View From the Global Tank: Boston Bombing Puts Spotlight on Security Services’ Failure to Cooperate

© PhotoSimon Saradzhyan
Simon Saradzhyan - Sputnik International
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Was the bombing of the Boston marathon the result of an intelligence failure? There seems to be no clear answer to that question yet. But it does seem to me that had there been a greater degree of trust between the US and Russian secret services, they would have been more willing to share information and act on each other’s warnings, preventing Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev from allegedly bombing the Boston marathon's finish line on April 15.

Was the bombing of the Boston marathon the result of an intelligence failure? There seems to be no clear answer to that question yet. But it does seem to me that had there been a greater degree of trust between the US and Russian secret services, they would have been more willing to share information and act on each other’s warnings, preventing Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev from allegedly bombing the Boston marathon's finish line on April 15.

© PhotoSimon Saradzhyan
Simon Saradzhyan - Sputnik International
Simon Saradzhyan

Or at least that’s what I thought after noting that the counter-terrorism section of my US-Russian news digests have gone blank for months at a time.

However, as the case of the Tsarnaev brothers has revealed, the contacts between the two countries’ security services have remained quite frequent - but not very fruitful.

In January 2011, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) received a request from Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) to look into Tamerlan Tsarnaev.  According to the FBI’s account of its interaction with FSB, the Russian service warned Tamerlan could be a risk ''based on information that he was a follower of radical Islam and a strong believer, and that he had changed drastically since 2010 as he prepared to leave the United States for travel to the country's region to join unspecified underground groups.”

FBI agents looked into Tamerlan, found nothing suspicious, closed their probe in June 2011 and informed the FSB of its findings (or rather lack of them) in August 2011. The FBI says it did ask Russia's lead counter-terrorism service for additional information on Tamerlan, the elder of the Tsarnaev brothers - but received none.

Having heard from the FBI, the FSB sent the same request on Tamerlan to the Central Intelligence Agency. Like the FBI, the CIA looked into the elder of the two brothers, but found no ties to violent extremism and informed the Russian government accordingly in October 2011. (All in all, the US security services reportedly had at least four contacts with their Russian counterparts about Tamerlan in the year before his departure for Russia).

The CIA did reportedly ask the US National Counterterrorism Center to put Tamerlan and his mother Zubeidat into a database, called the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, or TIDE.  But that database, which is connected to watch lists, contains over half a million names, which makes it impossible to closely monitor all of the individuals contained in it.

While neither the CIA’s nor FBI’s 2011 probes yielded any results, my reconstruction of the Tsarnaev’s lives in the United States reveals signs Tamerlan was getting disaffected and radicalized at the time or shortly before the probes were conducted.

According to Tamerlan’s uncle Ruslan Tsarni, Tamerlan changed as early as in 2009, beginning to espouse what he called "radical crap.” And sometime in 2010 he traded in his trendy clothes and began to wear white linen garments. In 2009-2011, Tamerlan was barred from a national boxing championship because he was not a United States citizen, and the University of Massachusetts Boston rejected his application to study there. He dropped out of a community college and had to deliver pizzas in order to support the family he created with an American who converted to Islam and gave birth to his baby. Their family income was so low in 2011 that they qualified for state assistance.

The life-threatening illness of Tamerlan’s father and the arrest of his mother for alleged shop-lifting, followed by the divorce of his parents and their departure for the North Caucasus in 2011 must have also traumatized Tamerlan. Such family traumas like parental divorce have in the past contributed to the alienation of someone who eventually became a “homegrown terrorist,” according to a report on home-grown terrorist threats put out by The New York Police Department, which of all US police forces is arguably the best equipped to prevent terrorism.

With the closure of the probe, Tamerlan must have disappeared from the FBI’s radar. At least, the agency was not initially aware of Tamerlan’s departure on January 12, 2012 although the US Customs and Border Protection were alerted to it, according to Senator Lindsey Graham.

We may never know whether the FSB’s counter-terrorism agents were alerted to Tamerlan’s arrival and monitored his stay in the North Caucasus. They might well have done so, given that Russia’s border service reports to the FSB and that the Russian security services eavesdropped on Tamerlan’s conversation with his mother in 2011.

We do know from media reports that when Tamerlan came back to the United States from his six-month trip to the North Caucasus in July 2012, a US watch list system linked to the TIDE database did send an automated alert to a US customs official in the Joint Terrorism Task Force in Boston.

But there is no indication that the unidentified customs officer provided the information to any other members of the task force, which is supervised by the FBI, US officials told The Washington Post.

Had the FSB monitored Tamerlan during his stay in Russia’s most volatile region and alerted the FBI about the results of this monitoring, the US agency might have paid more attention to the elder brother upon his return from the North Caucasus than it did upon receiving the 2011 request.

And such attention might have generated results, because Tamerlan's radicalization was arguably easier to notice in 2012 than in 2011. It manifested itself in his alleged penchant for jihadist online videos and an argument he had in a local mosque over a preacher's call for Moslems to celebrate holidays like July 4.

The American side of the story claims whatever information the Russian side provided on Tamerlan in 2011 was insufficient to generate any strong leads. If US claims are correct that the Russian side eavesdropped on Tamerlan and his mother discussing jihad and a trip to Palestine in a 2011 phone conversation, but did not share the wiretap with the US until after the terrorist attack, that attests to that theory. But there could be more to the story.

Old prejudices may have led to a failure to act. After all,  the FBI agents – who ran a check on Tamerlan in early 2011– must have been briefed on reports that militant Islamists of Chechen origin mostly target Russia and that, although some have fought US forces in Afghanistan, they had not attacked the US homeland.

More importantly, US counter-terrorism officials might have treated the information supplied by their Russian counterparts with a pinch of salt. A senior State Department official explained the reason for such skepticism in a recent interview with Reuters. “The Russians typically file spurious requests on people that are not really terrorists, and that's why somebody might have discounted it,” the official claimed.

For their part, members of the Russian national security community are historically not only reluctant to share information that could reveal their source and methods to foreign secret services, but are also suspicious of their American counterparts.

Those suspicions are mutual and are unlikely to entirely disappear soon. After all, even though the vital interests of the US and Russia require their national security establishments to cooperate against the common threat posed by violent radicals, it is also the duty of these communities to spy on each other.

However, this lack of trust must be reduced to levels that would allow the CT wings of these communities to cooperate in ways that would, at the very least, allow them to avoid repetition of the “cooperation failure” that we observed in the case of Tamerlan Tsarnaev.

Such mutual trust can be built only if political leaders on both sides do not only speak in favor of greater bilateral collaboration in the field of counter-terrorism, but also relentlessly push the national security communities of the two countries to work together on a permanent basis. But more importantly, if the political leaders want to deepen cooperation in the sphere of counter-terrorism, they will have to improve the broader US-Russian relationship, which faltered in the course of the elections campaigns last year.

After all, as a former Russian military intelligence chief observed at a recent meeting of the three and four star veterans from US and Russian intelligence and security agencies, collectively known as the Elbe Group: “The level of intelligence cooperation between security services is an indicator of the level of trust between the two countries.”

Simon Saradzhyan is a researcher at Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center. His research interests include international security, arms control,
counter-terrorism as well as political affairs in post-Soviet states and their relations with major outside powers. Prior to joining the Belfer Center in 2008 Saradzhyan had worked as deputy editor of the Moscow Times and a consultant for the United Nations and World Bank. Saradzhyan holds a graduate degree from the Harvard University.

The views expressed in this column are the author’s alone.

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