by Matt Potter
To Russians at the time, the rumors of official skulduggery were all too believable. If anything, the FSB seemed to be treading unusually softly. The raid, well-publicized and dramatic as it was, was very little, very late. It would certainly send out an obvious warning to other crews and middlemen that they knew exactly what was going on. But by that point neither Mickey nor any of the other crews, charterers, or businessmen in on the world’s richest smuggling scene could stop trafficking—even if they’d wanted to. The money was simply too good.
To this day, the FSB—if it was indeed the FSB who ordered the bust, and not private interests working within the security service—has never acted against these airlines or their crews again. Nor has any more been heard from the Reconciliation and Accord Foundation.
Certainly, covert influence in the affairs of cargo operators is not unknown. As Grigory Omelchenko, the former chief of Ukrainian counterintelligence, told Peter Landesman of the New York Times, “Traffickers like Bout are either protected or killed. There’s total state control.” Perhaps, then, Ilya Neretin’s claim is not quite true. Maybe whoever was covering the arms shipment was watching all the time. Perhaps the crew weren’t, after all, alone without help from any quarter.
SLIGHT, MOUSY-HAIRED, AND leather jacketed, Andrei Alexeivich Soldatov looks more like the bass player in an indie band than the scourge of the Russian secret service’s more maverick tendencies. And like Mickey’s opposing angel, he’s also something of a Zelig, popping up at the scene at the most crucial points in the post-Soviet story. At just twenty-one, he became a reporter for the newspaper Sevodnya and paper-hopped, covering the Beslan school siege and massacre and the Moscow theater-hostage crisis. He’s met defectors, followed spies, and uncovered Kremlin complicity in criminal behavior. But now aged thirty-four, it’s as an investigator into the black ops and extrajudicial activities of Russia’s secret service networks, past and present, that Soldatov is best known.
“A lot of these flights in and out of Afghanistan are clearly enjoying some protection,” he agrees. He explains that his suspicions run to the idea that it may in fact be in Moscow’s interests to keep a pipeline for secret cargoes open, and to know what’s in other people’s. He also suspects that a little visible heroin trafficking into Russia itself, with the odd carefully managed seizure here and there, plays into the hands of a Kremlin keen to point out NATO’s inability to stamp out the smack trade at Russia’s back door—perhaps works even as a pretext for greater intervention in Central Asia once more. “There’s a new stage of the Great Game going on,” he smiles, recalling the covert jockeying for military and commercial influence in Afghanistan and India between Britain and Russia in the nineteenth century. So much for disorganized crime.
But if someone is killing, protecting, raiding, or controlling all the traffickers using these flights, and if someone’s letting just enough heroin into Russia to put pressure on NATO to exit Afghanistan, well, the question is, who? And just how high up do you need to go in order to find them?
“I always say to everybody, I’m not the police,” laughs Peter Danssaert when I call on him again, at his office in the dockside quarter of Antwerp, Belgium’s historic diamond hub. This time I need help understanding what looks more and more like secret state collusion and less like a few freelance bad guys. “I’m not in this line of business to put people behind bars or whatever else.”
For Danssaert, these questions are part of what attracted him to the job of researching trafficking flights. “For me it’s a puzzle—you have a problem to solve. If someone tells you there’s an arms flight over here, or some arms are being sent there, for me the motivation is to find out how it’s done, who’s doing it. How does it fit into the bigger picture?
”You see, many times, these arms brokers and freight forwarders who are doing illicit and gray stuff are also doing legitimate stuff. And in a lot of cases, they’re being hired by the same governments to do the same thing legally that they’re doing illegally, or at least the same thing openly that they’re doing illicitly! So, what I try to find out is, how? That’s the puzzle that keeps it interesting for me.”
But Danssaert is one of a small group of people—too small, he’ll readily admit—at shoestring-budget organizations in different countries, each attempting to monitor the migrations of arms and other destabilizing materials across the globe. It’s a hard job made harder by the conflicting demands of funding organizations who want certain reports “out there” while their particular topic’s hot—but they all want the reports to stand up, so they need to be methodically watertight. Danssaert says he’s “working right now on one that started out twenty pages long, and it’s now already two hundred pages. Amnesty are asking for it, but we’ve got to get it right. Hopefully we’ll publish it in the summer. Or, uh, just after the summer.”
The job’s also made harder, he says, by people who write about it. “When people write articles about it, they make it sound very easy, or at least much less complicated. But the world’s a complicated place, and this business is far more complicated than it sometimes seems.”
And just how complicated it can be—and just how “licit” and “illicit” can become dangerously blurred—is perfectly illustrated, says Danssaert, by the thick, cultivated murk that always tends to envelop not just the operations but the attempts by governments and law-enforcement groups to stop them.
“For example,” he smiles, “my personal problem with a lot of these reports into [Bout’s activities] is that they’re completely self-referential,” he says. “I’ve even known a case where an author wrote an article with some suppositions in it, then the intelligence agencies used that article as the basis of one of their reports, and eventually leaked that internal report back to the journalist, who quoted ‘intelligence sources’ in reporting it as fact!”
Indeed, it’s the suspicion of underhanded dealings—along with the inability or disinclination of the CIA, Washington, and some investigators to respond when questions are raised about their claims—that plays into the Bout apologists’ hands. Most famously, one of Danssaert’s predecessors at IPIS, a Belgian investigator named Johan Peleman, has become something of a favorite target among Bout’s camp, fairly or unfairly, for the perceived “sexiness” of his reports. “You can tell the ones with a hard-on to pin stuff on him easily,” says one investigator with amused contempt.
The punch line is supplied by the man himself, who, with typical flamboyance, acknowledges—even perhaps encourages—this diffuse infamy, seemingly delighting in playing jokes on those who’ve made Merchant of Death–watching into a lifetime pursuit. On his Web site, under “Contact Details,” it simply says: “Postal address: History book, intelligence files, and people’s imagination.”
But Bout is only the most visible poster boy for the whole phenomenon of “merc” outfits—these maverick aviators who’ve been playing a large, unacknowledged part in world affairs.
So how hard can it be for the authorities to clean up the skies—especially in countries under lockdown like Afghanistan, Iraq? On paper, blacklisting should work, or at least extremely close performance management and observation. So should searches. So should a lot of things.
The twist is, in the worst places on earth, for the most dangerous, crucial jobs, Mickey and his comrades, with their screaming, taped-up Ilyushins and Antonovs, not to mention their low rate cards for a job, were often the only game in town. As one airman I call to check a few facts in spring 2011 jokes with me, laughing as he ad-libs to the tune of Ghostbusters: “Who you gonna call? Byelorussians!”
Still, as the 2000s progressed, Viktor Bout’s role in Liberia and Angola was becoming more widely known. In late 2000, when British government minister Peter Hain made his impassioned speech to parliament in which he coined the nickname “Merchant of Death” for Bout, he succeeded in scaring the horses, and the subsequent pressure from monitors, NGOs, bloggers, intelligence services, and investigators would see some—though by no means al
l—of the wildcat crews’ operations for the U.S. military come under fire. By 2005, names like Bout and Damnjanovic came under increased scrutiny.
As the spotlight shone brighter on the illicit movement of guns, people, money, and resources around the world, some cargo outfits would move on again, looking for happier, more discreet hunting grounds—places where the skies were still free and where their services were once again in urgent demand. Places they had friends.
For some, that meant a renewed focus on empty, wing-and-a-prayer Africa; for others, the equally radar-free skies of South America.
Only this time, for Mickey, I couldn’t escape the feeling that it looked increasingly like a last bolt-hole. In fact, for many of their comrades, these outposts would be the end of the line. And for at least one very high-profile former Vitebsk colleague, this is where the international law-enforcement net would begin to close in.
PART V
Back to the Jungle: Central America and The Horn of Africa
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
High Times on the Costa Coca
Central America, 1999–2008
AS IT EMERGED THAT al-Qaeda had been funding itself with knockoff CD, T-shirt, and DVD sales, the penny began to drop that terrorism, drug-trafficking, illicit arms, the vice trade, and even copyright infringement might be full and integral parts of a global economy, just as the different parts and divisions of the “straight” economy are.
As eureka moments go, it was a little late, coming to the capitalist West a full decade after Mickey, Viktor Bout, and Leonid Minin had seized on it. But there it was, at last. Post–9/11, the world suddenly began feverishly trying to put the pieces of the international terror puzzle together.
To anyone who’d seen the Milošević regime in the last days of Yugoslavia funding guerrilla armies and paramilitary organizations with bootleg cigarettes and illicit weapons smuggled aboard Soviet-era cargo giants, it shouldn’t have been a surprise. But a surprise it was. So was the fact that the Taliban was nowhere near running short of money because they controlled the heroin trade, justifying the rather un-Islamic practice of drug trafficking by pointing out that it was for the greater good of bringing the infidel to his knees, using the old tactic of the passing Afghan “well-wishers” who used to throw the odd wrap of heroin or bag of weed into tanks and over garrison walls for the occupying soldiers, hoping it would addict and debilitate them.
Narco-terrorism, a term coined in Peru in the early 1980s, was the new buzzword, and the rise and proliferation of organizations like al-Shabab, the Janjaweed, Somali pirates, and the Colombian left-wing guerrilla organization FARC began to seem more like a global issue than a local one.
Suddenly, Mickey’s flights were no longer simply the concern of aid agencies, businessmen, warlords, and the odd monitor or plane spotter fortunate enough to have a desk in Washington, Antwerp, or Stockholm. Like it or not, even these radarless expanses were plugged into the global ecosystem—albeit an ecosystem overheating on its own wild, freewheeling energy.
These planes may have earned their narco-smuggling stripes back in Mickey’s Soviet-Afghan war days, but their route networks have grown, taking in cocaine from Colombia, Peru, Venezuela, and Mexico. As early as 1992, authorities right down through Central and South America had begun noting Central American cocaine cartels forming what one U.S. intelligence report called “formal alliances with Russian organized crime groups.” That year, Colombian authorities had begun recording contact between a Colombian known as “Caliche” whom they suspected was one of the main couriers for the Orejuela cartel, and a man he called “Sylvester” from Russia’s powerful Moscow-area mafiya, the Solntsevskaya Brotherhood. The two men, it emerged, were setting up a “large-scale distribution network” with the West African states—in which, coincidentally, a large ex-Soviet aviation infrastructure had quickly established itself—turning into popular transshipment points.
By 2001, an intelligence report by the Colombian Administrative Department of Security found that “Russian and Colombian criminal groups have been negotiating shipments of drugs that were paid for with short- and long-range weapons, that were later sold in Central America or directly to subversive groups of the country.”
All this high-volume trade with subversive and criminal groups—meaning, essentially, FARC—would be impossible, of course, without help and official collusion. Which is where FARC’s Cold War contact book came in. Through the 1980s, the guerrilla army had sent soldiers abroad for training, commonly to fellow revolutionary communist lands, from the Soviet Union to Vietnam. By the 1990s, the lines of communication and transport between their soldiers and their now-freelance ex-Soviet comrades-in-arms was bearing more profitable fruit.
Moisés Naím, for whom as Venezuela’s minister for trade and industry in the 1980s and 1990s, FARC’s activities had presented an almost daily challenge, compares the era’s Colombian drug-trafficking kingpins like Pablo Escobar explicitly to Viktor Bout. Both, he says, were “Mr. Big” characters in their own particular nascent industries; industries which would quickly become so highly evolved that they would no longer need Mr. Big figures at all.
With the mid-1990s decline of legendary Colombian cartels like Escobar’s, the components in the process—shippers and producers—saw they could work in more agile, less public ways and effectively sidestep these powerful middle men, and Latin America buzzed with strange new kinds of sea and air traffic. In Mexico, reports surfaced in 1998 that the Russian mafia was “supplying Mexican drug traffickers with radar, automatic weapons, grenade launchers, and small submersibles in exchange for cocaine, amphetamines, and heroin,” while DEA agents found posing as members of the Russian mafia with three hundred Kalashnikovs going cheap was suddenly an effective way to draw Mexican narcos out for a sting.
But an investigation by MSNBC in 2000 not only revealed the extent and richness of the network that made up the South American Connection, but proved to anyone harboring doubts just how mind-bogglingly profitable the business was for the airmen prepared to work the routes.
Recalling Andrei Soldatov’s cryptic words about protection for smuggling flights from Afghanistan, U.S. intelligence uncovered “an alliance of corrupt Russian military figures, organized crime bosses, diplomats and revolutionaries” flying regular consignments of weapons to Colombia and returning to the former Soviet Union with their payment—up to forty thousand kilos of cocaine a trip.
According to U.S. intelligence sources quoted in the MSNBC investigation, throughout 1999 Il-76s began taking off from air bases in Russia and Ukraine bound for Amman in Jordan packed with surface-to-air missiles, guns, and ammo. They would refuel in Jordan, “bypassing customs with the help of corrupt foreign diplomats and bribed local officials,” then head off, tracing seemingly crazy routes via the Canary Islands and Guyana to Iquitos, deep in the Peruvian Amazon jungle. There, they would land and unload at remote airstrips, or in some cases even parachute-drop their cargo to Colombian FARC guerrilla detachments. These were lightning operations allegedly coordinated by a committee of men: a rogue officer in the Peruvian army; a notorious fugitive Brazilian narco-trafficker, Luiz Fernando Da Costa, also known as Fernandinho Beira-Mar—or ‘Seaside Freddie’—living in Paraguay’s “smuggler city” of Pedro Juan Caballero; and a Lebanese businessman. Despite heated denials from Colombia, in August 2000 the Peruvian government confirmed the smuggling ring’s existence, and that each parachute drop to the guerrillas had included around ten thousand Russian-manufactured automatic rifles acquired on the black market in the Middle East.
At the jungle airstrips, the weapons would be unloaded and replaced with cocaine—some of which would be given as payment for the weapons to the Jordanian middlemen; the rest flown back to Russia and Ukraine “for sale there, in Europe and in the Persian Gulf,” at up to fifty thousand dollars per kilo. The sums were staggering. “While most of the weaponry goes directly to FARC,” wrote MSNBC’s reporters Sue Lackey and Michael Moran, “a smaller amount is par
celed off to other guerrilla groups [including] Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed movement best known for its guerrilla activities in southern Lebanon [via] Arab immigrant communities of Paraguay, Ecuador, Venezuela and Brazil.”
The subtle sophistication of the arrangement—in which every party to the deal was kept remote from almost every other party to make detection more difficult—echoed the loose agglomerations favored by networks like Bout’s and Minin’s. One U.S. intelligence agent told the reporters the weapons came from “… organized crime and the military. There is a tremendous gray area between the two in Russia and the Ukraine.” Indeed, the scale of the operation, not to mention the sheer nerve, took even the intelligence officers who uncovered it by surprise, drawing comparisons with the scale of “straight” manufacturing businesses. It was, said one in admiration, “a big operation … there are a lot of people involved. It’s literally an industry.”
Around this industry, like any other, grew networks of suppliers, secondary service providers, and bottom-feeders. Up and down Central America’s coast, the flight paths traced by Mickey and his fellow pilots in their Candids and smaller Antonov turboprops nurture small economies of prostitutes, bent cops, and fixers. But perhaps the most curious of all are the legions of fishermen and farmhands who set out into the wilderness daily before dawn in the hope of finding off-target or jettisoned bales of cocaine from a wayward illicit drop.
“GOOD MORNING TO you all. Ha-ha! It’s a beautiful March morning. That was Bob Marley, and this is a message from our sponsor.” There is crackling as someone covers the microphone with a hand, and the sound of the local radio DJ arguing with someone off-mic about which button to press to start the ad. Then they locate the button, and here it comes over the airwaves: a woman’s voice, matronly and with a soft Caribbean lilt, urging hungry Belizeans to come to her chicken diner. In the bright coastal sun, the Bakelite radio on the counter of the boat-repair shop loses reception for a moment, and the only sounds are the waves. Then it comes back on as the DJ introduces a comedy song called “I’m Just Another Gringo in Belize.”