The following article is Part 3 of the American Gladio series.
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In the previous article we began to explore the FBI's March 2011 assessment into Tamerlan Tsarnaev and how the agency apparently failed to solicit information about Tsarnaev's plans to travel to Russia to join the islamist insurgency in the Caucasus region or whether he had sympathies with such groups. Despite that, it appears there may have been initial inclination to do so, and then something changed.
The 2014 House Homeland Security Committee Report states, “The FBI CT Agent on the Boston Joint Terrorism Task Force, who conducted the March 2011 assessment, had the Customs and Border Protection Officer assigned to his team enter a TECS record in order to provide notification of Tamerlan Tsarnaev's international travel.”
What is a TECS record? TECS is owned and managed by Customs and Border Protection and represents its principal law enforcement and anti terrorism database. TECS contains Department of Homeland Security immigration data as well as information from other government, criminal and terrorism databases, including information from the Terrorist Screening Database, which is a declassified version of the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, otherwise known as The Watchlist. TECS also provides the ability to query the National Crime Information Center and the National Law Enforcement Telecommunication Systems.
As we explored in Part 1, the Russian government's primary concern was that Tamerlan Tsarnaev may travel to Russia in order to join the Islamist insurgency in the Caucasus region and requested that the FBI notify them if Tsarnaev was detected leaving the country.
The alert provided contact information for the CT Agent leading the assessment into Tamerlan Tsarnaev and requested that the CT Agent be notified of Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s international travel plan.
The CBP Officer who created the original JTTF TECS record configured the record to be visible to CBP officers when they conduct initial inspection of the international travelers arriving or leaving the United States, known as primary inspection. The CBP Officer included instructions in the JTTF TECS record that CBP conduct a more intensive inspection of Tsarnaev, known as secondary inspection.
Once Tamerlan Tsarnaev was entered into the database, if he was flagged leaving or entering the country, his detention was mandatory. The note in the database read, “Detain isolated and immediately call the lookout duty officer at N.T.C. Call is mandatory whether or not the officer believes there is an exact match. Advise the person answering the phone that you have a code tip lookout intercept.”
Up to this point, it seems clear that the FBI had at least some intention of preventing Tamerlan Tsarnaev from traveling to Russia, as the FSB had feared.
However, the 2014 House Homeland Security Commission report revealed that just two days after the TECS record was initiated, on March 24, 2011, the TECS record for Tamerlan Tsarnaev was revised. The details of the revised record remain unknown, as the relevant sections in the 2014 House Homeland Security Commission report are redacted.
Is it possible that some other agency or element of the government altered Tsarnaev's TECS record and steered the FBI CT agent away from the case?
Months after the FBI claimed it had closed its assessment on Tamerlan Tsarnaev and ceased all interactions with him, in September 2011, the FSB provided the Central Intelligence Agency information on Tamerlan Tsarnaev that the OIGs determined was substantively identical to the informations the FSB has provided the FBI in March 2011, resulting in the original FBI assessment.
Speaking at the Valdai Discussion Club, in October 2016, Russian President Vladimir Putin commented on the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing case, saying, “It is very sad this tragedy occurred. If the contacts and trust were on a different level between us and our partners, I am confident it would be possible to avoid this tragedy. We send our American partners information and often get no response at all. Some time ago, we sent information on the Tsarnaev brothers. We sent the first document, got no response, sent a second document, and got the response that ‘this is not your business, they are US citizens now and we will take care of things ourselves. The result was a terrorist attack in the USA. Is this not an example of how we end up with losses if we neglect cooperation in this very sensitive area?” asked Russian President Putin.
By October 19, 2011, the Central Intelligence Agency provided information obtained from the FSB, in September 2011, to the NCTC for watch listing purposes, as well as the FBI, DHS, and the Department of State for their information.
Upon receipt of the information, NCTC established a new TECS record for Tamerlan Tsarnaev in TIDE, apart from the original TECS record which was created in March 2011.
In the House Homeland Security Committee report on the bombings, under the section ‘Nomination for TIDE/TSDB and the Second TECS Alert, the entire paragraph and footnote is redacted.
The OIG report states that the two TECS alerts were not identical and that they remained distinct from one another. Tsarnaev's watch list records were included in the CPBs TECS database as four separate records. The four entries were based on combinations of each last name variant and dates of birth.
Interestingly, Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s declassified DHS US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) file contained several aliases, including Anzorvich Tsarnaev, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, Tamerlan Tsaenaeu, as well as Muaz Tsarnaev. Muaz is thought to be a tribute to renown Dagestani rebel Emir Muaz.
In October 2011, Tsarnaev’s watchlist record also was entered into the Department of State Consular Lookout and Support System (CLASS), used to perform name checks on passport and visa applicants.
Later that month, the NCTC referred Tsarnaev's record to the Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force, an FBI led Task force that works to identify known or suspected international terrorists operating in the United States. The mission of the FTTTF is to provide information that helps keep foreign terrorists and their supporters out of the U.S. or leads to their removal, detention, prosecution or other legal action.
According to the FBI website, “The participants in the FTTTF include the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security's Bureaus of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Customs and Border Protection, the State Department, the Social Security Administration, the Office of Personnel Management, the Department of Energy, and the Central Intelligence Agency.
By December 2011, Tamerlan Tsarnaev's watchlist record also was entered into the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) E-Selectee list, used for pre flight travel screening, From December 2011 until March 2013 - just one month before the Boston Marathon bombings.
That same month, an FBI FTTTF analyst reviewed Tsarnaev's information, conducted database searches, and determined that the Boston JTTF previously had conducted an assessment of Tsarnaev based on the same information from the Russian government from March through June. The FTTTF analyst also noted that the FBI Legal Attaché office in Moscow maintained an open case file on Tsarnaev.
Despite all of this, on January 21, 2012, Tamerlan Tsarnaev traveled to Russia on an international flight from New York to Moscow. The FBI contents that it only became aware of Tsarnaev's trip to Russia after the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings.
The 2014 House Homeland Security Committee report states, “there is no evidence that CBP officials at the John F. Kennedy International Airport examined his TECS record as the result of his listing. Therefore, they would not have seen this explicit request, referring to the order to detain and isolate Tsarnaev upon detection.
However, according to the DOJ OIG report, Tamerlan Tsarnaev was, indeed, identified as a potential subject of interest for the CBP at JFK International Airport on January 21, 2012.
The report states that CBP received passenger data for Tsarnaev from the airline before his travel and vetted it against various databases, including TECS. CBP customarily receives advance airline passenger data prior to a flights departure from or to the United States and checks that data repeatedly.
Interestingly, the following sentence or two, which likely revealed the date which CBP received passenger data on Tsarnaev, is redacted in the OIG report. The OIG report reveals that the CBP vetting also alerted a CBP officer in Boston of Tsarnaev's upcoming travel. Additional information in this regard is also redacted in the report.
Despite CBP being notified of Tsarnaev's travel plan in advance, why was Tsarnaev still able to avoid detention prior to his departure at JFK on January 21, 2012?
The OIG report goes on to state that information available to the DHS and the DOG OIGs does not conclusively establish whether the CBP Officer notified the FBI CT Agent who led the assessment into Tamerlan Tsarnaev about Tsarnaev's impending travel. It goes on to claim that searches of the CBP officer and CT Agents email records did not produce any evidence that such notification occurred by email communication. Additionally, it states that during interviews, the CBP officer and the CT agent each claimed they had no recollection of whether the CBP officer passed the travel information to the CT Agent.
However, the OIG report concedes that available information indicates that the CBP officer most likely notified the CT agent of Tsarnaev's impending travel. The CBP officer told the DHS OIG that his usual process when he received a travel notification was to retrieve the TECS record and then inform the agent who requested the (REDACTED) by email, orally, or by passing a sticky note. Moreover, the CBP Officer stated that he believed he followed his usual process in this instance and that the CT Agent would have told him that the lead was closed and that there was no interest in Tsarnaev's travel.
Further, the CT Agent stated that the CBP reliably passed along travel information concerning other subjects in the past, and he had no reason to doubt the CBP Officers statement that he believes he passed the notification of Tsarnaev's travel to the CT Agent in January 2012. The following paragraph in the OIG report is entirely redacted.
The 2014 House Homeland Security Committee report states, “Though the TECS alert was still active at the time of his departure, Tamerlan Tsarnaev did not receive the requested screening.” Why not?
According to the OIG report, on the evening of January 21, 2012, when Tsarnaev's flight was departing, he was a low priority relative to the other passengers of potential concern. As a result, CBP did not review his record or conduct an outbound inspection of him before he departed. No further information is given.
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While you consider these facts, stay tuned for more as we ask more questions about what Tamerlan Tsarnaev did while he was in Russia and how the FBI responded once he returned.
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