by Matt Potter
“With modern aircraft, with all the electronics it’s a lot harder. But the Il-76 and the An-12 are very rugged—they can take a lot of punishment. There’s still scope to use high-speed tape, like duct tape, and they won’t be taking any real risks where they see they’re putting their lives in danger. With these old Russian aircraft, it’s mostly mechanical, and something you can fix if you have a flexible mind. It’s like the pioneering early years of aviation, you know, the de Havilland flying into the Arctic and something happens, and they have to fix up a propeller by hand. It’s not pretty but it will get you home. It’s the same with these guys—they still have the pioneering spirit of the early days of aviation. You make temporary repairs and you get home the best way you can.”
After I put the phone down, for the first time in weeks I think back to Starikov and Barsenov, talked into taking off for the final leg of their journey to Malta with a pay bonus and faulty electrics. Then to Mickey’s words that day we first talked: “The lifestyle kills as many of us as the planes.”
No wonder Evgeny Zakharov bemoans the shortage of veteran pilots to train the younger generation out there: They’re the least publicized of all Africa’s endangered species. Another pilot puts it on a community forum, half jokingly: “I’m always surprised when another one of these planes crashes. Surprised that there are any still left to crash, that is.”
There’s something unutterably sad about it all, as if in some way the risks are part of some divine plan for these men; as if the business they’re in and their demise—the death and the taxes—all amount to the same thing, the same shadow following them and snapping at their tails until they run out of luck, stamina, or speed tape. Or until, one clear morning on a shelled runway somewhere, they look at their leaking fuel tank and flashing warning light and just decide that, flashing lights notwithstanding, they finally want to go home.
For the first time, I realize how tiring it must get to be torn between the thrilling, often lucrative independence of their own businesses and their paper status as expendable cheap labor with a life expectancy measured in flying hours. It’s a curious double life: both master of their own destiny and servant of others’ demands. The two businesses can coexist quite comfortably and for many years: Mickey Inc., independent shuttle trader, shares a two-hundred-ton airborne office with Mickey the employee. On the one hand, they’re just the messengers, the gofers; on the other, the kings whose fifteen tons or more they make every flight are their own import-export business and nobody else’s. Since I’ve known him, albeit intermittently, I’ve often caught myself on the verge of asking him whether he ever wishes he’d chosen the other path; a different, more stable life; settled down and become a …
But to my shame (or maybe it should be my pride), every time they pop into my head the words sound oafish and stupid and I duck the chance. Does he ever wish he’d become a what … an accountant? A doctor? An advertising copywriter? Had he ever thought about insurance? Jesus. I know what I saw in 1992, and it wasn’t a nation full of people taking the time to ponder the stability of future career choices. How fucking crass. If I were Mickey and someone like me asked about the wisdom of my professional path, I’d throw him out of my plane over the Arabian Peninsula without a parachute.
You see, for me that’s the funny thing about the whole business, about Bout, Minin, all of them. We want answers. Is Viktor clean or dirty? Is he the Merchant of Death or, as he contends, “the ideal modern businessman”? Entrepreneur, criminal, misunderstood visionary, or puppet? Innocent, cunning, or in denial? Or maybe something altogether truer, if less certain: maybe something in between. Something right there in the wide gray expanse between black and white, just like the arms business he followed.
Viktor Anatolyevich Bout, born in 1967, now a bony shadow of the flash, somewhat corpulent young mover and shaker who was arrested in that Thai hotel room in 2008, languishes in a U.S. jail awaiting trial. He wears a boilersuit, endures solitary confinement, and listens to Voice of Russia to hear “a familiar voice.” The vegetarian suffers, he says, from a lack of fruit and vegetables and tea—only warm water is available in prison. He looks old and worried and shaggy and stooping in his prison chains, which has started to give him a demeanor and posture not unlike Mickey’s. Away from the political grandstanding, some who met him, even those on the “other side,” have their doubts whether he was ever more than a schmuck, someone else’s chess piece. “Viktor Bout was not the great Merchant of Death, as the government and the reports and the Americans claim,” says investigator Brian Johnson-Thomas. “Though admittedly he may be a merchant of some death, of course. But to call him that, to label him the Merchant of Death as Peter Hain did, is absurd.”
Another insider who, during an off-the-record phone conversation, echoes Bout’s own statements and those of the Russian government, says, simply: “The CIA, Interpol, MI5—they’ve spent that much time investigating him, and this is the best they can do?”
Even as the trial approaches, the man seems somehow smaller than the monstrous Merchant of Death glowering from the UN reports, articles, and indictments. Indeed, there are even moments of dark comedy, as the Mr. Big image built up over the years meets with altogether more mundane realities. Bout watcher and blogger Alexander Harrowell recently wondered whether the plane that disappeared en route to the plinth in Smolensk might finally have turned up. His research had led him to a particularly battered old Candid, grounded where else but in the Arabian desert. A photograph on his Web site is captioned: “TL-ACN, serial no. 53403072; ex-Centrafrican Airlines, now rotting in Umm Alquwain.” In the tiny, sparsely inhabited Emirate, the plane has become a sand-spattered ad for the Palma Beach Hotel—its fuselage now exhorting passers-by to call 06-766-7090, should they wish to sample what the hotel calls its “classy facilities and amenities that give pleasure.”
Bout himself has turned his Web site into an archive of documents that he claims prove his innocence, clips of his accusers, and UN reports in which he either appears or is, he contends, tellingly absent, to back up his claims of a frame-up. At the time of writing it’s still active, although he appears to have caught the post-Wikileaks zeitgeist with claims the U.S. government has “ordered Google to take it down”—and indeed, it’s interesting to wonder whether, as Bout goes to trial having entered a plea of not guilty in the U.S., his testimony will become another test of how transparent the U.S. government and others really want their statecraft to be. If he gets to tell it, Bout’s story may yet turn out to be more of a Pandora’s box than the controlled release of incriminating evidence his accusers are hoping for.
Meanwhile, Bout’s wife, Alla, languishes in Russia, championing her husband’s cause and experiencing, it seems, a distinctly Cold War welcome from America when she attempts to visit him in jail. Elsewhere, the underground chatter grows. Will there be a deal? A swap—perhaps at Vienna airport, both sides’ preferred venue for the last exchange of spies? Or will Viktor Bout stand up and attempt his biggest trick yet—to remain fuzzy and insubstantial in front of prosecutors and TV cameras?
Whatever the result of his trial, there are questions about his degree of influence that remain. And about those “huge forces,” too. Like Ilya Neretin said, if Viktor Bout is a prince, let’s ask who the kings are.
Bout’s business partner, Richard Chichakli, remains in hiding as I write this, probably still in Russia, posting occasional video diary pieces on the Internet about his predicament, his innocence, and mysterious break-ins to his apartment. Like Bout, he has a Web site on which he energetically protests not just his innocence but his insignificance. “Victor is just a person, and I am pretty much a nobody,” he tells me in summer 2010 while awaiting the result of the extradition hearing that saw Bout sent to America for trial. I get the feeling he’d like to disentangle himself from Bout, the legal process in which he finds himself, the whole situation. He’s clearly a shaken, frightened man who no longer trusts anybody; first claiming Viktor Bout’s guilt or innocence
will be “determined at trial,” then that no trial he will receive at the hands of the U.S. can possibly be fair. He’s just written a letter to Barack Obama protesting his treatment and lamenting what he sees as a continuation of the persecution he received at the hands of the Bush-Cheney administration. His assets have been frozen, and a new U.S. Government indictment has just been issued against him, this time for alleged violation of a sanction placed upon him in 2005. Yet despite the endless investigations, charges, and accusations ranged against him, this former accountant, real-estate man, U.S. soldier, and airport manager whose life was “dismantled and destroyed” by the armed, masked government agents who leaped from black armored trucks and surrounded his suburban home in Richardson, Texas, just after breakfast on the morning of April 26, 2005, has not been convicted of any crime. No wonder he’s cautious.
My approach to him for an interview elicited written answers on an e-mail—and an attached PDF file containing those same answers as a sealed record, should I try to edit or misrepresent the e-mail’s in-line content. He ends with the sigh of what seems like a disillusioned man—or at least one who has realized late in the game that he and Bout are not kings, perhaps not even princes, but tradable pawns. “Politics is always politics, and today’s fugitives could be tomorrow’s heroes and the opposite is true,” he says. I remember Peter Danssaert’s sardonic laugh when he told me about traffickers “being hired by the same governments to do the same thing legally that they’re doing illegally.”
As Chichakli signs off, there’s another tantalizing hint that things are more than they seem. “As we speak,” he finishes cryptically, “there is a horse trading going on in connection with this matter, and we just have to wait to see which horse was made to go.” And with that, he’s gone. I mail him again, but the silence has descended.
I’ve seen guilty men wriggling on hooks, and innocent ones too. And for the first time, I find myself thinking how much worse it would be to wriggle on a hook when you’re neither black nor white but gray, eternally convinced that the man they’re describing might have your name and life story but really isn’t the true you at all. It sounds like purgatory, and perhaps for Bout and Chichakli it is.
For his part, party-hungry Leonid Minin no longer looks quite as impressive, or as much like the Lord of War on whom Nicolas Cage partly based his character Mickey Orlov in the 2005 film of that name. Released after serving two years on relatively minor offenses, he was acquitted of charges relating to arms trafficking because, of all things, the Italian courts felt they lacked the appropriate jurisdiction. Like Bout in jail in Thailand, he looked smaller and thinner and was rumored to be embarrassed by the coverage of his arrest. In 2006, he tried unsuccessfully to appeal against the freezing of his funds as a person associated with the now former Liberian president Charles Taylor. Delivering its judgment in 2007, the Court of First Instance of the European Communities noted the applicant’s name, date of birth, and nationality:
Leonid Minin (alias (a) Blavstein, (b) Blyuvshtein, (c) Blyafshtein, (d) Bluvshtein, (e) Blyufshtein, (f) Vladimir Abramovich Kerler, (g) Vladimir Abramovich Popiloveski, (h) Vladimir Abramovich Popela, (i) Vladimir Abramovich Popelo, ( j) Wulf Breslan, (k) Igor Osols). Date of birth: (a) 14 December 1947, (b) 18 October 1946, (c) unknown[)]. Nationality: Ukrainian. German Passports (name: Minin): (a) 5280007248D, (b) 18106739D. Israeli Passports: (a) 6019832 (6/11/94–5/11/99), (b) 9001689 (23/1/97–22/1/02), (c) 90109052 (26/11/97). Russian Passport: KI0861177; Bolivian Passport: 65118; Greek Passport: no details. Owner of Exotic Tropical Timber Enterprises.
Then the court rejected his appeal and ordered him to bear his own costs and that of the Commission, and I can’t help but read his statement, brief though it is, and feel a little sad on his behalf. “The applicant adds that all his funds and economic resources in the Community were frozen following the adoption of Regulation No 1149/2004, so that he was not even able to look after his son or pursue his activities as manager of a timber import-export company.” Perhaps the pathos was intended; perhaps he got off lightly with two years in jail and the quiet life of a small citizen in Israel. Still, it’s not the life he once enjoyed in Odessa, Ukraine, or Milan or Africa or any of those other countries. As a man, like Bout he’s clearly highly intelligent, talented, and, well, he knew how to enjoy his old life. He’s disappeared now—some claim he was strangled in Kiev, the death hushed up; others claim that he’s alive and well. But if anyone ever pondered wasted career choices, the forks in the road that led him to this, I wonder if it might be him.
Tomislav Damnjanovic seems to have disappeared even more completely than Minin since the New York Times kicked up a stink about his work for the Pentagon back in 2007. Hugh Griffiths’s guess is that he’s still “sharking about somewhere”; Peter Danssaert reckons he simply became too hot for anyone to touch him, at least for a while. As I write this in spring 2011, a picture looking very much like him still haunts a MySpace page in his name that lists him as “Male, 56, Serbia,” but the page is dormant, and his only friend is the social network’s customer-support avatar. Milos Vasic, talking to me fifteen years after the Belgrade crash investigation he still calls his “greatest moment,” even finds it hard to recall much about the man in the piece he calls “the broker.”
Igor Salinger tries for a while to get me in touch through a go-between, but the go-between either can’t trace him, or he doesn’t want to be traced. A former employee of Damnjanovic’s tells Salinger he could pop up in Sharjah any minute. After all, he’s a businessman, one who may have become involved in things most of us would try to avoid, but who is just as innocent of any crime as you or I.
I want to find him again; he seemed happy to chat openly with the guy from the New York Times back then, in those pre–Viktor Bout bust times, despite a few memory lapses and his feeling that it was all official, all a matter of record, so why the fuss? I chase shadows for months, but it’s as if he’s just faded away. I tell Danssaert, who just says with a grim laugh, “Of course. He’s a small, small fish.”
Even Milos Vasic, whose article named him in the wake of the Surcin crash, pauses. “I’m sorry, I can’t … this name, it doesn’t play any music to me,” he sighs, finally. Then he too is gone, and I’m overcome with the creepiest feeling that I’ve gone crazy and the man I call Tomislav Damnjanovic is no more substantial than the words I’m now writing on this flickering screen.
Somehow, something about all these men, and I can’t be sure what it is yet, is making me uneasy. For one thing, as Moisés Naím told me, “Just imagine! If we’d only found a way, back when it mattered, to offer strategists like them worthwhile leadership or business roles on the legitimate side!” Arthur Kent, a veteran Canadian TV newsman who reported the first Gulf War, flew into Afghanistan with the cinemas during the Soviet-Afghan conflict, and now reports on the Afghan heroin connection for his own independent news agency Sky Reporter, puts it another way: “The irony is if you put people like [Bout or] your friend Mickey in charge and told them, ‘The objective is actually total success and peace with the Afghans, plus you’ll make a lot of money on the side,’ they’d do a lot better than Karzai, NATO, the UN, and Obama anytime. Because those guys fool themselves into thinking that they are decent and God-fearing and honest, but it’s their inability to monitor and audit properly that has the bad guys making money hand over fist but not really getting an opportunity themselves to contribute!
“All the decent buccaneers that I know would love to see things get better for the ordinary people. They don’t want to make money on other people’s backs entirely; they want to make more than other people, sure, but many buccaneers I know—smugglers and black marketeers—they are still critical, even while they are flourishing in the black market. They still point the finger at your politicians and say, ‘Man, they’re so full of shit, the stuff that’s going on.’ ”
Maybe he’s right. Maybe right now we need more pragmatists. In these times of extremism and idealism, just maybe Mick
ey’s guys, with their can-do attitudes and their realism, are the closest thing we have to hope of reconstruction, despite—or perhaps because of—the things they carry.
But there’s more to it, and it’s making me itch badly now. Somehow, men like Bout, Minin, even Mickey make me feel, whether they are guilty or innocent or all shades in between, like we’re all missing something very, very big. Only I don’t know what it is yet.
Maybe, just as with Mickey, it’s the nagging sense that Bout, Minin, and the rest of these Lords of War are just links in a bigger chain; that their champagne lifestyles and poster-boy statuses are somehow partly constructs, the very thing we need to believe cogs in the illicit arms trade should look like; just as we need to believe that fundamentalism looks like Osama bin Laden, or Mickey looks like Han Solo. Maybe Bout and Minin are just like Mickey, men trying to handle the lethal pressures someone makes it worth their while to handle.
And as one comment on a pilots’ chat room said the day after the Entebbe crash that killed Evgeny Korolev: “If that plane was overloaded, I hope that the commercial guy is unable to sleep for a long, long, long time.”
MICKEY TELLS ME he has never crashed (crash-landing doesn’t count, nor does clipping a telegraph pole, having things fall off the plane, or turning round and landing immediately after takeoff with an engine problem). But the life’s left visible scars on him nonetheless. Even the younger ones like Dmitry and rookie part-timers like Pavel, an African-trained copilot I only ever meet once, who must have been at elementary school while Mickey was undergoing his baptism of antiaircraft fire over Soviet-occupied Afghanistan, look permanently drained; pallid even through their tan in the heat of Africa and the Middle East.