further remarkable facts about CIA’s graham fuller and uncle ruslan

Uncle Ruslan aided terrorists from CIA official’s home
Daniel Hopsicker, Mad Cow Morning News, Apr 29 2013

In 1995, the uncle of the accused Boston Marathon bombers incorporated a company called the Congress of Chechen International Organizations. Even as the company was sending aid to Islamic terrorists in Chechnya, its listed address was in the home of former top CIA official Graham Fuller. Ruslan Tsarni was listed as the company’s resident agent. The company’s address was 11114 Whisperwood Lane in Rockville Maryland, the home of Graham Fuller, the one-time Vice-Chairman of the National Intelligence Council at the CIA under President Reagan. Over this past weekend, Fuller reluctantly confirmed the report published here last Thursday, Boston bombers’ uncle married daughter of top CIA official. He admitted that Ruslan Tsarni had once been married to his daughter. But then in the same breath, he derided what he called “rumors” of links between Tsarni and the Agency as absurd. But documents surfaced over the weekend that cast a long shadow of doubt on Graham Fuller’s assertion, which amounts to a beat cop waving his baton and saying, “There’s nothing to see here folks. Move along.” The documents include a letter written by the President of the Congress of Chechen Organizations International that, at least on the surface, could not have seemed more ordinary. It was all about shoes.

In the letter, Congress of Chechen Organizations International President Mohammed Shashani is interceding with the Board of Directors of Benevolence International, a charity that would later be designated a financier of terrorism by the Treasury Dept and shut down by US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald after the 9/11 attack. Shoshani was interceding with Benevolence on behalf of a new military commander in Chechnya named Sheikh Fathi, who had just arrived from spending 10 years fighting in Afghanistan. Sheikh Fathi was a military commander in the violent Jihadi movement in Chechnya, noted Fitzgerald in a later indictment, as well as an influential preacher of violent Jihad. In the Benevolent International indictment, Fitzgerald said:

Sheikh Fathi was a major conduit for providing material support  to the Chechen rebels.

The uncle of the alleged Boston bombers was part of that conduit. Just how connected are these people? Fathi would gain a measure of infamy several years later when he introduced the top al-Qaeda operative in Afghanistan, al-Khattab, into the Chechen conflict. The move had disastrous results, turning what had been a civil war into a Jihad. Later al-Khattab became the so-called 20th hijacker Zaccarias Moussaoui’s commander in Chechnya, according to French intelligence, and had close links with  Osama bin Laden, according to former NYT journalist Phil Shenon’s book, “The Commission”. But back to the letter. And the shoes. On behalf of Sheikh Fathi, Mohammed Shashani is thanking Benevolence International for the receipt of 2000 pairs of what Fitzgerald, in an indictment charging the leaders of Benevolence International, called “Anti-Mine Boots for the Chechen Mujahidin”. The  Saudi-based charity operated for years in Russia and Chechnya, pumping $50m into Mujahidin coffers, estimated Russian intelligence. Sheikh Fathi’s eagerness to procure 5000 more pairs of US protective shoes, Fitzgerald explained, had been to minimize the damage caused by small Russian-made camouflage mines, called Frog mines, which were wreaking havoc in the ranks of his Chechen fighters.

What does this have to do with the Boston Marathon bombing? One clue: the President of Uncle Ruslan’s Congress of Chechen Organizations International, an expatriate Penn State engineering, Professor Mohammed Shashani, conducted almost all of his business through another organization he led, called the Chechen-Ingush Society of USAia. All of his above board business, that is. Ruslan’s outfit surfaced for the dirty bits, the covert side of the Chechen’s cause. Was Ruslan Tsarni’s organization acting as a free agent, or was it a “cut-out” for the CIA, a convenient way to establish plausible deniability while executing decisions made by US intelligence agencies, who were apparently interceding on the side of people we were calling “rebels” instead of “terrorists” for no reason other than it suited US objectives for Russian forces to get bogged down in a series of bitter civil wars? Were such actions US policy at the time? Some say the answer is the latter. Wikileaks cables seem to agree. USAia’s fostering of a Jihadi mercenary force in Afghanistan led directly to the blowback that became the 9/11 attack. The creation of a “second Afghanistan” in the Caucasus may also have led to blowback: the unintended consequences of a covert operation. The result was in bombs going off in Boston. Were two young Jihadis from the North Caucasus region of Russia recruited to become Islamist terrorists and attack the US at the Boston Marathon? Questions remain. No, questions don’t remain. They abound. The elder Fuller had retired from the agency almost a decade before the brief marriage, wrote Laura Rozen, the reporter he selected to give him a sympathetic hearing. If he’d retired and taken up horticulture or origami or golfing in Florida wearing lime-green sweater-slack combinations, rumors that his ex-son-in-law had connections with the CIA might indeed be absurd. Was that how Mr Fuller was spending his well-deserved retirement? Nope. He was working for RAND Corporation. It was a busman’s holiday. But there was also something else. Back in 1996, uncle Ruslan’s company was actively aiding Islamic terrorists in Chechnya. And there’s no telling what he’s up to now, because a story last week revealed that he was working for the US Government again. And again, it was USAID. This time, since 2008. Using the home address of a top CIA official under President Ronald Reagan, who had also, perhaps not coincidentally, been the author of a famous memo that eventually led Oliver North to step off a plane in Iran with TOW missiles in one hand and a cake for the Ayatollah in the other, Ruslan Tsarni’s Congress of Chechens put into practice the CIA’s unacknowledged policy in the former Soviet Republics. He’s been stirring up shit on Russia’s southern border.

But Hopsicker was wrong to pour scorn on the existence of Misha:

Misha Speaks
Christian Caryl, NYRB, Apr 28 2013

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. Tamerlan’s uncle Ruslan told CNN after the attacks:

It started in 2009. And it started right there, in Cambridge. 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 a 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, saying:

I wasn’t his teacher. If I had been his teacher, I would have made sure he never did anything like this.

A 39-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 USAian 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 US. 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 UnS to escape growing persecution of Armenian Christians there. The family was welcoming to me but very nervous. His father said:

We love this country. We never expected anything like this to happen to us.