After days of many Internet sleuths trying to track down the mysterious "Misha," Christian Caryl, the editor at the Democracy Lab at Foreign Policy has found him through people he says knew the Tsarnaev family in Boston.

His account of their meeting is at the New York Review of Books, where he has published before, and where it can have the maximum value influencing the American intelligentsia, such as it is because since the demise of The New Republic and the further drift of the Nation, NYRB is the most credible intellectual publication, in my view in ways that The Daily Beast simply can't pretend to. (Why do I go into this? Because the obvious question is why Caryl didn't publish at Foreign Policy where he is an editor.)

So this is really a journalistic coup — and a coup for our whole field of Sovietology, if you will, or Russian/Eurasian studies.

Even so, I'm not persuaded.

It feels to me as if someone realized just how much it was needed to put the Misha story to bed, and get the myriad journalists and amateur sleuths off the story, and the loose ends were tied up this way.

As it will no doubt be pawed over by the left (Empty Wheel), in much the same way they played gotcha over Uncle Ruslan's CIA connection ((he married the daughter of a retired CIA agent, Graham Fuller, whom he met in Bishkek while working as a lawyer), let me note that Christian Caryl used to work for Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe. RFE/RL is inevitably portrayed as a CIA front in the conspiracy circles, although  this hasn't been true since the 1970s, when Sen. Clifford Case blew the whistle on the CIA connection and the radios were reformed and put under the management and transparent funding of the US Congress. Today, it is managed by the Board of International Broadcasting and funded by Congress.

I used to work at RFE/RL as editor of two publications in 2002-2004, and continued to freelance for some years afterward, and I can't say I ever saw any "CIA directives" or indeed any editorial directives come in at all with the exception of a request to hold a story about a major demonstration in Kiev to make sure it was covering, and not inciting news.

Even so, former CIA agents were employed there and it's not clear what connections they might have, if any. The reality is, for the gotcha-gamers on the left, is that today, RFE/RL is pro-Kremlin, if anything. The blogs and commentary and and selection of news stories are all realist-oriented and can tilt toward appreciation of Putin's management abilities — it's nothing like the glory days of a conscious support of dissidents as a matter of good faith. The pro-Russian tilt is definitely associated with Barack Obama's own politics, which come out of the Democratic Socialists of America and similar groups of the 1980s that found something progressive about the Soviets and/or saw them as "enemy of my enemy is my friend".

All this is by way of a lengthy affirmation that I think it would be pretty contrived to find a CIA link to this story merely because its author once worked at RFE/RL as the Washington director (he left a few years ago), and yet, some people will likely not rule it out completely. It's like the link in Ruslan's story — tenuous, and unlikely, but still there.

Bottom line, however, today, and for the last 30 years, working at RFE/RL is not a sign that you are related to American intelligence. It is not controlled by the intelligence agencies. It is not governed by former intelligence people. It's just that some of it does cling here and there.

My comment at the New York Review of Books:

I appreciate the legwork that Christian Caryl put into getting this story, but I'm not persuaded so far. It doesn't feel right.

For one, the last name literally means "Allah-believer" in Russian, and so it does not seem
to be a typical Armenian or Ukrainian name. We're told it could be the
name of an Armenian in Baku, however.

Is Allakhverdov his real name, or one he adopted after conversion?

For two, there's a legendary KGB chief who was named Mikhail
Allakhverdov. Coincidence much? Any relationship? Or is this somebody's
idea of a joke?

http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%…

Furthermore, there's the discrepancies in the story. While Uncle
Ruslan doesn't say he met him, Tamerlan's sister's ex-husband said
he saw Misha at the house, speaking for hours, and it got the father,
Anzor, upset. Then the mother reassured him. Now it seems as if no one
saw him at the house?

I think for due diligence, photos of Misha should be verified with
the father and mother, who did see him, to see if it is the same person.

Also, since Tamerlan was said to have met this Misha at his mosque, the leadership of the mosque could be asked to verify it.

He seems awfully mild-mannered and non-charismatic for the fellow
that multiple relatives said was responsible for Tamerlan's conversion.

Various hypotheses have been made about whether Misha could be an FBI
or an FSB (Russian intelligence) informant. I lean toward the latter
hypothesis just knowing how Russia works because someone likely in the
emigre community would have had to inform the FSB about Tamerlan for
them to bother with him, or they had to watch him through someone they
had working for him. Such informant networks never went away after the
collapse of the Soviet Union and the KGB, even re-named, never changed.

I continue to think that the main thesis of this story is not that
the FBI dropped the ball, but that the FSB held the ball. They let
nature take its course, with deadly results. I want that angle to be
thoroughly researched, and see if it ties to Ramzan Kadyrov, president
of Chechnya, and is in any way related to any desire to get revenge for
being put on the Magnitsky List, and for the entire existence of the
Magnitsky List. As always, I think it's worth asking: who profits?

Others find reason to believe Misha is an FBI informant because they
feel there are thousands of such informants watching Muslims and even
engaging them in sting operations to catch them. Those who make this
hypothesis have to be challenged to explain why they think the FBI would
then allow their charges to actually go through with a terrorist act,
instead of arresting them and getting credit for their vigilance. It
doesn't make sense. Meanwhile, Putin has bombed his own Chechen people
and numerous crimes remained unsolved in Russia where Chechen assassins
are implicated.

People keep discussing Chechens as resistance fighters or radical
Islamists. It is far more complex, and it's important to remember that
the chief ideologue of Russia, Vladislav Surkov, is a Chechen, and that
Putin's number one loyal governor, Kadyrov, is associated with many
human rights crimes.

The Tsarnaev family is filled not with resistance leaders, but Soviet
policemen. They are lawyers (which means working for state
organizations, not as defense attorneys); prosecutors; one is even a
policeman in Kadyrov's Interior Ministry. Even so, they left Chechnya,
did not live in Chechnya, and the mother is not ethnically Chechen, so
tying them to anything Chechen could be a false positive.

Ultimately, the pat nature of this find of Misha now has me wondering. He was
found by the FBI, then quickly found by Caryl, with the basic message:
"Nothing to see here, move along" — which suggests either he truly is
innocent of involvement in anything OR he could be one of ours, and they
want the attention off him. OR that the FSB is engaged in an elaborate
ruse to make us think that.

Naturally, Misha could be merely a devout Muslim unrelated to
anything, and we get all that. But the questions do remain open about
who informed the Kremlin's considerable spy networks of the nature of
the Tsarnaev's growing radicalism. Someone among Tamerlan's increasingly
few friends informed on him to the Russian authorities.