Outlaws Inc.

by Matt Potter

  While the responsibility for logging and checking aircraft registration, along with airworthiness and safety checks, should lie with an individual country’s civil aviation authority, the reality, especially in developing economies and states with high levels of corruption, is never quite that simple. He sighs, clearly frustrated at the task faced by the monitors in nailing even the worst, most cocksure smugglers. “They’re everywhere, and they’re unbelievably confident. I mean, these are people who’ll offer you raki and slivovitz at ten in the morning when you go to see them for a meeting about their activities. And they’re all getting around any attempt to keep tabs on them by registering their planes in lax regimes like Kazakhstan, where there’s no transparent, consistent, and reliable record keeping. So all the global databases, like the British one, are being utterly defeated by the lack of transparency in these unregistered countries. It’s crazy—we know what they’re doing, but they’re always one step ahead.”

  I can understand the frustration of men like Griffiths, and even more so those like Peter Danssaert of Antwerp’s International Peace Information Service, whose concern—and research on behalf of clients like Amnesty International and the U.N.—has taken him deeper, into covert government involvement in the gray economy these flights serve. “As I explained to the European Commission,” notes the Belgian researcher, “many of these illicit transfers, and/or diversions of weapons, could not take place without at least one government knowing about them, and another turning a blind eye.” He adds drily: “That’s most likely the reason funding can be difficult to secure. Government involvement, or at least turning a blind eye, is the second taboo in our little world, after the connections between aid flights and arms smuggling.”

  This makes a difficult job into one constantly threatening to become impossible. I find Mickey hard enough to pin down, even in close conversation over a beer. The idea of trying to tackle thousands and thousands of planes, consignments, crews, clients, and cargoes every day more or less forensically seems positively quixotic.

  But as Danssaert describes the slippery customers and the brazen operations; the wormholes that keep opening up and swallowing them without trace again and again, just as the net is closing around them; and the obstacles faced by researchers at IPIS, Amnesty, and within governments, I can’t help thinking it seems more than merely crazy how the traffickers are always “one step ahead.”

  No, not just crazy. Somehow, it seems positively uncanny—almost as if there are more powerful forces at work, throwing a spanner in the works of the monitoring and policing agencies.

  And if that’s the case, then the idea of poster boys like Bout and Minin as public enemies—lords of war, striding round the globe engendering chaos and destruction all by themselves—starts to seem not merely misguided but like a hugely successful red herring.

  After all, Leonid Minin’s coke-and-girls party was a present to himself, celebrating the successful shipment of 113 tons of small arms to West Africa. That’s a lot of guns, enough to get noticed by law enforcement, even the remaining Ukrainian military.

  But then, it wasn’t as if nobody back in Ukraine had noticed long ago. In the mid-1990s, Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma ordered a parliamentary commission to investigate the rate at which arms went missing from his bases. The report found that of Ukraine’s $89 billion in military stocks in 1992, by 1998 $32 billion had mysteriously evaporated.

  No sooner was the report ready, however, than the commission was mysteriously closed down. All seventeen volumes of work disappeared. The head of the commission, General Oleksandr Ignatenko, was court-martialed and stripped of his rank. The only publisher willing to go public about the findings, a Kiev newsletter editor named Sehry Odarych, was ambushed one night outside his apartment, shot in the leg as a warning, and told as he writhed in pain against the wall of the block, “Stop getting mixed up in politics, or we’ll eliminate you.” The attackers simply vanished and were never found. The police informed Odarych he’d shot his own leg in a bid for attention, though he didn’t have a gun.

  The secrecy around the upward connections of operations like Mickey’s is often so deep and tightly enforced that it’s only when things go wrong, as they did in Belgrade for Starikov and Damnjanovic, that a crack appears for a brief moment and we gain a glimpse of the forces at play.

  Indeed, but for one incident, involving an Il-76 flight into Afghanistan in the mid-1990s, even the little we know about the smuggling routes from coalition- and NATO-occupied Afghanistan might never have come to light. And if the flight had gone as planned, it’s possible we may never have heard of Viktor Bout or the men with no names for whom he may or may not work.

  But the flight did not go as planned. And the story, even as it continues to emerge today, is one of the more curious tales in gunrunning history.

  IT IS A sunny Sunday in Moscow. Young, successful, fresh-faced, and sharply dressed, film producer Ilya Neretin is the guy behind 2010’s Russian record-smashing, true-story action blockbuster Kandahar: Survive and Return, about a gunrunning Il-76 crew’s kidnap and escape from the Taliban in 1995.

  The film’s great—a swashbuckling, hyper-real yarn full of grit and suspense. I’m not surprised it went down so well in a resurgent Russia, just as the Rambo films did in a gung-ho 1980s America determined to reclaim some of its self-confidence even at the expense of factual reportage. But I’m interested in the story, and in its background. The men were flying a mission for Viktor Bout, but there has always been talk of darker dealings about their run to Kandahar that day; and if I can understand who these other, publicity-shy forces are with an interest in Il-76 missions like this, then perhaps I can begin to put Mickey’s work in context.

  We chat at length—about the film, about the state of the country then and now, about Neretin’s recent private travails, about the pleasures and pains of filming in Morocco (Kandahar’s body double), and about the long strange trip Russia has been on since 1991. I like Ilya a lot: He’s great, easy conversation; he pulls mother-in-law stories and wisecracks out of nowhere; and though I’ve been chasing him for weeks for this chance to speak with him, he’s got that rare ability to make you feel as though he’s been bursting to get together with you for a chat for ages. And while he’s telling me about the film—and the challenges involved in getting a full Il-76 and crew over to Morocco—he laughs all the time.

  He likens the crews he met—the original guys, on an arms-smuggling mission for Viktor Bout to Afghanistan, and the team of Byelorussian daredevil cargo dogs he had to call to fly the Candids on film—to cowboys.

  “What happens to these guys on their missions, and the captured crew especially, it’s just like a western,” he says. “In westerns, the heroes say, ‘This is my land. There is no government, no police, nobody can help me—only I can do it, alone.’ Our Ilyushin-76 crew on this flight came to understand that. Look around: Taliban, arms dealers—there’s only enemies. In that situation, we might say the Taliban are the red Indians. So if I want to keep my freedom, or my land, as they say in westerns, I have to do it myself.”

  It’s a picture of crews like Mickey’s I’ll encounter time and again—called cowboys as an insult by those who believe they cross the blurry line between business and criminal activity too often, and as a compliment by those who know them for their self-reliance and toughness, like real-life High Plains drifters. But Ilya’s words are also a shocking summation of the post-Soviet mind-set that spawned Mickey. No government, no police, and it’s help-yourself time: Call it anarchy or call it Reaganomics.

  Ilya is a breath of fresh air in a lot of ways. After months of wrestling information from insiders who’d rather not talk at all, I find him charming, irreverent, and wisecracking, and his interest in the crews mirrors my own. “The human story is … interesting, I think,” he agrees. “We’re talking here about the taxi drivers.” Then he goes off on a tangent about a visit from his mother-in-law. There’s a lot of laughter.

  We’ve been tal
king for a while, and I’m feeling pretty comfy with him. I mention that I’m actually looking into the story of these crews—not just their lives but their role in spreading humanitarian aid, peacekeepers, guns, and drugs, hope, and darkness around the world.

  Then I tell him it’s an interesting connection in the film, that the Il-76 there was chartered by Bout.

  Ilya stops me, but doesn’t say anything for a moment or two. “Matt, you and I, we know what kind of world we live in, I think,” he says, finally. “Look, Matt, I will tell you this. There are so many ‘Mr. X’ figures ruling this world. And Mr. Bout is a prince. But there are kings. If you sell arms, you will do it, if some high-up guy will cover you. My aim wasn’t to get to the truth about all that. That’s for prosecutors.” Then he adds: “And journalists.”

  Then, suddenly, he has to go. I contact him again, but—apart from a few dating-scam e-mails obviously sent by a Trojan virus on his computer—I never hear back from him.

  So I do some more digging. And that’s when I discover the other side of the story of this crew’s daring escape. Because the whispers are true: There’s more to the story of the captured crew than his script, or he, is letting on.

  Yes, this recently privatized crew of former Soviet pilots were forced down in their Il-76 and diverted to Kandahar by the Taliban back in 1995 while making an illicit arms run to the Northern Alliance—just as in the movie. And just as in the movie, they were kept hostage by the Taliban for over a year.

  It’s all correct, just as it happened in the film. The Russian government tried to negotiate at first, but the negotiations stalled. As the weeks became months, hope began to fade and the crew began to take matters into their own hands. They hatched a plan, talking to their captors themselves and convincing them that, as well as the cargo, the plane itself—now simply gathering dust and peeling on the airfield runway—was quite a catch, worth millions on the open market, and more as the Taliban air force’s very own military-cargo transporter. But, they said, without regular maintenance and the occasional firing of the engines, it would be useless. A complex, regular maintenance regime needed all seven crewmembers, they said. And, for the first few check-ups—all conducted under armed guard—they showed the Taliban just how to do it.

  By Friday, August 16, 1996, after more than a year of captivity bordering on slavery, the guards had become relaxed enough for four of them to disappear for prayer, leaving only three guarding the crew. The pilot, Vladimir Sharpatov, saw their chance. Saying only, “We need to start the engines,” the crew pushed past their captors, locking them out of the Ilyushin and starting the jets to taxi down what, by any estimation, was nowhere near enough runway for takeoff.

  This is where the plane and its air force–veteran crew showed their true mettle, lifting the wheels just as runway became rock and heading not north to Russia—Sharpatov knew the Taliban would have fighter planes patrolling the air corridor by now—but west to Iran, and then on to their home away from home, Sharjah, flying just meters off the ground to evade Taliban radar. Less than three days after the heavily bearded, dazed, and exhausted crew landed at Sharjah, the fed, rested, shaven, and medically treated crew arrived home in Russia to a heroes’ welcome. Three days more, and the crew were decorated with Order of Orange and Hero of the Russian Federation medals by Russian president Boris Yeltsin.

  That’s what happened, and it’s all true. In Russia, indeed, the action film’s portrayal is fast taking its place in the canon of historical fact. Dmitry Rogozin, formerly leader of Russia’s Narodna (“Homeland”) party, now Russia’s ambassador to NATO, even calls the film a “documentary”; he has become friends with Sharpatov, whom he calls a national hero, “like a pop star.” Well, like Mickey, Sharpatov’s a brave and resourceful man. He deserves hero status.

  But the truth is a complex, multilayered thing. And so what I am about to tell you could also be the full story. It may also be what really happened.

  By August 1995, relations between Russia and even the northern Afghan government were tense, Russia accusing the Afghans of fomenting unrest in Tajikistan. Still, with a nod and a nudge from the security forces, Viktor Bout was commissioned to fly munitions into Kabul under the radar, on the quiet, for the more moderate mujahideen of the Northern Alliance.

  Bout knew the pilot, Sharpatov, who’d been flying for him regularly since they met in a Sharjah hotel bar. This was not the first time he and his crew had done the arms and ammo run from Albania through to Kabul in the Candid, and Sharpatov knew exactly what he was carrying and how careful he would have to be to avoid detection. Normally, it was fine—nichevo. But not this time. The radio operator failed to maintain radio silence, and the Taliban air force’s MiG-21 intercepted them.

  According to investigators Farah and Braun, when news of their captivity reached Bout, he hit the cell phones. Bout himself told New York Times journalist Peter Landesman that he called the Taliban commanders, attempting to kick-start solo negotiations with them by phone, then flew to Kandahar himself but was denied access. The commanders were convinced that the flight had to have been an official Russian air force mission and would only go through the government, but their negotiations also stalled. Quite why the Taliban’s men should have become so convinced of that fact is an intriguing question that’s never really been fully addressed. Was it simple paranoia? The inability of a highly politically committed group to see a simple private arms deal for what it was? Marshal Shaposhnikov’s flat “No comment” when I press him on the issue, even years later, of whether this was indeed in some way a covert state mission raises the tantalizing prospect of a black op of some kind through a deniable middleman like Bout.

  For many months, nothing was heard. Then, behind the scenes, Bout, whether alone or in consultation with the cash-strapped Russian military, reportedly came to an agreement that both he and the Taliban could live with. They’d allow the men and their plane to “escape” if Bout would agree to supply them with planeloads of arms and ammo from now on. Everybody was a winner. Within days, the crew were allowed to fly home.

  One source at the UN who actually knows Bout and prefers to remain off the record claimed to me in the spring of 2010 that Bout had once told him that he’d just been doing what he’d been instructed to do by “someone much further up the food chain.” Just who that person is has never been fully established—and if Marshal Shaposhnikov knows, he isn’t saying—though there are claims Bout’s father-in-law is a former KGB grandee, and these days is one of Vladimir Putin’s staunchest backers.

  And while he was freer with his hints in the old days, since the heat came on, Bout’s lips have got tighter too. Once, when he was asked outright, he said, “They didn’t escape; they were extracted. There are huge forces—” and then promptly clammed up. In an interview with the New York Times shortly before his arrest, he appeared on the verge of saying more, then backed down once again: “[My clients are governments, but] I keep my mouth shut,” he said. Then, pointing to the middle of his forehead: “If I told you any more, I’d get the red hole right here.”

  Indeed, the FSB were not averse to reminding cargo operators who held the whip hand. In 2000 the Russian secret service, perhaps embarrassed by Bout’s increasingly high profile, perhaps as a friendly warning across the bow, appeared to make a terrifying example of one of his Il-76 operator peers. In September of that year, masked FSB men announced they had seized an Il-76 carrying twenty-two tons of hidden cargo unlisted on its documents, then raided the offices of its operator, a Moscow-based cargo outfit called East Line working out of Domodedovo airport around thirty kilometers from the city, whose regular patterns of flights to Pakistan, the Arab Emirates, India, China, and South Korea seemed to have flagged what they had long suspected: This was a major smuggling operation, with one goal being the evasion of customs on contraband from China. Despite the protestations of the director general, Amiran Kurtanidze, the armed, balaclava-clad FSB agents trashed the office, pulling out drawers and filing cabinets,
and walked out with all the company’s computers and paperwork, effectively paralyzing East Line’s entire cargo operation.

  News of the bust spread fast: Two more of the company’s planes were found idling on remote runways in Siberia and Nizhny Novgorod, their crews, having got the news on the radio en route from China with twenty-nine tons of illicit cargo hidden “beneath the floorboards,” tried to turn and head back to China before running low on fuel. They then promptly landed their planes and fled into the steppes and the villages, leaving them Mary Celeste–style, to be discovered hours later, radios still crackling.

  But there was a twist. Kurtanidze claimed to the press that the busts and charges of wrongdoing were, first of all, mistakes that could easily have been rectified—and then part of an elaborate setup orchestrated by a shadowy group he called the “Reconciliation and Accord Foundation” that was trying to control routes to China as an air-cargo operator for its own dark purposes, and to snuff out any “competition.”

  Some of the braver Russian newspapers went further: the FSB, they said, was harassing one of the precious few good companies. East Line had set up in the tough days of 1993 at Domodedovo, and, it was claimed, had refused to pay the mafia groups who were crawling all over the airport. This was, it was whispered, nothing but a shakedown by mafiya elements within the Russian state itself. Russian business paper Kommersant speculated that a strengthening of control over customs clearance, or a personal business interest from a member of the government, were behind the raid. While the investigation dragged on East Line’s fortunes plummeted, and by the time it was quietly dropped, after a succession of government statements reiterating their claims about the airline but not one prosecution, Kurtanidze was gone, and aviators, exporters, and charterers across the former Soviet territories were in no doubt as to who the real players were.