Boston bombing suspect was on two US watchlists

CIA told Russian government it had no suspicious information on brother

People gather at a makeshift memorial in Copley Square, near the site of the Boston Marathon bombings yesterday in Boston, Massachusetts. Photographs: Mario Tama/Getty Images

New York Times

Despite being told in 2011 that an FBI review had found that a man who went on to become one of the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings had no ties to extremists, the Russian government asked the CIA six months later for whatever information it had on him, US officials have said.

After its review, the CIA also told the Russian intelligence service that it had no suspicious information on the man, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who was killed in a shootout with the police early Friday. It is not clear what prompted the Russians to make the request of the CIA.

The result of the US inquiries into Tsarnaev’s background was that even though he was found to have no connections to extremist groups, his name was entered into two different US government watchlists in late 2011 that were designed to alert authorities if he traveled overseas.

The picture emerging yesterday was of a US counterterrorism bureaucracy that had at least four different contacts with Russian spy services about Tsarnaev in the year before he took a six-month trip to Russia in 2012 but never found reason to investigate him further after he returned from the trip, or any time before last week’s attacks in Boston that killed three people and injured more than 260.

After the CIA cleared Tsarnaev of any ties to violent extremism in October 2011, it asked the National Counterterrorism Center, the nation’s main counterterrorism agency, to add his name to a watch list as a precaution, a US intelligence official said. Other agencies, including the State Department, the Homeland Security Department and the FBI, were alerted.

That database, the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, or TIDE, which contains about 700,000 names, is the main repository of information from which other government watch lists are drawn, including the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Database and the Transportation Security Administration’s “no fly” list.

The information conveyed to the watch list included a transliteration from Cyrillic of Tsarnaev’s name - “Tamerlan Tsarnayev” - two dates of birth (both of which were incorrect, officials said) and one possible variant spelling of his name.

The first Russian request came to the FBI in March 2011, through the bureau’s office in the US Embassy in Moscow. The one-page request said that Tsarnaev “had changed drastically since 2010” and was preparing to travel to a part of Russia “to join unspecified underground groups.” In response, counterterrorism agents in the FBI’s field office in Boston, near where Tsarnaev was living, began a review to determine whether he had extremist tendencies or ties to terrorist groups. The review included examining criminal databases and conducting interviews with Tsarnaev and his family. ---------------------------- The Irish Times