Three people died at the finish line of the Boston Marathon on April 15, 2013. Two hundred and sixty-four more were wounded. Two brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Chechen refugees living in the United States since 2002, committed the massacre: one, Tamerlan, died in the act, and the other, Dzhokar, is now on death row, awaiting execution. Washington called it another case of Islamist radicalization. A common story after 9/11: Islamists, lone wolves, self-starters, nothing more to see.
Fourteen years earlier, in September 1999, apartment buildings in Moscow, Buynaksk, and Volgodonsk were blown up in the night. Nearly three hundred civilians died in their sleep. The bombings provided the pretext for a second Chechen war and launched an obscure KGB lieutenant colonel into the Russian presidency. Who carried out the attacks has never been officially established. Those who tried to find out, journalist Anna Politkovskaya and former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko, were murdered.
What Putin presented to the world in 1999 was a sinister exploitation of the Islamist terrorism phenomenon: commit a terrible crime, designate “Islamist terrorists” as responsible, and then sell “security” to whoever is frightened enough to buy it. It worked so well on the Russian people that he has been selling it to them ever since.
Boston fit that pattern with uncomfortable precision. On this occasion, however, Putin’s intended market for his “security” may have been the entire Western world.
Here are the facts in the public record. In 2011, Russia’s FSB sent two separate warnings to the FBI and the CIA, flagging Tamerlan Tsarnaev as a potential extremist with suspected ties to Islamist militants. The FBI investigated, found nothing it deemed actionable, and closed the file after Moscow declined follow-up requests for additional information. The CIA responded the same way.
For 13 years running, since April 15, 2013, Putin has been telling the same well-rehearsed story to Western audiences in interview after interview and at every Valdai Club he attends:
“In 2011 we warned our American partners about the Islamist ties of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who was living in the United States. Our colleagues did not take our information seriously and even advised us not to meddle in their affairs. So I instructed [FSB chief Alexander] Bortnikov not to raise the issue with the Americans again. A few months later, the Tsarnaev brothers carried out the Boston Marathon bombing. You see, they are not ready to cooperate with us in the fight against international terrorism, even when their own security is at stake.”
In this tale, Putin conveniently skips the most dramatic chapter in the story of Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s life and death.
The Tsarnaevs did not carry out the Boston Marathon attack “a few months” after Moscow’s warning, as Putin likes to imply, but more than a year later, in April 2013.
And in 2012, something remarkable happened:
By that point, after two interrogations in 2011 Tamerlan had every reason to believe that the Russian security services saw him as a potential Islamist militant. He also knew what usually happens in Russia to people in that category, often without trial. Yet in January 2012, he went to Russia anyway. Not by some secret back route, but perfectly legally and in the open, his name in all the databases, flying into Sheremetyevo Airport. A man in his position does not do that unless he is very sure that, in Russia, he will be safe.
There is only one scenario under which Tamerlan could have been that confident: FSB agent Tsarnaev was flying to his handlers.
And they did handle him very extensively. What he did in Russia next is known mainly from Russian reporting and security sources. As Novaya Gazeta detailed in an investigation by Irina Gordienko, officers of the Dagestani Center for Combating Extremism repeatedly logged Tsarnaev’s meeting with two suspected members of the Islamist underground, Mahmoud Nidal and William Plotnikov. Both of those contacts were liquidated by Russian security forces, one on May 19 and the other on July 14. After the second killing, Tamerlan disappeared. Local law enforcement assumed he had gone into the forest to join the militants.
In reality, Tamerlan resurfaced in Moscow. From there, this supposedly dangerous Islamist terrorist, whose “criminal intentions,” in the Kremlin’s own telling, had been the subject of two formal FSB warnings to the Americans, passed openly through Sheremetyevo Airport again and on July 17 flew back to the United States nearing his mission and his death.
When a US congressional delegation arrived in Moscow after the bombing to clear up with their Russian counterparts evident inconsistencies in the Tsarnaev case, those counterparts brusquely sent them away. They told the members of the delegation they possessed no information at all about Tsarnaev’s presence in Russia in 2012, an account flatly contradicted by their own regional branch’s documented surveillance of his activities in Dagestan.
One of the American diplomats accompanying the delegation, Ryan Christopher Fogle, then became the target of a staged FSB operation: Russian officers lured him with promises of “secret information” about Tsarnaev and arrested him in front of TV cameras. Ambassador Michael McFaul had to go in person to retrieve his own diplomat from FSB custody, with the footage broadcast on Russian prime-time news.
After that performance, visible US efforts to challenge Moscow’s account of Tsarnaev went quiet. US authorities seemed to begin to realize that the truth they were asking for may prove for them too terrible to accept.
The Kremlin felt their weakness and unleashed on American society its standard narrative: “Cooperate with us, or you will go on being blown up.”
Within days of the Boston Marathon bombing, a consensus assembled with unusual speed a large group of influential US “useful idiots” skillfully groomed and led by Kremlin agent Dimitry Simes. They argued that “ceaseless badgering of Russian officials over shortcomings on human rights and democracy will produce a chilling effect on the Russian government’s willingness to cooperate on terrorism.” Their activity culminated in Barack Obama signing in June 2013 a joint statement with Vladimir Putin declaring that the Boston bombing showed “anew that the global terrorist threat is not weakening and calls for a buildup of our joint efforts.”
It reassured the Kremlin that even after the Boston bombing, Washington was prepared to treat Russia as a security partner rather than as a source of the threat.
The annexation of Crimea in 2014 did not happen because of Boston. But the political environment that Washington and Moscow constructed in the aftermath of the bombing told the Kremlin something important: the West still needed Putin more than it feared him. The “counterterrorism partnership” narrative that bloomed through 2013 made uncomfortable questions about Dagestan and Sheremetyevo professionally hazardous to ask. It was in that climate, shaped in part by the post-Boston consensus, that the Kremlin calculated its 2014 moves and found the West unprepared to respond. The bill from that miscalculation has been paid in Ukrainian blood ever since.
Today, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev sits on federal death row. Executing him forecloses the most direct remaining human source who might still be pressed, under different political conditions, to fill in the blank spaces around his brother’s six months in Dagestan and his frictionless passages through Sheremetyevo Airport.
The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.