Filenews 29 March 2024 - by Marc Champion
It's been more than 20 years since al Qaeda's Osama bin Laden boasted of his success in bringing down New York's twin towers, and there are still millions of people who prefer to believe that the CIA or Jews were responsible. So it's no surprise that conspiracy theories are proliferating just five days after terrorists murdered at least 139 people at a concert venue in Moscow.
Impotence and paranoia
What is different this time is the role of the state in spreading this nonsense, because the reality is much more banal and – from the point of view of the Russian security forces – the more difficult to explain: it is a marriage of a spectacular level of incompetence with – as I have written before – a catastrophic paranoia at the top of the Russian state.
On Tuesday, the head of Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) accused not only Ukraine but also US and UK intelligence services of facilitating Friday's attack. There is so far too much evidence to suggest the responsibility of the Islamic State – it has claimed responsibility and provided videos taken by the perpetrators – for even Vladimir Putin to deny. The real issue, however, Russia's president said on Monday, is "who benefits?" — the structural question conspiracy theorists have always asked over the centuries.
The benefit of each person from an action, of course, is not evidence, but a possible motive and, as anyone who has watched a crime series on television knows, there can be many people with motives for a murder who do not actually commit it. If one accepts the question of "who benefits" as proof of guilt, then Putin will have to agree with those who accuse Russia of orchestrating Hamas' attack on Israel on October 7. There is no evidence of Russian involvement, but Moscow has benefited from the distraction of attention and resources from the war in Ukraine.
Meanwhile, the only evidence Russia offered of a link between Ukraine and the attackers — that the suspects were arrested near Bryansk on the way to the Ukrainian border — was undermined by a statement by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, who said they first tried to cross Russia's usually open border with his country but turned back towards Ukraine after seeing the barricades set up by the Belarusian authorities.
What we do know is that the attackers parked their white Renault outside the concert venue in Moscow's northern suburbs at around 7:55 p.m. local time, managing to escape 20 minutes later after indulging in a gruesome barrage of gunfire and setting fire to the concert venue. According to various testimonies, it took about an hour for the police to arrive. TASS, Russia's state news agency, reported at 8:33 p.m. that SWAT teams were on their way.
Question marks
Russia's interior ministry has dismissed this image of delay, saying local police arrived at the scene within five minutes of learning of the attack. Monday's statement did not give an arrival time or a time to inform police. Whatever has happened here, the police arrived at the scene only after the perpetrators fled.
Russia has one of the largest surveillance and security forces in the world, including, according to a 2022 Kremlin decree, 934,000 regular police officers and about 75,000 employees working for the FSB (excluding the agency's border guards). That's not the highest concentration of security personnel per capita in the world, but it's large: the U.S., with a population far more than double Russia's, has a similar number of police officers to 957,000, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which in turn has half the FSB's staff of 35,000. China, which if anything does not take security issues lightly, has twice as many police officers as Russia for a population 10 times larger.
The FSB, however, is the successor organization to the Soviet KGB. Its senior executives and organizational DNA — including Putin himself personally — come from the Soviet era and focus more on controlling society than protecting it. As with his top military figures, Putin values the loyalty of security chiefs to him more than their skills or even the results they produce in their work. According to Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, analysts and critics of the FSB, the service in recent years has been limited to the most brutal practices and mentalities of the NKVD of the Stalin era. As for the Russian police, they are better known for their low salaries and corruption than for their law enforcement skills.
The main problem
The key problem here, however, is not necessarily police failure. Questions about why security services fail to stop terrorist attacks are raised every time they succeed. The tragedy of September 11, 2001, which could have been prevented but internal rivalries of different security agencies prevented information from being transmitted from one to the other, caused quite a stir in the US, including the creation of a new Department of Homeland Security within weeks of the tragic events. When Islamists carried out mass shooting attacks on a football stadium, open-air cafes and the Bataclan concert hall in Paris on November 13, 2015, killing 130 people, similar unrest ensued within the French security services.
But for a disaster to lead to improvements, honesty about what went wrong is required. The Kremlin hopes that blaming Kiev and the West for the attack will turn a difficult domestic political situation in its favour. Not only can Putin and his service chiefs deflect public anger, but they may also pave the way for an escalation of the mass mobilization they will need to wage the war in Ukraine going forward. Even the gruesome, publicized torture of the four alleged armed perpetrators, including cutting off one terrorist's ear and giving electric shocks to the genitals of another, is counted on by the Russian side to promote this distraction.
However, none of these potential Kremlin victories will change the nature or effectiveness of the FSB. Nor will it make further successful terrorist attacks less likely. For ordinary Russians this is a problem, because while the threat to their security posed by independent Ukraine was always imaginary and not real until the day of Putin's invasion, the threat from Islamist terrorism was and remains a fairly realistic risk.
