Graham Fuller, Uncle Ruslan, the CIA and the Boston Bombings

F. William Engdahl

Are there too many coincidences in the Boston Bombings official narrative to call them coincidences? Behind each one lurks the shadow of Graham Fuller—a top CIA strategist who famously advocated co-opting Islamic extremists to further advance the US agenda in Central Asia—and his cozy ties with the accused brothers’ uncle. William Engdahl delves into the ramifications of the Fuller-Tsarni connection, the most compelling of the Boston smoking guns, and the threatening can of worms it has opened up.

One of the many unexplained (at least not officially) anomalies of the persons claimed to have carried out the Boston Marathon bombings is the presence of key CIA figure in the direct family of the accused brothers. Ruslan Tsarnaev, the outspoken uncle of the brothers was married to Samantha A. Fuller until 2004. Samantha’s father is Graham Fuller, the senior CIA person who architected the Afghan Islamic fundamentalist Mujahideen war against the Soviets. He is also implicated in creating a global jihad network, presumably acting on behalf of CIA interests.

Ruslan Tsarnaev, who changed his name to Ruslan Tsarni, lives in a posh Washington DC suburb of Bethesda Maryland. He has worked in the past for companies tied to Dick Cheney’s Halliburton as well as a “consultant” in Kazakhstan with the State Department’s USAID which has been identified as a CIA front. [1] Take it all in: The two brothers, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, accused though never proven in a court of law to have been responsible for the Boston Marathon bombings, had an uncle, the same uncle who agreed to bury the remains of the one dead brother. This uncle was married to the daughter of Graham Fuller, one of the most important CIA architects of using Islamic Jihadists/terrorists against the USSR during the Cold War and after, throughout Central Asia, including Chechnya and Kazakhstan. Coincidence?

The Fuller CIA Link

The discovery of the connection between a very, very senior CIA man, Graham Fuller, to the uncle of the accused Boston bombers was more than a bit embarrassing for Fuller. He took what for a professional CIA agent was an extraordinary step of issuing a public denial. In an exclusive interview on what reportedly is a CIA-linked website, “Back Channel—Al-Monitor,” Fuller hurriedly denounced media links of his CIA connection to the bombers’ uncle: “…possible connections between Ruslan and the Agency through me are absurd.” [2] Fuller then went on to admit, “Samantha was married to Ruslan Tsarnaev (Tsarni) for 3-4 years…They also lived in our house in [Maryland] for a year or so…” [3]

Fuller went on to claim Ruslan was “homesick” for Chechnya, and that his English was “shaky,” yet after the Boston bombings, a very English-fluent Ruslan gave a press conference from his posh Maryland home denouncing his nephews.

The central question is who is Graham Fuller? The answer turns out to be that he was perhaps if not THE most instrumental, one of the most instrumental people inside the CIA during the 1980’s who convinced CIA Director Bill Casey and the Reagan Administration to recruit fundamentalist Muslim Salafists or Jihadists from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and elsewhere, train them in techniques of guerilla insurgency and send them against the Soviet-occupied Afghanistan. They were called Mujahideen. [4] One of the more famous of those Mujahideen was a young Saudi from a very wealthy family named Osama bin Laden. In a sense then we might call Graham Fuller the “Godfather of Al Qaeda.”

Fuller was also the key CIA figure in convincing the Reagan Administration to tip the balance in the eight-year-long Iran-Iraq war by using Israel to channel weapons to Iran in what became the Iran-Contra Affair. As well, in 1999, around the time his daughter Samantha and “Uncle” Ruslan Tsarni (aka Tsarnaev) lived at his home near Washington, Fuller, former Deputy Director of the CIA’s National Council on Intelligence, then a senior figure at the Pentagon and CIA-linked neo-conservative RAND corporation, advocated using Muslim forces to further US interests in Central Asia. He stated,

“The policy of guiding the evolution of Islam and of helping them against our adversaries worked marvelously well in Afghanistan against [the Russians]. The same doctrines can still be used to destabilize what remains of Russian power, and especially to counter the Chinese influence in Central Asia.” [5]

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Russia’s main pipeline route out of the Caspian Sea basin transits through Chechnya and Dagestan. The 1994-1996 Chechen war, instigated by the main rebel movements against Moscow, served to undermine secular state institutions. The adoption of Islamic law in the largely secular Muslim societies of the former Soviet Union served US strategic interests in the region.

This is precisely what happened in Chechnya with hundreds of CIA-trained Jihadists and Al Qaeda fighters sent into Chechnya, Dagestan and other parts of the former Soviet Union, precisely where Uncle Ruslan and his two Tsarnaev nephews came to the USA from. Coincidence?

Is it mere “coincidence” that the uncle of the two young men accused of the Boston bombings was related in marriage to the CIA figure who advocated using the networks which were later named “Al Qaeda” across Central Asia including Chechnya where the Tsarnaev brothers had roots? The more independent researchers examine evidence around the Boston terror bombings, the more the official US Government version of events stinks. Closeup pictures of obviously fake red paint designed to look like blood from a man whose legs were supposedly blown off of flesh to the bone, pictures of private security contractors carrying large backpacks at the direct bombing site after the bombing and chatting with police, reports of eyewitnesses of police over loudspeakers telling marathon runners there was a “terrorism exercise” taking place as a test that day. All these anomalies, combined with the CIA ties of Uncle Ruslan, present an incredible set of coincidences. It is time for an open and serious citizen commission of inquiry be formed to investigate.

In a future article we will look closely at the role of the same Graham Fuller in creation of what is rapidly becoming an Islamic fundamentalist dictatorship in Turkey and across the Islamic world. The Graham Fuller-Ruslan Tsarni connection opens up what looks to be a very ugly can of worms. The two accused of the Boston bombings were never proven guilty. Their mother in Russia vehemently insists they were set up as patsies by the US Government to be blamed. [6]

It may be that carelessness somewhere exposed Graham Fuller and the tip of a very secret and very explosive network of international terror whose ties with Langley and the US Government are inadvertently coming into daylight in what might well be the most important revelation of destructive secret intelligence operations in modern history. Graham Fuller, ’methinks thou doth protest too much,’ when you proclaim absurd ties between the CIA and accused Boston bombers and that is drawing the spotlight of the civilized world to you and your accomplices and activities. Fuller’s earlier role in Turkey with another network of Salafist fundamentalist Islam will be our next view into the murky underworld of intelligence agencies and attempts to manipulate entire parts of the human population.

F. William Engdahl ---

[1] Emine Dilek,The Tale of Uncle Tsarnaev CIA Chief Graham Fuller and a Turkish Islamist Who Lives in USA, April 27, 2013.

[2] Laura Rozen, Former CIA officer: ‘Absurd’ to link uncle of Boston suspects, Agency,, The Back Channel, April 27, 2013.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Center for Grassroots Oversight, Profile: Graham Fuller.

[5] Ibid.

[6] RT, Tsarnaev brothers’ mother: My sons are innocent, this is a setup, 19 April 2013.

PART II

Boston and the CIA ‘Snafu’: The grey eminence behind Turkey’s Erdogan and the AKP

F. William Engdahl

In the first part, geopolitical analyst William Engdahl discussed the role of CIA’s Graham Fuller in creating the policy of using angry Jihadist Muslims as trained terrorists in Afghanistan and elsewhere against the Soviet Union. Herein—largely drawing on the revelations made by FBI whistle-blower Sibel Edwards—Engdahl throws the spotlight on the entire CIA-sponsored Islamic Jihadist operations run through Fetullah Gülen across Turkey into Central Asia and Russia and China.

VOLTAIRE NETWORK | FRANKFURT (GERMANY) | 25 MAY 2013

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Part I: Graham Fuller, Uncle Ruslan, the CIA and the Boston Bombings Graham Fuller (foreground) and Turkish Muslim guru Fetullah Gülen who has dark ties to CIA and fanatical Jihadist groups worldwide.

The open press statement of denial by senior reportedly former CIA official Graham Fuller in April of a link between the Boston Bombings and the CIA, labeling the reports “absurd,” may go down in history as one of the worst intelligence blunders [1] in the past century. The public admission by Fuller, on a website reported tied to the CIA, of his relationship to the Uncle of the alleged but not ever convicted Boston bombers opened a can of worms the CIA might well wish never had been opened. The public admission by Fuller, on a website reported tied to the CIA, of his relationship to the Uncle of the alleged but not ever convicted Boston bombers [2] opened a can of worms the CIA might well wish never had been opened. A deeper look into Fuller’s role reveals him to be a key figure in what FBI whistle-blower Sibel Edmonds terms American Deep State rogues. Edmonds worked as an FBI translator from Turkish, Azerbaijani and Farsi languages during and after September 11, 2001 when she uncovered damning email and other evidence of criminal networks linking the actors of 9/11, drug networks out of Turkey and terrorists in and around Al Qaeda together with senior Pentagon and other US Government officials. [3] Fuller, A Deep State Rogue As later identified, among the people uncovered by Edmonds’ translation efforts at FBI were notorious neoconservative Richard Perle, Iraq war architect who headed Bush’s Defense Policy Board advisory committee in 2001; Douglas Feith, neocon Under-Secretary of Defense under Bush-Cheney; Anwar Yusuf Turani [4], key figure in the anti-Beijing Uygur separatist operations under the name East Turkistan National Freedom Center in Washington DC. East Turkistan is their name for China’s Xinjiang Province where Uygur riots took place several years ago. Turani modestly calls himself President-in-exile, East Turkistan (Xinjiang), though it’s by no means clear who if anyone elected him. Whistleblower Sibel Edwards has revealed extraordinary information on the U.S. government’s support for international terrorist networks and organised crime. She was described as "the most gagged person in the history of the United States" by the American Civil Liberties Union.

In her classified translations Edmonds discovered that a criminal network had penetrated the highest levels of the US Government including Pentagon and FBI, and were engaged in illegal sales of weapons, including nuclear, of drugs and more. Criminal activities were being protected by claims of State Secrets, she asserted. Repeated attempts to call attention inside the FBI to what she was convinced was a conspiracy against the United States from within came to no avail. Her gripping account to bring attention to an alarming rogue network inside Washington is the subject of her autobiography, Classified Woman – The Sibel Edmonds Story. [5] Attorney General John Ashcroft went all the way to the Supreme Court to muzzle her under a little-used Doctrine of State Secrets. Edmonds, suffering under an unprecedented Bush Administration gag order, was banned from revealing the complicity of high-ranking US and Turkish figures uncovered by her and duly reported at FBI before she was fired in 2002 for “blowing the whistle.” She partly got around the Government gag by posting photos with no comment on her website. Others filled in the names. [6] Graham Fuller was one of the 21 American Deep State rogues Edmonds posted. In 1995, according to investigative journalist Daniel Hopsicker, the uncle of the alleged Boston bombers, Ruslan Tsarnaev, “incorporated the Congress of Chechen International Organizations in Maryland, using as the address listed on incorporation documents 11114 Whisperwood Lane, in Rockville Maryland, the home address of his then-father-in-law.” [7] Father-in-law was Graham Fuller whose daughter was married to Uncle Ruslan. Chechnya, an autonomous province of Russia deeply involved in oil pipelines from the Caspian Sea, has been the scene of Islamic jihad terrorists since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. In 1995 when Uncle Ruslan founded the Congress of Chechen International Organizations from Graham Fuller’s home, the Islamist Jihad terror war against Moscow was raging full-force in Chechnya. Putin and Russian intelligence have repeatedly claimed the terrorism was being fed from outside. As more is coming out on the role of Fuller, the evidence points to the conclusion that the Chechnya terrorists were also a project bearing the footprints of the “former” CIA political Islam expert, Graham Fuller. By 1988 Fuller had formally moved from a very senior post at CIA to the neo-conservative think tank, RAND Corporation, where he officially worked on the “Middle East, Central Asia, South and Southeast Asia, and problems of ethnicity and religion.” [8] While at RAND Fuller played a key role gaining asylum for a Turkish national in the USA. Fetullah Gülen, a Turkish national who was forced to flee in 1999 and seek asylum, won his US residence permit due to the intervention of two senior CIA or former men. One was Graham E. Fuller. [9] Foreign Policy Journal describes the role of Fuller and the CIA in getting indicted Turkish fugitive Gülen asylum in the USA: “Fethullah Gülen became a green card holder despite serious opposition from FBI and from Homeland Security Department. Former CIA officers (formally and informally) such as Graham Fuller and Morton Abromovitz were some of the prominent references in Gülen’s green card application.” [10]

Jihad Spreads to Central Asia From his new luxurious heavily-guarded estate in Saylorsburg, a remote part of eastern Pennsylvania, Gülen launched a series of fundamentalist Salafist mosques and madrasses, not only in his native Turkey where he was the alleged power behind Turkey’s AKP regime of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, himself a product of Gülen’s schools, but across the Islamic regions of Central Asia as they separated from the Soviet Union in the chaos after 1991. [11] According to Edmonds, an authority on the subject, “US Islamization Operations in Central Asia via Gülen started in late 1997, early 1998. That brings me to …Graham Fuller.” [12] Fethullah Gulen, lives in Pennsylvania. From there he runs a $25 billion international network. He is tied to hundreds of Gulen charter schools in the United States itself, 36 of which are located in Texas alone.

A memoir by former head of Turkish intelligence, Osman Nuri Gundes, claims that Fethullah Gülen’s worldwide Islamic movement based in Pennsylvania has been providing cover for the CIA since the mid-1990s, and that in the 90s, the movement “sheltered 130 CIA agents” at its schools in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan alone. [13] Gülen schools in Russian Chechnya and Dagestan regions, both locations of fanatical Jihadists since 1991, were ultimately banned by Putin. The Russian government has banned all Gülen schools and the activities of the Gülen-linked Nurcu sect in Russia. Over 20 Turkish followers of Gülen were deported from Russia in 2002-2004. In 1999 Uzbekistan closed all Gülen’s Madrasas and shortly afterward arrested eight journalists who were graduates of Gülen schools, and found them guilty of setting up an illegal religious group and of involvement in an extremist organization. In Turkmenistan, government authorities placed Gülen’s schools under close scrutiny and have ordered them to scrap the history of religion from curriculums. [14] Responsible Turkish journalists I’ve met with relate that Gülen-loyal police tied to Edrogan’s AKP have infiltrated the Turkish police, intelligence services and other key state institution and are systematically arresting, purging or silencing all nationalist military, trade union and other secular figues opposed to creation of an Islamic Sharia state in Turkey, uprooting ninety or more years of Kemalist legal foundations. More than one hundred Turkish journalists have been arrested for writing critically about the actions of Gülen’s AKP. Gülen’s public profile is as a humble, deeply spiritual Imam of love and brotherhood. His record in practice is anything but. Gülen once stated, “You must move in the arteries of the system without anyone noticing your existence, until you reach all the power centers, until the conditions are ripe." Sounds a bit like Lenin in the old days. Certain networks in Washington including people in and around Fuller obviously have no problem with that. Why would the CIA and US agencies want Central Asia? As Obama adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, notes in his now-famous book, The Grand Chessboard, “For America, the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia...America’s global primacy is directly dependent on how long and how effectively its preponderance on the Eurasian continent is sustained…It follows that America’s primary interest is to help ensure that no single power comes to control this geopolitical space and that the global community has unhindered financial and economic access to it." Washington has used Turkey and the AKP fundamentalist networks of Gülen to wreak havoc across the post-communist oil and mineral-rich regions of Central Asia. Graham Fuller’s foot prints are all over those covert operations as are Fetullah Gülen’s. In 2008 Fuller published a book titled, “The New Turkish Republic: Turkey as a Pivotal State in the Muslim World.” As Sibel Edmonds describes, the process involved using Turkey with assistance from ’actors from Pakistan, and Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia’ as a proxy, which in turn used Bin Laden and the Taliban and others as a proxy terrorist army before 9/11. [15] Edmonds notes regarding US operations in Central Asia, “This started more than a decade-long illegal, covert operation in Central Asia by a small group in the US intent on furthering the oil industry and the Military Industrial Complex, using Turkish operatives, Saudi partners and Pakistani allies, furthering this objective in the name of Islam.” [16] Her middle name suggests a reference to her father’s CIA posting in Turkey.

What did Uncle Ruslan Tsarnaev, uncle of the Boston alleged bombers do when he was married to Graham Fuller’s daughter? Ruslan worked for companies connected to Halliburton, doing oil deals in the Caucasus and as “consultant” for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in the former Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan. Russia barred USAID from its soil in late 2012, alleging USAID together with CIA was attempting to influence the internal political processes in the country. [17] Some are beginning to ask whether the Boston bombing might have been a deception operation carried out by the Rogues associated with Graham Fuller and the network within the CIA and Pentagon, to make it appear Putin was behind the ghastly events. In any case, when Graham Fuller went to the press to publicly denounce CIA links to the Tsarnaevs he made what is likely to go down as one of the greatest snafus in US intelligence history. He lost his cool, and with it, has put the spotlight on the entire CIA-sponsored Islamic Jihadist operations run through Fetullah Gülen across Turkey into Central Asia and Russia and China.

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[1] Laura Rozen, "Former CIA officer: ‘Absurd’ to link uncle of Boston suspects," Agency, Back-Channel Al-Monitor, April 27, 2013.

[2] Laura Rozen, "Former CIA officer: ‘Absurd’ to link uncle of Boston suspects, Agency," Back-Channel Al-Monitor, April 27, 2013.

[3] Daniel Hopsicker, "Boston bombers’ uncle married daughter of top CIA official," April 26, 2013.

[4] See "The Government-in-Exile of East Turkistan Republic"

[5] Sibel Edmonds, Classified Woman – The Sibel Edmonds Story, First Edition, 2012.

[6] Sibel Edmonds, "Sibel Edmonds’ State Secrets Privilege Gallery."

[7] Daniel Hopsicker, Op. Cit.

[8] 2006 Campagna-Kerven Lecture Series, Speaker Bio - GRAHAM E. FULLER.

[9] Emine Dilek, "The Tale of Uncle Tsarnaev CIA Chief Graham Fuller and a Turkish Islamist Who Lives in USA," progressivepress.net, April 27, 2013.

[10] Sibel Edmonds, "Turkish Intel Chief Exposes CIA Operations via Islamic Group in Central Asia," boilingfrogspost.com, January 6, 2011.

[11] Pelin Turgut, The Turkish Imam and His Global Educational Mission, Time, April 26, 2010.

[12] Sibel Edmonds, Op Cit.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Sibel Edmonds, cited in "The Turkish Lobby, the Neocons, and the Crusade to Free the Ergenekon Terrorists," rastibini.blogspot.de, December 15, 2008.

[16] Luke Ryland, "Court Documents Shed Light on CIA Illegal Operations in Central Asia Using Islam and Madrassas," lukery.blogspot.de, July 10, 2008.

[17] Emine Dilek, Op. Cit.