Boston Marathon Bombing Analysis

The Boston Marathon is a tradition held annually on Patriots’ Day and it attracts hundreds of thousands of people to the 26 mile run from Hopkins, Massachusetts to Boston’s Back Bay Neighborhood. On April 15, 2013, the race was set to mark the 117th anniversary of the marathon. All was well until five hours into the race, Boston became the target of a terrorist attack when two bombs detonated 12 seconds apart from each other. The two bombs which had been placed inside backpacks containing pressure cookers that were filled with pellets and nails, were placed near the finish line where the crowd was watching the race (Boston Marathon bombing of 2013, 2014). The first bomb detonated on the north side of Boylston Street which was less than half a block from the finish line. The second bomb went off 12 seconds later about 600 feet from the first bomb.

The explosion covered about 15 square blocks with three bombing victims dying on scene and around 264 people seriously injured. The gory crime scene was filled with injured runners and spectators who had lost limbs, contained abrasions, or received traumatic brain injuries caused by the shrapnel from the bomb. Soon after the explosions, first responders transformed the regular medical tent set for runners into an

emergency medical facility to treat the wounded.
After the attack, the public was asked to submit photographs and video footage that could be relevant to the investigation of the attacks. Law enforcement pieced together clues from the evidence provided by the public and footage from surveillance cameras to identify the suspects. Three days after the attack, the FBI distributed “images and video footage of two men identified as suspects in the attacks, including one photograph that showed one of the men placing a package at the location of the second explosion (Boston Marathon bombing of 2013, 2014).” Eventually, officials were able to conclude that the two parties responsible for the attack were brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev; two Russian men who had been known to be religious extremists.
According to a report released by the House Committee on Homeland Security, the FBI, Customs and Border Protection, and other officials were criticized for missing opportunities to scrutinize Tamerlan Tsarnaev after he was first investigated by the FBI in 2011 (Viser, 2014). Federal officials were condemned for failing to communicate and coordinate appropriately within the intelligence agencies. The report details the trip Tamerlan took to Dagestan in July 2012 to communicate with terrorist networks in the Caucasus (Viser, 2014). The trip taken a year before the Boston Marathon bombings revealed ties to extremist groups in the region. Federal agencies had been keeping track of Tamerlan due to his travel.
Some of the early warnings that placed Tamerlan Tsarnaev on the intelligence community’s watch list were presented by the Federal Security Service (FSB), which is a Russian intelligence agency, starting in March 2011.

The page-long written warning relayed contact information of the Tsarnaev family and cautioned the U.S. of Tamerlan’s association with radical Islamists (Viser, 2014). After the warning, Tsarnaev was brought in for questioning by the FBI. The interview and investigation led to Tsarnaev’s name being entered into TECS, a database used to alert the agencies when a suspect has left or reentered the country. After no links to terrorism were revealed, the FBI closed its investigation in June

2011.
But in September, the CIA received a second notice from the FSB similar to the first one issued to the FBI. On October 19, 2011, information about the suspect was shared with other intelligence agencies. Immediately after receiving new details about Tsarnaev, his name was reentered into the TECS system with “dire warnings” that included a note in the entry that ordered officials to detain Tsarnaev if he was found trying to leave or reenter the U.S. Unfortunately, his name was misspelled while being entered into the database the second time. When Tsarnaev left the country to head to Moscow from New York’s JFK airport, an alert was triggered but he was not searched or interviewed at all (Viser, 2014). According to Viser, the first TECS note had expired after a year and even though the second note was still in effect, the misspelling of his name did not alert officials when Tsarnaev returned to the country on July 17, 2012. Apparently, even his birthdate was entered into the system incorrectly. The report issued by the House stated that Tsarnaev had not been detained and investigated because they had had higher priority suspects that day.
The analysis of intelligence on Tamerlan Tsarnaev was mediocre at best because important details that could have helped prevent such a tragedy were impaired. Although both the FBI and CIA received warnings from Russia years before the attack, the agencies mishandled the valuable intelligence provided. Details like birthdate and name keying errors were blunders that could have been avoided. If the correct details would have been entered into the TECS system, maybe Tamerlan would have been detained and questioned soon after his return from Moscow. Maybe the intelligence community would have scrutinized every move Tamerlan made after his return. Unfortunately, errors in communication and coordination did not prevent the Boston Marathon bombings and instead became a failure of the U.S. intelligence community.