Some years ago, I had the chance to speak with one of America’s great spymasters, former Director of the National Security Agency (NSA) and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director, General Mike Hayden. A young political science student at Duquesne University, our shared alma mater, I asked him about working with Moscow on counterterrorism operations.
Succinctly, he explained that essentially there is no real cooperation and that the US cannot expect to work with certain counterparts. I still regret the mental effort I wasted with naive thoughts about true international counterterrorism collaboration.
The timeline of the Crocus City Hall attack in Moscow on March 22 offers a detailed case study of why the United States and its Western allies should permanently shelve any counterterrorism cooperation with Russia, right across the board from the intelligence and tactical level to strategic efforts.
The US gains nothing from sharing information with Russia, and we shame our intelligence and law enforcement officers if we expect any degree of mutual respect and reciprocity from their Russian counterparts. We also propagate a brutal and ineffective regime’s security apparatus.
On 7 March, the US Embassy to Russia publicly warned of possible attacks on large crowds. The National Security Council cited “duty to warn” policies as the justification. In private, the warning contained an extraordinary level of detail. US officials told the Russians that the 6,000-seat Crocus City Hall concert venue was a possible target, according to the Washington Post. On 19 March, Vladimir Putin called the warnings “blackmail,” apparently suggesting (though his logic was elusive) that the US might be planning the attack it had warned about.
Just three days later, Islamic State-Khorosan (IS-K) jihadists struck the venue. Beginning at 19:55, the four Tajik men spent the next 18 minutes using AK-pattern rifles, handguns, knives, and improvised incendiary weapons to kill 143 people and wound or poison around another 200 via smoke inhalation from the fire they had started.
A Mumbai-style attack (that is gunmen rampaging through heavily populated urban spaces) requires a rapid and heavily armed response from police. And yet despite the US warning 16 days earlier which specifically mentioned Crocus City Hall as a possible target, neither local nor federal security forces made an appearance, allowing the terrorists to do their work uninterrupted. There was, as far as can be discerned, no additional or significant security at Crocus City Hall.
It’s known that at 21:03, some 68 minutes after the attack began and 50 minutes after the Islamist gunmen left, no one from the Special Rapid Response Units (SOBR) or the paramilitary OMON had arrived at the site. Concert-goers waiting for rescue burned to death or died as they inhaled smoke, including 28 people found in a toilet.
Within the next 24 hours, the suspects were captured, and the next steps played out in a predictable, brutal fashion. Telegram channels showed the torture meted out: one suspect had an ear cut off and shoved into his mouth. Another was subjected to electrical shocks to the genitals.
When they arrived in court, all the men showed signs of abuse and torture. One appeared unconscious. Two confessed. Despite rapid and credible claims of responsibility from IS-K, Putin blamed Kyiv three days after the attack, claiming the suspects had fled toward Ukraine (they were in fact detained closer to Belarus.) FSB Director Alexander Bortnikov then implicated the United States and the United Kingdom in the crime, suggesting their intelligence services worked with Ukraine to employ the Islamists.
To summarize — the US used its intelligence capabilities to warn a hostile state of a forthcoming terrorist attack, giving sufficient detail for the Russians to prevent it and was then smeared for supposedly organizing the bloodshed. The Kremlin’s behavior is all the more reprehensible, given CIA warnings of impending attacks saved countless Russian lives in both 2017 and 2019, after which Putin conveyed thanks to the CIA.
Even before this latest example of help being thrown back in its face, the US and Russia never had a sustainable framework for counterterrorism cooperation. Arrangements at the intelligence, law enforcement, or geostrategic level had already collapsed.
While the US has a more global approach to terror group designations, Russia has always set definitions according merely to whether they target Russia.
Any Russian help to the US was always limited to those parameters, from initial support for the war in Afghanistan to aiding FBI investigations only when it served the Kremlin’s purposes, as with the Boston Marathon bombers when it offered some help two years before the attacks and then stopped.
Russian support for the Global War on Terror is itself a tale of falling cooperation and rising suspicion. Immediately after the 9/11 attacks, there was tangible Russian support in Central Asia, but that barely lasted a decade.
While reports of outright Russian support for the Taliban during the US occupation were only graded as a low-confidence assessment, most of America’s longest war saw practically no support from Russia or its partners. The US had to end operations out of Uzbekistan under Russian pressure in 2005 and later across the whole of Central Asia.
Practically speaking, US help did nothing to stop this most recent attack in Moscow. The Kremlin did not just ignore information, it scoffed at it.
This seems to fit a pattern where the United States plays by the old rules, while Russia casually breaks them. It was reported on April 1 that CIA officers and other US officials around the world were deliberately targeted by Russia’s notorious GRU intelligence unit 29155, which used acoustic weaponry to severely damage the health of numerous US officials with expertise on Russia (incidents collectively known as Havana Syndrome.) These are extremely serious allegations not formally accepted by the US authorities, but they would hardly be a surprise.
Finally, after looking at the brazen, public display of judicial torture inflicted on the suspects, it is nothing short of insulting to have the honest work of Western counterterrorism professionals used to support Putin. Even the sordid history of enhanced interrogation during the George W. Bush Administration does not compare to the abuse displayed (and celebrated by leading propagandists and state officials, including the prime minister) after the Moscow attack. The US would never accept any intelligence the Russians had extracted using such torment, and should in no way aid the work of men who operate like this.
Intelligence agencies with internal mechanisms requiring a duty to warn, such as CIA, now face this dilemma: if warnings do not work, are not guaranteed to protect sources and methods (and more specific warnings inherently reveal more material), and are then misused by hostile states both operationally and for propaganda, what is their use?
The US should instead recognize that it has no duty whatsoever to protect profoundly nasty totalitarian regimes that abuse our goodwill, and the excellent work of our intelligence agencies. It is dealing with a Russian government either so incompetent or so cynical that it is willing to sacrifice the lives of 143 people, and many, many thousands more in its aggression against neighboring countries like Ukraine.
The authoritarian bargain in such regimes is that citizens trade their freedoms for security; American intelligence should not assist Putin’s image when his thugs fail.
Terrorist groups will continue to target Russia, and the US will likely continue to gather intelligence on those groups. Next time — and there will be a next time — everyone involved might do well to remember General Hayden’s words of wisdom; Russia doesn’t really do cooperation.
Michael C. DiCianna is a research assistant with the Yorktown Institute. He worked as a consultant in the US intelligence community for several years, focusing on military affairs in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Middle East.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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