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

by Douglas Farah

  The routes into Afghanistan varied. Some flights went directly from Sharjah into Afghanistan, either to the main airport in Kabul, the Bagram air base near the Afghan capital, or the Taliban’s favored airport in Kandahar. When weapons were shipped, Russian air executives said, the planes’ cargo holds would have been loaded in Eastern bloc transshipment points before transiting in Sharjah. Other flights came southeast from the Pietersburg airport, in South Africa, and some reportedly arrived from convenient neighboring airfields in Central Asia. British intelligence officials also detected a pattern of flights through Islamabad, where Sergei Bout operated a Pakistani branch of Air Cess.44

  At the same time, the Taliban’s new Antonovs, acquired from Bout and Sheikh al Nahyan, were also pressed into service. Under orders from Taliban officials, the freighters under Afghan air force control were given false commercial registrations as Ariana planes. The use of spurious civilian registrations instead of the standard military designation was vital to the planes’ ability to fly international routes. Iranian ground air controllers monitoring the planes’ flight paths would not challenge their routes if they were assumed to be civilian planes. “If it was [known to be] air force, it could not overfly Iran or Pakistan,” an Afghan government official explained in 2002, adding that each military overflight would have required permission from the Iranian foreign ministry—as well as UAE approval for each Sharjah landing. The Afghan officials had no choice but to comply with the false registrations. Several colleagues had been hustled off by the Taliban’s secret police and held for months in Kabul prisons. “From the legal point of view we should not have done it, but what could you do? The minister [Mansour] ordered it, and we had no choice.”45

  To ensure that the new air force Antonovs were treated as Ariana planes on their covert arms flights, Taliban officials also ordered at least four of their planes disguised in the civilian airline’s distinctive blue and white colors. “I understood that if it did not go under the color of Ariana, maybe Sharjah airport would [insist on] special permission,” an Afghan official recalled. U.S. intelligence officials later surmised that Bout’s large avionics operation in Sharjah may have played a role in repainting the aircraft. One official cast doubt on the Taliban air force’s ability to properly disguise the Antonovs, saying they lacked adequate painting skills, experience, and tools to complete the task without threatening the planes’ wing weight and aerodynamics. Bout’s avionics crews, on the other hand, performed “a tremendous amount of painting work at Sharjah and Ras al-Khaymah. Bout’s avionics shop had been certified by the Russian-based Antonov plane manufacturing company and was the premier service agency for Antonovs throughout Africa, Asia, and the Mideast. “It’s a huge part of their business,” the official said. “They’re just about the only operation in the Mideast that would know how to properly repaint an Antonov.”46

  False Ariana identification cards were also printed for Taliban air force pilots who were assigned to fly the new Antonovs, posing as Ariana crewmen. Copies of fake IDs for at least four Taliban pilots ended up attached to several of the civilian Antonov registries. 47 Even the planes’ bills of lading—mandatory cargo lists—were often altered to describe the military cargoes as “spare parts.” Sometimes even that flimsy pretense was dropped. An October 23, 1998, waybill for an Ariana flight to Kabul cited “aircraft parts” for the Taliban air force—a shipment that originated with a now-defunct firm in Gaithersburg, Maryland.

  U.S. and Western intelligence officials were never able to confirm the precise methods used by the Ariana planes and Bout’s charters in moving weapons and other supplies into Afghanistan in the late 1990s. But American and Afghan officials and Russian aviation veterans said the hectic schedules of Bout planes provided enough information to detect likely patterns. The aircraft often flew at night, arriving in Sharjah and then flying out again under cover of darkness. The Antonovs would land briefly in Sharjah in the early morning hours for refueling and maintenance stops that Sergei Mankhayev described as a “so-called technical stopover” before heading for Afghanistan. Confiding an insider’s view of an arms transporter’s typical arrangements, Mankhayev said that “an airport station manager in Sharjah would of course come on board for inspection but all he would do is look at the papers, which would state that the cargo is TVs and spare parts. And he would leave without poking into it.” Bout’s planes had made similar stopovers during his early 1990s’ arms shipments to the Rabbani government, Mankhayev said. “During the daytime, you could not see Ariana Antonovs landing in Sharjah. I never saw them then. They did it quietly, during the night.48

  Russian air veterans theorized that in the case of Ariana planes, military cargo shipments were likely either transferred from the holds of other planes transiting in Sharjah, or from warehouses where arms had been stored from other flights or even from incoming deliveries dropped off by dhows plying the Persian Gulf. During a tour of Ariana’s warehouse at the Sharjah airport in 1997, the former Ariana executive saw several massive military aircraft engines waiting for airlift to Afghanistan.49 The planes would return to Afghanistan, landing again in darkness after each three-hour flight to disgorge new shipments of arms and ammunition at airfields in Kabul, Bagram, and Kandahar. Sometimes the planes were routed to Islamabad or Karachi, where they were loaded with heavy Pakistani matériel before returning to the Afghan airfields.

  An Afghan air force brigadier who served for a brief period with the Taliban’s air force was often among the military officials who waited for the weapons flights to arrive at the airport in Kabul. He sometimes supervised crews of soldiers hefting the familiar green crates. The official, who was later sacked by the Taliban during one of their purges, watched night after night as military crews removed crates of Kalashnikovs and aerial bombs, BM-12 and BM-40 heavy artillery pieces, and Russian-made Hurrigan (Hurricane) rocket batteries. “They were off-loaded in Kabul and then put on regular [An-32] military planes to go directly to Kandahar or to Konduz or Mazar, or wherever,” the brigadier recalled in April 2002 during a tour of the Afghan air force’s runways at the Kabul airport. The Antonovs also made passenger runs into Pakistan, he said, returning two or three times a night to ferry squads of Arab, Afghan, and Pakistani jihad warriors to the front lines, where they were needed to reinforce combat operations against the Northern Alliance. The cargo planes carried as many as a thousand Taliban loyalists over the course of several hours, the brigadier recalled.

  “Nighttime flights,” the Afghan officer recalled tersely. “It was special aircraft and it was secret.”50

  CHAPTER 8

  Black Charters

  In the summer of 1998, Jakkie Potgeiter, a security specialist with SaferAfrica, a South African human rights group, began tracing a batch of Air Cess flights from Pietersburg Gateway Airport to Mauritius. Concerned that Bout’s cargo airline was being used to arm UNITA rebels in the southern Congo in their twenty-five-year fight against Angolan forces, Potgeiter contacted Mauritian authorities, who informed him that some of the Air Cess flights were flying on from Mauritius to Islamabad. Curious, he obtained flight records from Pakistani aviation authorities for the Islamabad portions of the flights.

  Potgeiter was baffled by the Indian Ocean route taken by one Air Cess plane, EL-RDK, an Antonov An-12, that had left Pietersburg on May 23. Oddly, the plane’s tail number, he learned, matched the registry of an old An-8 that had crashed years earlier. Potgeiter grew even more suspicious when he discovered that the Antonov had not landed as scheduled in Islamabad. He tried Air Cess’s South African handling agents, who refused to divulge more about the plane’s activities or what the Antonov listed on its cargo manifests. “We couldn’t find any records that the plane actually landed there,” Potgeiter recalled. “It seemed that it never showed up in Islamabad. Or if it did, they had no information showing that it had.”

  Finally, reaching out to his informal network of relief agency contacts in Central Asia to see what they could find out, Potgeiter stumbled onto
one of Bout’s arms routes into Afghanistan. A relief worker based in Kandahar relayed the news that the Air Cess Antonov had been spotted at the airport in the Taliban stronghold during the same period it had been scheduled to land in Islamabad. “The guy had no idea what it was unloading there,” Potgeiter recalled in 2002. Unaware that Bout’s planes were systematically helping the Taliban, Potgeiter filed the plane’s diversion away as a curiosity, concentrating instead on Bout’s arms pipelines in the Congo. “We were more interested in the Africa portion of the trip, so the Afghan landing didn’t register as important to us at the time. After September 11 and all the talk about Bout working with the Taliban, it looked a lot more curious in retrospect, eh?”1

  Potgeiter’s early discovery about the Air Cess flight into Taliban territory was both a fluke and a portent. As early as 1998, the CIA’s “thugs and guns” analysts had learned that Bout’s ground crews in Sharjah were performing maintenance chores for Ariana airline planes flying into and out of Afghanistan. Michael Scheuer, the veteran CIA counterterrorism analyst who directed Alec Station, the Virginia-based unit that tracked bin Laden and al Qaeda, perceived the link as an ominous development that could aid al Qaeda’s activities in Afghanistan. At the same time, the CIA was paying careful attention to a steady stream of intelligence reports that showed al Qaeda operatives moving furtively back and forth between the UAE and Afghanistan. Since Ariana was the primary transportation link between the two nations, the airline, Scheuer concluded, was being used as a “terrorist taxi service.” If Bout’s crews were involved in maintaining Ariana planes and loading cargo, Scheuer surmised, they were part of a clandestine system that aided in the movements of al Qaeda terrorists. “We’d see al Qaeda operatives in the emirates and then we’d see them later in Afghanistan,” Scheuer recalled. “They were getting into Afghanistan either through Karachi, in Pakistan, or through the emirates. And when they were coming through the emirates, it was almost always through Ariana flights. Since Bout’s operation was working with Ariana, they were part of the same set of concerns.”2

  The movement of Taliban and Arab militants on Ariana was aided by a fraudulent document mill that had been set up by Taliban officials in Ariana’s Kabul headquarters. Mullahs who needed quick passage to Sharjah were often handed false identification labeling them as Ariana employees. Flights that normally carried crews of five or six suddenly doubled or tripled in size, large enough at times to staff a 757 jet. “We would have planes going out with twenty mechanics on board,” the senior Ariana executive said. “Do you think all those people were mechanics?” One Ariana flight from Kabul that arrived in Sharjah on March, 31, 2000, carried a “crew” of thirty-three. An outbound flight to Kabul the same day left with fourteen Ariana “staff” aboard, including pilot Captain Mohammed Wardak, a Taliban air force officer whose real identity lay hidden in Afghan aviation files. “The Taliban would always have lots of their own people on the planes and they always had Ariana cards,” recalled former Ariana flight engineer Abdul Shakur Arefee. The engineer was unnerved to see mullahs sometimes carrying the same identification he did. “Sometimes they were soldiers. Sometimes there were Arabs, I guess bin Laden’s people. They would come off the planes with heavy bags and nobody would dare ask them anything.”3

  At the time, American intelligence officials were unaware of the Taliban’s widespread use of forged Ariana identification to provide easy passage. But in January 2003, U.S. troops captured a Taliban official, Janat Gul, who admitted that he had served as Ariana’s president in the year before the September 11 attacks. Although Ariana’s foreign flights had already shut down during his tenure because of the UN embargo, Gul was accused by U.S. officials of running the airline as a Taliban fiefdom. Gul, who also used the name Hamiedullah, was transferred to the U.S. detainment camp at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba, where he appeared on December 28, 2004, before an American military tribunal. During the hearing, Gul admitted to an unnamed U.S. Marine colonel overseeing his case that “there was a different facility for the Taliban themselves, other than where Ariana airline was serving the civilians. The Taliban had their facilities and there were gates and nobody else could go in there.” Gul also testified that the airline “acquired help from aviation agencies to help us carry passengers.” The Marine colonel cited evidence that Ariana had been controlled by the Taliban and used by the mullahs to transport their members and jihadists fighting the Northern Alliance. The colonel also said that “an active al Qaeda member and licensed pilot brought in other al Qaeda members to work for Ariana airline.” Gul denied the charges, but he remains in U.S. custody at Guantánamo.4

  American officials also grew alarmed in the late 1990s by the flight patterns of Bout’s own planes into and out of Kandahar. The CIA’s Afghan informants reported that shipments of light weapons and ammunition were being off-loaded from Bout-owned cargo planes on the ground at Kandahar’s airport. “Our human intelligence said it was mostly small arms and ammunition, going to Kandahar and occasionally to Kabul,” Scheuer recalled. Bout’s flights into Kandahar brought arms and supplies directly into the heart of the militants’ stronghold. The airport had long been the economic nerve center for the Taliban movement, and with the expansion of bin Laden’s terror training camps at nearby Tarnak Farms in the late 1990s, the Kandahar airport became al Qaeda’s logistics lifeline as well.

  One former Ariana pilot who flew frequently into Kandahar said the facility constantly swarmed with Arabs—a sight Bout’s pilots and crews could not have missed. “I would see Arabs with sat[ellite] phones walking around the terminal, in touch with Taliban officials at the highest levels,” the Ariana pilot recalled. Mullahs and their al Qaeda contacts sometimes spread rugs out on the terminal floor for impromptu meetings. After one flight into Kandahar, the senior Ariana executive was stunned to see the reclusive Mullah Omar huddled on a rug with a rebel leader from Tajikistan, surrounded by their aides. “There they were, cross-legged on their mats, chattering into cell phones,” the executive recalled. A Talib government official explained to him later that the supreme leader “likes to meet like this.”5

  Even bin Laden had reportedly flown on Ariana on his early travels in Afghanistan. After he was expelled in May 1995 by Sudanese officials under pressure from Saudi Arabia and the United States, the al Qaeda leader and nearly a hundred of his relatives and most trusted fighters flew into Afghanistan on a chartered plane. There was also a second flight from Sudan, also filled with al Qaeda loyalists. Later reports suggested the first plane that ferried bin Laden was a private charter; others suggested it was an Ariana plane. In one intriguing account, bin Laden’s former bodyguard Nasir al-Bahari told the al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper that the flight that carried bin Laden was a Tupolev piloted by a Russian—an account also reported by FBI officials.6

  Scheuer and some American counternarcotics officials were also intrigued by a curious dovetailing between the flight patterns of Bout’s planes and the Afghan hunting activities of Persian Gulf royals. The pace of flights by Bout network freighters into Kandahar would suddenly pick up in February and March—the same period when emirati and Saudi princes were flying into Afghanistan on their private jets to join Taliban officials in the annual hunt of houbara bustards. In early autumn, the same flight patterns between Bout planes and Persian Gulf jets would twin again in Tanzania, where bustards migrated by the thousands before the hard Afghan winter set in. Officials at the CIA’s counternarcotics center suspected that some of the Persian Gulf royals were using the hunting flights as cover to export Afghan heroin. And the presence of Bout planes enlarged the circle of suspicion. “They were very interested on the counternarcotics side about the patterns between Bout’s flights and bustard-hunting season,” Scheuer recalled.

  British intelligence officials on the ground in the UAE and Pakistan had also relayed their own suspicions that Bout’s planes were ferrying Afghan narcotics. “The British believed that a lot of their street crime was linked to Afghan heroin and they fel
t it was a major source of his income,” Scheuer said. At one point the British broached a plan to approach UAE officials for permission to send in an undercover team of agents to search for evidence of Afghan heroin on one of Bout’s planes. “They wanted to swab his planes for drugs,” a U.S. official recalled. “They were confident if they were able to do a close microbiological inspection, they would find clear evidence of drug trafficking, presumably heroin.” But the British never developed enough evidence to make the approach viable, and support for the scheme faded.7

  Afghanistan’s opium fields had been a steady source of Western Europe’s heroin supply throughout the 1990s, both during the Rabbani regime and during the ascension of the Taliban. Soon after the mullahs took power, U.S. diplomats and drug enforcement teams working in Pakistan learned that Taliban officials were being paid lucrative tithes from local drug lords to provide guards in the poppy fields and safe passage for drug rings as they transferred heroin shipments out of the country. “The Talibs were getting paid for safe passage of narcotics traffickers from Afghanistan into Pakistan and also for guarding the dope,” recalled Jonathan Winer, then deputy assistant secretary of state for international law enforcement. Between 1998 and 1999, Afghan opium production doubled to forty-six hundred tons, accounting for more than 72 percent of the world’s heroin trade.8 Julie Sirrs, a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst who made four trips into Northern Alliance-held territory in Afghanistan between 1997 and 2000, heard frequent accounts during her travels that Ariana “planes would leave with opium and its derivatives. They used both cargo and passenger flights. The Taliban didn’t make a differentiation.”