Tamerlan's passport and the terror watchlist issue by R Renny
February 3rd 2014
When
Tamerlan left the US in January 2012, his name was on two security
databases. This should have raised some suspicion as he was heading
for Russia, and again on the way back. This never happened: Why ? Who
failed?
An FBI failure ?
The Russian internal security service, the FSB, sent information to the FBI on March 4, 2011, saying that Tamerlan may be associated with Chechen terrorists and he had changed drastically since 2010. What does this mean? It probably means that they had him under surveillance of some sort before 2010 and had no reason to believe he was radical until 2010 when he ‘had changed drastically’. They couldn’t have observed such a drastic change in him within three months. In December 2010, the Russian forces detained William Plotnikov, a Canadian citizen of Russian origin who converted to Islam and joined the separatist forces in Dagestan. After interrogation they obtained from him a list of contacts, allegedly containing Tamerlan’s name. The list included names of people of North Caucasian origin living in Europe and the United States, with whom Plotnikov was in contact on the internet. Plotnikov communicated with Tsarnaev on one of the most popular Islamic social networking website – World Association of Muslim Youth (WAMY), which Tamerlan was visiting from his youtube channel (although not the one created 17 months later in August 2012). The FSB found Tamerlan’s youtube page and then sent the letter to their colleagues abroad. According to some US officials, the Russians also intercepted text messages between Zubeidat Tsarnaeva and her son ‘vaguely’ speaking about jihad, and those were the reason why the FSB approached the FBI.
The letter from FSB, according to US Rep. Keating, gave Tamerlan’s:
- name,
- date of birth,
- his cell phone number and
- information about his boxing career,
- his weight and his Golden Gloves matches.
- It talked about his wife and mother, giving the mother’s Skype number.
The Russian request was forwarded to the Joint Terrorism Task Force in Boston. There, FBI field agents and other officials translated the letter and opened a threat assessment of Tsarnaev, searching government databases for potentially terror-related communications. As part of the standard 90-days inquiry, investigators looked into whether Tsarnaev used online sites that promoted radical activity and they interviewed Tsarnaev and his family members. They found nothing connecting him to terror activity and closed the case in June 2011.
This kind of assessment is the lowest-level investigative step that put Tamerlan’s name to a low level Department of Homeland Security database used by U.S. officials at the border to help screen people coming in and out of the U.S. That database is called TECS (previously, the Treasury Enforcement Communications System).
According to a WSJ article, Mr Tsarnaev provided his correct birthdate to the FBI agents which was different from the ones provided by the Russians. That is the reason why his details in the TECS database and the FBI Guardian system are correct.
This kind of assessment is the lowest-level investigative step that put Tamerlan’s name to a low level Department of Homeland Security database used by U.S. officials at the border to help screen people coming in and out of the U.S. That database is called TECS (previously, the Treasury Enforcement Communications System).
According to a WSJ article, Mr Tsarnaev provided his correct birthdate to the FBI agents which was different from the ones provided by the Russians. That is the reason why his details in the TECS database and the FBI Guardian system are correct.
A CIA failure ?
The FSB claims they never received a reply from the FBI, and that was the reason why they contacted the CIA with the same information later that year, in September 2011. The letter sent to the CIA contained almost identical information, although it provided 2 possible birthdates and a variation of how Tamerlan’s name might be spelled, as well as the spelling in the Russian-style Cyrillic alphabet.
We can only guess what was the reason that the FSB had sent additional dates of birth and spelling variations to the CIA – was it to confuse them or to provide more possibilities to uncover Tamerlan’s supposed radical activities? Also, by providing the Russian Cyrillic spelling, they actually gave them the spelling as it would appear on his Kyrgyz passport and his Russian/Soviet birth certificate. Whatever spelling they provided, be it Tsarnayev or Tcarnaev, how many Tamerlans with similar surname do compete in Golden Gloves matches?
We can conclude that it is reasonable to expect the CIA not just take in whatever information comes from the Russians, but that they should confirm first if the data has some validity.
We can only guess what was the reason that the FSB had sent additional dates of birth and spelling variations to the CIA – was it to confuse them or to provide more possibilities to uncover Tamerlan’s supposed radical activities? Also, by providing the Russian Cyrillic spelling, they actually gave them the spelling as it would appear on his Kyrgyz passport and his Russian/Soviet birth certificate. Whatever spelling they provided, be it Tsarnayev or Tcarnaev, how many Tamerlans with similar surname do compete in Golden Gloves matches?
We can conclude that it is reasonable to expect the CIA not just take in whatever information comes from the Russians, but that they should confirm first if the data has some validity.
Apparently, though, that’s exactly what the CIA didn’t do. They decided to add Tamerlan’s name to another database, called TIDE, which was done by the National Counterterrorism Center. The spelling of Tsarnaev's name in TIDE was not the same as the spelling the FBI used in its investigation. According to an NBC news report, this spelling was only one letter off from the FBI/TECS spelling.
Which means they didn’t check it at all. Whatever their excuse might be, they cannot blame the Russians for any misspelling – it was probably enough to Google up Tamerlan and Golden Gloves, and they would have the correct spelling in front of them. Never mind checking other government databases or at least the DHS database TECS. If the CIA says they used the spelling that the Russians provided without checking it – they might have to change the name of the agency – leaving out the word Intelligence. Also, trusting the FSB with information provided directly to them – that borders with negligence of duty. Why do you need spies, if you trust everything they send you officially? You can just have clerks who write down whatever comes in, right?
According to the WSJ article, the CIA didn’t find anything of concern and referred the information to the FBI, as Tamerlan was a legal resident in the U.S. The FBI subsequently sent another request for further information to the Russian FSB on October 7, 2011.
Why the CIA would nominate someone to be added to the TIDE database, if they didn’t find anything of concern, is anybody’s guess.
Which means they didn’t check it at all. Whatever their excuse might be, they cannot blame the Russians for any misspelling – it was probably enough to Google up Tamerlan and Golden Gloves, and they would have the correct spelling in front of them. Never mind checking other government databases or at least the DHS database TECS. If the CIA says they used the spelling that the Russians provided without checking it – they might have to change the name of the agency – leaving out the word Intelligence. Also, trusting the FSB with information provided directly to them – that borders with negligence of duty. Why do you need spies, if you trust everything they send you officially? You can just have clerks who write down whatever comes in, right?
According to the WSJ article, the CIA didn’t find anything of concern and referred the information to the FBI, as Tamerlan was a legal resident in the U.S. The FBI subsequently sent another request for further information to the Russian FSB on October 7, 2011.
Why the CIA would nominate someone to be added to the TIDE database, if they didn’t find anything of concern, is anybody’s guess.
An airline failure ?
Three days before Tamerlan left for Russia, the TECS database generated an alert for him - triggered by his flight reservation, according to an April 24 article in The New York Times. That text alert was received by a Customs and Border Protection officer who is a member of the FBI's Boston joint terrorism task force. By that time, the FBI's investigation into Tsarnaev had been closed for nearly six months, although they were apparently still trying to get some information on him as late as October. But the case was officially closed, so the Customs officer didn’t do anything.
The trip didn't set off a similar alert on the TIDE watch list "because the spelling variants of his name and the birth dates entered into the system -- exactly how the Russian government had provided the data months earlier -- were different enough from the correct information to prevent an alert," the Times reported.
However, according to a fact sheet published by the National Counterterrorism Center:
“Currently, both TIDE and many of the end user screening systems are name based, which means that people with names similar to those in the database may be stopped for additional screening by TSA or at a port of entry.”
In other words, the spelling doesn’t have to be completely correct, they can still stop you at the border.
On Jan. 21, 2012, the airline on which Tsarnaev was traveling allegedly misspelled his name when it submitted its list of passengers to the U.S. government for security screening. Airlines are required to provide the list of passengers on international flights so the U.S. can check their names through government databases, including the terrorist watch list.
Because his name was misspelled, there was not another alert on TECS like there was three days earlier.
This claim is countered by the NBC news report saying that:
“When Tsarnaev showed up at the airport for his January 2012 trip to Russia, Customs and Border Patrol officers noticed his entry in the TECS system, triggering the email to the CBP agent assigned to the Joint Terrorism Task Force in Boston. But while Tsarnaev was subjected to some extra questioning, agents had no grounds to prevent him from traveling. "It's not like he was going to Yemen or Somalia," said the official briefed on the probe.”
Tamerlan was flying with Aeroflot from the JFK International airport directly to Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport. Again, knowing how international airlines operate, it is completely inconceivable that they would have ‘misspelled’ his name. First of all, we know that his flight reservation contained correct spelling, entered by himself, – as that was what triggered the first alert. The check-in clerks do not write down the names on their own – they check the reservation system and check the name with the person’s documents. If the information doesn’t match up – he would have a problem to board the plane. They would not change the spelling from what was originally in the reservation to what was on his passport – especially as his passport must have had the correct spelling anyway.
Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano said that even though Tsarnaev’s name was misspelled, redundancies in the system allowed his departure to be captured by U.S. authorities in January 2012. But she said that by the time he came back six months later, an FBI alert on him had expired and so his re-entry was not noted.
“The system pinged when he was leaving the United States. By the time he returned all investigations had been closed,” Napolitano said.
NBC News reports that by the time Tsarnaev returned, his name had been purged from the TECS watch-listing database because of time limits on how long "U.S. persons" can stay in the database when there is no additional derogatory information, an official said.
The trip didn't set off a similar alert on the TIDE watch list "because the spelling variants of his name and the birth dates entered into the system -- exactly how the Russian government had provided the data months earlier -- were different enough from the correct information to prevent an alert," the Times reported.
However, according to a fact sheet published by the National Counterterrorism Center:
“Currently, both TIDE and many of the end user screening systems are name based, which means that people with names similar to those in the database may be stopped for additional screening by TSA or at a port of entry.”
In other words, the spelling doesn’t have to be completely correct, they can still stop you at the border.
On Jan. 21, 2012, the airline on which Tsarnaev was traveling allegedly misspelled his name when it submitted its list of passengers to the U.S. government for security screening. Airlines are required to provide the list of passengers on international flights so the U.S. can check their names through government databases, including the terrorist watch list.
Because his name was misspelled, there was not another alert on TECS like there was three days earlier.
This claim is countered by the NBC news report saying that:
“When Tsarnaev showed up at the airport for his January 2012 trip to Russia, Customs and Border Patrol officers noticed his entry in the TECS system, triggering the email to the CBP agent assigned to the Joint Terrorism Task Force in Boston. But while Tsarnaev was subjected to some extra questioning, agents had no grounds to prevent him from traveling. "It's not like he was going to Yemen or Somalia," said the official briefed on the probe.”
Tamerlan was flying with Aeroflot from the JFK International airport directly to Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport. Again, knowing how international airlines operate, it is completely inconceivable that they would have ‘misspelled’ his name. First of all, we know that his flight reservation contained correct spelling, entered by himself, – as that was what triggered the first alert. The check-in clerks do not write down the names on their own – they check the reservation system and check the name with the person’s documents. If the information doesn’t match up – he would have a problem to board the plane. They would not change the spelling from what was originally in the reservation to what was on his passport – especially as his passport must have had the correct spelling anyway.
Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano said that even though Tsarnaev’s name was misspelled, redundancies in the system allowed his departure to be captured by U.S. authorities in January 2012. But she said that by the time he came back six months later, an FBI alert on him had expired and so his re-entry was not noted.
“The system pinged when he was leaving the United States. By the time he returned all investigations had been closed,” Napolitano said.
NBC News reports that by the time Tsarnaev returned, his name had been purged from the TECS watch-listing database because of time limits on how long "U.S. persons" can stay in the database when there is no additional derogatory information, an official said.
Passport issue.
The question here might be what kind of passport he actually had. His father said that Tamerlan had an old Kyrgyz passport which was soon to expire, and that was one of the reasons why he was flying to Dagestan. We don’t know when Tamerlan was issued his Kyrgyz passport – if it was the old passport he came to the U.S. with or if he had another issued later on through the Kyrgyz embassy in Washington.
As Tamerlan was able to travel in 2012, both out and in the U.S., it is reasonable to assume his passport was not an old one from before 2004. If he had a passport issued between 2004 and 2006, it would have had a validity of up to 5 years – meaning it would have expired by….2011 at the latest. If it was issued after 2006, his passport would have been valid until 2016 at least. So, what exactly was wrong with his passport? Why did he need a new one?
A report by LA Times says that the Russian passport Tamerlan applied for while in Dagestan was an internal passport. The internal passports in Russia are their main form of identification inside the country. They cannot be used for international travel.
So, why did he apply for it? His family suggested that it was his plan to move to Dagestan, together with his wife and daughter, later in 2013. That would explain his need to have a document confirming he was a Russian citizen, because it would make it much easier for him to bring his wife and child to the Russian Federation Republic of Dagestan.
According to Novaya Gazeta, Tamerlan didn’t have a return ticket. What exactly were his intentions?
As Tamerlan was able to travel in 2012, both out and in the U.S., it is reasonable to assume his passport was not an old one from before 2004. If he had a passport issued between 2004 and 2006, it would have had a validity of up to 5 years – meaning it would have expired by….2011 at the latest. If it was issued after 2006, his passport would have been valid until 2016 at least. So, what exactly was wrong with his passport? Why did he need a new one?
A report by LA Times says that the Russian passport Tamerlan applied for while in Dagestan was an internal passport. The internal passports in Russia are their main form of identification inside the country. They cannot be used for international travel.
So, why did he apply for it? His family suggested that it was his plan to move to Dagestan, together with his wife and daughter, later in 2013. That would explain his need to have a document confirming he was a Russian citizen, because it would make it much easier for him to bring his wife and child to the Russian Federation Republic of Dagestan.
According to Novaya Gazeta, Tamerlan didn’t have a return ticket. What exactly were his intentions?
A Russian failure ?
What the FBI omitted completely was that the FSB never asked them to investigate Tamerlan – what they asked for was to be notified when Tamerlan leaves for Russia. So, when the DHS TECS system alerted them THREE days before he boarded the plane for Russia, they should have done just that – notify Russia “He’s going your way”. No need to stop him – there was really no reason for that.
But they obviously thought that if he enters Russia, the Russians would find out anyway. Which is quite reasonable and we have to ask again – why the Russians didn’t stop Tamerlan the moment he landed in Moscow.
Their own explanation is: Tsarnaev arrived with a Kyrgyz passport, they said, which did not attract attention. So, they obviously didn’t know he possessed a Kyrgyz passport and that would be the passport he would use to enter Russia. When Tamerlan was moving to the U.S. in 2003, he didn’t go through Russia. At that time he lived with his two sisters and his aunt Maret in Kyrgyzstan. They travelled to the U.S. through Turkey, arriving on July 9, 2003 and leaving from Ankara on July 19, 2003, according to a statement by the Turkish Interior Minister.
It is an entirely different issue again that the FSB let Tamerlan leave Russia after what happened there. The Russian Center for Combating Extremism had opened a card of operational records on Tamerlan while he was in Dagestan, according to the Russian paper Novaya Gazeta. The reason for that being his repeated encounters with Makhmud Nidal, an 18-year old, half Kumyk, half Palestinian. Nidal had been under surveillance at that time for about a year. As one of his ‘jobs’ in the underground was to recruit new members for the terrorist ‘separatist’ movement, the Center thoroughly investigated every person who had been in contact with him. When they investigated Tamerlan in that April of 2012, they discovered that it wasn’t the first time he was of interest to the operatives – they discovered their files on Plotnikov from 2010, connecting him to Tamerlan, and the subsequent requests to the FBI.
So, the FSB found out that neither the FBI, nor the CIA had notified them of Tamerlan’s travels as they had requested, and that he had arrived to Dagestan at the end of January 2012.
What did the Russians think at that moment? If they thought he may have been associated with Chechen terrorists, as they said in the letter to the FBI, why didn’t they arrest him and interrogate him? Maybe, they thought it would be easier just to watch him and let him bring them to the core of the terrorist group? Nidal was killed by the Russian Special forces on May 19. According to the sources that talked to Novaya Gazeta, Tamerlan was staying at his relatives’ apartment and after Nidal’s death he wasn’t going out unless necessary. His aunt Patimat had to bring him food to the apartment.
But they obviously thought that if he enters Russia, the Russians would find out anyway. Which is quite reasonable and we have to ask again – why the Russians didn’t stop Tamerlan the moment he landed in Moscow.
Their own explanation is: Tsarnaev arrived with a Kyrgyz passport, they said, which did not attract attention. So, they obviously didn’t know he possessed a Kyrgyz passport and that would be the passport he would use to enter Russia. When Tamerlan was moving to the U.S. in 2003, he didn’t go through Russia. At that time he lived with his two sisters and his aunt Maret in Kyrgyzstan. They travelled to the U.S. through Turkey, arriving on July 9, 2003 and leaving from Ankara on July 19, 2003, according to a statement by the Turkish Interior Minister.
It is an entirely different issue again that the FSB let Tamerlan leave Russia after what happened there. The Russian Center for Combating Extremism had opened a card of operational records on Tamerlan while he was in Dagestan, according to the Russian paper Novaya Gazeta. The reason for that being his repeated encounters with Makhmud Nidal, an 18-year old, half Kumyk, half Palestinian. Nidal had been under surveillance at that time for about a year. As one of his ‘jobs’ in the underground was to recruit new members for the terrorist ‘separatist’ movement, the Center thoroughly investigated every person who had been in contact with him. When they investigated Tamerlan in that April of 2012, they discovered that it wasn’t the first time he was of interest to the operatives – they discovered their files on Plotnikov from 2010, connecting him to Tamerlan, and the subsequent requests to the FBI.
So, the FSB found out that neither the FBI, nor the CIA had notified them of Tamerlan’s travels as they had requested, and that he had arrived to Dagestan at the end of January 2012.
What did the Russians think at that moment? If they thought he may have been associated with Chechen terrorists, as they said in the letter to the FBI, why didn’t they arrest him and interrogate him? Maybe, they thought it would be easier just to watch him and let him bring them to the core of the terrorist group? Nidal was killed by the Russian Special forces on May 19. According to the sources that talked to Novaya Gazeta, Tamerlan was staying at his relatives’ apartment and after Nidal’s death he wasn’t going out unless necessary. His aunt Patimat had to bring him food to the apartment.
Two months later, on July 14, the Russian Special forces killed 8 people, including William Plotnikov. From that moment on, the Russian operatives claim to have lost sight of Tamerlan. The police went to his father’s apartment, but the father claimed everything was fine, and that his son had gone back to the U.S. They didn’t believe him and thought Tamerlan had joined the militants in the forest. They didn’t believe he had left, because he didn’t pick up the new passport he had applied for at the end of June. “At first we were only looking for him in the republic (of Dagestan), checking lists of passengers on planes, trains, were on duty at bus stations. Then we expanded the searching area to the whole region.” In the end it turned out that Tamerlan Tsarnaev flew out of the Mineralnye Vody airport to Moscow on July 16, and the next day he flew out of Moscow back to the U.S.
Now, going back to the letter from March 2011 sent to the FBI, the FSB stated that Tamerlan had changed drastically since 2010 and they were worried he would join the radical militants in Dagestan. What did they base it on? Was there something in the correspondence between him and Plotnikov that would suggest such intentions? Did he maybe express a desire to join Plotnikov who had moved to Dagestan in December 2010? And, more importantly, was Tamerlan really that radical? His family suggest that his intentions were to move to Dagestan together with his wife and child and live a normal life there. How can we confirm that what the FSB is claiming is actually based on their investigation and not some hidden agenda?
Now, going back to the letter from March 2011 sent to the FBI, the FSB stated that Tamerlan had changed drastically since 2010 and they were worried he would join the radical militants in Dagestan. What did they base it on? Was there something in the correspondence between him and Plotnikov that would suggest such intentions? Did he maybe express a desire to join Plotnikov who had moved to Dagestan in December 2010? And, more importantly, was Tamerlan really that radical? His family suggest that his intentions were to move to Dagestan together with his wife and child and live a normal life there. How can we confirm that what the FSB is claiming is actually based on their investigation and not some hidden agenda?
An organized failure ?
According to Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, the FBI had contacted Tamerlan after he got back from Dagestan, regarding the purpose of his travels. They were obviously aware, as the TECS system was alerted when he was leaving and when he came back as well. The FBI have never confirmed her claims. According to an NBC News source from Dagestani police, the FSB provided the FBI with a case file on Tamerlan in November 2012, indicating he had at least six meetings with a leading jihadist in Dagestan. Again, the FBI never acknowledged this.
To conclude, the Boston FBI office was conducting the threat assessment of Tamerlan Tsarnaev in 2011. Although the Russian request was only asking to be alerted in case Tamerlan leaves the US for Russia, that is exactly what the FBI didn’t do. We might assume that his name ended up on the TECS database only as a result of the assessment, not because the FBI ever intended to alert the Russians. They apparently never considered adding him to the TIDE database which would have made it easier for other agencies to have access to his details and later when the CIA nominated him to the database, they would have seen the correct details. The CIA conduct is even more mind-boggling, because although they had proper information, they entered incorrect details into the TIDE database, resulting in no alerts when Tamerlan was leaving the country. There is no way that the CIA did NOT have the correct details and their excuse that they only entered the details as provided by the Russians is pathetic. Also, blaming the airline for allegedly misspelling his name, is only smoke and mirrors, trying to deflect attention from the fact it was them who misspelled his name.
Anyway, all this misspelling and failure to put Tamerlan’s name on the watch lists doesn’t excuse them, because they were still alerted and very well aware of his travels.
The Russians conduct is questionable as well, as they perfectly knew where and when Tamerlan was during his stay in Dagestan and they didn’t seem too keen to detain him until after Plotnikov was killed when Tamerlan managed to escape in the last minute.
What we have looks like some intelligence agencies not doing their work properly, not able to connect the dots, not acting on previous alerts and information – or deliberately withholding information in order to confuse and mislead other agencies, as well as protecting one’s back by pretending they ‘acted according to the law’.
Why would these agencies deliberately mislead each other? That’s a question only they might be able to answer.
To conclude, the Boston FBI office was conducting the threat assessment of Tamerlan Tsarnaev in 2011. Although the Russian request was only asking to be alerted in case Tamerlan leaves the US for Russia, that is exactly what the FBI didn’t do. We might assume that his name ended up on the TECS database only as a result of the assessment, not because the FBI ever intended to alert the Russians. They apparently never considered adding him to the TIDE database which would have made it easier for other agencies to have access to his details and later when the CIA nominated him to the database, they would have seen the correct details. The CIA conduct is even more mind-boggling, because although they had proper information, they entered incorrect details into the TIDE database, resulting in no alerts when Tamerlan was leaving the country. There is no way that the CIA did NOT have the correct details and their excuse that they only entered the details as provided by the Russians is pathetic. Also, blaming the airline for allegedly misspelling his name, is only smoke and mirrors, trying to deflect attention from the fact it was them who misspelled his name.
Anyway, all this misspelling and failure to put Tamerlan’s name on the watch lists doesn’t excuse them, because they were still alerted and very well aware of his travels.
The Russians conduct is questionable as well, as they perfectly knew where and when Tamerlan was during his stay in Dagestan and they didn’t seem too keen to detain him until after Plotnikov was killed when Tamerlan managed to escape in the last minute.
What we have looks like some intelligence agencies not doing their work properly, not able to connect the dots, not acting on previous alerts and information – or deliberately withholding information in order to confuse and mislead other agencies, as well as protecting one’s back by pretending they ‘acted according to the law’.
Why would these agencies deliberately mislead each other? That’s a question only they might be able to answer.
Further reading:
Information about Kyrgyz passports
Information on the TIDE and TECS database
More on the Russian letter
More on the spelling mistakes
More on: one letter was off, airport questioning
More on the system alerts to Tamerlan Tsarnaev's travels:
Novaya Gazeta original article
WSJ article
Information on the TIDE and TECS database
More on the Russian letter
More on the spelling mistakes
More on: one letter was off, airport questioning
More on the system alerts to Tamerlan Tsarnaev's travels:
Novaya Gazeta original article
WSJ article
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