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

by Douglas Farah

  “We are reduced to living like animals!” he yelled, overcome by shame and rage. “Go. You have seen how we live. You will do nothing about it. Now go.”

  As his planes flew tons of guns into the chaos of sub-Saharan Africa, Bout’s network also aided two northern African states that were directly opposed to U.S. interests and often widely considered to be international pariahs—Libya and Sudan. Libya was, at the time, the world’s foremost sponsor of terror. Its enigmatic and megalomaniacal leader, Muammar Gaddafi, was also the chief sponsor of the rebel armies that were being serviced by Bout and ravaging the subcontinent in the name of pan-African unity and liberation. Selected cadres from different nations were hosted at special Libyan training camps at the World Revolutionary Headquarters in the desert. Libyan special forces and secret services trained thousands of potential revolutionaries from Africa, Latin America, and Asia.

  By the 1980s Gaddafi’s headquarters had become “the Harvard and Yale of a whole generation of African revolutionaries.”11 Many of Gaddafi’s star graduates would become loyal Bout customers, and Bout opened several air charter companies there, including one called Cen Sad/Sin Sad, which operated out of Tripoli but was registered in the Bahamas. Western intelligence officials also learned that Bout air crews had begun regularly servicing not only Sin Sad planes but also Gaddafi’s personal fleet. That relationship continued, officials said, at least through early 2000, and perhaps beyond.12

  Sudan, too, was in the grips of a radical Islamic revolution led by the National Islamic Front (NIF). The NIF leadership that took over Sudan in a bloody 1989 coup d’état came from the Muslim Brotherhood, a loosely knit organization that has spawned many of the radical Islamic groups that espouse terrorism, including the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) and al Qaeda. The NIF offered refuge to Osama bin Laden and several hundred of his Islamic combatants in 1991 when they were forced from Afghanistan. In Sudan, bin Laden opened training camps, farms, and businesses, and helped found a bank to stash the money that would later help him carry out a series of terrorist attacks.13

  As early as 1992, Bout used Khartoum as a base to fly weapons to Bosnian Muslim forces in Sarajevo, something he could not have done without connections at the highest level of the regime.14 He continued to use Khartoum as an operational hub for many years, including flying relief flights for humanitarian groups during the Darfur crisis in 2005.

  The regime was not as hospitable to its own people as it was to Bout and bin Laden. Throughout the 1990s, the NIF waged a series of wars against different groups in Sudan in what became a “systematic policy of scorched-earth clearances. Many hundreds of thousands were killed or displaced.”15 Yet Bout was able to open up air transport companies there, transit through the totalitarian state, and move weapons, all indicating a high level of access in one of the world’s most shuttered regimes.

  Bout’s first known commercial excursion to Africa was in 1992, when he flew UN peacekeepers to Somalia. Like much of Bout’s history, the accounts of the origins of his African adventures are vague and contradictory. What is clear is that Bout figured out a lucrative niche in breaking the flimsy UN weapons embargoes that existed almost exclusively on paper. New information that has emerged about Bout’s activities in Africa suggests that his operation was busy at work there in the early 1990s, much earlier than the official timeline constructed by U.S. intelligence agencies—which places Bout’s emergence in Africa at about 1995.

  In his initial African ventures, Bout seemed to concentrate largely on legitimate operations, and much of his early business came from the United Nations and other official groups. In addition to the 1992 flights to Somalia, he flew French troops, WFP food deliveries, and aid workers across the continent. South African records show that he visited South Africa on a work permit in 1992, and twice more on similar visas in 1993, a sign of how strong his interest in that region was from the beginning of his business ventures. 16 But he was also almost immediately looking beyond government and official business.

  Bout was in contact with Liberia’s Charles Taylor in the early 1990s, when Taylor was still fighting in the bush, according to eyewitnesses. When Taylor became Liberia’s president, Bout earned millions of dollars in his business with the former warlord. In November 1992 the United Nations placed an arms embargo on Liberia, seeking to stanch the flow of weapons that inflamed violence there. A year later, a similar ban was imposed on arms deliveries to Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA forces in Angola. Despite the United Nations’ growing international use of arms embargoes to keep the peace in Africa, Bout’s expanding client list soon included a host of African nations and rebel groups that had been targeted by the sanctions.

  In theory, the embargoes were designed to prevent each UN member state from selling arms to the country under the sanction. The measures were the United Nations’ first real attempt at curbing the flow of weapons in the post-Cold War era. But the embargo measures contained several fatal flaws. There were no enforcement mechanisms built into international law, and no police or military forces were issued orders to enforce the embargoes. In effect, the only penalty for breaking the international weapons embargoes was public censure.

  “You’ve had UN members, on the one hand, applauding the imposition of arms embargoes, while on the other hand selling arms to the countries under arms embargoes,” lamented Tom Ofcansky, a State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research analyst who helped track Bout.17 To date only one person in the world has been charged and convicted of violating a UN weapons embargo.18

  Even if the governments of the region had wanted to enforce the embargoes it would have been almost impossible. Much of Africa, especially the central and western regions, had no radar coverage. Semiliterate civil aviation officials often made their livings by collecting landing fees and bribes while keeping virtually no records. Frustrated by arms traffic into Sierra Leone, UN investigators warned in 2000 that aviation “authorities are frequently informed of violations of their airspace by pilots who come across illegal traffic. They are also aware that aircraft operators can operate with impunity in their sphere of sovereignty, without their knowledge.” And African military authorities “do not have the means to intercept such traffic.”19

  There was another inherent weakness in the new world order. Recognizing the need for toughened arms controls after the Cold War, the United States and thirty-two European and former Soviet bloc nations met near The Hague in 1996 and signed the Waasenaar Arrangement, a pact that created a global system for monitoring the flow of arms. But the arrangement depended on the political will of the participants and the severity of their arms laws and tracking systems.

  Under the agreement, nations buying weapons are required to obtain meticulous documents, including transshipment papers known as “end-user certificates” (EUCs), from sellers. The EUCs are designed to ensure that the weapons were legally purchased, delivered for the sole use of a purchasing government, and will not be resold to a third party. All of the signing nations are obligated to report twice a year on all their arms transfers and make their documents available for inspection. But they are easy to forge. There are no standardized forms for the certificates. Some governments type their EUCs on letterhead stationery of the Ministry of Defense. Others are even less formal. Companies or governments selling the weapons have no legal requirement to ensure that a government allegedly purchasing the weapons is, in fact, the actual destination of the cargo—even when the purchases fly in the face of credibility.

  For example, from July 1997 to October 1998, planes flying for Bout’s Air Cess company made thirty-seven flights with weapons from Burgas, the center of Bulgarian weapons production, to the West African nation of Togo, a country smaller than West Virginia and with a population of about 5.6 million. Bout had spent parts of the previous two years visiting different weapons factories in Bulgaria and setting up a network for future shipments. Then he or his clients forged a series of Togolese EUCs and provided the forgeries to a company called KAS
Engineering, based in Gibraltar, an offshore haven. The company names where the weapons would be purchased were real, and the certificates could pass as genuine.

  KAS Engineering, using the forged EUCs and an apparently false affidavit empowering the company’s Sophia, Bulgaria, office to represent the government of Togo, then contracted for the weapons in Bulgaria. Bout’s aircraft would deliver the shipments. “Some of the end-user certificates had been provided to the representative of KAS Engineers (Gibraltar) through the captain of a flight coming from Togo and some by express mail from Dubai, United Arab Emirates,” the UN investigation found. “Further investigations disclosed that the mail was sent by a Mr. Victor Bout.”20

  The routes of the weapons were fairly standard. The planes flew out empty from Ostend, Belgium. They headed for Burgas to load the weapons. Most of the flights then transited through Nairobi, Kenya, and Khartoum, Sudan, listing their final destination as small airstrips in either the DRC or Kenya.21

  On paper the transactions appeared legal, among thousands that are carried out each year. No questions were raised. No one selling the weapons in Bulgaria was required to explain why a peaceful, small African nation, with a tiny military that had relied for forty years on French weapons, suddenly needed to spend $14 million for Soviet bloc weapons, including fifteen million rounds of ammunition; twenty thousand 82-millimeter bombs; or six-three hundred antitank rockets.22

  In reality, the matériel was shipped to UNITA rebels in neighboring Angola and did not stay in Togo except for the bribes, in weapons or in kind, that Togolese officials extracted for their transshipment services. The EUCs had been crudely forged, copied off a document that UNITA had acquired. And the person whose name appeared on the document as authorizing the purchases on behalf of the government of Togo was not in the government when the flights were made. A single telephone call or a quick Internet search would have revealed potential problems with the deal.

  Landing heavy cargo planes with illicit cargoes in wartime conditions required more than individual effort. It took an internationally organized network of individuals, well funded, well connected, and well versed in brokering and logistics. In Africa, the only organization that fit that description was Viktor Bout’s network.23

  In the case of the “Togolese” shipments, no one was ultimately held responsible for the arms trafficking. The company in Burgas fulfilled its legal responsibility by having a certificate on hand, even a forged one. Togolese officials could correctly claim the document was forged. Under those rules, accountability was not possible.

  “When it comes to making real recommendations and heavy-duty commitments to stop this or that, most countries don’t want this practice of middlemen to end,” said Johan Peleman. “They don’t even want to regulate it. They don’t even want to start processing legislation that would enable them to go after this go-between who uses their territory to organize his deals abroad but is nevertheless the brains of the operation, who cannot be caught under current legislation.”24

  The UN arms embargoes were ineffective, but the Security Council’s efforts to track the violators were not. A core group of UN investigators, along with nongovernmental organizations interested in tracking the flow of weapons, set out to slowly and methodically map the weapons trafficking networks. Under the terms of the international embargoes, the United Nations could send panels of experts to different countries to monitor the effectiveness and name violators. The “name and shame” campaign led to the first detailed, public reports on Bout, his aircraft, front companies, partners, and protectors. They received virtually no attention, however, from the Security Council’s superpowers or in the mainstream press. And the lack of an ability to actually punish the alleged offenders soon left a small dose of public embarrassment as the only price one had to pay.

  The UN investigators had few illusions. Peleman recounted how he was mocked by one of Bout’s chief operators during a confrontation. The Bout associate, Pavel Popov, taunted Peleman for being unable to put Bout out of business and even dared him to ground a Bout plane. “They basically laugh about it,” Peleman reflected ruefully after the encounter. “As long as the United Nations takes action, puts experts in the field, and issues reports, and the countries where these individuals are doing their business do not act, then, indeed, few things can be done. Of course, the United Nations is only as powerful as UN member states allow it to be. And the United Nations, as such, cannot arrest people, has no subpoena rights or whatever. It’s up to the individual member states to act.”25

  By 1993, Bout had turned to South Africa as a base of operations on the continent. Although many of his aircraft were already operating out of Sharjah in the UAE, Bout began using Pietersburg Airport, 180 miles northeast of Johannesburg, as a hub from which he could ply his assorted trades. Bout was already flying gladiolas and other flower species out of Africa to the UAE, at a considerable profit. He began flying beef and poultry from South Africa to other African nations. On a continent with little transportation infrastructure, air freight was the only way to move perishable goods any distance, and Bout’s companies soon grew from the original three to several dozen. Aircraft that Bout could acquire for $30,000 would pay for themselves after just two or three flights. If they fell from the sky, cheap replacements were easy to find. If crews became disgruntled, there were always more pilots waiting to be hired. It was a growth industry for the foreseeable future.

  Bout built up enough air capacity to fly twenty-five hundred French troops to Rwanda in 1994 in a futile effort to halt the genocide there. There are persistent but sketchy intelligence reports that Bout also had flown weapons to the Hutu genocidaires to facilitate the killings that the French were later ordered to prevent. But the French were not the only government forces using Bout planes.

  At about the same time, Bout was also supplying the Força Aérea Popular de Angola (FAPA), the Angolan air force. Included among the services Bout was offering, according to one intelligence report, were two parachute teams of forty men each. The teams could have been mercenaries or trainers or both.26 The Angolan government, a longtime Soviet client, was a natural fit for Bout, and a lucrative one. It had the largest Soviet-built air fleet in Africa, one that Bout could provide maintenance facilities for. Given the likelihood of Bout having spent time in Angola in the late 1980s, just a few years before, setting up the new business there did not present any serious difficulties. To handle the business he set up a company called the Air Charter Center (ACC) in Belgium.

  According to Bout’s Interpol arrest warrant, from 1994 to 1999, some $325 million in funds were deposited into the ACC’s Belgian bank accounts. The money came from “the Liberian company Simportex, the Angolan air force and the Angolan armed forces.” The money was then systematically transferred to the Belgian bank accounts of shell companies named Vial and Yuralex Corporation, both registered in Delaware. Bout had the power of attorney over the Vial account. “Various foreign payments were made from these accounts, which were clearly transit accounts,” the warrant says. “There are indications these funds could come from apparently illegal activities (weapons trafficking).”27

  When the Angolan government discovered in 1998 that Bout had been dealing with the UNITA rebels at the same time, they cut him off, becoming one of the few customers to ever sever ties over his double dealings. Bout had discovered that he could more than double his earnings if he supplied UNITA. The movement’s leader, Jonas Savimbi, had flourished as the charismatic anti-Communist leader during the Reagan administration’s efforts to contest the dominance of Marxist revolutionary movements worldwide. Reagan even invited him to the White House, and hailed him as a hero. In June 1985 Savimbi hosted a secret meeting of the world’s “freedom fighters” at his jungle base in Jamba, including representatives of the Nicaraguan contras and the mujahideen of Afghanistan. The meeting was organized by a then little-known Republican operative named Jack Abramoff, whose code name during the meeting was “Pacman.” Twenty years later, A
bramoff, after becoming one of Washington’s most influential lobbyists, was convicted of political influence peddling and corruption.28

  Affectionately known as the “Black Cockerel” by his supporters, Savimbi had the unique distinction of being the only guerrilla leader during the Cold War to be simultaneously supported by the CIA and the People’s Republic of China as he battled against Angola’s Soviet-backed regime. But when the Cold War ended, Savimbi scuttled several peace accords and drove the exhausted nation back to civil war by refusing to accept the results of the 1992 elections that he lost. Even as he lost his international legitimacy, Savimbi retained a wide range of supporters. He had been staunchly supported by South Africa’s apartheid government, and elements of the white-dominated security forces continued to route weapons to Savimbi after they formally lost power in 1994.29

  Mobutu of Zaire, one of Bout’s early clients, was another longtime supporter of Savimbi and UNITA in Angola, and it is likely that Bout made his first UNITA contacts through Mobutu or his henchmen. UNITA maintained offices and a quasi-diplomatic presence in Kinshasa, part of the legacy of the Cold War when both UNITA and Mobutu were staunch U.S. allies and urged to help each other. Mobutu provided EUCs for Savimbi, as well as warehouses to store his weapons. However, by the early 1990s Savimbi was already aware of the increasingly precarious position of his longtime ally and began to take precautions. In 1993 Savimbi sent a special envoy to Togo, hoping to open another avenue for weapons. Savimbi was particularly anxious to obtain another source of the precious EUCs.