Merchant of Death: Money, Guns, Planes, and the Man Who Makes War Possible

by Douglas Farah

  The American had no idea how to pick out deserving refugees from Hutu mass murderers. His resources were limited. He had no defined policy guidelines from Washington. All he had been asked to do was to help streamline the movement of food supplies and other humanitarian aid and to monitor the overall flow of events. He was to report back to Washington on any prospects that might help U.S. decision makers fashion a coherent response to the crisis—even though it lay at the bottom of the list of American foreign policy priorities.

  The American cared, but his mission was daunting, and there were few others helping him do it. He was among the remnants of a shrinking pool of U.S. intelligence officials and humanitarian aid providers still based in Africa. Their ranks had steadily diminished since the end of the Cold War, numbers thinned by attrition and budget cuts. Africa had seen more than two thirds of its CIA stations closed since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Embassy staffs were slashed, development aid offices shuttered, and knowledgeable field workers sent Stateside without replacements.

  By the mid-1990s, most stations in the countries at risk did not have regular CIA stations. Sierra Leone was covered from Conakry, Guinea. Liberia and Burkina Faso were covered from Abidjan in the Ivory Coast.

  The station chiefs, once among the most influential U.S. officials abroad, were reduced to what the CIA and diplomats disparagingly called “circuit-riders,” moving from one country to the next and relying almost entirely on liaison relationships with often corrupt and brutal local intelligence services. Almost all capability to run human intelligence operations had been irretrievably lost.

  Arriving at the airport, the American recognized quickly that despite its cratered runway and broken hangars, the facility, carved out years before as a lifeline for white administrators who worked for the Belgian government, was still usable. Old Russian cargo planes circled in and took off at a desultory pace. But the rest of Kisangani was in no shape to receive a flood of refugees. The jungle was encroaching, leaving Kisangani’s Belgian-built cement administrative buildings overgrown with moss and decaying in the relentless humidity. The city’s tin-roofed shantytowns stank, stagnant and fetid. Functioning hospitals, running water, and garbage service were distant memories, and electricity was provided only by private generators. Once-paved streets were in such disrepair that it was easier to walk or ride a bicycle than navigate over the enormous craters in a vehicle. Even transportation by boat on the dark, sluggish Congo River was slow and dangerous, a throwback to Conrad’s day. The railroad link to Kinshasa was now a rusted set of tracks to nowhere, unused for decades and retaken by the jungle.

  The airstrip would have to do. By the time the U.S. official had showed up to look the facility over, the situation in Kisangani had taken a turn for the worse. Just days before the American arrived, Kabila’s rebel troops had seized the city. Tons of food would have to be moved by air, and Kabila had abysmal relations with the UN relief organizations. And the United Nations, which had precious little airlift capacity of its own, would have to scurry to charter as many aircraft as it could find.

  The arrival of Kabila’s troops was an ominous development for more than just the American’s hopes for an aid airlift into Kisangani. Even for a superpower that was not paying attention, the dire situation around Kisangani had the tragic timbre of a disaster in the making. Kabila’s forces had swept through the already ravaged countryside, looting like freed criminals and devouring like famished locusts. Many of the volatile gunmen were teenagers, some adolescents and children. Many had been kidnapped and impressed into military service. They had little to eat and were often doped up on gin and amphetamines. Lugging heavy bandoliers of ammunition, they could barely lock and load their AK-47s, and some held guns almost as long as they were tall.

  Kabila, a rotund despot with a fondness for safari suits, had received personal tutoring from the legendary Argentine-Cuban guerrilla Ernesto “Che” Guevara in the 1960s. The Congo was rich in natural resources, and Kabila had bought support from Rwanda, Uganda, and other foreign allies by promising rights to the country’s bountiful diamond, uranium, timber, coltan, and iron concessions once he took power. He placated his troops by giving them license to loot and rape at will. As his forces swept in to Kisangani, Kabila was poised to ride the wave of good fortune all the way to the presidential palace in the capital of Kinshasa.

  Once assured that the airport still functioned, the American official moved quickly to jump-start the relief pipeline. The airfield was swarming with Rwandan, Ugandan, and Congolese soldiers. In their drab uniforms, T-shirts, flip-flops, and cheap wrap-around plastic sunglasses, the troops were impossible to separate from the refugees. They were thugs more than soldiers, using their AK-47s and RPGs to loot from the exhausted refugees who drifted nearby on foot and bicycle, in search of food and a place to camp. The American finally found Kabila’s officers, and once he had negotiated guarantees that the relief supplies would not be looted, the airfield was ready to receive aid.

  Russian Ilyushin Il-76 and Antonov An-24 cargo planes began arriving with pallets piled with food, medical supplies, and plastic sheeting. The planes were easily identified by the UN World Food Program (WFP) logos on their tails. Piloted by veteran Ukrainian crews, the Russian planes flew in day after day, ferrying tons of emergency staples for tens of thousands of refugees.

  As he stood at the tarmac, the American found himself watching one of the mammoth Il-76s creak downward for a rocky landing. Grinding to a halt, the freighter lowered its rear door and began its off-loading of food parcels. Oddly, the crew members brought out a ladder, set it against the tail, climbed up, and removed a UN logo that gave the plane its official protection. The startled American continued watching as the crewmen then began loading the Ilyushin with crates of weapons.

  “I didn’t know those tail markings were magnetic, but I guess they were,” recalled the official, who still works for the U.S. government. “Then guys in uniforms were moving quickly, taking good old-fashioned crates of AK-47s and ammunition onto it. When it was loaded up, it just took off. We don’t know where it went.” The entire turnaround time was less than an hour.3

  Reporting the strange events at the airfield back to his superiors, the American soon learned that the plane—and its cargo of weapons—belonged to Viktor Bout. The Ilyushin had flown the food supplies into Kisangani under official UN auspices and left with a load of weapons destined for parts unknown, most likely delivered to Rwandan troops on another battlefront. The departing flight was just one of the hundreds, if not thousands, of arms runs that made Bout infamous during the 1990s as the preeminent weapons provider to Africa’s dictators, warlords, rebel leaders, and terrorists. And the inbound flight of food supplies for the WFP was an example of Bout’s deft ability to keep his planes airborne with moneymaking cargoes and to ingratiate his operation with governments and global organizations.

  The American had heard about Bout’s operation. Sparse intelligence reports had linked the Russian’s aircraft to the arming of the Hutu killers only a few years earlier, although hard evidence of those flights remained sketchy. There were newer reports that Bout’s crews were flying for Rwandan troops, helping them project a military presence far from their home base in their tiny country. But in 1997, the Bout network was not a U.S. priority, only “of interest,” the American recalled later. He could look into the movements of the Bout planes in Kisangani. But he could not touch.

  In a model he would repeat in other killing fields, Bout was profiting from several sides in the Congolese conflict. His planes were feeding refugees, shuttling in the weapons for Kabila’s rebel forces while Mobutu, Zaire’s fading president, remained a close client and personal friend.

  Mobutu had been well worth cultivating. Famously fond of leopard skin hats and capes, Mobutu had skillfully portrayed himself as a foe of international communism to loosen the spigots of American financial aid. For years he had effectively blunted calls for reform in Zaire—his chosen name for the Congo—by repe
atedly threatening to switch sides in the Cold War. But by 1997, the United States and other old foreign friends were no longer willing to rush to his aid. Mobutu, who had memorably spent tens of millions of dollars to lure Muhammad Ali and George Foreman to Kinshasa in 1974 to fight the “Rumble in the Jungle” heavyweight championship fight, had almost nothing left but his well-stocked Swiss bank accounts. He was dying of cancer, and his empire was slipping through his aging fingers.

  Three months after the American officials saw the Bout plane loading weapons at Kisangani, the Russian sent another aircraft, on a dangerous mission to extract Mobutu and his entourage from their last stronghold. Mobutu escaped into exile. Renaming Zaire the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Kabila ascended to his place.

  Bout’s flagrant arms shipments to both combatants stunned even the most jaded observers. Belgian researcher Johan Peleman, who mastered the flight routes and corporate structure of Bout’s network as he investigated UN arms embargo violations in Africa, came away unnerved “in the way that ideology or politics are not at all involved. And it shocks me in that, if I can find out who’s supplying these rebels or this government, they themselves can find out as well. So they very often knowingly do business with the very person who’s supplying their enemies.” 4

  Toward the end of 1997 the U.S. official returned from the DRC to attend a classified year-end review session with senior American intelligence officials who headed African divisions from several government agencies. One of the primary topics was the DRC and the Rwandan-backed incursion that had propelled Kabila into power. The intelligence community had entirely failed to foresee the developments.

  “We did not realize that Rwanda could project power halfway across the continent,” the official recalled. “They had to have Il-76s flying to do that. Specifically, the Rwanda experience brought home to us that you can’t just look at the order of battle for a state, but you have to look at the gray market, nonstate actors that can be brought to bear.”

  Viktor Bout had begun to alter the landscape of modern war.

  Bout’s Africa operations left bloody footprints across the continent. Chaos gave rise to instability. Instability bred more chaos. The results, writ large, were staggeringly bleak. The massive continent has fifty-three countries and is the size of China, the United States, Europe, India, Argentina, and New Zealand combined.5 Yet a 2003 World Bank study found that only nine nations merited even a barely acceptable fair-governance rating. The rest, comprising more than 80 percent of the continent, were judged as failing or failed states.6

  The private global arms trade had surged, reaping as much as $10 billion a year—an industry that researchers believe had its most rapid growth in the decade following the end of the Cold War.7 The effects were immediate and pronounced on African countries that were suddenly awash in guns. African tribal factions had long fought territorial wars using a patchwork of simple and outdated weaponry—rustic hunting rifles, shotguns, spears, and machetes. Even the more modernized streams of arms that had been covertly shipped to African rebel groups by the Soviet Union during the Cold War were carefully meted out and controlled. But everything changed as the African market was flooded with a tide of assault rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, antitank cannons, and endless supplies of ammunition.

  In northeastern Uganda, the Karimojong tribe had used traditional weapons for centuries to settle territorial disputes. Deaths were rare, and feuds usually were settled by clan elders. But by the late 1990s, according to a 2001 State Department fact sheet on African weapons flows, the tribe and its neighbors had been armed with an estimated forty thousand AK-47s. “Not surprisingly,” State Department officials said, “cattle rustling and clan warfare became more lethal.” Kalashnikovs became a common wedding dowry. Efforts by the government to disarm the tribe led to violent clashes, and a once-peaceful area had “become part of the arc of conflict that stretches from the Horn of Africa to east, central and southern Africa.”8

  The Eastern bloc was not alone in culpability for rising weapons flows in Africa. Between 1991 and 1998, U.S. weapons and training deliveries to Africa totaled more than $227 million—and American military aid to the seven African nations involved in the DRC wars totaled $125 million over the same period. But the ubiquitous AK-47 and other Eastern bloc weapons far outstripped American varieties in popularity. In the post-Cold War era thirty-five million to fifty million AK-47s were churned out by Russian and East European factories. By contrast, about eight million American M-16 varieties were manufactured.9 The flow of Russian assault rifles was so vast that in Kenya, the barter rate for a single AK-47 dropped from ten cows in 1986 to two cows in 2001, the nongovernment organization Oxfam reported.10 Easy access to weaponry gave the rudimentary armies of drugged children and untrained militias the firepower to level entire societies.

  One group whose ascendancy can be traced, at least in part, to Bout’s weapons provisions is the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in Sierra Leone. The RUF’s battlefield advances coincided neatly with Bout’s weapons deliveries. The luckiest victims in Sierra Leone were those who escaped the RUF’s onslaughts of amputations, rape, and torture and eked out a hardscrabble existence as slaves in the conflict’s diamond fields.

  There, the men and boys, watched by armed guards cradling Kalashnikovs and wearing their ubiquitous wraparound plastic sunglasses, were forced to dig diamonds all day, six days a week. The heaviest activity was during the rainy season, when the alluvial diamonds were easier to wash from the rivers and streams. Stripped to their underwear, the slave laborers would haul gravel from pits dug by shovel deep into the muddy riverbeds. Cave-ins were endemic, often bringing death by suffocation.

  Others would haul the gravel to the river, to be washed in rudimentary gravel sifters called “shake-shakes,” where the diamonds were picked from the stones and turned over to mine bosses. At times the digging grew so frenzied that the workers dug under pylons holding up bridges and the foundations of houses, causing their collapse.

  The men were forced at gunpoint each night to strip and wash each body cavity under the watchful eyes of the guards, to ensure that they were not smuggling out any stones, a crime that brought an automatic death sentence.

  As Bout-supplied weapons flowed to the RUF in 1998 and 1999, both in direct flights and through weapons transshipped by Charles Taylor in Liberia, the rebels were able to carry out campaigns that were as chilling and destructive as their names: “Operation No Living Thing” and “Operation Pay Yourself.” The commanders directing the mayhem dubbed themselves with equally mordant nicknames: Kill Me Quick, Superman, Poison, Mosquito, and Mosquito Killer.

  The child soldiers bore the brunt of these operations. Often they were given mixtures of cocaine and amphetamines the night before setting off on “mayhem days,” the endless hours when they would rampage through the countryside, killing, mutilating, raping, and pillaging until they collapsed from fatigue and hunger.

  To ensure that the children could not abandon the rebel forces, the commanders would often take razor blades and carve the initials “RUF” into the young soldiers’ chests. The brand was tantamount to a death sentence. An escapee caught on the road by the RUF could easily be identified as a deserter. And if the enemy caught him, it was equally fatal because he would be unable to deny his affiliation to the rebel movement.

  Large swaths of eastern and northern Sierra Leone were reduced to abandoned, barren wastelands that resembled hellish scenes out of Goya paintings. Burned and bombed-out villages populated by those too weak and ill to flee were slowly retaken by jungle growth. Dilapidated, unused clinics, schools, and businesses that had been razed to the ground were stripped of anything of value, from the aluminum roofing to plumbing hardware. The rubber plantations and palm trees that produce palm oil were slowly chocked by overgrowth after years of neglect.

  In the overcrowded refugee camps in the eastern regions of the country, where most of the war was fought, relief workers found that close to 70 perc
ent of the women were victims of sexual assault, and the percentage was almost as high among the men. The crisis was so overwhelming that doctors and nurses would not even test for HIV/AIDS because they had no way to treat the infection if it were found. Instead they limited themselves to testing for traditional sexually transmitted diseases that could be treated with antibiotics.

  The scorched-earth campaigns left thousands of maimed victims. The rebels often mocked their victims before amputating their limbs, asking them if they wanted to be “short-sleeved”—with the limb chopped off above the elbow or knee—or “long-sleeved,” with just the hands or feet amputated. Many of the maimed still live in tattered, crowded homes built out of plastic sheets and aluminum roofing.

  The fragile domiciles are clustered in the Amputee and War Wounded Camp, a den of human anguish by the side of the main road in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Disfigured men, women, and children eke out a numbing existence there, squatting in abject poverty and living off international food donations. They are largely ignored by their own government and now almost forgotten by the world outside. Dust, flies, and mosquitoes hover over the camp. Visitors are no longer welcome. Too many foreigners have arrived, promising relief. Few have delivered.

  Sitting beside an open sewer canal a few years ago at the camp, a man with both arms hacked off cursed his young son as the boy tried to light a cigarette. The boy was missing a leg, and teetering on crutches, he was unable to light a match to help his father out. When he saw an American visitor watching, the old man demanded that the stranger avert his eyes.