Outlaws Inc.

by Matt Potter

  The expat network is wide and enduring. “I’ve got a lot of [aviator] friends in Africa,” remembered Sergei Ivanov— a technician who worked at an Angolan base known as Volga, after the Russian river, throughout the freewheeling, conflict-torn late 1990s and early 2000s—when he was tracked down by a Russian newspaper after another crew plummeted to their deaths. “There are literally masses of airplanes from the Soviet Union out there. On a single airfield in Angola I once counted thirty An-12s, plus a lot more Il-76s, An-72s, and other aircraft.

  “[My bosses] had this great plan,” said Ivanov, “to create a fleet of aircraft across Africa operating from Namibia, with technical bases elsewhere—officially authorized by the Russian authorities. They brought equipment: ladders, lifts, and so on. Parts were bought, experts were hired from Ekaterinburg and Kirov. All just to serve the Angolan aircraft.”

  These surreally located Slav-speaking communities and dozens like them from Iraq to Uganda became, for many technicians, pilots, and crew, homes from home, with crews, technicians, admin guys, and security living and working together for companies with good old Russian names like Volga-Atlantic and Troika-Link. Roll up at any air base’s gates, or the network of warehouses, shops, and houses that form around them, and you’d be as likely to hear a Russian- or Ukrainian-league football match blasting through the thin walls of the prefab huts as the engines of an approaching Candid.

  Like the Englishmen dressing for dinner and sitting down at mahogany tables in jungle clearings in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, these men transplanted their unit, their skills, their hardware, even their culture out to sub-Saharan Africa, Arabia, South Asia, and the Far East.

  And though it seemed Sergei Ivanov was keen to point out that his bosses, of which Evgeny Zakharov was one, refused to take sketchy cargo or even servicemen, not all of them were quite as fussy.

  “Sometimes you’d see six aircraft from the former Soviet Union a month come down,” said Ivanov to the Komi, Russia–based reporter who tracked him down. “It was mostly Ukrainian crews who crashed. They were shot down, basically. We used to call them bezpredelschik—‘the lawless ones.’ The devil only knows what made them carry the kind of stuff they used to carry.

  “Militants from UNITA used to put us under pressure too, when they wanted to fly,” he said. “They knew us quite well, but we would never take military. We never took weapons either. It got to the point, when they threatened us with handguns and tried to force us to take some general on board, that we actually used to pretend we’d ‘broken’ our plane! And the difference is, we lost only one plane over Angola.”

  These lawless, doomed Ukrainians Ivanov used to watch fall flaming to earth across Angola were Mickey’s old Afghantsy comrades—war tested and steely nerved. Like the Air America boys from whom they’d inherited the mantle of winged white devils, they lived by the credo, “Anything, anywhere, anytime, professionally.” They were also crack flyboys, airmen who, as the Kazakh president used to say about his personal pilot, “could land upside down in a cave.” They came, they played fast and loose, they took money to fly whatever you have, and having come through the hell of Afghanistan, they thought they were immortal.

  But here, out over the savannahs, the forests, and the mountains of an Africa dissolving into a dozen different wars, the rich rewards to be gained from flying arms and even members of different fighting groups made them targets. The paydays were potentially massive, but so was the cost as these Icaruses burst into flames from Luanda to Kinshasa. Dozens were shot down, blown up, or killed by Mickey’s old demons, bad luck, bad timing, bad weather, tiredness, and “the life.”

  But even more aircrews from places like Siberia, Ukraine, and Byelorussia who came flooding into the world’s tropical chaos zones fell victim to their new environments.

  “I knew one An-26 crew that was virtually wiped out on one assignment because most of the crewmembers got malaria,” says one veteran cargo pilot. “This crew lived together on the plane, ate together, did everything in close confinement, in their bubble, and the malaria just swept through them. Quite a few of them got killed because of lack of proper understanding of the illness and lack of treatment in time. It wiped out more than fifty percent of the crew.”

  But even that won’t stop the plane flying the next job “the very next day,” he says. Then he adds something that startles me, something that echoes Viktor Bout’s dark warning about the nameless people who will “give him the red dot right there” if he says too much: “There are forces who bring other people to the aircraft, and it flies again.”

  WHEREVER THE PILOTS and their crews flew, in their wake there grew whole cottage industries of Slavic émigrés, Afghan war vets, technicians, trainers, fixers, import-export agents, charter guys, middlemen. Because while the Soviet air force and army had been wound down, the intelligence services and secret police weren’t immune to the pinch either.

  Suddenly, the “gray men” began appearing—former KGB agents with phones full of numbers, lines on plentiful cash, and heads full of questions about the local rebels and their diamond mines. It was straight from a Graham Greene novella as these exotic colonial outposts became the haunts of wealthy businessmen with no CVs and well-connected émigrés with vague pasts in intelligence. For some company pilots, they represented a chance to grab a piece of the pie, to go into business.

  “Just think,” they said in dirt-floored bars and makeshift offices all across the continent, “with your cash and connections, and my flying ability, we could clean up.”

  Cash appeared, planes were registered, and that’s exactly what they did. Where did the cash come from? What strings were attached? It was anybody’s guess. Those who knew weren’t telling, and the flyboys weren’t about to look any gift horses in the mouth.

  Africa was Viktor Bout’s stomping ground too. He bought up a small aviation outfit in the DRC called Okapi Air and renamed it Odessa. Leonid Minin, meanwhile, was building his African import-export empire, holding court with Liberia’s Charles Taylor, and putting his crews up at the infamous Hotel Africa in Liberia—also a favored stopover for smugglers and traders, including one who reportedly used it as a convenient place to rest on Pakistan-Netherlands hashish runs.

  Those were high times indeed. But now those men are gone and the skies over Africa are ruled by others—some good, some bad, and not one of them doing anything that anyone will arrest them for.

  “There are all kinds of people out there, from Tajikistan to Angola,” laughs Mark Galeotti, whose work for the British Foreign Office saw him become persona non grata in the CIS for a while, “and a lot of them are former intelligence professionals. In the 1990s there was a massive running down of the intelligence networks. Under Putin a lot of it crawled back, but a lot of people by this point had already cut their connections and, frankly, were making a lot more money outside. So in plenty of places, you’ve got your former local military-intelligence resident, the sort of chief officer in a country, who’s married a local, settled down, and is now the go-to fixer for Russians wanting to do any kind of business.”

  The result, a network of consular teams, businessmen, and expats—many left there by the receding tide of Cold War politics, others heading out to the furthest reaches of the old sphere of influence in search of work—means wherever you are in the world, and whatever you, your crew, and your mammoth Ilyushin aircraft need, you’re never too far from a friend of a friend of Mickey’s.

  And nowhere was the so-called gray area dividing Russian and Ukrainian commercial pilots and mercenary activity grayer than at these far-off, disease-riddled outposts in the sun.

  Even Mickey’s old commanders from the air force were in on the action: While Mickey had left the military and gone into business, his former comrades had been marketing their own services pretty energetically, too. Through the mid-1990s, Mickey’s old commander in chief Marshal Evgeny Shaposhnikov had become Boris Yeltsin’s personal representative on the board of a firm called Rosvooruzhenie,
a wholly state-owned arms-sales and export company set up by the Russian state itself to bring in cash.

  By the early 2000s, the business of arming, supplying, and transporting to East Africa was booming, literally, with men and hardware flying off the shelves once more—this time above the counter.

  Sales of attack helicopters and MiG fighter jets to disreputable regimes like Sudan, where they were just as likely to end up in the hands of the Janjaweed militia’s “Devils on Horseback” troops as responsible COs, put Russia in the firing line of international peace monitors, but they had the happy effect of giving the country semiofficial on-the-ground military presence in some of the world’s least stable trouble spots: Every regime’s air force across Africa, Asia, and the Near East equipped with Russian planes suddenly also found it needed the men to maintain them, repair them, oversee their use, and train the country’s own airmen (indigenous air force pilots in places like Sudan are chosen primarily for their loyalty to the regime, not their skill, and are legendarily, tragicomically inept).

  “The main point, it’s not that Russian pilots are replacing American pilots,” says Evgeny Zakharov. “The reason is more to do with Russian planes—Antonovs, Ilyushins—are better for Africa. These Russian aircraft, the Ilyushins and Antonovs, have replaced American aircraft. That is the reason. And so there’s a lot of demand for pilots. For example, there’s a very, very big shortage of pilots for Antonovs. I tell you, these Russian pilots are really in demand because it’s easy to find somewhere to train to fly a Boeing, but there is no place you can train to fly an Antonov-12.”

  The humans followed the hardware wherever it was the only thing that could do the job—the Candid’s twenty giant wheels made it perfect for rough airstrips; the Antonov-12 could land anywhere; and in the empty spaces of the third world, they could all fly well past their official airworthiness had expired—until, and in some cases after, they simply began to fade away. The result was the spread through the third world of de facto Russian, Ukrainian, and Byelorussian air bases, compounds, and communities. Just like the old days, the businesses had branches everywhere: trained air force men, instructors, military intelligence, technicians. Only this time someone else was paying and none of it cost the exchequer, the armed forces, or the people back home a single cent.

  The existences of any state-sponsored arms-running operations are shrouded in secrecy, but tantalizing glimpses into their workings show just how blurred the lines between instructing another country’s pilots (legal under international law), maintaining their aircraft (also legal), and fighting for their air force as mercenary forces (very illegal) can become.

  In May 2008, a Russian fighter pilot was reported “killed in action” in Sudan—a country in which, despite the trade links, there was no Russian military involvement, let alone action. Both the Sudanese and Russian authorities first denied all knowledge, then that any such incident had taken place. Then, in the now-familiar routine I first saw at work on Belgrade airport’s molten tarmac, they ordered an immediate media blackout: Sudanese government troops raided local radio stations who reported the incident, shutting one down; Russian state media censored the story.

  But pictures leaked out via the Internet, and finally Russia—having denied that “any Russians whatsoever were in Sudan at the time”—claimed the pilot was an instructor at a MiG fighter air base outside Khartoum.

  Just one problem. The “instructor” happened to be flying his MiG-29 into battle against a two-hundred-vehicle assault force of over twelve hundred heavily armed Islamic Justice and Equality Movement rebels from Darfur, marching on the capital. As the armored column headed toward the presidential palace, the MiG came in for the kill, only to be hit by 12.7mm and 14.5mm machine-gun fire. And when the pilot’s parachute failed to open on ejection, his secret mission as a mercenary pilot almost died in the dust with him.

  And it wasn’t just “decommissioned stockpiles” of pilots and aircrews who ended up putting deals together in the sub-Saharan sun, but former Soviet secret agents too—those ex- KGB and FSB men who’d opened up shop here for whatever services they were in a position to provide. Indeed, even today much of the South African secret police is made up of Mickey’s old compatriots.

  Andrei Soldatov remembers how former KGB men in South Africa met with Nelson Mandela’s newly installed ANC government in the mid-1990s to discuss the provision of a ready-made secret service for South Africa—one that was not tainted by having worked for the previous apartheid regime. “Mandela’s people asked this one former KGB officer to organize the transfer of thousands of [former Russian KGB] people from Moscow to South Africa. So that’s what happened. And now the former KGB guy who arranged it, he’s quite comfortably off, and he’s come back to Moscow. His son’s still out there working on it.”

  This fact makes all the more intriguing a March 1998 daylight housebreak and assassination attempt at Viktor Bout’s $3 million Johannesburg mansion by phenomenally well-armed, masked paramilitary raiders who have—incredibly, given the audacity of the crime—never been caught or identified. Bout’s mansion, in the exclusive Sandhurst district, was so heavily fortified some locals mistook it for a VIP detention center: walls five meters high were crowned with high-voltage wire fencing, while heavily armed security guards and attack dogs kept up a twenty-four-hour patrol of the grounds. On paper, the house itself, not to mention its two swimming pools, fountains, tropical garden, and separate accommodation for guests, should have been impregnable. It also provided Bout with a very comfortable lifestyle. Yet one March afternoon, as his elderly Russian housemaid was chopping fruit in the kitchen, the door was kicked in by masked paramilitary-style raiders who knocked her unconscious, beat her son, and stormed through the house, making off with $6 million in ready cash but, oddly, leaving all other valuables—including paintings and antiques—where they stood.

  That was the first “warning,” according to Richard Chichakli. He claimed the message was clear: “You’re vulnerable. Get out.” When just days later Bout’s car was peppered with bullets by a gunman on a motorbike, then a henchman was beaten on the street, he took the hint. As with the KGB/FSB’s masked-raider bust of East Wing, and the subsequent claims of involvement by a secret society, rumors of South African secret-police involvement in the Bout raids persisted. This was partly because, by this time, the discreet influence of former Soviet secret service men, and particularly those from the GRU, the old counterintelligence networks abroad, had become so pervasive—with Africa a particularly popular haunt.

  “The sort of people who were abroad anyway tended to be the smart guys or the ones who had skills,” confirms Galeotti. “And until the late Gorbachev years, they tended to be those who played the game in the Communist Party and everything else—not because they actually believed in it, but because they wanted the cushy job. The number of KGB I’ve spoken to who say, ‘Why did I join the KGB? To get a cushy job! Joining the party was the only way I was ever going to get to live abroad!’ So now you have these very smart, amoral people out there, still working off the same skills and knowledge base.”

  They work on the legitimate side, mostly—businessmen whose networks from the old days are useful for contacts and suppliers. These people, says Mickey, will know the outfit he flies for, and will often know him personally; they’ll know he can get a job done. They might even request him by name. It is, he says, no different than belonging to a football club.

  It’s a small, tight-knit community, all right, just like any pioneer group. And when a crew is lost, which is often, everybody knows at least someone connected with the disaster. Which makes me wonder how they can be so fatalistic; how even when it’s so close to home—the same kind of plane, the same airport, the same client, a friend—men like Mickey can accept the same fuzziness around the crash as they accept in their business dealings.

  So I make up my mind to find out. And that means getting deeper inside the minds, and the remaining outpost communities, of this exotic and incre
asingly endangered airborne species.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Russian Rain Keeps Falling

  The Congo, 2005–2009

  IT’S BEEN AN ODDLY COLD, dark midsummer 2010 in East Africa, chasing Mickey’s crew, friends, and contacts around, catching the odd flight, and keeping up with Sergei’s drinking. I’m getting over a fever, fed up, and, more than anything, increasingly claustrophobic—I’ll never know how it is Mickey and company still haven’t tried to dice each other up. I’ve got so much Nile beer coming out of my pores that nowadays even the mosquitoes look the other way when they see me coming. This is, Mickey tells me, what you get from the Life—though I can never get to the bottom of whether he just means “from life” and he’s adding the definite article because that’s what Russians (who don’t have them) think you do when you speak English. Or if he really means something called the Life—the way you live when you’re in the gang.

  We make a motley handful about town in Africa: an ever-fluctuating number of giant, spindly, gangly, fat, tanned and pale, old and young Slavs dressed to the nines, trailed by one incongruously scruffy little Brit. And here, as dollar-spending mzungu and airmen to boot, we are a target market. Like sailors’ dens in a port town, the local economy, from restaurants and bars to tattoo dens, hotels turned bordellos, and casinos, is geared up for these crews and their dollars. Hassan, the stocky, flashy boss of the Simba Casino in the belly of a giant mall in Central Kampala, has even started hiring Kazakh girls as dancers. “We had a lot of old Soviet airmen in when we got the dancers last time,” he says. Another pilot says there’s recently been a whirlwind romance between a Ukrainian airman and just such a dancer. “This time next month, they’ll have their own cargo airline,” he laughs. “And guess who he’ll have doing sales.”