OPINION:
As President Trump weighs a new partnership with Russia, he would do well to consider Russia’s role in the Boston Marathon bombing 12 years ago, April 15, 2013, in which three people were killed and more than 500 injured.
The bombers were Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, two ethnic Chechen brothers from Russia, and the actions of the Putin regime before and after the bombing show that the Russian authorities, at the very least, facilitated and may have planned the worst act of terrorism on American soil since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
The full story of the Boston bombings needs to be better known. It is a warning that the Putin regime, as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy pointed out in his recent Oval Office encounter with President Trump, is a danger not just to Ukraine and Europe but also to the U.S.
Russia’s involvement with the Tsarnaev brothers began in March 2011 when the Russian Federal Security Service warned the FBI that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was a follower of radical Islam and was preparing to leave the U.S. to join “unspecified underground groups.” The FSB, however, provided no further details despite repeated requests. The FBI questioned Tsarnaev but did not find evidence of links to terrorism, and, in keeping with internal guidelines, the inquiry was dropped.
In January 2012, despite having been interrogated on the basis of a tip from the FSB, Tamerlan Tsarnaev traveled to Russia on a Russian visa and spent six months in Chechnya and Dagestan, the center of Islamic radicalism.
Once in Dagestan, Tsarnayev met with Mahmud Nidal, a suspected recruiter for the Dagestan radical Islamist underground. Tsarnaev was also in contact with another radical in Dagestan, William Plotnikov, a Russian Canadian who had converted to Islam and joined the insurgency. Both were liquidated while Tsarnaev was in Dagestan. Nidal was killed on May 19, 2012. According to Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta, he did not surrender because he knew the authorities had “too much information on him.” Plotnikov was killed in a separate operation along with seven other insurgents.
Tsarnaev, however, despite the security blanket in Dagestan, was not detained or questioned. Jean-Francois Ratelle, a professor at George Washington University who worked in Dagestan on the radicalization of youths at the time, told Voice of America that the fact that he grew a beard and spent time with young radicals led to him being under constant surveillance and repeatedly detained and questioned.
The Dagestani authorities said that they believed Tsarnaev had joined the insurgency. Instead, he went to the North Caucasian resort town of Mineralny Vody and flew to Moscow, where he left for the U.S. on July 17 without any obstacles. With Tsarnaev en route to the U.S., Russian authorities made no further effort to contact U.S. intelligence or to warn of the growing danger.
After the Boston bombing, a delegation of U.S. senators went to Moscow to try to learn more about Tsarnaev’s period in Russia. Russian officials denied that Tsarnaev had been in Russia in 2012. When Ryan Christopher Fogle, a diplomat who accompanied the delegation, tried to meet a person who said he had information about the bombings, he was arrested in front of waiting television cameras and accused of espionage. The purpose was apparently to warn against investigating the Russian connection to the Boston bombing.
In the months after the bombing, Russian officials emphasized that the tragedy was the result of the U.S. refusal to cooperate with Russia in the war on Islamic terrorism.
The Associated Press quoted one Russian security expert as saying, “The U.S. intelligence agencies would now [after the bombings] be more interested in expanding cooperation which has not existed until now.”
Vladimir Putin repeatedly returned to the subject of the bombings, which he described as the cost of failing to cooperate with Russia in the fight against Islamist extremism. In a meeting with political analysts on Oct. 27, 2016, however, he also gave an explanation for why Russia did not give the U.S. information about Tsarnaev’s period in Dagestan. He said that when the FSB tried to warn the U.S. about Tsarnaev, they were told that it was “none of our business.” As a result, he instructed [FSB director Alexander] Bortnikov not to raise this issue with the Americans anymore.
The U.S. asked the FSB in March 2011 for specific information that was never provided. The fact that Tsarnaev spent six months in Dagestan in 2012 in contact with violent extremists was known to the Dagestani anti-terrorist unit and the FSB. If it had also been known to the U.S., it would have prevented the Boston bombing.
• David Satter is the author of “The Less You Know, the Better You Sleep: Russia’s Road to Terror and Dictatorship Under Yeltsin and Putin.” He is vice chairman of the Remembrance Society, which commemorates victims of totalitarianism.
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