by Matt Potter
As I wrote this chapter, the news came in that an An-24 (NATO codename: Coke) had inexplicably nosedived into Nganga Lingolo cemetery on its final approach into Brazzaville, Congo. All five Ukrainian crew and one Congolese passenger killed. I’m no conspiracy theorist, but that sounds like a run of terribly bad luck for anyone.
It does get better away from the Congo, and away from the gaffer-taped planes themselves, but not much. Because while East and Central Africa have a great many things going for them, they aren’t always world leaders in health and safety. So instead of asking how these things happen and trying to protect the poor Joes they tended to happen to (and usually at altitude) by, say, going after whoever wanted to hide a conscription of cluster bombs aboard a civilian aircraft, people started taking aim at the messengers.
The way Mickey tells it, and we’re translating roughly here, “It’s always the same, just with a different visa.” Coming back from the Afghan war in the eighties was just the same, he says; like America’s Vietnam vets, the Soviet Union’s grunts got back from their unwinnable, sun-parched, booby-trapped, guerrilla-war hell only to find they were the whipping boys. “It was, ‘We don’t know what you were doing out there anyway,’ ” he recalls. “And, ‘We heard you did some bad things, plus you did not win, and it was all a big mistake, so you will get nothing from us.’ ” And now, twenty years on, he’s still wearing the mark of Cain: uprooted, demobbed, he tries to steer a course through the daily, hourly drip-drip of compromises his new third world homes test him with, and to stay alive. But even down here, the term “mercenary pilots”—shortened to mercs by the locals—has become the buzzword favored by firebrand politicians wanting to be seen as cleaning house and African nationalists who believe the continent would be just fine if they could get rid of white troublemakers. The mercs are everybody’s favorite whipping boys.
Meanwhile, in New York, Stockholm, London, and Ostend, governments and arms monitors rage against “dirty airlines,” “dirty planes,” and “traffickers.”
Some powerful voices are beginning to speak up, though, including the former World Bank chairman. “Note how, in our narrative, the criminals and the deviants are always the suppliers,” sighs Moisés Naím. “It’s never the consumers, even when it’s the consumers who are creating the profit opportunities, and who are behind the market that creates the people we now call criminals and deviants.”
Naím suspects looking to scapegoat the deliverymen is a more attractive option for many within the business and political spheres than tackling root causes. “The EU, the U.S., Russia, China—we can all keep on churning out weapons systems and land mines, snorting cleaner, meaner drugs, buying our way into brands on the cheap and DVDs in the pub; this way, when people get hurt it’s not our fault, it’s the guy at the other end.
“It’s estimated that eight percent of China’s GDP is associated with export and production of counterfeit goods, from car brakes to Prada bags,” he says. “And when you have eight percent of an economy like China’s involved in that, it means that literally millions of people wake up every day and can only make a living and bring food to the table because they are involved in what we, here in the West, call ‘illicit’—and they call a normal way of making a living.
“To use a more cruel analogy: For us consumers in the West, we are told by our governments that these are all ‘illicit acts.’ They are ‘criminals.’ ‘Underground.’ ‘Deviants.’ There’s a lot of deviancy in the conversation. Now, you go tell that to the Afghan farmer whose only way of making a living for his family is to plant poppies for export. And you know that he’s not getting a lot of money. The big money is never at the beginning or end of the chain—the big money is in the middle of the chain. But we call him a criminal, right? He’s a ‘drug grower.’ Or the woman who leaves her family in Guatemala and is beaten all the way and is an illegal worker, and ends up working as the nanny of an investment banker. Blame them? No. The consumer creates the market—every time.”
“Our businessmen are at fault, not the crews,” nods former pilot Andrei Lovtsev. “They have gone there to Africa, and to be truthful they’re working there for kopecks compared to the foreigners. I speak to the Americans and they say, the Russians—even though it is more Ukrainians, Kazakhs, and so on—in the business rent out the planes for kopecks, and the crew get even less. For an An-12, they only charge around $1,000, $1,200 an hour whilst an American Hercules will cost $6,500. The crew get $5,000 or $6,000 a month. It is very low, yet they fly to difficult places in difficult conditions and are met by Kalashnikovs and taken away, and they don’t know if they will be shot or not.”
Indeed, the airmen themselves are now often more valuable to local thieves and warlords than the cargo they carry. In August 2010, three Latvian-Russian pilots flying food in for international peacekeepers in Sudan were heading from Darfur’s Nyala airstrip to their rented villa downtown. Suddenly, several 4x4s swerved into their route, blocking the road, and gunmen forced them to the floor, kidnapping them. It was the second such incident in Sudan in a month: In July 2010, the “horseback devils” of the Janjaweed militia had abducted and beaten a Russian pilot shipping supplies to UN/African Union peacekeepers in Darfur, having forced his aircraft down at gunpoint during takeoff and dragged out and pistol-whipped the three rebel commanders he was also secretly transporting. From being expendable, among rebel groups airmen like Mickey are now highly prized both for their ransoms and the bargaining power they represent.
Unusually, in both these instances the airmen were recovered swiftly, before any public ransom demands had been made; and though news reports are vague as to how or why the men were released, a deal with the militias seems likely. The flight boycott of Somalia that followed the deaths of an entire Byelorussian crew in 2007 meant a lot of cargo never got carried and a lot of money never got made. And in Darfur right now, there is simply too much cash at stake to risk a kidnap turning into a murder.
There is, however, another possibility. Viktor Bout hinted that “huge forces” were behind the recovery of his gunrunning Il-76 crew captured by the Taliban in the mid-1990s; indeed, it’s widely believed that a quid pro quo deal was struck to begin supplying the Taliban with arms in return for their release. And with Russia supplying arms and mercenaries to the Janjaweed’s backers in the Sudanese government, it would be all too easy to see both incidents as simply ways of hurrying up the next delivery or putting pressure on price. They certainly wouldn’t be the first Islamist militia to wrap cash and kidnapping up into an offer that ex-Soviet cargo operators just couldn’t refuse.
If you’re wondering why airmen would take the risk with jobs like these, whoever’s prepared to fly over Africa gets fat bonus commissions, and Mickey admits with a shrug that the rewards from government contracts, humanitarian aid, raw-material transport, and ad hoc business make even the risk of kidnap and violence worth taking. And meanwhile, the men and the metal and the extra tons of overloaded cargo just keep falling from the sky and disappearing into the bush at gunpoint.
IN A LOT of ways, Katya Stepanova is Mickey’s opposite—a live wire, a respectable businesswoman running a successful business according to the rules. She pays her taxes and has a landline and a postal address; she’s great, runs a transparently honest company; and most of all, she’s full of infectious lust for life where Mickey is often downbeat, obscure, vague, and comfortable with his silence and his worst-case scenarios.
Still, the picture even she paints of that generation’s progress across the continents after the motherland set them free without a paycheck or a pension is a sobering one. She talks me through a lineup of her family friends and what’s happened to them since they first came out here to fly cargo. There they were, young and strong, smart cookies and crack aviators, mechanics, loadies, and navigators. And then, like Iggy Pop’s Dum Dum Boys, they begin to fall in a grim roll call of casualties. Bad luck, bad calls, and the wrong plane.
“There’s this guy, he died in the Antonov cra
sh in Luxor a couple of years ago. He’s one of the guys at the bottom of Lake Victoria—yeah, that was one of Evgeny’s crews. Some got kidnapped in the DRC, nobody ever paid the ransom. Another one’s dead, another just disappeared, I don’t know what happened to him …”
The crews all know one another from way back, she says. From the same towns, they’ve all been colleagues, and friends, flying the same planes for years all over the world. Then they came to Africa and worked as hired hands—different planes, different crews. A huge number are dead or missing.
I’m stunned for a moment, recalling Mickey’s first conversation with me, the way he counted these devils down on his fingers, like a man biding his time here in this world before bowing to the inevitable and heading off into the water, the fire, and the hereafter with one of them. Here they are, his brothers gone before. It’s like a family tree in horrible, inverted negative, in which instead of one common ancestor multiplying to produce generations of offspring, the logic is reversed and a whole generation of men produces a single heir, the sole survivor of twenty years of flying these foreign skies.
It pisses Katya off, she says, that all this work can be done and all these sacrifices made by good men in the name of getting their job done, and at the end of it, “all people want to talk about is gunrunning, like that’s the only thing they’re carrying.”
She reminds me that nobody ever wants to investigate these air operations, or the crews’ fifteen tons of cash cargo, when they’re using them to take more food to more starving refugees than any other crews, aviation outfits, or airlines, big or small, could ever hope to match; or that without their constant flights here and there, on- or off-record, much of places like East Africa would simply grind to a halt.
This is not just a figure of speech. In 1960, when Belgium granted it independence, the Democratic Republic of Congo (then called Zaire) boasted ninety thousand miles of navigable roads. By 1980, independent for two decades and with the highway-maintenance budget having quadrupled, there were only six thousand miles. By 2006, Kemal Saiki, a UN spokesman briefing the media on a passenger plane crash, said that the Democratic Republic of Congo did not even have two thousand miles of roads and that for many people, traveling around the country by aircraft, using small, wildcat aviation outfits, is the only option. Today, with just a few hundred kilometers of road left outside of the capital Kinshasa, people and goods find themselves back where they were in the late 1800s, chugging slowly down overgrown rivers in perilously overloaded barges straight from Conrad’s Lord Jim.
In Uganda, the most stable, most developed country in the region, there used to be trains. Today, following a disastrous attempt at privatization, the service is suspended indefinitely, tracks now overgrown with weeds and covered with mud, and even having become home to expanding market squares and auto-repair shacks.
Even when you can travel by land, you’re hostage—often literally—to thieves and bandits. Here, transport companies build in a margin of 33 percent of their goods that they assume will be stolen before the cargo reaches the recipient at the other end. That, of course, means higher prices for the surviving merchandise—both to compensate for these losses and to pay higher insurance premiums. And often that means the produce is priced out of the market. Simply nobody at the other end—in an area in which poverty is legion—can afford to pay a whole third higher than the market price. So they either go without or they steal and buy on the black market. The whole cycle begins again.
American reporter Denis Boyles came out here in the 1980s and interviewed one of the last of the Air America generation, an American bush pilot named George Pappas, tooling his beat-up DC-6 from conflict to conflict, chasing the sweet deal at the end of the rainbow. One of Pappas’s clients, a Zairean businessman, told him, “The pilots here are like sharks. They make excuses and wait until we need them very badly, and then they raise their rates. It is very difficult, very expensive.” Boyles claims to have been informed by one of these pilots that “ninety percent of the cargo he carries is, one way or another, contraband.” The real number, he says, was even higher.
In Africa, whatever you’re carrying, you skip a whole lot of trouble, paperwork, and danger—as well as bandits, bribes, police, and military roadblocks—if you take it by air. As one small ad for a reputable Ugandan plane operator in Kampala’s local freebie the Eye says: “You’ve a meeting in Arua. It’s a 7-hour drive at least [and] you’ll get home at night, exhausted. If you arrive home. Because 2,334 people died and 12,076 were injured on our roads in 2008. So charter a plane and keep your accountant happy. After all, how much is your life worth?”
Even in Russia itself, according to assassinated FSB whistleblower Aleksander Litvinenko, the secret police favored private-enterprise pilots with military experience for the really sensitive jobs, like moving explosives around the country from air base to air base. So prone to theft, prying, and graft were the road and rail networks that the chance of some small-time crooks nicking their consignment from a lay-by, only to stumble across the whole plot, was a chance they were unwilling to take.
But still, to many the idea of a connection between the business of states—wars, insurgencies, government policy—and these chaotic rogue cargo men seemed casual at best. They were hustlers, after all; man-with-van enterprises, nothing more. But suddenly, one afternoon in a luxury hotel in Bangkok, all that seemed to change.
On March 6, 2008, more than two dozen Royal Thai Police, in a sting operation orchestrated by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, swooped down on a conference room on the twenty-seventh floor of a gleaming, steel-and-glass Sofitel hotel in the Thai capital and promptly arrested Viktor Bout, handcuffing him at gunpoint and holding him in one of the suites before taking him off to jail. In its indictment, the DEA charges that during a well-planned sting, Bout incriminated himself in a plot “to sell millions of dollars’ worth of weapons [rumored to be Russian SA-model shoulder-mounted surface-to-air missile launchers and attendant ammo] to the Colombian narco-terrorists … the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) to be used to kill Americans in Colombia.”
Russian diplomats were livid, calling his detention politically motivated. The Americans were jubilant. But there would be more twists to come than either could possibly have realized.
The indictment, which charged Vikter Bout with nine offenses including money-laundering conspiracy and wire fraud as well as trafficking, continued: “An international weapons trafficker since the 1990s, has carried out a massive weapons-trafficking business by assembling a fleet of cargo airplanes capable of transporting weapons and military equipment to various parts of the world, including Africa, South America, and the Middle East. The arms that Bout has sold or brokered have fueled conflicts and supported regimes in Afghanistan, Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Liberia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and Sudan.”
Perhaps someone had been watching the skies over Latin America quite closely through the 2000s after all.
Then, just three months later, in July of that year, the Africa–Latin America connection was blown wide open, hitting headlines across the world when a Soviet-crewed Antonov seized in Sierra Leone as a result of an American investigation was found to contain a staggering six hundred kilos of cocaine belonging to a Venezuelan narcotraficante group using Africa as its distribution hub. At fifty thousand dollars a kilo, there’s silly money for anyone with a rusty cargo plane and who knows the value of discretion.
Ironically, it seems the narcos know what the world’s NGOs, governments, and international peacekeeping organizations have been slow to realize: that if you want a job done professionally and with no conflict of interest, it never pays to squeeze your suppliers. Crewmen seem to have been paid well for such journeys: The captured leader of Venezuela’s infamous mob, the Valencia-Arbelaez organization, which was smashed by undercover U.S. DEA agents after it purchased a $2 million plane to run monthly flights between Venezuela and Guinea, claimed he was “paying my pilots
$200,000 to $300,000 per trip.” He could afford to: The cost of ex-Soviet cargo aircraft for sale and charter had, according to the Moscow Times, “plummeted because of the financial crisis.” Reporting the bust, the Moscow Times discovered that “The [narcotraficante] gang hired a Russian crew to move the newly purchased plane from Moldova to Romania, and then to Guinea. Fuel and pilots were paid for through wire transfers, suitcases filled with cash and, in one case, a bag with $356,000 in euros, left at a hotel bar.” No wonder men like Mickey can be talked into making a few extracurricular no-questions trips.
Again, the Russian Foreign Ministry thundered that it considered the pilot to have been “kidnapped,” not arrested by the United States. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin himself weighed in, telling the U.S. it had “overstepped its mark.”
But between the lines, maneuvering of a more subtle kind was taking place. One operation down, one plane impounded. For investigators, prosecutors, and politicians, it must have felt like nailing jelly to a wall. Worse for the growing number of agents and monitors bent on proving and shutting down men like Bout, in their eagerness or frustration, the failures and lapses in their methods that Peter Danssaert had warned about began cropping up again. Ironically, this time it was the aviators who were edgy about shadowy conspiracies.
What Bout’s associates, and indeed the Russian government, claim is a politically motivated U.S.-led smear campaign against him has resulted in a bizarre situation in which both sides are crying foul and alleging dirty tricks on the part of the other. In a message from his hideout, where he’s taking refuge from CIA interest in him on what he claims is a trumped-up case, Bout’s close associate and “brother” in business Richard Chichakli, who oversaw Sharjah’s open-door boom time—tells me: “Victor Bout is just a person who may or may not have done wrong. That can be put to a trial in a court of law—and the U.S. will not have, nor will ever provide a ground for, an impartial trial. They have already spent more than $400 million on [hunting him down] and they cannot, just cannot, come up empty-handed. The politics says Victor should go to jail or die, and that will justify the action, make the great American experts look good, and give credibility to the U.S. and its stories. The evidence I have says exactly the opposite, and the U.S. government knows that.”
