by Matt Potter
The stricken eighteen-year-old Candid sat charred and smashed on the runway for two weeks. But just as with the plane whose crew were wiped out by malaria, there were forces at work that would see the plane fly again, even fatally damaged. Or at least pieces of it, for there was too much money in its parts for it to be written off completely. Its four Soloviev engines alone would fetch hundreds of thousands of dollars if they could be rescued. So on March 23, 2007, just two weeks after the downing of the first Candid, another Il-76 and crew was dispatched by the owner, bringing equipment and engineers who would cannibalize the dead plane.
The second Il-76 crew, all Byelorussians, some from Mickey’s old base in Vitebsk, flew in and dropped the repair team without incident. But someone had been watching them closely. Shortly after takeoff, at a height of just three thousand meters, the pilot reported “a problem” with engine number two. As he turned to return to the airport, the second and third of three surface-to-air missiles slammed into the plane. The wing exploded, falling into the ocean, while the plane, now a ball of fire, continued along the beach line, smashing into a farm. Witnesses saw crushed farm animals, human corpses, and wreckage spread over a four-acre radius. Ten of the eleven-man crew died instantly, while the eleventh was found staggering around the crash site and died later that day. Reports suggest that missiles were fired from a farmhouse near the airport and from a small boat, suggesting that the attack was coordinated. Somali troops quickly cordoned off the area—not to trap the pirates who’d shot the plane down, but to “clean up” the scene. Within hours, they’d stripped the wreckage and issued a statement claiming no missiles had been fired after all, and they didn’t know what had happened to the Il-76.
Back in Byelorussia, mourners lined the streets to welcome the airmen’s corpses home. Talking about it, Mickey himself is obviously affected by the fact that the Byelorussian airmen were Vitebsk alumni, and some were returned to his old billet town for burial. I was pretty shocked myself—I’d done a humanitarian run from Denmark to Baku on the plane with its Byelorussian crew a couple of years before. But guerrillas’ rockets and pirates with RPGs have long been a fact of life on Somali flights. In a curious twist of fate, May 6, 2010, saw a Spetsnaz commando raid to free a Russian supertanker’s crew from pirates (who were threatening to blow up the $93 million ship) launched from a Russian destroyer called Marshal Shaposhnikov.
Information is everything to Mickey’s crew: who’s shooting, who’s paying, who else has been, who’s made it back. These guys are info addicts, and that makes them incurable gossips. They’d make great reporters, I tell them: They’ll shoot the shit with anyone—bag ladies, cops, soldiers, crims—if it’ll give them a lead, if someone’ll let slip a phone number, if it’ll help them get a fix on the weather, the fighting, or some guy who’s in the market for a couple of crates of Courvoisier they just happened by over the border. Where there’s reception, they talk on phones in short snatches or while we’re waiting for takeoff, then switch to radio to finish the conversation. We live point to point, not day to day, and measure out our lives in stacks and crates—the toppling, strapped-down bar chart of the independent trader.
The crew get supremely antsy whenever they’re on the ground for longer than it takes to pick up or drop off. Because while everyone in the aid game keeps telling you it’s a race against the clock, everyone in business will tell you just as straight that time is money. In any case, as far as the guys shipping the goods are concerned, they are indistinguishable—same game, different logo.
In some ways, it’s infuriating to chat with Mickey and have the most casual questions batted back at you. It took me ages to find out where he was from, simply because his gut response to everything is to shrug, mutter something vague like “the USSR,” or fob me off with a half-truth. Conversations about destinations, cargoes, or friends and family connections are nonstarters. In a moment of exasperation, I once told him the only reason I asked so many questions in the first place was because he didn’t tell me anything to start with. Mickey just shrugged and offered me a cigarette, then called to Dmitry and started talking to him.
But looking back, I can’t really work out why that surprised me so much.
On December 12, 2009, apparently working on a tip-off, Bangkok police raided and grounded an Il-76 on the tarmac at the city’s international airport. The plane was refueling on a bizarre, twenty-four thousand–mile planned route from arms-embargoed North Korea that zigzagged over most of the earth, taking in the Ukraine, Iran, and Thailand.
This time, the mysterious tip-off was spot-on. As they ripped the plane apart, they found case after case of what were listed as “machine parts for the oil industry,” but was in fact thirty-two tons of RPGs, bombs, ground-to-air missiles, and other military hardware, guns, and ammo. This was big: a sanctions-busting run carrying an illicit arms consignment from North Korea. The crewmen were taken away, the plane impounded, the cargo confiscated. For the Thai police, the raid was a total success.
That’s where the jubilation ended, and the bafflement and frustration began. Because this was where investigators looking for answers encountered the same blurriness that drives me to distraction with Mickey and the boys.
The man whose crew was manning the Il-76—a Kazakh from Shymkent called Alexander Zykov whose cargo aviation company, East Wing, may or may not have been operating the flight, instantly washed his hands of the shipment. Zykov and his wife—who, it turned out, was registered as the Il-76’s legal owner via her Sharjah-based company—denied all knowledge of the flight and its business. They claimed to know nothing of any arms, and reportedly told journalists that, although the men worked for him, they were all currently on holiday, having rather mysteriously taken unpaid leave together a few weeks before. Indeed, when reporters from the Associated Press called Zykov by telephone prior to paying a visit to the compound where the men had stayed, he’s reported to have told them he’d no idea how to find out who’d even booked the flight, or on whose behalf, slamming the phone down after suggesting they “Go find them” themselves.
Yet when the detained crew’s close friends and families were tracked down, they reacted with indignation, intimating not just their belief that the crew (who’d all worked for East Wing for long enough to be known locally as the Zykovtsy, or “Zykovites,” and even had their own bedsits in a military-style company compound for downtime between jobs) had been very much on East Wing business at the time of the Bangkok bust, but that this obfuscation was pretty much par for the course, along with faked papers and sketchy jobs. The crew themselves protested they’d assumed the cargo was what it said on the manifest: components for oil equipment. Beyond that, it was “don’t ask, don’t tell.”
Then things began to turn really weird.
The more investigators tried to find out who was behind the flight, or who’d placed the order, the more they felt they were wandering in a labyrinth of mirrors. Airmen, charter agents, customs officials, monitors all weighed in, coming up with company after company whose name appeared on different forms and certificates. Yet every single one turned into a dead end. Contacts explained they’d never heard of the plane, flight, or owner. Telephone numbers turned out to be dead. E-mails bounced back. People named on the documents denied any responsibility for the contraband. The plane had been leased and chartered onward, through shell company after shell company, and finally to a firm created just one month before the flight in Spain whose listed owner appeared, after much research, to be fictitious. Then, in a further blow, the North Korean company who appeared as having fulfilled the order for the weapons turned out not to exist either.
Days later, the crew were quietly released from their Bangkok jail and sent home without charge. After all, there was no evidence at all suggesting that they had any knowledge of the nature of their cargo. Even seasoned trackers like Brian Johnson-Thomas shake their heads looking back on it. “It smelled of a setup,” he says. “There’s something fishy about it, all the way from the ti
p-off to the fact that the guy behind it all now seems not to exist. Is it a failed sting, something bigger? We have to wait and see.”
While the bust and intercontinental goose-chase gained brief news value for its perfect storm of sketchiness, there’s so much about this case that’s actually pretty typical—almost textbook—for gray ops. If you take all the statements at face value, neither crew nor owner knew of the cargo; nobody was responsible for the plane; the crew were employed by the airline, but not flying on the airline’s business or behalf; and clients existed on paper only.
“The phase we’re in,” says Moisés Naím. “is about certain activities becoming tightly interwoven with other very legitimate operations, so much so that it’s hard to detect them, and even harder to legislate against them.” In other words, there’s sufficient room, here and on many such flights, for doubt, deniability—and for a lot of clients, that’s just fine. Nobody wants to put their stick into the anthill for fear of what they’ll stir up. Right now, the shippers get their flights, the pilots get their business on the side, the airports make money, everyone’s happy. Like Brian Johnson-Thomas’s pilot friend, who came across as highly public-spirited by offering the NGOs his services for free on some routes, Mickey’s generous terms are a gift horse to aid agencies. Understandably, with rates as cheap as his, many are reluctant to dig deeper into his motivations.
Still, the Dunkirk-spirit nature of the cargo business—not just humanitarian flights to emergency zones, but just-in-time commercial and military logistics deliveries too, along with a breakneck schedule of too many flights in too short a time frame so familiar to small-time man-with-van operations everywhere—means turnaround is often alarmingly quick and scrutiny often comically low.
Even the most brazen stowaways and bizarre cargo consignments get carried through. After the 2004 tsunami sent waves over thirty meters high into coastal communities from Indonesia, Thailand, and Malaysia to Sri Lanka and countries across the Indian Ocean, destroying cities and killing more than 230,000 people, the veteran Eastern bloc A-Teams with their cavernous superplanes and anything-anywhere attitude were the first on the scene with relief and reconstruction supplies in what, at the time, was close to hell on earth.
When the Sri Lankan Tamil Tigers mounted their first air attack in March 2007, the Times (London) reported that the Tigers’ attack aircraft had been smuggled into the country in kit form after the tsunami of 2004, exploiting lax security amid the aid effort.
There was time to pick up plenty extra to smuggle home, too. John MacDonald remembers having the wits scared out of him by one vodka-drinking stowaway while flight managing for the hordes of swarming Ilyushin and Antonov crews that turned the skies black over the disaster zone.
“During that period in Southeast Asia, there were these Il-76s and these two Antonov-12s; they were taken out there to be based in Kuala Lumpur and to fly aid and supplies all around the region,” he says. “I was running around these aircraft, just running around like crazy, finding out whose they were, just to make sure they were okay and safe—it all went well. So I walked into one plane, and the crew compartment’s not that big in those things, and I could hear this unearthly shrieking. I walked through the cargo door, and walked up, and this horrible screaming was getting louder. I looked up, and from the floor to the ceiling, there was a huge, four-foot-six, maybe five-foot-high cage there in the darkness, and in the cage was this huge tropical bird with half its feathers fallen out, just flapping and squawking. These guys had been based in west-coast Africa, and the pilot had bought it on the black market over there the week before the tsunami thinking he was going home the next week to the Ukraine and would give it to his little girl. But then when the emergency came, there was too much work to turn down getting relief jobs in. They traveled halfway round the world, and all the while there was this man-size bird, they’d been feeding it vodka and bread, and its feathers are falling out, and it’s just squawking away with this unearthly sound in there. You could hear it for miles around.”
He laughs as he counts off all the checks and landings they’d have had to make with their shrieking passenger on the way.
“Just look at the map and the range of the plane—they’d made all these flights to get from West Africa to Malaysia, it took them ages, from Pointe-Noire to Nairobi, then Addis Ababa, then the UAE—maybe Sharjah—then somewhere in India, then one more stop somewhere else, then over to Kuala Lumpur. All with this giant bird squawking and flapping. Nobody saw a thing. Not only that, but bear in mind the crew have been sleeping, eating, everything on the plane: It’s a madhouse. Anyone who’s been in these planes at the best of times knows the smell is like the back of a Moscow taxi, all body odor and grease and whatever else, and on top of that you’ve got a giant bald alcoholic bird.”
In fact, animal life is a frequent stowaway with some crews, and a nice little earner if you can keep it alive long enough to deliver it. But these extra cargoes have unintended consequences, too. Within a year, black-cargo flights in and out of Africa were being identified by TRAFFIC, the wildlife trade monitoring network, as the real culprits for several outbreaks of bird flu in previously “clean and contained” countries.
“The official line that it was migratory birds was rubbish,” says TRAFFIC’s Richard Thomas. “It’s no coincidence that in Nigeria, where they banned the import of chickens because of bird flu, a supposedly sealed-off and certified farm right next to the airport was the site of their outbreak. They’d banned imports, but of course diseased birds then began being smuggled in on these masses of unmarked planes.”
Their laissez-faire take on import-export “piggybacks” when flying aid to tsunamis or peacekeeping runs for the UN has made them legends, even among UN staff themselves. “I can’t help but miss them,” sighs one aviator who flew supplies during the Angolan war in the early 1990s. “Back in Luanda my colleague was flying for the UN,” he recalls. “He wanted to buy an African gray parrot for the pilot house, so he promptly went over to the Il-76 crew, who were also flying for the UN, to ask for a favor—he wanted to ask them to buy an African gray parrot in the northeast of Angola on their next trip, during the week. Well, they invited him in and offered him a vodka or two—and this was at ten A.M. My friend declined the vodka and showed them his walkie-talkie; he said he was on standby and asked them to get him a gray parrot on their next trip. The conversation got involved and more vodka flowed, then all of a sudden the drinking stopped and the Il-76 crew got up and walked out. My friend asked if this was an inconvenient time and apologized for interrupting their socializing time in UN camp. The captain turned around and said, ‘No problem—we fly now and fetch the bird!’ And so they did. By six P.M. there was an African gray parrot in the house!”
The stories are legion—birds, tanks, pigs, helicopters, statues of pop stars, pianos, whole wine cellars, people, fake watches, arms, drugs, there’s nothing that hasn’t at some point become a bit of piggybacked “cash cargo” on a fully legitimate humanitarian run paid for by someone who has no idea what’s coming in and going out with their lifesaving goods.
But beyond the hijinks, there are clues that this casual approach—and the black-hole status of airports in places like Afghanistan and sub-Saharan Africa—prevail at least partly because of the reluctance of the people we’d normally think of as the “good guys” to clean them up.
Because sometimes, even humanitarian-aid flights in Mickey’s Il-76 become a cover not just for illicit extra cargo the crew themselves might want to carry, but for top-secret, Bond-style “black ops” missions by governments like our own.
JUST AS THE bad guys are all looking for a little legitimacy from the cover a UN contract or humanitarian mission provides, so do the people we’d normally think of as the good guys.
Which means someone very powerful indeed has an interest in providing the best smokescreen possible for whatever Mickey’s crew is doing—and some of the “illicit” cargoes we’re all trying to track are in fact carried
as part of a highly complex, well-planned web of operations on behalf of our own governments. There have long been reports of unlisted passengers arriving and being spirited out of crisis areas by easygoing crews or game-playing operators. Diplomats and UN officials are known to fly undercover, inside specially comfort-fitted Il-76s, when they have to fly en masse. The photos are on the UN Web site after the fact; but for security reasons, the details are kept vague until they’ve landed. Indeed, I’ve been unlisted on most of my flights, albeit under less salubrious conditions, dealing directly with the crew alone and paying them for the inconvenience rather than go through official channels, airlines, or lessors themselves; it’s simpler that way. But it’s now clear that the odd cash flight, and the occasional scandal over “extraordinary renditions” of suspected Taliban combatants, is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to governments turning to ex-Soviet black-cargo planes themselves when there’s a shady job they need doing. According to Igor Salinger, Damnjanovic and Djordjevic’s doomed arms shipment from Belgrade under the watchful eye of the Milošević regime was far from the only black-ops waltz the former Yugoslavia’s cargo charter men danced with world governments. “They made a number of flights out of Bosnia on behalf of U.S. arms trading companies,” he smiles. “And we both know that in Bosnia you can’t pee your pants without Langley CIA being informed.”
In 2007, a UN panel of experts report circulated to the UN Security Council even found that the Sudanese government in Khartoum had chartered Antonov-26s, painted them in white United Nations livery, and used them to ferry secret stashes of arms to the Janjaweed militia with which to terrorize villages in Darfur.