Boston Attack Renews Fears About Homegrown Terrorism

The Federal Bureau of Investigation interviewed suspected marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev in 2011 at the request of the Russian government, but didn't find evidence of suspicious activity and closed the case, an FBI official said Friday.

The fact that the FBI spoke with Mr. Tsarnaev, who was killed Friday morning in a firefight with authorities, is likely to become a focal point of the post mortem into how the attack was able to be carried out at the Boston Marathon. It also speaks to the challenge faced by authorities as terrorism morphs to some extent from the complex international plots of a decade ago to small-scale attacks carried out by individuals located within U.S.

U.S. counterterrorism policy has since 2001 focused largely on killing terrorists overseas or preventing them from getting into the U.S. But the Boston bombings show how the diffusion of terrorist tactics easily transcends borders. Countering small groups of individuals inside the U.S. can be a bedeviling assignment.

Bruce Riedel, director of the Intelligence Project at the Brookings Institution, a nonpartisan Washington think tank, said the Boston attack was likely a harbinger. "We are likely to see this as the future face of terrorist threats to the United States," he said, adding that the case of a small number of radicalized participants who have lived in the U.S. and execute a plot is "the counterterrorist community's worst nightmare, homegrown, self-radicalizing terrorism that learns its skill set off the Internet."

Much about the motivation and background of the Tsarnaev brothers, the alleged perpetrators of the Boston bombings, remain unknown, and a full reckoning won't be possible until those details are untangled.

The two brothers, the elder Mr. Tsarnaev, 26 years old, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, ethnic Chechens, immigrated to the U.S. roughly a decade ago, and have been legal residents living with their parents in a Boston suburb. The younger brother, who was taken into custody Friday night, became a citizen last year.

An official familiar with the issue said the Russian government reached out to U.S. counterterrorism officials in 2011 and expressed concern that the elder brother might be planning to travel to their country to engage in terrorist activities. The FBI looked into his background and interviewed him, but found no "derogatory information" about him, the official said. They relayed that information to Russia, which had defeated a Chechen separatist movement, and considered the matter closed.

The FBI had no further interaction with him, the official said, until they got his name Friday morning in the bombing investigation and began a search of their files.

Authorities say he traveled to Russia from January to July 2012, but the reasons for his travel are unknown.

 

Where did the alleged bombers of the Boston Marathon come from? What were their career aspirations? What can we learn from their online media presence? WSJ's Jason Bellini has "The Short Answer."

A YouTube page that appeared to belong to the elder Mr. Tsarnaev featured multiple jihadi videos that he had endorsed in the past six months. One video features the preaching of Abd al-Hamid al-Juhani, who was an assistant to an al Qaeda scholar in Chechnya, and another features Feiz Mohammad, an extremist Salafi Lebanese preacher based in Australia. Four months ago, he also "liked" a well-produced video featuring the black flags of Khorasan, a significant jihadist theme.

Mr. Silber, now with the investigative firm K2 Intelligence, said the Boston bombings show that the terrorist threat persisted even in the wake of the death of Osama bin Laden. "This more pedestrian, bare-bones terrorism is out there, and it's going to be very difficult to detect."

Rep. Michael McCaul (R., Texas) said the challenge for U.S. policy makers is how to shift the attention of U.S. counterterrorism efforts to address the threat from smaller, more nimble operations that may not have direct contacts overseas. "Certain flags should be raised," he said.

The profile of the Boston bombing in many ways resembles a number of the recent foiled plots, a federal law-enforcement official said. They have been small with little or no intelligence chatter, and have involved suspects who have been in the U.S. for several years and appeared to have assimilated.

U.S. counterterrorism officials have in recent years intensified warnings about the homegrown threat, though the threat has gotten less public attention because most of those plots, with the exception of the 2009 Ft. Hood shooting in Texas, have been disrupted or botched.

At an assessment in March of the threats facing the U.S., Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said he expected al Qaeda-inspired homegrown threats to continue at a rate of fewer than 10 a year. Meanwhile, al Qaeda's core leadership, he said, was probably unable to carry out large-scale attacks in the West.

After the younger brother was in custody on Friday night, Rep. Peter King (R., N.Y.) said the homegrown nature of the Boston attack showed the need for local authorities to bolster their intelligence capabilities.

"The fact that these terrorists were from overseas, living legally in our country for a period of time, and the fact that there was no federal intelligence or chatter prior to the marathon bombings, demonstrates once again the Islamist terrorist threat to our country from within our borders," he said.

A wild card in the bombing is the possible role of the Chechen separatist cause, which flared after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 only to be crushed by the Kremlin. Olga Oliker, an international security specialist at the Rand Corp. think tank, said that the Chechen separatist leadership has become radicalized and more recently formed an umbrella radical group, the Caucuses Emirate, which was designated by the U.S. as a terrorist organization in 2011.

The leadership, however, tends not to direct overseas operations. Ms. Oliker said it is more likely the two brothers were sympathizers who decided to take action in the U.S.

Bruce Hoffman, director of the Center for Security Studies at Georgetown University, said Chechen influence in the global jihad shouldn't be discounted. He noted two recent rounds of arrests in Europe that involved Chechens allegedly carrying out plots at the direction of al Qaeda.

"The potential is there that this is not as isolated a phenomenon as we might hope it is," he said.