by Matt Potter
Again, for all the rumor and allegations, there appears to be no hard evidence of any wrongdoing; just frustration at what seems to be the ever-deepening mystery of the woman’s identity. For a Westerner, it seems incredible. Can it really be so easy, even today, to pull identity tricks like this? To cultivate blurriness to the point that it fools the CIA, Interpol, and MI5? There’s only one way to find out. And for me that means going back to Russia, where it all started.
EKATERINBURG IS THE home of Russia’s military-industrial complex, where the stockpiles of weapons, APCs, and ammunition Mickey flies around the world were—and still are—made, stored, diverted, sold off. Its parts factories and workshops keep the clouds of Candids and Antonovs flying beyond the life spans even their makers imagined. It was also, as it happened, ground zero of Russia’s 1990s mafiya apocalypse.
This is the former Soviet Union’s own arms-trafficking Bermuda Triangle. But it’s also Mickey’s hometown, or as close to it as you can get and still be somewhere.
Ekaterinburg is the spot where Vladimir Starikov’s doomed Il-76 crew slipped their moorings one last time, bound for Belgrade. Near here in 2000 following the ski-masked FSB bust back in Moscow, fugitive East Line crewmen abandoned their contraband-laden Il-76 and melted away, leaving only their modern-day Mary Celeste aircraft on the runway.
It’s a place where airmen go to slip off the earth. Gary Powers’s U2 spy plane was downed here in unexplained circumstances in 1960—even now, fifty-one years later and more than two decades after the end of the Cold War, the CIA and National Security Agency judge the flight transcripts to be so sensitive they refuse to declassify them.
To this day, it remains a place known for its citizens’ habit of vanishing—becoming fugitives, outlaws, disparus, or corpses. And in the summer of 2007, it’s here that my acquaintance with Mickey flickers briefly into life again.
I’ve driven all the way from Moscow via Tatarstan and Bashkortostan, piggybacking a work assignment on the sly to see him, and the Urals’ eastern slopes are dark already. A planned meeting with one of Mickey’s old cargo comrades in Kazan has already been a bust, partly because I’m on a shadow mission myself, attempting to fit these illicit meetings around another journalistic schedule that, as it turned out, put me several hundred clicks from where I needed to be, but I still have high hopes of catching up with Mickey after a couple of years’ peace. Ahead and behind as I loop down the slopes, the low red sun turns the trans-Ural highway into a river of fire. Ahead is Ekaterinburg, formerly Sverdlovsk, and before that, Ekaterinburg—and at various points in between, a carefully edited blank patch on Soviet-published maps. The Urals’ reputation as the Soviet Union’s own gigantic Area 51 is chiefly owed to a wall of secrecy that for decades swallowed up entire towns, cities, mountains and forests, secret bases, and “disappeared,” dead, or deformed populations. The region was off-limits to all foreigners and many Russians until 1992, and many sudden blank areas on the local maps remain that way.
Throughout the Cold War, it was the heart of the Soviet “nuclear archipelago” (alongside neighboring Chelyabinsk—known here as Tankograd—whose main employer in 1991 was a secret chemical weapons facility): a place of so-called ghost factories, weapons facilities, and secret arms bases disguised as car-manufacturing plants, foundries, and farms.
But these ghost factories also produced their own ghosts, a city of people whose true work had to be concealed from families, friends, and even colleagues. Cover-ups are what Ekaterinburg has always done like no place else, and on an industrial scale. When Moscow came under threat from the German advance in 1941, most state facilities, from weapons production to secret government bunkers and chemical facilities and even the St. Petersburg Hermitage museum’s art collection, were relocated here, behind the towering border of the Urals. After the war, the industries remained. When the world’s worst nuclear accident before Chernobyl happened here in 1957, a total media shutdown and army-enforced quarantine ensured that no one beyond the affected valleys, towns, and forests knew about it until decades later—even today, the Lonely Planet guide warns would-be picnickers that leaked radiation around Lake Karachay and the Techa River will kill a man within an hour.
When in 1979 a bioweapons plant disguised as a factory in a southern residential suburb leaked weapons-grade anthrax into the neighborhood, again the Men in Black appeared, the cordons went up around what was now being described by the Soviet authorities as “the abattoir which was the source of the food poisoning outbreak,” and for the next few days the city was simply erased from news, radio, and public discussion. As with the 2002 Moscow theater-hostage crisis, even the emergency services were kept in the dark by the KGB’s cleanup squads. To this day, most locals believe it was the result of contaminated meat, not an accident at a lab where antibiotic-resistant bubonic plague bacilli were stored next to silos of anthrax and superstrains of smallpox big enough to wipe out nations.
Even the town house in which the Bolsheviks shot the Romanovs was “erased”—bulldozed by order of an aspiring local politician named Boris Yeltsin, specialist in the disappearance of state funds, who as president of Russia and friend to Commander in Chief Evgeny Shaposhnikov would oversee Mickey’s transition to a freelance career.
Threatened by a 1991 coup attempt, President Yeltsin would nominate this his plan-B capital—a secret bunker for his cabinet to disappear into if threatened. But the reputation of the city today rests on the early 1990s explosion of criminal, mafia, and semilegal economic activity that continues even now to make its mark on countries, economies, wars, and politics around the globe. Even for Muscovites, it’s the Wild East. This is the edge of the steppe, where for centuries fugitives, Il-76 pilots fleeing mysterious FSB busts, mafiosi, and careless travelers alike have simply melted away, into the grasslands or under the roads. Here, the mafiya have their own clubs, neighborhoods, sports teams, even cemeteries.
From these mob-controlled factories, Ilyushin and Antonov engines were spirited to Africa, Central Asia, and the Caucasus to service the wandering airmen there. Local chemical and nuclear weapons, liberated in the cataclysm of economic collapse, attracted potential buyers from Iran, Pakistan, and Central Europe. Businessmen put two and two together and founded air ops, scouting around for talent from local garrisons.
It’s been a long drive from Moscow and I really don’t want the sun to set before I reach my hotel in town. The plan is to keep going, with the needle hovering just far enough inside the speed limit to deter bribe-hungry cops. But as I snake down the valley side, something happens that illustrates just how tenuous identity becomes here, even in Russia, just miles from where Mickey grew up.
Beside the narrow highway that winds down through the first half of the Urals and into the grasslands is a mirage of bustling roadside activity: thin, whining dogs on rope tethers, buyers and sellers, brightly colored stalls, the spiced gray smoke of kebabs grilling on an open breeze-block fire. Except it’s not a mirage. Here are Oriental faces, Uzbek-registered cars coated in primer and hitched to wagons; sick chickens and luminous plastic footballs, toys, bootleg goods, jarred honey and battered tanks full of petrol. My traveling companions and I stop at the informal Central Asian bazaar in need of a stretch and hungry, but hungrier still for human interaction, for the sound and sight and smell of someone other than ourselves; for a bit of up-close and a break from distance and uncertainty.
Suddenly, and without knowing how, I’m talking bad Russian to Zayna—for reasons that will become clear, she asks me not to use her real name—a girl from Uzbekistan who travels as part of this impromptu caravanserai through the empty heart of Russia in summer, and for whom we are items of outlandish, absurd exotica. She ushers me to the shaded back of the tent and opens a drawer. It is full of replica and blank-templated Russian driver’s licenses, along with laminate and a small camera. She looks up from the samples pegged along the top: one for fugitive oligarch Boris Berezovsky, “Godfather of the Kremlin,” now living in London; on
e for President Putin himself; one for Osama bin Laden (patronymic middle name: Terroristovich). One for Lenin, too, now apparently a resident of Moscow and with no points accumulated. ID costs five dollars. I return to the Russian rental car with five new, utterly different Russian driving licenses and ID cards: just like Bout and Minin.
I decide to back myself up in case they’re found, adding a couple of cheeky celebrity names so I’ve got dumb-tourist-with-a-novelty-souvenir room to maneuver with the cops if it comes to it—I’m O. bin Laden on one of them, a Moscow resident. I flash one to the receptionist at my crummy hotel that night when she asks for it. To my astonishment, it passes. Not a flicker. Though to this day I’m unsure if she was fooled or saw through it but genuinely couldn’t give less of a fuck who I was. The number gets noted down, entered into the guest registration system, and I can’t help but think of Iain Clark’s defense of Russian operators in Africa: “They’ll go with what documents they’re given, and if they’re fake, so be it.”
This is just a five-dollar cheapie; if it was part of my business plan, I’d invest much, much more time and money in getting the best. Besides, your ID is only ever as good as the willingness of the person checking it to accept it. For Tatyana, just like Mickey, with only the paperwork and underpaid officials in third world countries to negotiate, slipping through that door is a daily thing. The rules say someone’s name has to go here, here, and here? Of course I’ve got a name—why not take two or three?
Charter agent John MacDonald laughs when we talk about Mickey’s can-do approach to paperwork. “Get him to tell you about the invoices!” he hoots. “If you want phantom paperwork, that’ll put the wind up you!”
I finally catch up with Mickey over an early vodka breakfast in the center of town, where he’s back with some stuff for his mother and sister. The canteen is cheerless, Formica benches and fast-food chairs ill-suited for his golem frame, but he knows it and thought even I might find it. He’s a little grayer in the face than I remember but in fine fettle, relaxed and even talkative. I show him my new Russian driver’s licenses, and we talk about why they’re no good, and why in most parts of the world, in most situations, nothing has to be any good anyway. Then, ordering another drink, he explains his invoicing practice.
“You want me to bring you ten thousand dollars of cargo. We talk and agree a price of twenty thousand dollars. I will invoice you for twenty thousand. Your company receives the invoice and pays. You and I stand on the runway, or we sit on a chair under a tree or in a hut, have a beer and a cigarette. We relax, chat about business, and then I give you five thousand and put the other five thousand cash into my own pocket. Then we drink to success.”
You need to spread it around a little, naturally, he says—you need to keep your colleagues sweet—and so everybody wins except the official buyer you work for. But then, that might be an oil-type company, the UN, some government or aid organization, at any rate someone with big, deep pockets who’s got so used to being ripped off and paying over the going rate that they actually think it is the going rate. The names on the invoices can change, of course, says Mickey. They might be paying the outfit he flies for, or any one of several companies owned by either him or that parent company. Depends what it is, who it’s for, and who needs to know.
We talk about Ekaterinburg, the nightlife, his mother’s illness; about the ghost factories and how it was back then when it seemed everybody worked for a different highly classified military facility. With a slow, rheumatic roll of the shoulders as he twists his lanky frame around on the fixed plastic chair, he tells me that just like the jobs he flies now, the whole secrecy thing is overdone. “It was normal,” he shrugs, “like London or anywhere, people who work for the military would tell you something different if you asked what they do in their job. Secrets were part of life. But still, you know what they do. People talk.”
Before we part, he wants to take me round town, but I’ve got more leads to chase up and I tell him I’ll see him on the road, thinking Kazakhstan, his next stop. As it turns out, it’ll be another three years, hundreds of fruitless phone calls, and thousands of miles farther south, but that’s how it is with people like Mickey. Mark Galeotti believes this identity-hopping quality, this ability to slip seamlessly off the radar and into different roles and identities, goes deeper for Mickey, Tatyana, even Bout, than a calculated wish to deceive.
“It’s not actually a situational thing,” he says. “It’s a reflex. You’ve got to remember that this is one of the glories of the old Soviet system. On paper it was hierarchical, ordered, rational, and everything had its place. In practice, it was everything but. And if Russians have a genius, it’s to screw over those people who try to rule them, and at every occasion.
“So for a lot of people, it did become second nature—a habit, where you automatically do it. You know that you don’t trust the system, and you are constantly looking at ways of screwing the system—not because you’re a rebel, but because that’s the only way you get anything. Everyone plays the black market. Everyone looks for how they can get away with minor infractions. It doesn’t matter if you’re a Communist Party official or whoever you are, everyone operates na levo—on the left. And after a certain point, certain instincts get ingrained. Now add to that the professional instincts of people who operate in a very gray area.
“You don’t trust the powers that be—it doesn’t matter who they are or what they are, that’s just the instinct that you’ve got. And therefore you will automatically do everything that you can to be as amorphous, as invisible, as possible. From a legal point of view it means that when push comes to shove, no one can ever really prove you’re anywhere. You can always claim there’s ambiguity.”
Their ghost selves accompany these men through their lives, but often they are only exposed when they crash and suddenly things get binary: definitive identification, established causes, and insurance assessments and payouts that want black or white, alive or dead, name, date of birth, dental records. But sometimes it seems the men have disappeared and the ghosts are all that’s left. I find myself thinking of another crew, friends of Katya’s killed when their Antonov-12 crashed in Uganda in 2005. Even the black-box flight recorder was empty, its layer of magnetic tape having faded to nothing.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Death and Taxes
Entebbe to Ekaterinburg, 2010
THE BREEZE IS PICKING UP, carrying whirls of sand and grass husks on its warm jets. And on the foggy, overgrown hook end of this disused upcountry air base deep in the West African bush, among rusting helicopters and a cement-mixer graveyard, the 250-square-meter iron bird is popping and blinking as it cools down. Night sounds drift in through the plane’s iron skin: motorbikes, wire-mesh gates being clanked, a rifle firing, dogs. Somewhere farther off, a televised football match and the unsettling human-voice-in-distress cries of the night birds wander in and out with the direction of the wind. A fuel truck backs up in the distance, and once or twice another plane crosses the sky.
Inside, the pungent smell of dope is everywhere. Everywhere is full so it’s piss in a tin, crap outside with the little red malaria-carrying mosquitoes sucking you dry, or don’t do either. And there aren’t any showers, but that’s immaterial because I haven’t changed clothing or even taken my shoes off for at least twenty-four hours, and now I’m not sure I want to. No one else has either, as far as I know, with the exception of the late-substitution loadmaster I haven’t met before, a young, even slightly hip, shaven-headed Ukrainian with an iPod, named Alex, defiantly slipping into Jesus creepers whenever he comes “indoors”—something Sergei always used to do. He’s added a dressing gown over his tracksuit bottoms and jumper and looks like a mental patient, grunting and swearing at bulging, tumbling cargo and struggling with canvas straps. Here he is now, bug-eyed, pale, and sweating, on his way past with a bundle of rags, his unplugged headphones dangling loose from his ears.
He points at the towering mass of loose cartons. “I think we can
do it.” Then he licks his lips. “Yes. We can do it.” Seeing my frown, he sticks out his hand. “A hundred dollars?” But neither of us has a hundred dollars.
They say nothing’s certain in life but death and taxes. And with his cash business, at least, Mickey’s got tax pretty well licked. But the older he gets, the more I fear for him. The planes are aging, the loads creeping up and up past even the physics-defying abilities of men like him. Still, spectacular escapes and close shaves always stick in the mind longer than the bodies by the road, and like all of them, Mickey is convinced he’s lucky. Perhaps a part of him has started to believe the myth, I think. That larger-than-life creation, the schizoid comic-book caricature that jumps from the pages of the trafficking reports and the mouths of other bush-jockey pilots is so dazzling—a sort of Bond villain/Scarlet Pimpernel combo—it’s pretty much all that I saw at first, back in Belgrade and wherever else I looked. Until I met Mickey. Then, when the layers come away, you’re left with a bunch of blue-collar guys and the muggy, canvas-packed shadows inside an Ilyushin-76 at night, and things look different. Less glamorous.
Back in London I get a call from my anonymous pilot-informer who’s haunted the hangars of Sharjah with these men and seen them push the make-do-and-mend cult as far as it’ll go—and further. “I’ve been in crews where we didn’t have any contracts for technical support in most places, but still we had no problem,” he shrugs. “When there’s a new wheel change, there’s always a local guy who can change a wheel, and a number of crews have that knack and like sorting their own problems. It’s not for everybody, but if you’re driving a ’61 Ford Escort to work every day and you get a technical problem? Well, you know your way under the hood—you know its workings inside out. After a couple of years, and it’s the same for these airplanes.
