The Brothers (23 page)

Stop killing our innocent people and we will stop.

At some point someone managed to snap a picture of the note—or a picture was leaked by law enforcement—and ABC News published it. It appears to show that the quoted version in the filing omits the following sentences: “I bear witness that there is no God but Allah and that Muhammad is his messenger. [bullet hole] actions come with a [me]ssage and that is [bullet hole], in’shallah.”

This note, which the media often called a confession, certainly makes it seem that the brothers were the marathon bombers, but it does not say it—at least the portion known to the public does not. It contains no information on where, when, or how the brothers made the pressure-cooker bombs and whether anyone helped them, how and when they transported them to Boylston Street in Boston, where and when they planted them, and who detonated them. In other words, it contains none of the kinds of specific information that generally constitutes a confession. If the court of public opinion could be held to the standard of reasonable doubt, then someone would have to ask its jury this question:
Is it conceivable that the Tsarnaev brothers were not the marathon bombers but, once they knew they were the suspects, they decided to run?
The answer would have to be,
Yes, it is conceivable.
The evidence available to the public before the trial began in January 2015 included nothing that directly linked the Tsarnaev brothers to the bombing or explained its mechanics or the brothers’ motivation.

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THIS BOOK
is not an impartial jury. Like the American public, it assumes from the start that Tamerlan and Jahar Tsarnaev are the Boston Marathon bombers. The difficulty with making sense of their story occurs sometime before Jahar’s non-confession confession and has only a little to do with the lack of a clear picture of the steps they took to manufacture and plant the bombs. What is truly lacking from the story is a clear and accessible explanation for how two young men who appear to be very much like hundreds of thousands of other young men came to cause carnage in the center of their own city.

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 counterfactual: 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.

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.