by Matt Potter
On occasion, these heavily disguised cargo giants themselves had, it was revealed, been used as bombers in a secret bombardment of civilian populations by President Omar al-Bashir’s Sudanese regime. “The most astonishing revelation,” reported the Times, “was the use by the Sudanese armed forces of [these] white-painted military aircraft in Darfur.” On March 7 [2007] a photograph was taken of an Antonov An-26 aircraft on the military apron of Al-Fasher airport, the Darfuri regional capital. Guarded by soldiers and with bombs piled alongside, the plane was painted white and has the initials “UN” stenciled on its upper left wing. Another Sudanese military aircraft was disguised in the same manner. The report said that white Antonovs were used to bombard Darfur villages on at least three occasions in January.
Like Damnjanovic’s doomed arms shipment from Belgrade on behalf of the Milošević regime, like the masses of spontaneously combusting, flapping, vaporizing-in-midair flights over the Congo and Angola, these apparently harmless humanitarian-aid flights have a strange habit of blowing up—almost as if there were high-explosive cargoes on board instead of the tires, sanitation equipment, foodstuffs, and tents that appear on the manifests.
And whenever these flights do come down, it feels like Surcin all over again. I do some more digging into the fate of Katya Stepanova’s navigator friend. And the more I discover, the more it looks like talk of incorrect paperwork, faked licenses, alcohol intake, and so forth is (intentionally or not) a very convenient smokescreen. Increasingly, it seems that nothing the crew did or did not do would have saved them. And equally, perhaps Stepanova is right when she says the Candid was in tip-top condition.
Because the simple, inescapable fact is, the Ilyushin-76 blew up midair, shortly after takeoff from Entebbe, just after five A.M. on March 9, 2009, disintegrating with such force that an engine shot off, missilelike, and sank a local fisherman’s boat on Lake Victoria. That looks like an explosion. And if the plane was sound, and the crew didn’t ever know what hit them, then just what exploded up there?
This is something the investigators seem unusually keen to gloss over, preferring to ask questions about the navigator’s paperwork and the pilot’s CV to questions about the nature of the cargo. Indeed, early claims coming from Ugandan authorities and the owner were that it had been carrying water-purification equipment and tents for the African mission to Somalia. And then the wreckage, physical and metaphorical, began to float up to the surface. And something else emerged with it: claims that the plane was carrying Burundian soldiers on a peacekeeping mission, and men from the Pentagon’s new breed of corporate mercenaries, a U.S. “private military contractor’ called DynCorp, then at the center of controversy about its conduct carrying out contracts for the Pentagon in Iraq.
If there was a secret military cargo on board—perhaps one so clandestine that even the flight’s operator, Evgeny Zakharov, perhaps even the pilot, didn’t know what it was—could it have caused the crash?
It’s a conclusion that has plenty of support among aviation communities in the area. Some—and Stepanova and the operator of the flight, Zakharov’s former company Aerolift, appear to agree on this—go further, believing the flight was sabotaged by Somali militants opposed to Uganda’s assistance in the UN peacekeeping effort there. They point to the fact that peacekeeping operations have been sabotaged at Entebbe many times before; that organized attacks on peacekeeping operations in the region are frequent and the subsequent bombing, in July 2010, of venues showing World Cup games live in Kampala, were carried out by Somali Islamists al-Shabab.
One thing’s certain: Whenever a cargo flight explodes, focusing on the crew and raising the possibility of human error is convenient for everybody but the dead men. From insurance claims to official secrecy, everything gets easier if the crew caused the crash, not the plane or the cargo. And ironically, the pressure the Ugandan army put on the CAA to clear flights as they take off not only means their cargo can’t be inspected; it also denies ground staff the chance of finding any other irregularities. An al-Shabab bomb, for example.
There are too many questions to leave it alone. So I decide to return to the crash site myself, in the company of one of the first men on the scene.
The sky is black and bruised over the northern shore of the world’s second-largest freshwater lake. On this overcast June afternoon, the breezes in the grass ringing the gunmetal waters have the look of the rural East Anglian coastline, albeit with eerily calm sea and thinner cattle grazing on the adjoining fields. On the far shores, invisible on the distant, watery horizon, are Kenya and Tanzania.
One year on from the crash, boats still comb the endless waters close to the shore, known as Magombe, where the parts of the Candid’s fuselage and engines fell. “Magombe actually means ‘death,’ ” says Entebbe-based investigative reporter for the national Daily Monitor newspaper Martin Ssebuyira, pointing out to the spot, a couple of miles out, where the Candid’s remains lie, split and smashed, under eighty feet of water and a further forty feet of impenetrably thick mud. “It’s had the name for centuries—I think nothing good happens there. Fishing boats sometimes don’t come back from that patch, so most of them avoid it. And now it’s death again.”
A wiry, soft-voiced Ugandan in his early twenties, Ssebuyira looks nothing like the kind of hard-bitten gumshoe who’d pose as a member of the secret police to get on the hastily scrambled boats and see the crash site close up, but that’s what he did. The Entebbe reporter was chased away from the crash scene the night the UPDF boats and their searchlights went out on the lake. But unlike the other reporters, he came back, hid a camera beneath his jacket to resemble the bulge of a plainclothes officer’s shoulder holster, bluffed his way onto one of the boats, and was one of the first to the point of entry.
“We kept finding body parts,” he says. “A lot of things. And it was clear from the floating wreckage that this plane did not simply crash … But that was the story that kept coming out! One of the fishermen said he saw fire on the plane in the air. Then he was taken away by the authorities. Then boats came to patrol the shore of the lake. All the local people on the lakeshore were prevented from fishing.”
Ssebuyira filed his reports. More witnesses appeared, more evidence surfaced. Slowly, the official story changed. In addition to the crew, seven “others” had been killed in the crash. They were later claimed to be fighting men, service personnel on a low-profile flight to join a Burundi peacekeeping mission. Then the DynCorp connection came to light.
The reasons for the crash, though, are shrouded in mystery; not because there are too few of them but, unusually, too many—certainly more than enough to lead Ssebuyira and others, like the expat Russian airmen and their families, to suspect smokescreening. “It was announced that the crew were drunk,” says Ssebuyira. “They were seen drinking at the Four Turkeys at three A.M., before reporting for flight duty at four A.M.,” he says. “And there were claims the captain thought an hour’s sleep was enough to sober up. But they also claimed that the plane was past its service life—it had expired, but they were still flying it. Then they found that the crew might not have been the expert fliers they thought. There were a great many things that should have been fixed, but they weren’t.”
So who was behind the smokescreen, if indeed there was one? In addition to the Ukrainian aviation authority casting doubt on the navigator’s qualifications, over at the opposition paper the Independent, news editor Patrick Matsiko wa Mucoori’s sources also told him that the CAA of the Russian Federation had drawn a blank in tracing the pilot’s papers, too. Their report concluded simply: “Maybe Kovalev did not have a pilot licence.” But despite the accusations regarding the crew’s fitness to fly, the plane’s state of repair, and the rebel activity in the area, another story slowly began to emerge.
The huge explosion onboard that “cracked the fuselage down the center like an egg,” in the words of U.S. divers who attempted to raise it, was, according to this version of events, not caused by any water-pumping
or purifying equipment or other innocuous aid; and the DynCorp “peacekeeping contractors” bound for Mogadishu weren’t just hitching a lift. The water burned so fiercely and long that even the military stayed clear. Something down there was worrying them, and with the high-explosive nature of the event, it didn’t take too long to figure out what it was.
“They weren’t carrying aid equipment,” snorts one pilot who claims to have known the men. “They were carrying a payload to Somalia for the Pentagon’s private army. Then the plane blew up before it hit the water. That was a big fucking bang. And now they’re arresting anyone who goes near it or saw the flash in the sky. It doesn’t take a genius to spot a cover-up.”
Without evidence, without transparent investigation—and U.S. navy divers subsequently being called in to conduct the salvage operation inside a cordon sanitaire didn’t help calm the conspiracy theories one bit—these are the theories that spread. And now, with the plane buried under forty feet of mud at the bottom of one of the great African lakes, it’s likely we’ll never know the exact cause.
Still, Mucoori continues to hope something good will come out of it, for the sake of the crews if nothing else. “Hopefully,” he wrote in his report, “this will mean that aid agencies and large logistics companies will start using legitimate operators rather than just using the cheapest option and feeding the cowboys. People’s lives are worth more than a few extra dollars.”
But with even blue-chip Pentagon partners willing to use shadow planes and lie about the cargo—not to mention using “humanitarian aid” as a fig leaf for whatever military payload they are really transporting in beat-up Soviet charter planes with crews like Mickey’s—suddenly every cop is a criminal. Indeed, those who’ve known Viktor Bout for many years claim his gunrunning was as much for the major governments and their cronies as for anybody they disapproved of, and that’s why he was allowed to continue for so long, with so many investigative task forces being pulled off the case and resources constantly being diverted from the departments monitoring his activities.
Typically, investigations are halfhearted or too quickly concluded. Causes are covered up. E-mails—mine and others’—to investigative teams, to governments, to aviation authorities, go unanswered, calls unreturned. The UN’s Congo operation lists a phone number in Kinshasa, but I rang it every day for six months and never once got picked up. Even the UN secretary general’s office becomes evasive with me when I ask how come the UN base in Entebbe is so unaware of the extra cargo on flights in and out, saying they can’t tell me “when we’ll have an answer for you, or if we’ll have one at all.” Africa is chaotic, say all parties, and a soft, universally beneficial vagueness descends again—one from which Mickey and his men may be small winners, but from which there are those who stand to gain far, far more. And while everyone has an interest in leaving room for doubt about their use of this secret superpipeline, men like Patrick Mucoori continue to push for transparency, men like pilot Viktor Koralev and navigator Evgeny Korolev continue to die, and the Soviet-made steel keeps roaring overhead.
PART VI
The Journey Home: East Africa and Russia
CHAPTER TWENTY
The Ghost Factory
Russia, 2008
FALSE NAMES AND BORROWED IDS are part of the plan for me just as much as for the aircrews themselves while I follow Mickey around. At times I feel like I’m wandering the world in a strange dream in which people, like planes, keep switching faces, names, lives. There are whispers of more airmen’s bodies being recovered from crash sites than there were airmen in the planes. Of planes that crash, only for investigators to discover they’d already been completely destroyed in another crash years before. The whole thing begins to feel like some gothic tale from Kipling.
There are, of course, more worldly explanations. At most checkpoints in Africa, a flashed dollar bill is as close as I get to telling anyone my name or showing anyone a passport, and a piece of borrowed ID (in which I transform into a hulking middle-aged Russian) settles the rest.
As filmmaker Hubert Sauper wrote when he trailed these crews’ progress round the African lakes in a Candid, “In order to fly with cargo planes we had to disguise ourselves as pilots and loadmasters and carry fake identities. In villages we were mistaken as missionaries, and in fish factories managers feared we might be EU hygiene inspectors. We had to become Australian businessmen in the fancy hotel bars, or just harmless backpackers in the African bush, ‘taking pictures.’ ” His submersion was so effective he even found himself making news headlines across the world as having been kidnapped, simply because of the American Embassy’s confusion as to his whereabouts.
Even to those who know him, Mickey’s cultivated protean quality makes him time-consuming, and often impossible, to trace. In the years between our meetings, while preparing for trips to Russia, Africa, and elsewhere to chase Mickey, I find hooking up with him impossibly difficult because his telephone SIM cards are changed wherever he goes, and in any case seldom last the month, and because clients, charter agents, and bosses rarely seem to have any more of a clue than I do where to find him. Even when I know the hotel he’s in, reception haven’t a clue if he’s there or not because he uses different names and IDs to check in.
But if Mickey is vague and elusive out of habit and necessity, many operators higher up the food chain turn it into an art. One of the most mysterious cases on the intelligence agencies’ files is a woman. Intelligence officials know her simply as Tatyana, and professionally, they are as spooked by her as anybody ever was by Keyser Söze.
She is believed to be one of the closest aides not just to Viktor Bout, but to other international traffickers operating in the triangle of Moscow, the United Arab Emirates, and sub-Saharan Africa. She first appeared on the radar back in those first heady Wild East days in Milošević’s Belgrade. Since then, she’s displayed an uncanny nose for imminent war and a tendency for turning up wherever the second horseman rides into town, including a tour of West Africa that kicked off in Monrovia, Liberia, in 1999, just as the shooting began.
“Tatyana” is a curious, semimythical creature even to those who make paper-trailing their business. Sightings of her are often reported but she has never been successfully tracked, and although Tatyana is always her first name, her last name is different on almost every signature she leaves behind.
She is known to turn up wherever a number of traffickers of arms and “gray” cargo, including Bout, are setting up new business operations and to be a lawyer, or at least legal advisor, for Bout. Her birthday always appears as the same date, though on each piece of ID a different year is given according to intelligence officials quoted in a second 2010 intelligence report commissioned by the deposed ruler of Ras al-Khaimah, written by a former member of the U.S. air force’s special forces, and issued by Mercury LLC suggesting the emirate and its Sharjah neighbor may be a “rogue state” possessing terror links with Iran.
Tatyana’s role, according to Farah and Braun, was—perhaps still remains, his physical imprisonment notwithstanding—to scope out new business territories for Viktor Bout’s organizations, going on ahead of him to do all the legal and financial research—dot the i’s, cross the t’s, and gather paperwork—before flying back to her office in Moscow. And while some sources say she is in her late twenties, a woman matching her description has served Bout’s companies, and those of other known traffickers, for a decade or more.
“She was first identified by European intelligence officers,” says the Ras al-Khaimah report, “[who were] monitoring the activities of the Bout operation in Europe and Africa,” and has appeared for contractual meetings just before the arms shipments arrived in Belgrade, Liberia, Dubai, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Thailand, the Congo, Belgium, and the tiny emirate of Ras al-Khaimah itself. If Tatyana really is now in her late twenties, her appearance in Belgrade would have made her a sixteen-year-old legal expert.
Everyone who sees her, deals with her, looks at her, or knows people who
know her agree they’re talking about the same woman, only each time she’s different somehow. According to the anonymous author,
the ability of [these traffickers] to use nimble corporate branding to hide their activities appears to be the work of [Tatyana]. Tatiana …—it is unclear if this is her original name—manages [another cargo baron] Egli’s business operations. A woman matching [Tatyana’s] description has frequently appeared in both Egli and [Viktor] Bout’s operations over the past decade or so. “Her first name is always Tatiana but the last name is always different, but usually a Russian variation on the same theme,” says the source. “There’s always this woman around. Same birthday, same month, always a different year. My theory is that she is an administrative secretary for Egli and maybe even Bout. She has been found working with both men in Dubai, RAK, Ostend, Monrovia, Freetown, South Africa, Bangkok, and Kinshasa, if you follow me … She is the expert in all sorts of paperwork and incorporation rules.
Or this even more intriguing twist: Her full identity has, according to research by Farah and Braun, proved unusually difficult for intelligence agencies and investigators to definitively establish. So difficult, in fact, that the only plausible explanation from the officials monitoring Tatyana’s activity is that “she” is in fact a composite of two or more different people—apparently almost identical in appearance and with the same level of expertise, sent from the same office, under the same name, passport, ID, and job title, to different places at either the same or different times. Thus Tatyana can then disappear at will, only to pop up thousands of impossible miles away in another conflict zone, seconds later; or put the clock back, so to speak—younger today than when she was while clearing the last-minute legals in mid-nineties Belgrade or early-2000s Liberia.
Brian Johnson-Thomas has an even more tantalizing lead on this shape-shifting woman—one that hints at just how powerful this blurring of roles may be. “Tatyana, so far as I know, is the daughter of a major-general in the old KGB and the sister of one of Putin’s ‘advisors,’ ” he says. “All of which, of course, adds credence to Viktor Bout’s claim to me, over a beer in Kisangani, that he himself was also responsible to higher authority, as it were.”