Warnings preceded major terror attacks—in Moscow, Boston, and Israel—but none was sufficiently heeded
Three major events of our time—the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings, the October 7 attack last year on Israel by Hamas, and the bombing two weeks ago of a rock concert in Moscow—were preceded by specific warnings from Russian and American intelligence agencies that were ignored.
It is an astounding pattern of indifference to bothersome warnings that once again suggests the limits of good intelligence collection and distribution. It can also be seen in the indifference in the White House and the Congress to intelligence assessments making clear that there is no chance Ukraine can win the brutal and murderous war that was initiated by Russia two years ago. From a strategic standpoint, that war is over, according to analysts in the Central Intelligence Agency and elsewhere in the community. But on the ground it continues, supported by a White House that is desperately pushing Congress to authorize more billions for the bankrupt government of the equally desperate President Volodymyr Zelensky.
The current debate is about whether the intelligence provided by the Central Intelligence Agency to Russia before the March 22 bombing of a rock concert that killed more than 140 and injured hundreds, was more specific than initially reported under a procedure known in the United States as Duty to Warn. There may have been earlier understandings, but Duty to Warn was a post 9/11 product—America had no specific prior warnings from friend or foe of the attacks—that was put into effect by then Vice President Dick Cheney over the objections of the CIA’s clandestine operations division.
The only public indication of the pending attack in Moscow was a March 7 statement by the American Embassy there warning Americans visiting there to avoid large gatherings for the next two days because of reports of a pending extremist attack. The lack of further information before the March 22 slaughter led some journalists and bloggers to report that the American intelligence community had concluded the threat was not credible and thus the Russian leadership was not at fault for not insisting on intensive security at the concert.
In fact, as I have been told by an informed official, there were more intelligence-to-intelligence warnings, at least one of which was marked “urgent,” provided before the concert by the CIA to Russian intelligence. “Marking it ‘urgent,’” the official said, “means that the data provided” about a pending Islamic terrorist attack “was credible and near-term. It’s neither our responsibility nor capacity to direct the internal defenses they [Russian intelligence] take or don’t take to counter . . . what we tell them about.”
The Washington Post added seemingly important detail this morning to the American Duty to Warn revelations by reporting that a last minute terrorist warning to Moscow specifically cited the concert hall as the target site for the ISIS-K terrorists.
The American official took issue with the Post account, explaining that the target, as depicted in the Duty to Warn report, was not known other than as a “public gathering,” and the CIA officer’s brief, as spelled out in the message, did not specifically cite the March 22 concert, although “it was a likely hit.” The worry, he said, was that focusing on the concert as the target” would certainly reduce precautions taken elsewhere.” The official also caustically viewed the account presented to the Post as being “deliberately spun to make [Russian President Vladimir Putin’s] failure far worse.”
Furthermore, he said, the account provided to the Post, while accurate in part, had been presented by “someone ignorant of the process.
“The highly secret report on the attack in Moscow,” he explained, “was prepared by the Counterterrorism Center at CIA headquarters and delivered to the terrorism division of the Russian Federal Security Service located in the old KGB building in Moscow. Separate briefings were presented in person by the FBI officer at the embassy. This is an established relationship.”
The official then turned to the Boston Marathon bombing in the spring of 2013, perhaps the most critical domestic American intelligence failure since the 9/11 attacks. He pointed to the successful cover-up of the failure by the FBI office in Boston to deal with two never-before-reported Duty to Warn alerts from Russian intelligence about the planned attack. Two bombs exploded at the finish line, killing three and wounding hundreds, many seriously. The bombs were triggered by two brothers, Tamarlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev from the former Soviet Union whose ties to extremist organizations there were initially relayed, in secrecy, by Russian authorities to federal officials in Boston two years before the bombing. Tamarlan was killed in a police shootout hours after the bombing and Dzhokhar, after his conviction for mass murder, remains under a death sentence in a maximum security federal prison in Colorado.
It was reported at the time that Russia had in 2011 warned the FBI that Tamerlan “was a follower of radical Islam and a strong believer” and that he was preparing to travel to the Caucasus “to join unspecified underground groups.” FBI agents from the Boston office told the media after the bombing that and they had checked out the brothers after getting the Russian data and concluded, after what apparently was a perfunctory visit to the Tsarnaev home, “that at this point we haven’t found anything substantive that ties them to a terrorist group.”
An inspector general’s report released a year after the bombings by the Office of National Intelligence, the nominal head of all American intelligence, accused Russia of not sharing what it knew at the time about the two brothers. The report cited Russia’s failure to reveal an intercepted telephone conversation between Tamerlan and his mother in which they discuss Islamic jihad. An American intelligence official subsequently told the New York Times that the IG report, which was not made public, found that the FBI had done “all that it could” to check out the two brothers, despite what the report claimed was a lack of information provided by Russia, including the phone call between Tamerlan and his mother about jihad.
The IG report was essentially just another of what the US military and intelligence community consider a “cover your ass” report designed to protect the FBI from more of the censure it received at the time of the bombing, I was further told by the informed official that the Russians had in fact provided the CIA with a warning about an “impending terrorist attack” in Boston. (It was eerily similar to the warning provided by the CIA to Moscow days before the concert bombing last month.) The Russian warning in 2013, submitted twelve days before the marathon under its Duty to Warn obligation, provided the names, locations, and backgrounds of what it listed as “identified perps”—the Tsarnaev brothers were cited—in a document whose cover page was marked “urgent.”
None of this was made known by the FBI at the time or since. Nonetheless, there are many in the American intelligence community who believe, as the American official told me, that “those Russian bastards share considerable responsibility for failing to adequately warn the Americans.” He caustically dismissed that view: “You gotta know the game before you are qualified to keep score.”
Israel’s failure to anticipate the October 7 Hamas assault is the most dramatic example of neglecting to listen to and take account of a series of Duty to Warn messages from the American intelligence community, whose satellites watched and listened as Hamas instructors trained cadres how to breach the Israeli border in six places and trained others to fly over the border fence in crude paragliders. These activities grew more intense early last fall.
American satellites, as reported widely in the media as well as in earlier columns of mine, also picked up the voices of instructors as they were lecturing Hamas soldiers how to fly and drive across the borders. All of this was relayed immediately to Israel and ignored.
The Israeli high command also ignored repeated warnings about what clearly was a serious training exercise for a cross-border assault from a veteran analyst in its Unit 8200, Israel’s signals and communication intercept agency. The analyst provided the New York Times the report with her complaints two months after the attack, as the Israeli public was reeling in shock and fear about the IDF’s failure to protect its citizens. A full independent inquiry into the intelligence failure was promised at the time by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but it has not yet happened. Nor is the fate known of the analyst who had the courage to speak the truth to power.
If there is a message in all of this, it is a dour one. You can count on the men and women in the field who are watching and listening to do their jobs, but not on the senior officers and officials who receive their warnings. The system is broken.
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