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

by Douglas Farah

  CHAPTER 7

  The Taliban Connection

  The mullah had a shopping list and money to burn.

  In the winter months of 1996 and into the spring of 1997, Farid Ahmed, a young turbaned Afghan cleric, was a persistent visitor around the hangars and air freight offices at Sharjah International Airport. He had been secretly dispatched to the Persian Gulf emirate by senior mullahs of the new power in Afghanistan, the Taliban. Only weeks earlier, the puritanical mujahideen from Kandahar had swept into Kabul after their grueling two-year insurgency and routed the weakened government of Burhanuddin Rabbani. The missions given to Ahmed, a wispy-bearded, fervent graduate of Pakistan’s fundamentalist Islamic madrassas, were to procure new supplies of weapons and airplanes for the Taliban and to set up a covert pipeline to transport arms back to Afghanistan.1

  Sometimes alone, sometimes accompanied by other Taliban operatives, Ahmed went door to door through the airport’s offices and hangars. He badgered flight directors and cargo shippers, flashing detailed lists of the lethal items sought by the Taliban’s leadership. For the rogue state’s foot soldiers, Ahmed sought massive quantities of Kalashnikov automatic rifles, shoulder-fired grenade launchers, ground rockets, mortars, antiaircraft batteries, and ammunition. For the Taliban’s air force he wanted aviation supplies—tires, hydraulic fluid, spare fighter jet parts, and replacements for their ancient MiG-21 jet fighters. Most importantly, Ahmed told the air cargo executives he approached, the Talibs were willing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to purchase long-distance cargo planes capable of flying in the tons of military hardware their leaders craved.2

  “He was all over the airport, in everyone’s hair,” recalled Victor Sherin, a stocky, blunt Russian who worked as managing director for Volga-Dnepr Gulf, one of several Russian-owned aviation firms that Ahmed pestered with offers to buy matériel.3

  The Taliban’s buying spree came at a crucial juncture for their armed forces. As the shock troops of true believers had waged their seesawing insurrection against the Rabbani government and forces loyal to his defense minister, Ahmad Shah Massoud, they had depended primarily on Pakistan’s intelligence services and military for tanks, artillery, ammunition, and supplies. But their symbiotic relationship with the Pakistanis began to strain after the Talibs seized Jalalabad and marched into Kabul in late September 1996, forcing a ragged retreat by Massoud’s forces to a safe haven in the Shamali plain. Eager to scatter the remnants of Massoud’s holdouts, the Taliban’s senior leaders began chafing at their dependence on Pakistani officials. Pakistan’s military advisers and Interservices Intelligence directorate (ISI) agents had inflamed the Taliban’s “mistrust and impatience” by parceling out weapons only after operations “were approved and cleared by the Pakistani Army.”

  At the Taliban’s moment of victory, their senior leaders could not yet depend on the financial largess of their future patrons, Osama bin Laden and his cadre of terror operatives. Bin Laden would soon pool money, arms, and resources with the Talibs, but he and his forces had only recently arrived in Afghanistan after leaving their haven in Sudan in May 1995 and setting up a compound in the mountain redoubt of Tora Bora.4 Not independent enough to break off from their Pakistani patrons, the Taliban’s mullahs began to display “a vested interest in developing an independent procurement capability,” Human Rights Watch analysts later concluded.5 A U.S. military intelligence official later agreed with that assessment: “Pakistan played a big role in weapons transfers, absolutely. They provided mostly the big stuff—tanks, trucks, heavy artillery. But the small arms that any army lives on, the Taliban needed a steady diet of that, and they would take it from whatever sources were available.” 6 In late 1996 the Taliban regime looked to the emirates—with Farid Ahmed as their agent.

  Ahmed set up shop in Sharjah that November, appointed as the new station manager for Ariana Afghan Airways—the nation’s government-run airline. The baby-faced cleric had been selected for the post by a powerful patron among the Taliban’s leadership—Mullah Akhtar Mohammed Mansour, the new head of the Afghan air force and later the Taliban’s defense minister. An Afghan who worked as a senior executive with Ariana during the early days of the Taliban’s rule said that Ahmed had an even more important patron—Mullah Omar, the reclusive, one-eyed Taliban leader who acted as apostle for Afghanistan’s fundamentalist Islamic insurrection, and who remains to this day a fugitive from American forces. “He was under the direct control of Mullah Omar,” the former Ariana executive said.7

  To those who met him in Sharjah, young Ahmed seemed an odd choice to entrust such a clandestine mission. The newly arrived cleric saved money by sleeping in local mosques instead of renting. “He was basically a miser,” recalled Samir Zeidan, general manager of Flying Carpet Express, a cargo firm that Ahmed later hired.8 Ahmed brought his own tea to business meetings and was prone to bouts of sudden giggling. Only twenty-five when he arrived in Sharjah, the mullah was oblivious to the crucial details of plane routing, schedules, international air regulations, and cargo requirements that Ariana officials struggled with daily. He spoke little English, a staple among Ariana’s pilots and senior staff, though he was fluent in Punjabi and Urdu and could hold his own in Farsi. A scion of a prosperous trading family with roots in both the UAE and Pakistan, he had worked briefly in Dubai before the Taliban came to power and had connections with the Afghan expatriate community there. Viktor Bout’s business partner Richard Chichakli got to know Ahmed during his business trips to Sharjah and was unimpressed. “He knew nothing about the airplane industry,” Chichakli said dismissively. “If he wanted to do business, he would send for someone else to help him.”9

  But Mansour had chosen Ahmed for other traits—his unwavering loyalty, his stealth and discretion, and his years of fundamentalist Islamic religious training. As Mansour’s handpicked representative, the young mullah was given complete authority over Ariana’s staff and bank accounts in the UAE. And he was entrusted by Mansour with the sensitive assignment of finding cargo planes for the Taliban’s depleted air force. The minister informed senior officials of Ariana that Ahmed reported directly to him and that they were to follow his orders. In late 1996 Mansour quickly assigned the veteran Ariana executive to act as Ahmed’s minder, helping him bolster Taliban flight routes to and from the emirates: “Mullah Farid is in charge of everything in the emirates,” Mansour flatly told the executive.10

  Until the Taliban takeover, Ariana had staffed only a few desultory flights through the UAE, mostly half-filled passenger routes back and forth from Dubai. Cargo flights laden with consignments of radios, refrigerators, and other prized appliances made runs into Afghanistan from both Dubai and Sharjah, but they flew fitfully, rarely on a standard schedule. That changed in short order. Passenger flights quickly grew to as many as five scheduled runs weekly, all routed through Sharjah. The volume of cargo activity rose dramatically, too, sometimes as many as three flights a day. Ariana’s operation in Afghanistan swelled as the cargo volume rose, growing from a staff of eight hundred to nearly fifteen hundred by the late 1990s.

  For both Ahmed and the older mullahs who oversaw his mission, Sharjah was an ideal location. The trade-obsessed UAE was one of only three nations in the world—along with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan—that had diplomatically recognized the new Taliban regime. The UAE’s leader and founder, Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan al Nahyan, had spoken glowingly of the Taliban’s new leadership. Both the elder Sheikh al Nahyan and the UAE’s dynamic young crown prince and defense minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum, soon became visitors to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, flying in with other wealthy Persian Gulf sheikhs to join in lavish hunting parties in the hills near Kandahar. Navigating the bleak terrain in Land Cruisers, they joined their Taliban hosts in releasing trained falcons to track down pheasantlike houbara bustards, a quarry prized in the traditional Bedouin hunting rites. The young crown prince returned several times in 1998 and 1999, mingling in well-appointed tents with his counterpart, Manso
ur, other senior mullahs, and on at least one occasion in 1999, reportedly with Osama bin Laden, who was known to fish at a nearby dam with Mullah Omar.11 Warming to his hosts, Sheikh Maktoum agreed to suspend all landing fees for Ariana planes—a move that further aided the surge in air traffic to and from Sharjah.12

  Sand-swept, arid, and overrun by legions of traders, shippers, moneymen, and smugglers, Sharjah’s airport catered to the more than seventy airlines and air cargo firms based there. Loading bays hummed all day and well into the night with the propeller drone of antiquated, durable Antonovs and Ilyushins. Russian and Arab ground crews hefted off heavy pallets stacked high with appliances, construction materials, and military equipment. “The only reason to be in Sharjah was smuggling,” the senior Ariana executive said. “In Sharjah, it was anything goes.”13

  Inspection was lax and regulations easily skirted. Planes regularly landed and took off at late hours. Ground crews were adept at whisking cargos on and off in the enveloping early-morning darkness without interference from airport security men. Abdul Shakur Arefee, an Ariana flight engineer who flew frequently through Sharjah in the late 1990s, watched puzzled as arriving planes taxied off to dimly lit nooks, where ground crews hustled shipments on and off without interference from airport inspectors. “In Dubai, all the cargo would have to be taken off near the gates. No exceptions,” Arefee recalled. “But in Sharjah, there was not too much tight security. When the planes came, they would park in isolated places and unload there.”14

  Russian pilots and cargo shippers had been flocking to Sharjah’s airport in growing numbers since the early 1990s, attracted by the facility’s low overhead, paltry regulations, and close proximity to valued Third World capitals. Anxious to escape Russia’s brutal winters and desperate to make a living, scores of Soviet air force veterans drifted to the UAE, taking whatever cut-rate opportunities they could find to fly. The Russians in Sharjah were a tough, freebooting bunch who maneuvered their aging freighters out on regular cargo runs to remote landing strips across the Middle East, Africa, and south-central Asia. Many were familiar with the region, having fought the Afghan mujahideen in the 1980s. But for some, memories of the brutal Afghan war and its bitter denouement were still too raw to contemplate doing business with the likes of Farid Ahmed. Alexei Inchuk, general manager of the Sharjah-based Phoenix Airlines, shuddered inwardly when Ahmed and “a whole pack of Talibs” entered his office that winter. The Afghans asked to buy an Antonov An-12 cargo plane. Inchuk turned them down flat. “They were ready to offer a very good deal on it,” Inchuk recalled. “But I said no. I fought in Afghanistan in my time and I don’t have much time for these people, especially for Talibs.”15

  Sergei Mankhayev, general manager of Republic Air Company, was approached by an unnamed Taliban broker who showed him a want list of “civilian aircraft and spare parts.” The broker also waved a second list, detailing sought-after “weapons, ammunition, and MiG combat aircraft,” along with several dozen armament varieties, from grenade launchers to ground rockets. Mankhayev refused the offers. So did Victor Sherin, waving Ahmed off when he proposed buying several heavy-duty Antonov air freighters for the Taliban’s air force. “I have never met a more cunning and sly person in my life,” an agitated Sherin recalled. “The word about him here was that it was nothing for him to cheat a kaffir (infidel). You could see how he was trying to catch every word that I said in Russian to my colleagues.” The mullah was not deterred. He returned with his aides, pressing for aviation fuel, hydraulic fluid, and tires for MiG fighter jets. Again Sherin showed them the door. “I did not want to get hooked by them. You do something illegal and then they threaten to report you to the authorities and you will have to work for them for then on. So they left and went on looking around.”16

  For weeks, Ahmed made no apparent headway in his shopping spree for arms. Then he found the man who would fly for anything for the right price: Viktor Bout.

  That winter, Ahmed met with two Russian businessmen in a hotel near the Sharjah airport. The former Ariana executive who had been assigned as Ahmed’s minder flew in from Kabul after receiving hurried orders to join the mullah in Sharjah. He met Ahmed at the hotel and the two men went to a third-floor room, where they were met by the two Russians. One was a stout man with hooded eyes and a trim brush mustache who took the lead in the conversations.

  The Russian did not give his name to the Afghan executive, who was excused by Ahmed after a few minutes, leaving the mullah alone with the visitors. But years later, the Ariana executive would identify the heavyset man as Bout—recognizing his stolid face from a color portrait of the arms merchant published in the New York Times in 2003. When the meeting was done and the Russians had departed, Ahmed told the Ariana official that he was “working with the Russian people to get supplies for the [Taliban] air force.” Over the ensuing weeks, Ahmed divulged more, explaining that he had forged a deal with Bout’s Air Cess operation “to get tires and other replacement parts for fighter jets. And it wasn’t just tires,” the Ariana executive recalled later. Ahmed confided that the Taliban was also getting “arms and ammunition,” and explained that another Sharjah-based firm, Flying Dolphin, an allied company owned by an emirate sheikh, would handle charter flights for Ariana.17

  Bout would vehemently deny that he had dealt with Taliban officials, and he has repeatedly maintained that he never dealt with al Qaeda or any other Islamic militants. “I haven’t entered any contracts” with the Taliban or al Qaeda, he insisted during a 2002 Moscow radio interview. In a public statement released later the same year, Bout said, “I am not, and never have been, associated with al Qaeda, the Taliban or any of their officials, officers, or related organizations. I am not, nor are any of my organizations.” In his flinty appraisal of world politics, Bout scoffed in his Moscow interview that U.S. officials had conveniently ignored their own historic role in arming Afghan militants, while using him as a scapegoat to “say that the Russians are to blame.”18

  It is not clear to this day whether Bout’s arrangements with Ahmed were related to the Russian’s negotiations over the previous year with the Taliban for his imprisoned crew and impounded Ilyushin Il-76. But his covert business relationship with the Taliban blossomed afterward. Though concealed from the outside world, Bout’s clandestine deal became a turning point in the growth of his arms empire, providing weapons, cargo planes, plane maintenance crews, and even pilots to the Taliban in a relationship that would clinch his notoriety as the world’s “gun runner extraordinaire,” as the U.S. State Department later described him.19

  Until that point, despite the growing global reach of his air fleet and business interests and his clientele of Big Men, guerrilla leaders, and warlords, Bout had remained a regional player in the international arms trade. He had dominated Africa’s weapons pipelines, perceived as an integral threat to the continent’s peace both by the British government and concerned activists such as Johan Peleman, and was only beginning to worry American intelligence officials who had finally started to focus on the continent’s flaring internecine conflicts.

  But Bout’s secret deal with the Taliban showed just how far he was willing to go. By enabling one of the world’s most fanatic and reviled regimes, Bout had taken the penultimate step of aiding a repressive government that was already shunned by most of the world—even by his own Russian government. But for Bout, the step was both logical and understandable. His operation needed to seek out the world’s wars and chaos to flourish, and the ascendance of the Taliban had swept into power a dream customer—a warlike regime that required a steady supply of weaponry to maintain its hegemony and arm its jihadist al Qaeda guests.

  Bout’s arrangements with the Talibs were forged in secrecy and carried out covertly for nearly five years before their dimensions were revealed by press accounts and intelligence reports that emerged only after the September 11 attacks. Both Bout and the mullahs proved to be masters at operating in the shadows. As the Taliban’s oppressive rule hardened, Western govern
ments and the United Nations responded in the late 1990s with a tightening series of trade embargoes and even an international flights ban. But during the winter of 1996-1997, Bout risked only minimal sanctions by joining forces with the mullahs.

  On December, 17, 1996, the European Union Council of Ministers imposed the first international arms embargo against the Taliban, banning the sale of “weapons designed to kill, and their ammunition, weapons platforms, nonweapons platforms, and ancillary equipment.” The ban was tentative and porous. Just two weeks earlier, Bout had opened an Air Cess office at the Ostend airport—a move that left his Belgian operation in technical violation of the ban, which also covered “spare parts, repairs, maintenance, and transfer of military technology and contracts entered into prior to the onset of the embargo.”20 But Russia was not yet a member of the EU. And since most of Bout’s planes were based in Sharjah and registered at various times during that period in Swaziland, Liberia, and Equatorial Guinea, it is not likely that the ban would have extended to his flights.

  According to Bout’s former pilot Vladimir Sharpatov, the Russian government had also issued a prohibition in 1995 on all flights by Russian-owned firms into Taliban-controlled territory in Afghanistan—a move that followed the militants’ snaring of Bout’s Ilyushin and his plane’s crew. But because his firms and planes were based outside of his native country, Bout’s operation again was likely exempted—and there is no evidence that any pressure was applied by Russian officials.21