could have joined the guerrillas in the forest. He did not, though Kartashov later told the secret police he had talked about it—and Kartashov felt he had talked him down. There were rumors, later, of Tamerlan’s making contact with William Plotnikov, who had emigrated from Russia to Canada at the age of fifteen, become a boxer, and gone to Dagestan to join the Islamic insurgency. There does not, however, appear to have been any connection between the two, aside from the eerie coincidence of superficial details of biography. Plotnikov died in the typical blaze of gunfire in a Russian security operation in July 2012; ultimately the only people who linked him to Tamerlan were unnamed Russian secret-police operatives who leaked the information to an enterprising but notoriously unreliable Russian newspaper. The same unnamed sources claimed Tamerlan was connected to another insurgency fighter, Mahmud Nidal, who, by the time this unsubstantiated leak appeared, had been killed in another firestorm, in May 2012.

In the end it seems that most of what Tamerlan did during his six months in Dagestan was talk. Talking—and having someone not only listen to what he had to say but also take it seriously enough to question and criticize and try to guide him—was a radically new experience for him. Feeling, for the first time in his life, like he belonged most certainly entailed a kind of radicalization, a fundamental shift in the way he perceived the world and himself in it—but that is just as certainly not what anyone has meant by suggesting that Tamerlan might have been radicalized in Dagestan.

•   •   •

IN MID-JULY 2012,
Tamerlan told his friends he had an issue with his documents that required him to return to the United States at once. Like the claim that he went to Dagestan to have a new Russian passport made because his old one had expired, this documents story is murky. Given that at the time the Tsarnaevs left Russia the country was issuing only five-year passports, Tamerlan’s Russian passport actually would have expired years earlier. Unless the Tsarnaevs had a passport made for Tamerlan at the Russian consulate in New York—which appears exceedingly unlikely, because Anzor and Zubeidat went back to Russia to get their own documents in 2007—he would have had no Russian document to renew and would have had to travel to Dagestan on his United States documents. Another clue suggesting that Tamerlan was likely traveling as an American is that about halfway through his stay in Dagestan he went to Azerbaijan for a few minutes. Jamal told me about the trip: he drove Tamerlan to the border, and Tamerlan crossed it and came right back. It had something to do with his documents. But if Tamerlan had indeed been in the process of renewing his Russian passport, he would have been unable to leave the country just then. It would appear that he was in Dagestan as an American, with a Russian visa that allowed a maximum three-month stay—and he had to leave and reenter to restart the countdown.

He had no desire to leave Dagestan for even a few minutes. He told Jamal he wanted to stay, and the older man berated him. “What are you going to do here?” he shouted. “Herd sheep? Go back to America and get an education!” Tamerlan told Gadzhiev he wanted to stay, and Gadzhiev understood and welcomed his desire. And when Tamerlan had to leave, he said he would return soon. Whatever was calling him back clearly had nothing to do with his Russian documents: it was an American exigency.

•   •   •

TWO MONTHS
after Tamerlan’s departure, the Union of the Just staged a protest that criticized not only the Russian regime but also American foreign policy. Shocking onlookers in Kizlyar, the protesters burned a United States flag—a gesture that had never before been seen in Dagestan. Months later, when Gadzhiev was interviewed by men representing the FBI, he would taunt them by recalling that protest. One could say, if one were so inclined, that it was Tamerlan Tsarnaev who had radicalized the Union of the Just.

PATRIOTS’ DAY

T
amerlan returned to Cambridge in July 2012. A couple of weeks later, Zubeidat left for Dagestan. There was an understanding in the family now: Dagestan was the place to live. Anzor was back there, starting a car-repair business with Jamal’s help. He was not the reason Zubeidat was going back—she had her own family in Dagestan. Jahar was talking about going the following summer. Tamerlan now thought of Dagestan as his home—he just needed to get his U.S. passport and he would be on his way. Joanna asked him once why he would want an American passport, given how he had come to feel about the United States, and he seemed not to understand the question. A U.S. passport was and always would be a valuable commodity—no matter how inherently hypocritical Tamerlan might find the American electoral system or how inherently unjust the American mode of government. It was an odd exchange. Joanna was employing rhetoric that had too often been used against lefties like her:
If you hate America so much, why don’t you just get out?
Tamerlan saw no contradiction in his response. There were many things he disliked about America, and he saw valor in speaking out about them—but he saw no reason to reject so prized an asset as an American passport. If his English and his political education had been better, he might even have said that dissidence is the highest form of patriotism.

Things had not been good between Tamerlan and Joanna in a while, as this uncharacteristically confrontational encounter might suggest. Norfolk Street, where the Tsarnaevs had lived longer than anywhere else since Zubeidat and Anzor met, was no longer home. In September, Jahar returned to college, leaving only Tamerlan, Karima, and Zahira. In November, Joanna asked them to move out, which she had not done even when the rent was severely in arrears. Now she served Tamerlan a formal eviction notice.

But they were a family breaking up, and the eviction notice was just one of the many steps in this jerky process. Tamerlan and Joanna went through stages when they attempted if not a reconciliation, then at least a connection. In January 2013, Tamerlan gave her a phone number for his sister Bella and suggested she call her. Bella said she had just returned to the New York area from Chechnya, where she had divorced Rizvan. Ramzan, their son, was staying in Chechnya, as the rules required. Bella said her health was worse: the problem had spread to her heart. Perhaps Tamerlan had hoped that Joanna would help Bella seek medical treatment and pay for it; perhaps Joanna tried to. But when she next checked in with Bella, the young woman said she had found medical assistance in New Jersey and was doing all right. Tamerlan said that Ailina had remarried, and her husband was Muslim. Joanna told Tamerlan she would let him stay until June 2013.

Time and again that winter she steered their conversations away from Ron Paul and conspiracy theories, and toward what Tamerlan might do with his life. He said he wanted to go into auto electrics. He mentioned a private school that offered vocational training in that field—a school on a par with the Catherine Hinds Institute. Joanna talked about ways of getting a more serious education. Once when they were standing in the front yard, she suggested he was better than what he was aspiring to. Tamerlan seemed taken aback, sheepish and confused. But what was it that he was better than, exactly? There were so many ways in which Joanna had been disappointed and so many ways in which he had given up trying—but in all likelihood this conversation, too, concerned needing to make a living. This was likely the last time they spoke.

•   •   •

JAHAR HAD A NEW
ROOMMATE
in room 7341 of Pine Dale Hall, a sophomore dorm at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Andrew Dwinells was a studious engineering major, the kind of kid who would surely turn a degree from a middling state school into a stepping-stone to a decent graduate school, a respectable career, and a solid middle-class childhood for his future offspring. This was supposed to be Jahar’s path—that was the story told in Kyrgyzstan, Dagestan, and even Cambridge—but Dwinells’s presence served up daily reminders of how little Jahar had in common with a young man who was actually living the American ambition. They never talked. They exchanged text messages only when one of them was locked out of the room, which happened often enough. The door locked automatically when shut, leaving whoever had forgotten his key card to stare at the light-wood veneer with the colorful name tags—Andrew and Jahar—and cutout stickers that, with some difficulty and no small doubt, could be identified as a lily pad and a turkey. The residential advisor had placed these on the door, as if the boys were eight years old. Inside, the decor was just as unimaginative and inelegant. Two long, narrow strips of furnishings mirrored each other: twin beds hiked up on banks of drawers; desks pushed up against opposite walls; two narrow cupboards that blocked the window. The two sides of the room were identical, except Jahar’s was always a mess and Andrew’s was neat bordering on uninhabited.

Andrew rose early to go to class. Jahar was invariably asleep when he left. Andrew did most of his studying in the library or the common area in the dorm; when he returned to the room, it was always dark and Jahar was either absent or staring at his computer screen. Sometimes, the small television perched on a desk would be on. Very rarely, one of the boys would make a comment about something that was on television. Once, this was something about September 11, 2001, and Jahar said it had been a government conspiracy. A lot of people at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth believed a lot of different things. Andrew thought Jahar was a weird one, but not in any extraordinary way.

Andrew saw students come in and out of their room. Most came because Jahar was a campus pot dealer; a small group were Jahar’s friends. On occasion, one or two of them would hang with Jahar in their room; more often, their small clump moved off somewhere, in a thick cloud of marijuana smoke.

It was as tight and purposeless a group as any set of college friends ever was. At its core were Jahar and two kids from Kazakhstan who had come to Massachusetts to go to college. Dias Kadyrbayev was a skinny boy from a middle-class family in Almaty. His coming to the United States was a triumph of his and his family’s will. He was the only one in the group who had anything resembling ambition, but much of it was focused on a girl named Bayan, whom he had been dating in Kazakhstan since sixth grade. Bayan came from money and planned to get a business degree in the United States, so Dias beat her to it: the year she was finishing high school back at home, he was already a freshman at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, and Skyping incessantly with her. His sophomore year, Bayan enrolled at Babson College, west of Boston, where she studied business with the sons of Middle Eastern sheikhs; Dias drove sixty miles north every Thursday to pick up Bayan to bring her to his off-campus apartment in New Bedford, next to Dartmouth, for the weekend.

Azamat Tazhayakov, a short boy with a face and broad-chested body that would surely, with age, become as perfectly round as his father’s, was the son of an oil executive who fancied himself one of the dozen most influential men in Kazakhstan and was probably one of a hundred. All the boys in the family would be educated abroad and all would go into oil—this was preordained—but probably because Azamat went first, he landed at UMass by mistake. His father had confused the University of Massachusetts with Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and signed Azamat up for the Bachelor Pathway Program, the fancy name of a revenue-generating program for foreigners that does not guarantee admission to a degree program but does provide English instruction and a way to secure a student visa. Once Azamat arrived, it became clear not only that UMass was not MIT but also that it offered no major appropriate for a future oil magnate. His father wanted Azamat to transfer to the University of Texas, but Azamat, who disliked upheaval more than anything else, showed uncharacteristic resolve and convinced his father that all American universities were essentially the same for the first couple of years. He was allowed to stay.

Azamat and Dias met at the very beginning of freshman year, and both of them met Jahar a short time later. Both the Kazakhs spoke Russian as the second of their household languages, and this made them good and tolerant enough company for Jahar, who was re-Russifying himself. He was spending an increasing amount of time on Russian-language social networks, which provided not only virtual company but also copious amounts of pirated music and films in Russian.

Their first year, Dias and Azamat also made friends with a girl named Pamela Rolon, who introduced them, the following September, to her younger sister, Alexa Guevara, and a medical lab science major named Tiffany Evora. Robel Phillipos, Jahar’s friend from Rindge and Latin, rounded out the group. The Kazakhs managed to persuade their parents to allow them to rent the off-campus apartment in New Bedford starting their sophomore year. They claimed it would be easier for them to study there. By “study,” they—or at least Dias—meant “get stoned.” Jahar provided the weed for free in exchange for Dias’s acting as both a runner and a sort of customer liaison.

The boys furnished their apartment with a sort of 1980s panache that put one in mind of a café on the outskirts of the former Soviet empire. There was a fair amount of black lacquer, there was a plush sectional sofa, and there was a large television set. The group spent three or four evenings a week on that sofa, getting stoned, watching movies, and eating. The boys played FIFA, a soccer video game; the girls talked about which of the boys might be the hottest lovers, though it does not appear that anyone but Dias was getting much action. The group made several weekend runs to New York, though once they got it together to make the three-hour drive, they usually had just time enough to snap a picture in Times Square, or in front of the Statue of Liberty or the
New York Times
building, and post it on a Russian social network before making the drive back. On one of those trips, though, they found the time to go to New Jersey to buy a used BMW for the Kazakhs. Azamat’s father was bankrolling this purchase—Azamat had explained to him that it was too hard, always having to ask Jahar for a ride to and from campus—and Jahar helped pick out the car, using what Anzor had taught him. It is not clear who picked out the vanity license plate for the front of the car (Massachusetts requires only that the back plate be state-issued) or whether it was there from the start. It read
TERRORISTA#1
. It was funny.

The Kazakhs and Jahar were practically family. In fact, family was exactly what they were in the eyes of T-Mobile: because Jahar was the only person in the group who had a Social Security number, required to enter into any financial contract in the United States, all four of them—he, Dias, Azamat, and Bayan—had a family cellular plan, with Jahar as the primary subscriber.

At first glance, the group Jahar assembled at college was not dissimilar to the group he had in high school. His ability to make friends with kids different from him and from one another had been one of the qualities that impressed teachers, marked him as a “good kid” in Cambridge’s progressive hierarchy. But a closer look would have shown that something had changed, perhaps profoundly. He was no longer shifting effortlessly among groups. This tiny crowd was insular. And it was, essentially, a group of outcasts. Dias and Azamat were still fairly disoriented in their American life. All the Americans in the group came from difficult families except for Robel, whose mother had raised him resolutely alone. Jahar was the only member of the group who had the option of identifying as white—an option still important for fitting in at a state school in Massachusetts: UMass Dartmouth was roughly seventy percent white. Of course, Jahar was white only in the United States. In Russia his sharp features and curly black hair marked him as “black,” and though he had never experienced this himself, he would have heard from Tamerlan about the ordeal of moving through Russia while being recognizably Chechen in ethnicity; one need only spend a couple of hours in Moscow changing planes in order to feel the hostility and the heightened police attention.

What Jahar did have was the experience of growing up Muslim in the United States after September 11. In his case this experience was barely mitigated by the experience of commonality and belonging that many other Muslims enjoy: he hardly ever went to mosque, and while some years he fasted (and abstained from smoking pot) for the daylight hours during Ramadan, in his family this was an individual rather than a group choice. In his life, being Muslim was purely a mark of otherness. He did not share even this experience with the Kazakhs. Though they were similarly vaguely practicing Muslims for whom Islam was code for heritage and family rather than religious practice, they had grown up in a country where the majority of the population shared their identity. They had never before encountered people who found the very idea of Islam frightening. Toward the end of the first semester of his sophomore year, Jahar tried spending a bit more time at mosque, but this too failed to give him a sense of community. Here he stood out because of his height and his pale skin, and people kept asking him when and why he had converted.

With the possible partial exception of Tiffany, no one in the group was much concerned with studying. Robel was suspended for a marijuana violation toward the end of the first semester of sophomore year and was not allowed to return in the spring. Azamat, the only nonsmoker in the group, got a letter in early January notifying him that he was suspended for failing to maintain the required grade-point average. He did not bother to do anything about this, even though the notice rendered his student visa invalid. As it turned out later, the system had made a mistake: Azamat’s grade-point average was good enough. Jahar’s grades, on the other hand, were slipping. At the start of his sophomore year, he changed his major to biology; this did not seem to help his grades or his morale.

In February or March, Jahar saw Larry Aaronson across Norfolk Street and called out to him.