by Matt Potter
Just 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.”
Those huge forces. The East Line bust came eight years in, but it came courtesy of the FSB—or was it the shadowy Reconciliation and Accord Foundation, shutting down crews, operators, and planes who threatened their monopoly and who, even all these years later, never were identified? Were the secret state and private business one and the same, as Litvinenko said before he, too, got shut down? The FSB, the government, wanting to make money the same way private businesses did. Contacts everywhere. A lot of muscle. All the men and machines. None of the competition. No structure, no comebacks, no contracts, and don’t come to us if your embargo gets broken. Almost too perfect.
At our meeting I broach the subject with Rogozin. He talks, cagily, about the virtues of the men, then about how his recently published memoir, The Hawks of Peace, contains “plenty of bombs” for those who read it in the West. He asks me to read the just-finished English translation. Maybe I can pass it to any interested publishers. And suddenly, time is up. Rogozin stands, envelops my hand in his colossal right paw, and bids me good luck even as I despair at not having got more from him on the nature of this global shadow network. Then, as we part, he looks at me and winks. And smiles as he says to me, in English: “Every Russian has good connections.”
My mind’s racing now. Reagan, Thatcher, Kohl, then Bush, then everybody in the West, got to feel they’d seen off an Evil Empire; “won” a Cold War. But the Soviet air force didn’t break; it bent, reshaped, and re-formed. They are still out there, flying whatever needs to be flown. Just the terms of their contracts have changed. Same company, new logo. All those superplanes, pumped out by a Soviet military-industrial complex as fit for military or commercial use, dual-registered, ready for anything, anytime, anywhere with just a change of insignia. Mickey talking to me for the first time back on that runway: “We just rebranded, though that’s not what we called it at the time.”
And with that simple coat of paint, that change of name, the largest, most elaborate illusion ever staged was finally pulled off. After that, it was all easy. Once you’d turned a whole armed force into a thousand SME businesses and congratulated NATO on winning a game well played, no one was watching anymore. And after that, getting the world’s greatest stockpile of decommissioned weapons to magically change places with billions of dollars in African blood diamonds would be child’s play. Outfits like Mickey’s can do things no state could ever do in its own name—even one as powerful as Russia or as strategic as Ukraine. A black op, an arms run, drug couriers, clandestine human cargo, extraordinary renditions, mercenary drops would be unthinkable for the military. Who commanded it? Who signed the orders? Who authorized the plane? They would be ordered to stop. But for shadowy, maverick SME businesses within businesses, well, who knows what they’re doing?
This was a secret state running its business on the al-Qaeda model: loose affiliations, no pyramids, independent operators reporting to no one. The old way had foot soldiers and lieutenants. The new way just has enterprising solo operators: Mickey.
I remember what Mark Galeotti said the day we talked about the rise of the Ekaterinburg mafia. “Any of the individual players is often going to be very ramshackle and doing things very ad hoc. They might be wily and have street smarts, but they’re not intellectuals. They don’t have business plans or mission statements. However, the organism as a whole and the economy that it represents is often surprisingly sophisticated. It reacts very rapidly. The role of the umbrella ‘gang’? Simply to set the turf rules, to mediate disputes because shoot-outs are bad for business—to maintain security, and a brand name people will respect.”
Then I think of the Il-76 grounded in Bangkok with arms from North Korea. The bust, the uproar, then nothing. The crew were freed to return home to Kazakhstan and Belarus with no suggestion of charges being brought. The owner of the company who chartered the plane down in Shymkent claimed they’d taken holiday and were working na levo. The cargo’s paper trail led the CIA through a trail of shell companies and finally to a man who, it appeared, had never existed, except on paper. You had to love that.
There are huge forces, just like Viktor said, and they’ll bring you in from wherever you get caught out—Kandahar, Bangkok, Darfur.
Outsourcing, it turns out, was the way forward in the East as well as the West. Whole armies of crack aviators, no job too tough or too hush-hush; almost untraceable, and paid by the hour. And maybe, while you’re using them, you can even pick up some info about what they’re carrying for the competition. Soviet Air Transport’s Evgeny Zakharov now: “These ex–air force crews thought like military crews—the order comes, they’ll carry it out.”
In the end, of course, as in the beginning, this is a story about money. It’s what works the magic, blinds the audience, produces rabbits from hats and valuable contraband from seemingly empty cargo holds. It’s what democratizes Soviet regimes, and it democratizes weapons, power, drugs, too.
So a standing air force became a private air force, doing the same job but free of the ideology—pilots “resigning” from one permanent contract, going freelance or taking unpaid leave, and flying off to Angola in the same planes for the same people; people who now bore no responsibility for them. They were now able to break the embargo, run the guns, collect the cash in a way that they could never have managed in government livery. Factory trade unionists, soldiers, generals, ministers, and secret policemen—even Marshal Evgeny Shaposhnikov, commander in chief of the CIS forces, the Soviet Union’s last minister of defense, soldier of distinction—became slick, designer-suited advisors, consultants, CEOs, corporate decision makers at global aviation companies, government-funded export firms, charities, think tanks. There was money coming in, and nothing else mattered anymore. Behind the smoke and mirrors, the invisible networks, the armies turned SME businesses and the regiments now man-with-van outfits: the misdirection, the plotting, and the double-dealing, that’s the simple, banal, everyday beauty of it all.
The Soviet Union didn’t implode because it changed its mind but because it ran out of cash. The truth behind the secret is that there are no sides; there is no right, no wrong, no left or right. There never has been, really. There is just money. And like money, Mickey and the boys will simply flow with the gradient of supply and demand. To talk to them about sanctions is to talk to the wind about treetops, or the waves about drowning men. They are no more essentially good or evil, left or right, moral or immoral, than investment, insurance, advertising, business, politics, journalism, flying, or money itself.
The devil’s greatest trick was making mankind believe he didn’t exist. No wonder the monitors, cops, and spooks have a hard time tracking these men—they’ve been forced to look for plans, for chains of command, for paper trails, for Mr. Big figures. Yet these men have found a way of carrying on without any of that. They don’t have a plan, chain of command, a governing body, a modus operandi, a belief system, allegiances, or a set of rules. Except one: When enough people want them, and when the time and place demands, they will appear. Look at them down there. Mickey, Tatyana, Viktor Bout, and their friends and crewmen and business partners aren’t the horsemen of the apocalypse; they’re just chasing the money like the rest of us. The Soviet Union is gone. Long live the new Union: the one without a name or an anthem, a currency or even a border.
Silently, invisibly, this has become the Union we all live in. Theirs is the invisible empire, mighty in its weakness, invincible in its ethereal nature, hidden in plain view out on the open spaces and empty runways of the world. And if you think you can see them coming, or know what they’ll do next or who they’ll be tomorrow, good luck.
Then I feel a jolt and another shudder, a blast of bright, holy sunshine through cloud and smeared cockpit glass, and we’re clear.
OLD SMUGGLERS DON’T die; the
y just pull one last disappearing trick.
It sometimes seems to me that Mickey’s whole life had been a series of quiet departures: home and family in the hills, his garrison, Afghanistan, the air force, the Soviet Union, and any place that seemed like it was getting too regulated, too real. And as I think of him, a moment comes back to me with lightning clarity and makes me laugh.
It’s 2007, and I’m standing beside Mickey’s plane on a July morning so hot the secure airstrip perimeter and the minefields beyond are quaking in the haze. While we kick the ground and wait for our friends with the paperwork to show up and take their boxes of cigarettes, whiskey, and whatever else, I can feel the skin on the back of my neck blistering in the sun. Mickey and the boys have hats on, towels round their shoulders, long-sleeved jackets, whatever it takes to keep the sun off; and if it makes them look like bag ladies, not having them is starting to make me look like a burn victim.
We’ve just landed, but the waiting’s killing me. For some reason, we’ve got to meet someone else out here on the perimeter track. Mickey—that ill-fitting captain’s jacket now splitting at the elbow and so worn and shiny it’s starting to glint like it’s wet—looks across the tarmac with that disappointed half smile of his. McKinlay the Canuck is shuffling over; I can hear him grumbling. But the crew seem oddly fidgety, and no one’s making a move to get the fuck out of the heat. There’s not much talk.
McKinlay and I offer to stick around, but Mickey’s not having it. He sends us on our way. We’re heading off, arms full of bags and boxes, across the shelled, cracked runway, picking our way between the tussocks of grass. As we head for the dirt verge to make our shortcut, Mickey shouts to us above the din.
“Hey! Remember …”
We stop, turn back to him, looking very small across the shimmering asphalt. He stops waving.
“Don’t step off the tarmac.”
And with that, he’s gone again.
Mickey’s a master at disappearing acts, just like so many rogue aviators of the Union. Having pulled off the greatest collective illusion in history, these days these unlikely outlaws are more modest; some vanish in a puff of smoke into the sides of mountains. Others disappear into the African Great Lakes, or tropical seas, and the waters and the forty-foot-thick silt beds and stones close over them leaving not a ripple to show they or their plane had ever passed this way. They fly into thick fog, low cloud, dark forests, never to be seen again.
Some take off one day and are swallowed by the air itself, man and two-hundred-ton ship finally escaping the dull pull of the earth, the demands of the paperwork, the cops, the yee-hawing Chechen crazies with their RPG launchers, the business hassles, the border officials, the clients and bosses, the radar and the mujahideen, the FBI, the CIA, the mafia, the fixers, and the congressmen.
Others just want to go home.
After I turned down the offer of a ride to Mogadishu, I never saw Mickey again. For a while he had his other SIM cards. Then his number rang again for a couple of days, but he never answered. Then the tone was gone again and I just heard dead air in the speaker. Those he flew with or for, at least the few I had anything like a lead on, said he’d not been around. Maybe he’d left the business, said one, but I didn’t buy that for a minute. Mickey only really ever felt happy flying; the ground was where it all got dirty. Like he told me once, take the aerial view or go mad and die drunk. So I started to worry. Not all the time, of course—I mean, really I hardly knew the guy—just a nagging sensation partly, I suppose, from feeling I was off the ride. I got into checking out the rumor networks, kept tabs on the air-crash sites. Pretty soon I began to feel like a naturalist on the TV whose tagged elk hasn’t come home with the thaw.
The elk never did show. Like their lives, their deaths are rumors, trails leading off into the fog. Then, about a month before I began collecting together all the notes that eventually became this book, I finally heard Mickey had touched down for good: nothing to do with flying, just a plain old heart attack, back in Russia. And that was it, the way I heard it; no drama, no plane crash, no Viagra, no mafia, no Nubian princesses or bar brawls, no mountainsides or lakes, no flaming engines or Stinger rockets, Janjaweed abductors or Taliban warlords; just what I like to think he always called the Life. Bullets in the air, vodka on the ground. One way or another, they’ll get you in the end.
By last summer Sergei, liveliest of them all, had also bought the farm. The sky took him (of all people; the general feeling is that it beat the bottle by about a week) while he was freelancing on another plane with another crew. Unlucky is what they say, but even the greatest sleight of hand can only hold off gravity for so long. I tend to think of him when I drink too much and regret it, and also on the rare occasions I skip stones, their kinetic energy and lift slowly giving out until they fall. I’m sure he’d laugh if he knew.
Word is that Lev just disappeared one day—he just didn’t turn up for a shift, a perennial favorite of crewmembers chasing bigger bucks. Posted missing, presumed got out in time. The last anyone heard from him, he was muttering about moving to Thailand, flying with smaller planes and setting up in the bar business, but it doesn’t look like he ever got it started—it’s all been way too quiet out there.
Eternally pissed-off Dmitry and whatever friends or strangers made up the numbers flight by flight could still be out there, flying for whoever has the work. I actually spoke to Dmitry on the phone, once, after I left Africa. After all his prickly attitude, he turned out to be the one who told me to keep in touch, and I lucked into him on a call home. He said times had been pretty tough; they’re all banning Antonovs and Ilyushins for being too noisy, too old, too unregistered; plus everyone else was starting to get in on the act.
As it happened, Evgeny Zakharov was saying the same thing at the same time: “You know who kicked us out of the Somalia contract? White South Africans. We were a bargain, but now they’re the bargain fliers in Africa.” The airline owner’s got a weariness about him today, but I can’t help thinking he sounds almost relieved as he says, before we bid good-bye: “Russian pilots are not as attractive as they used to be.”
The phone call with Dmitry was shorter than I’d hoped. He seemed different, younger, more relaxed somehow away from the plane. He said he had been marooned in Asia without a flight out of there for weeks, and he’d realized it couldn’t carry on that way for too long anymore, not financially. He said maybe it’s time he put in some hours as a trainer. Then a woman’s voice was shouting in the background, and he had to go. Now the piece of paper’s gone, but it doesn’t matter. So is my connection to his world. Like the man Wittgenstein said: Even if a lion could speak, you wouldn’t understand what it wanted to tell you.
And the others? Well, if you hear anything, tell me. They’ve melted away, two or three removes too distant for an armchair stalker like me to hope to keep tabs on them. Maybe the bullet in the night got them too, maybe not. I’d like to think maybe they made it through, cheated the most dangerous, nobody-gives-a-damn business on this flyblown planet, and came in for their final landing okay. It’s a phrase a lot of these Eastern flyboys use when they want to say retire, and now I can see why. Say “retire” and you tempt fate, invite smoking engines and moving mountaintops. Retiring is a laughable ambition; landing is something they know they can pull off.
So happy landings, whoever’s left. I like to think you catch a drink together sometimes, by a poolside in Dubai or some back porch in Tatarstan, Thailand, or God knows where, but maybe that’s just me. Are you alive or dead? I guess you get to be both until I track you down and find out. And you know as well as I do, that will never happen. So for now, I just keep looking at the sky.
One day, somebody will write a real book about these men and the dangers they face; the kind of book that makes politicians sit up and listen. And then the whole damn circus will stop; there’ll be no more junk planes, no more deathtraps, no more exploding cargoes, no more cash deals, no more bribes, no more four-day, nonstop operations, and n
o more of the kind of lives that push men like Mickey to the edge and over. The last of the independents will be unionized, grounded, regulated, the skies made safe, the business brought into line, the men protected. Like the rest of us, they’ll live their lives on CCTV, pay their taxes, get mortgages, join what passes for regular society. One day it’ll happen.
Meanwhile, the clouds keep moving, the rivers flow; the dust blows forward and back; the last free men on earth fly across those great, dark spaces between the radar; and the planes, money, and cargo keep on flowing across the lines we’ve drawn on a few bits of paper.
It’s getting cold. Back home, February’s already here with an easterly wind that chills the bones. Time to go inside, where there’s light. It’s only when I reach the pool of yellow light by the door of my home and look back that I realize how quickly the night can fall here in the Northern Hemisphere. Now there’s just a small point of light crawling high above, making its way across the sky to the northeast. And it cheers me to think that up there, high above the black earth, someone is looking through a cockpit window and thinking about home.
Mickey, if you’re up there somewhere, I’ll see you for that cold Baltika on the other side sometime.
And Sergei, you were right. I worry far too much.
Author’s Note
While Mickey’s world is one that bears a striking resemblance to the world we live in, it is a world that straddles not only the ambiguities in national and international law but also lines of loyalty and conduct in personal, command, legal, and business relationships. It has been made very clear to me several times in the course of researching and writing this book that the disclosure of the identities of many of the men herein would potentially lead not only to serious implications (for them and their continuing employability), lawsuits (from them), or unwelcome attention and even criminal charges (against them), but to exposure to serious harm.