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

by 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.

Voltaire Network | Frankfurt (Germany) | 20 May 2013

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]


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