by Matt Potter
Over the years, Viktor Bout has become a cause célèbre, a thorn in the side of an ever-larger band of arms-trade monitors, plane watchers, UN investigators, and governments who can’t quite believe it should be so hard to stop the deadly cargo of missiles, planes, guns, and ammunition to an unstable developing world full of cash-rich customers. His aviation companies have shape-shifted so often that nobody, not even Interpol, the CIA, or MI5, seem to this day to be exactly sure what, or where, they are.
But for now, all that—the fame, the photo shoots in glossy magazines, the arrest warrants—was still in the future. He was the undisputed cargo kingpin of this new age, and business was good. And Bout was nothing if not a big thinker. In the months ahead, as he rose to prominence as the operator of several ex-Soviet planes, he would move to South Africa, locate bases in the Middle East, become Boss Hogg of a remote airport near Mafikeng, and in time draw allegations of being a platinum-service gunrunner simultaneously to both the Afghan Taliban and the U.S.-backed Northern Alliance, arms trafficker to Angola, smuggler of blood diamonds and more. He was, if not first to market, then certainly the best.
But he wasn’t alone.
CHAPTER SIX
The Warlord Is Always Right
The Caucasus, 1994
THE DEAFENING WHINE CHANGES TO A HOLLOW, throaty roar as the engines surge. There’s shouting and pointing in the cockpit, the copilot’s tapping on the glass at something below; everyone’s looking down. We’re too high for mountains and the sky’s been as smooth as a monorail. Then a nod from Mickey and it’s over, the roaring silence and the blackness closing around us again.
Steely glances and forget-about-it shrugs ricochet around the fuselage as shadows melt from the bathroom-lit cabin and into the half light of the fuselage. We’ve been curled, slumped, and slouched, entering a kind of willing suspended animation like men trapped in a bank vault or down mines in disaster movies. Now the spell snaps. Alarmed by the shouting, it’s a while before I can find out what’s going on.
“Chechnya,” tuts Dmitry, turning out of his pod to grab a bite. “The idiots are shooting at us.” He rolls his eyes. “Again.”
“What’s the point? We’re too high. Much too high,” sighs the flight engineer. Everybody shrugs. Someone opens a can of Sprite, but it’s been shaken and explodes out, to much cursing.
Apart from the word Chechens passing back down the cabin, nobody says anything after that. I look round at the faces. They are blank, intense but vacant, and it’s hard to tell if they’re just doing their jobs, lost in the automatism of aircrew life, or thinking about being shot at, beyond range or not.
Despite the crew’s obvious disdain for the possibility that someone’s shooting, it often can and does end badly, even here. On a clear and starry night like this in August 2002, a giant Russian transport helicopter was shot down by a trigger-happy Chechen warrior on this same spot. The giant helicopter crashed in the midst of a minefield, one of the inky-black, unlit areas now visible through the navigator’s glass. In the biggest single loss of Russian life of the whole Chechen war, 119 aircrew and Russian soldiers died, and a used rocket launcher was recovered close to the crash site.
There’s been antiaircraft activity around Chechnya for years. Mostly they’re wreckers just like the nineteenth-century lantern carriers who’d steer ships onto rocks in the hope of plundering some of the valuable cargo that survived the wreck. But animus against Russian planes specifically plays a part too—for the scorched-earth bombing tactics deployed against civilians in Grozny during the war. On September 9, 2010, a female Chechen suicide bomber dressed as a medic blew up a busful of Russian air force personnel on its way to Mozdok air base in North Ossetia.
“A really experienced pilot can fly his Il-76 anywhere,” grins one Ukrainian I talk to later. “Snow, heat, fucking anywhere. But Chechnya still makes everyone nervous.”
“Not really true, I think,” frowns Mickey when we next speak. “No problem at high altitude. And even if you take a hit, maybe it doesn’t damage you too badly. I could crash-land it, probably.” He coughs up a wheezy little laugh. “Maybe even in a minefield.”
The savage irony nobody mentions is that these rebels are firing weapons from the very same stockpiles as the ones Mickey’s team is carrying. Because one unintended consequence of the global move toward self-determination that the collapsing USSR kicked off is that you get a whole lot more of these freelance psychos with rolling eyes, itchy fingers, and a bellyful of plum brandy or religion taking wild potshots at your Candid from the rooftops, hillsides, and treetops of places like Grozny. And when the market rules, these whooping vigilantes will always have more than enough rockets. The dawn of the era of the customer was also the beginning of a new kind of terrorist.
Back in 1992, it took a special kind of sixth sense to see just how snugly the two new doctrines in town—political self-determination and personal consumer choice—would fit together; to see that large groups of people, from the former Yugoslavia to Chechnya, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Macedonia, were determined to have it their way. And that like all consumers, they were prepared to enter the open market to get whatever it took.
Not that armed militias were anything new: In the superpowered past, rebel groups had always been supported by one bloc or the other. The long-running Angolan wars (1961–1975, 1975–2002) had long been proxy Cold War confrontations, with the UNITA rebels receiving military assistance from the U.S. and South Africa, and their enemies the MPLA backed by the Soviet Union. It was all part of a larger game, there was no doubt as to who was in charge—the phrase “puppet regime” said it all—and, of course, there was always a political and military quid pro quo. But suddenly things were different. Now access to the finest, most powerful military hardware—along with anything else—wasn’t a favor they needed to beg of anyone with a broader range of interests at heart; not the Kremlin or the White House or China, not the CIA or the KGB, or anyone else for that matter. The hardware, the bullets, the mercenaries, the mayhem was their right as consumers, and their money (or homegrown cash crops, natural resources, whatever they could trade) was calling the shots now.
In Angola, Liberia, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone, diamonds bought those old Soviet stockpiles; in the DRC, timber, gold, diamonds, furs, and coltan called the tune, with operators like Bout and Leonid Minin (a heftily built Israeli-Ukrainian, boss of the Odessa mafia turned trafficker and all-around wheeler-dealer who’d recently set up a business called Exotic Timber Enterprises, flying innocent-looking cargo flights between Europe and Africa on a regular basis) making the deals and men like Mickey flying in and out packed to the rafters with extras on the side.
It looked like chaos. It was a thriving market. The International Relations and Security Network, part of the Zurich Center for Security Studies, nails the spirit of the 1990s globally when it calls Minin’s and Bout’s trade in stockpiled weapons to whomever was paying “a diffusion or democratization of military power.”
Suddenly everyone was a potential arms customer no matter what the international community said. Provided they had the cash, or payment in kind, that is. However underdeveloped and poverty-stricken your country was, you had something. And, just as globalization cheerleader Tom Friedman told us to do in The Lexus and the Olive Tree, whatever they had, they leveraged it, sold it, traded it, just to get into the game. In Africa, that meant dictators were free to trade blood diamonds for weapons and shipped-in mercenary support. In Serbia, mafia control of the airports created ad hoc free-trade zones, shipping arms to rogue states like Libya in exchange for hard currency, and the blossoming of a drug-and-bootleg route that still marks Europe today. Meanwhile, at the bazaars of Tajikistan it meant heroin for arms, flown down onto dusty, barren scree and disused runways by Mickey or any one of a dozen other outfits taking their newfound customer-is-always-right creed literally.
Everything had changed. Everything, that is, but the forces of law and order—agencies like the UN, the FBI, the CIA, MI5,
Interpol, and the rest of the police, intelligence agencies, and regulators who, for the past forty years, had been dealing with the kind of transnational organized crime you could pin a structure on.
IT’S POSSIBLE THAT, at any other time, these night-flying crews in their battered Il-76s and Antonovs would have rung alarm bells; that the men behind their cargoes would have been targeted, investigated, neutralized—if not by their own governments, then by those in the West, and wherever else they operated. But this time, conditions made that impossible.
Amid the global recession that cast a pall over trade and politics from Europe and the Americas to Asia in and around 1992, a new mind-set had taken shape in the West; one focused squarely on “delivering value.” The word outsourcing entered usage in English in the 1980s, and by the 1990s, with all that cheap labor suddenly available in the former Communist bloc, it was the economic buzzword, rooted in the very concept of good governance. And as state agencies increasingly spoke the language of the boardroom, Western governments (all far less spooked than they had been by the idea of people doing whatever the hell they liked to each other in places like Guatemala, Rwanda, Afghanistan, and the Philippines now that we knew they weren’t about to be turned into “Soviet puppet regimes”) focused on pleasing their stakeholders, putting more dollars in their pockets by driving down the costs of any nice-to-haves. Which included contributions to remote, fluffy agencies like the UN.
But for the UN itself, the world stayed the same size—in fact, it got bigger. Where there’d been one big old Soviet Union, here were dozens of new places with names like Armenia and Azerbaijan that seemed to have a whole lot of problems suddenly flaring up and no one else to look after them. Membership suddenly shot to 177 member states. Then there were countless smaller countries from Africa to Central America whose Cold War “sponsors” on either side had suddenly melted away. The UN had to police them all. So as the cost of peacekeeping operations skyrocketed, the big payers found themselves being asked for more. In 1991, UN peacekeeping ops cost a fairly typical $490 million, and payment arrears amounted to $358 million. Suddenly, just one bloody year later (a year in which Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Mali, Afghanistan, Rwanda, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Angola, Sudan, Somalia, Guatemala, Peru, Colombia, Algeria, and Uganda all plunged into the abyss), the cost of the UN’s peacekeeping operations around the world had nearly quadrupled to $1.76 billion. Meanwhile, the arrears in paying for these operations had doubled.
Things quickly spiraled out of control. By 1995, the UK’s permanent representative to the UN was complaining of the “crisis of funding caused by the disproportionate sums paid by certain countries … the USA (30 percent), the EU (30–35 percent) and Japan (11 percent) contribute 75 percent of the total. This has a particularly negative impact in the U.S. where Congress and influential elements in public opinion argue that America should not have to pay one third of the cost of operations in which … there is no direct American interest.”
Panic set in, heightened by the fact that the U.S. had become a notoriously late payer of its contributions, when the incoming Clinton administration discovered to their horror in 1993 that the budget deficit they’d inherited from successive, big-on-defense Bush and Reagan governments was almost double what they’d been told. It was a deliberate and cynical overspend known as Stockman’s Revenge, after its mastermind, Bush’s chief economist, and was intended to sabotage any incoming Democrat administration by leaving the government so broke it would be unable to initiate any welfare or other expenditures. The all-powerful Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan would consider the new administration’s budget plan credible only if they could show immediate savings of some $500 billion. In this context, and with the disastrous “Black Hawk Down” Battle of Mogadishu making overseas adventure look like a loser’s game, funding the UN’s overseas adventures plunged down the list of priorities.
At the height of this crisis, the UN itself was so spooked about how to pay for all these new deployments that it prepared a list of ways to boost funding that even included borrowing on the commercial market—effectively, meeting the bank manager and applying for a loan to buy a nice new peacekeeping operation. So as any organization would in its shoes, the UN focused on driving down its own costs by outsourcing “noncore” activities. And that meant aid delivery and cargo transport. And as luck would have it, the biggest pool of pilots and transport planes the world had ever seen had just become available, and the word was that these former Soviet crews would work for peanuts.
And they would, provided there was a way to boost their wages under the counter.
FOR HIS PART, Sergei says he rarely knows what’s in the main shipper’s cargo—as another Il-76 pilot says, “It’s all just cargo to us.” Charter agent John MacDonald points out the “need-to-know” nature of most jobs they do, and that one of the standard conditions of his employment, or at least an understanding on many of the jobs, is that the crew won’t ask and the shipper won’t tell. A rogue Il-76 seized in Thailand in 2009 on an illicit, embargo-busting arms run between North Korea and Iran via the Emirates, Azerbaijan, Sri Lanka, and Ukraine bears this out. The crew were captured, imprisoned in Bangkok, then somewhat unexpectedly released without charge. One reporter, from Air Cargo News, managed to talk to their relatives, who spoke of the big paydays their husbands, fathers, brothers, and friends would get from their bosses in return for being prepared to fly the plane no matter what the job, how dangerous the conflict zone, or how poorly maintained the plane. They mentioned missions to Sudan and Somalia. One man, quoted as Mikhail Petuknov, a friend and once fellow pilot of one of the crewmembers, told Air Cargo News: “It’s not easy … their planes are old, so the flights are dangerous. And it also means being ready to break pretty much every aviation law in the book. But it’s work, and they pay well.”
There was one more important condition: that they would ask no questions about the cargo, and would keep their own mouths shut.
Still, Mickey shrugs, the secrecy cuts both ways. With most of the cash jobs, neither charter bosses nor cargo clients know—or maybe even want to know—what’s piggybacking with their stuff, and when they do they’re mostly willing to turn a blind eye so long as everyone’s happy and their consignment gets through. So that’s when the crews begin to make “real money”—by delivering the official payload and either taking private orders for other stuff on the quiet, or just flying it in on spec. And so skilled were these crews at making their margin on the extra tonnage they carried, objects as big as cars and weighing several tons could be made to melt into the very fabric of the fuselage.
Even clients who see what they shouldn’t are persuaded to look the other way for the blink of an eye it takes to make the switch. Brian Johnson-Thomas has fond memories of one crew who never missed an opportunity to double their upside, even if it meant contravening a few rules—including, seemingly, the laws of physics.
“They were the guys who managed to make two whole Lada saloon cars simply vanish inside the plane,” he laughs. Johnson-Thomas was flight managing for an NGO at the time, taking forty-five tons of blankets by Candid to a humanitarian emergency. “I had to hook up with an Il-76 and its crew who had been doing another job, but were now free and were being diverted with the blankets into the disaster area,” he recalls. Johnson-Thomas arrived at the landing-berth rendezvous and waited. The aircraft arrived, the ramp came down, and to his surprise, Johnson-Thomas saw two large Russian-made Lada cars sitting inside, where the aid was supposed to go.
“I said, ‘What’s all that about?’ ” he remembers. The loadmaster explained: At that point, Ladas were actually cheaper in the West than they were in Russia, and you couldn’t get the spare parts back home—so they were buying secondhand Ladas in the West, taking them back to Ulyanovsk, and cannibalizing them for sale.
Johnson-Thomas was having none of it. They were absolutely full up to maximum capacity and beyond with the official load, he explained. The Ladas would have to st
ay behind.
“I said, ‘Look, I’m afraid the aid cargo’s got to go in there, and there’s no room for your dodgy Ladas,’ ” he laughs. “But the navigator just took me aside and said: ‘Captain Brian, please: You go next door, you have a beer, and when you come back in one hour, you will not see any Ladas. And I will give you balance sheet, and I promise you, it will be good enough to pass.’
“Well, what could I say? So that’s what I did. And when I came back, the blankets, the aid boxes, they were all in, and the cars had vanished. Nothing. Oh, they were there all right, somehow, but they were hidden, and true to their word, they’d made the balance sheet ‘good enough to pass.’ And that’s all it ever has to be.”
As a model, it’s remarkably simple, the equivalent of the small-town cab driver dealing cannabis from the glove compartment with or without the say-so of Control. Only for a battered Toyota, substitute an even more battered Soviet air force flying machine. So simple, in fact, that anyone remotely capable of standing back and looking at the free-for-all that was developing could have seen what would happen, even before Il-76 crews like Mickey’s started being downed by RPG-toting pirates in the Horn of Africa, blown up in Angola, and kidnapped by the Taliban—and before all that contraband spilled from the stockpiles onto the battlefields and urban jungles.
But nobody was capable of standing back. For the West, this was the peachy-keen 1990s. The Cold War was over. Now let the markets self-regulate and bring peace and prosperity. Never mind the fact that the living standard in Russia itself had plummeted since free-market reform. Never mind that life expectancy was falling. Never mind the bloody conflicts from Nagorno-Karabakh to Rwanda. Unfettered movement of goods across borders had to be applauded, not hindered. These were birth pangs for a new universal order of peace and prosperity in which the angels of the free market would make this the best of all possible worlds. In America, the Clinton administration was so sold on this vision that even when they were told about the mafia takeover in Russia, they dismissed the evidence: One report was returned from the desk of Vice President Al Gore with “a barnyard epithet”—reportedly the word Horseshit—scrawled across the front.
