By 1996 he was filling the IPIS’s heavy metal file cabinets with records that began to sketch out the enormity of Viktor Bout’s operation. As crumpled blue Gaulois packs littered a research room fogged by clouds of cigarette smoke, Peleman slowly sketched out a profile of how Bout’s network operated. He turned up flight documents that showed the route of Bout’s planes as they made their way from Ostend to Burgas and then on to African airfields. He learned the names of Bout’s Russian aides and top Ukrainian pilots. He picked up intelligence about Bout’s bank accounts in Sharjah and New York and learned that the Rwandan government owed him $21 million for unpaid arms deliveries. He even found suspect weapons shipment lists on the Internet.
“Bout is not like any of his competitors,” Peleman explained several years later, surrounded by mounds of bulging folders and strewn documents. “With Bout it’s different. He runs a fully integrated operation. He sources the arms, he organizes the transport, and he sources the financing. I even have evidence of direct Bout payments to arms factories.”
Peleman could rattle off details about Bout’s operation like a management consultant dissecting a Fortune 500 company. There was a bit of awe and mordant amusement in Peleman’s obsession, but he never lost sight of the ultimate victims of the Russian’s handiwork. “This person was a major supplier of arms to African rebels whose military operations took a toll of thousands of lives,” he said. As he learned more about Bout’s operation, Peleman grew openly disillusioned by what he saw as a lack of interest from countries with the biggest stake in a secure Africa—the United States and Britain. At times he felt as if he were working alone on Bout, ignored by intelligence services and diplomats with unlimited resources. “Africa is not high on the agenda. There are no classrooms of analysts and secret agents looking into the situation in Sierra Leone and Liberia. These countries are just not important enough on the national agendas of those states, I’m afraid.” He called them “black holes.”11
Austin was finding much the same thing. Armed with her own files on the Bout organization and other arms supply lines, she organized a round of closed-door briefings for congressional staffers in Washington. A bipartisan group of aides voiced curiosity, but little changed. Austin tried the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) and Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL). At the INR, intelligence analyst Tom Ofcansky showed interest in tracking the movement of weapons. At the INL, Austin found another willing listener in Winer, who did pioneering work on mapping criminal networks that operated beyond state control.12
But before American policymakers could act decisively against Viktor Bout’s arms pipelines, they first had to have a clear understanding of what his vast business represented. And they needed a clear signal from the White House that the Third World arms trade was a foreign policy priority.
“Transnational threats” was the new national security catchphrase in the Clinton administration. But how those threats were defined and how they needed to be blunted were issues very much in flux throughout the 1990s.
Bill Clinton had entered the White House in January 1993 with a fresh take on the international landscape evolving after the fall of communism. Priding himself on his ability to cast an eye to the future, Clinton viewed a new world awash in global opportunity, freed of the Cold War yoke of competing ideologies. The Soviet threat had eased, and while China and smaller obdurate players such as North Korea, Iran, and Iraq remained nettlesome, Clinton was already concerned about new perils rising from terrorist and criminal groups that were independent of state sponsors and able to diffuse their violent activities across continents. “Today as an old order passes, the new world is more free but less stable,” Clinton said in his January 20 inaugural speech. “Communism’s collapse has called forth old animosities and new dangers.”13
The Colombian drug cartels that had operated unchecked through the 1980s, ravaging U.S. cities with cocaine, seemed the most obvious examples. The narco-traficantes were soon joined by other perceived global perils. Russian mobsters operating in Odessa, Moscow, and other Eastern bloc cities now had cells in American enclaves such as Brighton Beach in New York and West Hollywood and San Fernando Valley in Southern California. And just a month after Clinton took office, the February 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York—a portent of the September 11 terror attacks—quickly riveted the attention of his new administration to the threat posed by violent Islamic militants on American soil.
Within weeks of entering the White House, Clinton’s senior cabinet officials started to transform the upper levels of the bureaucracy to accommodate new offices capable of responding to transnational threats. Clinton’s new secretary of state, Warren Christopher, pushed for the creation of a new deputy secretary position for international law enforcement. “Clinton realized, and Christopher was sensitive to it as well, that drugs, crime, and terrorism all needed to be dealt with simultaneously out of the same framework,” said Jonathan Winer, who would later occupy a scaled-down version of the post. A hard-charging former staffer for Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, Winer had cut his teeth as an investigator in the late 1980s and early 1990s pursuing the scandal that rocked the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), an Islamic-run financial institution with major holdings in the UAE that suffered the biggest banking collapse in history at that time. Winer also oversaw the hard-hitting Senate report on the ties between United States-backed contras in Nicaragua and drug traffickers.
Les Aspin, the new defense secretary, also drew up plans for a deputy secretary to oversee the newly created Office of Peacekeeping and Humanitarian Assistance. “The Pentagon was still very focused on conventional wars and had been very reluctant to get into counternarcotics and counterterror efforts,” said Brian Sheridan, who would later oversee the Office of Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict of the Department of Defense (DOD). “So Les Aspin whipped up this new architecture to handle counternarcotics and other do-gooder stuff.”
But both efforts ran aground, spurned by congressional Republicans skeptical of the transnational threat concept. Unable to win budget approval, Clinton officials were forced to scatter the duties of their new transnational-themed offices through the government’s upper echelons, with terror, narcotics, and organized crime functions still kept separate. When Winer took over the new State post as deputy assistant secretary for international law enforcement, his portfolio included drug cartels and organized crime but not terrorism. At the Pentagon, Sheridan’s office dealt with counterterror issues but not narcotics.
“Clinton realized, astutely, that international drugs, crime, and terrorism all needed to be dealt with out of the same framework,” Winer said. “They each required cross-border law enforcement, evidence-gathering, international access to bank records, sharing of intelligence and police resources—the whole infrastructure had to be coordinated from a central point. But he ran right into a brick wall in Congress.”
Not everyone in the Clinton administration saw the wisdom of focusing on transnational threats, especially in the early days. “I was not convinced at first,” said Rand Beers, who served in senior positions in the National Security Council (NSC) and State for several decades, under both Republican and Democratic administrations. “Jonathan [Winer] convinced me. I certainly came to see money laundering and other elements as important. Russian organized crime was growing. Nigerian criminal groups were operating. We were seeing drug trafficking spin-offs in other areas. All these were factors that helped change my mind. Also, my greater appreciation for how corruption is undermining development in many parts of the world.” Beers would later quit as the Bush administration’s counterterrorism director at the NSC, blaming the failure of Bush, Cheney, and other senior officials to understand and counter transnational threats, most importantly, al Qaeda.
Still pressing for his transnational focus, Clinton responded by gradually shifting oversight for counterterror policy and counternar
cotics efforts to the NSC. The NSC’s close advisory role in the White House and its streamlined ability to respond rapidly in realms of foreign policy and law enforcement gave Clinton more flexibility to tackle transnational threat issues on a broad basis—and on his own terms.
The man who began knitting together the disparate “transnational threat” threads at the NSC was Richard A. Clarke, a career civil servant whose canny policy analysis and skillful bureaucratic maneuvering had enabled him to flourish in three presidential administrations, dating to the Reagan era. Clarke had done stints at the Pentagon and State, and by the tail end of the Bush administration in 1992, he was ensconced at the NSC, where he had been assigned to oversee “drugs and thugs,” a loose amalgam of crime, narcotics, and terrorism. A national security Jeremiah who openly warned that the United States needed to gird against terrorist perils, Clarke assumed a primary counterterror advisory role after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. A massive car bomb set off by Islamic militants in an underground garage beneath one of the Twin Towers killed six people, injured more than a thousand, and panicked thousands into fleeing down smoke-filled stairwells. As investigators centered on a group of Muslim extremists inspired by Omar Abdel Rahman, a blind Egyptian cleric who exhorted violence against U.S. civilian targets from his New Jersey mosque, Clinton ordered the NSC to ramp up the nation’s defenses.
Ruddy-faced, blunt, and decisive, a mandarin who cultivated fierce loyalists inside the government and influential contacts in foreign capitals, Clarke was given the reins of a new interagency panel, the Counterterrorism Security Group (CSG). The CSG began coordinating terrorism strategy, drawing experts from the NSC, CIA, and senior levels at State, Defense, and Justice. Meeting once a week, Clarke’s committee sifted through the latest classified reports on terrorist activity. Their reports reached the highest tiers of Clinton’s administration.14
Clarke quickly expanded his portfolio into other transnational issues. He pressed NSC officials to consider using a presidential emergency designation to target Russian organized crime syndicates. He also played a behind-the-scenes role in the covert American effort to apprehend Colombian cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar.15 As his influence grew, so did its trappings. He won a third-floor office with a vaulted ceiling in the Old Executive Office Building—a suite once occupied by Colonel Oliver North, the secretive White House aide at the center of the Reagan administration’s Iran-contra scandal. Clarke’s aggressive approach and relentless focus on the perils posed by terrorism in general, and al Qaeda in particular, impressed like-minded Clinton staffers. They admired his hard-edged outlook and his ability to cut through the chatter of formal meetings and harness the government’s complex budgeting process. “Dick’s a lightning rod. He gets in twenty to thirty minutes what other people take months to synthesize,” said Witney Schneidman, the State Department official who started the hunt for Bout. “That attracted a core of people who had no patience for the usual bureaucratic BS.”
Clarke’s position was strengthened by a series of presidential directives that firmed up the Clinton administration’s intent to act against transnational threats. They flowed directly from a new spate of spectacular terrorist crimes. In March 1995, the bizarre attempt by Aum Shinrikyo cult members to release nerve gas in a Tokyo subway added biological and chemical attacks as a perceived threat in the terror arsenal—along with growing worries about loosely controlled nuclear materials. A month later, the Oklahoma City bombing by right-wing extremist Timothy McVeigh raised new fears of attacks on government buildings.
Clinton responded with a classified June 1995 directive that identified terrorism as the most urgent national security issue, putting all agencies on notice to “deter, defeat, and respond vigorously to all terrorist attacks on our territory.” In October, Clinton codified his concerns about transnational threats. Signing Presidential Directive PDD-42 to combat “International Organized Crime,” he ordered federal agencies—including the NSC, Justice, State, and Treasury—to integrate their efforts against terrorism, international criminal syndicates, drug traffic, and money laundering. The next day, Clinton elaborated during a speech in New York to UN delegates celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the global organization. Linking the World Trade Center and Oklahoma City bombings to narcotics-linked abductions and executions in Latin America and harassment by criminal gangs in Central Europe, Clinton called on the United Nations and allied governments to take on “the increasingly interconnected groups that traffic in terror, organized crime, drug smuggling, and the spread of weapons of mass destruction.” As he listed his priorities to the General Assembly, Clinton added another that had received scant attention during his first term: he urged the delegates to “intensify our efforts to combat the global illegal arms network that fuels terrorism, equips drug cartels, and prolongs deadly conflicts.” It was the opening that would eventually allow U.S. intelligence and national security officials to target Viktor Bout’s arms network.16
But beyond bold speeches, American officials were ill equipped in 1995 to even recognize the head of a worldwide arms transport network, let alone pursue one. In the past, arms traffickers had been targeted on a piecemeal basis, and prosecutions were limited to illegal transactions made on U.S. soil or clearly involving American weapons procurers. Rogue international arms merchants such as Edwin P. Wilson, the former CIA officer accused of illegally selling weapons to Libya in the 1970s, were pursued only through rare Justice and intelligence agency cooperation. U.S. arms trade laws remained narrow, focused only on direct sales.
In 1996 the Clinton administration finally added teeth to the statutes, nudging Congress into regulating arms brokers under the Arms Export Control Act. Recognizing that weapons merchants provided their lethal wares not only by direct sales but also by acting as brokers and transporters, the United States now outlawed any arranging of arms deals not licensed by the State Department. The new law defined brokering as “financing, transportation, freight forwarding, or the taking of any other action that facilitates the manufacture, export, or import of a defense article or defense service.”17
That definition neatly described the activities of Bout’s organization—except for the glaring problem that he had no known American presence and was not known to have shipped any United States-made weaponry. Sheltered behind layers of shell companies and airplanes that constantly shed old identities, Bout appeared safe from U.S. law. With its far-flung business interests and scattered aircraft fleet on several continents, Bout’s network was a post-Cold War phenomenon, operating with clandestine ties to numerous governments but beholden to none. Its hidden structure was comparable to Latin America’s drug cartels, with their offshore bank accounts, small fleets of drug-carrying planes, and highly mobile legions of smugglers stationed from Medellín to Miami.
But where cocaine-ferrying organizations were flagrant criminal enterprises, the international legal status of Bout’s arms deliveries remained murkier—and there was no certainty that any other nation possessed the political will to shut down his organization. The United States’ tough new antibrokering law had broken new ground, but in Europe, regulations covering arms middlemen were much weaker, and in most of Africa, nonexistent. For the moment, all that American intelligence officials could do was learn more about his operation and watch him work.
Even hobbled by shrunken resources and minimal legal authority, the U.S. intelligence operation that had stumbled on Bout’s arms routes began to make headway. Now grown to a small circle of Africa analysts, the operation developed a small trove of material on the Russian’s transport empire. Many of the initial leads and information came from the NGO community.
U.S. intelligence officials assembled an early list of Bout’s aircraft, traced some of his African routes, and with the aid of British intelligence, started to learn more about his background. “Looking at his planes, we could see there was a large capacity,” said a U.S. official involved in the effort. “We began going through the process of scrubbing a
nd verifying his holdings. We started seeing his fleet in all parts of Africa.”
But they were still only gathering string. There were no calls from State or the NSC to learn more about Bout.18 Other European arms dealers operated freely in Africa, and some even had a few planes at their command, leading some officials to question whether Bout’s operation was any more a threat than his rivals’. Frustration mounted among the few officials who felt Bout’s network needed to be countered. “A U.S. intelligence person I know had been warning officials about Bout for years and no one listened,” recalled Alex Vines. “He was quite disillusioned about it.”19 One of the officials deeply involved in the effort smiled wanly as he reflected on his early experience. “I’ve been eating and sleeping Viktor Bout the last couple of years,” he said.20
Despite Clinton’s insistence that his national security, intelligence, and legal experts coordinate efforts against transnational threats, Clarke’s intrusion into fiefdoms traditionally guarded by the FBI, CIA, and State ran into resistance. Senior FBI and Justice officials balked at the NSC’s involvement in narcotics and international organized-crime issues, openly vocal about what they perceived as Clarke’s efforts to stage-manage counterterror and organized-crime strategy.
Merchant of Death: Money, Guns, Planes, and the Man Who Makes War Possible Page 13