Losing The File

There is a spirit of meanness that conspires to make human beings feel that any group they belong to is superior to another group that they have no interest in. Challenges exist to the visceral response of dismissal when approached by another country's security apparatus, when the approached group feels it is exceptional and the other is not. Enough illogical competition exists between two security units in the same country; take the FBI and the CIA, for example, working counter to the country's interests because of a sense of dismissal one for the other.

And the suspicion and dismissal is heightened when the security groups of different countries are involved. Take, for example, Russian security services approaching American security services, for and intelligence and co-operation, and even a heads-up. The reaction is that the foreign group has nothing to teach the domestic one, and there is no need to collaborate on a professional level, since the foreign group has much to learn in investigative techniques before they can assume partnership with a more advanced team.

But it is not necessarily so. Each may have developed their own professional standards, and each may have discovered particularized methods that work for them through prior experience, in an exceptional manner. We are naive to think that Russian intelligence personnel tend to be more averse to human dignity and human rights, more likely to trample both, than representatives of the FBI or the CIA. The latter two have given ample examples in the past that do them few favours as far as sterling reputation is concerned.

Their lack of coordination before the terrorist attacks of September 21, 2001 was one example of national security dysfunction. Distrust and competition between the two American agencies is said to have been greatly improved since then. And it may well have been. But it seems that when confronted with the need to respect the intelligence of foreign security agents, there may be much to be desired in the ability and the wish and the recognition of the need to collaborate.

When Russian agents informed their American counterparts that there might be an issue relating to the activities of a young Chechyen-American, perhaps being recruited into violent jihad, they don't appear to have been taken very seriously. Russia's security services in asking for cooperation with the FBI appears to have been shunted aside with disinterest; an investigation discovered nothing amiss with the activities of Tamerlan Dzhokhar.

Nor did the FBI unearth their files on the young man once the Boston Marathon bombing occurred, and not even when video images surfaced of two young men, one of whose profile might have been a good fit for a man whom Russian security had earlier identified as a potential terrorist, and who American security had assured itself was no one of any particular interest to them.