U.S., Russia just don’t get along, even on terrorism

Cooperation is up after Boston blasts, but caution remains

The FBI says decades of distrust between the two nations make cooperation difficult.

Shortly after FBI agent Jim Treacy arrived inMoscow in early 2007 as the new legal attache at theU.S. Embassy, he saw a man photographing him. Treacy had no doubt his shadow was an agent with the FSB, Russia’s Federal Security Service, and that hewanted to be seen — the officer, after all, was 15 feet away, clicking ostentatiously with a long-range lens.

“I just assumed it was the FSB welcoming me back to Moscow,” said Treacy, who had done a tour in the Russian capital in the late 1990s.

For much of the past decade, cooperation between the FSB and the FBI has been guarded and pragmatic at best. In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings, and the identification of ethnic Chechen suspects with potential ties to an Islamist insurgency in the Russian Caucasus, the White House and the Kremlin have been talking up greater cooperation on counterterrorism.

“This tragedy should motivate us to work closer together,” said Russian President Vladimir Putin last month. “If we combine our efforts, we will not suffer blows like that.”

President Barack Obama echoed those remarks, and FBI Director Robert Mueller visited Moscow last week for what were described as productive meetings. FBI agents have been working closely with the FSB to determine whether suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev, whowas killed in a shootout with police four days after the blasts, received any training when he visited Dagestan for six months in 2012.

Russia has provided more information since the April 15 bombings, but U.S. counterterrorism agencies have not seen evidence to substantiate reports in Russia that Tsarnaev met with militants in Dagestan.

Deep mutual suspicion, which stretches back to the Cold War and is periodically inflamed by cases such as the sleeper agents busted by the FBI in 2010, means there are significant limits to U.S.-Russian security cooperation, according to former and current law enforcement officials and scholars of the countries’ relationship.

“There is a broad culture of mistrust that is going to be very hard to change,” said Fiona Hill, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the co-author of “Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin.”

“That’s a huge obstacle to moving forward on counterterrorism. It’s the same sets of people who have to cooperate,” she said.

For their part, Russians are no more sanguine about the true state of the bilateral security relationship.

“The key word is trust,” Nikolai Kovalyov, the former director of the FSB, said in a phone interview. “Trust between people, trust between our politicians and trust between security services. Because we have this mistrust, ordinary Americans now suffer, and some of them had to sacrifice their lives.”

ELENA FITKULINA/GETTY-AFP PHOTO Even as U.S. and Russian agents probe the Boston bombings, a man in Chechnya’s capital, Grozny, reads a placard in support of bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev last week.