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

by Douglas Farah

  “He did the job, so people came back for more, and he kept delivering, no matter what the circumstances, no matter where he was called on,” said an intelligence official who tracked Bout. “People know that and respect that.”

  Bout may have always delivered, but he never left calling cards. For more than a decade, he shied away from publicity, maintaining a rigid silence with a hermit’s fanaticism. Only when he felt threatened did he reluctantly surface to explain himself.

  His past is “hopelessly mired in obscurity,” said Thomas R. Pickering, who was involved in American efforts to track Bout both during Pickering’s mid-1990s tenure as U.S. ambassador to Moscow and later as undersecretary of state for political affairs in the last three years of the Clinton administration. “That is clearly how Bout wants to keep it.”

  Discretion was of the essence in the arms trade. Too much flamboyance could scuttle a delicate arms deal, or mark a delivery man for capture or death. Customers were happiest when foes were unaware of what lay hidden in their arsenals. The need for caution became even more paramount for Bout when he began playing both sides in some of the conflicts he stoked, arming both the UNITA rebels and government forces in Angola, and later, the Afghan government and their mortal enemies the Taliban. Bout justified his silence by hinting of menacing forces at work behind him. “If I told you everything I’d get the red hole right here,” he said to one interviewer, pointing to the middle of his forehead. 18

  To stay safe, routes had to be varied, schedules staggered, landing zones constantly altered. At the same time, deliveries always had to come in on time and weapons loads shipped as advertised. Keeping the customer satisfied kept one’s reputation solid. Whatever else his customers felt about Bout, they counted on him to come through.

  Bout kept his origins a blur, sparing not a single anecdote from his childhood or recollection of his brief Soviet military career. The first photos passed discreetly to the press were grainy Russian passport snapshots, supposedly taken when Bout was still in his twenties. They showed an unsmiling, prematurely middle-aged man with all traces of youth already extinguished. “It is sort of like Jesus,” said one U.S. official. “He suddenly appears on the scene miraculously, as a full-blown character.”

  The first candid images of Bout emerged in late 2001, taken clandestinely by a Belgian photographer, Wim Van Cappellen, who joined Dirk Draulans on his journeys with Bout in the African bush in 2001. Van Cappellen carefully circumvented Bout’s strict photo ban by surreptitiously capturing the Russian in the corner of his picture frames as he snapped with a wide-angle lens. The photos showed Bout in his element, supervising the off-loading of weapons from one of his battered cargo planes, surrounded by blank-faced rebel soldiers. He was dressed, as he almost always was, in a light polo shirt, khaki pants, with a baseball cap and sunglasses. It was the publication of the photographs, rather than Draulans’ account of Bout’s weapons movements, that prompted a furious call from the Russian to Bemba, bitterly complaining that he had been betrayed. Finally, in 2003, frustrated by mounting press coverage about his work for the Taliban and African warlords, the publicity-averse Bout consented to formal portraits for a New York Times Magazine feature. The photographs showed a pensive, aloof figure who could have walked on as a bourgeoisie villain in a Sergei Eisenstein film in the 1920s—preening in a severely tailored suit, staring defiantly at the camera.

  By appearance, Bout imposed by girth and stolidity. With his fleshy face, drooping brush mustache, and suspicious, flint-eyed stare, he radiated torpid sullenness. He dressed to the nines when necessary, but formal wear only straitjacketed his barrel chest and ample gut and exposed his massive hands. Bout was more relaxed in the bush, with his freshly laundered, nearly identical sets of polo shirts and khakis, affecting the casual look of Internet-age Western entrepreneurs unconcerned about boardroom haberdashery.

  Bout’s leaden appearance, intimates said, masked a resourceful intellect; a winning and persuasive demeanor when necessary; and a cunning, radarlike insight that allowed him to quickly size up any client, rival, or pursuer. In person, Bout was opaque, rarely confiding much, even to those who had dealt with him for years. Acquaintances who admired Bout for his deal-making acumen still left business meetings grasping for insights.

  “How do you describe Bout? He was a man with a big belly and a big mustache,” said one associate. “He was very friendly. He was quiet, he didn’t say a lot. He loved to hunt, to be outdoors. He is hard to describe. He was very smart. He had a real gift for languages. He was always everyone’s friend.”

  Bout was often helpful to others in the aviation industry. “If you needed a plane, he would swap routes and things with you,” said Gary Busch, an arms transporter who worked around Bout for several years in Africa. “He was competitive, but also very cooperative. I have never heard anyone say anything bad about Viktor on a personal level. He was a nice guy.” Sanjivan Ruprah, a Kenyan who worked with Bout in Liberia and the DRC and later tried to broker a multimillion-dollar deal for the U.S. government to use Bout’s services in arming anti-Taliban forces in Afghanistan, said that his erstwhile partner “was always on the move and seemed to be very much in demand in the region.... He had a jovial, intelligent and shrewd personality.”19

  Bout could be winningly generous, as Vladislav Ketov, a globe-trotting Russian cyclist, discovered when he was stranded in the Persian Gulf emirate of Sharjah during a trip around the world. Bout paid for Ketov’s ticket home to Russia, and over the next five years, sent him $50,000 to cover expenses for the cyclist’s journeys and altruistic projects. Eager to respond in kind, Ketov offered to paste the logo of Bout’s main air cargo company, Air Cess, on his bicycle. The publicity-averse Bout declined the offer, telling Ketov: “My company doesn’t need much advertising.”20

  But others described Bout as a hot-tempered control freak who lashed out at his employees. Resentful business rivals and former partners told of a tough, skillful adversary who betrayed at will and discarded old allies without a second thought. “If he had a hobby, it was money,” recalled one of Bout’s first business partners, Alexander Zakharovich Sidorenko, an aviation executive and decorated former Soviet paratrooper known for daredevil parachute feats. “He was ready to con and stiff even his best friends for a profit. I still don’t understand it. It was as if he was walking on the edge of the knife all the time.”21

  After severing relations with Bout in 1994, another former partner, Sergei Mankhayev, said he “watched him grow richer and richer, and it is quite obvious how he did it. I am not sure he has ever done a fair, honest and legal contract in his life. Deception was his strongest point, beginning with the authorities and ending with his partners and even friends. He would cheat on you at the first opportunity.”22

  Bout clearly enjoyed the spoils of his aviation empire, acquiring Mercedeses and Range Rovers and building a far-flung real estate portfolio that included high-priced apartments in Moscow and St. Petersburg and gated estates on the Belgian coast, in Johannesburg, and in a secluded enclave in Sharjah.23 Even in Monrovia, the hapless Liberian city that had the sad distinction of being the only capital in the world devoid of lights, water, and garbage service, Bout was granted the use of a plush villa near the Hotel Africa with a private generator and water supply.

  His pilots alternately praised and despised him. For new hires and freelancers, wages were decent: $5,000 to $10,000 a month. But they hardly made up for planes that one air executive described as “flying coffins.” Bout rented apartments in Africa for the crews during their extended stays, or negotiated to make sure they could stay in safe compounds. He kept an entire floor of the Meridien Hotel in Kigali, Rwanda, available year-round for himself and his crews. “He would take good care of his pilots,” insisted Vladimir Sharpatov, a star aviator who flew for Bout through the late 1990s. “Once, after we delivered 34 tons of Afghan money [printed by the Russian government] to Kabul, he even invited the whole crew to a Russian restaurant in Sharjah. I remember
him as a considerate and kind person and I cannot say anything bad about him.”24

  Bout also had grudging admirers within Sharjah’s cutthroat expatriate community of Russian air entrepreneurs, pilots, crewmen, and mechanics. “Viktor was very professional and he had a very professional staff, too,” said former partner Igor Abdayev, general manager of Jet Line, Inc., which operated in concert with Bout’s network. “But he sometimes tended to get carried away in his business operations. He got involved in those bad contracts in Africa and that in the end ruined his business reputation.”25

  Though willing to banter when necessary with his clients, Bout often seemed to be uncomfortable in large social settings. He had a dark, fatalistic sense of humor, veined with an ominous strain of menace. Draulans recalled how Bout “told the story of how a Belgian guy named Olivier Piret, one of his financial people, had come to visit him in South Africa. He came with his fiancée. On their way to Bout’s house they were robbed. The thief threatened to cut off the girl’s finger to get off the diamond ring. Viktor thought that was funny as hell. He laughed and laughed.” Bout, Draulans sensed, was “vulgar, low-class and always overwhelming in conversation.”

  In the few interviews he has given over the years, Bout carefully sidestepped penetrating questions about his own activities. He complained perpetually of being targeted by enemies because he is Russian. When asked about his career in the arms trade, Bout usually responded with the well-rehearsed evasion that he was only in the air transport business and had no obligation to know what his cargo was.

  “When a client orders a certain kind of transport and pays the lease per hour, what is transported and how it is transported is regulated not by the owner of the transport but by that organization or person who undertakes to organize the transportation,” Bout said in a 2002 interview after he was named by the international police organization Interpol in a “red notice” warrant requesting his immediate arrest. “You see, it looks as if an airplane can take off by itself and fly somewhere. But what about somebody’s decision to load it? A plane isn’t parked in an open field. There are authorities, there are customs, security controls.”26

  Viktor’s older brother, Sergei Bout, who has long worked at Bout’s side as a detail man, sounding board, and the one person he trusts without hesitation, put it more succinctly during a terse exchange the same year: “Imagine a taxi driver who is supposed to give a lift to a customer who asks him to take him to a certain location. But suddenly this taxi driver asks the customer what is in your suitcase. It is not my bloody business what my customer has in his trunk. I am a taxi driver, I am a carrier. I don’t know what I carry. Maybe I carry a nuclear bomb. No one is informing me about it.”27

  CHAPTER 2

  Planes, Guns, and Money

  What little is known about Viktor Bout’s early years has emerged from his own clenched narrative and from the scavenged leavings of a hidden life. Intelligence agencies have tracked him with spy satellites and electronic intercepts, scoured his bank records, and charted his network’s hierarchy for more than a decade. Shreds of personal history have been lifted from passports, from Soviet school and military documents, and from the few Russian colleagues willing to talk.

  According to official Soviet and Russian records acquired by Western intelligence, Viktor Anatolijevitch Bout was born on January 13, 1967. The most official of the array of Russian passports Bout has used on his travels pinpoints his birthplace in the faded Soviet outpost of Dushanbe, Tajikistan, a Central Asian capital hemmed in by mountains and sunken in rural poverty. Bout claimed an alternate birthplace during a 2002 radio interview in Moscow, saying he was born near the Caspian Sea in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, a provincial capital near the Iranian border racked by heat and dust storms. He said his father was an auto mechanic and his mother a bookkeeper.1 A South African intelligence report from 2001 lists him as Ukrainian, and his mother is said to have German ancestry. His Interpol arrest warrant says he may have been born in Smolensk.2

  Bout has acknowledged graduating from Moscow’s Military Institute of Foreign Languages in the late 1980s and then earning a degree in economics from the Russian military college. According to intelligence documents, he attended school 47 in Dushanbe between 1974 and 1984, and took a sociology degree in intercultural communications before attending the foreign languages institute from 1987 through 1991.3 He served in a military aviation regiment, including a two-year stint in Mozambique, most likely his introduction to Africa.

  For years, journalists and Western officials speculated openly that Bout had a KGB background, whispers he strenuously denied. Some reports suggested that one or both of his parents were senior Soviet intelligence agents. His mother wept, Bout complained, after she read the KGB allegations in a newspaper. Other reports raised the possibility that Bout’s wife, Alla, who reportedly ran fashion studios in Johannesburg and Sharjah, and also may have run one of Bout’s travel agencies, was the daughter of a senior KGB official who met an untimely and suspicious death. Bout angrily denied all the talk, saying he “never served in the KGB or any other organization linked to the KGB.”4

  In fact, the Moscow foreign languages institute where Bout first emerged in the dying Soviet star system was well known among Western intelligence experts as a feeder academy for the Soviet espionage services, and Bout was a prize student. He speaks almost perfect English, as well as nearly flawless French and fluent Spanish. During his time in Africa he claimed to have learned several more, including Xhosa and Zulu in South Africa. Other reports suggested he had a familiarity with German, Portuguese, Farsi, and Urdu.5 Bout’s “big advantage” in starting out in the air transport industry, said Sidorenko, his former partner, “was that he spoke several foreign languages: Portuguese, English, German. It seemed to me like a great asset at the time. It was very important in our business.”6

  The language school, said Western defense analysts, was in fact most closely allied with the GRU, the vast, secretive Soviet military intelligence network that for decades oversaw the flow of Russian arms to revolutionary movements and Communist client states in the Third World. “Language training was usually a pretty good tip-off to a GRU officer,” said Graham H. Turbiville Jr., former chief of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency’s Soviet/Warsaw Pact Strategic Operations Branch. “These GRU guys had privileges that weren’t available to the normal Russian military. And they had the know-how and the flexibility and the assignments to reach beyond their borders.” British intelligence concluded early on during their investigations of Bout’s background that he emerged from the GRU. “They never had any doubt that Bout was GRU material,” said an analyst who has worked with British intelligence.7

  Bout has acknowledged his stint in the Soviet military, saying only that he retired “with an officer’s rank.”8 Other reports have identified him as a former major. Dirk Draulans, the Belgian journalist who traveled with Bout in Africa, reported that the Russian began his military career as a navigator at a Russian air base near Vitebsk in Belarus, and later trained air force commandos there for the GRU.9 Early British and South African intelligence reports said that Bout was stationed in Rome by the KGB from 1985 to 1989, but U.S. officials now say that was unlikely. A more reliable account by UN officials placed him as a translator for Russian peacekeepers in Angola in the late 1980s. Sidorenko affirmed his Angola posting. “Bout was a trade representative in Luanda,” Sidorenko said. “His friend was chief of the Russian submarine base in Angola. They had lots of business connections in this country and when the Soviet Union broke up they chose not to return to their homeland, but stay and do business in Africa.”10

  Russian intelligence services, particularly GRU agents, maintained a strong presence in Angola for years, using their embassy and outposts there to keep up contacts with rebel movements and to serve as a bridgehead for moving arms throughout the region, said the British intelligence analyst. “Bout was stepping into existing relationships,” the analyst said. “He didn’t simply show up and say,
‘I’m some Russian you never heard of, let’s do some business.’ He was the new face of the old pipeline.”11

  Former CIA analyst Michael Scheuer said Bout’s contacts and protection by the former Soviet military “were a given” in the CIA’s analysis of Bout’s activities. There was no other way he could have an organization mushrooming over several continents and maintain the far-flung empire, Scheuer said.

  When Bout struck out on his own in 1991, the year of the final death throes of the Soviet state, he was able to take swift advantage of the convergence of several fortuitous economic and political factors that came to the fore as the USSR disintegrated. The most critical factor for his future as an air transport magnate was that the bloated Soviet aviation fleet was suddenly on life support, and its massive assets—its planes—were up for grabs. Thousands of pilots and crewmen were suddenly unemployed. Funding for maintenance and fuel had evaporated. Hundreds of lumbering old Antonov and Ilyushin cargo planes sat abandoned at airports and military bases from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok, their tires frayed and their worn frames patched with sheet metal and duct tape.

  “The entire Soviet civil air system collapsed,” recalled Thomas Pickering, who served as U.S. ambassador to Moscow from 1993 to 1997. Pickering saw the detritus of the Soviet commercial fleet at close range whenever he flew into the Russian interior. From the door of his aircraft, the ambassador viewed aged cargo planes sitting stranded and idle—the perfect transports for hustlers eager to move contraband. “Everywhere you’d fly, you’d see these parked airplanes, always with flat tires, just sitting there, useless,” he said.