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

by Douglas Farah

  His massive shipments of rifles and ammunition were evident only in the carnage they left behind in bullet-pocked villages and cratered battlegrounds across the African interior. His weather-beaten cargo planes were common sights at African airfields, but few veteran aviation hands realized that the Russian aircraft shuttling in and out regularly were part of Bout’s global fleet. Even in the regional capitals where his planes landed, his name was unfamiliar to most of the continent’s foreign diplomats and rarely recognized by intelligence agents posted there.

  During a three-year stint as U.S. ambassador to Sierra Leone from 1995 to 1998, John Hirsch never heard the Russian’s name. He never read it, either, in any of the confidential intelligence cables that came across his desk. From his embassy office in the capital in Freetown, Hirsch was well aware that the corrosive five-year-old civil war between the government and RUF rebels still flared in Sierra Leone’s rural eastern sector. While the rebels methodically ravaged the region’s hills for contraband diamonds, uncounted thousands died each year amid atrocities committed by both sides.

  UN investigators who later looked into massive violations of the arms embargo imposed by the Security Council on Sierra Leone in 1992 concluded that arms deliveries were repeatedly carried to the RUF both on Russian-made Mi-18 helicopters and by airplane—and that Bout and his accomplices were “key to such illicit practices, in close collaboration with the highest authorities in Liberia.”1 But at the time, Hirsch had almost no intelligence backup and few reliable African sources to provide firsthand reports from the distant front lines. There was hardly any interest from Washington to learn more. Hirsch surmised from his own readings that Liberian strongman Charles Taylor was behind the reported weapons deliveries to the RUF factions. And the ambassador also suspected the involvement of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. But Hirsch had no hard evidence showing where the weapons were coming from and who was behind the logistics of supplying them. Even if he had, it was clear that his superiors in Washington were preoccupied with other diplomatic spheres. “It was very difficult to get anybody to pay attention about the RUF in Washington,” Hirsch recalled. “It was considered a very secondary, tertiary matter.”

  All of Africa, Hirsch felt with a rising sense of gloom in the mid-1990s, seemed a tertiary matter in the eyes of the U.S. government. The October 1993 Black Hawk Down debacle in Somalia that left eighteen American soldiers dead after running gun battles on narrow Mogadishu streets had curbed the Clinton administration’s tentative impulse toward African peacekeeping. The harrowing spasms of genocide and famine in Rwanda in 1994 sealed the matter. By the mid-1990s, the State Department was preoccupied with brighter prospects for peace in the Middle East and the spread of democracy in the former Soviet bloc. Africa was low on Washington’s radar, perceived both as a diplomatic backwater and an intelligence wasteland. Already sensing their distance from Washington, Hirsch and his counterparts across the continent keenly felt the loss of up-to-date, detailed intelligence assessments.

  The inability to cull accurate information came at the worst possible time, just as Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Angola, and Zaire reeled from a new spate of internecine violence. “The Africa operation was stripped after the Cold War,” recalled former CIA analyst Michael Scheuer, who headed the bin Laden unit at the agency’s counterterrorism center. “It came back to haunt us.” One station chief in West Africa described himself as a “one-armed guy trying to hang wallpaper by himself. I read the newspapers, meet some officials, and have no assets in the field. My secretary knows as much as I do.” 2

  With only the CIA’s circuit-riders sporadically helpful, Hirsch resorted to trading stale bits of information with his diplomatic counterparts from Britain and the other nations still based there. “Everybody just lived on the rumor mill and passed the same rumors around,” Hirsch recalled. “By 1997, the rumor was that the RUF was on its last legs. That turned out to be totally inaccurate.” When Hirsch heard from his superiors in Washington, he was told to stay upbeat and concentrate on efforts to solidify peace talks between the government and the RUF in Abidjan. “The focus then was on building up the government and strengthening its capacity,” Hirsch recalled. “I think it was a naive view that the process was sorting itself out. We assumed the guarantors on both sides would keep the agreement. But it wasn’t solid at all. The troublemakers weren’t party to these negotiations. Looking back now, the troublemakers were Taylor and Gaddafi.”

  Both dictators, intelligence officials would learn, had hired Bout. But at the time, Hirsch saw no effort by either the U.S. or the British government—perceived as the stewards of their former colony’s independence—to learn more about how the peace process was being disrupted. “Neither the United States nor the United Kingdom devoted any intelligence assets to tracking the trail of money, arms and diamonds in the West African region,” Hirsch later wrote in an unsparing account of his tenure in Sierra Leone.3

  The situation was little improved for Hirsch’s successor Joseph Melrose, who served as ambassador from 1998 through 2001. Melrose was forced to evacuate the embassy staff in Freetown when the RUF attacked in December 1998. When he returned several months later, the permanent embassy staff was reduced to two Americans: Melrose and a security officer. A few Sierra Leoneans manned the phone on the off-chance that the country’s shoddy communications system might patch through a call, and others performed secretarial services. Melrose’s intelligence coverage from the CIA circuit-rider in Conakry was “extremely spotty. They hardly ever came.” The Defense Intelligence Agency, which also had personnel in Conakry, provided more regular coverage of the RUF and the war’s overlap into Guinea, but almost nothing about the weapons networks feeding the conflicts.

  The coverage was so haphazard, in fact, that even when Bout’s arms pipelines were at their busiest, during Melrose’s tenure, the CIA never mentioned the Russian or his weapons activities to the ambassador. Even if Melrose had been tasked to look into Bout’s movements, Melrose later noted, he had no one to do the job. Melrose finally learned about Bout’s operation during a 2000 visit to Sierra Leone by the United Nations panel of experts, who, over dinner, laid out what they had learned.

  But despite the embassy’s lack of intelligence, the first nascent signs of U.S. intelligence-gathering against Bout’s operation had quietly begun. As early as 1995, both American and British intelligence had separately started culling the first strains of information about the Bout organization. They would be joined later in the decade by Belgian, French, and Dutch intelligence operatives, and also by South African agents.

  The American effort was more automatic than deliberate at first, the result of the NSA’s broadly targeted sweeps of foreign telephone chatter. U.S. electronic surveillance aircraft flying out of Angola began picking up cryptic references to Bout amid intercepted conversations about arms shipments supplied to African rebel groups. Spy satellites equipped with long-distance cameras occasionally captured the fleeting presence of Bout planes at landing strips and airfields near battle zones. “Nineteen ninety-five is the period where we first picked him up,” said a U.S. official involved in the early effort. “We were following conflicts and insurgencies and the African rebel movements and these planes and registries kept showing up. But we were focused mostly on the conflicts, not the sources of arms, at that point.”4

  Part of the problem was that the intelligence community was prevented from talking among its sister agencies and to the State Department by bureaucratic and legal walls that had dated back to the Cold War. These internal dead ends, known as “stovepipes” in the jargon of the intelligence community, made certain that the information gathered remained tightly compartmentalized.

  The repeated references to Bout also failed to filter out from CIA headquarters at Langley because there was no direction from senior policymakers at State or elsewhere in the Clinton administration to target African weapons flows. “Why wasn’t Bout picked up earlier? It’s not the job of intel people to do policy,”
one former U.S. official said somewhat ruefully. “Their job is to gather intelligence and bring it to the policymaker.”5 On the diplomatic end, Hirsch said, “the interest from Washington was more in the political dynamics of these groups” and not in the arms trails that kept them going. Besides, he added, “Sierra Leone was perceived to be a British responsibility. The U.S. worried about Liberia, the Brits worried about Sierra Leone, [the] French worried about Guinea. No one saw West Africa as a regional matter.”

  Within the U.S. government, analysts and intelligence officers usually focused on single countries—a Cold War tendency that grew from monitoring habits directed at stationary targets such as missile silos and weapons factories. It would take years before the shift in the new world order would begin to be recognized, and there would be some impetus to shift the focus to regions and transnational analysis. Fittingly, the sharp-eyed CIA analyst who first noticed Bout’s growing empire was assigned to cross-border transnational trends.

  Unknown to Hirsch, the British had also begun to glean intelligence on Bout’s operation. Unlike the technologically dependent American operation, the British picked up their information on the Russian’s arms flows from case agents stationed at government embassies and from informants on the ground in Sierra Leone and elsewhere in West Africa. The British had not allowed their network to atrophy as the Americans had, but even so, their access to the RUF and its allies was severely limited. The effort to learn more about Bout was directed by MI-6, Britain’s foreign-aimed Secret Intelligence Service, and also involved the Defence Intelligence Staff, the secretive arm of the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defence.

  “They became aware as Bout grew into an entrepreneurial presence in their backyard,” said the analyst with ties to British intelligence. “It was the extent to which he facilitated the arms trade and made it easier for rebel leaders to operate in Sierra Leone and elsewhere.” A few British activists concerned about the deteriorating situation in Sierra Leone had begun calling for the United Kingdom to send in a peacekeeping force. That did not occur until May 2000, when Britain launched Operation Palliser, flying a parachute regiment into Freetown to evacuate Commonwealth and European citizens threatened by the advance of RUF troops.

  But the broadening flows of weapons from Bout’s network and other arms suppliers in the mid-1990s stimulated backstage discussions among intelligence experts about the possibility of inserting peacekeeping forces. The prevailing concerns were “proliferation and force protection,” said the British analyst. “They began to look at him long before peacekeepers were deployed. They wanted to know what they would have to contend with.”6

  Like their American counterparts, the British did not widely disseminate the results of the early intelligence gathered on the Bout network. The information remained closely held at the Africa desks at MI-6 and in the Ministry of Defence until Bout’s activities in Sierra Leone reached a crescendo in 1999 and 2000. “Until someone decided Bout was a policy issue,” the analyst said, “no one did much more than keep watch.”

  With the sharp reduction of Western intelligence-gathering and diplomatic personnel in the remote regions of Africa, global nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) filled the vacuum, fanning across the continent to tackle the growing need for humanitarian aid in nations broken by violence. In the process, NGO activists saw firsthand the devastating effects of the arms pipelines and began to advocate for solutions.

  The NGOs often based their people for extended stays in conflict zones where diplomats and intelligence operatives rarely traveled. Unencumbered by stifling bureaucracy and the confining trade-offs of international diplomacy, the activist groups used their newfound knowledge about the logistics of Africa’s violence to advocate for change. In Rwanda, where NGOs rushed to the aid of masses of victims of the Rwandan genocide of 1994, field workers got their first glimmerings of clandestine arms flights and began to raise alarms, pressing Western political leaders and diplomats to act.

  “NGOs were the only entities putting out information to the world about [Bout’s] importance,” said Jonathan Winer, who was a senior official in the State Department at the time. “This was especially true because U.S. intelligence in this period was focused on Europe, transition in the former Soviet Union, Middle East, South Asia and the Pacific Rim, almost everywhere except Africa, which was generally viewed as being of lesser importance.”7

  One of the first crusaders against unrestricted arms flows was Africa specialist Kathi Austin. For eight months in 1994 and 1995, Austin, a dark-haired idealist based out of San Francisco, worked to unravel the arms routes into the Great Lakes region in East Africa. Dispatched on a fact-finding trip to Central Africa for the Institute of Policy Studies, Austin daringly slipped into refugee camps on the border with Zaire and found former Rwandan Hutu soldiers rearming with new stocks of weapons. (CIA investigators later confirmed that Bout’s planes had armed the Rwandans after they sought refuge in neighboring Zaire.)

  A short, dynamic woman who drove herself and others hard, Austin recognized early on that aircraft were the key components of the illicit arms networks she was tracking. At first she and other activists were uncertain whether Bout was as big a player as other veteran arms traders who also made their mark in Africa. “We didn’t feel he was a kingpin in the early days,” Austin said. “But he really grew into a monster. By 1997 or 1998 he had taken over.”

  Austin and other NGO workers honed their knowledge of the arms pipelines by getting to know the players on the ground, often at their own personal risk. They developed relationships with pilots and couriers, learning how aircraft registrations worked. They watched as the same aircraft and pilots moved among different weapons-trafficking organizations, and could see how Bout-run companies gained dominance over smaller operations. By the end of her Rwanda tour, Austin was convinced that the Bout network was a serious player in the weapons game, and began to write internal reports citing his operation.

  At the same time, at the London office of Human Rights Watch, British arms analyst Alex Vines had also picked up traces of Bout’s operation. Vines began talking to African sources about Bout in 1995 as he took part in an examination of the United Nations’ sanctions-enforcement process. Some of the group’s African information had also come from Austin, who moved over to Human Rights Watch to continue her work in Angola and elsewhere in Africa. A Dutch colleague, E. J. Hogendoorn, also assembled an early unpublished report for Human Rights Watch on Bout’s flights out of Ostend Airport in Belgium. “E. J. was ahead of the curve,” Vines said, “but his report was under review for 4 or 5 years and by then, everyone had picked up on Bout.”8

  By the spring of 1997, the frequent arrivals and departures of the oversized Ilyushins at Ostend had triggered an investigation by Belgian federal police. “There were rumors about what he was doing with these planes,” said Devos Bart, a federal police officer based at Ostend. Bart and other investigators began a series of spot checks on the cargo holds of TAN network planes. The bays were empty, leading investigators to assume that Ostend was being used as a jumping-off point to the arms loading zones at Burgas and other transshipment points in East Europe. “His planes would always leave without cargo. This was suspicious, eh?” Bart said. In December 1996, Bout’s TAN operation at Ostend suddenly folded, replaced by a new flagship, Air Cess. But the constant presence of police and Bout’s growing notoriety among local activists in Ostend took its toll.

  Ronny Lauwereins, Ostend’s security director, arrived one morning in late July 1997 to find Bout’s Air Cess office abandoned. “He just stopped paying his rent and went away,” Lauwereins said. “He took all his files with him.”9

  Bout’s Ostend flights also piqued the curiosity of Johan Peleman, a Belgian peace researcher based in a converted Franciscan monastery in Antwerp. Working for the International Peace Information Service (IPIS), an Antwerp-based group that studied the roots of international conflict, Peleman was trying to trace the clandestine channels that had delivered we
apons to the Rwandan Hutus. Operating from a cramped office that once served as a monk’s nook, he began looking into the curious TAN network flights out of nearby Ostend.

  He learned more from Ostend activists who helped force Bout’s exit from the airport by printing leaflets exposing his activities. Peleman suspected that some of the outbound flights of Bout’s Ilyushins were ferrying weapons to the Hutus. The planes were registered in Liberia—an immediate tip-off of clandestine activity. Soon Peleman had learned what Belgian police already knew—Bout’s planes “took off at Ostend without any cargo aboard, but later were loaded with weapons in Bulgaria or Romania, and flew on to Rwanda. Because under Belgian law, foreign firms whose airplanes ply between other states may not be prosecuted, it was impossible to charge Bout.”10

  Peleman, like Austin, had no formal investigative training. He was a philosophy student who spent his college years burrowing into the writings of French psychoanalyst and thinker Jacques Lacan. A conscientious objector against Belgian military service, Peleman had started out with no knowledge of weapons. But with a scholar’s obsession, he became a self-taught expert in deciphering arms trade EUCs, port-of-shipment records, and flight plans, using the obscure documents to uncover the mechanics of what he called “war economics.” A wiry, somber man with hooded blue eyes, Peleman chain-smoked unfiltered cigarettes and repeatedly downed espressos through his long days of research.