The little the Americans had learned about Bout and his organization had come not only from their own electronic intercepts and intelligence sources, but also from European intelligence agencies, UN investigators, and from a small circle of resourceful international activists who worked doggedly to expose Bout’s operation and stem his weapons flows across the Third World. The growing trove of data on the arms pipelines provided a sobering window into what became known in the intelligence community as the “shadow infrastructure,” the deadly symbiotic web of weapons purchasers and transporters who fueled conflicts around the globe.
Bout had many competitors in the arms trade, but his unique monopoly over the air transport that moved the bulk of the arms streaming into Africa made him a dominant figure who had to be urgently countered, the Americans felt. Their worries mounted as intelligence reports raised suspicions that Bout’s planes were also being used to supply the militant Taliban regime in Afghanistan and their patrons bin Laden and his al Qaeda terror network.
“Bout was clearly a guy who needed to be dealt with,” Schneidman recalled. “There was evidence he was fueling wars all over Africa. Our job was to promote stability and peace in the region. It fit every definition I knew of in terms of pursuing the national interest.”
The American effort to scuttle Bout’s operation geared up quickly. Schneidman asked for an informal briefing from the CIA expert. Days later, the analyst showed up with an impressive file on the Russian, filled with the few shreds known about Bout’s personal history along with a breakdown of the planes under his command and their extensive flight patterns, and a compilation of the extensive arms deals he had cinched in Africa. Excited that someone on the policy side was finally focusing on the arms pipelines in Africa, the analyst brought along a colleague, a translator from the NSA who spoke the same colloquial Russian that Bout and his colleagues used to veil their long-distance conversations on cell and satellite phones. The NSA official had listened in as Bout and his cronies conducted their deals in Africa and laid plans from their home base in Sharjah, one of the seven United Arab Emirates that include the wealthy kingdoms of Dubai and Abu Dhabi. The NSA official’s “drop dead” presentation, recalled one of the impressed government officials who watched, “was absolutely stunning.”
The analysts also unveiled a series of black-and-white satellite photographs showing dozens of planes parked in formation on the ground at Sharjah International Airport. They all belonged to Bout’s air firms or to allied cargo operations. “These guys were responsible for fueling the war in Angola,” Schneidman said later. “I was responsible for that. And this guy was playing both sides in Angola, selling guns to the government and to the rebels. It was outrageous, crazy shit.”
The briefing in the early summer of 1999 set off a chain of events that by early 2000 had quietly led to Bout’s designation as the highest-ranking international target other than Osama bin Laden and his top tier of terrorist leaders. “People got him right away,” Schneidman recalled. “We were dealing with the real possibility of crisis in Africa, and that got people’s attention. And Bout was an intriguing, mysterious character, and the sheer size of his operation opened a lot of eyes.”
By early 2000, Schneidman was joined by Lee Wolosky, a blunt, aggressive White House National Security Council adviser assigned to devising strategy against transnational threats. An expert on Russian organized crime and political corruption, Wolosky quickly seized on the Bout operation as the quintessential symbol of the unforeseen perils of the new age—stateless rogue organizations that offered material support to any armed camp willing to pay for their services. Wolosky had worked in Moscow at the dawn of Russia’s chaotic experiment with capitalism, and had grown alarmed at the emergence of its powerful new class of plutocrats and gangsters. But Bout, Wolosky felt keenly, had risen beyond them, posing a clear and present international danger—more for his ability to carry things than for the things he carried. “Viktor Bout was a bigger problem than just moving weapons,” Wolosky said. “He had a logistics network, the best in the world.”
Unable to rely on U.S. law because the Bout organization’s arms deliveries occurred outside American borders, Wolosky and Schneidman traveled repeatedly to Europe and Africa throughout 2000 and 2001, cajoling and pressuring friendly nations to join in their efforts to build a criminal case against Bout’s organization and track him down for arrest. CIA analysts traced his planes. Law enforcement agents scanned phone and banking records. British intelligence officials and other European and Western spy agencies were consulted. At the urging of Richard A. Clarke, the NSC’s maverick counterterror czar, Bout’s name was even discussed as one of the earliest targets for the controversial practice of “rendition”—the arrest of a foreign national abroad, where the prisoner is handed over to a third country for detention.
But the formidable clout of the U.S. diplomatic and intelligence apparatus had unanticipated limits. America’s foreign partners preferred to pursue their own interests. Interagency squabbles took a toll, as did the impotence of international law to keep pace with the arms trade. Bout remained free, and his armada of planes flew on. The Bush administration’s attention was diverted, first by the horrors of September 11, 2001, and then by its invasion of Iraq and the postwar fiasco that followed. Despite revelations that his planes had secretly aided Islamic militants in Afghanistan, Bout’s organization not only survived, but also flourished—astonishingly, by flying weapons and supplies to the U.S. military and private contractors in Iraq, reaping millions from the nation that once pursued him.
Viktor Bout emerged as a player in the international arms trade in the early 1990s, the unsettled post-Cold War era when most foreign policy experts assumed that the primary threat to U.S. national security was still posed only by nations with nuclear forces and standing armies, fixed borders, and traditional ideological and pragmatic interests. The notion that transnational threats—the Clinton administration’s phrasing for terrorists, narcotics cartels, global organized crime, and other dangerous “nonstate actors”—might prove as dangerous as hostile nations was an idea still in its infancy.
But when the Berlin Wall fell, so did that paradigm. Decentralized, far-flung organizations created first by drug cartels and then by ethnic-based crime syndicates that emerged from Russia and China rendered international boundaries and traditional loyalties meaningless. Al Qaeda took center stage in the late 1990s as the most infamous and dangerous transnational threat, but Africa’s guerrilla armies and local warlords fit that rubric as well, seizing control of large swaths of territory, terrorizing and killing thousands for private gain, and leaving millions of survivors homeless and destitute.
Bout represented a third breed—Soviet-bloc entrepreneurs who rose from the ashes of the Cold War. These businessmen had easy access to the massive inventories of weapons and ammunition that had been manufactured for decades to sustain a vast military that was suddenly shrinking. They soon realized that there were fortunes to be made from Third World clients who looked to their old former Communist allies to purchase weapons. The system only required a cash influx to become operational again. In the new incarnation, the revived arms pipelines could sell to anyone because there were no longer ideological enemies, only potential clients. The Bout network became the new face of the old system.
With his network’s formidable logistical prowess and unfettered access to weapons, Bout became “the poster child of transnational threats,” said Gayle Smith, who headed the NSC’s Africa office during the last two years of the Clinton administration. “You want to talk about transnational threats? We had [al Qaeda’s bombing of U.S. embassies in] East Africa, global warming, and Viktor Bout.”
Transnational threats also worried the United Nations, but the Security Council pursued Bout in its own fashion, more concerned with documenting violations of arms embargoes than with shutting down the pipelines. While the work of Wolosky and Schneidman’s team proceeded in secret, the United Nations did more than a
ny government to publicly expose the Bout network’s activities in Africa. Throughout the 1990s, the Security Council had been imposing arms embargoes on war-ravaged African nations, hoping to dry up the arms flows that fed the violence. But without an international peacekeeping force to enforce the bans, the United Nations could resort only to the public shaming provided by its investigative reports and the limited use of financial and travel sanctions.
To buttress its cases, the Security Council dispatched experts across Africa to report on weapons flows and identify those responsible. UN embargo reports stacked up in the late 1990s, often naming Bout firms as prime culprits. In report after report, the United Nations relied on Belgian investigator Johan Peleman to provide its extensive research. A chain-smoking former philosophy student, Peleman guided a series of reports documenting the movements of Bout’s planes and firms, gaining expertise as the foremost independent authority on the Russian and his empire. A globe-trotting detective, Peleman grew adept at exposing Bout’s holdings and plane movements by uncovering obscure flight records and “end-user certificates”—international cargo transit papers that were normally used to identify arms clients but that are easily forged. Another UN collaborator was Kathi Austin, a passionate American activist who worked for several nongovernmental agencies. Austin, who joined the UN panel on the DRC, made daring trips into terrorist-run refugee camps and shantytowns to show the lethal impact of small-arms flows in the poorest regions.
Penetrating the veiled, complex corporate structure of the Bout organization was maddeningly difficult for even the most experienced investigators. The Russian deployed a welter of front companies around the globe, including entities in Texas, Delaware, and Florida. Assets moved constantly from one shell to another. Bout network flights were aided by the incoherence of the international aircraft regulation system. Hiding aircraft and companies was almost as easy as flying weapons into war zones, and the Bout network excelled at avoiding international aviation scrutiny by registering planes in compliant nations such as Liberia, where warlord Charles Taylor had turned his country’s government into a well-oiled criminal enterprise, and in tiny, remote jurisdictions such as Swaziland and Equatorial Guinea, where oversight was lax. “If you look at all of Bout’s various escapades, how easy it was for him to move aircraft and move weapons, get end-user certificates, change aircraft registration, you get an amazing picture of how corrupt many parts of the world are,” said Michael Chandler, a retired British army colonel who led the United Nations’ panel of experts on the Taliban and al Qaeda.
As his profits soared, Bout cultivated close business and social ties with some of the Third World’s most abusive and murderous strongmen. He dealt directly with Charles Taylor in Liberia, Mubuto Sese Seko in Zaire, Paul Kagame in Rwanda, and rebel leaders Jonas Savimbi in Angola, Jean-Pierre Bemba in the DRC, and Sam “Mosquito” Bockarie in Sierra Leone. Bout armed and hunted with Ahmad Shah Massoud, the resistance fighter and Northern Alliance leader who became an Afghan hero but who was also accused of massacring his foes. Bout’s organization then nimbly switched sides in Afghanistan, covertly aiding the despotic Taliban regime, secretly providing the Islamic militants with their own fleet of cargo planes and flying in weapons and supplies that aided both the mullahs and their al Qaeda financiers.
Bout’s discerning eye for associates complemented his organizational wizardry. He carefully selected his aides, hiring loyal bankers and accountants, pilots and security toughs who got the job done professionally, discreetly, and always loyally. “Viktor Bout was like a jeweler, putting people into place,” said a longtime business associate. “He had to select each one, asking who knew the country and the parts of the country, to ensure he did not have any problems there. It took him a long time, and was like making jewelry. Every piece had to be there. That is why he is so successful.”2
The jeweler still flourishes.
Bout’s friends and associates say he has paid a heavy personal price for his success, managing an international operation that continues to draw heavy scrutiny and onerous financial sanctions from the United Nations and the world’s superpowers. Richard Chichakli, a longtime American associate and likewise a target of American and UN sanctions for his dealings with the Russian, says that Bout is a decent man who has been misunderstood and deeply wronged by his image as the world’s leading arms merchant. The portrayal, he said, is a myth fabricated by hostile officials, intelligence agencies, and journalists.
“He doesn’t want to be God,” Chichakli said. “He just wanted to retire in Africa, near the rain forest, to raise his daughter. They didn’t get the man but they sure killed his dream.”3
In a world that President George W. Bush divides starkly between those “who are either with us or against us,” Bout has become both. Enemy and ally, hunted and hired, he remains useful both to governments and to the violent movements that threaten their security. The endurance of his network remains a thumb in the eye of the new world order, glaring evidence of the impotence of nations to take concerted action against the global arms trade.
“The Viktor Bout story is a story of failure, a failure of the U.S. government,” said Lee Wolosky, who lobbied loudly for Bout’s arrest after Wolosky left government service, only to be dismayed by the silence of U.S. officials who replaced him. “I am not under any illusion it worked.”
The struggle to shutter Bout’s empire remains a narrative still unfolding, a chronicle of nations pitted uncertainly against one resourceful man.
CHAPTER 1
The Delivery Man
One evening in April 2001, Jean-Pierre Bemba, a Congolese warlord leading a rebel army of guerrillas and gun-toting teenagers, discovered that he had a problem. Camped with his ragtag troops on a remote mountaintop in the northeastern corner of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC; formerly Zaire) with a magnificent view of Lake Albert, Bemba realized he was low on beer.
The rotund Bemba was hardly cut out for the role of austere revolutionary. Not one to give up the comforts of home to live off the land with his deprived gunmen, the articulate, fastidiously dressed warlord traveled with his own generators, chemical toilets, and hard tents, complete with cots. He was not about to waste a lovely night of revelry in the bush because of a simple oversight of logistics.
Fortunately, Bemba’s traveling companion had a solution. Viktor Bout, who was tagging along with the warlord as part of an arms delivery into his remote stronghold, was equipped not only with his usual stores of weapons and ammunition, but also with the means to scour for beer. As part of the full-service package he provided to Bemba’s war machine, Bout had rented the rebel leader two aging Soviet-built Mi-24 helicopters. Bemba and his retinue normally used the gunships to avoid the brutal marches that his troops were forced to make across hills covered with scrub brush and hellish clouds of torturing mosquitoes and small, biting flies. But on this night, Bout’s helicopters proved uniquely fortuitous.
Moving swiftly with the authority of a seasoned commando, Bout gathered his crew and, accompanied by a heavily armed escort of twenty of Bemba’s men, choppered across Lake Albert into Uganda. There, they occupied a small Ugandan town for about an hour, ordering residents in the town’s market square to find all the available beer. When the townspeople had rounded up a few cases—Bout paid a little money for them—he scrambled back into the copter with his occupation force and flew off. Fortified with enough drink to last the night, the revelers sprawled across a secured hilltop as lights twinkled from the fishing boats on the lake below.1
Bemba could afford Bout’s services because Bemba controlled access to something Bout very much wanted: a rich diamond field that netted the rebel leader $1 million to $3 million a month in sales. These “blood diamonds”—illicit gems that were mined in rebel-held territory and shipped abroad despite international embargoes against their sales—were mostly moved illegally through the neighboring Central African Republic, where both Bemba and Bout had friends and protectors in high places.2
When Bout finally bedded down, he slept, as he often did, with some of his crew near one of the helicopters. The aircraft was primed to make an emergency exit in case something went wrong. Bout’s willingness to go the extra length for Bemba, despite the risks, made his client happy and kept the good times rolling. But Bout always took care to stay a step ahead, even from his clients.
Bout’s ability to supply his customers with whatever they needed under almost any circumstances—while always keeping his options open—has come to define the Russian entrepreneur and his remarkable career. Unlike his rivals in the underground arms trade, Bout has not been content to live from deal to deal. He is a quintessential big-picture man who understands that organizations, not deals, are the underpinnings of meteoric business success. While most of his Russian countrymen struggled with the strange new complexities of international capitalism—the USSR’s mortal ideological anathema for nearly three quarters of a century—Bout quickly built a flexible, expanding corporate organization that fused the functional remnants of the archaic Soviet system with the West’s fluid, ambition-driven business culture. He built an operation that ranged across continents and hemispheres, carefully scattering planes, handpicked employees, corporate entities, and hidden wealth, creating a formidable empire capable of operating at a moment’s notice in dozens of cities across the world.
Merchant of Death: Money, Guns, Planes, and the Man Who Makes War Possible Page 2