Merchant of Death: Money, Guns, Planes, and the Man Who Makes War Possible

by Douglas Farah

  Not even thirty years old when he first drew the attention of intelligence officials in the mid-1990s, Bout, now forty, remains the preeminent figure atop the world’s multibillion-dollar contraband weapons trade, an underground commerce that is outpaced in illicit profits only by global narcotics sales.3 Bout’s corporate earnings have reached easily into the hundreds of millions, and his own personal net worth was conservatively estimated at $5 million in 1998—well before he consolidated his firm’s multimillion-dollar take from the Taliban and his organization’s post-September 11 supply flights for the United States in Iraq. In Afghanistan alone, U.S. Treasury officials and Western intelligence reports claim, Bout’s operation reaped more than $50 million for deals with the extremist mullahs. And hundreds of flights into Iraq for the U.S. military and private contractors may have netted his operations as much as $60 million.4

  Bout and his associates became masters at outsourcing their arms profits. So careful with his investments that he retained finance experts and even a Swiss bank administrator, Bout stands accused by the Belgian government of illegally laundering more than $32.5 million in arms profits through shell holding companies between 1994 and 1996.5 Often he took his payments in diamonds and other commodities stripped from the land in areas controlled by his warlord and tyrant clients. Congolese rebels offered coltan, a mineral ore used to make cell phones and computers. Ahmad Shah Massoud, the late Northern Alliance leader and Afghan defense minister, reportedly paid in emeralds. Charles Taylor in Liberia paid in diamonds, and to ensure that the payments were accurate, Bout hired a gemologist who often flew along on weapons flights to assess the stones.

  New wars meant more money for Bout and for his competitors in the arms trade. But unlike his rivals, he also had an unfettered ability to deliver his goods. His private air force—which grew to more than sixty Russian cargo planes and a handful of American models by the late 1990s—made him the top private supplier and transporter of killing implements in a world addicted to his products.

  Each year over the past decade some three hundred thousand to five hundred thousand people have died in sputtering, little-understood regional wars that have eroded international stability from the Democratic Republic of the Congo to Colombia.6 Most were killed with light weapons, from semiautomatic rifles to easily carried machine guns. The most popular and durable of them all is the Kalashnikov assault rifle, known as the AK-47, manufactured across the former Soviet bloc, as well as in China, North Korea, and elsewhere.

  Invented in 1947 by Mikhail Kalashnikov, the AK-47, with its distinctive banana-shaped ammunition clip, flooded the Third World because of its simplicity of design and ruggedness. It rapidly became the weapon of choice for liberation movements, terrorists, and guerrilla armies. It is simple enough to be taken apart by a child, and often is in Africa’s conflicts. It could take a beating and keep on firing long after most other weapons were inoperable. More than a hundred million of the weapons have been manufactured in the past six decades, nearly ten times as many as its nearest rival, the U.S.-made M-16.7 Ammunition was another vast, lucrative market because most of the armed groups across Africa and Latin America had little training and no fire discipline. Thousands of rounds could be expended in a brief firefight as gunmen fired wildly into the bush until their supplies were exhausted. Similarly, the Russian antitank rocket-propelled grenade known as the RPG or “Ruchnoy Protivotankovy Granatomyot” has flooded the Third World since its invention in 1961. RPGs were skillfully wielded by mujahideen fighters against Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s and by Somali street fighters against U.S. Special Forces in the Black Hawk Down battle in Mogadishu in 1993. This constant, profligate use of Russian-designed weapons and ammunition created a constant demand for resupply.8

  Bout did not take sides in his business. Any and every combatant was a prospective customer. His planes simultaneously armed warring factions in several different conflicts, aiding the Northern Alliance and the Taliban in Afghanistan, rebel and government troops in Angola, and several sides in the prolonged wars that convulsed the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

  “He was friends of everyone,” said one longtime associate. “They tolerated this because they had no alternative. No one else would deliver the packages. You never shoot the postman. He has no loyalty. His loyalty is to his balls, his sweet ass, and maybe his wallet.”9

  Bout has often insisted he is simply a businessman, and he has long expressed bitterness about being targeted as an international criminal, complaining he is a marked man because of his high profile as a successful Russian. “I exclusively deal with air transportation,” he said in 2002 in one of the few interviews he has granted. “And I have never been involved in the arms trade.”

  Indeed, Bout’s aircraft often carry legitimate freight. His planes flew humanitarian supplies to nations ravaged in late 2004 by the devastating Indian Ocean tsunami. And they have hauled UN relief supplies for refugees fleeing the same African conflicts stoked by the guns he sold. Bout-controlled planes have ferried flowers from South Africa to Belgium and shipped beef and chicken around the African continent. Through much of the 1990s, he owned the franchise to sell Antonov aircraft in Africa, and ran one of the few maintenance facilities and aircraft-painting facilities outside of Russia that serviced Soviet-built planes.

  Remarkably, even though many of the weapons shipments flown by Bout’s planes have had lethal and reprehensible consequences, the deliveries were often made legally. He began just as the world economy was entering an era of fast-paced transformation. The laws governing the sales of weapons, designed to deal with country-to-country sales, simply could not keep pace. The result was a vast “gray market” of gunrunning that might violate UN or regional embargoes, but rarely ran afoul of national arms laws. The Bout network’s work with the repressive Taliban did not overtly violate international law—because global arms and trade bans on the militants were enacted too late, and because the world at large remained unaware of his activities until after September 11. Even now, cracks and loopholes in international law often allow the Bout network to continue operating with near-impunity.

  Bout was artful in skirting the edge of laws that were clearly unenforceable. Under existing international law, weapons merchants have few obligations—other than moral compunctions—to ensure that their arms supplies go to a legitimate army or state. And though a growing number of countries have enacted toughened statutes covering brokers and even transporters such as Bout, cargo carriers have little legal obligation to view and authenticate what their containers really hold. Customs officials, too, are rarely obliged to check invoices against real cargo. So the shell games continue around the globe, with few brokers held accountable.

  “Very few countries have the sort of legal instruments to deal with exactly those middlemen or brokers,” said Johan Peleman, a Belgian arms trade expert who investigated Bout’s violations of weapons embargoes for several UN panels. “When it comes to making real recommendations and heavy-duty commitments to stop this, most countries don’t want this practice of middlemen to end. They don’t even want to regulate it.”10

  While often described by casual acquaintances as polite, easygoing, and gifted at picking up languages, Bout did not get by on charm. In business relationships and social situations, he was often fussy in his personal habits, impatient to get to the point, overbearing and aggressive in cultures that prized social niceties and tact. His reputation was built almost entirely on his well-established history of delivering whatever his clients wanted, when they wanted it, and for that, he could be forgiven almost anything else.

  He was brash, at times to the point of bullying, and did not brook criticism well. During Bout’s hopscotch tour with Bemba of rebel strongholds in the Congolese hills, someone made the mistake of mentioning a verse of the Bible, offering an interpretation that seemed to bother the Russian. In front of a crowd of people, Bout suddenly launched into a loud, extended discourse in fluent French, explaining how the vers
e should be taken and how foolish the interpreter was. The startled audience of his impromptu exegesis was stunned into silence. No one dared disagree.

  “He is really intelligent and could talk about anything,” said Dirk Draulans, a Belgian correspondent for Knack magazine who tagged along with Bout and Bemba during their rounds in the Congolese bush. “It was sophisticated small talk, anything from the Bible to free trade zones. However, he is not charming and he does not have humor.”

  Yet at other times Bout waxed lyrical, conjuring up a bleakly haunting vista as he reminisced about his journeys in Afghanistan. “One of the most beautiful landscapes I ever saw was Afghanistan in spring,” Bout rhapsodized. “A third of the country is colored blood red by poppies.” Bout also showed a sociologist’s fascination with tribal patterns in the regions where his guns stoked bloodshed. “He knew all about the historic and current Hutu and Tutsi migrations in the region,” Draulans recalled. “He was a very smart guy. He said he was there as a tourist. That was the big joke. He said maybe some bad things had gone on the airplanes, but you know, he cannot inspect the cargo. But we saw weapons being loaded twice onto VB aircraft.”

  Like a tourist from hell, Bout incessantly videotaped nearly every meeting, every flight, every village and hamlet where he landed. His videotaping habit got him into trouble once on the same African trip, when he wandered away from a political meeting Bemba was holding and began filming a hospital in a nearby town. After Bout was gone about an hour, a local policeman showed up in Bemba’s camp to consult with one of the warlord’s bodyguards. The policeman confided that he had just arrested a white man, who had written his name on the paper, for illegally filming at the local hospital. This white man was being held in the town’s sweltering, fetid prison, angrily demanding immediate freedom. The officer wanted to know what he should do with the prisoner, then showed a scrap of paper bearing the man’s name. It was Bout. Informed in no uncertain terms that his prisoner was an important person and had to be sprung immediately, the policeman, suddenly trembling and sweating, rushed back to the jail to let his VIP inmate out. Time and again Bout’s carefully cultivated friendships with Big Men would save him from unpleasantness.

  “Bout could not have done what he did without the help of princes, kings, and presidents,” said Michael Scheuer, a former CIA counterterrorism analyst who headed Alec station, the agency’s in-house unit that tracked Osama bin Laden in the late 1990s. “It would have been impossible without help from the very highest levels.”

  In Sierra Leone, Bout negotiated weapons deals directly with Sam “Mosquito” Bockarie, a wiry hairdresser-turned-battle-commander notorious for savage combat tactics. Bockarie’s nickname derived from his boasts that he would suck the life out of his enemies. Bockarie’s violent Revolutionary United Front (RUF) forces were sponsored by another Bout client and friend, Charles Taylor, the president of Liberia. Taylor is one of only two sitting heads of government since World War II to be indicted for crimes against humanity and now awaits trial in The Hague on eleven counts, including mass murder and the enslavement of citizens.11 Taylor’s alleged atrocities were legion, but he earned particular condemnation for forming and training Small Boy Units (SBUs), fierce combat units composed of children who were often sent into battle high on amphetamines and cocaine to bear the brunt of the fighting.

  Like Taylor, Bemba of the DRC, who was named one of the country’s vice presidents as part of a fragile 2005 peace accord, was another Bout client who now faces charges of human rights abuses at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. He was a player in the decade-long spasms of war in which tens of thousands died and hundreds of thousands were forced to flee their homes.12

  In Angola, Bout’s planes shipped weapons to government forces and to the União Nactional para a Independência Total de Angola (UNITA) rebels under Jonas Savimbi. UNITA had degenerated from a once-respected rebel movement seeking to overthrow a Marxist regime to a violent force that preyed on civilians. A 1999 report by the U.S. Institute of Peace said that UNITA “has plunged Angola back into a recurring nightmare of war and human rights depredations.”13

  Despite his easy entry into the inner circles of dictators and warlords, Bout was socially awkward and contemptuous of many of the African leaders he dealt with. Conspicuous among his clients, a white man in a black continent, he would walk in on presidents and ministers without waiting to be announced and demand immediate attention, regardless of what his prominent client might be doing. Several complained behind his back of his apparent racism and lack of respect, but few ever dared to confront him to his face.

  Bout’s entitled sense of ease was aided by the constant presence of a security detail of Russians who had served with the special forces of the GRU, the former Soviet Union’s military intelligence apparatus. Heavily armed and well trained, they made sure no one got too close to the boss if Bout did not want to be bothered. The guards generally kept a low profile, though one redheaded security man was conspicuous for the large hunting knife he carried.

  Bout appeared at home roughing it in the bush. When Draulans traveled with him, Bout sometimes chose to pitch a small tent and sleep with his bodyguards next to his aircraft, rather than riding into the villas that Bemba commandeered as his headquarters. Bout dealt with few in the rebel command except Bemba himself, and spent most of his time with his bodyguards and pilots. Most days, Bout would set up his satellite telephone and make a morning round of brief calls, alternating in Russian, English, French, and other languages, usually for about an hour. Mostly he barked orders, juggling several calls in several languages simultaneously if his cellular phone was operational. And he always made sure to hang up after no more than a minute or two—a security precaution to avoid tracing.

  If his precautions bordered at times on paranoia, Bout seemed to hew to at least one unvarying personal code: entrusted cargo had to be delivered. Bout almost always came through. Ironically, his widespread network of weapons suppliers and clients, stretching from Afghanistan to South Africa, enabled him to embrace the capitalist ethic of customer service foreign to his Communist upbringing.

  No effort was spared, not even in the roughest conditions and terrain. American officials who saw the first spy satellite photographs of Bout’s planes in action were astonished by their setting: crude dirt airfields in East Africa. Most of the runways were pocked and rutted to the extent that they posed impassable hazards for most modern air freighters. But Bout’s antique Antonovs, Ilyushins, and Yakovkevs—some of them forty-year-old models— were durable enough to take the punishment. Maintenance facilities were unheard of in the war zones where Bout’s planes flew, so his crews had to be adept at jerry-rigging almost anything. Civil radar coverage on the African continent was severely limited and huge swaths of territory went uncovered, making it virtually impossible to track his old planes as they shuttled into the interior—or hunt them down if they crashed. At least five are known to have crashed or been destroyed by ground fire.14 Several veteran Russian air executives said the actual toll of crashed Bout-owned and Bout-leased planes is even higher, but hidden by his veiled corporate structure and shifting plane registries. There have also been unconfirmed reports of pilot deaths. “They are real kamikaze. There is no better word for it,” said one former Bout partner.15

  The fuselages of Bout’s aircraft were often sheathed in lead, which made them heavier but offered crucial protection against sprayed bullets. In May 1997, Bout’s friend and client Mobutu Sese Seko, president of Zaire, was refusing to face the fact that his despotic rule spanning three decades in that country was finally over. As rebel forces advanced, he had retreated from the capital of Kinshasa to the lavish Gbadolite Palace, a few hundred miles to the north.

  Finally, Mobutu summoned an aircraft to carry him and a cache of plundered loot into exile in friendly Togo, in West Africa. Bout answered the call, sending an aging Antonov to pick up the cancer-ridden dictator and his entourage. But the plane arrived as rebel troops loyal to
Laurent Kabila closed in. Mobutu and his aides hurried aboard as the engines were still running. As the old Antonov lumbered down the runway, Mobutu’s remaining bodyguards, realizing they had been left behind as targets for the rebels, fired a hail of bullets as the aircraft slowly rose from the end of the rutted landing strip. Bullets peppered the aircraft but did not puncture the armored fuselage. Mobutu lived long enough to die four months later in gilded exile in Rabat, Morocco. 16 “We were lucky it was a Russian plane,” Mobutu’s son Nzanga later remarked. “If it had been a Boeing it would have exploded.” 17

  Once, according to an aviation associate of Bout’s, one of his aged Russian planes, scheduled to fly a load of weapons into Angola from South Africa, faced grounding by authorities for safety violations. The plane’s tires were so worn that metal bands were showing through. But rather than delay the flight by waiting for a rushed shipment of new tires, Bout suggested that his crew coat the worn tires in black paint to make them appear new, hiding the telltale silver wire.

  Taking a look, Bout’s agreeable pilot announced that since the Russian plane’s tires typically had twenty-one rubber layers and only seven had worn through, “there was no problem,” recalled the Bout associate. Only the intervention of Bout’s nervous client forced the crew to wait for replacement tires before taking off.