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DUTY TO WARN
The Moscow attack and the most crucial words in the international intelligence community
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It took the American media only a few days to cite the phrase “duty to warn,” today arguably three of the most revered words in the intelligence community’s lexicon. When invoked, they require specific information about an imminent terrorist attack to be forwarded to vulnerable and threatened nations, including Russia and Ukraine. The US duty-to-warn obligation even extends to other potential adversaries such as Iran, with that government having a similar obligation to warn all. The requirement doesn’t include operations run by either nation.
This American intelligence community passed a warning of a possible attack involving religious extremists from Pakistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan eighteen days in advance of the Moscow concert hall assault that killed at least 137 people and injured more than one hundred. Such a warning invariably comes from intercepts from the National Security Agency and agent reports from the Central Intelligence Agency.
The Americans did their job but the Russian intelligence community, heeding its boss, did not. President Vladimir Putin publicly called the warning “provocative statements” three days before the attack, and the Russian security services ignored it. They bear responsibility, in the view of American intelligence experts, for failing to do what was necessary to protect the concertgoers.
The self-declared perpetrators were members of the Islamic State’s Khorasan Province, known as ISIS-K. The extremist group gained traction in eastern Afghanistan a decade ago after terrorizing the local population with beheadings and other brutalities. ISIS-K was designated a global terrorist group by Washington in 2016, after it survived a little known but intensive offensive by American and Afghan forces. The group briefly burst into prominence in the fall of 2022 when it attacked the Russian embassy in Kabul, killing six people. ISIS-K earlier had claimed responsibility for the death of 170 Afghans who were beset by bombs and gunfire while attempting to flee the country, along with thirteen American military personnel, in their chaotic withdrawal from Kabul in mid-2021. The retreat from a lost war was a gutsy decision by President Biden, who was more willing to admit defeat than his predecessors. But the ISIS-K attack turned a difficult decision into a tragic one.
In Afghanistan, ISIS-K is now in competition, if not open civil war, with the Taliban and recruits heavily among disgruntled Taliban followers.
ISIS-K, along with similar terrorist groups operating out of neighboring Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, has been intensely targeted by American intelligence. One involved CIA operative told me that the agency has an asset that Russia lacked during its war in Afghanistan in the 1980s: a capability to monitor signal and communication intelligence from ISIS-K and related terrorist groups. The data is assumed to have come via American gear that was installed on a mountain range in Pakistan.
The now retired agent said that he and others in the intelligence community “truly believe that there is a duty” to warn other nations—even Russia—of impending terrorist attacks. He also recalled the brutality of the extremist groups in the region who often did not kill their enemies immediately but relished putting them through a slow death. “They liked to chop up people, limb by limb, and let them bleed out until they died,” he said. Russians, he told me, are an especially prized target.
Another involved official, with many years of experience, explained that “the number one priority of the American community is tracking all of these ISIS groups—both the leaders and the hit squads. We have superb international cooperation in the effort and openly share data with those countries that are vulnerable, including both Russia and Ukraine. When we have the opportunity—that is, military access—we take them out with our own assets, often without publicity, except when the Delta Force and SEALs beat their chests in competition.” (At this point, he assured me that the various commanders of the involved special forces units put an end to “that nonsense.”)
The official explained that when there is immediate intelligence on a planned terrorist attack and no American forces available, “we alert the vulnerable foreign target with what we know.” The official added that “had ISIS relocated to Ukraine, we would have known it and removed them. They did not do so, and so we did not.” He went on: “For many organizational and cultural reasons Russia simply lacks the capability to do what we can do in this shadow world. We gave them a timely and accurate heads-up, but they were still vulnerable and paid a grisly price.
“The threat to Russia from the Muslim extremists existed long before the USSR collapsed. The Chechnya massacre”—in 1999 Putin ordered the destruction of Grozny, the Chechen capital—“and trouble in Georgia”—two provinces there vainly sought to break away from Russian control in 2008—“are examples of a struggle that will continue. It has nothing to do with Ukraine except that [Putin’s] focus on Ukraine” led him to make a false accusation—a reference to Putin’s continued insistence that Ukraine was involved in ISIS-K’s massacre at the concert.
The prophetic alert released by the US Embassy in Moscow on March 7 explained that the embassy “is monitoring reports that extremists have imminent plans to target large gatherings in Moscow, to include concerts, and U.S. citizens should be advised to avoid large gatherings in the next 48 hours.”
By any standard, the American intelligence was riveting. President Putin chose to ignore the warnings, and in its aftermath he has fixated on what he apparently and wrongly believes was an attack that in some way had been orchestrated or known in advance by the Ukrainian government.
His denial of the reality led him, as an essay in Politico put it, to assume that his relationship with Hamas and stance on Israel’s war in Gaza meant that Russia would not be an ISIS target. He went so far as to ask rhetorically: “Are radical and even terrorist Islamic organizations really interested in striking Russia, which today stands for a fair solution to the escalating Middle East conflict?”
The tragic reality, as the Russian leader continues to insist on Ukraine’s involvement, is that he and his cowed bureaucracy failed his people and their children. In many nations, such a catastrophic mistake would have political consequences.