Mayhem by Michele R. McPhee

Author:Michele R. McPhee [MCPHEE, MICHELE]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Steerforth Press
Published: 2020-04-14T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Informants

High-level officials in the Pentagon and CIA likely exchanged classified intelligence regarding the successful Russian raid that killed seven Islamic militants in the Northern Caucasus. The region had become an international problem not just because of persistent internecine war between Chechens and the Russian Federation but also because of its geography. It is located at Europe’s doorway into Asia and contains critical oil and gas pipelines.

If the informant was someone, as many believed, who had been flipped into cooperating by foreign counterintelligence agents from the CIA, DHS, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), NSA, or FBI, someone might be in line for a promotion or even a higher-paying private-sector job in the lucrative defense industry as a result.

It was also possible, ironically, that Plotnikov himself had helped recruit the informant when he gave the FBS a list of the men with whom he had exchanged jihadi ideals online. One of those men was Tamerlan Tsarnaev. Another was a notorious nineteen-year-old jihadi recruiter named Mahmud Mansur Nidal.1

The United States had had Nidal under surveillance for months.2 And the Russians had marked him as one of their most wanted men after suspecting him of recruiting a brother and sister to serve as suicide bombers in one of the bloodiest attacks attributed to his ragtag group of insurgents. The bombers drove vehicles packed with explosives into a police checkpoint in Dagestan. The brother detonated the first blast. His sister followed, but only after emergency responders had arrived. Fourteen people were killed and dozens more wounded, according to Russia’s National Antiterrorism Committee. After the blasts Nidal went underground. So Russian counterterrorism officials building the case against him were surprised when he showed up in May at the Al-Nadiriya Mosque on Kotrova Street in Makhachkala — the main Salafi mosque in Dagestan’s capital — and chatted with Tamerlan. According to reports citing Russian officials, this was not an isolated incident. Nidal met with Tamerlan near the mosque multiple times. Then, on May 19, 2012, counterterrorism forces tracked Nidal to his hideout. When he launched a grenade at officers as they approached to arrest him, they cut him down in a blaze of gunfire. A video of the standoff posted on YouTube shows that a crowd of Nidal’s supporters surrounded the counterterrorism forces and shouted “Allah Akbar” (God is great) at the masked commandos.3

At a congressional hearing after the Boston Marathon bombing, Congressman William Keating referred to Tamerlan’s meeting with Nidal and the fact that one of the most wanted men in Russia surprisingly emerged from hiding to meet with the American at the mosque several times in May: “He [Tamerlan] was meeting with a known terrorist insurgent, Mahmoud Nidal; someone already on their radar screen in Russia…Now he came back to the US after the person he met with reportedly was killed, and the other person who was known to him was killed. So he sort of beat feet [made tracks] and went home.”4

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