Former chief of terror information-sharing: Tsarnaev handling 'looks like a
mistake'
By Bryan Bender, Globe Staff
A sign calling for citizens of Boston to "Shelter in Place" is shown on I-93
in Boston Friday, April 19, 2013. Two suspects in the Boston Marathon
bombing killed an MIT police officer, injured a transit officer in a
firefight and threw explosive devices at police during their getaway attempt
in a long night of violence that left one of them dead and another still at
large Friday, authorities said as the manhunt intensified for a young man
described as a dangerous terrorist. (AP Photo/Elise Amendola)
WASHINGTON _ The former chief of the federal government's
information-sharing program said Friday that preliminary signs indicate law
enforcement and intelligence agencies failed to properly scrutinize one of
the Boston Marathon bombing suspects after he was added to a terror
watchlist by the CIA months after FBI investigators concluded he did not
pose a threat.
Ambassador Thomas E. "Ted" McNamara said in an interview that the fact that
Tamerlan Tsarnaev had been placed on a terror watchlist by the CIA should
have triggered more alarms among counter-terrorism officials, especially
after he traveled to a known hotbed of islamic militancy in Russia,
Dagestan, in 2012.
"This looks like a mistake in the sense there should have been some method
to jack up his significance," said McNamara, who served until 2009 as the
Program Manager for Information Sharing Environment, a position established
in the wake of 9/11 to make sure counter-terrorism agencies share
information on potential threats. The ISE office reports to the director of
national intelligence, which also was created after the 2001 attacks.
"This guy was considered a low-level threat," he added. "There are a few
things that might have bounced that up to higher level attention. But
apparently it stayed in that low-level database."
At Russia's request, Tsarnaev was first investigated by the FBI between
March and June of 2011. The FBI determined he did not pose a threat. The FBI
has said that it sought additional information from Russia on Tsarnaev on
repeated occasions but received no response.
In September 2011, after a similar request by the Russians to the CIA, the
CIA requested that Tsarnaev be placed on a terror watch list, and he was
placed on the list the National Counter-Terrorism Center, set up after 9/11
to coordinate the different databaes.
Tsarnaev's name also was placed on a separate FBI terrorist screening
database, and another one linked to the Department of Homeland Security.
Homeland Security detected that his travel to Russia in 2012, but his
warning status was not high enough to require an follow-up interview by
border authorities when he returned. A security official said this week the
FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force in Boston was notified of his travels,
however.
Meanwhile, Massachusetts officials who oversee anti-terrorism "fusion
centers" created to disseminate federal, state, and local information on
potential terrorist threats said they were never informed about the FBI's
original three-month investigation.
McNamara views this story as a trail of missed opportunities to identify an
increasingly radicalized subject.
"We have come an incredibly long way but we still have a substantial way to
go," said McNamara, who also served as ambassador-at-large for
counter-terrorism as the State Department. "We sometimes forget that we are
not as fully up to speed as we ought to be or need to be."
McNamara's expressed his concerns Friday as the House Foreign Affairs
Committee heard testimony from specialists on the North Caucuses region of
Russia, which encompasses Chechnya and Dagestan. Tsarnaev, a citizen of
Kyrgyzstan who died after a firefight with police in Watertown on April 19,
was planning during 2011 to travel to Dagestan, which prompted Russia's
Federal Security Service to warn the FBI and CIA that he had become
radicalized.
In response to questioning from Representative Bill Keating, a Cape Cod
Democrat, specialists suggested that continuing distrust between former Cold
War foes may have contributed to the failure to track Tsarnaev.
"This is the problem of distrust between our countries and our security
forces," said Andranik Migranyan, director of the Institute for Democracy
and Cooperation in New York and a former adviser to the Russian government.
He said he believes US officials may have doubted the Russians motives in
passing along information about Tsarnaev.
"I am afraid that they just didn't pay enough attention to this warning," he
added, speculating the US officials suspected Russia's overture was "some
Russian plot-`This is not [a] terrorist, it is something else.' "
Keating, a member of both the Homeland Security and Foreign Affairs
Committees, said he hopes that one lesson from the Boston tragedy is that
the two countries need to find a way to work together more closely on these
matters.
"One of things we want perhaps to come of this is a better opportunity to
have security advisers and law enforcement that work more closely, despite
our differences, as difficult as they can be at times," Keating said. "In
both countries, lives could be lost."
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