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

by Douglas Farah

  All through the summer and fall of 2005, Bout’s planes flew on for U.S. contractors, relentless, untouchable. In December there was a modicum of progress. Sharjah aviation authorities reported they were on the verge of finally grounding the Air Bas/Irbis fleet. Bout’s avionics operation there had already been shuttered.

  But Bout’s network was already undergoing yet another metamorphosis. Even as Air Bas went dormant, its planes were parceled out to new firms capable of flying from anywhere Bout had airfield connections: Dubai, Fujairah, Ajman, Ras al Kahymah, Chisinau, Almaty.

  Chris Walker was not surprised to hear that Bout’s fleet was still shuttling into and out of Baghdad. “He sure was persistent as hell. It’s a shame the contracting folks weren’t as persistent as he was,” Walker said. More than a year after he made the reluctant decision that allowed Bout’s freighters to keep flying into Iraq, Walker had returned from Iraq, working in a Defense Department annex in Virginia for a military committee making recommendations on whether to build a new cargo aircraft prototype for future American airlifts. Promoted to a lieutenant colonel in the Air National Guard, Walker had shrugged off his frustrating effort to get to the bottom of the military’s habitual use of Bout’s planes as “a front-row seat on the way the world really works.

  “It was dealing with the devil to get what needed to be done and the powers that be approved it, so that’s the way it was,” he said. “If the government really wanted him bad they could have come up with a pretext and seized his planes. But I guess they looked at Viktor Bout and figured this guy’s an asshole, but he’s our asshole, so let’s keep him in business.”

  EPILOGUE

  After fifteen years of flying weapons for killers and for governments, weathering pursuers and halfhearted sanctions, Viktor Bout’s empire endures, now an implacable fact of life on the world stage.

  International efforts to hunt him down and scuttle his air operations are mostly abandoned, confined to sporadic efforts by the Treasury Department and the UN Security Council to freeze his assets. The CIA no longer has analysts specifically assigned to monitor his flights and follow his activities. “They’re all working on counterterrorism now,” a U.S. official said. The Belgian government’s money-laundering probe is still active and the worldwide Interpol notice for Bout’s arrest warrant remains open, but judicial officials in Brussels have little hope of progress, stymied by Russia’s firm refusal to extradite him or even acknowledge his citizenship. Only the British maintain an active intelligence effort to track Bout’s movements, and even that operation has been sharply reduced in scope.

  Bout has had to adjust to a diminished version of the swaggering, globe-trotting lifestyle he once led. He lives in a luxury apartment complex in Moscow, where he is occasionally spotted eating at the fancy sushi bars he favors. According to Western officials and a European intelligence source who have followed his activities for several years, Bout is often seen at the Moscow offices of Isotrex, a semiofficial foreign trade firm. The company is directed by a group of deputy ministers for key Russian government agencies tied to the nation’s armament manufacturers. At Isotrex, Bout reportedly works closely with an aide who has been known to turn up regularly in countries where he has set up new business operations. European intelligence officials say that the woman, in her late twenties, and whom they have dubbed “Tatyana,” is a legal expert who often arranges the Bout firms’ initial paperwork and financial infrastructure before returning to her Moscow base. The woman’s identity is not known, and officials suggest she may be a composite of two different people. Intelligence officials say Bout himself moves with ease across Russia, Western Europe, and the former Eastern bloc, ranging from his home base to satellite operations in Moldova, Belgium, and Kazakhstan and arms depots in Bulgaria and the Ukraine. Outside Eastern Europe, the UN travel ban forces him to travel mostly by land, relying on disguises and shifting passports. Confirmed and suspected Bout sightings have stretched from Cyprus and Beirut to Moldova and several African nations.

  In one recent interview, Bout claimed that he has given up on his air operations. “I’m in construction business in Russia these days,” he said.1 But he still appeared to have vital stakes in several air cargo firms audited by a Canadian aviation consulting group in mid-2005. David Barnes, an air safety expert who heads Beacon Field Corp., traveled to Moldova and Sharjah to inspect several air cargo operations on behalf of KBR, the Halliburton subsidiary that hired Bout’s planes for dozens of flights into Iraq and Afghanistan for the U.S. Defense Department. Barnes found numerous questionable air safety and procedural quirks at Jet Line in Moldova, and at several other Bout-linked firms.

  Seeking maintenance records for a Jet Line plane that appeared to have previously crashed, Barnes went to the firm’s dingy headquarters near the Chisinau airport. But Jet Line officials shrugged him off, producing nothing. One Jet Line staffer warned Barnes to stay away one morning at the Chisinau airport, saying, “It would be better for you if you were not around.” Barnes took the advice. “They were probably working on an arms shipment,” he concluded. In Sharjah, curious about Jet Line’s use of planes that had previously flown for Aerocom, another Bout-linked firm, Barnes approached a Russian Antonov pilot. “I mentioned it to him and he laughed,” Barnes recalled. “He said they changed their company names and aircraft registrations all the time.”

  Barnes would not detail the recommendations he made to KBR. But he said it was clear that American firms using Bout’s flights “have a mission and they need to do it as cheaply as possible. That makes Bout the player. He doesn’t bring much attention to himself and he’s always there with a huge fleet of aircraft. It comes down to how much do you want to spend and what do you want to deliver?” Barnes concluded that Bout remained in business because “the guy’s protected. Governments need his services because he’s useful. He’s not a dumb guy. You have to respect him for what he’s done.”

  In July 2006, just as hostilities erupted in southern Lebanon between Israeli defense forces and Hezbollah fighters, Western intelligence officials learned that Bout had been spotted at a Hezbollah military building. Officials also reported that Bout’s longtime associate Richard Chichakli, who had been operating from Moscow after fleeing from Texas following the Treasury Department’s seizure of his assets, also traveled to Damascus—where he is now based, according to his American lawyer. The confluence of sightings and the discovery by Israeli intelligence officials that Hezbollah had been armed by late-model Russian antitank weapons and other matériel fanned official suspicions that Bout’s network might have played a role in the Hezbollah buildup.

  On September 6, 2006, Israel’s deputy prime minister Shimon Peres publicly accused Russia of arming Hezbollah with sophisticated armor-piercing Fagot and Kornet antitank missiles during the conflict. He said the weapons had moved to Hezbollah through Syria and Iran. “We saw the weapons, they had certain markings,” Peres said in a Russian radio interview. A high-level Israeli delegation was dispatched to Moscow to raise the issue, and by mid-October there were reports that a Russian state weapons official in charge of arms exports had been fired.2 But officials had not confirmed any direct involvement by the Bout network.

  At the same time as the Lebanon crisis, a group of radical Somali militias operating under the banner of United Islamic Courts seized control of Mogadishu, the battered Somali capital. After several days of pitched combat in late July, the Islamic factions, led by a former lieutenant of Osama bin Laden, quickly consolidated their hold over the city’s international airport, a crumbling facility nearly abandoned by foreign aircraft over the past decade. Then, on July 26 and again on July 28, excited residents near the airfield streamed outside after hearing a rumbling from the sky. They watched as a droning Ilyushin Il-76, with the flag of Kazakhstan painted on its tail, descended from the barren horizon and taxied down the airfield’s dusty runway. When the plane halted, waiting militiamen clustered around and hurriedly unloaded truckloads of familiar long brown a
nd green boxes used to transport weapons. Journalists were barred from the airport, but several stationed just outside the field managed to snap pictures of the aircraft, using telephoto lenses.3 The plane’s identifying tail number, required by international aviation regulations, had been stripped off, preventing any attempt to learn who was behind the weapons shipments. The Kazakh Foreign Ministry denied any official involvement.4

  Alarmed at the sudden triumph of an al Qaeda ally on the strategic tip of the Horn of Africa, U.S. military officials ordered an investigation. Within weeks, intelligence officials concluded that the flights were carried out by Bout’s air network. The officials grew increasingly dismayed as they continued over the summer to probe into Bout’s operations, turning up new disturbing signs that his arms delivery network was active not only with the Islamic militias in Somalia, but also with the faction’s allies in neighboring Eritrea. “We have developed a large body of information of what Mr. Bout’s organization is doing” in the Horn of Africa, one U.S. intelligence analyst said. “I am alarmed at what he is doing as it undermines Centcom’s counterterrorism strategy in the region.”

  Then, in August, European Union (EU) intelligence officials formally protested to Russia after one of Bout’s henchmen, who had been seeking to cut a deal with authorities to exchange information on the Russian’s network for immunity and protection, was kidnapped, along with his girlfriend, in Western Europe as he prepared to deliver a large cache of what he claimed were incriminating documents. Suspecting that Bout’s organization was behind the abduction and that he personally may have been traveling clandestinely to Europe to arrange weapons deals, EU officials asked the Russians to investigate. They received word from Russian officials that the abduction was a “rogue operation,” not an officially sanctioned activity. The Russians did not address the question of whether Bout had been directly involved in the abduction.

  Bout’s relations with Russia’s intelligence community had always been suspected but never confirmed, but in November, reports of a new American criminal investigation into Bout’s organization produced the first solid evidence that both networks worked hand in hand. Federal firearms agents working on a case involving shotgun sales at a small town Pennsylvania sporting goods store in July stumbled on documents indicating that the store had provided more than $240,000 in rifle scopes, optical devices, and other paramilitary items to a Russian company that allegedly fronted for the FSB, the Russian state intelligence agency that had replaced the KGB. The items had been shipped in spring 2005 to Tactica, Ltd., a Moscow firm described in an affidavit by ATF investigators as part of the “ ‘Vympel Group,’ which is a known identifier for an elite counterterrorism unit that is controlled by the Russian Federal Security Service [formerly the KGB].” The Russian firm’s top official later denied ties to the intelligence branch. The federal agents also seized foreign wire transfers for the Tactica purchases indicating that $60,000 had been paid from Rockman EOOD, a Bulgarian holding company owned by Sergei Bout and sanctioned by Treasury in 2005 as part of the assets freeze against the Bout network. The equipment was restricted from foreign export without authorization from the State Department, and while the owners of D&R Sporting Goods, a Nanticoke, Pennsylvania, firm, insisted they had filed proper documents, federal agents indicated that State had turned down the firm’s request to sell the items. ATF agents invoked Bout’s involvement with Tactica as a compelling reason to continue the investigation, saying that Bout “and his numerous shell companies around Eastern Europe and the world were also identified as significant participants in providing weapons to the dictator Charles Taylor in Liberia, rebel groups in Rwanda and the Taliban, as well as subsequent war crimes that were committed by those regimes.”5

  Despite the new flare-ups of interest in Bout’s activities, the investigations remained piecemeal, focused only on scattered corners of the world. There was no longer a central U.S. government apparatus that could rapidly transform the new spate of information into coordinated action. Even Centcom, now suddenly anxious about the flood of weapons into East Africa, had been Bout’s protector only months earlier, pressuring Treasury officials to hold off on their sanctions while the Russian’s cargo planes completed their final deliveries into Baghdad. Despite the uptick in intelligence attention, there remained no concerted American policy to do anything about Bout’s continuing activities.

  Even as the Bout network faded as a target for Western intelligence and law enforcement agencies, his international mystique grew. Several film scripts emerged from the flurry of media profiles of Bout and his business. The first to appear, the 2005 film Lord of War, was loosely based on Bout’s gunrunning activities. Nicolas Cage played Yuri Orlov, an amoral Russian American weapons dealer specializing in the delivery of planeloads of weapons to warlords and terrorists in Africa and the Middle East. Just before the film was released in the United States, director Andrew Niccol boasted that an Antonov An-12 used in a pivotal scene had been rented from “one of the most notorious arms traffickers in Africa.” Pressed by Newsweek reporters, Niccol admitted, “Well, I suppose I can say that it was Viktor Bout’s plane. The crew said that plane ran real guns into the Congo the week before we were using it to film fake guns. That plane has since crashed, running something described as suspicious cargo out of Uganda.”6 FBI agents later investigated the film company’s use of the plane as a possible violation of the OFAC ban on doing business with Bout, but in the end, no action was taken.

  Playing film critic, Bout panned his portrayal. “I’m sorry for Nicolas Cage,” he said. “It’s a bad movie.”7

  Most of Bout’s old nemeses had moved on, despairing of ever seeing him put out of business. Witney Schneidman has a consulting business specializing in African trade. Johan Peleman and Kathi Austin continued to work for the United Nations in missions around the globe that targeted arms trafficking and war crimes allegations. Lee Wolosky was ensconced as a corporate attorney, specializing in international litigation for a New York firm headed by Wall Street legal top gun David Boies. Joining as an adviser for Senator John Kerry during his failed 2004 presidential campaign, Wolosky had hoped that revelations about Bout’s flights into Iraq might catch fire as a political issue. But Kerry’s inner circle never pressed the matter.

  Despite the short-lived promise of the Bout task force that he once headed, Wolosky was convinced that that no American administration was capable of decimating the Russian’s organization without fierce political will and clear lines of authority emanating from the White House. “We were doing things a different way,” Wolosky mused from his New York office. “We were an ad hoc group that didn’t fit into the interagency structure. We were able to bring in State, CIA, FBI, ATF into the White House. Sometimes we had to drag them in. But there was a lot of buy-in once they understood the White House was behind it.” In hindsight, Wolosky felt that Bout’s global organization was a chilling glimpse of the global logistics capacity that might one day ferry a nuclear weapon—exactly the sort of airlift that was used by militant Pakistani physicist A. Q. Kahn in smuggling dangerous nuclear materiel to Libya, Iran, and North Korea in the late 1990s. “We were beginning to see and understand how people were conducting business in the seams of the international economy,” Wolosky said. “But we were trying to herd international cats.”

  Only Andreas Morgner remained on the case, still lobbying for action against Bout inside the OFAC. Government working groups dealing with Bout and weapons trafficking had long been disbanded, but Morgner kept on as time permitted. He enjoyed some small successes. An executive order signed by President Bush on October 31, 2006, redesignated Bout under a new set of sanctions targeting arms traffickers who had allegedly violated a UN weapons embargo imposed on the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Bout’s years of deliveries into the DRC constituted an “unusual and extraordinary threat to the foreign policy of the United States,” the order stated.8 Similar to the assets freeze related to Bout’s activities in Liberia, the new sanctions authoriz
ed the OFAC to seize all Bout’s U.S. accounts and prohibited any American person or company from doing business with him. The sanctions list also included several of Bout’s well-known associates in the DRC: Sanjivan Ruprah, Dimitri Popov, and Douglas Mpano. Popov and Mpano were the managers of two Bout-related air freight companies, which were also designated: Great Lakes Business Company and the Compagnie Aérienne des Grands Lacs.

  Bout emerged from seclusion to scoff at the latest American slap. Appearing on the Russian Today television network, he stuck to his old lines. “Every time it is the same story, the same repetition. I can even call it a witch hunt,” he said. “They are accusing me since 1998 of all kinds of illegal arms trade in Africa. But even with all the power of the American administration, the CIA, the FBI, and all their means, like satellites, they are still not able to come with certain proof.” 9

  Indeed, the new assets freeze was more symbolic than practical. Most of the limited funds that were within reach of authorities had already been seized in the earlier Liberian sanctions. At best, it was a way to keep up the pressure, to let Bout know that he could not operate with complete impunity, and that someone inside the U.S. government was still watching. But the sanctions had limited real value, amounting to small-bore nuisances at best compared to the dashed international manhunt that preceded them. The new efforts were ghost pains, nagging reminders of both the brief promise of the now-abandoned Bout chase and the United States’ unsavory dalliance with Bout’s network in Iraq. They were paper threats postured by a paper tiger.