The Brothers

Nine HOW MUSA KHADZHIMURATOV FELL OUT OF LOVE WITH AMERICA

“This is a catastrophe,” the woman told me. “It is a catastrophe for us Chechens.”

She said she knew right away. In fact, she had always known. The woman had been eight years old when the first war in Chechnya began—she had grown up being a target. So when her own eight-year-old daughter here, in suburban Boston, asked if it was true that the bombers were Chechen, the woman said, “No!” and turned off the television: the word CHECHEN had been right there on the screen, beneath a picture of the younger brother. Turning off the television did not help any more than turning off bad news has ever helped anyone. The girl soon heard it at school and at the playground, and her best friend was not allowed to come over to play anymore.

The woman would not let me use her name, but she talked to me while she cooked—traditional rough Chechen bread in large square loaves, and cake: the family was expecting a visitor from Chechnya. They had been living in Boston for about seven years at the time of the bombing, and life had been pretty good. They came as refugees—a relatively privileged status that entitles new arrivals to seek both employment and public assistance—because the brother and father of the woman’s husband had both been disappeared by the Russians. Her husband worked in construction, and she was staying home with their three children, two of them born in this country. They had a house in a middle-class neighborhood, next door to another Chechen family. They socialized primarily with other Chechens; this was a traditional house, where the woman would set the table for the men and stay out of the room while they ate and talked. She knew the wives, but since Tamerlan never brought his wife to their house, she knew nothing of the Tsarnaevs except that the older brother sometimes played soccer with her husband and the other men. She had never seen Dzhokhar—until she saw him on television on April 19, 2013.

Two days later, they came for her husband, just as she knew they would. It was the woman’s mother-in-law who called Almut Rochowanski, the New York City lawyer who had started an organization for Chechen refugees: “The FBI has taken my son.” Rochowanski arranged for a lawyer from the Massachusetts branch of the American Civil Liberties Union to step into the FBI’s interviews as the man’s representative, and the FBI soon seemed to lose interest in the man, but for his mother, Rochowanski told me, “It was just repeating what had happened to her other son and husband in Chechnya.”

A short while later, Rochowanski and the ACLU put together a one-page Russian-language memo on how to act when the FBI comes to your door. Most important point: “You don’t have to let them into your home.” Other most important point: “You don’t have to go with them.” But, sighed Rochowanski, “most are too intimidated not to let them in.”

ROCHOWANSKI HAD TRAINED as a lawyer in her native Austria, then continued her studies at Columbia and ended up spending many years working in and around the North Caucasus, which boasts some of the world’s highest concentrations of uniforms per square kilometer, but she had never spent time dealing directly with law enforcement. “It’s the first time I became intimate with this,” she told me. Up close, it was not pretty. “You don’t want to think that they take a kid in their early twenties and interrogate him for eight hours without giving him a drink of water. Which probably amounts to torture. But then you hear about it and you think, ‘Right, this is how law enforcement works: it breaks people down.’”

Rochowanski is wrong, legally speaking: these coercive interrogation practices used by the FBI in the course of the War on Terror would probably not be considered torture if an international court were to review them. A possible exception, according to legal scholars Philip Heymann and Tom Lue, is the prolonged withholding of medical treatment, which has been a part of the interrogators’ repertoire. In 2003, the United States Supreme Court took up the question of coercive interrogation practices in the case of Chavez v. Martinez but was unable to render a majority decision. Six separate opinions resulted. The question of whether it is constitutional for law enforcement to employ such techniques as sleep deprivation, the withholding of treatment, and hooding remained open.

After the attacks of September 11, 2001, the United States declared the War on Terror. “Terror, like fear, is an emotion, so declaring war on an emotion is hardly a strategy conducive to success,” snapped terrorism scholar Louise Richardson in a 2006 book. President George W. Bush’s 2002 National Security Strategy narrowed the focus of the so-called war, but only slightly: “The enemy is terrorism—premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against civilians.” Unlike terror, terrorism is not an emotion but rather a phenomenon, or even an instrument, but that does not make it any easier to fight. And as Heymann has pointed out, declaring war against an enemy who is not a state or a person or a group of people makes it impossible to determine when the war has been won—or lost, or otherwise ended.

President Barack Obama’s National Security Strategy, published in 2010, retrospectively redefined the War on Terror as “a war on al-Qa’ida and its affiliates” and responded to Heymann’s criticism: “This is not a global war against a tactic—terrorism [sic] or a religion—Islam. We are at war with a specific network, al-Qa’ida, and its terrorist affiliates who support efforts to attack the United States, our allies, and partners.” This may have sounded more specific, but the basic political and legal problems of the war, by then nine years old, remained unresolved. What laws govern an American war against something that is not a state or even a circumscribed entity? And considering al-Qaida’s loose structure, how are the generals and soldiers of this war to define the enemy? A lack of clarity persisted on the issue of the objective, or the end point, of the war: When would it be over? When there are no more attacks on U.S. soil? But for over ten years following September 11, there were no attacks that were attributed to al-Qaida. When there are no more attacks on Americans anywhere in the world? When there is no one left who is capable of launching such an attack? The War on Terror—or on terrorism, or on al-Qaida—remained a shapeless and an endless one.

It is in the nature of terrorism to engender an outsize response. “A little bit of terrorism goes a long way,” writes Heymann.

And a nineteen-year-old kid escaping on foot compelled the governor of Massachusetts to put the state’s largest city on virtual lockdown—what seemed like a reasonable safety measure at the time but was also one of the most extraordinary curtailments of liberty experienced by Americans in living memory.

Perhaps it is just too frightening for most people to believe that a small group—or just a pair—of ordinary people using means most of us could have at our disposal and following a plan that spanned barely an afternoon could inflict so much pain and suffering on so many. Behind such great fear, surely there must be an equally great threat.

Using the language of war when talking about terrorism enabled the Bush administration to draw on the practices of war as well. The legal waters were murky, particularly because much of what was being called war was taking place on U.S. soil, and the enemy was ill-defined. Immediately following the September 11 attacks, the president claimed the right to detain anyone, including United States citizens on American soil, indefinitely without charges. And since this was war, the president also wanted detainees who were not U.S. citizens—but who may have been longtime legal residents—tried by military tribunals, which would have extraordinary powers and whose proceedings would be closed to the public. Some of Bush’s more far-reaching measures were rolled back over the following few years, but the practice of targeting noncitizens—“investigative profiling on the basis of immigration status,” in Justice Department terminology—persisted. This happened in part because, unlike such extraordinary measures as the indefinite detention of citizens, the indefinite detention of noncitizens in practice required no change in the law. For the majority of the more than twelve hundred aliens detained in the wake of September 11, visa violations or other immigration-status irregularities could be found to justify detention. For the rest, a novel way of applying an existing statute was introduced: simply by being noncitizens they became, in the eyes of the law, witnesses who might not be available to testify unless detained. An untold number of people were deported after being detained. Testifying before the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, in December 2003, Heymann pointed to this cycle—detention, closed hearing, deportation—as one of the greater threats to liberty contained in new antiterrorist policy and practice, calling it “what amounts to a claim of a right to make individuals disappear from American society on executive orders and without the public openness that is necessary for trust in the legitimacy of your government.”

The practice of targeting aliens long predated Bush’s counterterrorism policies, however. In 1986, amid that era’s fears of international terrorism, President Ronald Reagan issued a secret directive establishing the National Program for Combatting Terrorism, which in turn created the Alien Border Control Committee, charged specifically with finding ways to quietly deport suspected members of the Palestine Liberation Organization. The best-known case to have resulted from the ABCC’s activities was that of the L.A. Eight, six student-visa holders and two longtime permanent residents who were arrested in 1987 and held in maximum-security cells without ever being charged with a crime. The L.A. Eight tried to sue, but the government turned itself into a moving target, continuously switching what was presented as grounds for detention and deportation: the arsenal of rules and regulations of what was then called the Immigration and Naturalization Service made that eminently possible.

Bush’s counterterrorism reforms created the vastly powerful Department of Homeland Security, which subsumed the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Aliens remained the target. In the case of the Boston Marathon bombing, following established policy and practice to focus on noncitizen immigrants from Chechnya seemed the obvious thing to do. Never mind that the brothers themselves were not from Chechnya, that there was no indication—only the assumption—that they were part of a larger network, that Dzhokhar was a United States citizen, and that one of the last things Tamerlan is known to have said is, “I am a Muslim American.”

IF CHECHEN IMMIGRANTS were the obvious focus for the FBI investigation, then Musa Khadzhimuratov was the obvious first suspect. He had been a fighter in the Chechen insurgency—indeed, he was chief bodyguard to one of its leaders in the 1990s. He owned firearms. He lived in New Hampshire, where Tamerlan had apparently purchased the fireworks used in making the bombs and where he had gone to a shooting range. Tamerlan had visited Musa at his house less than three weeks before the bombing. From Musa’s point of view, he was just as obviously beyond suspicion: he came from an earlier, secular generation of Chechen resisters, as foreign to the proponents of an Islamic state as the Russians themselves; owning guns is the norm for a Chechen man, and since New Hampshire places no restrictions on the purchase or possession of firearms, it should not, Musa figured, make him subject to scrutiny; and most to the point, he was so obviously and profoundly disabled. Though after several years in the United States he could drive a car and lift himself in and out of it, he needed help stowing his wheelchair in the trunk and removing it. More generally, in order simply to live he needed the around-the-clock care of his wife, who helped deal with everything from his persistent petit mal seizures to his procedure for emptying his bowels.

Just a bit less obviously but even more crucially, the Khadzhimuratovs were deeply aware of the precariousness of their good life. They had everything—the credenza, the chandelier, the crystal glasses from which they had never removed the tiny oval paper stickers, the used car—but all of it had been bought on credit, all of it paid off by scrimping enabled by a most powerful desire to build a normal life in peace. They now had friends here, and their kids had friends, and the kids were using Americanized names at their American school—fourteen-year-old Ibragim was calling himself Abraham—but they themselves had been teenagers when the first war in Chechnya began, and they knew how life could change drastically and irrevocably. When they came to the United States, they made the unspoken new-immigrant pledge: though nothing in their lived experience had taught them to put their trust in a state, or in the future, they did—they chose to believe that the United States would shelter them and care for them. The country met them partway. They came bearing refugee “white cards,” entitling them to public assistance, but after a couple of years only Madina and the two kids got their permanent-resident green cards; Musa was rejected for having been part of the insurgency, which, in the post-9/11 era of Russian–American cooperation, made him an accessory to a terrorist organization in the eyes of not only the Russian but also the U.S. government. Musa could continue to live in the United States as a refugee, but unlike the rest of his family, he would never be entitled to apply for citizenship and his status would remain forever temporary, subject to being revoked by the authorities. More important to his everyday life, as a noncitizen he would be entitled to medical help from the state for a maximum of seven years—and that time had just run out when the bombs went off at the Boston Marathon.

They came for Musa. Two FBI agents questioned him in his apartment. “They wanted to know why I didn’t go to the authorities to say that I know him. I said, ‘I was waiting for you to come to me.’ I guess that response kind of got to them.” It probably did. It was a dumb thing to say, too, because it was not exactly true. Like some other immigrants who came to the United States in the Internet era, the Khadzhimuratovs left Chechnya without leaving it: they were constantly, for hours on end, on Skype with Madina’s older sister in Grozny, and while they followed the news, they got it by way of the Caucasus, reading the websites that covered their native region. The Caucasus was not interested in the Boston Marathon bombing—the Caucasus was not exactly impressed by a bomb that killed three people, well below the weekly average for that region—until the suspects were identified as Chechens. By that time, the names of the Tsarnaev brothers were known and Tamerlan was dead. There was nothing to do but wait for the FBI to come with its questions.

When the FBI came again, the agents took Musa to a local office for questioning. It was a typical FBI interrogation room: windowless, lit with a flickering fluorescent light. And it was a typical FBI questioning session—no audio or video equipment was used. The FBI records its interrogations only if the subject is in the Bureau’s custody, but Musa, like most of the Chechens, submitted to the questioning voluntarily and without engaging a lawyer, not only because he knew himself to be innocent but also because he thought that this way his innocence would be all the more obvious.

“It turned out they thought I was the mastermind,” he discovered. “Because I keep guns at home. And also because I’m into sports and so I would have chosen the Boston Marathon as a target. I said, ‘If I’d had anything to do with it, do you really think I would have gone out and bought guns under my own name, or let him come for shooting practice right here, under my nose?’”

Several hours into the interrogation session—by this time Musa had been without food, water, or medication for eight hours, so he was beginning to slip in and out of consciousness—he was hooked up to a polygraph machine.

“Let’s see how you are going to lie now,” he remembered one of the agents saying.

“Look at the wall!” he remembered one of the agents shouting. Musa was having difficulty holding his head up and his eyes open. “Lift up your head and look at the wall when we ask you questions!”

“Did you help the Tsarnaev brothers plan the bombing?” he remembered one of the agents asking.

“I freaked out,” he told me a couple of weeks later. “I tore the wires off me and said, ‘You can’t treat me like a criminal. This is the last time I set foot in this building. You can arrest me if you want, you can never give me a green card if you want, but I’m going home now.’”

“You can’t,” he remembered an agent saying. “Your apartment is being searched right now.” He also remembered being told that his refugee status would be revoked and he would be deported. At this point, Musa felt that he no longer cared: he wheeled himself out of the FBI office.

MUSA, like other Boston-area Chechens, and like Almut Rochowanski, who was trying to help them, was just beginning to discover how, exactly, law enforcement casts a wide net in the age of the War on Terror. “This is what they [the FBI] do,” Rochowanski told me. “The policy priority is to get as many of them [aliens] out of the country as possible. You would think you’d want to keep them where you could watch them, but I don’t know, I’m not a policy expert for Homeland Security.”

Indeed, for nearly thirty years the main threat American law enforcement has used against aliens suspected of supporting terrorism has been deportation. It has remained the weapon of choice even in the dozen years since the September 11 attacks showed clearly that a terrorist attack on the United States could be planned and directed from overseas. From a policy or strategic standpoint, deporting suspected terrorist supporters to countries that are themselves suspected of supporting terrorism makes no sense. But it suits the bigger imagination of the War on Terror, in which terrorists are larger than life and have America under siege.

Ten THE STRANGE DEATH OF IBRAGIM TODASHEV

On May 1, 2013, twenty-four-year-old Reni Manukyan landed at JFK Airport in New York. She had been traveling for a while: a two-hour flight to Moscow from a southern Russian city where she had been visiting cousins, then the ten-hour flight to New York, and now she had to recheck her luggage for the final leg to Atlanta. But before she could get her bags, the Homeland Security officer at passport control instructed her to follow another officer to a room off the giant baggage hall. The room is large and windowless, and at any given time three or four officers are seated behind metal desks there, talking to passengers who have just arrived from some foreign country, while other similarly inconvenienced passengers wait their turn in stiff plastic chairs. The space is eerily bright and still; the optimistic din of the arrivals hall disappears the moment an officer shuts the heavy door. The use of any electronic devices is forbidden. People spend their time waiting with nothing to distract them from the dread of not being allowed to enter the country.

A few minutes after Reni was led in, the door closed behind a woman wearing a hijab, and Reni knew why she was here: “What, are you taking all the Muslims off their flights?” she snapped at the officers. Reni herself was wearing a tracksuit and a simple black-and-white-patterned scarf on her head—she liked to be comfortable when she traveled—but in her passport picture, taken soon after she converted to Islam in the summer of 2010, she was fully covered. That must have been what drew the officer’s attention, because nothing else about Reni could arouse suspicion. She was born in Russia but had lived in the United States since she was a teenager; her mother was serving in the U.S. Army; Reni herself had a good steady job as an assistant housekeeper at a big chain hotel in Atlanta; and she traveled back to Russia to visit relatives with some regularity.

It was not too long before one of the officers motioned Reni over to his desk and started asking questions. He wanted to know where she had been. Reni had gone to Russia for a cousin’s wedding—she had left Atlanta on April 16. Over the course of the next twenty minutes, the officer asked a great many detailed questions about her mundane and limited travels in Russia during the previous two weeks. Then he asked her if she knew Tamerlan Tsarnaev. Reni said she did not. The officer insisted that she knew him, and she equally adamantly insisted that she did not.

“Who is Ibragim Todashev?” the officer asked then.

“Why? Did he do something?” Reni asked back.

“What do you mean?” the officer asked. “What could he have done? Why did you ask that? What do you think he would have done?”

Reni had asked the question because she was not taking any of this very seriously. It was not until later that she realized that “you should never joke with them.” Ibragim Todashev was her husband. They had married in July 2010, after knowing each other for a couple of months—this was why Reni had converted to Islam. Ibragim had moved from Boston to Atlanta to live with her, but after a bit less than a year she grew tired of supporting him while he did nothing but the “brainless sports” in which he competed, namely mixed martial arts. They moved to Orlando together, thinking that the Chechen community there would make it easier for him to find a job, but there they split up and Reni moved back to Atlanta, although subsequently they had made up and split up and maybe made up again, eventually settling into a comfortable pattern of talking on the phone every day and spending every other weekend or so together.

So what bad things could Ibragim have done? He could have cheated on Reni. He could have gotten into a fight—that had happened a few times, and once, a couple of months before they met, he had been arrested in downtown Boston for attacking a driver who he thought had hurled an insult that mentioned Ibragim’s mother. Reni was not all that surprised by these fights: as she saw it, Americans and Russians—especially Russians from Chechnya, where Ibragim was born—just drew the line between acceptable and unacceptable behavior in different places. Chechens saw an insult as no less a transgression than a blow, and as far as a Chechen was concerned, an American who shouted an obscenity was spoiling for a fight. Sometimes Reni thought Ibragim might have been better off staying home and mooching off her than roaming the streets and getting into fights with Americans, who were liable to call the police, who in turn were liable to think a loose cannon like Ibragim—a professional martial artist to boot—should be kept under lock and key. Reni, who was not Chechen and who had spent the last two weeks with relatives in Russia, had no idea of the hold the very idea of a Chechen martial artist had taken on the American imagination in that time.

Reni spent five hours in that room, answering questions that made little sense to her. Her plane had left by the time she came out. She dialed Ibragim, who explained that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was his friend Tamerlan from Boston. Reni had never met him, but Ibragim had mentioned him and she had talked to him once or twice when she answered Ibragim’s phone.

“Tell them what you know,” Ibragim instructed her. “Don’t try to hide anything. I’ll tell you more when I see you.”

The next morning two FBI agents were waiting for Reni when she came to work. They had another circular conversation. A week later, Ibragim came to visit: he drove up on Thursday and back the following day. He told Reni that all the Chechens in Boston and Orlando were getting dragged in for questioning. The day he left, the FBI agents came again. This time Reni decided she had something to say about Tamerlan.

“If you ask me, I’m going to tell you, I don’t think he did it.” She really was starting to think that maybe, like some of the American Chechens were saying, the Tsarnaev brothers had been set up. People were starting to point out some inconsistencies in the FBI’s story—but even more, the ongoing siege of the Chechen community made it feel like they were the ones under attack.

After Reni said she did not think Tamerlan did it, all hell broke loose. “That’s when it started with the curse words,” she told me. “He says, ‘So you fucking think it’s right to kill people?’ And I say, ‘Don’t put words in my mouth.’”

Reni was starting to get scared of the FBI. They could do anything—they could even get Ibragim deported. He had booked a ticket to travel to Chechnya on May 24: he had just gotten his green card, and this would be the first time he would visit his parents and eleven younger siblings. Now Reni was begging him to cancel the trip because she was afraid he would not be allowed to return. She spent all day May 21 calling and texting him, trying to get him to cancel. Ibragim relented, and Reni, who had booked the ticket for him herself, logged onto Expedia.com to return it. By the time Reni texted Ibragim to tell him she had canceled the ticket, it was around six-thirty in the evening—the end of Reni’s shift at the Hilton, one of her two hotel jobs.

She rode her motorcycle home. She felt her phone vibrating like crazy as she rode, but she did not look at it until she got home: it was her younger brother Alex, whom she had helped get a job at the Hilton, calling to say that the two FBI agents had shown up there again. She had Alex pass the phone to one of the agents, and then she told them to come to her apartment. They came at seven-thirty. While Reni was waiting for them to arrive, she called and texted Ibragim, finally writing in Chechen: “Why aren’t you answering me?” When they first got married, Ibragim had said he would want their children to speak Chechen, so Reni, who found languages easy, learned this one. Whatever was going on now, it seemed like a good time to switch to a language few other people would be able to understand.

The two FBI agents left a bit after nine, after another circular and unpleasant conversation; as usual, one of them had asked most of the questions while the other took notes. Reni looked at her phone: still no response from Ibragim. She went to bed. When she woke at five and her phone’s screen was still blank, she grew worried. She dialed his number. I’m going to wake him up, she thought. He is going to scream at me. There was no answer.

ELENA TEYER THOUGHT it was only slightly odd when her daughter converted to Islam. That is, covering herself was a strange choice for a beautiful young woman with long thin legs. Riding her motorcycle in that getup could not have been comfortable, either. Other than the dress, converting seemed to have been easy. Reni explained to her mother that the basic “Thou shalt not kill” and “Thou shalt not steal” from the Bible—roughly the sum total of her familiarity with the Christianity into which she was born—underlay both religions. It had also seemed logical: Reni had been in search of an identity ever since they moved to the United States, and if she had now found one through the love of a good man, so much the better.

Elena’s own story contained perhaps too little love, too few good men, and too much change. She was one of those Russian women who rely on no one but themselves. The Soviet Union collapsed while she was still in college, making her one of the millions who had to make their way without their parents’ help or guidance. Elena became a restaurant manager. She did well, raising two kids on her own. In the early aughts she moved from southern Russia to Moscow to help open and run a hotel restaurant there. In 2004, she started corresponding with an American man, who soon came to visit and then soon came to visit again, and within two years thirty-five-year-old Elena and her children moved to Atlanta to live with him. The marriage lasted less than six months before Elena moved out with her kids. She wanted to go back to Russia, but three tickets would have cost nearly three thousand dollars and she could not imagine getting that kind of money. A local Orthodox church helped her rent a tiny basement apartment. Elena started working—first as an on-call waitress for a catering business, then she worked her way up to maître d’ at a fancy hotel restaurant. Two years after arriving in the United States, she was making enough to pay rent on a good apartment and cover expenses, but she had no health insurance. Plus, her permanent-resident status, for which she had qualified as the wife of an American citizen, could be revoked now that she was no longer married, which would make it illegal for her and the kids to stay in the country. Elena was no stranger to hardship, but the uncertainty was starting to feel like too great a burden.

Someone mentioned that the U.S. Army was hiring. After fighting two wars for years, the military was perpetually short on personnel. She failed the test administered at the recruitment office: her English was not up to par. But the recruitment officer gave useful advice on how to study for the test and—even better—told her that an English-language course for prospective recruits would be opening up soon.

Elena left the kids in Atlanta and went to a base in Texas for the course. It was like English-as-a-second-language basic training. The students had to rise at four in the morning, dress in uniforms, and stand in formation in the quad—before spending the day studying English. Elena discovered that she loved it. It might have had something to do with having grown up a military brat, but that was not the crux of it. This was difficult—giving up your personal freedom at the age of thirty-eight is hard, as is getting up at four every day—but things had been difficult her whole life. What they had not been was fair. The Army offered a clear, transparent, and fair deal: Elena gave over her mind and body in exchange for training, job security, medical insurance, and American citizenship for her and her kids. Both partners paid up front. Then she would be set: there would be retirement benefits, too. Honesty and openness are inherently seductive qualities, especially for people who have rarely encountered them. Elena became a patriot of the United States.

She completed the English course, then eight weeks of basic training, followed by vocational training—she had decided she wanted to work at an on-base drugstore—in San Antonio. She served in Fort Jackson, South Carolina, for two and a half years, and then was transferred to Germany. When she went overseas, only her son, Alex, went with her. Her daughter was twenty by then, too old to be dragged around by her mother. Elena wished she had commenced the dragging around a bit earlier, in fact: Alex, who was eleven when they came to America, was doing very well. He was growing up American, while his sister, Nyusha (in her case a diminutive for Evgenia), seemed to be struggling to figure out who she was. While Elena was away for her initial military training, Nyusha went and legally changed her name to Reniya Manukyan, taking the last name of a family friend of Armenian descent who she believed was her biological father, despite Elena’s denials. Reni stopped considering herself Russian, began referring to herself as Armenian, and even taught herself the language. She had the ability and perseverance for these kinds of feats.

Although Elena continued to call her daughter Nyusha, she got it: the girl was looking for somebody to be. The conversion to Islam was the product of the same need and actually made a bit more sense to Elena because it was not an abstraction—her daughter was in love with Ibragim. Nyusha took things a bit far when she tried reprimanding her mother for her insufficiently modest dress; Elena was not one to be told what to wear, except when she was at work in the Army. But Elena liked Ibragim. He was gentle, and he had been through a lot: fleeing the war in Chechnya with his family as a child, growing up in Saratov, a Russian city on the Volga, an ethnic Other, returning to Chechnya when it was still in shambles. Ibragim had gone back to Saratov to attend college—he had studied to be a translator from English—and had come to the United States on a work-study program before what would have been his last year of college. He had stayed, getting political asylum. His family back in Chechnya was doing well—his father had a high-level job with the new administration—but most of the prospering had come after Ibragim left. Elena saw him as a boy alone in a strange country, and she had a pretty good idea of what that felt like. She was happy to accept him fully into her family, as long as he finally got a job and stopped relying on her daughter, who worked two.

Elena herself felt like she was finally settling into a good life. After two years in Germany she requested a transfer to Georgia: she had spent only a few years in Atlanta, but she felt like the city was home, both because Nyusha was there and because it was where Elena first landed as a Russian mail-order bride. She and seventeen-year-old Alex returned to Georgia in March 2013. She was now based at Fort Stewart, 230 miles southeast of Atlanta, and Elena immediately set about house-hunting in Savannah, the beautiful historic town about forty minutes away, toward the coast. A month later, she was closing on her first house. The date was April 15.

ELENA DID NOT BEGIN to grasp the impact of the Boston bombing until two weeks later, when her daughter was detained at the airport on the way home. Reni-Nyusha told her mother that Ibragim had been called in for questioning and said that the FBI was following him everywhere he went. On May 10, during a visit to Reni, Ibragim came down to see Elena in Savannah. Reni had asked him to run some things of hers from Atlanta to her mother’s house. Ibragim struck Elena as depressed. She was also surprised to see he was still limping, ostensibly a consequence of a knee operation back in March. It might in fact have been the result of a fight he had had in an Orlando parking lot a few days earlier.

Around seven-thirty in the evening on May 21 someone knocked on Elena’s door. It was two FBI agents. “What’s our fools’ psychology?” she ranted to me a year later. “If we haven’t done anything wrong, we fear nothing. I even kept telling them they were doing good for the country.” Obviously, she let them into her house.

“They spent two hours asking me the same questions over and over again: Did they sleep together? Did they sleep on the couch together when they spent the night at my place? How religious was he? Did he abuse her? I told them that if anyone had so much as touched my baby in a bad way, I would have killed them. That’s exactly what I said.” That is easy to believe. Elena is a large, shapely woman with long blond hair—the very image of an all-powerful Russian matriarch, as well as of the ideal Russian mail-order bride, and the very opposite of her own daughter, who is slight, dark-haired, and soft-spoken.

After a couple of hours of circular questioning, Elena asked the agents to leave. She called her daughter.

“I just had a visit from them,” said Elena.

“So did I.”

Elena tried calling Ibragim, but he did not pick up.

AFTER TRYING IBRAGIM unsuccessfully at five in the morning, Reni got ready for work and jumped on her motorcycle. As she left her apartment complex, she noticed a car. Everything about the car was conspicuous: the way it was parked, across two spaces, the man at the wheel, who was white—an unusual sight in this neighborhood—and the fact that he was sitting at the wheel of a parked car in the wee hours of the morning. Ibragim had mentioned being followed by the FBI, but Reni did not yet realize that overt, menacing surveillance is a typical FBI tactic that was being applied to several of Tamerlan’s friends. She did know that the man at the wheel had to be an agent. She raised the face shield of her motorcycle helmet and gave the guy a stare she hoped conveyed the depth of her disdain for him, and rode away. The car followed her, but she lost it easily and rode to the Holiday Inn, where she was working the morning shift. The FBI car, as it turned out, went to the Hilton, where she was supposed to work that afternoon and evening.

At seven o’clock Reni’s phone rang; it was a former supervisor with whom Reni had stayed friends. He was also a biker, and he, his wife, and Reni often took weekend riding trips together.

“What’s your husband’s last name?” he asked. “It says in the paper that a guy named Ibragim has been killed in Orlando.”

The thing about working at a hotel is that there is always a newspaper at hand early in the morning. Reni grabbed a copy of USA Today off the top of a stack and found the headline. The FBI agent called from the Hilton just then; she told him where she was, and he said he was coming. It took him forty minutes to get there. Meanwhile, Reni kept dialing her mother.

Elena had a training session that morning. She could not pick up when her daughter called or when an unknown number began showing up on her phone every few minutes. She finally picked up when the training ended, around seven-thirty in the morning.

“Hello. We were at your house last night.”

This was when she lost her cool. “You are going to start calling me at work now? I told you everything yesterday. I have nothing else to say to you.”

“We have something to tell you. Ibragim Todashev died of gunshot wounds this morning.”

Elena hung up and called her daughter. Reni was screaming into the phone: “Mama, they’ve killed him!”

“Then I knew that they weren’t kidding,” Elena told me. She rushed to do the paperwork for an emergency leave; her commanding officer was understanding, but bolting from work at an Army base still requires a lengthy bureaucratic procedure. Meanwhile, the two FBI agents from the evening before came.

“You don’t have to worry about your children,” said the one who usually did the talking. “Your family is safe.”

“Why? Why?” Elena remembers screaming, meaning, Why was Ibragim killed?

“He became aggressive,” the agent told her.

“What are you telling me that my children are safe for when you just killed one of them? Look at me—I’m being aggressive now, too. Are you going to kill me?”

What Elena remembers the FBI agent doing next is this: “He placed his foot up on the chair right next to where I was sitting, and he hiked his pant leg up. He had a gun strapped to his shin. He said, ‘If you touch my gun now, my partner can kill you. He has that right.’ The gun was just about level with my face. It’s a good thing I didn’t reach for it then. Or I wouldn’t be talking to you today.”

WHAT EXACTLY Ibragim Todashev did to get himself killed was not clear then and is not clear now. By the day of his death, he had been what the FBI called “interviewed” three times. The first time, on April 20, began with Ibragim on the ground on the condo complex’s bucolic lawn, with armed men crowded around him: this was the manner in which the FBI first ID’d him, though he was never arrested and all his conversations with the FBI were, technically, voluntary. From that point on he was under constant overt surveillance. In addition, the FBI took all of his electronics—but returned them a day later. At least at some points, the FBI appears to have had a drone follow him. And on May 16, his girlfriend, Tatiana Gruzdeva, was arrested.

The other women in Ibragim’s life seem to have had varying levels of awareness of Tatiana’s existence: Elena thought Tatiana was Ibragim’s roommate, and Reni thought she was the girlfriend of Ibragim’s best friend, Khusein Taramov. In any case, Tatiana was arrested for alleged visa violations, leaving Ibragim living in the apartment alone.

On May 21, Ibragim got a call from the FBI agent he had seen a few times over the preceding month. He said that a group of agents from Boston had come to Orlando and wanted to talk to Ibragim—and that this would be the last interview. Ibragim still did not want to make the trek downtown to the FBI offices, so the agents agreed to come to him. He wanted to meet at a hookah bar; they eventually settled on talking in his apartment. Ibragim was apparently scared of the FBI at this point: he asked Khusein, who was also from Chechnya, to come to his place and stay there during the interview.

The team from Boston consisted of one FBI agent and two state troopers. A Justice Department report later described them as a homicide team. They were in Orlando to investigate the triple murder in Waltham in September 2011, the one in which Tamerlan’s best friend, Brendan Mess, and another Rindge and Latin graduate were killed. Khusein was not allowed to be in the apartment; a Florida FBI agent kept him in the parking lot, talking. Ibragim lived in one of those Orlando planned communities that look like they have been airlifted from a place that never existed. The condos are small vertical affairs, but each has its own entrance and two levels. The facades are a combination of cheap texture paint and equally cheap siding, but the backs feature double-height windows and sliding doors that open onto a lake with bridges and a fountain. Khusein and the Florida FBI agent stayed in the working-class front; Ibragim spent his last hours sitting by the sliding door, looking out onto the aspirational back. At seven-thirty in the evening, the homicide team from Massachusetts began questioning Ibragim, just as the FBI agents in Atlanta and Savannah began questioning Reni and Elena. After the interviews in Georgia ended, the one in Florida went on—and on.

According to the report, around ten-thirty Ibragim slowly began confessing to having been Tamerlan’s accomplice in the triple murder. In another hour, he agreed to write a statement about it. Around midnight, one of the state troopers went out to the parking lot to get Ibragim’s phone from Khusein. While he was out of the building, something happened. Early reports had the remaining two officers saying, variously, that Ibragim had grabbed a broomstick and charged the officers with it, and that he had run to the kitchen area to grab a knife. The final official report said that Ibragim jumped up from the mattress on which he had been sitting composing his confession, threw a coffee table up in the air, knocked the FBI agent out of his chair, ran into the kitchen area, grabbed a metal utility pole, raised it over his head with both hands, and charged the trooper, who raised his hands to his face to protect it. The FBI agent fired seven shots at Ibragim, killing him.

IT WAS THE BOSTON GLOBE that first reported that law enforcement seemed to be investigating Tamerlan’s possible connection to the September 2011 triple murder. The newspaper’s source was a relative of one of the victims, who had been questioned by police following a months-long lull during which the investigation seemed to have gone dormant.

In the spring of 2011, after nearly a year of marriage, Reni had demanded that Ibragim find a way to make money. He went to Boston that summer and worked as a van driver for an adult-care center. According to the law enforcement narrative that eventually emerged, he left the city immediately after the killings.

Reni told me Ibragim had actually left Boston earlier and was not there on September 11, the day the three men were murdered. She said she could see that from the records of their joint checking account: the charges Ibragim was making using his debit card showed he was elsewhere. Reni has the kind of memory and attention to detail that make her quite certain of things like this. But the bank, she said, had already deleted records for 2011 by the time she tried to get proof of Ibragim’s alibi.

Nearly a year after Ibragim’s death, the confession he did not finish writing would be leaked to the media. Written in slanted Russian-style cursive on a pad of white ruled paper, it said:

This short description contains four details that are inconsistent with what little is known about the murders. First, it was clearly not a robbery: five thousand dollars in cash and even more in marijuana had been left behind. Second, if Tamerlan had a gun, why did he not use it to kill the men instead of slashing their throats? Third, two of the bodies had signs of struggle, while this confession seems to describe them as lying down on the floor and allowing themselves to be immobilized without resisting. Finally, the men were not found with their hands taped up—nor were they found all together: the bodies were laid out in separate rooms and their blood had pooled there, suggesting that those were the rooms in which they were killed.

There may be explanations for all of these discrepancies. Tamerlan may have, for example, initially told Ibragim that the crime he was planning was a robbery. Indeed, he may have done this in order to persuade Ibragim to help. It is conceivable that Tamerlan had a gun he could not or did not want to fire, for reasons either technical or conceptual. The struggles may have occurred when the men were being taken to different rooms. And the killers may have removed the tape after the victims were dead. Alternatively, the confession may have been written, or dictated, or both, by someone who lacked specific information about the murders.

Two things are certain. One, Reni is quite sure that the handwriting is Ibragim’s: the document is genuine. And two, Ibragim is dead and so is Tamerlan, which means it is virtually impossible that the facts of the Waltham murders will ever be fully known.

WHEN SHE WAS at last able to leave the base, Elena had to drive to Savannah to change into civilian clothing. Then she drove the two hundred fifty miles to Atlanta, straight to the Holiday Inn. Reni was in one of the hotel rooms with the FBI agents and her manager; she was afraid to be alone with the agents. “I kept saying to them, ‘Show me what you say he wrote with his own hand,’” Reni told me. “They kept saying, ‘We don’t have anything here.’”

That afternoon Elena drove her daughter the four hundred–plus miles down to Orlando. Reni’s phone kept ringing, and she kept trying to tell people what she knew but finding herself unable to speak. She’d cried and screamed so much that morning that she still had not regained her voice. She phoned Ibragim’s mother, whom she called Mama. “Mama, they have killed him.”

In Orlando, they met up with Khusein, who told them what he knew. They drove to the medical examiner’s office. “When I asked them how many bullets,” Reni told me, “I sure didn’t expect to hear that kind of number. I fell facedown on a table and I wailed. I said, ‘I want to see the body.’—‘Are you sure?’—‘I’m sure.’ They wheeled him in on a gurney, he had a sheet covering him up to his neck. They had us standing on the side where you couldn’t really see the wounds. His eyes were still open, and they were this murky gray color. His upper jaw looked clenched but the mouth was slightly open. And I started saying, ‘Mama, why isn’t he getting up? When has this ever happened that we are all standing around him and he is not getting up?’ It was like I knew everything but I couldn’t believe anything.”

Then began a month of paperwork. Reni did not cry anymore. She had to take her husband’s body home to Chechnya, and the process required so many steps, each of which required so many documents that she really did not have to think of anything but getting the right letters and certificates to the right people. The original death certificate indicated that Ibragim was to be buried in the USSR, a country that had been defunct for twenty-two years. The certificate had to be reissued. The new version had Ibragim’s mother’s maiden name where Reni’s last name should have been; it had to be reissued again, and Reni began to suspect that all of this was being done on purpose. Delta Airlines, which operated the only direct flight from Miami to Moscow, refused to take the body on board. Reni was terrified of flying with a layover because she was convinced something would go wrong. She called a Delta supervisor to beg and argue. The explanation she was given, she told me, had to do with Ibragim’s alleged association with Tamerlan. Eventually, the Russian carrier Aeroflot agreed to fly the casket. Ibragim’s father, Abdulbaki, came to Orlando to fly back with Reni and the body. At boarding, Reni was taken aside and subjected to a complete body search.

It was just before takeoff that it all hit Reni: “He and I had talked about going home together one day. And here we were, he and I, flying home. Except I’m in the passenger cabin and he is in baggage. I’d been working all month to bring this about, but it’s like it wasn’t seeping in. I hadn’t slept all month. And now it all came, the tears and everything.”

THEY CHANGED PLANES in Moscow and flew another couple of hours to Grozny. A group of men met them at the airport. Jamal Tsarnaev was among them: it seemed appropriate for the Tsarnaev family to be present, but it had not been clear if the Todashevs would want Anzor there.

The plane was late—it was almost four in the afternoon when they landed. It was the time of year when days are longest, but the men still thought they should hurry in order to bury Ibragim before sundown, in accordance with Muslim tradition. Tradition actually requires that people be buried by sundown on the day of death, and this was June 20, nearly one month later. With the coffin in a boxy Russian-made van, the men drove in a caravan to the Todashevs’ house to drop off Reni; women do not attend Muslim burials. Ibragim’s mother ran out of the house barefoot and rapped on the van door. One of the men let her in and she threw herself on the coffin, trying to grasp it in an embrace.

“Let me see him!” she wailed.

The men had discussed this earlier and decided that the coffin should stay shut to avoid traumatizing any of the women. The gunshot wound on Ibragim’s head had been stitched up, but they worried about the condition of the body after nearly twenty-four hours in transit.

“Then I want to be buried with him!” screamed his mother.

The men would open the casket later, at the cemetery, out of sight of the women—and later they would report that Ibragim looked fine, and even the smell of the embalming solution struck them as pleasant.

I MET RENI in July 2014. She was living in a village about three hours outside the city of Volgograd (once called Stalingrad), in the desolate Russian countryside, the land of hopelessness and depopulated villages. In Volgograd itself, there was a lot of new construction: the city was slated to host the European soccer cup in another four years, and stadiums and hotels were going up. I stayed at a brand-new Hampton by Hilton. Reni walked into my hotel room and scanned it with a professional’s skeptical eye: “I see. An electrical teakettle in place of a coffeemaker. The pad and pen are missing. Otherwise, not bad.”

She was out of the hotel business, though, and out of the United States. After the funeral, she did not return. “I’m never setting foot in America again,” she told me. “Everyone is getting either deported or killed. I’m sure I have a mark next to my name and if I went back I wouldn’t be able to find a job.” Nor, she said, did she want to live in America. The realization must have come to Reni when she was already in Russia, because she asked me to take a few things back to the States for her, including a key to the car her brother was now driving in Atlanta. A friend, the bike-loving former supervisor who had called her with the news of Ibragim’s death, had sold her motorcycle for her. Khusein, who had a green card, had not been allowed to return to the United States after a visit to Chechnya, and Tatiana had been deported. Reni waited out her year of mourning and remarried; her new husband’s name was Ibragim, and he was Chechen. She now lived with his family in the Russian village and spent her days helping with the difficult day-to-day of a farm, looking after cattle and milking. She stayed in touch with Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, who gave her updates after each of Dzhokhar’s weekly Wednesday phone calls: he generally reported he was doing well. “I don’t want to tell her this, but I don’t believe they’re going to let him live,” Reni said to me. Like Zubeidat, she was sure of the Tsarnaev brothers’ innocence—they were “set up,” both women kept saying. “At least I know Tamerlan is in heaven,” she said, meaning he had been innocent and he had been murdered, just as Ibragim had been.

A lawyer with an organization called the Council on American-Islamic Relations, with offices in Orlando, was, more than a year after Ibragim’s death, still working on a report and a possible lawsuit to be filed on the family’s behalf. In Russia, the Todashev family had also engaged a young Chechen Moscow-educated lawyer named Zuarbek Sadokhanov. I met with him in Grozny the day after the funeral; he was simultaneously jazzed and heartbroken at the prospect of going up against the FBI and the U.S. government itself. “When the state acts unlawfully, this destroys democracy,” he told me earnestly over espressos in a café in a city that had long been the capital of lawlessness in a profoundly lawless country. But this was precisely Zuarbek’s point: “I’m sad. I feel like I’m watching the last perfect justice system in the world destroy itself.”

ON MARCH 25, 2014—ten months after Ibragim Todashev’s death—the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and a Florida state attorney, Jeffrey Ashton, released separate reports, both of which concluded that the FBI agent who shot Ibragim had acted in self-defense and in defense of the state trooper, and that his actions had been justified.

The 161-page Florida report included detailed interviews with the FBI agents and the Massachusetts policemen as well as neighbors who had noticed something going on in Todashev’s apartment during the wee hours of the interview. The image of Ibragim that emerges from the report is radically different from the image of the gentle, innocent man painted by Elena: in the document he is frightening. More to the point, the officers were frightened of him. Before traveling to Florida they had viewed five videos of Ibragim’s fights, studied the physical traces the fights had left on his body—his broken nose and the “cauliflower ears” deformed from being repeatedly boxed. The fights they watched are indeed scary: filmed in poor lighting, from below, they show lithe, extremely muscular men attacking each other in a cagelike ring. The men wear shorts, boxing gloves, and nothing else, and what they do to each other looks as fierce as a street brawl, and as regulated as one. In one of the videos, Ibragim is knocked to the ground at the very beginning, then pounded by his opponent, but around minute three gets up as though possessed of some superhuman power—and the fight goes on for a couple of minutes more, until he loses.

The officers also viewed a video of the May 4 fight in the Orlando parking lot that had led to Ibragim’s arrest, his second. Ibragim had already been under surveillance for two weeks. The Florida FBI agents filmed him beating up two men until the police arrived. Ibragim, for his part, knew he was being watched, if not filmed. The agents who showed their Massachusetts colleagues the video also explained that they had interviewed people at the gym where Ibragim trained and had been told that “they thought he might be retarded, ah, because of the level of force and, ah, injuries that he was taking and he wouldn’t submit.”

The officers were scared going in, but the interview went better than they could have expected. The report included text messages sent and received by one of the state troopers.

“He signed Miranda. About to tell is [sic] his involvement,” he wrote at 10:28.

“Amazing,” someone responded a minute later. An hour and twenty minutes later—four and a half hours into the interview—the trooper grew positively giddy.

“Okay he’s writing a statement now in his apt,” he wrote at 11:53.

And two minutes later: “Whos your daddy.”

And immediately after: “Whos your daddy.”

And: “???”

And half a minute later: “Getting confession as we speak.”

In seven minutes, his mood shifted drastically. He texted the FBI agent and the other trooper: “Be on guard. He is in vulnerable position to do something bad. Be on guard now. I see him looking around at times.”

In another minute, whatever it was that happened that night began happening. Ibragim had stopped writing the confession and had gotten up. The trooper, who had gone from giddy to worried, was now apparently so terrified that he fumbled with his holster. The FBI agent shot Ibragim three times, and he went down. Then the trooper saw exactly what he had seen in one of those fight videos: Ibragim, wounded and bleeding, rose again, like some sort of deathless monster. The FBI agent fired four more shots, one of them hitting Ibragim in the top of the head and three of them hitting him in the back.

The Florida report included a screenshot of the trooper’s phone with the text messages, but the messages following his warning one—“Be on guard”—were redacted, covered with rectangular bars applied to the graphic. A blogger then did what most people with a computer could do: he removed the bars to reveal the messages. (Several journalists successfully repeated the trick.) The next message the trooper sent to his fellow officers—the other trooper and the Massachusetts FBI agent—went out the evening of May 22, nineteen hours after Ibragim died:

“Well done this week man well done joy some time at home and in will talk soon.”

A minute later: “That was supposed to say well done men we all got through it and are now heading home. Great work.”

The un-redacting of the report also revealed the name of the FBI agent who shot Ibragim—and The Boston Globe then meticulously verified his identity. He was Aaron McFarlane, he was forty-one years old, and he had been with the FBI since 2008. Before that, he had been a police officer in Oakland, California. While there, he was accused of falsifying a police report, and the Oakland Police Department was sued twice by former suspects who claimed he had physically assaulted them. The Oakland police settled each of the lawsuits for $32,500, and McFarlane left in 2004, with a lifetime annual pension of $52,000.

OF COURSE they sent a killer to interview Ibragim, thought Elena. And look at those text messages in which they congratulate each other for killing him! Her view of America had changed radically in the months that passed between Ibragim’s death and the publication of the text messages and information about FBI Agent McFarlane.

Elena returned to Fort Stewart in late June 2013, after Reni finally left for Chechnya with Ibragim’s body: Elena’s emergency leave had lasted a month. On June 26, she told me, she was at a doctor’s appointment on base when two sergeants from her unit came to fetch her. “They took me somewhere. A woman came out and, without introducing herself, started to search me and told me to hand over my phone and keys. She said, ‘You can’t take anything with you if you are going inside.’ I said, ‘I’m not planning to go anywhere, at least not alone.’ One of the escorts, a female sergeant, said she’d go in with me, so she was also frisked. When we went in, I saw one of the agents who came to my house before. He said, ‘We have received information that you are planning to buy a gun and shoot FBI agents.’ I said, ‘Tell me, is it illegal to have a gun in the house?’—‘No.’—‘Okay, that’s the only question I have for you, and I have no answers for you anyway.’” The agent did not try to keep her in the room.

Elena told me she had never owned a gun and had no desire to have one.

Three weeks later, the agent called again. Elena hung up as soon as he introduced himself, then recorded his number in her phone as “Terrorist.” He did not call again, though.

In another month, Elena’s commanding officer summoned her to inform her, apologetically, that the FBI had flagged her as being under investigation. As she understood, that essentially meant she was being placed on indefinite paid leave: she could neither carry out her work duties in the military nor be reassigned or promoted as long as she was so “flagged.” The next day, Elena accepted a medical discharge from the Army. She was now forty-four, retired, and, she felt, a lot wiser than she had been a few months earlier.

America’s promise of fairness, openness, and honesty had turned out to be a ruse, she concluded. It was not a better country than Russia; it was just a better liar. Elena had grown up and begun raising her own children in a country that was capable of anything: bombing its own cities out of existence, as it did with Grozny in 1995 and 1999; blowing up more than three hundred people in order to secure an election, as it did in 1999; killing its own citizens abroad and endangering dozens of lives in the process, as it did with a former secret agent in London in 2006. America had said it would be different—its laws were firm, its courts were fair, and its respect for human life was absolute. Nothing in Elena’s lived experience had taught her that a country could really be like that, but as both an immigrant and a new Army recruit, she had accepted the premise enthusiastically.

But the minute she heard her daughter screaming into the phone—“Mama, they killed him!”—she knew she had been fooled. The same rules applied in this country as in the old one. The secret police killed people when they wanted to; a reason could always be found later. The secret police could and would engineer tragedies to their own ends, or to the government’s; someone to blame could always be found later.

In May 2013, someone who claimed to be a resident of the Watertown neighborhood where the gun battle between law enforcement and the Tsarnaev brothers occurred posted a video on YouTube that, he wrote, showed the apprehension of Tamerlan—alive—by the police and his saying “podstava,” the Russian word for “setup,” as he was detained. I watched the video several times—it was darkness, flashing lights, sirens—but I was unable to discern someone being detained or to hear anyone say “podstava.” If Tamerlan had indeed said that word at any point, it could have meant anything from “I was set up” to simply a rueful interjection, as though life itself had engineered the setup. But the interpretation of the video became gospel among followers of the numerous “Free Jahar” groups on social networks: here was evidence that the brothers themselves believed they had been set up.

Elena became part of the online community of Jahar’s defenders. The many online groups, with a combined membership in the thousands, were an odd conglomeration of left-wing doubters, right-wing conspiracy theorists, young women with crushes on Jahar, and middle-aged women aghast at the too-apparent barbarity of keeping a young man alive in order to kill him after a trial the outcome of which was preordained. Early on, the movement had been dominated by energetic young people intent on exposing a truth that departed dramatically from the official version of events. In the summer of 2013, for example, I interviewed a thirty-one-year-old Truther with a shaved head and tattoos on most of his exposed skin who had moved to Boston from Las Vegas to conduct his own investigation. Over time, men like him switched their focus to other government conspiracies, and middle-aged women driven primarily by compassion gradually took over. Elena fit in well among them, and the story of the killing of Ibragim naturally became the centerpiece of the movement’s narrative of the obstruction of truth and the lack of justice. Elena now devoted herself to the movement fully.

In December 2014, she flew to Boston, barely scraping together enough money for the ticket and one night in a hotel, to attend Jahar’s final pretrial hearing—the first time he would be brought to court since pleading not guilty in July 2013. As the brief proceedings were wrapping up, she shouted out in Russian: “Dzhokhar, there are people here who love you! We pray for you and support you! We know you are innocent!” She told me later she had decided ahead of time she would scream in Russian “so he would know it wasn’t someone mocking him.” As the U.S. marshals moved in to usher Elena out of the courtroom, she screamed at them, too: “I am an American citizen and I have the right to say what I think!”

Eleven EVERYONE IS GOING TO JAIL

After he pulled off his shirt, as instructed, outside the apartment door, Azamat was frisked, handcuffed, shackled, walked a few paces through a thicket of men in SWAT gear, and shoved into the backseat of a police car. A few moments later a man in civilian clothes thrust his head into the car. He was in his forties, broad-shouldered, with close-cropped gray hair and plain white good looks.

“Where the fuck is Jahar?” he shouted.

“I don’t know,” said Azamat. “The news says he is in Watertown.”

“Don’t you fucking lie to me!” barked the agent. Afterward, he shouted something else about Jahar’s life being over and Azamat’s being in danger.

After about an hour just sitting in the cruiser while men in SWAT gear ran around and in and out of the building, shouting and radioing, Azamat was driven a short distance in New Bedford. He no longer knew where Dias and Bayan were. An officer got him out of the car, unshackled him, and told him to stand next to the vehicle. Azamat stood. People in uniform and in civilian clothes continued to run in and out of the building. They had arrived at the state police barracks, where the FBI had temporarily set up shop that afternoon, nearly certain that Jahar would be captured at the Carriage Drive apartment. It was another hour before someone led Azamat into the building, into a tiny, windowless room that was almost completely empty—even the shelves against one of the walls were barren, save for a recording device that sat on one of them. The device, however, would not be used, because the FBI records interviews only with subjects who are in custody, which Azamat was not.

There were two agents in the room, an olive-skinned man and a pale woman. They were both small—they did not tower over Azamat like the man who had shouted at him. Although Azamat was still handcuffed and shirtless, he must have felt a bit less scared—Special Agent Sara Wood later testified that he was relaxed and smiling. He asked to go to the bathroom. The agents said he could not, just yet. He said he was bursting and would go in his shorts if they did not let him use the bathroom. One of the agents said that he could go if he signed a form first. The form said that Azamat was agreeing to talk to the FBI voluntarily and was waiving his right to an attorney. Azamat signed—he would have signed that anyway—and then Special Agent Farbod Azad, the olive-skinned man, took him to the bathroom.

When Agent Azad brought Azamat back, they began talking. It was just before eight on Friday evening. It was almost half past four in the morning on Saturday when Azamat got home. In the intervening hours, Agent Wood, the pale woman, asked most of the questions, and Agent Azad took notes. Azamat answered questions about Jahar, who not long after the questioning began was found in the boat in Watertown, though Azamat would not know about this until later. Sometimes one of the agents would leave the room for a while. At one point Azamat was so cold that he begged the agents to find him a shirt. Agent Wood went to look for one but returned empty-handed. Apparently, in the entire police barracks filled with people many of whom had come in from other cities (Agent Wood herself had driven up from New York that morning), no one had a spare shirt, T-shirt, sweater, or jacket to lend to Azamat. Agent Wood later testified that Azamat shook violently but not from the cold: it was nerves. She said that the shakes began when the questioning brought them to Thursday night and the friends’ visit to Jahar’s dorm room. Azamat told the agents that they had taken a computer, his own Beats headphones, and a backpack. He also told them that in the morning, once he learned that Jahar had been identified as one of the bombers, he had told Dias that he needed to remember where he had disposed of the backpack.

“Why?” asked Agent Wood. She later testified that Azamat shrugged in response.

“Why did you throw out the backpack?”

“I don’t know.” In Russian, even more than in American culture, “I don’t know” can mean many things other than simply pleading ignorance—including “I don’t know what to say” and “I don’t know how to explain it to you.”

“Between his shaking and indicating that they threw the backpack out, it was clear we weren’t getting the full story,” Agent Wood later told a jury in federal court. “As I began to confront him, he continued to say, ‘I don’t know.’ Finally, he didn’t respond, but his shoulders slumped and his body language changed. I lowered my voice and leaned across the table. ‘What was in the backpack?’ He responded, ‘The stuff you use on New Year’s.’”

Agent Wood did not understand.

“Petarda,” said Azamat, trying a Russian word. No match.

He tried to use a translation app on his iPhone, as he had several times during the conversation, but it did not know the word, either. He gestured with his hands and tried to imitate the sound of fireworks: “Wee, wee, wee, boom!” Agent Wood finally got it.

On the fourth iteration, Azamat’s list of things removed from Jahar’s room included: the laptop, the headphones, the backpack with hollow fireworks, and a brown ashtray, which he also had not mentioned earlier. He succeeded in omitting what he most wanted to conceal, which was the bag of marijuana. And he still did not know where Dias had thrown the backpack.

Before Azamat mentioned the fireworks, but after he had handed the agents his phone and told them the password and gone through and translated for them the text messages he had exchanged with Dias, he asked if he should speak to his consulate. Agent Wood got the number of the Kazakh consulate and let Azamat use the landline, but it was half past ten at night and he got voice mail.

A bit after midnight, the agents told Azamat that he was free to go. He had no idea how to get home: Dias had also been taken into custody, and at any rate, Azamat had no phone service. He put his head on the lone desk in the little room and fell asleep.

The person who roused him was the big man from the previous afternoon. He was Agent John Walker, and he was directing this part of the investigation.

“I’m beginning to think I am being held here against my will,” said Azamat.

Agent Walker told him it was nothing like that—he was free to go. In fact, Agent Walker would drive him. When they arrived at Carriage Drive, Dias was there with two other FBI agents. They assembled around the table—the one at which Dias, Azamat, and Bayan had sat twelve hours earlier waiting for the FBI. Now it was the FBI, Dias, and Azamat, standing. The laptop, the ashtray, and the baseball hat sat on the table. One of the agents spotted the red hat.

“Is that Jahar’s?” he asked.

The boys nodded.

“We want that hat,” said the agent.

“I don’t know, I kind of like the way it looks on me,” said Dias, grabbing the hat and putting it on his head.

Azamat quickly tore the hat off his friend’s head and handed it to the agent.

The agents searched the apartment—Azamat had signed a consent form for that, too—and left, taking with them what they had found of Jahar’s stuff. When they were gone, Azamat asked Dias where he had thrown out the backpack.

“In the dumpster,” said Dias.

“You idiot,” said Azamat.

ROBEL DID NOT SEE the men in SWAT gear lay siege to 69A Carriage Drive, and he did not see his friends being led out of the building at gunpoint, in handcuffs and shackles. He had known to get as far away as possible from that place. After Azamat drove him to campus so he could dump his bag with the marijuana in it and they returned to Carriage Drive, Robel said, “The media are going to be here soon,” and got to work finding a ride out of New Bedford. He got hold of Quan Le Phan, a former roommate. He probably did not have to explain why he had to get away from the Kazakhs’ apartment: by this time, all of UMass knew that Jahar had been identified as one of the bombers. Quan had to leave campus anyway because the dorms were being evacuated, but Robel bombarded him with messages urging him to hurry until, less than half an hour later, Quan took Robel with him to his parents’ house in Worcester, about seventy miles to the northwest.

Just after three in the afternoon, Robel got a text from Azamat: “Policemen are coming to our apartment…” and less then a minute later: “They are looking for you…” Robel responded, “Tell them we left because of campus lockdown and are coming back when they tell us to.”

Robel’s strategy must have been to try to make himself invisible while also appearing cooperative. He knew the police would come to Carriage Drive, but he figured that if he avoided being spotted by them and especially if he made it inconvenient enough to try to get him, maybe the police would forget about him. There is, however, no such thing as being too inconveniently located for FBI agents conducting an investigation. Two officers—an FBI agent named Dwight Schwader and a county police detective named David Earle, who was also assigned to the Joint Terrorism Task Force, one of a hundred such interagency groups run by FBI offices around the country—drove to Worcester. They asked Robel, Quan, and Quan’s roommate Jim Li, who had gone with Quan and Robel to Quan’s house from Dartmouth, to meet in the Price Chopper parking lot. The boys came and then took turns walking across the lot from their car to the officers’ SUV, getting in, and answering questions. Before letting them into the vehicle, the officers, who were wearing SWAT gear, stood each of the boys against the SUV and patted them down thoroughly.

Robel’s interview lasted a couple of hours, and just another two hours later, he was already feeling cavalier about it.

“It was kind of funny,” he texted at 1:53 in the morning to a friend named Elohe Dereje, an aspiring actress and model in Maryland. “They asked me what I was doing all day when I was hanging out with people. I told them smoking on so many occasions that they just started to laugh.”

A minute later, he added, “They grilled me for 2 hours straight.”

Elohe responded:

LMAOO WHAT?? YOU DID NOTTT…

LIKE WHERE THEY INTERROGATE YOU?

THEY HAD TO TAKE YOU?

WOW, SO DID YOU FIND OUT

WHY THEY DID WHAT THEY DID?

WHY HIS BROTHER BOMBED

THE MARATHON?

It was less than twenty-four hours since the brothers had been identified, but the narrative had already taken hold: it was the older brother who had bombed the marathon.

Later, when the officers who interviewed Robel were cross-examined in court, it would become clear that the interview had not been all that funny. At one point, Agent Schwader asked for Robel’s phone, and Robel placed it on the center console of the car. The agent went through his text messages, including the ones he had gotten from Dias the evening before: “Come to Jahar’s!” and again “Jahar!” But Robel kept saying that he did not remember anything about going to Jahar’s room, and his repetitive recollections of his numerous pot-smoking sessions served as his explanations both for how he had spent the day and for why he did not remember anything but the smoking. Agent Schwader thought he was stonewalling. Among other things Agent Schwader yelled at him was, “Maybe you are their bitch and you stayed outside,” when Dias and Azamat went in. Robel still insisted that he did not remember going to Jahar’s room.

It was not until after the officers allowed Robel, Quan, and Jim to go back to Quan’s parents’ house that the agents at the New Bedford police barracks got Azamat to talk in detail about Dias’s search of Jahar’s dorm room. So a couple of hours after Robel had relaxed enough to start bragging in text messages about his interrogation, the agents showed up at Quan’s house. They said they needed to talk to Robel. It was four in the morning.

They talked for about forty minutes. They studied his phone again. Robel still insisted that he did not remember going to Jahar’s.

The next day, Robel got a call from Michael Dukakis, the almost eighty-year-old former governor and 1988 Democratic presidential candidate, with whom Robel’s mother was on friendly terms. The old man said Robel’s mother had called him, worried sick because she had not heard from her son in two days. So Dukakis tried calling, perhaps hoping that Robel would answer out of respect—or because he was avoiding only his mother’s calls. And indeed, Robel answered. He told Dukakis that he was so confused he was not even sure what he had told the investigators so far. Dukakis must have told him to go home, because on Saturday both Robel and Jim, whose parents also lived in Boston, left Worcester and returned to their families.

BACK AT CARRIAGE DRIVE, Dias and Azamat assessed their situation. They seemed to be out of the woods. They had not been arrested, they had given the FBI Jahar’s things except for the backpack, and with Jahar himself having been caught, maybe the FBI did not need the backpack anymore. Dias and Azamat did not know where Bayan was, but they assumed the officers must have let her go early: after all, she had not gone to Jahar’s with them, and anyway, she was a girl. They could sleep—they had not done much of that in a while.

They came for Dias and Azamat in the afternoon. Both were told they were being arrested for visa violations. “This may be the first time Immigration makes a house call over a student-visa violation,” one of Azamat’s defense attorneys, Nicholas Wooldridge, would later say at trial. “And the FBI is with them! This may be the first time the FBI makes a house call over a student-visa violation.” Wooldridge was almost certainly wrong; with arresting people on visa-violation grounds having become one of the most important law enforcement tools after September 11, there had probably been many such joint “house calls.”

When Azamat saw Agent Walker, he rushed to tell him what he had found out—that Dias had thrown the backpack in the dumpster. He also said he remembered that the garbage had been picked up the previous afternoon.

Dias and Azamat were taken to Boston, to the Thomas P. O’Neill, Jr., Federal Building, a 1980s stack of glass and concrete bands that houses a variety of government agencies, including a number of Homeland Security offices. Dias and Azamat were questioned again. Then they were booked and taken to county jail. They still did not have lawyers.

AZAMAT HAD CALLED his father, Amir, as soon as the FBI agents had left in the early morning—it was the middle of the day in Kazakhstan. “Everything is fine,” Azamat told him. “We’ve been released.” It was late at night in Kazakhstan when he called his father again: “They are taking us again, it’s about the visas.” This was when Amir started looking for a lawyer and booking a ticket to Boston.

Amir Ismagulov (in the Kazakh tradition, the eldest son takes his surname from the grandfather’s first name, which is why Azamat and Amir have different last names) is the kind of man who may not believe in the system but is certain of his ability to work the system. Amir became famous in Kazakhstan in 2011, after he addressed the country’s authoritarian president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, publicly asking that authorities stop gratuitous inspections of businesses, and immediately received personal assurances for himself and his enterprise. Later that year, two bombs went off in Atyrau, the Kazakh oil capital, where Amir had a house; a radical Islamist group took credit for the bombings. Amir played a role in the ensuing shake-up of the city and received a government medal for his role in the fight against terrorism. Not only did Amir have money, expertise, and connections that always made him feel safe and confident, he even had proof that his family was on the right side in the War on Terror.

By Sunday, April 21, Amir had engaged a large Chicago law firm that had done work for Kazakh oil and gas companies. He expected VIP service from it. It took only a few days to get a visa, and on Thursday Amir landed in Boston. A Russian-speaking representative of the law firm—a junior partner, not a flunky—greeted him at the airport. Then he informed Amir that the firm had decided to drop the case: “It’s too high-profile for us.” It was also the wrong profile; the firm did not generally handle criminal cases. But Amir was now certain it had something to do with the fact that the firm’s senior partners were Jewish. The junior partner recommended a Boston-based immigration firm, with which he had already made the preliminary arrangements. The immigration lawyers assured Amir that there was nothing to worry about; they had handled hundreds of visa-snafu cases. While the immigration lawyer was preparing for the arraignment, the criminal defense lawyer who was representing Dias recommended lining up an experienced criminal attorney as well, and had an acquaintance of his come up from New York to start familiarizing himself with the case. Amir hired everybody.

On the morning of May 1, both Dias and Azamat were scheduled to appear at an immigration hearing. They had been in jail for ten days; their fathers, who were both in Boston, had not yet been allowed to see them. But when Amir got to the courtroom, his son and Dias were not there: each of them in turn appeared on a video screen through an uplink from the jail, and the judge informed them that their cases were continued for a week. Reassured by his son’s new immigration lawyer, and by seeing his son on the screen, Amir left the court certain that Azamat would be free in a week’s time.

At four o’clock that afternoon, Azamat and Dias were brought to the federal courthouse. The FBI had filed a criminal complaint against them. The document, which named both Azamat and Dias, described their alleged crime as follows:

An accompanying affidavit by Special Agent Scott Cieplik explained that Dias, Azamat, and Robel had “collectively decided to throw the backpack and fireworks into the trash because they did not want Tsarnaev to get in trouble.” Although the criminal complaint concerned only Azamat and Dias, the affidavit stated that there was probable cause to charge Robel with lying to investigators.

Amir got on the phone with the Kazakh consul in New York, Yerlan Kubashev. Amir had had enough of the slick American lawyers who seemed to think their job was to take his money and issue reassurances in exchange. “Find me a Russian-speaking lawyer!” Amir demanded. Kubashev thought it was a bad idea. Amir clarified: “Find me a good Russian-speaking lawyer!” The conversation lasted two hours, and in the end Kubashev helped Amir make contact with Arkady Bukh, a forty-one-year-old New York City criminal attorney given to wearing long velvet jackets and red bow ties. Bukh had immigrated to the United States from Azerbaijan in the early nineties and was admitted to the bar in 2003. He had represented a long line of Russian cyber-criminals, including hackers, spammers, and child pornographers. His website called him “Top New York Criminal Defense Lawyer” and implored: “Stop being a victim of the circumstances. Trust your freedom to No-one [sic] but Bukh.” Amir hired him. By this time he was out about seventy thousand dollars, between the bulk of the retainer that the big Chicago firm had kept and the fees he had paid the immigration lawyer and the criminal lawyer, both of whom he had taken off the case almost as soon as they entered it.

Amir’s belief in his ability to work the system might have been shaken, but his faith in his son remained firm: Azamat was innocent, and he was a good young man. Amir finally got to see him on May 3—two weeks after the arrest, two days after the arraignment—and Azamat told him everything. He said that lots of students had gone to Jahar’s room that evening—it just so happened he and Dias and Robel were the only ones who got in. He said that he and Dias had both told investigators the truth, and if there had been any obfuscation at all, it concerned the marijuana. He said that he had not even realized that the FBI was interested in the fireworks. He also said that he would never snitch on Dias; he would never agree to testify against him. And in any case, no one had ever intended to do anything bad, except smoke pot.

It looked like the classic game-theory setup known as the prisoner’s dilemma: Bonnie and Clyde are held separately and pressured to testify against each other. If either testifies, he or she will get a reduced sentence, while the other is put away for a long time, but if neither testifies, both have a chance of going free. Just as Azamat would never snitch on Dias, father and son were sure Dias would not give Azamat up either; the young men had been brought up with similar concepts of honor and friendship.

AFTER A FEW DAYS back in Cambridge, Robel had started to feel safer. Dias and Azamat had been jailed—they were probably getting deported—but he was home. Although the FBI had called, Robel remained a free man. By April 22, he was even feeling cocky again about having come that close to real danger.

“I was the last person to see the terrorist!” he texted a friend in Ethiopia. “I got questioned by the FBI detectives and I got followed for a day.”

“Are you lying??? Did you know him personally?? they didn’t hurt you or anything?” The friend was suitably impressed and worried. And a few minutes later the friend texted again: “Did he ever say anything to you about it?”

“He was one of my oldest friends,” was all Robel would say.

Then the FBI wanted to talk to him again. Robel made childish excuses on the phone: he did not have a good way of getting to downtown Boston (a twenty-minute subway ride from Cambridge). The FBI sent a car.

At eleven in the morning on April 26, Robel was delivered to a Homeland Security office in Boston. It was another windowless room, barely large enough for the desk and two chairs that were there. This time Robel talked to Special Agent Michael Delapena, a twenty-four-year veteran of the FBI who favored what he called “building rapport” over yelling and threatening as interviewing techniques. He asked about Robel’s drug use, his classes, his family: he learned that Robel had been raised by his mother, an Ethiopian immigrant, and had never known his father. He established that they, Robel and Agent Delapena, were both Americans, and he said, “We have been attacked.”

At first Robel insisted that he remembered getting Dias’s text—“Come to Jahar’s!”—and nothing after that. Agent Delapena told him he needed to choose sides: “You need to be part of Team America.” The other guys were playing for the other team, he said, and as long as Robel could not remember anything about being in the room, Delapena said, he was “on the bench.” He then instructed Robel to close his eyes and imagine being in the room—as a mental exercise, to try to break through the amnesia. Robel said he still could not remember. “That’s not an answer,” said Delapena.

A couple of hours into the interview, Robel remembered being in the room and seeing Jahar’s roommate there. Delapena stepped out of the room—to brief other agents on the progress he had just made, but also perhaps to let Robel’s distress intensify. When he returned, Robel was terrified. Was he going to be arrested? Were the other agents, whom he had glimpsed outside, going to be mad that he had not told them what he was telling Delapena now?

“There are wolves out there,” confirmed Delapena. Then he got up and locked the door. “It’s just you and me in here.” All Robel had to do to enjoy Delapena’s continued protection was produce a written statement.

The resulting document, a bit more than one single-spaced page, eventually became evidence in the case against Robel.

The timing of the text message is off by an hour, but that is understandable. More important, according to the testimony of at least three other people—Lino Rosas, in whose room Robel and Azamat were playing FIFA when the message arrived; Azamat; and Andrew Dwinells—Dias had entered the room first and had been rummaging through Jahar’s things for about ten minutes by the time Robel and Azamat arrived, together.

Robel had lived in the same dorm, so he knew that the door locked automatically when closed and required a key card to open.

It was a plain black backpack.

None of the fireworks was red.

The statement contains no other references to the laptop. Why would Robel include the assertion of lacking any recollection of a fact that was probably relayed by the interviewing agent? Something similar happens at the end of the penultimate paragraph:

The statement hardly reads like a spontaneously produced recollection of the facts known to Robel. It reads rather like it was dictated or even written by someone else and then given to Robel to sign. The last paragraph reads:

The charges proposed in the criminal complaint against Azamat and Dias added up to a maximum sentence of twenty-five years—five for conspiracy and twenty for obstruction of justice—but Robel, who would now be accused of lying to investigators, was looking at a maximum of sixteen. And because Robel was a United States citizen, he spent less than two weeks wearing an orange jumpsuit: on May 6, he was released on bail.

AZAMAT AND DIAS left county jail, too: they were transferred to a federal facility and placed in solitary. They saw each other again after a few weeks, when they, Robel, and all of their lawyers came together in a large conference room with the prosecution’s team and Bayan and her lawyer. They were there to videotape Bayan’s deposition before she left for Kazakhstan. Such were the terms of her immunity deal: she would tell the truth, and she would leave the United States. The story she told was essentially similar to what Dias and Azamat had by now told the investigators; she even admitted to being the one who demanded that the backpack be removed from the apartment. But she told the story first.

“Bayan’s father was the smart one,” Amir admitted later, during Azamat’s trial. “He got a lawyer right away.”

ABOUT HALFWAY THROUGH Azamat’s trial, Amir asked me over a lunch of oysters at a waterfront restaurant near the courthouse, “Do you think our lawyers are talking too fast? Is the jury having trouble following them?” It was July 2014. Amir had been living in the Boston area since he flew in at the end of April the previous year—he had gone back to Kazakhstan only once, for a month, to renew his visa. Azamat’s mother and toddler sister had temporarily moved to Boston as well. Amir wanted his other son, who was a year younger than Azamat, to come join the support team, too, but the young man’s application for a visa was rejected. Amir had even yanked him out of Cambridge University to intern at Chevron’s Kazakhstan operation for half a year—he had figured a recommendation from an American employer would get his son a visa. He figured wrong.

Living in America was hard. Amir started out driving the boys’ BMW, the one he had paid for, but every few days he would be chased by several unmarked cars at once, stopped with great fanfare, made to get out of the car and submit to a search, so that each time it was a couple of hours before he was allowed to continue on his way. After a few weeks, with no sign that this pointless ritual was going to end, Amir ditched the BMW and started alternating between cabs and rental cars. Then there was the issue of housing: Amir had to change apartments every month or two, because every renewable short-term furnished-apartment lease had a way of becoming not so renewable once the landlord learned why Amir’s family was in Boston. Arkady Bukh’s people would find Amir a new place, negotiate the option of renewing the contract every few months—and in a few weeks the cycle would be repeated. Amir racked up more than half a dozen Boston neighborhoods in just over a year.

Hiring Bukh had been a good idea: it was by far the highest-profile case he had ever handled, and he threw everything he had at it. Seven of his people rented a house together in a Boston suburb, and, when they were not busy apartment-hunting for Amir, they were cramming for the trial. They went to see every person with whom Azamat had been friendly in college; most of them refused to talk to the lawyers, a few explained that the FBI had told them not to talk to anyone, and not one person agreed to testify for the defense. The legal team reconstructed every FBI interview and interrogation, finding numerous inconsistencies and digging into them. Since they had no witnesses, they would mount a defense based solely on attacking the government’s case.

They did it like it’s done in the movies—in fact, while I was reporting on the trial, I enticed two of my own family members to come watch on two separate days, promising them a cable-series-worthy spectacle, and they were not disappointed. Cross-examining Special Agent Sara Wood, defense attorney Nicholas Wooldridge asked whether Azamat had been allowed to use the bathroom on request—and after Agent Wood asserted that he had been, and denied that he had been told he needed to sign his waiver of rights in order to be allowed to pee, the defense showed a video of Azamat being taken to the bathroom several minutes after the time recorded for his signature on the form that said he had agreed to talk to the FBI without a lawyer. Agent Wood had not merely denied coercion: she had claimed that Azamat signed the form after he returned from the bathroom. What made this cross-examination particularly cinematic was that the lawyers had been able to establish that the clock on the wall at the police barracks had not been set forward to daylight saving time, so a video that at first glance appeared to show an innocuous sequence of events was revealed to tell a different story.

After that day, which came about halfway through the two weeks of testimony, I could not imagine the jury convicting Azamat: the FBI agent who had conducted the first and most important interview with him had just been caught lying on the stand. That, I thought, served to discredit her report—the only existing record of the interview—and without the report, the government’s case would seem to fall apart. Later, Wooldridge caught Wood’s partner, Agent Azad, in the same fib, cementing what I thought was a victory for the defense. Perhaps even more important, the government’s case was not so much about facts, which were not in dispute—Dias, Azamat, and Robel had certainly gone to Jahar’s room, they had driven away with the backpack holding the fireworks, and Dias had thrown it in the trash—as it was about intention. Did they, as the charges alleged, “willfully conspire,” and did they have the “intent to impede, obstruct, and influence” the investigation? The prosecution repeatedly pointed to Azamat’s obsessive surfing of news sites as proof that he was trying to track the manhunt in order to help Jahar get away. The defense was arguing that Azamat kept checking the news because he was confused, scared, and incredulous. The government’s only witnesses who could testify to Azamat’s state of mind before he knew that Jahar had been caught were the FBI agents who had interviewed him then—and the jury had now seen that they could not be trusted.

But Amir, who did not speak any English—the court provided simultaneous translators, but they had some trouble keeping up with the defense—had picked up on cues to which I was not paying attention. The New York lawyers were indeed talking too fast. They also looked too good: their suits fit too well, and Wooldridge’s hair actually shone. The government’s lawyers—the men in their baggy suits, the lone woman in her boxy outfits—and their speech, which struck me as occasionally hokey, and broad Massachusetts accents, had a much better connection with the jury.

The jurors took a day and a bit to return a verdict, but as I found out later, that had been an illusion of deliberation: one of the jurors had simply been ill on the first day. In fact, the jury’s unanimous decision had been nearly instant. Azamat never had a chance.

Azamat and Dias were in solitary for the first six months in federal prison. Then they were placed together for a few months, then separated again—and placed in solitary—before Azamat’s trial began. Once they were in separate cells, each was offered a deal: a reduced sentence in exchange for pleading guilty and testifying against the codefendants. Azamat told Amir he had turned the deal down. Amir told me that Dias’s father had told him that Dias had said no as well—indeed, he did not testify at Azamat’s trial.

Dias was scheduled to face trial two months after Azamat, in September. A month earlier, at what was scheduled as a pretrial hearing, Dias pleaded guilty. In exchange, the government asked that he be sentenced to no more than seven years behind bars.

THE SENTENCING was scheduled for 2015. If Bayan’s father, by being first to hire a lawyer, proved that he was the smart one, now it looked like Dias’s father, who had had his lawyer cut a deal with the prosecutors, was not so dumb either, while Amir, who had spent a million dollars on lawyers and uprooted his family to come to Boston to try to move mountains for a year, was enough of a fool that his son was staring at twenty-five years in prison. Amir instructed the lawyers to look for a deal: it was a question of survival now, not of honor. At Robel’s trial in November, Azamat was a witness for the prosecution.

Azamat’s head was shaved now. He was prison-pale, the kind of pale that results from spending twenty-three hours a day in a tiny locked room. Amir must have bought him a new shirt for this trial—he was well used to the routine of exchanging a laundered white shirt for a soiled one through a special window at the courthouse—but he made a mistake with either the size or the style: the cutaway collar of the shirt spread out over the collar of Azamat’s navy English-cut suit, making him look like he was wearing someone else’s clothes.

When Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephanie Siegmann asked Azamat to tell the jury of his agreement with the prosecution, he said, “As long as I tell the truth, it may help with my sentencing.” He had been given no promises.

Azamat had not testified at his own trial, so now he told the story in court for the first time. Answering the prosecutor’s questions, he ran through it step by step: Dias texted him, they went to Jahar’s room, it was locked, later they got in, he and Robel watched Project X while Dias searched the room, they left, they ate, some of them smoked, they watched The Pursuit of Happyness, they slept, and then Dias emerged from the bedroom. “He wanted to throw the backpack,” testified Azamat. “I agreed with him.” When the prosecutor asked him what language he and Dias used to talk about the backpack, Azamat said it had been English. When Robel’s defense attorney pointed out that Azamat had not said this in earlier interviews and interrogations, Azamat said that he did not remember.

The question of whether Russian or English was spoken that morning in the apartment was essential to Robel’s defense. His lawyers’ strategy rested on two assertions: Robel was too stoned to remember anything, and he did not understand what Dias said about the backpack because Dias and Azamat spoke Russian to each other. The prosecution, basing its case in large part on the strange statement Robel had signed in April 2013, in that little room Agent Delapena had locked, promising to keep the “wolves” out, insisted that the conversation had been conducted in English—and Robel had even said, “Do what you have to do,” which his defense now denied. In other words, in the prosecution’s narrative, Robel and Azamat had played identical roles in the story: neither of them had touched the backpack or the fireworks, and both of them had passively acquiesced to Dias’s intention to dispose of them. Indeed, they had been together every step of the way, from eight in the evening on April 18 to nine in the morning on April 19. They had watched Project X together while Dias searched Jahar’s room, and they had both napped together while Dias and Bayan had words about the backpack. Unlike Robel, Azamat had never denied going to Jahar’s room. So why was Azamat charged with conspiracy and obstruction of justice while Robel was charged only with lying to investigators? The prosecutors would not answer that question, but when I asked Robel’s defense attorney Derege Demissie, he suggested the government chose the lighter charge for Robel because “they could make it stick.”

Why could the heavier charge be made to stick to Azamat and not to Robel? It was obvious: Robel was not a foreigner or a Muslim. Demissie used every opportunity to point out the distinction, stressing that Dias, Azamat, and Jahar “shared a language and a religion” that were foreign to Robel. At one point, Judge Douglas Woodlock instructed the jury that it would be “inappropriate” to take the defendant’s religion into consideration—but he allowed Demissie’s remark to stand.

Demissie even got former Governor Dukakis to take the stand. He admitted that he had no direct knowledge of the events in question, but his testimony demonstrated that Robel was one of Massachusetts’ own. That was evident even before he came to court, causing a minor news sensation. The local media, which had only briefly acknowledged Azamat’s trial and Dias’s guilty plea—there had been a day or two when I was the only journalist in the courtroom—turned out in force for Robel’s trial. Boston Globe columnist Yvonne Abraham published a piece titled “Robel Phillipos Made Stupid Mistakes That Any Kid Could Make.” In it she asked, “Is it absolutely necessary to bring the full force and power of the federal government down on him?” The following day, Abraham was a guest on a public-radio talk show, and listeners kept calling in to affirm her view: Robel seemed like a regular kid, he could be one of their kids, and he should not go to prison.

LOST IN THE DISCUSSION of just how stupid a mistake Robel had made was a simple question: How much damage had the three friends’ actions done? When Azamat was on the stand during Robel’s trial, prosecutor Siegmann asked him to explain to the jury why he had been convicted. “Because I took the stuff, it blocked the investigation,” he said.

Once the FBI learned of the backpack and its having been thrown in the dumpster, it appointed Special Agent Kenneth Benton, a twenty-six-year veteran of the agency who specialized in white-collar crime and public corruption, to look for it. Benton assembled a team of twenty-five agents who, dressed in hazmat suits and armed with rakes, spent a day and a half sifting through trash pulled up by an excavator at the landfill where a garbage truck had taken Carriage Drive waste on Friday afternoon. The agents produced a number of false-hope backpacks before they finally got one with the JanSport logo on the outside and an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven sheet of ruled paper inside, with some of Jahar’s ethics homework. It also contained the emptied-out fireworks containers and the Vaseline jar. Between assembling a team of agency volunteers, cordoning off a section of the landfill, and a bad-weather delay, the agents did not start digging through the garbage until Thursday the 25th and did not find the backpack until the afternoon of Friday the 26th. Jahar had been in custody for one week. Robel was just signing the confession with the inaccurate description of the backpack.

Robel was charged with “knowingly and willfully making a materially false, fictitious, and fraudulent statement.” The key word here is “material”—meaning that it had a substantial impact on the investigation, or, as Azamat said, “blocked” it. But Robel knew less than the investigators learned from Dias and Bayan almost as soon as they were detained—before Robel was interviewed for the first time, in the Price Chopper parking lot. Even if he had instantly spilled everything he had known about the fireworks and the Vaseline, it is difficult to imagine that the information could have influenced the course of the investigation. What if the investigators had learned of the backpack and the dumpster even sooner than they got to Robel, say, as soon as they laid siege to Carriage Drive? The garbage truck had already come and gone, so the FBI might have been spared a little time and expense but none of the humiliation and filth of the landfill search.

And what if Dias had not taken the backpack at all? That would not have aided the process of identifying Jahar: by the time investigators arrived at Pine Dale Hall, his name had been known for hours. Nor did the government ever claim that the contents of the backpack helped determine where or how the Boston Marathon bombs were made.

IN ROBEL’S CASE the jury was out for four days. Longer deliberations bode better for the defendant. But the jury returned with a verdict of guilty on two counts of making false statements, which left him vulnerable to the maximum sixteen years for that crime.

IN MAY 2014, a year after Amir moved to Boston, some young women from the boys’ informal support group happened to catch a cab with a Russian-speaking driver from Central Asia. They asked him for his number so that they could give it to Amir: not only did the guy speak Russian but he drove a minivan—handy for when Amir was going to visit Azamat in jail with family and friends, or members of the defense team. A day or two later, Amir called the cabbie to drive him and several others to the federal prison.

Khairullozhon Matanov, Kair for short, said he knew about the case—he understood whom Amir was going to see—but that is not what they discussed on the way. Kair was an ethnic Uzbek from Kyrgyzstan: he left in 2010, when mobs were attacking Uzbeks and setting fire to Uzbek-owned businesses throughout Kyrgyzstan. He had family back home—he had been sending them money from his work as a cabdriver, but now he had his green card and wanted to set up something more permanent and lucrative, like perhaps some sort of an export-import business with Kyrgyzstan. He asked Amir which he thought would be better to ship to Central Asia: clothes or cars. Amir was in favor of cars. “The profit margin is the same,” he said, “but there is less busywork. But you have to take care to have a customer lined up for every vehicle you ship—then it will work.” This was the kind of conversation Amir would have liked to have with one of his own sons. He decided he wanted to know Kair.

That was on a Wednesday. On Friday, Amir needed a ride, and he called Kair. Or maybe he just wanted to talk to Kair and needing a ride was an excuse, because Amir kept calling. There was no answer.

THE INDICTMENT against Kair was filed on May 29, 2014—the Thursday between the Wednesday he drove Amir and others to the jail and the Friday when Kair himself was arrested. The timing may have been a coincidence—or Amir’s acquaintance with Kair may have been the indirect cause of Kair’s arrest. Like other immigrants who had known the Tsarnaevs, he had been tracked by the FBI for months, but unlike all the others, he failed to stay as far away as possible from anyone else affected by the case. He was charged on two counts—obstructing justice by destroying evidence, like Dias and Azamat, and “making materially false, fictitious, and fraudulent statements,” like Robel.

Indictments are written by grand juries, groups of sixteen to twenty-three people who, unlike trial juries, are appointed in proceedings that are closed to the public and who are sworn to secrecy in perpetuity. Federal grand juries consider prosecutors’ requests for indictments, hear from witnesses—predominantly, though not exclusively, FBI agents—and decide whether there is probable cause to charge a person with a crime. Their decisions do not have to be unanimous, and far more often than not, they agree with the prosecution and the federal agents who make the case that charges should be brought. There is no standard of “reasonable doubt” in the work of a grand jury, because it does not determine guilt; the question the grand jury is answering is: “Do we suspect this person of having committed a crime?” The indictments, then, are usually accurate reflections not only of the story the FBI is telling about a crime or a person, but of what makes us suspicious. In Kair’s case, the narrative began after the eleven points of the indictment that rehearsed the story of the marathon bombings:

12. Khairullozhon Matanov is a citizen of Kyrgyzstan who entered the United States lawfully in 2010, has lived in Massachusetts since then and has worked, among other jobs, as a taxicab driver.

13. While in the United States, Matanov met Tamerlan Tsarnaev and became friends with him, and he also knew Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Matanov participated in a variety of activities with Tamerlan Tsarnaev, including discussing religious topics and hiking up a New Hampshire mountain in order to train like, and praise, the “mujahideen.”

14. In the hours and days following the bombings, Matanov contacted and attempted to contact Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev by cellphone and saw Tamerlan in person at least twice.

15. About forty minutes after the bombings, at approximately 3:31 p.m. on Monday, April 15, 2013, Matanov called Tamerlan Tsarnaev and invited him to dinner that night. Tamerlan accepted. That night, Matanov bought Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev dinner at a restaurant.

16. After Matanov returned from dinner with the Tsarnaevs following the bombings on Monday, April 15, Matanov spoke with Witness 1 (whose name is known to the Grand Jury). When Witness 1 told Matanov that Witness 1 hoped that the Boston Marathon bombers were not Muslim, Matanov initially responded that the bombings could have a just reason, such as being done in the name of Islam, that he would support the bombings if the reason were just or the attack had been done by the Taliban, and that the victims had gone to paradise.

17. In the days following the bombings, Matanov continued to express support for the bombings, although later that week he said that maybe the bombings were wrong. He expressed sympathy for the victims’ families, although he continued to explain away the significance of the victims’ deaths on the ground that everyone must eventually die.

18. On Wednesday, April 17, 2013, Matanov called Dzhokhar Tsarnaev at approximately 5:04 p.m., but did not connect. Within a minute or so, Matanov called Tamerlan Tsarnaev and talked for almost one-and-a-half minutes. He then placed a call to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev around 5:35 p.m. that did not connect. At around 6:53 p.m. Matanov called Tamerlan Tsarnaev again, and talked for about a minute. Matanov made another call to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev that did not connect on April 17, 2013, a few minutes later, around 6:57 p.m. At some point later that night, Matanov visited Tamerlan Tsarnaev at his residence in Cambridge, MA. Around 9:35 p.m. the same night, Matanov made another call to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev that did not connect.

Paragraphs nineteen and twenty describe the release of the suspects’ photographs by the FBI. According to the indictment, Kair looked at the pictures shortly after they were released by going to the CNN website on his laptop. At 8:16 in the evening he called Jahar’s cell phone and did not get an answer. New, higher-resolution pictures were released at two in the morning, and Kair looked at them again shortly afterward. At 7:17 in the morning he called Jahar’s cell phone again and did not get an answer.

The next section of the indictment is called “Matanov’s Cover-Up.”

In other words, Kair had gone through the same process as Dias, Azamat, and several others: the knowing and not knowing, going back and staring at the grainy photos over and over, then knowing and not believing, and finally being unable to maintain denial once the bombers had been named—and going into a panic. So what did he cover up? “Matanov falsely told Witness 1 that he did not know whether Tamerlan Tsarnaev held any extremist views,” states the indictment.

It is not illegal to lie to one’s friends or roommate—and judging from the fact that Kair talked to Witness 1 when he returned from dinner and that he woke up Witness 1 early in the morning, Witness 1 was probably his roommate. By seven in the morning Kair was in his cab, driving a regular client, and telling him that the person they were talking about on the radio was someone he knew—and that he even recognized the address the reporter mentioned. The client, referred to in the indictment as Witness 2, asked whether Kair had visited the place on Norfolk Street, and “Matanov falsely claimed that it had been a while, when in fact he had been at Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s apartment less than 2 days previously.” This lie did not break any laws, either. The episode itself hardly qualifies to be included in the section of the indictment called “Matanov’s Cover-Up”: if he was covering up, he was not doing a very good job.

After dropping off his client, Kair went to see Witness 3, whom he had once introduced to Tamerlan.

What he was covering up here was the possession of either contraband or stolen cell phones, much as Robel and the others had tried to cover up their marijuana use.

It was still Friday morning. Kair picked up Witness 2, his regular client, again and, it would appear, asked him for advice on the best way to report to the authorities his relationship with the Tsarnaev brothers. He was under no legal obligation to do this: even though the FBI was imploring anyone with information about the brothers to come forward, such cooperation with the authorities is voluntary and failure to heed such calls cannot be punished. Witness 2 tried dialing a police officer acquaintance on Kair’s behalf, and when he could not reach him, the two—the cabbie and his client—went to the nearest police station together. This happened to be in Braintree, a suburb on the opposite side of Boston from where the brothers had lived and staged their bungled escape.

Kair was interviewed by a Braintree police officer—and, according to the indictment, though he gave the officer some information about the brothers, including their phone numbers, he also told some lies. He said, for example, that he had not seen photographs of the brothers released by the FBI: he was apparently trying to justify not having gone to the police earlier, most likely because he did not realize that the law did not require him to.

There is no indication, however, that the detective asked Kair when or under what circumstances he had last seen Tamerlan. In fact, when Kair’s defense attorney got a transcript of this interview, he discovered that the detective had interrupted Kair’s story of his relationship with Tamerlan.

In fact, as defense attorney Edward Hayden pointed out in court a few days after the indictment was filed, the transcript shows Kair saying that he was not sure that Tamerlan’s wife and daughter would still be at Norfolk Street now that Tamerlan was dead.

That is the last of the lies Kair ostensibly told the Braintree police officer. Then he went home and asked Witness 1 to take some of the illegal cell phones off his hands. The person refused. Then Kair deleted most of the video files he had on his laptop as well as its Internet cache. By doing so, claimed the indictment:

There is no allegation in the indictment that Kair was in any way involved with organizing the bombing or with trying to help the brothers evade law enforcement—or that he knew anything that might have altered, influenced, or sped up the investigation. Sharing violent beliefs is not a crime, and neither is trying to hide one’s beliefs. It is also possible that Kair was trying to cover up the fact that he, like most Russian speakers on the planet, watched pirated video.

The FBI did not contact Kair until Saturday afternoon. Over the course of several interviews he told the FBI everything he could recall, including the contents of his conversation with the brothers over dinner the evening of the bombing. Tamerlan had pointed out that no one had taken responsibility for the bombing and this probably meant that it was not al-Qaida, which always made its claim of responsibility within two hours of the act—a patently false assertion. The indictment accused Kair of making a series of contradictory statements in his conversations with the FBI: he had at first omitted the fact that he drove the brothers to the restaurant that night, though he admitted right away that dinner had been his treat. He also made muddled statements about when he finally and fully realized that the Tsarnaevs were the suspects, but the grand jury was certain that he knew when he first looked at the pictures on Thursday evening.

In sum, Kair’s crime appears to amount to having been confused and perhaps scared, and trying to conceal his own petty illegal activity—after voluntarily going to the police with information about the brothers.

IN APRIL 2013, the FBI placed Kair under “overt surveillance”—like Ibragim Todashev, he knew he was constantly being followed and watched. He got a lawyer. In early May, Kair apparently decided to see if he could drive crazily enough to shake his FBI tail. The following day, his lawyer relayed the FBI’s request to drive more carefully; Kair complied. Just before the Fourth of July, the lawyer relayed the FBI’s request that Kair stay away from any celebrations (“The city was on edge,” Special Agent Timothy McElroy offered later in court by way of explanation); Kair complied. Just before Patriots’ Day 2014, the lawyer relayed the FBI’s request that Kair leave the city for the holiday; Kair complied. But once the anniversary of the bombing had passed, things appeared to get back to normal: Kair began making plans for his new export-import business, and he even let his relationship with his lawyer lapse. Then he gave Amir a ride to the federal prison. Two days later, he was in jail himself.

He was wearing an orange jumpsuit when he was led into a courtroom at the federal courthouse in Boston for his detention hearing and arraignment on June 4, 2014. A bailiff removed Kair’s handcuffs once he had waddled over to the defense table; the shackles stayed on. His court-appointed defense lawyer, Edward Hayden, ran through the indictment, pointing out the inconsistencies, the absurdities, and most important, the absence of a description of anything that could be construed as a crime.

The prosecution stressed that Kair was facing up to twenty-eight years in prison—eight for lying and twenty for obstructing justice—and this made him a flight risk. Kair speaks seven languages and has “significant ties outside the country,” making it even more likely that he would flee, argued Assistant U.S. Attorney Scott Riley. Plus, he said, the defendant would probably be deported if convicted—all the more reason to try to leave the country before trial if he were released on bail.

The judge noted that Kair could not actually be deported to his country of origin because the United States had granted him political asylum. At least one of the prosecutor’s arguments was thus rejected out of hand. It began to seem possible that this was that rare—perhaps unique—occasion when a noncitizen in a terrorism case would be released on bail. Maybe all the defense attorney had to do now was ask for it.

“At this point I cannot find reason to argue against detention,” said Hayden instead. “I don’t see any place for him to go.” Kair had been behind bars for less than a week, but his life had fallen apart: his landlord had already evicted him and his employer had fired him, revoking his lease on the cab. With no home, no job, and no family in the United States, Kair was now committed to “voluntary detention without prejudice” in county jail.

In a few weeks, the women of the Free Jahar movement organized a place for Kair to stay in the Boston area—and if the judge would allow him to leave the district, Elena Teyer had volunteered to house him in Savannah indefinitely. But the judge rejected this proposal, and Kair’s detention stopped being “voluntary.” He was scheduled to face trial no sooner than the summer of 2015.

Twelve WHAT WILL WE KNOW?

“Why are you writing this book?” Mohammed Gadzhiev, Tamerlan’s friend and deputy head of the Union of the Just, asked me. We had spent most of a day talking, and the conversation had taken a few twists. Gadzhiev had been by turns condescending, engaged, and intimidating. Now, in the evening, we were drinking black tea at a large wooden table outdoors at a roadside café on the outskirts of Makhachkala, and Gadzhiev signaled it was time I came clean about my agenda. Specifically, he wanted to know why I had asked comparatively few questions about the celebrity martyrs whom Tamerlan had been rumored to have tried to contact in Dagestan. Because, I said, I saw no credence to the rumors—an impression my interlocutor clearly shared. I had asked him many detailed questions about his own time with Tamerlan and conversations they had had, and what he was asking me now was this: If I was not chasing the story of the great Dagestan-based terrorist conspiracy that radicalized Tamerlan Tsarnaev, then what story was I writing?

I told him I had been a reporter at both of the wars in Chechnya and had covered their aftermath, and he was mildly impressed. I told him that a few years back I had spent time at a university studying with people who strove to understand the nature of terrorism. I told him that I had been a teenage Russian-speaking immigrant in Boston—and at this point I sensed that Gadzhiev had lost interest.

“So you are one of those people who think social injustice is to blame,” he said, his voice brittle with disappointment. “Why can’t you believe that he simply objected to U.S. foreign policy and that’s why he did it?”

In fact, I can and do believe that not only Tamerlan but Jahar as well could have made a rational choice—that is, a choice consistent with their values and their understanding of causal relationships—and, as a result of that choice, set off bombs that killed three people and injured at least 264. The story I was trying to tell was not one of big conspiracies or even giant examples of injustice. The people in key roles in this story are few, the ideas they hold are uncomplicated, and the plans they conjure are anything but far-reaching. It was the hardest and most frightening kind of story to believe.

The dominant understanding of terrorism in American culture, which has driven both media coverage of terrorism and law enforcement response to it, rests on the concept of “radicalization.” Radicalization theory has its roots much more in the FBI, whose staff psychologists and behavior specialists have developed it, than in the academic study of terrorism, whose representatives briefly became talking heads on American television after September 11 and still stalwartly try—and fail—to explain to the civilian branches of government what they have learned. According to radicalization theory, a person becomes a terrorist by way of identifiable stages of adopting increasingly radical ideas, until he or she is finally radicalized into terrorist action. This theory has shaped policy, behavior, and lives, though it remains highly controversial among terrorism scholars. Common sense and human experience show that only a small minority of people who subscribe to radical ideas—even the kinds of radical ideas that justify and promote violence—actually engage in violence. Research also shows that some terrorists do not hold strong political or ideological beliefs. In other words, knowing what someone believes can help neither to predict terrorism nor to explain it. Still, the bulk of the FBI’s efforts in the War on Terror have concentrated on tracking routes to presumed radicalization, ferreting out ostensibly radicalized individuals, and cracking down on networks that supposedly facilitate radicalization. At first it was assumed that where there is radicalization, there is a network, but in recent years the FBI has been proposing the “lone wolf” terrorist model to explain the apparent absence of such networks in some cases. The radicalization hypothesis itself, on the other hand, has held steady in the face of a glaring lack of evidence.

In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing, both law enforcement and the American press corps focused their efforts on finding out who radicalized Tamerlan or both of the Tsarnaev brothers, and when and where. The possibility that their actions were driven by simple ideas acquired without any concerted outside help, that, as Gadzhiev said, Tamerlan “simply objected to U.S. foreign policy” like hundreds of thousands of other people but, unlike the overwhelming majority of them, decided to use a bomb to express his opposition—this terrifyingly simple idea was never on the table.

For anyone inclined to feel sympathy for the brothers, or at least to attempt to understand them—that is, for their friends and family, and the friends and family of anyone caught up in the investigation—Gadzhiev’s simple explanation is also too painful and counterintuitive to entertain. The fallout that has so direly affected this group seems to demand a larger, more dramatic explanation. So people as different in background, social status, and relationship to the events as Zubeidat, Amir, and some of the Tsarnaevs’ American friends have come to subscribe to one of any number of variants of a single conspiracy theory.

THE FIRST COHERENT conspiracy theory took shape within a month of the marathon bombing. In May 2013, in London, I met with Akhmed Zakayev, the last surviving member of the 1990s pro-independence Chechen leadership who was still fighting that fight. He had no doubt that the bombing had been organized by the FSB, the Russian secret police. “Putin and his cohorts are the only ones who benefited from this bombing,” he said. How? Russia was preparing to host the Olympic Games in Sochi in 2014. Some politicians and media in the West had questioned the wisdom of giving the Olympics to Russia, because Putin’s law enforcement could not be trusted to ensure the safety of visiting athletes, dignitaries, and the public. Russia had seen dozens of terrorist attacks every year of the past decade—suicide bombings, car bombs, and several hostage-takings—so many, in fact, that they drew public attention, even inside Russia, only when the attacks occurred outside the embattled regions of the North Caucasus. In November 2009, a high-speed train going from Moscow to Saint Petersburg crashed, killing twenty-eight people and injuring more than ninety; law enforcement classified the disaster as a terrorist attack. In March 2010, two explosions in the Moscow Metro killed forty people and injured more than a hundred; a pan-Caucasian insurgent organization with roots in Chechnya claimed credit. In January 2011, a bomb went off in the arrivals hall of a Moscow airport, killing thirty-seven people and wounding 180. Add to this history the many attacks, large and small, in and around Chechnya and Dagestan; the fact that Sochi is geographically close to the region; and the Olympic Games’ unfortunate history as a terrorist target: the 1972 hostage-taking at the Munich Olympics, where eleven members of the Israeli team, one German policeman, and five of the terrorists were killed after a long standoff and a bungled rescue, was one of the attacks that launched the current era of international terrorism.

According to Zakayev’s logic, Putin and his secret police, faced with growing concern about Russia’s ability to provide adequate security during the Olympics—and knowing just how well-founded this concern was—hatched a paradoxical plot. They enticed two Chechen-Americans, the Tsarnaev brothers, to set off bombs at the Boston Marathon. This would reposition Chechen terrorism as an international threat—something Russia had long claimed but lacked evidence to back up—as well as shore up American support for a continued Russian crackdown in the Caucasus and preemptively disarm any critics of what might prove to be an imperfect security effort in Sochi. After all, events would have ostensibly shown, the Americans had proved unable to protect their own sporting events against the Chechens.

Zakayev based his arguments on the known facts. By this time the FBI had acknowledged that back in 2011 the FSB had alerted it to Tamerlan’s existence, as part of a regular exchange of information on suspected terrorists. In Zakayev’s view, this showed that the FSB was already tracking Tamerlan. When Tamerlan traveled to Dagestan in 2012, Zakayev was convinced, it was at the FSB’s instigation. Once the young man was indoctrinated and trained, the FSB sent him back to the United States with instructions to set off a bomb at the next big sporting event.

No wonder Putin was uncharacteristically fast to react to the Boston bombing, becoming one of the first world leaders to express his condolences and stress the importance of international cooperation in the fight against terrorism. The Russian president, reasoned Zakayev, had planned the tragedy—and the reaction—himself.

Then there was the opposite theory, or perhaps the same theory but with a different cast of characters. A number of people, many of them far outside the usual-suspect circles of conspiracy theorists, became convinced that the FBI was behind the bombings. The FBI certainly had greater opportunity to commit the crime than did the FSB. The FBI had access to Tamerlan, it had had Tamerlan on its radar at least since the FSB alerted it to his existence in early 2011, and the FBI has been known to engage people in elaborate imaginary terrorist plots in order to identify potential attackers. But what would have been the FBI’s motive? This is the weak part of the theory: most of the proponents to whom I have spoken suggest that the FBI enticed Tamerlan Tsarnaev to bomb the Boston Marathon in order to test the agency’s ability to impose martial law in America.

Part of what has kept people engaged with the FBI-conspiracy theory, and has even kept new adherents streaming in, is the impressive list of inconsistencies a slew of self-styled investigators have identified in the law enforcement narrative of the bombing. Many of the criticisms of the FBI story are nitpicky and hardly bear repeating, and some are imaginary, but a few seem significant enough to consider. Any conspiracy theorist, for example, will tell you about the backpack: in the available photographs of Jahar taken at the marathon, he is seen walking in the crowd, carrying a gray backpack easily on one shoulder. Another set of pictures shows a backpack that has been ripped apart by the device that exploded inside it. The backpack in the second set of photos is black. Of course, the most likely explanation for the discrepancy is that there were two backpacks, a gray one carried by Jahar and a black one carried by Tamerlan. But the indictment in Jahar’s case says that both bombs were concealed inside black backpacks. And the conspiracy theorists also have pictures of a third person—someone whose general demeanor and outfit make the theorists believe he is an officer of some sort of military or militarized organization—with just that kind of black backpack with a white square on its handle that can also be seen in the second set of photographs. (In the available photos of Tamerlan, he is carrying a black backpack, but one without a white square on the handle.)

There may be a variety of explanations for this—two people at the giant event could have had the same backpack, or any or all of the photographs may be inauthentic—but the conspiracy theorists point to other holes in the story: Danny, the owner of the hijacked SUV, made contradictory statements about the timing and sequence of events; police officers’ accounts of the manhunt and the shoot-out are full of incredible assertions—cars turning around on a dime on narrow streets; individual cops being in three places at once, or on what appear to be thirty-six-hour shifts, or both—and the explosive device that was supposedly thrown by one of the brothers in the middle of a tiny residential street harmed no one and damaged nothing.

The inconsistencies in stories told by police officers are likely to have logical explanations, paramount among them the fact that the police were sleep-deprived, scared, and genuinely confused by the disarray in the ranks of law enforcement. The general human tendency to misremember details would have been exacerbated. If any of them had things to conceal, these probably concerned matters peripheral to the question of whether the brothers were guilty of the bombing. But they serve as a reminder to consider what evidence was available when American public opinion convicted the brothers, long before any proof was presented in a court of law.

Members of the investigative team originally picked out Jahar and Tamerlan on surveillance videos because their behavior appeared different from that of the rest of the marathon spectators. When the first blast sounded, the two did not panic or run. By all accounts, before the FBI released the surveillance photos and asked for help identifying the suspects, the brothers acted normal, showing no signs of distress or intention to escape—until they became the objects of a manhunt. At that point the very fact that they were running away served as affirmation of their guilt.

Later, other evidence was said to emerge. A few days after Jahar was captured, Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick and several media outlets citing sources in law enforcement said that there existed another video, in which Jahar could be seen setting his backpack down on the ground at the spot where the second explosion occurred. Then, according to these sources, he could be seen walking away—and acting calm when the first explosion sounded. The video was not released to the public.

While Jahar was hiding in the boat, he scrawled a note on its interior wall. It was quoted in the grand jury indictment, and later a larger portion was included in one of the prosecution’s filings in the case:

At some point someone managed to snap a picture of the note—or a picture was leaked by law enforcement—and ABC News published it. It appears to show that the quoted version in the filing omits the following sentences: “I bear witness that there is no God but Allah and that Muhammad is his messenger. [bullet hole] actions come with a [me]ssage and that is [bullet hole], in’shallah.”

This note, which the media often called a confession, certainly makes it seem that the brothers were the marathon bombers, but it does not say it—at least the portion known to the public does not. It contains no information on where, when, or how the brothers made the pressure-cooker bombs and whether anyone helped them, how and when they transported them to Boylston Street in Boston, where and when they planted them, and who detonated them. In other words, it contains none of the kinds of specific information that generally constitutes a confession. If the court of public opinion could be held to the standard of reasonable doubt, then someone would have to ask its jury this question: Is it conceivable that the Tsarnaev brothers were not the marathon bombers but, once they knew they were the suspects, they decided to run? The answer would have to be, Yes, it is conceivable. The evidence available to the public before the trial began in January 2015 included nothing that directly linked the Tsarnaev brothers to the bombing or explained its mechanics or the brothers’ motivation.

THIS BOOK is not an impartial jury. Like the American public, it assumes from the start that Tamerlan and Jahar Tsarnaev are the Boston Marathon bombers. The difficulty with making sense of their story occurs sometime before Jahar’s non-confession confession and has only a little to do with the lack of a clear picture of the steps they took to manufacture and plant the bombs. What is truly lacking from the story is a clear and accessible explanation for how two young men who appear to be very much like hundreds of thousands of other young men came to cause carnage in the center of their own city.

On the Friday after the bombing, when Tamerlan was already dead but Jahar was still on the loose, Maret Tsarnaeva, Anzor’s older sister, spoke to reporters in Toronto. Soon after, she would tell people that she was certain the bombing was a secret-police plot and that she was in danger. And then she would disappear—American friends assumed that she moved back to Chechnya. But that day, she was still seeking to make herself heard, in fluent, idiomatic, if heavily accented, English. “For me to be convinced that these two nephews of mine did this cannot be taken lightly,” she said. Journalists shouted questions, struggling to be heard over one another’s voices and the incessant clicking of shutters. “Why are you asking question, ‘Do you believe?’” Maret finally snapped. “If they have done this, I have to believe.”

It was just very difficult to believe. Friends and other relatives argued that it was impossible: the brothers were normal, acted normal, and loved their friends and family. But terrorists are normal. As far back as 1981, Martha Crenshaw, a pioneer in the study of modern terrorism, wrote, “The outstanding common characteristic of terrorists is their normality.” This observation has since been echoed and further substantiated. Scott Atran, an anthropologist who has traveled the world talking to current and perhaps future members of jihadi groups, has identified several other characteristics that his subjects seem to share. They are usually in their early twenties, they are often immigrants, they have usually been educated in secular schools, often with an emphasis on science, they are usually married, and their socioeconomic background is usually middle-class but marginalized. They tend to form most of their connections in small circles of family and friends; they socialize within them, marry within them, and their terrorist networks are for the most part limited to them.

Crenshaw points to political conditions that enable terrorism—a group has to be excluded from the political process. And she suggests one other personality trait required of a terrorist: a high tolerance for risk. Growing up in and around war zones and in high-crime environments will inure a person to risk and violence. So the Tsarnaev brothers fit the profile perfectly. But most disaffected immigrants from unstable countries, most immigrants who never make it out of the struggling lower rung of the middle class and beyond the bounds of a suffocating social circle, even most angry Muslim young men without a religious education but with a high tolerance for danger, do not build bombs and kill people.

The imagination demands something distinct, huge, and immediately recognizable to explain the leap between an ordinary life and the path of a terrorist. In December 2013, The Boston Globe published a near-book-length exposé based on almost eight months of reporting by a team of journalists, and this team’s conclusion was that Tamerlan suffered from schizophrenia. He apparently heard voices that told him to do terrible things. The evidence for this newspaper diagnosis was this: it would seem that Zubeidat once said something about Tamerlan’s “voices” to Max Mazaev’s wife, who, years later—after the bombing—relayed the conversation to her husband, who, in turn, mentioned it in a telephone conversation with a psychiatrist who had once treated Anzor but had never met Tamerlan—and the psychiatrist may have said the word “schizophrenia,” among others. The diagnosis not only was based on ephemeral evidence but was actually counterfactual: terrorism experts broadly agree that a firm grip on reality is required to carry out a secret plot of any complexity. As for the “voices,” Zubeidat most likely meant an inner voice that she felt, at that moment, was leading her teenage son astray.

But if it was not a giant mental disorder, was there a huge conspiracy that led Tamerlan and Jahar astray? Most of the media coverage hewed to the FBI’s radicalization theory, and proposed a variety of characters suspected of having indoctrinated Tamerlan: first a man named Misha, who turned out to be a soft-spoken Armenian-born Muslim convert living in Rhode Island who had not seen Tamerlan in three years; then the Russian-Canadian Dagestani insurgent William Plotnikov and the teenage Dagestani fighter Mahmud Nidal; and, finally, Magomed Kartashov’s Union of the Just. The problem with these theories is that either the supposed villains have no evident relationship to an armed struggle, as in the cases of Misha and Kartashov, or there is no evidence that Tamerlan ever met them, as in the cases of Plotnikov and Nidal.

SINCE SEPTEMBER 2001, U.S. courts have taken up an average of forty terrorism-related cases a year. More than five hundred people have been charged, and virtually all of them have been convicted and sentenced. Dozens of bombing plots have been revealed. In 2014, Human Rights Watch released a report that analyzed many of those cases. The researchers concluded that “all of the high-profile domestic terrorism plots of the last decade, with four exceptions, were actually FBI sting operations—plots conducted with the direct involvement of law enforcement informants or agents, including plots that were proposed or led by informants.”

Since 9/11, the bulk of the FBI’s efforts have centered on fighting terrorism, which became its top institutional priority and consumes forty percent of the agency’s operating budget. Between 2001 and 2013, the number of terrorist attacks carried out on American soil by people connected to Islamic organizations numbered zero, but trumped-up terrorist plots numbered in the dozens, and the people who went to jail because of them in the hundreds. The Human Rights Watch report describes the work of the FBI (initially quoting from a former FBI agent, Michael German):

In one case, it was the FBI informant who suggested detonating a bomb near a synagogue in the Bronx and using Stinger missiles to attack airplanes taking off from Stewart Air National Guard Base near Newburgh, New York. The informant assembled the group for the planned attacks and procured the weapons. Then the four men the informant had recruited were arrested. Federal judge Colleen McMahon, who heard the case in Manhattan in 2010–2011, said, “The essence of what occurred here is that a government, understandably zealous to protect its citizens from terrorists, came upon a man both bigoted and suggestible, one who was incapable of committing an act of terrorism on his own.” The judge was referring to the alleged leader of the Newburgh Four, James Cromitie. “Only the government could have made a terrorist out of Mr. Cromitie, whose buffoonery is positively Shakespearean in scope,” said Judge McMahon, and sentenced the defendants to twenty-five years behind bars, in accordance with mandatory-sentencing guidelines.

Most of the people I have heard arguing that the FBI was responsible for the Boston Marathon bombing were unaware of the agency’s recent pattern of hatching terrorism plots. Some of them were basing their impression on their personal experience: “I am used to being set up,” said Maret Tsarnaeva, referring to the life of a Chechen in the former Soviet Union. Others drew inferences from their knowledge of the Boston FBI office’s track record.

When Jahar was indicted in federal court in Boston in July 2013, a major trial was under way in the courtroom next door: the notorious gangster James “Whitey” Bulger, captured after sixteen years on the run, was being tried for racketeering. Files made public during the Bulger trial showed that for at least fifteen years, the mobster had fed the FBI information about both rivals and associates, using the agency to eliminate obstacles and advance his business while the FBI ignored his crimes, which included numerous murders, in exchange for information and a cut of the proceeds.

Two years earlier, another high-profile case that was heard at the same courthouse brought to light what had long been rumored: a Watertown- and Waltham-based drug ring had for years, and to the tune of millions of dollars, enjoyed the protection of one or more members of the Watertown Police Department, who helped them avoid investigations and raids. The possible connection between this case and Tamerlan gave rise to some of the more complicated—and convincing—Boston-grown conspiracy theories.

The friends with whom Tamerlan dealt and smoked pot lived in Watertown—indeed, Tamerlan’s stories about the town’s crooked cops left an impression on his friend Mohammed Gadzhiev in Dagestan. Brendan Mess was almost undoubtedly connected to the Watertown drug ring. The murder of Mess, Erik Weissman, and Raphael Teken, which was never fully investigated, had been handled by the office of the Middlesex County district attorney, at the time Gerard Leone; Leone had also judged the Golden Gloves amateur boxing competition in Lowell that Tamerlan had won.

The list of coincidences continues. Less than three months after the Waltham triple murder, another person in the Boston area was killed in the same bizarre and barbaric manner, by having her throat slashed with such force that she was nearly decapitated. Sixty-year-old Gail Miles was found killed in her Roxbury apartment on December 3, 2011. Miles was a former Watertown police officer: she had made history by becoming the first black woman on the force, and then made history again sixteen years later, in 2000, when she sued the department for racial and gender discrimination. One of the men she accused of harassment was Jeff Pugliese, the officer who would later engage Tamerlan in the one-on-one firefight on Laurel Street in Watertown. No one was ever charged in her murder, and the crime itself has not surfaced significantly in the Boston media since the initial few days of coverage—a highly unusual lack of profile for the killing of a former police officer.

And then there are the CIA coincidences. Anzor’s former sister-in-law Samantha Fuller, his brother Ruslan’s first wife, was the daughter of Graham Fuller, a former highly placed CIA official whose areas of specialization included Russia and Islamic countries and communities. Both Samantha and Ruslan worked for U.S. government–funded programs in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, programs widely believed to have ties to the CIA. So in some conspiracy theories, it is the CIA connection that brings the Tsarnaevs to the United States in the first place.

There are enough connections and coincidences to spin any number of narratives that explain not only how the Tsarnaevs got to America but also who is responsible for the Waltham triple murder, why it was not investigated, how the brothers got the idea to bomb the marathon, and why a Boston FBI agent killed Ibragim Todashev. Most likely all of these theories are wrong. The bulk of the contradictions and inconsistencies in this story can be explained by things much more pervasive and also often more dangerous than conspiracies: incompetence, ignorance, and fear. But some of these connections provide useful leads. Indeed, using only the known facts, it is possible to construct a plausible theory of what happened with the Tsarnaev brothers—and to point to the gaping holes that the investigation into the attack had, at least by the time Jahar’s trial began, failed to answer.

THIS PART OF THE STORY begins in March 2011, when the Russian FSB sent the FBI a letter alerting the agency to the existence of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, a Chechen from Dagestan living in the Boston area who, the FSB claimed, had become radicalized. The FSB’s approach to identifying suspected radicals abroad, for the purposes of continued cooperation with the FBI in the War on Terror, is exactly the same as at home: it considers all urban young Muslim men to be radical—and to be especially radical if they are of Chechen descent. The FSB’s counterparts in the FBI know this and talk about the Russians “playing whack-a-mole” instead of fighting terror. They knew that they had received Tamerlan’s name simply because the FSB happened to find it—and that happened probably because when Zubeidat and Anzor renewed their Russian passports, they had to put down the names and addresses of their children. Still, though the FBI knew that the FSB’s intelligence on suspected Islamic radicals was generally useless, it had its own use for the name: Tamerlan fit perfectly the FBI’s “investigative profile.” He was young, an immigrant, lacked a steady income, and, as a Russian-speaking Muslim in Boston, was an outsider among outsiders. In fact, the FBI had followed this logic earlier, all on its own: the first time an agent came to Norfolk Street to interview Zubeidat was in 2002, the year the family arrived in the United States. The agency’s visits were roughly annual after that—a perfectly ordinary occurrence for people from places the United States views with suspicion (my own first FBI interview, with the Boston field office, took place when I was sixteen; the agents did not bother to seek my parents’ presence or permission)—but the FSB alert prompted the FBI to intensify its efforts.

In the spring and summer of 2011, FBI field agents interviewed Tamerlan at least three times, came to the house on Norfolk Street, and talked to members of the Tsarnaev household. Zubeidat says that the agents tried to recruit Tamerlan. After the bombing, FBI director James Comey, in response to a series of questions from Senate Judiciary Committee member Charles Grassley, a Republican from Iowa, denied that the agency had tried to recruit Tamerlan, but declined to elaborate.

In September 2011, Mess, Weissman, and Teken were killed. There are at least three possible explanations for why law enforcement failed to investigate the gruesome—and unusual—murders: (1) Tamerlan committed the murders, but he was already informing for the FBI or being recruited into one of its terrorist plots, and the FBI protected him from scrutiny as it had done with Whitey Bulger when he murdered people; (2) Tamerlan committed the murders, but he did so either on orders from or in cooperation with the Watertown police, which had its own long-standing interests in the local drug market; (3) the murders were committed by the cops themselves, which is one explanation for the similarity to the later killing of former policewoman Gail Miles.

In January 2012, Tamerlan traveled to Dagestan. The explanation given to Joanna Herlihy and others—that he was going there to renew his Russian passport—was a lie. At least by the time Tamerlan arrived in Dagestan, he had no Russian passport to renew. (Zubeidat told Joanna that he lost all his Russian documents when he got there, but it is unclear how he could have had a Russian passport at all, having lived in the United States for longer than one could have been valid.) He was going back for the same reason any of the Tsarnaevs ever went anywhere: to find a better place to be. He found it. But after six months, someone called him back to the United States urgently. He told people it had something to do with his documents, and this was probably true. Political asylees who do not yet have their U.S. passports are typically advised not to travel to their countries of origin; the very fact of such travel throws doubt on their claim that they face danger at home. In truth, though, people do it all the time and rarely get caught—but when they are caught, they may not be allowed to reenter the United States. It seems that Tamerlan rushed back to America because someone warned him—or, more accurately, threatened him—that he would not be allowed back in. Such a warning could have come only from the FBI. Either Tamerlan had been gone too long for the tastes of the agents to whom he had promised his services as an informant, or the agents had decided that it was time to use a threat to cement or jump-start the recruitment effort. Tamerlan hurried back to Cambridge, where he was a househusband with only the siren call of the FBI informant or recruiter and his friends in now faraway Dagestan for intellectual company. What happened then was most predictable.

The history of terrorism is full of recruits gone rogue—it is dominated by groups that switched or abandoned loyalties. Perhaps the only surprising aspect of the FBI’s list of manufactured terrorist plots of the past dozen years is that all of them appear to have remained in the agency’s hands. Until Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who had, from all available information, hardly given jihad a thought before being fingered by the FSB and targeted by the FBI, went rogue. And, in the way of many modern terrorists, teamed up with his brother.

ACCORDING TO FBI REPRESENTATIVES who have spoken publicly about the case, members of the investigative team first focused on the images of the brothers about thirty-six hours before they released the photographs—and the decision to release them was prompted by the threat of a media leak. So the agency called a press conference, showed the images, and asked for the public’s help in identifying the suspects. The FBI could not use its facial-recognition software for the purpose because the surveillance camera that shot the video was mounted well above people’s heads, distorting the angle. All the pictures shown at the press conference were indeed made by cameras looking down on the subjects. While that may work as a technical explanation, it cannot explain how members of the Joint Terrorism Task Force had failed to recognize an individual they had interviewed and had under surveillance just two years earlier—and whose entire family had been tracked by the FBI for more than a decade. One conceivable reason is incompetence: it is theoretically possible that agents who pinpointed the brothers on the surveillance video failed to take the obvious step of showing the pictures to every local agent who had recently interviewed people suspected of links to terrorist organizations. A more logical explanation is that the person or persons who were in a position to recognize the brothers were consciously concealing this fact in order to protect their own or the agency’s reputation—either because it would look like the FBI had fumbled a solid investigative lead, causing tragedy, or worse, because the FBI had considered Tamerlan an informant.

Many people who recognized the brothers on television chose not to call the FBI hotline; but there were those who did call. At least one former high school classmate of Jahar’s who had been on the wrestling team with him called. Maret Tsarnaeva, the brothers’ aunt, called as well. By the time she talked to journalists, nearly twenty-four hours later, no one had contacted her in response to her call. Both of these calls appear to have been made before the MIT police officer was killed on Thursday evening.

In an October 2013 letter to FBI director Comey, Senator Grassley pointed to another odd set of circumstances:

Several months later, Boston reporters talked to a Cambridge police officer who described the town swarming with FBI that evening and concluded that the agency had been laying siege to the neighborhood in order to capture the brothers. By the time Senator Grassley’s office released the letter, in October, both the head of the FBI’s Boston operation, Richard DesLauriers, and Boston’s police commissioner had resigned, but three days after the letter appeared, the FBI field office in Boston, the Massachusetts State Police, and the Boston police (but not the Cambridge police, which is separate) issued a joint statement denying that the FBI was watching the Tsarnaevs before the Sean Collier murder, or even the shoot-out in Watertown:

Here, an explanation of incompetence strains the imagination: the FBI is claiming that it failed to follow up on leads identifying someone who was once considered a terrorism risk, even though these leads came in to its tip line set up specifically for this purpose, and in one instance from a woman—a lawyer—who claimed to have identified her own nephews in the pictures. It is also, bizarrely, claiming to have deployed personnel to pursue an unrelated matter in Cambridge on the Thursday after the bombing, despite an all-hands-on-deck order from the FBI director at the time, Robert Mueller. Another explanation in this instance makes infinitely more sense: The FBI was setting up an operation without notifying its local partners because it needed to ensure that no other law enforcement got to Tamerlan Tsarnaev before the FBI had captured—or killed—him. In other words, the explanation that best fits the facts is a cover-up.

TWO MYSTERIES REMAIN. Why did Ibragim Todashev die? Are Elena Teyer and Boston conspiracy theorists right to believe that his killing was planned—and if it was, then why did law enforcement want him dead? Logically, the assumption that Todashev was not involved in the triple murder in Waltham is at odds with the proposition that he was killed intentionally. If he knew nothing, there was no reason to get rid of him. If he did know something about the murder, it is still difficult to see why anyone would have needed him to die when he was already writing a confession. Of course, the confession is full of inaccuracies, but that in itself is neither unusual nor suggestive of Todashev’s innocence. After all, Robel Phillipos signed an outrageously inaccurate confession describing actions he had actually witnessed or taken, and the FBI had no issue with presenting it as evidence in court. The court, in turn, found Phillipos guilty. Todashev’s case, involving a Chechen immigrant with a criminal record, would have been even easier to prosecute, so the FBI had little reason to worry about the quality of its evidence.

Todashev’s death almost certainly resulted from a combination of incompetence and fear. The FBI found Todashev terrifying. This comes across in the testimony of individual agents as well as in the institution’s very approach to him: it sent seven armed officers to tackle Todashev in order to conduct its first “voluntary interview” with him. For his last interview, Todashev was to face four officers—the Orlando and Boston FBI agents and the two Massachusetts state troopers. One of the members of this team dropped out when the officers discovered that Todashev was not alone; the Orlando agent stayed in the parking lot with Khusein Taramov. Then the interview seemed to go much better than expected, the officers felt happy, lost vigilance, and one of the state troopers stepped outside, leaving only two armed men with the frightening martial artist, who was sitting on a mattress on the floor writing a confession. Whatever Todashev did when he stopped writing—whether he threw the coffee table, ran to the kitchen to rummage for a knife, grabbed a stick, or did all of these things—reminded the officers that they were facing a dangerously and perhaps superhumanly strong man. The fear caused the trooper to fumble with his holster and the FBI agent to shoot to kill. FBI agents are not generally instructed to try to make sure that an aggressive suspect survives, and the agency has exonerated its officers in every single internal investigation into such shootings, so there was no institutional incentive for Agent Aaron McFarlane to try to keep Todashev alive. His death virtually guarantees that we will never know who killed the three men in Waltham, and why.

The other mystery of the narrative of the Boston Marathon bombing is the buried lead of the story, the gaping hole in the investigation. Where did the bombs come from? The grand jury indictment postulates that the brothers read a bomb-making recipe in the al-Qaida–affiliated Inspire magazine and built them at home using pressure cookers, gunpowder from fireworks, and other materials. The Boston Globe exposé repeats this simple narrative:

And then the bomb is ready to go.

I talked to several explosives experts who assured me that “making a bomb in the kitchen of your mom” was probably an impossible proposition. In May 2014, after the initial and even the secondary wave of media attention had died down, U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz filed a motion that contained the following passage:

Of the five hundred people tried for terrorism and related offenses in U.S. courts in the past dozen years, Jahar Tsarnaev is the first to have set off a real bomb rather than a fake explosive provided by the FBI—and going into his trial, there was no indication that the FBI knew where and how the bombs had been made and whether anyone had helped make them. If someone had, it was not the young men who had been convicted as Jahar’s accomplices.

THE STORY OF THE BOMBS, if it is ever known, may turn out to involve more people, and people with bigger ideas than the people named in this book—or it may not. As for the brothers themselves, theirs remains a small story, in which nothing extraordinary happens—or, rather, no extraordinary event is necessary to explain what happened. One had only to be born in the wrong place at the wrong time, as many people are, to never feel that one belongs, to see every opportunity, even those that seem within reach, pass one by—until the opportunity to be somebody finally, almost accidentally, presents itself. This is where the small story of the Tsarnaevs joins the large story of the War on Terror.

“The War Against Terror is another moment in this continuing saga of our species toward an unpredictable somewhere between All against All and One World,” writes Scott Atran, attempting to place terrorism in the context of the evolution of human identities.

The rhetoric and actions of the U.S. government and its agents, in their outsize response and their targeting of specific communities, have probably done as much to create an imagined worldwide community of jihadists as have the efforts of al-Qaida and its allies. For Tamerlan, this vision offered a truer—and more realistic—path to greatness than boxing or keyboards could. And while Jahar may have envied his brother his place in heaven, he himself was getting ready to stand trial for doing exactly what he and his brother had wanted to do: for declaring war on a great power.