by Matt Potter
For the Ugandan and Rwandan forces, there was just one problem. The Democratic Republic of Congo is nearly ten times the size of Uganda and nearly ninety times bigger than Rwanda. This meant neither army could hope to truly control the vast areas they eventually “occupied”; instead, they focused their energies and troops around strategic targets, like diamond-mining towns and airfields. And, having taken these targets, they quickly found new partners for their import-export start-ups among the commanders of other occupying forces and the rebels they’d been fighting. They quickly found themselves welcomed by rebel warlords, neither as foes nor as liberators, but as customers and potential global distributors.
The only problem the Congolese warlords had always had was the high-risk, high-cost, ad hoc nature of air transport for these things. It was nobody’s idea of an efficient export process. So imagine the delight of these rebel leaders when they discovered that far from squashing their rackets, these UPDF and Rwandan forces, with their sudden monopoly—sorry, peacekeeperly control—over the transport infrastructure, mining towns, and air bases, not to mention their regular cargo flights to and from air bases back home like Entebbe and Kigali, were very much men with whom they could do business.
It soon became clear that rather than anything so gross as disorganized plunder, the export and resale of eastern Congo’s natural bounty was a key part of Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni’s funding strategy for the military action in the first place. Indeed, one of the primary motivations for this Second Congo War (1998–2003) appeared to be the lust for control over the country’s most lawless and (not entirely coincidentally) most mineral-rich territory, with even the loosely allied Rwandan and Ugandan forces clashing in a series of lethal firefights around the diamond-mining center of Kisangani in 1999.
The result was war as it might be imagined by Werner Herzog: an arena of charismatic psychopaths, brave leaders, visionary entrepreneurs, and avaricious chancers loaded down with guns, cash, and their own demons, toiling beneath a canopy of jungle foliage and strobe-lit by the regular apocalyptic electrical storms that roam the hills and plains of Central Africa. Generals, privates, and guerrillas alike came to the Congo with their dreams of riches, greatness, and dominion and saw them fulfilled; these things made them monsters. Accounts circulated of isolated indigenous pygmy tribes being hunted down by platoons of privateering troops and eaten as food; of soldiers with get-rich-quick schemes involving the cultivation of narcotics out in the huge, unpoliced hinterland, with plenty of money to go around for those who helped pack, transport, clear, and distribute the gear at the other end.
Just as in the crumbling Union back in the heady early 1990s and the Belgrade of the red businessman, supplier had met consumer in the ultimate free-market party. And it went down just like any entrepreneur worth his salt will tell you it always does: Once the warlords and rebels identified their customer and smoothed out their distribution, all that stockpiled DRC product started to, well, fly off the shelves. And fly it did—on the giant ex-Soviet aircraft flocking to the area as demand for their services exploded.
“It was so different to flying in Europe,” laughs Evgeny Zakharov. “Short runways and no weather! In Europe you’ve got always your [reports into] weather conditions: Here it’s fog; here it’s drizzle, there is bad weather. In Africa, you don’t have this, you never have a weather report. And no radar. Plus, the runway conditions are very, very bad. And then the manual will say the runway is two thousand meters, but really it’s not even fifteen hundred meters, because the other five hundred meters are destroyed by bombs, by wars, or for some other reason—like in Angola, where the runways kept getting destroyed by volcanoes.”
But they were made of stern stuff. And among the respectable entrepreneurs were familiar names. Ukrainian Leonid Minin was busy homing straight in on the natural resources. Viktor Bout, having supplied the Antonov that had spirited the cancer-riddled Mobutu from his wedding-cake palace to asylum in Togo before the mob could get to him, had been operating in these parts for years already and was on hand now to supply the Congolese warlord Jean-Pierre Bemba’s army of speed-guzzling teenage soldiers and rebel warlords with Soviet-built Mi-24 gunship helicopters in return for cash from Bemba-controlled diamond fields. There’s a story told by Bout biographers Farah and Braun that the helicopters not only helped Bemba steal a march on enemy forces, skip arduous route marches, and travel without fear of ambush, but even became his own private duty-free shopping courier on the rare occasion that his militia found itself camped somewhere remote on a hot night without quite enough cold beer.
The chaos would—had anybody pre-9/11 given a damn what happened in Africa—have provided a useful historical lesson to coalition forces in Iraq and post-2001 Afghanistan on how not to handle their logistical support. Planes flew in and out like taxis, and while there’s no suggestion that the crews, charter agents, or operators were doing anything illegal, the lack of system oversight their methods enabled was disastrous. The legitimate objectives of governments, armed forces, and even the UN (whose troops were implicated in 2008 in arms dealing, ivory trading, drug trafficking, and even counterfeit gold smuggling from the eastern DRC) became blurred and softened by their time in the jungle and proximity to so much precious plunder.
Still, financially for all parties, it was boom time: a win-win deal. Except, of course, for the ordinary locals, logged trees, protected species, and anyone the warlords happened to kill with the bullets and guns given to them as part payment by the Ugandan and Rwandan exporter-occupiers.
Well, maybe they weren’t the only losers. After all, in late-1990s Congo just as in early-1990s Russia, when powerful, rich, and avaricious men played high-stakes games, it tended to be the innocent, the hardworking, the unwitting, and the unlucky who got caught in the crossfire.
Stray bullets and unfortunate accidents had an eerie habit of picking out Mickey’s comrades. Stand on a runway in the DRC today, any potholed, dirt-tracked, litter-strewn, zigzagged, shell-holed runway. Look off to your left or your right, and there are the clues: everywhere, the fossil parts of these big, thundering, flying beasts. Panels and tires are halfway up trees, bolts and patches in ditches. Like the early aviators with their Icarus wings and multidecked canvas and flaming props, these new Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines were falling, exploding, flipping over, nose-diving, breaking up, liquidizing locals, and flying by the duct-taped seat of their pants to get the job done. They were ex-Soviet air force, they’d flown through missiles into minefields and back out again before breakfast, and they didn’t flinch from danger.
Sometimes maybe they should have, because the Congo has many ways of reclaiming the cargoes men try to fly out of there. The first to go was an An-12 that caught fire for no reason on landing at Bunia, forcing the crew to jump for their lives. Less lucky were the Il-76 crew that perished a couple of months later in June 1996, taking a chance on an overweight load and a ludicrously patched-up plane. They’d hit a telegraph pole earlier in the day, and the Candid was more tape than metal by the time they loaded up in the Congo. Not unusual, but the heat must have snapped it, and everybody died.
In 1998, Zimbabwe air force jets attacked and destroyed an Ilyushin belonging to Viktor Bout’s Air Cess on the ground at dawn in Kalemie.
The next incident suggested one possible cause of the apparently spontaneous combustion in Bunia, when on November 10, 1999, a former-Soviet An-12 loaded to the gills with high-explosive (and now internationally banned) cluster bombs simply blew up on the runway at Mbandaka airport, killing six occupants and spraying the air base with wreckage. It was a disaster that would recur with distressing regularity. At 11:30 A.M. on April 14, 2000, sparks from an air base warehouse fire in Kinshasa spread to a cargo of ammunition, obliterating an Antonov-28 before spreading to other aircraft. Some 109 civilians on the ground are said to have been killed.
Dozens of fellow aircrews from the former Soviet Union were shot down by UNITA rocket and rifle fire over the jungle
, and many more fell victim in other ways to their unstable phantom cargoes, with the seemingly spontaneous combustion caused by explosives in the hold, in midair or on runways, always given the benefit of the doubt by the possibility that it might, after all, have been an astonishingly accurate RPG shot that blew the planes up.
But as the 1990s progressed and first Angola, then Rwanda, Uganda, the Sudan, Somalia, Liberia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Burundi, and Sierra Leone all tipped toward chaos and war toward the end of the decade, Mickey admits the cold fact is that in some ways the dangers, even the deaths, helped anyone who wanted to play fast and loose.
For every crash site or shard of wing, just as many planes, crews, and illicit cargoes simply vanished, their fake ID, sketchy, ever-changing registrations and flickering paper trails making it impossible to determine whether they’d crashed or simply been repainted, and were now flying happily under an alias and new, heat-free ID. One Antonov downed in 2000 running arms to Liberia hadn’t officially existed for some time, having been registered and deregistered on the very same day in Moldova—a phantom plane, written off as scrapped, flying on regardless through the African mist with its deadly payload, a ghostly Flying Dutchman with no home in the world and death at its heels. Rumors of collusion in the smoke-screening by governments persist. On October 30, 2003, UN investigators were turned away from the site of a Moldovan Antonov-28 believed to have been transporting illicit arms consignments that had crashed outside Kamina by “military officers armed with AK-47 rifles and people wearing civilian clothes.” (The Moldovan operator later responded that they had conducted their own internal investigation and were “absolutely certain” they hadn’t been running illicit weapons. So that was that cleared up.)
Even if people know where and who you are, there’s a good chance in places like Africa you’ll get away with it. Doug Farah and Los Angeles Times correspondent Stephen Braun reported that Gary Busch, a contemporary of Viktor Bout’s, once found that three of Bout’s own fleet of planes were using the same tail number and air-operations papers, noting simply that this was simply “the way it was” when trafficking in Africa.
One tail number, three planes, five different reported routes per flight per plane. With up to fourteen “phantom” flights per registered tail number at any given moment, the night skies over Africa, Eastern Europe, Asia, and the Caucasus are full of Mickeys. But which ones do you believe? And which ones do you follow? And how? Radar coverage peters out, leaving gaping abysses over the emptiest parts of the landmass—the mountains, savannahs, and rainforests, the parts least likely to be under government or police control. Borders are long, porous, and frequently unpoliced. “Once you’re up,” says Mickey, “you can come down and change things wherever you want, really.”
“The Ilyushin Il-76, even more than the Antonov An-12 or An-24, is made for landing on rough, unprepared runways,” says Brian Johnson-Thomas. And one of its special powers, and what makes it better than any of the American models the world had been using, is that it’s designed to load and unload without ground assistance.
One former Il-76 pilot laughs as I ask him about the independence that buys. “If you really wanted to, maybe you could take off with whatever you like on board, wait until you’re out of radar range, buy yourself some time by misreporting your position, divert somewhere to make an illicit rendezvous, land, unload your cargo, hand it over, take on something else, take off again, and resume your original flight plan. In the places these guys operate, nobody will notice if you’re forty minutes late. Nobody can see where you are, and maybe you’ve already reported your position as close to your destination, so you might have just meandered a bit. That’s how flights take off with one thing on board and land with another. Let’s say for the sake of argument, food becomes something naughty, and that something naughty quickly becomes money.”
All this may explain the apparent anomalies in the few media reports that make it out of places like the DRC when Russian cargo flights, legitimate or otherwise, come down.
Ernest Mezak is an investigative reporter and human-rights activist for the Komi office of Memorial, a Russian organization dedicated to preventing repeats of Soviet-style state brutality. He has followed the lives, and deaths, of Africa’s Russian cargo airmen closely and points to the example of an Antonov-12 that caught fire at Mbuji-Mayi airport in January 2006. In the immediate aftermath, it seemed the plane contained first four men from Syktyvkar in the Komi Republic in Russia. Then it was not four but six men, from Syktyvkar and Ekaterinburg. It had flown in from Goma, except Russian news agency ITAR-TASS later claimed it had in fact taken off in Kinshasa. The weather was blamed for the crash, as was overloading and engine failure. At this point, a small media blackout appears to have descended, with the crew’s names being protected—at their own request, it was reported to have been claimed by the operator, Evgeny Zakharov—and their repatriation being organized discreetly by suited officials.
It really is that easy. Jump on the plane, taking whoever you like with you. Take off. Then, once you’re out of visual contact, do what you like. Carry on to your destination directly if you want. Or drop down into a field, make a rendezvous there, change your cargo, and take off again in a matter of a few minutes—nobody need ever know.
In those anything-goes years in Africa, Brian Johnson-Thomas recalls one ballsy pilot landing on a field with only the lights of a car to guide him down. The pilot was flying milk formula into Mogadishu in 1992 for Save the Children. Normally, the distribution operation would start at Mogadishu airport. But on this occasion, fighting meant the airport warehouse—now nearly empty—was too dangerous to get to. Not only that, but in the absence of any ceasefire, flying into the airport itself was out of the question. “So I drove out southwest of Mogadishu,” shrugs Johnson-Thomas, “and found a nice big bit of flattish desert.”
The Welshman then set about turning his “flattish desert” into a serviceable runway. He gathered up some sticks and lit a “pretty big” bonfire, then drove his Land Cruiser in a straight line for two miles, turned it back round toward the fire, and switched his headlights on to full beam, illuminating the other end of the notional runway. Then he waited.
“I spoke into the radio: ‘Can you hear me, Dmitri?’ ‘Yes, I hear you, Brian!’ ‘Right, Dmitri, GPS coordinates are so and so, wind is from the southeast, and whatever else!’ ”
Slowly, the sound of engines tore through the still desert night. Johnson-Thomas lifted his HF radio. “I said, ‘Er, left hand down, left hand down.’ And after a bit, he said, ‘I can see your fire!’ I told him to circle over the fire and my headlights, then told him he was clear to land. I remember, we were both laughing and joking around: ‘There is no other traffic in the circuit,’ all that airport stuff.”
Despite Johnson-Thomas’s fears for his Land Cruiser, the landing was straight from the textbooks. It must have made for a bizarre sight, a Soviet-era superplane being guided round into position by a lone man on foot in the desert, waving as if helping a friend to parallel park. “He came in beautifully,” beams the Welshman. “I did the whole thing, like at Heathrow … I wasn’t sure, they’ve got lots of little wheels rather than big ones, so I brought him round facing back into the wind, and then signaled. He dropped the ramp, killed the engine, and we rounded up all these watching locals, just sort of part-time sheep shaggers and camel drivers, to help unload quickly. Then we just opened the front door and dropped the ramp and they walked in, up the steps, took everything down the ramp and onto our trucks.”
Turnaround was, incredibly, quicker than he’d seen most cargo drops achieve with winches at international airports. “Dmitri was on the ground for something like five minutes, tops. Then he just took off again! That was it.”
For pilots who want to go out of their flight path and make extra unscheduled stop-offs for an undercover deal, the right know-how and a couple of contacts makes it incredibly easy to do. Mark Galeotti recalls instances of Soviet pilots st
ationed in Tajikistan making extra undercover journeys from base to carry heroin over from across the Afghan border, “learning how to do the equivalent of turning back the mileage clock on a car … only on their planes,” to cover their tracks in the event that anyone back at base ever asked for them to account for their journeys—or why they were suddenly so flush with drug money.
Even today, outfits like Mickey’s adopt what’s best described as a “can-do” attitude to identification and record keeping. One recent case saw an Il-76 belonging to a Sudan-registered outfit of what the local media had begun calling “mercs”—short for “mercenary aviators”–being stopped and inspected. The airline was a known one, and the tail number matched the number on its records, so the first instinct of the inspectors was simply to let it go. Then one of them spotted the problem: The airline had ceased to exist as a business three years earlier, after being struck off the civil aviation register and banned. Only clearly the guys operating the plane in the defunct airline’s livery had other ideas.
With a creative approach to registration and paperwork, cargo planes can enjoy almost as many aliases and new identities as men like Viktor Bout. As I write this in late summer 2010, out on the rough scrubland of Entebbe military base, I can see three apparently abandoned planes whose future may yet be as colorful as their past. There’s a white Il-76, registered in São Tomē & Príncipe, a tiny island republic off the coast of Guinea famed in aviation circles for its lax inspection and record-keeping requirements, and three Antonovs that according to one employee “the Georgians [another notoriously lax registration regime] were looking high and low for, for ages.” All are looking suspiciously well kept, having been listed as unfit to fly.
“Them?” laughs one air base guard. “Oh, they will fly again, of that you must have no doubt. Today they are old planes, past their service life. But someone will fly them—you watch them disappear!” He laughs an expansive, jolly laugh behind his sunglasses and automatic and shakes his head at my question. And well he might. Owners, operator, and crews of planes like these have been witnessed “reviving” their registrations, paperwork, and even livery overnight with a bit of DIY know-how, resorting to self-adhesive stickers with logos rather than paint, because they’re easier to change in a hurry—from blacklisted cargo airline or unknown independent operator to Kazakh air force or United Nations in as much time as it takes to peel, stick, and smooth over a few labels.
