by Matt Potter
The shift toward private contractors that has private security outfits like Blackwater and DynCorp playing soldiers in Iraq has given small, unaccountable, and hard-to-trace outfits like Mickey’s an increasingly important role in international policing, hostage-release, and peacekeeping efforts, just as they do in humanitarian relief. Between 2005 and 2006, with recruitment targets regularly being missed, the U.S. military began to loosen its rules in an effort to remain viable. Top recruitment bonuses were doubled to forty thousand dollars; the age limit was raised from thirty-five to forty-two; medical standards and rules on past criminal records were loosened; and still they found themselves needing to outsource more “noncore” duties. The delivery of military equipment, cash, construction materials, anything and everything to Afghanistan and Iraq was already up for tender from private companies; now it was spreading like wildfire to anywhere a job needed doing without the risk of what the U.S. State Department termed “entanglement.”
Open your eyes to it, and Mickey’s world is the one we all inhabit: a world where Blackwater, Halliburton, DynCorp, ArmorGroup, and the other private military companies are making hay in Africa and the Middle East by doing the things national armed forces would normally do. January 2011 saw the news break that Saracen, a private security firm linked to Erik Prince of the private military-contractor outfit formerly known as Blackwater, was training private armies in Somalia. (Saracen International is based in South Africa, with an offshoot headquarters in where else but Uganda; intriguingly, Prince’s spokesman denied he had “a financial role” but was, like Mickey, mainly involved in “humanitarian efforts” and fighting pirates off the Somali coast.)
The thing is, for anyone watching the skies, it wasn’t breaking news at all. There had been a private air force—or rather, dozens upon dozens of them—out here for some time.
Indeed, it’s increasingly difficult for governments anywhere to talk credibly about the “good” or “bad” work that teams like Mickey’s do, while the global brands we all love to wear, drink, walk on, talk on, and watch source their labor from developing—read lawless and highly corrupt—economies, and need their own instant transport and logistics infrastructure to match. Of course dirty work is going to need doing by someone so the rest of us can benefit. And any pronouncements about “dodgy” air operators who’ll take anyone’s shilling begin to sound very hollow indeed.
And it strikes me that this is what all the monitors, the record keepers, the global policemen who watch and wait and report on “shady deals” or allegedly inconsistent paperwork, rogue plane registrations and illicit flights, “merc” crews, and secret ops are missing.
It’s not just that some of these hush-hush flights and supply drops in unstable places might in fact be made in the name of completely legitimate causes; but that the very willingness of some outfits to enter into unconventional business dealings, do things that aren’t necessarily by the book, and take no-questions-asked mission briefs from unknown clients that the monitors lambaste is precisely what makes them the only game in town when the good guys want a bit of Mission: Impossible–style swashbuckling done, too.
As Iain Clark says, “They’re easy to deal with, you know? If they can do it, they’ll do it. It’s not like they’re full of shit, basically, like a lot of the Western crews, where it’s, “Uh, no, the book says this, so, no, we can’t do that’—sometimes just to be difficult. The Russian crews are quite obliging, you know? It’s like, ‘Don’t worry about it!’ ”
Talk to anyone on the ground from Darfur to Dubai, and they’ll agree with Clark—perhaps off the record—that there’s a place for small, wildcat crews like Mickey’s too; indeed, the loyalty and admiration they command is genuinely surprising.
Before I leave Clark’s office to navigate the endless abandoned corridors, dead ends, puddles, hanging wires, and shut doors that will finally open and spill me back out into the daylight, he throws a copy of the Ugandan news journal the Independent across the table to me. “Read that,” he says. I pick it up. The cover story is a report into the causes of, and alleged government cover-up involving, an Il-76 that exploded and crashed into Lake Victoria in 2009, reportedly on a secret mission to Mogadishu for another U.S. contractor. “Jeez, it makes me angry,” says Clark. “I mean, these guys really have their knives out for the Russian guys, the crews, and the operators.”
For the first time, this relaxed, infectiously good-humored man shows a flash of indignation as we part. “I’ve always found Evgeny Zakharov—whose company operated that flight—to be pretty much aboveboard,” he says. “But read that article, and it lays the blame on his planes. Now, I’ve never known him to cut corners. A lot of people who operate Russian planes will go with documents they’re given, if you know what I mean—and if the documents have been falsified, so be it—but I’ve never had a problem with him or his aircraft.”
By the time I’ve been searched again and am blinking in the African afternoon heat on the other side of Entebbe runway’s razor wire, Clark’s impassioned defense of the crews I’ve come to know seems somehow misdirected. Because while I was waiting to be frisked and ejected, I read the report he threw across the desk. And I don’t think it has its knives out for the crew or airline. The real villain of the piece is a very different one. And like the Mafia itself, it’s far more subtle and elusive than any one man.
The demise of the Candid and the men on board was almost crueler for being so sudden and so complete. Unlike Sharpatov, unlike Starikov and Barsenov even, the crew never knew what happened. And they never had a chance to play their one and only ace—their supernatural skill with a 1970s-vintage Ilyushin.
The plane took off from the notoriously slippery tarmac at Entebbe without a hitch, bound for Somalia. It was 5:14 A.M., the March morning still had its bite, and the radar was down again—it had recently had a complete overhaul, but the new, upgraded system had mysteriously stopped working after only four months. The surface of the great lake was smooth, only birds and early-rising local fishermen punctuating the calm through which the huge plane tore upward, still low enough over the water’s surface to cause ripples. The men on board were tired but they were professionals, and Mogadishu was a run that always made you concentrate, focused you. Tense, but not too tense. Nothing they couldn’t deal with. That one Russian word: nichevo.
That’s when the universe opened its jaws and swallowed the men and their plane whole.
If there had been radar, the operator in the control tower would have seen the plane abruptly drop from the screen just five and a half miles out over the lake. In fact, there were eyewitnesses—the fishermen, two of whom were nearly killed by pieces of the plane as it exploded, disintegrating in midair. One saw fire coming from the left side of the plane before it exploded. One saw the plane’s lights were out a split second before the blast. But it was all so fast, said everyone. In the blink of an eye (and some had the order of impact and breakup differently) the Candid had “split down the middle like an egg,” an American salvage technician said later—and plummeted, flaming, into the lake.
It lies there still, buried under twelve meters of silt and mud, itself beneath many meters of water, literally inside the lake bed. X-rays of the earth show the fuselage, sure enough split down the center, and maybe a piece of tailplane sticking up at an angle like a question mark.
The question mark won’t go away. And while the newspaper report Iain Clark threw across to me is hardly generous to expat airmen or the charter airline, Evgeny Zakharov’s former outfit, Aerolift, it reads to me like the indictment of an ecosystem.
Sure, the piece does point to alleged failures of maintenance on the part of the company, which appears to have been flying a plane twelve years beyond its end-of-service life; more tendentiously, it makes claims about the airmen. First, that navigator Evgeny Korolev had a forged navigator license. “Navigator Licence First Class No. 000316 which you have in your possession was issued on 08 October 1996 in another navigator name,” wrote
the Ukrainian aviation authority in response to inquiries by the Independent. “Please, pay attention to the fact that the photo of Korolev is stuck over the stamp. Therefore the certificate in the name of Korol should be considered illegal.” Second, that copilot Alexander Vochenko hadn’t flown an Il-76 since his Soviet air force days back in the 1980s and 1990s, and it’s never been established whether Captain Viktor Kovalev had ever actually possessed an airline pilot license. And yes, it reports claims that the crew were witnessed drinking in the Four Turkeys at three A.M., then reporting for flight duty at four. But it ends with a cry: “People’s lives are worth more than a few extra dollars’ profit.”
In response, the community is quick to rally to the defense of men, the airline business, and the aircraft itself. Iain Clark’s anger at what he called the “knives out” report in the paper is echoed by others I talk to, including Stepanova.
“The Il-76 in Lake Victoria was in very good condition—very good!” she rages.
A friend of the navigator Korolev and an acquaintance of Vochenko and Kovalev, she was with the crew the week before. They were new arrivals, and she helped them open their Ugandan bank accounts and had lunch with them the week before the flight. She says she’d agreed to let them use her home address to open the accounts, and then heartbreakingly, one day in September 2010, a year and a half after the crash, received a bank statement for one of her dead friends through the post.
“I couldn’t stop crying,” she says. “It was so sad for me. I flew with him everywhere. He even taught me to drive …”
Even the facts are less clear-cut than the article suggests. “Evgeny Korolev had his license,” she says. “He might have had his revalidation to one of the African countries forged, which I doubt, but if he’d forged it, how would he have got away with flying in South Africa before that? I’d flown with him many times over the Congo, in fact I was sitting with him most of the time, and he was in the cockpit with my friend over DRC the flight the bullets nearly got them.”
Perhaps, I venture, and it wouldn’t be for the first time, the Ukrainian aviation authorities’ records are inaccurate, as well as the Ugandans’. Or it may be that for jobbing airmen, the rush—indeed the need—to get on a crew, get flying, and make a paycheck as soon as possible on arrival in a new country—at the same time as trying to sort out their affairs and get their paperwork in order—means men take to the air before the official t’s are crossed, just like the otherwise law-abiding motorist who drives for a few days while his car tax is “in the post.” And when it all goes wrong, it looks bad to observers, regulators, and reporters used to getting definite answers.
Even Mickey shies away from some of the stuff that goes on. Ask him to name names, and he’ll just say, my guess is as good as his. He mentions the Il-76 at the bottom of the lake. “Who knows what caused that crash? Sabotage? Terrorists? Cargo? The plane? Maybe nobody even knows what was on that plane. The cargo they were paid to take, yes. What else? Probably the crew didn’t know really what it was. All of these things. Nobody knows.”
But for all the doubts they throw on the validity of the crew’s paperwork, and indeed on the condition of the plane, the investigative team at the Independent save their real ire for the postcrash cover-up, and for the politics of a system that can allow men like these to fly and die on a secret, quasi-military mission to Somalia in the name of getting their dirty work done cheaply, and then let them—literally—take the fall.
They also point toward a more sinister culprit: an illicit, or at least highly discreet, network of secret dealings between their government, its military, and the warlords, terrorists, and pirates of the Congolese hills that use Mickey, and crews like his, as often unwitting, deniable gofers, mules, and fall guys—with the UN’s MONUC base in Entebbe as a fig leaf.
And just as with the Somali ransom drop, the crews’ missions into these rebel-patrolled hills tell the secret story behind some of the most high-profile headlines in recent years.
ACCORDING TO THE newspaper’s news editor, Patrick Matsiko wa Mucoori, with whom I’m sitting less than an hour after leaving Iain Clark, the frantic rescue mission by locals and airport staff was aggressively hampered by the police and the army who appeared, just like the military and secret service agents throwing a security blackout around the runway in Belgrade back in 1996. Out on the lake, he says, they prevented rescue teams, and even local fishermen, from trying to make their way over to the burning, and rapidly sinking, wreckage.
The more Patrick talks, the more it becomes clear that while the planes, the owners, the crews, the operators are all convenient targets for investigation, their presence is a symptom, not the cause, of a deeper malaise.
Patrick’s office at the Independent is, it has to be said, pretty grand: dark-wood tables, bright, contemporary decor, PCs and polished steel. I tell him so. “It’s not my office,” he laughs, knocking back the last of his strong tea and cassava. “This is a meeting room. Here we can talk more privately.” The privacy (heavy door, no window onto the street, airlock-style reception) is necessary, he explains, because of the constant attentions and office intrusions of government spies at the newspaper offices. “You might have noticed one or two outside the entrance,” he smiles. “They just stand there looking like they’re waiting for friends, then report on their mobile phone who they see coming and going. They figure they’ll spot who’s leaking us stories that way.
“They get in, too—you see someone in the office and you assume it’s just a new person or a visitor, and it turns out they got in and were looking around.” He sighs. “Then after that, we usually get raided and the police take our computers away. Again.”
Stocky and smartly dressed with a neatly clipped mustache, Patrick is every inch the image of the urbane city slicker, with a confident, unflappable manner. And since the Il-76 came down, he’s needed all the confidence and steel he can muster. Because part of the reason the government is currently so interested in him is his team’s investigations—prompted by the Ilyushin’s explosion over the lake—into the vast amount of smuggling, profiteering, corruption, trafficking, and mercenary adventuring carried out by the Ugandan authorities themselves.
The Ugandan government and the military, he says, use private operators to do covert work in neighboring Congo, Sudan, and Chad as well as Somalia to the north. Many of these government-chartered flights involve private racketeering and looting by the army’s top brass. Given the very visible United Nations presence at Entebbe airport, and its use as a staging post for secret U.S.-led private military missions into Mogadishu, the government is understandably keen to disguise its use of these former Soviet planes.
“I started thinking, why didn’t our Civil Aviation Authority guys on the runway check whether these crashed Russian planes were okay to fly before they took off, like they would with any other plane?” Patrick says, though it’s worth pointing out that the cause of the crash still remains in doubt, and the aircraft’s condition is no more likely to be guilty than anything else. “My CAA source told me, ‘These planes are parked at the air force base part of the airport. So they get in these planes, they taxi for takeoff from the military base, then at the last minute come onto the airport runway—where our jurisdiction begins—then off!’ As they are actually taking off, you only hear the base commander—that is the commander in charge of the air force base—calling the head of the CAA, saying, ‘We have this flight, it’s going now, please clear it immediately!’ So the CAA says no, how can we clear it, we need to inspect it. But when they do, the air base commander calls the minister of defense—he makes a telephone call, and that’s it. He just tells them, ‘No questions! Just clear these flights from the military base. We take responsibility, but don’t ever ask to inspect them, just clear them to take off, understand?’ And of course nobody but the crew and soldiers is allowed anywhere near the air force base.”
Already alerted by the shroud of secrecy around the lake on the night of the crash, Patrick did
some digging. What he and his team found was a huge operation, bigger than anyone had suspected: a regular, top-secret trade corridor involving Ilyushin and Antonov crews being commissioned by the army and government to fly between the lawless, warlord-controlled uplands of the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo and Kampala, carrying priceless natural resources that they could sell for cash to line their own pockets. Clandestinely logged timber, gold, and silver, and even animals and animal furs, are all part of the traffic.
“Eastern DRC, which borders Uganda, is a rebel area, there’s no military there, no government—completely lawless,” he explains. “It’s almost like Somalia; it’s in the hands of warlords. You just deal with different warlords and bandits here and here and here. So you deal with them, and of course you buy the goods cheaply, pay them, and come back. Now, the Ugandan army spent about five years in Eastern DRC, claiming that they were pursuing Ugandan AVF rebels that were based in the Congo. So they captured the eastern Congo—it was actually under the control of the Ugandan People’s Defense Force—and started transporting minerals and wood and so on using these planes. And the UPDF formed alliances with various rebel groups. Eventually, due to international pressure, the UPDF left, but it maintained its ties with those rebel groups, and now they go in on these Russian planes, buy timber from local militia leaders in Congo—and you can buy anything—and just come back.”
For insiders, the logistics are breathtakingly simple. You want a local warlord to source the goods for you? Call up an old contact from the conflict, they’re all there, and they’re all on the same mobile provider as you. You need backup, hired muscle? That’s okay—you’re the army, just bring a few colleagues or command a few of your men.
Now, the plane. That’s easy, you’re the army, you’ve got dozens to choose from, right? Except you want to do it on the cheap because whatever you spend here is coming out of your own sweet pocket, and you certainly don’t want to have to ask too many people’s permission—less still have the UN contingent camped across the grass ask where the plane is they were going to take on an aid drop today. Bad look. So you hire an independent air operator and a team of mercs—probably one of the Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, or Byelorussian teams—with a giant plane that can fit, say, a platoon of men, a couple of jeeps, and a whole lot of contraband timber. Call it an Ilyushin-76, hypothetically, for the sake of argument. And make sure the guys you’re dealing with have that can-do spirit Iain Clark mentioned. If the price they quote is $3,000 an hour, offer to double it on invoice if they’ll split the difference. If they’ll do it, you pay $6,000 from the army’s coffers and collect your $1,500 personal cash-back to share among your men, with maybe a crafty $250 for your commanding officer to look the other way while you’re gone. Everybody’s happy.
