In 1996 Bout moved his aircraft registrations to Liberia. A UN panel investigating his activities later discovered why: just as Liberia had long been a haven for the maritime industry’s most hazardous and unregulated ships, the African nation also had become a flag of convenience for the fringe air cargo industry. A company incorporated in Liberia could locate its executive offices in another country and conduct business activities anywhere in the world. Names of corporate officers or shareholders did not need to be transparent, there was no minimum capital requirement, and incorporation could be accomplished in one day. Businessmen in several countries competed with each other to attract customers for these offshore registrations. The system led to a total disregard for aviation safety and a lack of oversight of Liberian-registered planes operating on a global scale.32
From 1996 through 1998, Bout associates Michael Harridine and Ronald De Smet conducted business in the United Kingdom on behalf of the Liberian Aircraft Register. This presented no logistical problems, since the aircraft did not need to be physically present to receive certificates of airworthiness that allowed them to make international flights.33 Other countries offered similar systems of registration without accountability, and when UN officials and others began focusing on Liberia, Bout was already shifting his plane registries elsewhere—Swaziland, the Central African Republic, and Equatorial Guinea among the most notable.
As his aviation operation grew, Bout heeded the first rule of the air transport industry: never fly empty. Like Milo Minderbinder, the cheerily infernal war profiteer in Joseph Heller’s World War II novel Catch-22, who filled returning bomber planes with shipments of fresh eggs and Egyptian cotton, Bout often scheduled lucrative cargo pickups wherever his planes dropped off weapons shipments. The practice ensured that his Russian freighters always carried a moneymaking load when they were airborne. If an Ilyushin Il-76 was bringing helicopter gunship parts into Goma, it might leave with a consignment of coltan, mining equipment, or blood diamonds. On a run of Kalashnikovs and MiG fighter jet tires into Kandahar, a load of lumber or carpets might be waiting for a flight out. RPGs or gladiolas, diamonds or frozen chickens, it made little difference as long as there was a profit to be made from one destination to the next.
In that manner, Bout’s air fleet flew the world in endless circuits. In the mid-1990s his Antonovs and Ilyushins would often fly out with empty cargo holds from Ostend Airport in Belgium. They would head for Burgas, a free-trade zone in Bulgaria conveniently near several arms factories, or any number of other East European airports where weapons consignments were loaded aboard. From there, Bout’s options were almost limitless. His planes might fly on to Sharjah, where the weapons shipments could be stored for later flights, transferred to other planes, or flown on, after refueling, toward night landing zones in Afghanistan. Alternately, the planes could fly south into Africa, taxiing down with crates of weaponry at Kigali Airport in Rwanda, at Kisangane, in Zaire, or on scores of landing strips hidden in African forests and hills. From there, the planes would rumble back toward Sharjah or other friendly airports. Sometimes their cargo holds brimmed with ordinary shipments of refrigerators and appliances bound for Afghan merchants. But more often the cargoes were spoils that warlords and dictators preferred to turn over to Bout’s crews as payments for their weapons deliveries—blood diamonds, coltan, gold, any natural resource that Bout’s network would then convert to cash. Eventually the planes would return to Sharjah or Ostend, poised for their next circuit.
Bout has said that his business took off exponentially in 1993 when he began flying his aircraft out of the UAE, overrun at the time by nouveau riche Russian vacationers and business hustlers. The bustling emirate of Dubai offered duty-free shopping and a wealth of Western products still unseen in Russia itself—the latest models of satellite telephones, televisions, stereos, refrigerators, and a heady array of American and Japanese cars. Bout saw the opportunity to increase his wealth by servicing his countrymen in their gallop toward once-decadent conspicuous consumption. He was welcomed in Dubai’s poorer neighbor, the emirate Sharjah, where airport officials eagerly sought to attract new cargo firms to increase business.
Bout’s Russian customers “bought everything from pencils to cars to electronics to IKEA furniture,” the Russian recalled. “I saw a gap in the transportation market and flew it all back for a premium.” When Bout discovered he could buy gladiolas in South Africa for $2 apiece and sell them for $100 apiece in Dubai, his business really took off. “Twenty tons per flight,” said Chichakli, who met Bout in Dubai while Chichakli headed Sharjah’s growing free-trade zone near the airport. “It was better than printing money.” Bout said his idea was to “create a network of companies in Central Africa, Southern Africa and the Emirates. I wanted to make a cargo and passenger airline like Virgin Atlantic.”34
By the late 1990s, at the height of his fortunes, Bout’s network was mixing arms flights and standard cargo deliveries at will. In South Africa, where his planes found a new base in 1997, Bout built an expensive refrigeration unit at Pietersburg Airport to chill the massive quantities of frozen chicken and meat he shipped across the continent. Chickens cost about $1 in South Africa, but they sold for $10 in Nigeria.35
The Bout organization made a tidy fortune off the legitimate business deals. And the steep profits reaped on the return flights allowed the expansion of its weapons operation. Figuring out how to load up empty aircraft with profitable goods “is where Bout showed his entrepreneurial spirit,” said Gary Busch, an arms transporter who worked around Bout for several years in Africa, often supplying weapons to the armies who were fighting rebel groups armed by Bout. “He grew as demand grew.”36
He also expanded by playing hardball with rivals in the air cargo business, and sometimes with his own partners. Alexander Sidorenko, the general director of the Russian aviation firm Exparc Air, took Bout on as a partner in 1991 and quickly found himself being deftly outmaneuvered by the novice businessman. Bout repeatedly struck deals with other firms for services while leaving Sidorenko with the bills. In one incident, Sidorenko laid plans with Bout to export Russian army airborne parachutes and platforms—only to discover that Bout had cut a deal on his own on the side, selling the equipment on his own for a much greater profit. “When he made these deals in my presence he chose to speak a foreign tongue and I couldn’t follow it,” Sidorenko recalled. “So he took these paratroops platforms for $200 (apiece) from me and sold them for $2,000 each—and he sold about 1,000 of them. I learned the real facts too late.”
The last straw, Sidorenko said, came when one of Bout’s henchmen entered his office and demanded the use of one of his jumbo Ilyushin Il-76 freighters for two months for flights into Afghanistan, Yemen, and Africa. “You can take a vacation in the emirates. Here is your down payment,” Bout’s associate told him, pointing to a briefcase filled with cash. “I didn’t open the case,” Sidorenko recalled. “I told him to get out. That was the end of my cooperation with Bout.” But it was not over. For months afterward, an enraged Sidorenko discovered, Bout’s planes made “about 200 flights using my company’s name, stamp and even [aviation] call signs.”
Finally, in 1998, Sidorenko confronted Bout face to face in a shopping mall in Dubai. “He looked me in the eye and said that he hadn’t done anything wrong,” Sidorenko recalled. “I wanted to say a lot of things to Bout there and then, but a mall in Dubai is not a place you make a public scene.”37
CHAPTER 3
A Dangerous Business
Viktor Bout’s entry into the air transport business brought early success in the unlikeliest of places—in Afghanistan, the war-torn nation abandoned at the close of the Cold War by demoralized Soviet forces retreating from a punishing decade of occupation and war.
In 1992, Bout’s small fleet of Antonovs began flying east toward Central Asia carrying military-green crates packed with Kalashnikovs, machine-gun rounds, and rockets. The munitions were destined for a fragile Afghan coalition government that had just
seized power after the collapse of the Communist puppet regime left defenseless by the Soviet withdrawal.1 Bout’s aggressive push into Afghanistan filled a weapons procurement vacuum left by the vanished Soviet overlords, and he built on his rapid success by expanding elsewhere in the Islamic world. Bout’s associates were soon covertly supplying Bosnian Muslim fighters in the Balkans. And he began stationing his cargo planes in the obscure Persian Gulf emirate of Sharjah, a centrally located air hub where his fleet could easily ply its circuitous routes among Africa, Europe, and Asia—and where a wave of hustling émigré Russian merchants had discovered tidy profits in the offing.
The arrival of Bout’s planes restored a modest Russian presence inside Afghanistan just as the country took its first shaky steps toward a coalition government. Following months of skirmishes that threatened civil war, a new administration had coalesced around Burhanuddin Rabbani, a white-bearded Islamic academic and mujahideen leader who had formed the ruling Afghan Islamic Council. Ahmad Shah Massoud, the battle-tested warlord and poet known as the “Lion of the Panjshir,” joined Rabbani as defense minister. Massoud would later oppose the Taliban as commander of the Northern Alliance resistance forces before his assassination by al Qaeda henchmen in September 2001.
During his stint as defense minister, Massoud promoted Bout as a miracle man who could replenish the regime’s depleted weapons stocks. Bout, in return, openly admired his new clients. “Rabbani and Massoud were the only hope” for Afghanistan, Bout said later. “I had a major pact with the Rabbani government. We sustained them.”2 Massoud may well have bankrolled some of Bout’s initial plane purchases, a Bout associate said, “paying in emeralds and other things.” At first Bout “was delivering packages. Some were weapons. He was like DHL. You pay up front, you give the destination, and he would deliver.”3
Massoud and Bout shared a love of hunting and weaponry, and met often in Afghanistan. Bout admired Massoud as a host, both for his fine table and his magnanimous entertainment of guests—especially visitors who kept him well supplied in weapons. The Bout associate, who occasionally joined the Russian and Massoud on hunting trips in the high, rugged Pamir Mountains that straddle Central Asia, said that the Afghan’s favorite entertainment was flying in his guests by aging Soviet helicopters to hunt Marco Polo sheep, a big-game trophy prized for their exquisite horns.
“Sometimes people would shoot at the helicopter, and it was okay to shoot back at them,” Bout’s associate said with a laugh. “No one cared. Massoud was very nice, a great host. Because of that I gave him my favorite hunting rifle, one with a special electronic scope. He kept looking at it when we were at dinner. He had a great kitchen, too, let me tell you. The food was fantastic. He gave us permission to hunt in his side of the Pamir. He gave us guides and everything.”
The Northern Alliance leader delegated the logistics of his arms resupply needs to his weapons procurer, Abdul Latif, who was ordered to find a new weapons connection days after Northern Alliance troops swept into Kabul in April 1992. Soon Latif was flying to the UAE and to Eastern European capitals to cinch the details of the arms deals with Bout and his assistants. Latif, a wily political operator whom Massoud later cashiered amid allegations of corruption, boasted that “I was the person contacted between our government and Mr. Bout.” Latif traveled with suitcases stuffed with cash. He would hand over the money to Bout in Dubai, and in return the Russian would “provide transport of these [arms] shipments,” Latif recalled.4 Bout’s planes brought rifles, shells, and tank ammunition from Prague and from the Bulgarian arms depot near the free-trade zone at Burgas, said Ahmet Muslem Hayat, a longtime Massoud aide known as “Commander Muslem.” But despite his private warmth toward Bout, Massoud chafed at the high prices the Russian demanded for his services. Massoud scorned his provider as “Russian Mafia,” a term Hayat echoed years later. “Bout charged a lot,” Hayat grumbled. “One tank shell was $60. From Russia, officially, it was $10.” 5
The Russian government was not selling weapons to Afghanistan in the early 1990s—at least not officially. Under its new president, Boris Yeltsin, the Russian Foreign Ministry preferred distance to engagement. Relations between the two nations remained cool, strained at times by outbreaks of ethnic unrest along the borders between Afghanistan and the Central Asian buffer states of Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan. In 1993 the Russians sent twenty-five thousand troops into Tajikistan to stabilize the country after a brief, violent civil war. Moscow suspected the Afghan government of aiding Tajik insurgents, and the two nations traded threats after rebels destroyed a Russian military outpost. In such a tense atmosphere, Bout’s planes had to operate clandestinely. Afghanistan had been Russia’s Vietnam, and bitter memories back home about the loss of fourteen thousand Soviet soldiers ensured that Bout’s crews took care not to draw attention to their covert arms flights.6
Vladimir Sharpatov, a decorated former Soviet Air Force pilot, flew many arms sorties for Bout into Afghanistan during the mid-1990s. Sharpatov, a crusty veteran airman who had worked off and on for Bout for years, first met Bout “at a hotel in Sharjah where we used to stay. He impressed me as a calm, reserved and soft-spoken man, who at the same time knew what he was talking about.” During the years he worked for Bout, Sharpatov said, “we never had any conflicts.” Sharpatov took his orders from both Bout and his brother Sergei. He found Viktor “a bit tougher than Sergei; he has got more grit.”7
When Sharpatov joined Bout’s Transavia air firm, the Russian’s fleet in the UAE consisted mostly of smallish Antonov An-8s known as “Camps.” The twin-engine, propeller-driven aircraft, built in the 1960s, were useful only for medium-range transport and limited to carrying an eighteen-ton payload, adequate for ferrying smaller munitions. But by 1995, Transavia had begun to field a leviathan Ilyushin Il-76 capable of long-range flights and hauling a forty-four-ton payload. The plane was not Bout’s. It had been leased from Aerostan, a Russian-owned firm in Tatarstan. The bulbous-nose, swept-wing “Candid” could easily lift tanks, heavy artillery, and disassembled helicopter parts as well as monstrous loads of guns and munitions.8 Sharpatov’s skill quickly won him a slot as the Candid’s pilot. He and his crew “worked on the best plane in the entire company,” he bragged.
In 1994 and 1995 Sharpatov piloted the Candid on a series of arms runs between Kabul and Tirana, Albania. The Il-76 would pick up its crated payloads in Tirana, usually a vast tonnage of “submachine gun and assault rifle rounds.” As a military veteran, he was familiar with the oblong, military-green crates. “I had carried munitions and matériel before and when the soldiers in Tirana loaded those green boxes on board our plane, I knew exactly what was in those boxes.” When he returned to Sharjah, Sharpatov also knew not to ask Bout prying questions. “I knew that it was not something illegal,” he said. “Nor was I nervous—I had done such things before.”9
The flights were usually uneventful except for a brief stretch when the Ilyushin neared the city of Kandahar, controlled by the fanatic Taliban. The Talibs patrolled the airspace around Kandahar with a single MiG-21 jet interceptor. But as long as Sharpatov kept the Candid at a safe distance, he had no problem reaching Kabul and dropping off his arms payload. When he returned to Transavia’s headquarters in the dune-swept emirate, Sharpatov could relax at the airport hotel where Bout’s crewmen and fellow Russian émigrés often met and drank.
Afghanistan was not the only place where Bout developed close ties to Islamic groups that only a few years earlier would have been considered enemies of the Soviet state. In 1992, soon after he went into business, NATO intelligence officials uncovered Bout’s involvement in the intractable conflicts spawned by the breakup of the former Soviet bloc.
The first of these new wars centered in Bosnia and Herzegovina, one of six Balkan republics that emerged from the disintegration of the former Communist nation of Yugoslavia. Serbs living in the new Bosnian state feared minority status and opposed its independence, preferring that the region remain attached to Serbia. Bosnia’s
Muslims, backed by Croatia in a sporadic alliance of convenience, strongly supported independence. As the European Community announced recognition of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina in April 1992, one of the most brutal European conflicts since World War II erupted, with the Belgrade-aided Bosnian Serbs on one side and Bosnian Muslims and Croats on the other.10
In an effort to keep the bloodshed from escalating, the United Nations imposed its first post-Cold War arms embargo on all sides. Bout, setting the template that he would follow in coming years, cut his teeth in his new capitalist incarnation by violating the sanctions.
The embargo gave a de facto advantage to the Serbs, who were better positioned to smuggle in the weapons necessary to attack the new state. Muslims in Bosnia had no standing army or stores of munitions to fight back. A brutal Serb campaign of “ethnic cleansing” sparked a wave of international sympathy for the beleaguered Muslim population. The United States and most of Europe paid lip service to the arms embargo, but were more than willing to turn a blind eye to weapons funneling into Bosnia.
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