Radical views and unsolved murders
With every day that passed, the questions burned brighter: What had driven two brothers, one married to a Rhode Island girl, the other a college kid who’d been well liked at his Cambridge high school, to kill and maim at the Boston Marathon? What had pushed them to this place—was it disaffection with their adopted country? Resentment at their station in life? Some faint identification with foreign jihadists? As Marathon Week receded, no clear answer emerged. There were plenty of reasons why it didn’t matter—and plenty of people who made it clear they didn’t care. But along with the anger and dismissal there was longing for a way to make sense of it, a box to put it all in. What the Tsarnaevs had done was evil enough. The lack of clarity about their motivations only made their disregard for life more difficult to stomach.
What was clear, within minutes of Dzhokhar’s capture, was that this was not the first time that US authorities—from local homicide investigators to federal intelligence officials—had heard the name Tsarnaev. Not even close. Shortly after the chase ended that Friday night, the FBI acknowledged that its agents had investigated Tamerlan for suspected terrorist inclinations two years earlier. Within days, it came out that the CIA had, too. In Boston and in Washington, news of the government’s past probes sparked pointed questions: Could the bombing have been prevented? Would a more vigorous investigation have saved lives?
In March of 2011, Russia’s Federal Security Service, the agency that had grown out of the Soviet-era KGB, sent a letter to the FBI through the US embassy in Moscow. The Russians reported that Tamerlan had, apparently while living in the Boston area, become a radical Islamist bent on joining militant groups abroad. Tamerlan, the letter said, had first sought to team up with “insurgents in Palestine” but had difficulty learning the language. Instead he hoped to link up with militants within Russia. The Russians’ concerns, the Wall Street Journal reported, were based at least in part on intercepted text messages between Tamerlan’s mother and a relative, in which she indicated Tamerlan hoped to join fighters in the Caucasus region. The letter asked the FBI to share any information it had on Tamerlan and his mother, whom the Russians believed had also become radicalized.
So, two years before the Boston bombing, FBI counterterrorism agents in Boston searched for Tamerlan in government databases. They looked for records of his phone communications, whether he had visited websites promoting radical activity, his travel plans, and any associations he might have with militants. Agents even interviewed Tamerlan and his parents. They didn’t find much, at least not enough to trigger further action. Under its own guidelines, the FBI must close a domestic investigation of an individual after ninety days unless it finds “derogatory information” that justifies reasonable suspicion of a terror threat. The FBI reported its inconclusive findings back to the Russians in August 2011, and had Tamerlan’s name added to a US Department of Homeland Security watch list. That way, any time Tamerlan exited or entered the United States, customs officials would be alerted. Tamerlan’s name would remain on the list for a year.
Russian authorities still had misgivings. In September 2011, they went to the CIA with the same concerns. The CIA investigation, though, also found no evidence that Tamerlan had ties to violent extremism. Still, CIA officials had his name added to a second watch list, the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment. Known as TIDE, the list is US intelligence agencies’ catchall for anyone connected to a terrorism investigation, a database of hundreds of thousands of names. Tamerlan was among those on the lowest rung of suspicion, so he wasn’t barred from air travel or subjected to additional screening at airports. When he then went to Russia in January 2012, US customs officials got an alert. But after his trip ended that July—after he had traveled to Dagestan and reportedly sought to make contact with militants, just as Russian authorities had feared—his return to the United States did not trigger any notifications. The customs list had stopped tracking his travel after a year, and the TIDE database didn’t flag him because his travel documents had an alternate spelling of his name and a different birth date. Without even trying, the would-be terrorist evaded the systems designed to monitor his movements, proving that the nation’s antiterrorism firewall still had holes. Boston would pay the price.
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The week after Dzhokhar was captured, Congress launched high-level hearings to determine whether the government should have done more. “We learned over a decade ago the danger in failing to connect the dots,” Republican US representative Michael McCaul of Texas, chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, said at his panel’s hearing. “My fear is that the Boston bombers may have succeeded because our system failed.” McCaul’s reference, of course, was to September 11, 2001. After the largest terrorist attack in US history, Washington took significant steps to improve intelligence sharing, even creating a new cabinet agency, the Department of Homeland Security, and new collaborative groups in every major US city called Joint Terrorism Task Forces, composed of federal, state, and local law enforcement officials. Those measures were informed by a key conclusion of the 9/11 Commission: that if government agencies had shared intelligence about terror threats facing the United States, they may have disrupted Al-Qaeda’s devastating attack.
In the weeks after the marathon bombing, deficiencies in communication came under the spotlight once again. When Boston Police commissioner Ed Davis testified before Congress, he said he hadn’t known that the FBI and CIA had investigated Tamerlan prior to the bombing—even though Boston police officers sit on the city’s Joint Terrorism Task Force. Davis said he wasn’t sure he would have done anything differently than federal investigators, but he would have liked to have known. “If there is information that comes in about a terrorist threat to a particular city, then local officials should have that information,” he said. “There should be a mandate somewhere that the federal authorities have to share that with us so that we can properly defend our community.”
There were communication lapses between countries, too. When Russian authorities first queried the FBI and CIA about Tamerlan in 2011, they asked US officials to alert them if Tamerlan ever traveled there. But US officials apparently never informed their Russian counterparts about Tamerlan’s 2012 trip. FBI director Robert Mueller III told Congress that while he did not believe such a notification would have prevented the bombing, he acknowledged the communication breakdown. For its part, the FBI had repeatedly asked Russian authorities for more information on Tamerlan, but none ever came. In a May 2013 meeting in Moscow, members of Congress asked two top Federal Security Service officials about the Russians’ failure to respond. “Why is it that three times our government has asked for more specific info regarding Tamerlan Tsarnaev, and you refused to do it?” Representative Bill Keating, a Democrat who represents a US House district south of Boston, said he asked Russian authorities on the trip. Russian officials said they never saw those requests.
In the months after the bombing, the FBI declined to send anyone to public congressional hearings, saying it couldn’t divulge anything while its own investigation into the attack was ongoing. And that self-scrutiny would in the end yield little. In August 2013, the New York Times reported that the FBI had determined that the agency could not have done anything more than it did to avert the bombing. Keating wasn’t persuaded. “Until they give us facts that we can review as an independent branch of government,” he said, “I don’t think that’s particularly useful what they think.” McCaul said that US officials receive only about two dozen letters from foreign countries every year about specific individuals like Tamerlan. That makes such warnings fairly extraordinary, he said, so the FBI and CIA should have performed a more thorough investigation. “What the Russians said was right,” McCaul said. “What they said came true.”
• • •
On September 11, 2011, three men—Raphael Teken, Erik Weissman, and Brendan Mess—were murdered in the city of Waltham, just west of Watertown. They were found the next morning in Mess’s second-floor apartment, on their stomachs, throats slashed, heads tilted to the right, their bodies covered in marijuana. Murders were rare in Waltham. In the decade before the three were killed, the city had seen five. This triple homicide appeared to be drug-related, and not just because of the marijuana. Weissman, thirty-one, had founded Hitman Glass, a bong manufacturer. Mess, twenty-five, a martial arts instructor, had told a friend he was considering getting into a marijuana-growing venture. Investigators thought he was running a drug operation. All three, including Teken, thirty-seven, a graduate of nearby Brandeis University, had been selling drugs for years, according to their friends. But they were known for low-level deals; friends could recall only one episode of violence, when Mess was beaten up for not paying a drug supplier in full.
The ritualistic array of the bodies suggested these were no ordinary killings. Other evidence indicated the violence wasn’t random, either. There were no signs of forced entry into the apartment, nor any marks of a struggle, even though both Mess and Teken practiced martial arts. Still, investigators found few other clues. For more than eighteen months, no suspects were named. Then, in the wake of the marathon bombing came a chilling revelation: One of the Waltham murder victims, Brendan Mess, had been Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s “best friend”—or at least that’s what Tamerlan had told John Allan, the owner of the Wai Kru mixed martial arts gym in nearby Allston, where Mess and Tamerlan occasionally worked out. Tamerlan often ate with Mess and Weissman at a nearby diner, Brookline Lunch, and had been a regular visitor to the apartment where Mess and Weissman lived. Mess’s girlfriend recalled Tamerlan and Mess making plans there a week before the murders. “Tam asked Brendan, ‘Are we going to do that thing?’” she recalled. “And I asked Brendan what that was, and he told me not to worry about it.”
More troubling, Tamerlan, despite their friendship, wasn’t visibly perturbed by Mess’s grisly death. He didn’t show up to the funeral or memorial service. He didn’t tell his wife that Mess had been killed; she learned of the murders through local news reports. When she asked Tamerlan what might have happened, he suggested that it might have been a drug deal gone bad. Others, too, found Tamerlan to be strangely nonchalant. “He laughed off the fact that he was murdered,” said Allan, the gym owner who had known them both. “Like, ‘Aw, man. It’s crazy, right? I guess if you do that, that’s what’s going to happen.’” Friends of the victims said they told homicide investigators about Tamerlan’s relationship to Mess. Investigators, however, never followed up. After the marathon bombing, that became an easy decision to second-guess: Would a more aggressive murder investigation have stopped Tamerlan before his violent spree in April 2013?
The question became much less academic after authorities began, following the marathon attack, to take a hard look at Ibragim Todashev, whose phone number the FBI had obtained by analyzing Tamerlan’s phone. Todashev, whom Allan had mentioned to investigators, had also trained with Tamerlan at the gym, and he was someone who stood out. “He’s got a bad temper, he clearly has anti- American sentiment, a radical-style Muslim,” Allan said. Todashev and Tamerlan sometimes prayed together. Todashev had graduated college in Chechnya, where he was from. He had come to the United States in 2008, hoping to improve his English, and the US government granted him asylum from Russia later that year. In April and May 2013, FBI agents interviewed him at least three times at FBI offices in Florida, where he lived.
On May 21, Todashev sat down for a fourth interview, this time at his Orlando apartment. The interrogation, with an FBI agent from Boston and two Massachusetts State Police troopers, started at 7:30 P.M. and lasted five hours. Investigators questioned Todashev about the Waltham murders. Todashev admitted he had been involved, implicated Tamerlan in the killings, and started to write a statement describing what had happened, according to the FBI; a court filing by federal prosecutors would later confirm that Todashev had asserted Tamerlan’s participation in the murders. At the interrogation, Todashev was sitting at a table, across from one of the state troopers and the FBI agent. When the agent looked away, according to a law enforcement official’s account, Todashev picked up the table and threw it at the agent, knocking him to the ground. The agent drew his gun and saw Todashev running at him, either with a metal pole or a broomstick. The agent shot Todashev, who fell backward. Todashev got up and charged the agent again. The agent fired more shots, killing him. The FBI initially released few additional details about the confrontation. The bureau even told the Florida medical examiner not to disclose its report on Todashev’s autopsy, citing an ongoing investigation into the shooting. Todashev’s family and civil rights groups, fearing a cover-up, called for more transparency from the FBI. The state prosecutor in Orlando, Jeffrey Ashton, said his office would conduct its own independent review.
Tamerlan’s possible involvement in the Waltham slayings added a sickening coda to the story of the marathon bombing. The murders—on the tenth anniversary of 9/11—had come at a turning point in his life, his isolation deepening, his views increasingly radical, his family falling apart. Only weeks before, his parents had sought a divorce. Had the killing of Teken, Weissman, and Mess been Tamerlan’s first violent strike against America? Had it been a warm-up, of sorts, for the marathon attack, and for murdering Sean Collier—the race and the cop both symbols of everything he wasn’t and would never be? Maybe all this cycled through his head that Thursday night of Marathon Week, not long after he and his brother had gunned Collier down. When they kidnapped Danny and commandeered his Mercedes, the route they drove took them right past the street where three men had been slain.
• • •
For two days after being yanked from the Watertown boat, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev lay unconscious in a hospital bed at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. FBI agents trained to interrogate “high-value” detainees waited outside the room for him to wake up. When he finally did, the agents began to pepper him with questions—and they did so before reading him his Miranda rights; a public safety exception to the procedure allows investigators to conduct limited interrogations of suspects before informing them of their right to stay silent. On April 21, Dzhokhar began to talk, providing investigators with their first details straight from the mouth of one of the men who had planned the assault on the marathon.
Dzhokhar, nursing a serious gunshot wound to the mouth and neck, provided some answers by nodding and by writing on a piece of paper. Talking was difficult. But he communicated quite a bit. He told investigators that he and his brother had considered other schemes, including mounting suicide attacks and setting off bombs at another large public celebration beloved by the city—the traditional Fourth of July concert along the Charles River, where hundreds of thousands gather every year to watch a massive fireworks show set to the music of the Boston Pops. When the brothers, working in their Cambridge apartment, assembled their bombs faster than expected, they began looking for a place to strike sooner than the summer. They had cased police stations—several in Boston and one in Cambridge—seeking law enforcement officers to target, before settling instead on the Boston Marathon. They had drawn motivation, Dzhokhar said, from the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and they had acted on their own, without any direct assistance from Al-Qaeda or another terror network. Though the date in mid-April coincided with tax day, and fell close to Adolf Hitler’s birthday and the anniversary of the Columbine High School massacre, both April 20, those events did not appear to influence their timing.
In mining Dzhokhar’s laptop, investigators had found books and a magazine promoting radical interpretations of Islam. The books included Defense of the Muslim Lands, The First Obligation After Iman, and Jihad and the Effects of Intention Upon It, which promotes martyrdom. Dzhokhar had also downloaded one book, noteworthy less for its long title—The Slicing Sword, Against the One Who Forms Allegiances With the Disbelievers and Takes Them As Supporters Instead of Allah, His Messenger and the Believers—than for the author of its foreword, Anwar al-Awlaki, a New Mexico–born Muslim cleric. Awlaki, whom counterterrorism officials had tracked for years, was an apparent source of inspiration for Dzhokhar and Tamerlan, who likely watched Awlaki’s influential Internet videos.
Awlaki was once seen as a moderate Muslim voice but became infamous for his anti-Western screeds, which his followers posted on the Internet. YouTube removed clips of his sermons in 2010, after a British student said that watching them inspired her to try to assassinate a member of Parliament—he survived the attack. By then, US officials viewed Awlaki as a major source of inspiration for militants trying to strike against the United States. The 9/11 Commission found that three of the 9/11 hijackers had seen Awlaki preach and had met with him. Nidal Malik Hasan, a US Army major and psychiatrist, e-mailed extensively with Awlaki before shooting and killing thirteen people and injuring more than thirty at the Fort Hood military base in Texas in November 2009. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who confessed to trying to set off explosives hidden in his underwear while on an airliner headed to Detroit on Christmas Day 2009, stayed at Awlaki’s house and got Awlaki’s approval for the bombing attempt, according to prosecutors. And Faisal Shahzad, an American citizen with an MBA, said his May 2010 attempt to detonate a car bomb in Times Square was inspired by Awlaki’s call for holy war against the West. Thus when a US drone strike killed Awlaki in Yemen in September 2011, President Obama called his death a “major blow to Al-Qaeda’s most active operational affiliate.”
Whether linked to Awlaki or not, these smaller, self-contained terror plots—perhaps financed or inspired by Al-Qaeda but carried out by a quiet few—had increasingly worried US homeland security officials since 9/11. These attackers didn’t necessarily have to find a way into the United States; some were already here, concealed, in effect, within ordinary-looking families. Their weapons of choice, including crude bombs and automatic weapons, could be acquired with relative ease or created using Internet recipes and widely available materials. “These extremists have no formal relationship with Al-Qaeda, but they have nonetheless adopted the Al-Qaeda ideology,” Matthew Olsen, director of the federal National Counterterrorism Center, told a high-level homeland security conference in June 2011. “And what makes them especially worrisome is that they’re really difficult for us to detect and, therefore, to disrupt.” The Tsarnaevs seemed to fit the profile—homegrown terrorists seemingly assimilated in America but harboring a latent hatred for it.
In August 2011, the White House warned in a policy paper of a growing number of American citizens and residents just like the brothers who were moved to act by the ideology of extremists abroad. “The number of individuals remains limited, but the fact that Al-Qaeda and its affiliates and adherents are openly and specifically inciting Americans to support or commit acts of violence—through videos, magazines, and online forums—poses an ongoing and real threat,” the paper said. President Obama, in the paper’s introduction, called on Muslims to help root out these threats. “Communities—especially Muslim-American communities whose children, families, and neighbors are being targeted for recruitment by Al-Qaeda—are often best positioned to take the lead because they know their communities best,” he said. Another necessary step, according to Olsen and the White House, is that federal, state, and local authorities communicate and share what they know—exactly what Ed Davis and others said should have happened before the Tsarnaevs brought deadly explosives to Boylston Street. Tamerlan, after all, had set off alarms years before, and there were troubling intimations about his intentions. The lack of knowledge of any specific intentions, however, meant they failed to attract more than a piecemeal response from law enforcement.
• • •
While back on the campus at UMass–Dartmouth the Wednesday after the bombing, Dzhokhar hung out, federal prosecutors said, with two friends he had entered college with in 2011: Dias Kadyrbayev and Azamat Tazhayakov, nineteen-year-olds who were born in Kazakhstan to well-off families. The three friends were among the few Russian speakers on campus. Classmates said they often spent time together, and with other international students. Kadyrbayev and Tazhayakov shared a black BMW, which Dzhokhar would sometimes borrow. The car had a fake license plate on the front, a gift from Spanish friends, that read TERRORISTA #1. Tazhayakov’s father would explain later that the plate was supposed to be a joke, a nod to a lyric from “Harlem Shake,” a popular dance track. “Terrorista #1 doesn’t mean Osama bin Laden, doesn’t mean ‘terrorist,’” Tazhayakov’s father told a Kazakh television station. “In their slang, it means ‘happy-go-lucky,’ ‘a leader of the pack,’ that sort of thing.”
On that Wednesday, two days after the bombing, Kadyrbayev drove over to Dzhokhar’s dorm. The two chatted outside as Kadyrbayev smoked a cigarette. Kadyrbayev noticed that Dzhokhar’s hair had been trimmed. Later on, Dzhokhar drove to the apartment Kadyrbayev and Tazhayakov shared in New Bedford and stayed until around midnight. The next day, Thursday, April 18, Dzhokhar gave Tazhayakov a ride home after class. It was just another week at college. Until suddenly it wasn’t.
On Thursday evening, after the FBI images of the bombing suspects led every news report in the country, a third friend, former UMass–Dartmouth classmate Robel Phillipos, who had gone to Cambridge Rindge & Latin with Dzhokhar, allegedly called Kadyrbayev as Kadyrbayev drove back to the New Bedford apartment. Phillipos was nervous. He told his friend, “Turn on the TV when you get home.” The face of one of the suspects was a little too familiar. Here, in grainy pixels on the screen, was a man who looked an awful lot like Dzhokhar, a man now being described as one of the most wanted criminals alive.
The three men’s accounts of what happened next diverged somewhat, but not long after the FBI put out the pictures, Kadyrbayev, Tazhayakov, and Phillipos went to Dzhokhar’s dorm room. His roommate told them Dzhokhar had left an hour or two before. So the three friends put on a movie. As they watched, they noticed a backpack full of hollowed-out fireworks, the powder gone. At one point, Kadyrbayev texted Dzhokhar, saying he looked like one of the suspects, Kadyrbayev told investigators.
lol, Dzhokhar replied—“laughing out loud” in text-speak. You better not text me.
Kadyrbayev got another text from Dzhokhar that he showed to Tazhayakov. It included a bizarre invitation plus a traditional Muslim greeting: If yu want yu can go to my room and take what’s there :) but ight bro Salam aleikum.
In Dzhokhar’s dorm room that night, Kadyrbayev, Tazhayakov, and Phillipos allegedly picked up Dzhokhar’s laptop and his backpack, which contained, among other things, fireworks and a jar of Vaseline. They brought the items back to the New Bedford apartment. As they watched the continuing news coverage, Phillipos would tell investigators, the friends began to “freak out.” Kadyrbayev wondered aloud whether they should get rid of the stuff they’d taken from Dzhokhar’s room.
“Do what you have to do,” Phillipos said he replied.
Kadyrbayev then allegedly put the backpack with the fireworks into a black garbage bag and deposited it in a trash bin outside the apartment. The next day, Friday, April 19, after Dzhokhar had been identified by name as one of the bombing suspects, Kadyrbayev and Tazhayakov watched as a garbage truck took the contents of the trash bin away.
Investigators soon interviewed and then arrested the three friends, accusing them of trying to help Dzhokhar cover up the bomb plot. Kadyrbayev and Tazhayakov were each charged on two counts of obstruction of justice. Both pleaded not guilty. Kadyrbayev’s lawyer contended that he had not, in fact, recognized Dzhokhar on the news and thus didn’t know his friend was a bombing suspect; Tazhayakov’s lawyer said his client was shocked Dzhokhar could have committed an act of terrorism. Phillipos faced two counts of making false statements in a terrorism case, following misleading accounts he allegedly provided to investigators. Phillipos’s lawyers said that he had nothing to do with removing the backpack or destroying potential evidence. Less than two weeks after the marathon attack, more than thirty federal agents combed through a New Bedford landfill looking for the discarded items. After hours of searching, they finally came upon Dzhokhar’s backpack. Inside were fireworks, Vaseline, a thumb drive, and something that spoke to Dzhokhar’s more mundane concerns before April 15, 2013: a homework sheet from the university.
• • •
The more the media drilled into the Tsarnaevs’ background, the more their relatives came under the spotlight. On the Friday morning after Tamerlan was killed, with police still hunting for Dzhokhar, investigators and reporters found their uncle Ruslan Tsarni, a corporate lawyer living outside Washington, DC. Tsarni first spoke with FBI agents inside his home. When he emerged, he walked up to the television cameras and reporters gathered outside looking for the latest in what had become the biggest story in the world. In an impromptu press conference, aired live on network television, Tsarni offered condolences to the bombing victims, denounced his nephews, and ordered Dzhokhar to turn himself in. Asked to explain what provoked the brothers to attack, Tsarni said: “Being losers. Hatred to those who were able to settle themselves. These are the only reasons I can imagine of. Anything else—anything else to do with religion, with Islam—that’s a fraud. It’s a fake.” He was asked how he felt about the United States. “I respect this country, I love this country,” said Tsarni, who moved to the United States in 1995 and became a US citizen. “This country, which gives [a] chance to everybody else to be treated as a human being and to just be a human being.”
An opinion writer for the Washington Post called his words “inspiring” and said his press conference was “a moment we all needed.” The New Yorker said he “looked like he might hunt his nephew down himself.” Two aunts of the Tsarnaev brothers, Maret Tsarnaeva and Patimat Suleimanova, had a very different view of things. Both expressed disbelief that their nephews could have set off the bombs. “I’m suspicious that this was staged,” Maret Tsarnaeva told reporters in Toronto. “I just do not believe our boys would do that.” Suleimanova, living in Dagestan, said that Tamerlan may have been religious, but he wasn’t an extremist. “A man who takes Islam cannot do this,” she said. “They are not terrorists. I have no doubt that they were set up.”
Tamerlan and Dzhokhar’s mother, Zubeidat, was the most insistent that her two sons had been framed, claiming, the week after the bombing, that it was all “lies and hypocrisy.” Her defiance was hardly surprising—US officials had her on a terrorist watch list, too. “They already want me, him, and all of us to look [like] terrorists,” she said at an April news conference in Dagestan with Anzor, her ex-husband and Tamerlan and Dzhokhar’s father. This was the family that had once come to the United States seeking a better life, settling in Cambridge, raising two boys whose lives became flecked with American influences. This was the family who had chosen this place, who had wanted it. Now, as they stood dismissing the overwhelming evidence of their sons’ horrendous crimes, they seemed as distant from American soil as they could possibly get.