Tweet
Former CIA officer: `Absurd' to link uncle of Boston suspects, Agency
The Back Channel: Dispatches from Washington to the Middle East
Al-Monitor
April 27, 2013
by Laura Rozen
Retired CIA officer Graham Fuller confirmed to Al-Monitor Saturday
that his daughter was previously married to an uncle of the suspects
in the Boston Marathon attacks, but called rumors of any links between
the uncle and the Agency `absurd.'
Graham Fuller's daughter, Samantha A. Fuller, was married to Ruslan
Tsarnaev (now Tsarni) in the mid-1990s, and divorced in 1999,
according to North Carolina public records. The elder Fuller had
retired from the agency almost a decade before the brief marriage.
`Samantha was married to Ruslan Tsarnaev (Tsarni) for 3-4 years, and
they lived in Bishkek for one year where Samantha was working for
Price Waterhouse on privatization projects,' Fulller, a former CIA
officer in Turkey and vice chairman of the National Intelligence
Council, told Al-Monitor by email Saturday. `They also lived in our
house in [Maryland] for a year or so and they were divorced in 1999, I
believe.'
`I, of course, retired from CIA in 1987 and had moved on to working as
a senior political scientist for RAND,' Fuller continued.
Fuller said his former son in law was interesting but homesick, and
moved back to Central Asia after the divorce.
`Like all Chechens, Ruslan was very concerned about his native land,
but I saw no particular involvement in politics, [although] he did try
to contact other Chechens around,' Fuller continued. `He also felt
homesick and eventually went back to Central Asia after the
divorce. His English was shaky. (We always spoke Russian together).'
A story on the Internet implying `possible connections between Ruslan
and the Agency through me are absurd,' Fuller said.
`I doubt [Ruslan] even had much to say of intelligence value other
than talking about his own family's sad tale of deportation from
Chechnya by Stalin to Central Asia,' Fuller said. `Every Chechen
family has such stories.'
Fuller said he had made several visits to Central Asia to do research
on post-Soviet political developments, and visited his daughter and
Tsarni there. `Our visit is briefly mentioned in my recent memoir,
Three Truths and a Lie, as well as their marriage celebration in
[Maryland],' he wrote.
A former Russian history and literature major at Harvard, Fuller said
he had a long interest in Soviet minorities, and found Ruslan
interesting.
Ruslan Tsarni has said in media interviews that his family was
estranged from his brother Aznor's, over what Ruslan described as the
growing religious fanaticism of Aznor's wife, Zubeidat, and that the
families had not spoken for several years. Aznor and Zubeidat's sons
Tamerlan, 26, and Dzhokhar, 19, are accused of carrying out the April
15th Boston Marathon bombings.
Fuller said he thinks he met Aznor Tsarnaev once, fleetingly, in
Kazakhstan. His daughter, he said, knew the family better, but when
Tamerlan was just a toddler, and Dzhokhar not yet born.
According to Fuller, the suspects' mother Zubeidat Tsarnaeva was not
an ethnic Chechen herself, but Dagestani, and so the family spoke the
couple's common language Russian, not Chechen, at home. `People who
lose their native language (identity) sometimes are more fanatic in
some respects,' he observed.
U.S. officials this week said that they added Tamerlan Tsarnaev and
Zubeidat Tsarnaeva to a US counterterrorism database in the fall of
2011, based on a warning from Russia's intelligence service that they
were suspected of being followers of radical Islam. Russia secretly
recorded some telephone conversations of Tamerlan and his mother
Zubeidat, including one between the two in 2001 `vaguely' discussing
jihad in Palestine, the Associated Press reported Saturday.
Tamerlan was killed in a police chase April 19th. Dzhokhar was charged
on two federal counts of terrorism April 21, and transferred to a
prison hospital outside of Boston on Friday, April 26.
`I for one was astonished at the events, and to find myself at two
degrees of separation from them,' Fuller said.
(Top photo: Graham Fuller, former vice chairman of the National
Intelligence Council and CIA officer; courtesy of author, from his
2012 memoir: second photo: Ruslan Tsarni, Fuller's former son in law,
CBS News)
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
The Back Channel: Dispatches from Washington to the Middle East
Al-Monitor
April 27, 2013
by Laura Rozen
Retired CIA officer Graham Fuller confirmed to Al-Monitor Saturday
that his daughter was previously married to an uncle of the suspects
in the Boston Marathon attacks, but called rumors of any links between
the uncle and the Agency `absurd.'
Graham Fuller's daughter, Samantha A. Fuller, was married to Ruslan
Tsarnaev (now Tsarni) in the mid-1990s, and divorced in 1999,
according to North Carolina public records. The elder Fuller had
retired from the agency almost a decade before the brief marriage.
`Samantha was married to Ruslan Tsarnaev (Tsarni) for 3-4 years, and
they lived in Bishkek for one year where Samantha was working for
Price Waterhouse on privatization projects,' Fulller, a former CIA
officer in Turkey and vice chairman of the National Intelligence
Council, told Al-Monitor by email Saturday. `They also lived in our
house in [Maryland] for a year or so and they were divorced in 1999, I
believe.'
`I, of course, retired from CIA in 1987 and had moved on to working as
a senior political scientist for RAND,' Fuller continued.
Fuller said his former son in law was interesting but homesick, and
moved back to Central Asia after the divorce.
`Like all Chechens, Ruslan was very concerned about his native land,
but I saw no particular involvement in politics, [although] he did try
to contact other Chechens around,' Fuller continued. `He also felt
homesick and eventually went back to Central Asia after the
divorce. His English was shaky. (We always spoke Russian together).'
A story on the Internet implying `possible connections between Ruslan
and the Agency through me are absurd,' Fuller said.
`I doubt [Ruslan] even had much to say of intelligence value other
than talking about his own family's sad tale of deportation from
Chechnya by Stalin to Central Asia,' Fuller said. `Every Chechen
family has such stories.'
Fuller said he had made several visits to Central Asia to do research
on post-Soviet political developments, and visited his daughter and
Tsarni there. `Our visit is briefly mentioned in my recent memoir,
Three Truths and a Lie, as well as their marriage celebration in
[Maryland],' he wrote.
A former Russian history and literature major at Harvard, Fuller said
he had a long interest in Soviet minorities, and found Ruslan
interesting.
Ruslan Tsarni has said in media interviews that his family was
estranged from his brother Aznor's, over what Ruslan described as the
growing religious fanaticism of Aznor's wife, Zubeidat, and that the
families had not spoken for several years. Aznor and Zubeidat's sons
Tamerlan, 26, and Dzhokhar, 19, are accused of carrying out the April
15th Boston Marathon bombings.
Fuller said he thinks he met Aznor Tsarnaev once, fleetingly, in
Kazakhstan. His daughter, he said, knew the family better, but when
Tamerlan was just a toddler, and Dzhokhar not yet born.
According to Fuller, the suspects' mother Zubeidat Tsarnaeva was not
an ethnic Chechen herself, but Dagestani, and so the family spoke the
couple's common language Russian, not Chechen, at home. `People who
lose their native language (identity) sometimes are more fanatic in
some respects,' he observed.
U.S. officials this week said that they added Tamerlan Tsarnaev and
Zubeidat Tsarnaeva to a US counterterrorism database in the fall of
2011, based on a warning from Russia's intelligence service that they
were suspected of being followers of radical Islam. Russia secretly
recorded some telephone conversations of Tamerlan and his mother
Zubeidat, including one between the two in 2001 `vaguely' discussing
jihad in Palestine, the Associated Press reported Saturday.
Tamerlan was killed in a police chase April 19th. Dzhokhar was charged
on two federal counts of terrorism April 21, and transferred to a
prison hospital outside of Boston on Friday, April 26.
`I for one was astonished at the events, and to find myself at two
degrees of separation from them,' Fuller said.
(Top photo: Graham Fuller, former vice chairman of the National
Intelligence Council and CIA officer; courtesy of author, from his
2012 memoir: second photo: Ruslan Tsarni, Fuller's former son in law,
CBS News)
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress