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http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2013/apr/28/tamerlan-tsarnaev-misha-speaks/
Misha’ Speaks: An Interview with the Alleged Boston Bomber’s ‘Svengali’
Christian Caryl
AP Photo/The Lowell Sun, Julia Malakie
Tamerlan Tsarnaev in 2010
As the investigation of the Boston Marathon bombings continues, one of the more clouded aspects is the tale of “Misha,” a mysterious US-based Islamist who has been accused by members of the Tsarnaev family of radicalizing Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the elder of the two alleged bombers. “It started in 2009. And it started right there, in Cambridge,” Tamerlan’s uncle, Ruslan Tsarni, told CNN after the attacks. “This person just took his brain. He just brainwashed him completely.” These accusations set off a frenzied search for what some reports have called an Islamic Svengali, and over the past few days, the FBI has said it has located and has been talking to “Misha,” though his identity has remained unknown.
Today I was able to meet “Misha,” whose real name is Mikhail Allakhverdov. Having been referred by a family in Boston that was close to the Tsarnaevs, I found Allakhverdov at his home in Rhode Island, in a lower middle class neighborhood, where he lives in modest, tidy apartment with his elderly parents. He confirmed he was a convert to Islam and that he had known Tamerlan Tsarnaev, but he flatly denied any part in the bombings. “I wasn’t his teacher. If I had been his teacher, I would have made sure he never did anything like this,” Allakhverdov said.
A thirty-nine-year-old man of Armenian-Ukrainian descent, Allakhverdov is of medium height and has a thin, reddish-blond beard. When I arrived he was wearing a green and white short-sleeve football jersey and pajama pants. Along with his parents, his American girlfriend was there, and we sat together in a tiny living room that abuts the family kitchen.
Allakhverdov said he had known Tamerlan in Boston, where he lived until about three years ago, and has not had any contact with him since. He declined to describe the nature of his acquaintance with Tamerlan or the Tsarnaev family, but said he had never met the family members who are now accusing him of radicalizing Tamerlan. He also confirmed he had been interviewed by the FBI and that he has cooperated with the investigation:
I’ve been cooperating entirely with the FBI. I gave them my computer and my phone and everything I wanted to show I haven’t done anything. And they said they are about to return them to me. And the agents who talked told me they are about to close my case.
An FBI spokesman in Boston declined to comment on an ongoing case. Allakhverdov’s statements, however, seemed to bear out recent reports that the FBI have not found any connection between “Misha” and the bomb plot.
One question is why members of the Tsarnaev family have made accusations about Allakhverdov. A close friend of the family in Boston said that Misha was not known to have visited Tamerlan at home. I interviewed Allakhverdov in Russian and it seems likely that in whatever contact the two men had, they would have spoken Russian.
In many ways, Allakhverdov’s parents seem typical former-Soviet émigrés who had embraced middle class life in the United States. His father is an Armenian Christian and his mother is an ethnic Ukrainian. The family had lived in Baku, Azerbaijan, but had left in the early 1990s for the United States to escape growing persecution of Armenian Christians there. The family was welcoming to me but very nervous. “We love this country. We never expected anything like this to happen to us,” his father said.
Christian Caryl’s reporting on the Tsarnaev family and the Chechen and Russian community in Boston will appear in a coming issue of The New York Review.
April 28, 2013, 8:10 p.m.
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And this comment:
(Catherine Fitzpatrick)
I appreciate the legwork that Christian Caryl put into getting this story, but I'm not persuaded so far. It doesn't feel right.
For one, the last name literally means "Allah-believer" in Russian, and so it does not seem
to be a typical Armenian or Ukrainian name. We're told it could be the
name of an Armenian in Baku, however.
Is Allakhverdov his real name, or one he adopted after conversion?
For two, there's a legendary KGB chief who was named Mikhail Allakhverdov. Coincidence much? Any relationship? Or is this somebody's idea of a joke?
http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%...
Furthermore, there's the discrepancies in the story. While Uncle Ruslan doesn't say he met him, the Tamerlan's sister's ex-husband said he saw Misha at the house, speaking for hours, and it got the father, Anzor, upset. Then the mother reassured him. Now it seems as if no one saw him at the house?
I think for due diligence, photos of Misha should be verified with the father and mother, who did see him, to see if it is the same person.
Also, since Tamerlan was said to have met this Misha at his mosque, the leadership of the mosque could be asked to verify it.
He seems awfully mild-mannered and non-charismatic for the fellow that multiple relatives said was responsible for Tamerlan's conversion.
Various hypotheses have been made about whether Misha could be an FBI or an FSB (Russian intelligence) informant. I lean toward the latter hypothesis just knowing how Russia works because someone likely in the emigre community would have had to inform the FSB about Tamerlan for them to bother with him, or they had to watch him through someone they had working for him. Such informant networks never went away after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the KGB, even re-named, never changed.
I continue to think that the main thesis of this story is not that the FBI dropped the ball, but that the FSB held the ball. They let nature take its course, with deadly results. I want that angle to be thoroughly researched, and see if it ties to Ramzan Kadyrov, president of Chechnya, and is in any way related to any desire to get revenge for being put on the Magnitsky List, and for the entire existence of the Magnitsky List. As always, I think it's worth asking: who profits?
Others find reason to believe Misha is an FBI informant because they feel there are thousands of such informants watching Muslims and even engaging them in sting operations to catch them. Those who make this hypothesis have to be challenged to explain why they think the FBI would then allow their charges to actually go through with a terrorist act, instead of arresting them and getting credit for their vigilance. It doesn't make sense. Meanwhile, Putin has bombed his own Chechen people and numerous crimes remained unsolved in Russia where Chechen assassins are implicated.
People keep discussing Chechens as resistance fighters or radical Islamists. It is far more complex, and it's important to remember that the chief ideologue of Russia, Vladislav Surkov, is a Chechen, and that Putin's number one loyal governor, Kadyrov, is associated with many human rights crimes.
The Tsarnaev family is filled not with resistance leaders, but Soviet policemen. They are lawyers (which means working for state organizations, not as defense attorneys); prosecutors; one is even a policeman in Kadyrov's Interior Ministry. Even so, they left Chechnya, did not live in Chechnya, and the mother is not ethnically Chechen, so tying them to anything Chechen could be a false positive.
Ultimately, the pat nature of this find now has me wondering. He was found by the FBI, then quickly found by Caryl, with the basic message: "Nothing to see here, move along" -- which suggests either he truly is innocent of involvement in anything OR he could be one of ours, and they want the attention off him. OR that the FSB is engaged in an elaborate ruse to make us think that.
Naturally, Misha could be merely a devout Muslim unrelated to anything, and we get all that. But the questions do remain open about who informed the Kremlin's considerable spy networks of the nature of the Tsarnaev's growing radicalism. Someone among Tamerlan's increasingly few friends informed on him to the Russian authorities.
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