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Finding Misha: Could the mystery man who radicalized Tamerlan Tsarnaev
have been an FBI informant?
The Week
Thu, Apr 25, 2013
By Walter Katz
There is hardly definitive evidence. But when you break down what we
do know, this idea isn't nearly as far-fetched as other conspiracy
theories circulating the web.
Earlier this week, Andrew Kaczynski, @BuzzFeedAndrew, posted "6
Mind-blowingly Ridiculous Conspiracy Theories Surrounding the Boston
Bombing." They were for the most part what one finds at Infowars or
Reddit. One theory intrigued me: #2 - "The Tsarnaev brothers were
double agents." It was as unsubstantiated as the others but it just
missed the mark of a far more plausible theory which didn't come to me
until Wednesday morning as I drove into work.
During closed door Congressional testimony on Tuesday, authorities
fleshed out what they knew about Tamerlan Tsarnaev before the Boston
marathon bombings:
Attention has turned to whether U.S. security officials paid enough
heed to Tamerlan Tsarnaev having been flagged as a possible Islamist
radical by Russia. The FBI interviewed him in 2011 but did not find
enough cause to continue investigating.
His name was listed on the U.S. government's highly classified central
database of people it views as potential terrorists, sources close to
the bombing investigation said. The list is vast, including about
500,000 people, which means that not everyone on the list is closely
monitored.
Members of Congress briefed by law enforcement and media reports
citing unidentified sources indicate Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has told
investigators from his hospital bed that the brothers grew radical
from anti-U.S. material on the internet and acted without assistance
from any foreign or domestic militant groups.
A disclosure which came later in the day revealed that Tamerlan was
listed in the federal government's Terrorist Identities Datamart
Environment (TIDE) database. The list contains 540,000 names of known
or potential terrorists from around the world. Only about 5 percent
the targets, according to Reuters, are U.S. citizens or legal
residents. According to the United States federal government, Russia
advised the U.S. of the concerns it had about Tamerlan, as a result
the FBI interviewed him in 2011, and that was it. Other than two trips
to Dagestan, his family life and his boxing career, nothing much has
been known publicly about Tamerlan.
Then I read a lengthy article by Adam Goldman, and others, at the
Associated Press, "Bomb Suspect Influenced by Mysterious Radical,"
which attempted to piece together what it knew. It took me a little
while to get a handle on its significance.
In the years before the Boston Marathon bombings, Tamerlan Tsarnaev
fell under the influence of a new friend, a Muslim convert who steered
the religiously apathetic young man toward a strict strain of Islam,
family members said.
Under the tutelage of a friend known to the Tsarnaev family only as
Misha, Tamerlan gave up boxing and stopped studying music, his family
said. He began opposing the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He turned to
websites and literature claiming that the CIA was behind the terrorist
attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and Jews controlled the world.
"Somehow, he just took his brain," said Tamerlan's uncle, Ruslan
Tsarni, who recalled conversations with Tamerlan's worried father
about Misha's influence. Efforts over several days by The Associated
Press to identify and interview Misha have been unsuccessful.
Tamerlan's relationship with Misha could be a clue in understanding
the motives behind his religious transformation and, ultimately, the
attack itself. Two U.S. officials say he had no tie to terrorist
groups.
Throughout his religious makeover, Tamerlan maintained a strong
influence over his siblings, including Dzhokhar, who investigators say
carried out the deadly attack by his older brother's side, killing
three and injuring 264 people. [Associated Press]
The article goes on to explore the developing relationship between
Tamerlan and the mysterious Misha: Then, in 2008 or 2009, Tamerlan met
Misha, a slightly older, heavyset bald man with a long reddish
beard. Khozhugov didn't know where they'd met but believed they
attended a Boston-area mosque together. Misha was an Armenian native
and a convert to Islam and quickly began influencing his new friend,
family members said.
Once, Khozhugov said, Misha came to the family home outside Boston and
sat in the kitchen, chatting with Tamerlan for hours.
"Misha was telling him what is Islam, what is good in Islam, what is
bad in Islam," said Khozhugov, who said he was present for the
conversation. "This is the best religion and that's it. Mohammed said
this and Mohammed said that."
The conversation continued until Tamerlan's father, Anzor, came home
from work.
"It was late, like midnight," Khozhugov said. "His father comes in and
says, 'Why is Misha here so late and still in our house?' He asked it
politely. Tamerlan was so much into the conversation he didn't
listen."
Khozhugov said Tamerlan's mother, Zubeidat, told him not to worry.
"'Don't interrupt them,'" Khozhugov recalled the mother
saying. "'They're talking about religion and good things. Misha is
teaching him to be good and nice.'"
As time went on, Tamerlan and his father argued about the young man's
new beliefs.
"When Misha would start talking, Tamerlan would stop talking and
listen. It upset his father because Tamerlan wouldn't listen to him as
much," Khozhugov said. "He would listen to this guy from the mosque
who was preaching to him."
Anzor became so concerned that he called his brother, worried about
Misha's effects.
"I heard about nobody else but this convert," Tsarni said. "The seed
for changing his views was planted right there in Cambridge."
It was not immediately clear whether the FBI has spoken to Misha or
was attempting to.
Tsarnaev became an ardent reader of jihadist websites and extremist
propaganda, two U.S. officials said. He read Inspire magazine, an
English-language online publication produced by al-Qaida's Yemen
affiliate. [Associated Press] Let's go back to what I view as the most
important line: "Efforts over several days by the Associated Press to
identify and interview Misha have been unsuccessful." So here is a
distinctive looking guy that Tamerlan may or may not have met in a
Boston-area mosque. He befriends Tamerlan, fills his head with radical
ideas over a period of time, and now no one knows who he is?
If the FBI was doing its job, how is it that they could learn of
Tamerlan, interview him, conclude he is not a threat and place him in
TIDE and the entire time have no clue about Misha? Natural questions
would be: "How long have you held such strong beliefs?" "Really, that
recently?" "Who gave you these ideas?"
Those were my thoughts rather unformed thoughts when I recalled
Miami. In 2006, the feds famously arrested seven young men, five
Americans and two Haitian nationals, in Miami and charged them with
plotting to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago:
The group pledged allegiance to al Qaeda and were provided money to
prepare the bombing plan. But the young men, who became known as the
Liberty City 7, did not operate on their own. According to NBC's
reporting, the Department of Justice claimed:
[Nasreal]
Batiste met several times in December 2005 with a person purporting to
be an al-Qaida member and asked for boots, uniforms, machine guns,
radios, vehicles and $50,000 in cash to help him build an "'Islamic
Army' to wage jihad'," the indictment said. It said that Batiste said
he would use his 'soldiers' to destroy the Sears Tower.
Gonzales said "the individual they thought was a member of al-Qaida
was present at their meetings and in actuality he was working with the
South Florida Joint Terrorism Task Force."
[NBC]
Walter Pincus writing for the Washington Post captured how the federal
government has pursued terrorism plots:
Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, separating serious terrorist
plotters from delusional dreamers has proved one of the FBI's most
challenging tasks. The effort is complicated by the bureau's frequent
use of informants who sometimes play active roles in the
plotting. [Washington Post]
Following two mistrials, Batiste, the alleged leader of a rather sorry
band, was convicted of all charges, one defendant was acquitted, and
the government secured guilty verdicts for providing material support
against the other five.
As Mother Jones explained, though, the case against the seven could
hardly have gotten off the ground without the ready assistance of the
federal government's informants, Abbas al-Saidi and Elie Assad, who
had worked for the FBI on other cases:
A few of the Seas of David men did recon the FBI field office in
Miami. But the mission had been conceived by Assad, the van and a
digital camera both provided by Assad - that is, the FBI.
When Assad failed to deliver the cash and with the Seas of David
growing increasingly skeptical about his claims, he tried to assuage
them by swearing them into Al Qaeda, which he did - in a warehouse
rented and wired for video by the FBI.
The oath became the government's piéce de rèsistance. [Mother Jones]
Trevor Aaronson wrote an excellent article in Mother Jones in 2011 in
which he dug into the FBI's counter-terrorism operation, which relies
on "Domain Management" to use informants to seek out potential
terrorists:
Once someone has signed on as an informant, the first assignment is
often a fishing expedition. Informants have said in court testimony
that FBI handlers have tasked them with infiltrating mosques without a
specific target or "predicate" - the term of art for the reason why
someone is investigated. They were, they say, directed to surveil
law-abiding Americans with no indication of criminal intent. [Mother
Jones]
Aaronson delves into the Liberty City 7, and gives plenty of other
examples from Portland to Maryland where informants developed a
one-on-one relationship with targets and then encouraged and molded
their burgeoning radicalism.
According to Aaronson, the FBI "maintains a roster of 15,000 spies -
many of them tasked... with infiltrating Muslim communities." In
addition, for every officially recognized informant there are three
unofficial informants. During the Mother Jones investigation with the
University of California, Berkeley, they examined 508
terrorism-related cases. Of those, "nearly half the prosecutions
involved the use of informants." Sting operations were used in cases
brought against 158 defendants. The upshot is that "with three
exceptions, all of the high-profile domestic terror plots of the last
decade were actually FBI stings"
Aaronson described how the sting is typically started with the FBI
assigning an informant to approach "the target posing as a radical."
As the relationship develops, "the operative will propose a plot,
provide, explosives, even lead the target in a fake oath to Al
Qaeda. Once enough incriminating information has been gathered,
there's an arrest - and a press conference announcing another foiled
plot." The question always remains, though, to what degree the plots
come about from the target's own mind rather than through the
machinations of the informant/agent provocateur.
This is a methodology which the FBI has used consistently since
9/11. Is it far-fetched to surmise that Misha was another al-Saidi or
Assad - used by the government to cozy up to Tamerlan and put ideas in
his head? Suppose Tamerlan, though growing sympathetic, never got to
the point of wanting to formulate a plot or wanting to take an oath
because he was busy boxing, or buying nice scarves or converting a
college girl from Rhode Island? Did the FBI determine that Tamerlan
was unlikely to adopt Misha's proposals and decided to move on to a
riper target? We don't know, but remember, we never hear of the secret
operations that don't lead to arrests.
When Misha, or whatever his real name was, got nowhere did he slip
back into the night without the FBI knowing that the seeds of
destruction had now been planted in Tamerlan's head? Was it only
later, once Tamerlan had gone back another time to Dagestan, or began
steering his little brother towards radicalism, that the plot was
hatched? After all, unlike the Liberty City 7, they didn't need
$50,000 to bomb the Sears Tower. Al that was needed was a $100 for a
pressure cooker and fireworks from New Hampshire.
This is not to lay claim to a certain "conspiracy" theory. I am a
lawyer, so I take the facts as they are known rather than as I would
like them to be. These are serious concerns, though, which merit
further explanation because of what the public has recently learned:
1. The FBI did know about Tamerlan years ago thanks to Russia's security services.
2. The FBI contacted Tamerlan and put him on the terrorism watch list.
3. Tamerlan, like the Liberty City 7, fell under the spell of a foreigner who behaved as if he had his best spiritual interests at heart.
4. The government was aware Tamerlan traveled back and forth to Dagestan.
5. Now no one seems to be able to identify or place Misha anywhere.
With all those factors, why wouldn't the government have attempted to
target Tamerlan?
In the experience I had as a criminal defense attorney, federal
informants are moved around the country at will. They are like
ghosts. Their names aren't real. They are from nowhere. They aren't
very accountable for their actions as long they get their man.
It would be disturbing if Tamerlan Tsarnaev - and by extension his
brother - was the product of an abandoned government sting operation,
for we will never know if Tamerlan would have set on down the path of
radicalism without the guiding hand of the red-bearded Misha.
On the other hand, if Tamerlan was targeted by the FBI through Misha
with the belief he was already vulnerable to developing into an active
terrorist and then moved on, they forgot what one FBI agent told
Aaronson: "Sometimes, that step takes 10 years. Other times, it takes
10 minutes." To have targeted and molded and then forgotten would be
negligence of the highest degree.
(I asked the FBI about my theory. Here's what they said: "Per long
standing policy, the FBI does not provide information on who may or
may not be an informant. All public statements regarding the Boston
Bombing investigation are located on http://www.fbi.gov/.")
have been an FBI informant?
The Week
Thu, Apr 25, 2013
By Walter Katz
There is hardly definitive evidence. But when you break down what we
do know, this idea isn't nearly as far-fetched as other conspiracy
theories circulating the web.
Earlier this week, Andrew Kaczynski, @BuzzFeedAndrew, posted "6
Mind-blowingly Ridiculous Conspiracy Theories Surrounding the Boston
Bombing." They were for the most part what one finds at Infowars or
Reddit. One theory intrigued me: #2 - "The Tsarnaev brothers were
double agents." It was as unsubstantiated as the others but it just
missed the mark of a far more plausible theory which didn't come to me
until Wednesday morning as I drove into work.
During closed door Congressional testimony on Tuesday, authorities
fleshed out what they knew about Tamerlan Tsarnaev before the Boston
marathon bombings:
Attention has turned to whether U.S. security officials paid enough
heed to Tamerlan Tsarnaev having been flagged as a possible Islamist
radical by Russia. The FBI interviewed him in 2011 but did not find
enough cause to continue investigating.
His name was listed on the U.S. government's highly classified central
database of people it views as potential terrorists, sources close to
the bombing investigation said. The list is vast, including about
500,000 people, which means that not everyone on the list is closely
monitored.
Members of Congress briefed by law enforcement and media reports
citing unidentified sources indicate Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has told
investigators from his hospital bed that the brothers grew radical
from anti-U.S. material on the internet and acted without assistance
from any foreign or domestic militant groups.
A disclosure which came later in the day revealed that Tamerlan was
listed in the federal government's Terrorist Identities Datamart
Environment (TIDE) database. The list contains 540,000 names of known
or potential terrorists from around the world. Only about 5 percent
the targets, according to Reuters, are U.S. citizens or legal
residents. According to the United States federal government, Russia
advised the U.S. of the concerns it had about Tamerlan, as a result
the FBI interviewed him in 2011, and that was it. Other than two trips
to Dagestan, his family life and his boxing career, nothing much has
been known publicly about Tamerlan.
Then I read a lengthy article by Adam Goldman, and others, at the
Associated Press, "Bomb Suspect Influenced by Mysterious Radical,"
which attempted to piece together what it knew. It took me a little
while to get a handle on its significance.
In the years before the Boston Marathon bombings, Tamerlan Tsarnaev
fell under the influence of a new friend, a Muslim convert who steered
the religiously apathetic young man toward a strict strain of Islam,
family members said.
Under the tutelage of a friend known to the Tsarnaev family only as
Misha, Tamerlan gave up boxing and stopped studying music, his family
said. He began opposing the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He turned to
websites and literature claiming that the CIA was behind the terrorist
attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and Jews controlled the world.
"Somehow, he just took his brain," said Tamerlan's uncle, Ruslan
Tsarni, who recalled conversations with Tamerlan's worried father
about Misha's influence. Efforts over several days by The Associated
Press to identify and interview Misha have been unsuccessful.
Tamerlan's relationship with Misha could be a clue in understanding
the motives behind his religious transformation and, ultimately, the
attack itself. Two U.S. officials say he had no tie to terrorist
groups.
Throughout his religious makeover, Tamerlan maintained a strong
influence over his siblings, including Dzhokhar, who investigators say
carried out the deadly attack by his older brother's side, killing
three and injuring 264 people. [Associated Press]
The article goes on to explore the developing relationship between
Tamerlan and the mysterious Misha: Then, in 2008 or 2009, Tamerlan met
Misha, a slightly older, heavyset bald man with a long reddish
beard. Khozhugov didn't know where they'd met but believed they
attended a Boston-area mosque together. Misha was an Armenian native
and a convert to Islam and quickly began influencing his new friend,
family members said.
Once, Khozhugov said, Misha came to the family home outside Boston and
sat in the kitchen, chatting with Tamerlan for hours.
"Misha was telling him what is Islam, what is good in Islam, what is
bad in Islam," said Khozhugov, who said he was present for the
conversation. "This is the best religion and that's it. Mohammed said
this and Mohammed said that."
The conversation continued until Tamerlan's father, Anzor, came home
from work.
"It was late, like midnight," Khozhugov said. "His father comes in and
says, 'Why is Misha here so late and still in our house?' He asked it
politely. Tamerlan was so much into the conversation he didn't
listen."
Khozhugov said Tamerlan's mother, Zubeidat, told him not to worry.
"'Don't interrupt them,'" Khozhugov recalled the mother
saying. "'They're talking about religion and good things. Misha is
teaching him to be good and nice.'"
As time went on, Tamerlan and his father argued about the young man's
new beliefs.
"When Misha would start talking, Tamerlan would stop talking and
listen. It upset his father because Tamerlan wouldn't listen to him as
much," Khozhugov said. "He would listen to this guy from the mosque
who was preaching to him."
Anzor became so concerned that he called his brother, worried about
Misha's effects.
"I heard about nobody else but this convert," Tsarni said. "The seed
for changing his views was planted right there in Cambridge."
It was not immediately clear whether the FBI has spoken to Misha or
was attempting to.
Tsarnaev became an ardent reader of jihadist websites and extremist
propaganda, two U.S. officials said. He read Inspire magazine, an
English-language online publication produced by al-Qaida's Yemen
affiliate. [Associated Press] Let's go back to what I view as the most
important line: "Efforts over several days by the Associated Press to
identify and interview Misha have been unsuccessful." So here is a
distinctive looking guy that Tamerlan may or may not have met in a
Boston-area mosque. He befriends Tamerlan, fills his head with radical
ideas over a period of time, and now no one knows who he is?
If the FBI was doing its job, how is it that they could learn of
Tamerlan, interview him, conclude he is not a threat and place him in
TIDE and the entire time have no clue about Misha? Natural questions
would be: "How long have you held such strong beliefs?" "Really, that
recently?" "Who gave you these ideas?"
Those were my thoughts rather unformed thoughts when I recalled
Miami. In 2006, the feds famously arrested seven young men, five
Americans and two Haitian nationals, in Miami and charged them with
plotting to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago:
The group pledged allegiance to al Qaeda and were provided money to
prepare the bombing plan. But the young men, who became known as the
Liberty City 7, did not operate on their own. According to NBC's
reporting, the Department of Justice claimed:
[Nasreal]
Batiste met several times in December 2005 with a person purporting to
be an al-Qaida member and asked for boots, uniforms, machine guns,
radios, vehicles and $50,000 in cash to help him build an "'Islamic
Army' to wage jihad'," the indictment said. It said that Batiste said
he would use his 'soldiers' to destroy the Sears Tower.
Gonzales said "the individual they thought was a member of al-Qaida
was present at their meetings and in actuality he was working with the
South Florida Joint Terrorism Task Force."
[NBC]
Walter Pincus writing for the Washington Post captured how the federal
government has pursued terrorism plots:
Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, separating serious terrorist
plotters from delusional dreamers has proved one of the FBI's most
challenging tasks. The effort is complicated by the bureau's frequent
use of informants who sometimes play active roles in the
plotting. [Washington Post]
Following two mistrials, Batiste, the alleged leader of a rather sorry
band, was convicted of all charges, one defendant was acquitted, and
the government secured guilty verdicts for providing material support
against the other five.
As Mother Jones explained, though, the case against the seven could
hardly have gotten off the ground without the ready assistance of the
federal government's informants, Abbas al-Saidi and Elie Assad, who
had worked for the FBI on other cases:
A few of the Seas of David men did recon the FBI field office in
Miami. But the mission had been conceived by Assad, the van and a
digital camera both provided by Assad - that is, the FBI.
When Assad failed to deliver the cash and with the Seas of David
growing increasingly skeptical about his claims, he tried to assuage
them by swearing them into Al Qaeda, which he did - in a warehouse
rented and wired for video by the FBI.
The oath became the government's piéce de rèsistance. [Mother Jones]
Trevor Aaronson wrote an excellent article in Mother Jones in 2011 in
which he dug into the FBI's counter-terrorism operation, which relies
on "Domain Management" to use informants to seek out potential
terrorists:
Once someone has signed on as an informant, the first assignment is
often a fishing expedition. Informants have said in court testimony
that FBI handlers have tasked them with infiltrating mosques without a
specific target or "predicate" - the term of art for the reason why
someone is investigated. They were, they say, directed to surveil
law-abiding Americans with no indication of criminal intent. [Mother
Jones]
Aaronson delves into the Liberty City 7, and gives plenty of other
examples from Portland to Maryland where informants developed a
one-on-one relationship with targets and then encouraged and molded
their burgeoning radicalism.
According to Aaronson, the FBI "maintains a roster of 15,000 spies -
many of them tasked... with infiltrating Muslim communities." In
addition, for every officially recognized informant there are three
unofficial informants. During the Mother Jones investigation with the
University of California, Berkeley, they examined 508
terrorism-related cases. Of those, "nearly half the prosecutions
involved the use of informants." Sting operations were used in cases
brought against 158 defendants. The upshot is that "with three
exceptions, all of the high-profile domestic terror plots of the last
decade were actually FBI stings"
Aaronson described how the sting is typically started with the FBI
assigning an informant to approach "the target posing as a radical."
As the relationship develops, "the operative will propose a plot,
provide, explosives, even lead the target in a fake oath to Al
Qaeda. Once enough incriminating information has been gathered,
there's an arrest - and a press conference announcing another foiled
plot." The question always remains, though, to what degree the plots
come about from the target's own mind rather than through the
machinations of the informant/agent provocateur.
This is a methodology which the FBI has used consistently since
9/11. Is it far-fetched to surmise that Misha was another al-Saidi or
Assad - used by the government to cozy up to Tamerlan and put ideas in
his head? Suppose Tamerlan, though growing sympathetic, never got to
the point of wanting to formulate a plot or wanting to take an oath
because he was busy boxing, or buying nice scarves or converting a
college girl from Rhode Island? Did the FBI determine that Tamerlan
was unlikely to adopt Misha's proposals and decided to move on to a
riper target? We don't know, but remember, we never hear of the secret
operations that don't lead to arrests.
When Misha, or whatever his real name was, got nowhere did he slip
back into the night without the FBI knowing that the seeds of
destruction had now been planted in Tamerlan's head? Was it only
later, once Tamerlan had gone back another time to Dagestan, or began
steering his little brother towards radicalism, that the plot was
hatched? After all, unlike the Liberty City 7, they didn't need
$50,000 to bomb the Sears Tower. Al that was needed was a $100 for a
pressure cooker and fireworks from New Hampshire.
This is not to lay claim to a certain "conspiracy" theory. I am a
lawyer, so I take the facts as they are known rather than as I would
like them to be. These are serious concerns, though, which merit
further explanation because of what the public has recently learned:
1. The FBI did know about Tamerlan years ago thanks to Russia's security services.
2. The FBI contacted Tamerlan and put him on the terrorism watch list.
3. Tamerlan, like the Liberty City 7, fell under the spell of a foreigner who behaved as if he had his best spiritual interests at heart.
4. The government was aware Tamerlan traveled back and forth to Dagestan.
5. Now no one seems to be able to identify or place Misha anywhere.
With all those factors, why wouldn't the government have attempted to
target Tamerlan?
In the experience I had as a criminal defense attorney, federal
informants are moved around the country at will. They are like
ghosts. Their names aren't real. They are from nowhere. They aren't
very accountable for their actions as long they get their man.
It would be disturbing if Tamerlan Tsarnaev - and by extension his
brother - was the product of an abandoned government sting operation,
for we will never know if Tamerlan would have set on down the path of
radicalism without the guiding hand of the red-bearded Misha.
On the other hand, if Tamerlan was targeted by the FBI through Misha
with the belief he was already vulnerable to developing into an active
terrorist and then moved on, they forgot what one FBI agent told
Aaronson: "Sometimes, that step takes 10 years. Other times, it takes
10 minutes." To have targeted and molded and then forgotten would be
negligence of the highest degree.
(I asked the FBI about my theory. Here's what they said: "Per long
standing policy, the FBI does not provide information on who may or
may not be an informant. All public statements regarding the Boston
Bombing investigation are located on http://www.fbi.gov/.")