Ostend’s management had also adopted a relaxed stance toward the air cargo firms that operated there, welcoming any company that promised steady freight operations. Bout’s competitors included an American firm linked by a Belgian parliamentary commission to clandestine arms flights to Iran and UNITA rebels in Angola in the early and mid-1980s; and another U.S. cargo operation that was tied in the early 1990s to rebel movements in Rwanda and the DRC. Both firms went out of business, as did a number of other Ostend-based cargo operations that were also suspected of using the airfield as a launch point for arms shipments.35
Most importantly, Ostend provided easy flight lines to Burgas, the Bulgarian free-trade zone, and to other East European transshipment points where Bout’s planes could load up with arms shipments and other cargoes before flying south to Africa or east toward Afghanistan. “We think he came here for cover for his flights to Burgas,” said Ronny Lauwereins, Ostend airport’s security director.
Bout showed up on occasion to personally take the reins of the operation, although he also had two partners—at least on paper. One was Michael Victor Thomas, a Frenchman whose name never cropped up on paper in any other Bout enterprises. The other was a Belgian shareholder, Ronald De Smet, a pilot who had reportedly flown for the Saudi royal family and who would later work with Bout in Liberia and South Africa.
The Russian set up his new offices on the first floor of a low-slung white brick building known as the Jet Center. He hired a secretary and installed a telex machine and a few pieces of leased furniture. Although Bout spent much of the time during that period in Sharjah and in African locations, Lauwereins would see him at odd hours, scheduling arrivals and departures of his ear-splitting Ilyushin Il-76. Bout left hints that he planned to settle in Ostend. He got in the good graces of the Jet Center’s owner by buying the man’s gated estate for $500,000. Soon expensive cars were prowling in and out of the mansion. And Bout even raised his public profile, staking out a helpful role in the high-profile disappearance of three Belgian girls by consulting with a Russian clairvoyant. 36
“He paid his bills on time and took care of everything,” Lauwereins recalled. “He had a lot of flights going in and out all the time. He must have been a good businessman because he was making a lot of money in those days.”37
In the summer of 1995, Bout and his crewmen were given a harsh lesson in the perils of working in the arms trade.
Afghanistan’s government desperately needed guns and ammunition. Bout’s hulking rented Ilyushin Il-76 was pressed into service. For three years, the Rabbani regime had survived a grueling series of clashes with rival warlords. Soldiers and civilians had died by the thousands. Kabul had been raked by rockets and artillery fire, but the government held—only to face its stiffest challenge from the sudden rise of the young fundamentalist students known as the Taliban. Under the command of the one-eyed Islamic zealot, Mullah Omar, an army of bearded, fundamentalist Pashtun students and battle-tested mujahideen had seized control of Kandahar in November 1994. The following spring, armed by Pakistan with heavy weapons and swift, gun-mounted four-wheel-drive pickup trucks, the mullahs launched a blistering offensive, attacking government troops from Kabul to Herat. Taliban forces reached Kabul’s suburbs before they were driven back, but by the summer of 1995 the Talibs controlled nine of the country’s thirty-one provinces and had dug in, rearming for an expected attack in the fall.38 Rabbani and Massoud were anxious to replenish their exhausted munitions supplies, and they turned to Bout for a quick fix.
On August 3, 1995, Transavia’s Il-76 set course for Kabul. Sharpatov was in the cockpit, leading a crew of six. The plane’s vaultlike cargo bay was crammed with AK-47 ammunition clips. The plane had stopped in Tirana, where Albanian soldiers spent hours loading green crates containing more than 3.4 million Kalashnikov rounds. Massoud had struck a deal with Albanian sources for five munitions flights, using Bout as the transporter. The Ilyushin’s tail carried a Russian federation decal, but its nose was emblazoned with a green, white, and red Tatarstan band—representing the Central Asian air firm that had leased the plane to Bout. The ammunition crates were labeled as “spare parts.”
“Albanian authorities signed a contract with the government of Afghanistan to ship ammunition to government troops,” Sharpatov recalled. “And since we were not involved in delivering ammunition or weapons to guerrilla forces, we were sure there was nothing wrong with what we were doing. Since it was a delivery sanctioned by the government, there was nothing criminal about it.”39
The crew had already made two runs between Tirana and Kabul, and they “went flawlessly,” Sharpatov recalled. But on the third flight, the Ilyushin veered too close to the perilous air corridor over Kandahar. “Our radio operator was stupid enough to establish radio contact with the [Taliban] control tower in Kandahar. There was a person there whom the radio operator knew and he got on the air just to say hi. The person asked where we were headed and when they found out we were flying to Kabul, they decided to [force] land the plane.”40
Within minutes, an ancient MiG-21 jet flying for the Taliban’s ill-equipped air force intercepted the Ilyushin and escorted it to the airport at Kandahar. An informant in Kandhar for the United States who was on the scene hours later told American diplomats in Islamabad that he saw “three crewmembers, one of whom had blonde hair, resting on cots beneath the aircraft wings.”41 The Talibs transferred the hostages to a converted storeroom near the governor’s mansion at Kandahar. With their prisoners safely stowed, Taliban troops swarmed over the Ilyushin, seizing the massive payload of munitions for their own Kalashnikovs. But as they cracked open crate after crate, they found—to their growing ire—that many of the rounds were corroded and useless.42
Bearded mujahideen fighters stood guard outside the storeroom all day and night. Sharpatov and his men were given cots to sleep on, but the frames were rusted and creaky. Instead, they stretched out on thin rugs laid over the concrete floor. They were fed undercooked rice that often sat for hours outside their door, accumulating pebbles and rat droppings. Several men cracked their teeth on the roughage. The Talibs bolstered their meals with occasional servings of fried potatoes and meager rations of meat and fruit, but the “primitive” diet took its toll. “Every one of us would have terrible diarrhea after eating,” Sharpatov said.
For the first several days, the crewmen wondered if Bout was trying free them. “We just sat around waiting for something to happen,” Sharpatov recalled. Back in Sharjah, Bout tried to negotiate by phone with the mullahs, and daringly even flew to Kandahar, only to be turned away. But the mullahs insisted on the involvement of Russian negotiators, convinced that the Ilyushin had been on an official government mission. On August 10 the Russian Foreign Ministry ordered Zamir Kabulov, a veteran of Afghan and Central Asian diplomacy, to fly to Sharjah and join Bout on his next flight to Kandahar.
Yeltsin’s diplomats were furious about being dragged into the affair. “This incident only caused irritation with the Russian government, since what had been done had been done without our knowledge,” Kabulov recalled later. “We did not know what was going on while he, naturally, was making money.”43 Kabulov arrived in Sharjah the same day, then joined Bout in one of the Russian’s Antonov An-32s, and by nightfall they were in Kandahar. Bout and Kabulov were ushered to the governor’s house, not far from where Sharpatov and his crew were held under guard. They were met by Mullah Muhammed Rabbani (no relation to the Afghan leader), who was in direct contact with Mullah Omar, who led the Taliban’s side of the negotiations.
“It was a very slow, sticky and unfriendly talk with the Talibs,” Kabulov recalled. The mullah stuck to a hostile tack—the crew, he intoned, had been “supplying arms,” and only a Taliban Islamic Sharia court could decide their fate. “They totally rejected our reasoning,” Kabulov said. “I tried to explain to them the entire chain of events, that the company did not have anything to do with Russia.” But the mullah “thought that it was just a cover for an operation by t
he Russian state secret services.” The Talib “would leave the room to confer with Mullah Omar, come back and repeat the same stance.” The mullah further complicated the talks by insisting that Russia had to compensate “the material damage to Afghanistan over the years of the civil war.” Hours later, the only progress was a Taliban agreement to allow the Russians to deliver food packages that Bout had packed on the Antonov.44
As the weeks dragged on, Sharpatov and his crew grew desperate with boredom and pessimism. They spent much of their time sleeping—or trying to sleep. They occupied the long hours devising new ways to kill the armies of ants that swarmed through their makeshift jail. They were given brief exercise periods in a courtyard and began collecting scrap metal for dumbbells. They had to tread carefully to evade scuttling scorpions and tarantulas.
In December, despite the hardened stances of both sides, the Talibs gave Sergei Bout permission to bring shipments of canned food to the imprisoned crewmen. When he entered the storeroom, the Bout brother motioned Sharpatov over to a corner. “Be ready to leave,” he whispered. “Do not take off your clothes when you go to bed at night. Do not take anything but your documents with you. There will be someone who will come for you at night and will take you to a safe place.”45
The crew lay awake for the next two nights, but there was no rescue. Sergei Bout returned several weeks later with more canned food and new orders. He told Sharpatov that he and his brother were working on a ransom deal. “He told us to sit tight and not do anything stupid,” Sharpatov said. Again, nothing happened. There were no further visits from the Bouts. The crew sank into despair. “We realized that no one was interested in saving us anymore,” Sharpatov recalled.
Despite the stasis, Bout’s Transavia planes continued to fly into Kandahar. A Bout lieutenant brought more food deliveries, and Kabulov kept up his dismal negotiations, also flying into and out of Kandahar on Bout’s planes. The diplomat found it odd that despite the strained relations between Bout and the Talibs, the mullahs allowed Bout’s planes to make regular visits. The planes would stop in Kandahar, dropping Kabulov off, then fly on to Jalalabad, where they would unload cargo shipments. “I was somewhat surprised,” Kabulov said, adding, “but not very much.” Veteran Russian aviation executive Sergei Mankhayev, a former Bout partner, later claimed that Bout used the Kandahar flights to deliver clandestine shipments to the Talibs. Bout “used this opportunity to fly there [to Kandahar] very often, sometimes to make 5 to 6 flights a day with a cargo of TVs, clothes and consumer goods made in China or Taiwan,” Mankhayev claimed. “In Kandahar, the Talibs would unload the stuff into trucks and take it across the open and uncontrolled border to Pakistan.”46
Kabulov tried to break the logjam by seeking out Russia’s Central Asian allies, conferring with Tatar officials and Afghan warlords. He approached the Pakistani government, trying to find leverage with the ISI, the secret service that had armed the Talibs and directed their military operations. The Taliban delegation changed faces regularly, but their responses did not vary. There was no progress for a year.47
In mid-July 1996, Sharpatov recalled, the mujahideen guards suddenly gave his crew permission to climb into the Ilyushin for the first time to fire up its engines. Over the next few weeks, the engine tests became routine. Kabulov learned later that the mullahs had been considering selling the seized plane and had dropped hints to Sharpatov and his crew. According to Sharpatov, the hostages shrewdly seized on the opening, telling their guards that the plane had to be in top condition for resale and required regular engine tests.
An escape plan began to form, Sharpatov recounted. On August 16, he and his crew took advantage of a momentary lull when most of their guards drifted off briefly for Friday prayers. The crew overpowered two remaining soldiers, and Sharpatov fired up the engines, taxiing down the runway. Several Taliban guards tried to block the moving plane with a fire truck, Sharpatov said, but by then the massive plane was picking up speed. Airborne seconds later, Sharpatov and his crew flew to Sharjah, ignored by the Taliban’s lone MiG, and returned to Moscow as heroes. The Bouts treated them to lavish dinners, and Russian president Boris Yeltsin honored them with medals.48
But in the years since, Western intelligence officials and Russian aviation veterans have raised doubts about the scenario, describing it as a convenient cover story for a staged escape and a secret deal between Bout and the Talibs. Several Russian aviation executives who were based in Sharjah in the mid-1990s insist that Bout crafted an arrangement with the mullahs that set his crew free in return for his agreement to supply the Taliban’s military with weapons. One veteran director of a Russian air firm described it this way: “When the Talibs captured the plane, they wanted to shoot the crew and keep the plane and the bullets. But Bout conducted very long talks with them and the Talibs told Bout to run several free rides with arms for them in exchange for the crew and the plane. Then the Talibs arranged for the so-called escape of the crew at Bout’s request. After that, Bout began supplying weapons to the Talibs as well.”49
Even Bout has intimated that the escape tale was a flimsy cover. But he hesitated to divulge more, hinting that the real story remains too sensitive because of the collusion of an unnamed government. “Do you really think you can jump in a plane that’s been sitting un-maintained on the tarmac for over a year, start up the engines and just take off?” he asked interviewer Peter Landesman in 2003 in Moscow. After a pause, Bout added: “They didn’t escape. They were extracted.” When Landesman pressed for an explanation, asking if the Russian government was involved, Bout clammed up. “There are huge forces,” he began, then lapsed into silence.50
Kabulov, who went on to become Russian ambassador to Afghanistan and then director for Asian affairs at the Russian Foreign Ministry, said he had no inkling of any covert dealings between Bout and the Russian government in the crew’s liberation—and added that he was unaware of Bout’s alleged secret arms arrangements with the mullahs. But ever the diplomat, Kabulov allowed that nothing could be ruled out.
“In Afghanistan,” he said, “anything is possible.”
CHAPTER 4
Continental Collapse
In March 1997, an American with a short, grizzled-gray beard stood watch on a crumbling tarmac in Zaire, squinting into the tropical sun past the broken-down hangars that passed for an airport on the outskirts of Kisangani. He was eyeing Russian cargo planes as they rumbled down the airfield’s rutted runways, laden with supplies for a nation in crisis.
He had arrived days earlier in the provincial capital, a sweltering, strategic jungle outpost on the Congo River that Joseph Conrad used as the backdrop for Heart of Darkness, his fictional descent into the moral netherworld of nineteenth-century colonial Africa.1 Unlike Conrad’s doomed European imperialists, the American had come to Kisangani on a mission of mercy, trying to help figure out how to avert a humanitarian disaster.
A veteran Africa hand who worked for the U.S. government, the American had spent long years ranging across the continent on countless thankless official assignments. But as he waited at the airstrip outside Kisangani, it seemed as if he had been suddenly dropped into his own modern version of Conrad’s hell. His immediate mission had been to see if the airfield, Kisangani’s sole airport and last remaining link to the outside world, was still serviceable.
In the days before the U.S. official arrived at the airport, thousands of Congolese refugees had been streaming toward Kisangani over ruined jungle roads, driven by war and starvation in a country on the brink of disintegration. Behind the desperate throngs were rampaging rebel forces led by Laurent Kabila and backed by the armies of Uganda and Rwanda. While Kabila and his rebel army fought to wrest control of Zaire from its aged, weakening dictator for life, Mobutu Sese Seko, the Rwandans and the Ugandans were bent on revenge, aiming to eliminate Hutu tribesmen hiding among the crowds of fleeing refugees. Accused of the genocidal slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Tutsi tribesmen in Rwanda in 1994, the Hutu killers had fled to United N
ations-run refugee camps inside Zaire. Now Kabila’s advance had driven them toward Kisangani, along with thousands of other displaced Congolese.2
Kisangani was a prize for whoever controlled it. The city was the regional hub of the lucrative diamond trade, run by clans of Lebanese merchants who had controlled the flow of stones since the early part of the twentieth century. In earlier days ivory also was smuggled through the city, 750 miles northeast of the capital, making Kisangani a hub of black market trade and violence. Called Stanleyville during colonial times because of its proximity to Stanley Falls, Kisangani was already home to five hundred thousand people. But by 1997, after years of war and neglect, it was a city in name only.
The American had already seen the first arrivals of the approaching human flood. The dispossessed were selling anything they could get their hands on. Refugees and locals hawked everything from jugs of water to auto mirrors ripped from the doors of passing cars. The hustlers milled among crowds of women and children, hoping for a single sale that might allow them to feed their starving families a small portion of rice. The U.S. official’s job was to help sort out the real refugees and help them get emergency shipments of food and aid that were about to be flown in by the United Nations’ World Food Program.
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