by Matt Potter
… trafficking to rogue states and African dictatorships under UN sanctions while at the same time supplying arms on behalf of some of America’s biggest companies, such as General Dynamics and Kellogg, Brown and Root, before transporting arms for US companies and other arms suppliers such as Taos, Inc., and the network in which he worked supplied Saddam Hussein, Charles Taylor, the Burmese military junta, the Islamic militias of Mogadishu, and Colonel Muammar Ghaddafi’s regime in Liberia. Like the more infamous Viktor Bout, Damnjanovic has chartered planes throughout Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe, supplying everything from humanitarian aid to hand grenades.
Damnjanovic has denied this. Indeed, even amid the mafia hits, crony politics, and chaos of war-torn 1990s Yugoslavia, nothing about his business dealings appears to have been illegal. “Damnjanovic isn’t an arms smuggler exactly,” laughs Salinger. “Just a man in the business who’s found a way to do, as we say in slang, Ilyushin business.”
His story is typical. As an employee of the state-owned Yugoslav national airline JAT throughout the 1980s, he was often stationed in Dubai, where he developed a taste for international high living far from his increasingly fraught home city of Belgrade. As Yugoslavia broke up and Slobodan Milošević’s regime began prosecuting a series of wars in Bosnia and beyond, the UN imposed sanctions that effectively grounded JAT by preventing them from landing outside what was rapidly becoming the former Yugoslavia. By 1992, his JAT office in the Emirates had closed, and Damnjanovic, like Mickey, started scouting for new opportunities. Now used to the luxury of Dubai’s air-conditioned expat bubble, he wasn’t about to head home to a life of sanctions, shortages, rocketing inflation, and war in Belgrade. Especially not now that he’d seen how easy it was to make money flying in and out of the Emirates carrying whatever paid best, to whoever bid highest.
In those heady days in the UAE, everybody was at it, it seemed. Rumors of Sharjah’s next Big Idea—an anything-goes gateway for whatever you’ve got—were rife. Dubai itself was great for anyone with an old plane and an eye for an illicit buck. A transport hub linking Europe and the Caucasus, the Middle East, the Horn of Africa, and Pakistan/Afghanistan, it was a free-trade free-for-all in which seemingly anything, or anyone, could be bought and sold for the right price. Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, the crown prince, was not only the visionary behind the Emirate’s breakneck growth but its major investor, financing luxury hotels, malls, prestige horse races, and airports with equal élan. He was also one of the first to recognize the Taliban’s claims of sovereignty during their pitched battle for Kabul. Under him—though there’s no suggestion that the sheikh himself either knew or approved—the authorities seemed willing to let whatever cargo come and go through Dubai’s once-pirate-infested port and airport, as long as it did so discreetly.
Sharking around Dubai looking for a partner, the slim, smooth-talking silver fox Damnjanovic fell in with a Russian wheeler-dealer and former chief in the KGB who had fetched up in Dubai like many of his former colleagues, keen to make a killing in this haven for hands-off cargo ops, money laundering, and high-class hookers. The two instantly spotted an opportunity in each other: Damnjanovic, to latch on to the Russian’s air-cargo operation and get a foothold in an aviation business that was rising fast; and the former FSB man, an inside line on the boom market for shady cargo. Belgrade was experiencing a mafia boom comparable to Russia’s, and sanction busting was the way to make big, big money.
Quietly, secret police chief Rade Markovic and customs head Kertes began taking a close hand in airport security, Markovic taking orders that came from the very top while Kertes coordinated shipments in and out. And after dusk, the terminal echoed with familiar thunder as Il-76s and Antonovs swept onto the asphalt and lined up alongside those last JAT flights out of the country. Slowly but surely, crews like Mickey’s became the regime’s own deniable conduit for anything Milošević and his cronies wanted done. And as it turned out, their timing was perfect.
Desperately in need of stable foreign currency to finance their government’s coffers, their lifestyles, and their proxy militia armies in Bosnia and Croatia, the Yugoslav regime was also aware that they were in a position to sell certain highly desirable commodities further afield. Salinger recalls a series of fake emergency landings near the smaller Montenegrin capital of Podgorica throughout the 1990s: The forced landing was a favorite pretext for stopping to drop off and load up with black market cigarettes away from watchful eyes, after which they’d fly on, “minor fault” miraculously fixed. They set about organizing a giant smuggling ring, using secret police and customs at Belgrade airport as the quartermasters and foremen, and cargo planes chartered by men like Damnjanovic to take the goods further afield. This was the boom time of the Eastern European cigarette-smuggling pipeline into the EU: The regime bought them cheap and in huge bulk from in-country outlets and suppliers (and, of course, many of the airmen bought their own to sell on the side either locally or in Russia, tax-free to Afghan vets), and transported them by aircraft from Belgrade out to the international twenty-four-hour money Laundromat that was Cyprus. (Damnjanovic and his partner “Misko” Djordjevic relocated to the island themselves in 1994.) They would then usually go on by boat to Greece or Italy, where the local syndicates would hand over cash and distribute them within the EU. Western European smokers in the mid-to-late 1990s would regularly buy cheap cartons in bars and on the street with warnings in Russian, Turkish, or Bulgarian, flown in by Il-76 from the Balkans, duty-free. Everybody won, except the people in a far-off foreign land being shot at by Serb militiamen.
To do all of this, of course, Damnjanovic needed the right planes, and men with his own special brand of the Right Stuff: fearless, highly skilled men just like Mickey and Sergei whose resourcefulness, professionalism, and lack of curiosity about their missions had been bred into them by tough years of military service. Men who could fly them anywhere, with anything, under any conditions—no questions asked. He began making contacts in Ekaterinburg—a highly secretive former KGB stronghold in Mickey’s home region of western Siberia, dotted with former military bases and arms depots.
The city had (indeed, still has) a well-deserved reputation as Russia’s “mafia city,” where anything could be done, or anything (or anyone) made to disappear for the right price. More important, it was home to the obscure Il-76 cargo outfit called SpAir (whose assets, in an interesting footnote, the IPIS/Amnesty report points out would later be transferred to Air Cess, the company started by Viktor Bout) and scores of job-hungry pilots like Starikov and Barsenov.
The flights grew more profitable and more frequent. But still, with the number and scale of its wars—present and planned—spiraling, the Milošević regime wanted more cash than it was making with cigarettes. For a while, though there’s no evidence linking the prodigious narcotics flow to Damnjanovic’s own chartered flights, the famed “Balkan pipe” worked well for many others, with heroin coming from the Caucasus, Albania, Turkey, and Afghanistan and going by land, sea, or air into Europe. Coke and Ecstasy went the other way to feed the Russian new rich and Serb high society. The differentials in cost at purchase and return at sale were enough to make them all good business for the regime, the smugglers, and for Mickey.
By 1994, Damnjanovic and business partner Djordjevic had moved back from Dubai, lingered in Belgrade, and promptly set up an office in Cyprus, where JAT flights carrying bankers and plainclothes cops would bring cases of hard currency to be laundered, night after night and day after day. Virgin cash would be deposited with shell companies in Panama, Israel, Greece, and Albania. Their goods and clean, hard cash would come back, via paper-only companies and shell operations, to Belgrade.
Then there were arms. According to a SIPRI report, it was while in Cyprus that Damnjanovic got the nod from the Serb authorities to start trafficking weapons in an effort to boost their coffers once again.
By 1996, they had turned arms smuggling into a huge business. Milošević’s regime was regul
arly supplying Qaddafi’s Libya and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, both under tough sanctions, with regular big-money shipments containing everything from antiaircraft systems to artillery and spare parts for Qaddafi’s own fleet of Yugoslav-made Galeb fighter planes, courtesy of the then-Yugoslavia’s state arms manufacturer, YugoImport SPDR.
According to Hugh Griffiths at SIPRI, Damnjanovic’s new outfit Mensus Trade promptly “organized dozens of sanctions-busting flights into and out of Yugoslavia and they became the people to contact when state arms companies or the government needed goods flown in or out, to or from Russia or the Middle East.” He was now a state-sanctioned trader of the kind that, in any other time and place, would have been highly risky; but instead of being arrested, his cozy relationship with the regime gave the Yugoslav government deniability and cover, and him as much business and secret police protection, at home and abroad, as he could wish for. It was a sure thing.
Then, in August 1996, Damnjanovic and Djordjevic called SpAir in Ekaterinburg with a job: fly some jet fighters, in parts, to Qaddafi’s Libya, a “rogue” state already under UN sanctions but desperate for an air force revamp. Phone calls were made between Damnjanovic in Cyprus and Djordjevic in Belgrade, who agreed to accompany this highly sensitive cargo to its ultimate destination to avoid slipups. Starikov, Barsenov, and their Candid had already been making these trips for months. They knew the route, knew their plane, maybe even knew the cargo. They just didn’t know this time would be different.
So it was that Starikov and his Il-76 crew dealt with Damnjanovic and Djordjevic and flew what they were paid to fly—unaware that they were pawns in a game being played by the highest levels of the Milošević regime itself. These gunrunning Il-76 flights to Libya would finance their cadre’s grip on power, their friendly militias and mafia clans, and the campaign of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo that would result in the deaths of many thousands, NATO strikes on Belgrade, and the fall of the regime itself.
But oblivious to any of this, and with a good cash bonus in sight, pilots Starikov and Barsenov flew their Ilyushin Il-76 into Surcin from the Urals. And just after midnight, having executed what the state media claimed was only a technical stopover but what other sources testified was a heavy weapons pickup, and with Djordjevic onboard to make sure the secret cargo was delivered at the other end, flight 3601 took off into a stormy black Belgrade sky bound for Malta and ultimately Libya.
Embargoed or not, it would be a chance for a nice, hot stopover, and hell, North Africa was better than what they were leaving behind in Ekaterinburg for a few days.
Besides, just at that moment Africa and the Middle East were heating up in other ways. There was good money to be made out there. Rumor was that one rather unlikely spot in the Arabian Gulf was becoming a particularly profitable base for ex-Soviet crews and their illicit payloads.
PART III
Gold Fever: The Middle East and Africa
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Men with No Names
The Arab Gulf, 1995–1997
ANOTHER FLIGHT, heading for the Caucasus. I wake from excited half sleep in the belly of the Candid. For a few disorienting seconds, my brain is as fuzzy as one of Mickey’s cargo manifests. I look at my pager, where the digital display says it’s just before 1:00 A.M. By now we’ve got to be over Ukraine, or maybe the Caucasus Mountains already. I’m freezing, but at least the claustrophobia, like the stink of men at close quarters, has faded. The metal hums so loudly everything went quiet about half an hour after takeoff, and the effect at night is oddly disorienting. The antique gaffer-taped fuselage shakes steadily. Just yards away in the night, four engines roar so loudly they’ve got the Il-76 banned from most European countries.
Dmitry, the navigator, sits at the cockpit entrance, pulls a pair of fingerless gloves from the lunchbox by his elbow, and slips back down the sloping floor to his hanging, front-gunner-style cubbyhole, where he settles his lofty frame into a comfy posture and watches the night roll by through the glass beneath his feet. Pens laid out on the folding desktop; charts out, notebook open. My fellow stowaway on the flight, a Scots-Canadian photographer named Doug McKinlay on assignment to shoot the dynamited Buddhas in the northern Afghan hills for CNN, cracks off a photo of the glass pod. Dmitry, surly at the best of times, jumps. He isn’t too happy about the distraction from the flash and wheels round, eyes blazing, arm flailing at the camera with a curse. Doug backs off, for now.
Silence settles in again. The flight engineer sits on a fold-down metal bench the same battleship gray as his overall top and track bottoms, and closes his eyes. Sergei, draped in an outsized jogging shirt, is drinking from a plastic cup and compulsively rubbing his eyes. The spring bed is taken—I can see a pair of feet from here—so I lie sideways on a small quarter of available fuselage space on a ridged metal bench jammed to the wall just behind the cockpit area with my head on my jacket, as I’ve seen the guys do. It’s horribly uncomfortable, but it’s all there is.
In Mickey’s flying warehouse, even if your tiny wire bench is taken, you can sit, or stretch out among the mountains of tethered crates of rice, open pallets of clothing and stacks of boxes, opaque twelve-kilo sacks, wooden crates, and blue plastic sheeting. I wonder if these are the so-called green boxes Mickey’s hinted they carry on runs like this, used to transport ammunition and small arms. And if they are, whether they’re licit or not. So tightly are they packed that there’s no hope of getting farther back, or burrowing between the tethers and boxes looking for stenciling.
There’s no point asking the crew, not really. The “double-blind” nature of the illicit stuff means that they’d be the last to know, or to ask. As for what happens at the other end, on paper at least it’s not their problem. They’re just the couriers, and—again, on paper—never need to cross the customs line with anyone’s smuggled gear but their own.
And it’s not as if that’s ever a problem either. It helps that many of the hubs these humanitarian cargoes fly from—like the wreck-studded cargo perimeter at Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates—have been notoriously lax about customs and security, frequently allowing cargo to come in and leave the airport without being inspected, failing to run the requisite checks on its airlines or keep records of airline business at the airport.
Sharjah is a word that keeps cropping up in conversations with Mickey and the team about their past and their plans. It’s their safe haven, they say, their R & R, just like home leave in the air force. There, nobody’s taking potshots at them; there’s air-con in the bars and hotels; they don’t get any hassle from anybody. Sergei can’t resist giving me too much information. “You know, you can always get a great shower in Sharjah,” he laughs, shoulders shaking, “and you take it, because you never know when you’ll see another.”
You will not be surprised to hear that Sharjah is a word that also figures prominently in whispered conversations, classified reports, and official correspondence about rogue aviation outfits in general and about money laundering, the international black market, gunrunning, the Afghan heroin trade, and human trafficking in particular.
Still, if you’ve never heard of it, that’s not an accident either: You and I were never meant to.
When its larger, splashier, less fussy neighbor Dubai opened up to trade and tourism with the goal of becoming the “Singapore of the Sands” and immediately began riding a monster two-decade boom, the tiny emirate of Sharjah saw the immense wealth that could be generated by turning a sparsely populated, feudal, Islamic desert city into a destination in its own right, a freewheeling hub for people, goods, and business. Only rather than open the Pandora’s box of tourism and attempt to attract fun-seeking foreign riffraff to its uniform, beige-and-cement city center—where a particularly puritanical form of Sunni Islam similar to Saudi Arabian Wahhabism held sway and all alcohol, short trousers, and popular music was forbidden—advisors to the ruler, Sheikh Sultan Bin Mohammed al-Qasimi, had one or two better ideas.
Their first plan—to turn Sharjah into
the global center for Islamic studies, packed with madrassas hosting boys from devout families across the globe—turned out to be a dud: too much investment, not enough quick return. Besides, it meant building a brand name from scratch. In religion, that’s no easy task. So by the mid-1990s, his advisors presented the sheikh with plan B. The small, single-runway desert airport that would make Sharjah’s foreign-investment fortune would not bring planes laden with unpredictable, high-maintenance tourists, or compete with Jeddah for the Islamic dollar. It would bring quiet, low-profile, easy-to-manage crates of cargo. Any cargo.
Of course, financial incentives and tax breaks were part of a package designed to lure freight and transport businesses to operate from the airport. But equally well understood was that this would be “a place to do business”—somewhere companies could come without fear of interference or overzealous regulators. And while the sheikh may not have seen it happening, bit by bit, for the duration of the 1990s, Sharjah airport gained a reputation among insiders as a gray cargo hub.
As early as 1993, former Soviet-issue Il-76s and Antonov An-12 and An-124 aircraft and their ex–Red Army pilots and aircrews were flocking there. By 1995, it was clear Sharjah had a hit on their hands. Which meant that the sheikh’s men, like the mayor of the Maine seaside resort in the movie Jaws, came to rely on the money that was flooding in so much that even as the really big sharks started sniffing around, they simply turned up the music and ignored the warnings. The emirate had a sketchy past as a trans-shipment hotspot in the nineteenth century’s hashish- and opium-smuggling trade, with drug-laden dhows flocking the waters around the dock, so it’s possible the sheikh’s court simply misunderstood any warnings they received about some of the custom Sharjah was attracting, or that he wasn’t kept as informed by his staff as he might have been. At least until he decided to take a direct hand in matters.
