Five years after twin bombings at the Boston Marathon left three people dead and hundreds more injured, the U.S. counterterrorism community is still failing to share critical information with law enforcement officers that could prevent similar attacks, according to a former Drug Enforcement Administration special agent.
Derek Maltz, who directed the DEA's Special Operations Division for nine years ending in mid-2014, said the institutional barriers between criminal and terror investigators that led to missed opportunities to detect or disrupt the Boston bomb plot remain today.
"If you have a wall up between those who are investigating terrorism and those who are investigating crime, you're going to have breakdowns and people are going to die," Maltz told the Washington Free Beacon. "The government still thinks you can do these terrorism cases in a cocoon. You can't, it's impossible."
Though information sharing from counterterrorism to criminal investigators has lagged, Maltz said it has significantly improved when information flows in the other direction. He said law enforcement officers have made great strides in flagging potential cases of terrorism uncovered during a criminal investigation and sharing that information with the local FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF).
Maltz said the weakness occurs when JTTFs are working on a terror investigation and uncover criminal activity, which often does not get passed on to criminal investigators.
"If you have intelligence on a potential terrorist, the idea of the Joint Terror Task Forces is to use the resources of all agencies, across all levels of government, to see what intelligence you have across the board," he said. "You may not have intelligence that verifies the subject is a terrorist, but there may be intelligence on the criminal behavior of the subject, which could then trigger a criminal investigation to develop evidence and neutralize the subject before he can commit an act of terror."
Maltz points to the arrest of Al Capone, a serial killer and mob boss who was arrested on an IRS charge and sent to Alcatraz before he could carryout additional murders.
In the case of the Boston attack, intelligence reports found the FBI missed several chances to prevent Tamerlan Tsarvnaev and his bother, Dzhokhar, from detonating two pressure-cooker bombs at the Boston Marathon finish line. The reports cited failures by the FBI to share information across federal, state, and local agencies about Tamerlan's suspected terrorism ties in the years leading up to the attack.
The reports revealed that the Russian Federal Security Service alerted the FBI in March 2011, two years prior to the bombing, that Tamerlan subscribed to "radical Islam" and was preparing to travel to Russia to join "unspecified groups." The FBI-JTTF in Boston questioned Tamerlan, but ultimately closed the case after determining he had no links to terrorism.
Tamerlan traveled from New York to Russia later that year, triggering an alert, but he was not considered a high priority among the 100 other names deemed a national security threat traveling that day. When Tamerlan reentered the United States six months later, authorities never detained him because his name was spelled wrong in the federal alert system.
The FBI never shared this information with state and local law enforcement prior to the bombings.
Meanwhile, local authorities were investigating a Sept. 11, 2011, triple murder in Waltham, Mass., in which Tamerlan was a suspect. All three men had their throats slit from ear to ear, their corpses precisely positioned with marijuana sprinkled on top, leading authorities to believe it was connected to a large-scale drug operation. Neighbors told police that Tamerlan might have information on the incident given that he was a close friend of one of the murdered men, Brendan Mess, but authorities never questioned him.
Likewise, none of this information was shared with the FBI prior to the Boston attack. Maltz, who was the special agent in charge of the DEA's Special Operations Division at the time, said if the FBI and Boston JTTF had shared the Russian intelligence on Tamerlan in 2011, his department would have looked more closely into him as a murder suspect, potentially leading to an arrest two years before the bombing took place.
"I'm not saying this would have prevented the bombing, we'll never know that, only God would know that, but what I do know is that we never had a chance," Maltz said.
"If people in Washington don't wake up and they don't start recognizing that we need to get a unity of effort with all these great people in the government who are working on crime and terror, we're going to have these failures left and right."
Kerry Sleeper, the assistant director for partner engagement at the FBI, said Wednesday in testimony before the House Homeland Security Committee "it is clear that the FBI is more integrated with its law enforcement partners than ever before on the terrorism threat." His assessment was based largely on the swift response to the package bombings in Austin, Texas, that killed two people and injured five others. Homeland Security Chairman Michael McCaul lauded the collaboration between federal, state, and local agencies to track down the bomber as a model for terrorism response efforts.
But the committee, which assessed how cooperation among law enforcement agencies had improved since the Boston bombings, hardly mentioned how, or if, preventative, proactive coordination efforts had improved.
Maltz said this is where U.S. law enforcement continues to fall behind.
"The question should always be what did we do in advance to prevent the attack?" he said. "We know the FBI and other agencies are very good at putting together scenes after the fact and developing evidence to prosecute people. They have great expertise in this area, but the fundamental broken piece of the equation is what is being done in advance using all elements of national power."