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

by Douglas Farah

  The Russian government’s attitude toward the Taliban was disapproving, but also hands-off and remote. Boris Yeltsin’s diplomats had reacted stonily to the Taliban’s seizure of Kabul, stating the move “only aggravates the crisis into which Afghanistan has been plunged.”22 Russia had been printing Afghani currency under a contract with the Rabbani government—shipments that were also ferried at times by Bout planes. And by early 1997, the Russian government also began openly selling some military equipment to Massoud and other rebel factions.

  But the Russians still appeared reluctant to weigh in on Afghanistan’s internal matters so soon after their late 1980s withdrawal, leaving an opening for entrepreneurs such as Bout.23 There are even indications that despite Bout’s clandestine relationship with the Taliban, he may have kept himself in good graces with Russia by still quietly supplying the regime’s foe. In a February 2002 Moscow radio interview, Bout said he had continued to fly arms to the Northern Alliance “until the Taliban captured all the airfields”—a battlefield consolidation by Talib forces that was not completed until the United Front lost its airstrips at Mazar-i-Sharif in August 1998 and Bamian in May 1999.24

  U.S. intelligence officials were impressed by the sophisticated arsenals that both the Taliban and the Northern Alliance displayed in the late 1990s. Both sides fielded T-54 and T-62 Russian-designed tanks, towed artillery, multiple-rocket launchers, and MiG-21 and SU-17 fighter jets—equipment that would have required foreign assistance to buy, maintain, and operate.25 Russia’s intelligence services also played a covert role in Afghanistan in aiding Massoud and his Northern Alliance allies. According to a former Russian intelligence agent who defected to the United States, Russian operatives helped in the clandestine movement of arms to both Massoud and General Abdul Rashid Dostum, a former Afghan army general who fought the Taliban but who also switched sides several times during the civil war. It remains unclear if Bout was part of that official Russian arms pipeline.26

  “He was flying for the Taliban while flying for Massoud and the Northern Alliance,” said a close Bout associate. “Of course he was. He was friend of everyone. They tolerated this because they had no alternative. No one else would deliver the packages.”27

  Bout’s companies did more for the Taliban than merely deliver arms and supplies. Between 1998 and 2001, Bout’s network and allied air transport operations in Sharjah secretly sold twelve heavy-duty cargo planes to the Taliban, enabling the militants’ air force to bolster their air fleet and deliver tons of East European-issue arms into Afghanistan and ferry arms and thousands of jihad operatives inside the country. Some of the weapons shipments were eventually shared, U.S. officials later concluded, with the Taliban’s sheltered guests, bin Laden and his al Qaeda fighters.

  In June 1998 Vial, a Delaware holding company that Bout controlled through power of attorney and used to route arms profits to Belgium, transferred two Antonov freighters to the Taliban’s air force. Two more planes from Air Cess were also transferred to the air force, in January 1999. A fifth Antonov was turned over to Ariana, a sale that netted Bout’s network $100,000. That price, Afghan officials said, was more or less replicated in each of the other plane transfers—netting Bout’s companies a minimum of $500,000 from the Taliban treasury.28

  During the same period, the Taliban received seven other Antonovs from other companies working in concert with Bout’s operation. During 1998 and 1999 the Taliban bought five Antonovs from Flying Dolphin and Santa Cruz Imperial, two UAE-based air firms owned by Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed al Saqr al Nahyan, an influential former ambassador to the United States who was named in a UN report as “a business associate of Viktor Bout.”

  The sheikh, a distant member of the UAE’s ruling family and a diplomat who served as the emirates’ ambassador in Washington from 1989 to 1992, boasted that he “got to know many of the Bushes” during his stay in the U.S. capital. But by the late 1990s, Sheikh Abdullah had joined the growing ranks of the UAE’s air cargo haulers, basing most of his fleet in Sharjah. His flights, like Bout’s, ranged into Africa and Afghanistan. UN investigators reported in a December 2000 report on arms embargo violations in Angola that a Flying Dolphin freighter had joined Air Cess in supplying arms to UNITA rebels. And a UN report issued that same month on arms ban violations in Sierra Leone asserted that Flying Dolphin and Santa Cruz Imperial planes had repeatedly used Liberian and Swaziland registries during African flights. UN investigators concluded that the sheikh’s air operations worked in tandem with Bout’s—although American and British intelligence officials downplayed allegations that his firms were directly controlled by Bout.

  The sheikh had also been appointed during the late 1990s as a “global civil aviation agent” by Liberian dictator Charles Taylor. The posting gave the sheikh the authority to register foreign airplanes under the Liberian flag—in essence, giving him blanket authority to keep the freighters that he and Bout owned in Sharjah out of the range of international scrutiny. “The sheikh was operating abroad as an agent of the Liberian registry,” Johan Peleman said.29

  Sheikh Abdullah later acknowledged meeting both with Bout and with Farid Ahmed during that period. But the sheikh insisted he had not worked with either man. The sheikh claimed vaguely that former “Russian partners” of his had in fact owned the Flying Dolphin and Santa Cruz planes that were sold to the Taliban. He added that he had parted with the Russians after 1997—but he declined to identify them. Like Bout, the sheikh insisted he had never done business with the Taliban. He protested repeatedly about “the damage to my name” and how press reports about his firms’ alleged arms smuggling had made him out to be “like Al Capone, running this business for the Taliban. I am shocked at how they can say this, really I am.”30

  Another Antonov was sold in July 1999 to Ariana by Aerovista, a Sharjah-based cargo firm that worked with Bout’s firms on occasion. Apandi Lakhiyalov, managing director of the firm, later admitted selling the Talibs an “old An-24 passenger plane whose service resources had been almost exhausted.” Lakhiyalov said he had “a bad gut feeling” about the sale, but “what could I do? The economic condition was not quite good for our company and I don’t think we could have sold it to anybody else.” He insisted that he did not know Bout or coordinate business with him. But an official of KAS, a Kyrgyzstan-based firm that had joint rental contracts with Aerovista, said that Lakhiyalov’s company “may have done some business with Bout’s and Abdullah’s companies. They were not affiliated, they were only partners.” KAS was listed as a previous owner of the aircraft. Taliban records do not detail the seller of a seventh plane, an Antonov An-24 bought by Ariana in April 2001, but Afghan officials suspected that it, too, came from the orbit of Bout companies.31

  Bout’s work for the Taliban may have been hidden from the outside world. But the identity of his new customer was an open secret among aides and employees, one more rogue government joining his high-paying clientele. “Yes, he flew for the Taliban,” said the Bout associate. “He flew to the Taliban, not for the Taliban. He was landing in Kandahar all the time. But it was people paying him from Swiss bank accounts to do those flights. I don’t know who it was, but he was delivering packages to the Taliban. Not just weapons, but meat, food, all kinds of things.” And just months before the September 11 attacks, Bout admitted to Belgian journalist Dirk Draulans that he had indeed done business with the mullahs—though he was careful to insist that he had never dealt directly with bin Laden’s terrorist faction. “He said the Taliban were official, they were a government,” Draulans recalled. “But he said he never met al Qaeda or flew for them.”32

  Bout’s sweeping public denials also failed to reckon with a sheath of documents that sat in Taliban files. Senior officials of the Afghan coalition government that replaced the Taliban after the American invasion displayed the records to Los Angeles Times correspondent John Daniszewski in March 2002. The files documented the Bout network’s plane sales to the militants. One top Afghan aviation official cited Bout by name
. “He had a very upper hand in all these things,” the Afghan said.33

  South African intelligence reports also recounted a stream of profits from suspected sales of “heavy ordnance” to the Taliban, based on an informant inside Bout’s circle of pilots. And in 2005, when U.S. officials moved belatedly to shut down Bout’s global empire, the Treasury Department publicly stated that Bout and his firms had “profited $50 million from supplying the Taliban with military equipment when they ruled Afghanistan.” Juan Zarate, who targeted Bout during his stint as assistant secretary of the treasury for terrorist financing and is now the Bush administration’s chief national security official adviser on counterterror strategy, said that the Russian was “providing air cargo services to provide matériel to the Taliban, which was problematic at the time given the status of the Taliban as a sponsor of al Qaeda.”34

  During the American liberation of Afghanistan in late 2001 and 2002, U.S. troops uncovered massive caches of munitions that had been flown into the Kandahar airport during the Taliban’s rule and hidden in vast storerooms ringing the field. Inside submerged bunkers, soldiers found mountainous stacks of Kalashnikovs and RPGs in termite-gnawed crates, mortar rounds piled by the “tens of thousands,” and massive pyramids of ammunition boxes piled floor to ceiling. “It was clear the Taliban and al Qaeda shared the caches,” said a U.S. Defense Department official who toured the stockpiles in early 2002 and interviewed Afghan residents and captured Taliban fighters. Weapons taken from some of those caches were likely deployed against American forces by al Qaeda and Taliban resistance during the U.S. invasion in late 2001, the official said—and the militants have continued using them while waging their guerrilla war from the hills.35 “It was all intermingled,” the weapons expert said.

  By 1998, after his South African venture had imploded and Sharjah became the central hub for his Afghanistan work, Bout settled into a comfortable life the emirates. He worked side by side with his brother Sergei—who also spent a good deal of his time in Pakistan, tending Air Cess’s operation in Islamabad.

  Bout’s Air Cess office near the Sharjah airport was well appointed, with a receptionist and a bar well stocked with liquor—despite the emirate’s religious prohibition against alcohol. He moved openly in Sharjah’s expatriate Russian circles, attending emirate functions with his wife, Alla. In January 2000 he joined the Russian embassy in the emirate of Abu Dhabi in sponsoring an exhibit of Russian art, followed by a cocktail reception at the Sands Hotel. He also spread out his business interests, carefully basing some of his planes in other emirates. He kept the workhorses of his fleet in Sharjah while circulating his more dilapidated planes into storage in sun-punished airfields in the remote emirates of Ras al-Khaymah and Fujairah.36

  When one of his decaying Ilyushins in Sharjah became a candidate for the scrap pile, Bout faced a typical dilemma: he no longer wanted to pay steep storage fees for the useless plane, but UAE authorities prevented air firms from simply discarding their junkers. Ever the schemer, Bout came up with a novel solution. He sold the plane to a UAE advertising firm, promising to turn it into a roadside billboard along the bleak highway between Ras al-Khaymah and Fujairah. But he had to get the plane there. “He asked an ace pilot of his if he could do it,” recalled a Russian air executive who worked in Sharjah. “The pilot examined the plane and found that it could only fly on three engines out of four. The pilot was about to say ‘no,” when Bout offered him $20,000 for this trick.” After plastering the old plane with advertisements, the pilot managed to get the fraying hulk airborne. The plane shuddered aloft, engines sputtering, but the veteran airman managed to coax the old Ilyushin down to a soft landing in the sand along the highway. He walked away from the wreck and pocketed the $20,000—and Viktor Bout had wriggled out of another hole. “Bout loved this stunt and he bragged about it constantly,” the Russian said. “Anything for money, anything for risk. The more risk the better.”37

  Bout also knew how to cover his bases. Like any foreign businessman in the UAE, he had been obliged by business custom to join forces with an agreeable emirati sponsor. “This is how the sheikhs spread the money around,” said a U.S. diplomat based in the emirates in the late 1990s. “If you didn’t play the game, you couldn’t get visas, electricity hookups, phones, or anything you needed to stay in business. Clearly Bout had the right people working for him.” Soon after he arrived in Sharjah in 1993, Bout joined forces with Sultan Hamad Said Nassir al Suwaidi, the influential brother-in-law of the sheikh of Sharjah. Suwaidi had held diplomatic and government posts for the emirate and was once Sharjah’s police chief. Joining as Bout’s partner in the Transavia Travel Agency, Suwaidi took a traditional cut of Bout company proceeds—the actual figure was not listed, but the American diplomat said UAE partners typically raked in as much as 40 percent of the profits. Still, it was a small price for Bout to pay for easing government oversight and for special access to the emirate’s inner circles. Indeed, as his arms role in Africa became a diplomatic issue for American officials in the UAE, the arms merchant’s emirate connections afforded him official protection.38

  “We knew his planes were coming through Sharjah and we were concerned,” the U.S. diplomat said. “I went out to Sharjah airport with request after request to shut him down. The airport people would say: ‘But the aircraft aren’t registered in Sharjah. We’re afraid there’s nothing we can do.’ ”

  The diplomat went up the chain of authority to the sheikh of Sharjah, Sultan bin Mohammed al-Qassimi. The sheikh was an academic and an enthusiast of all things British, a visiting professor of Arabic history at Exeter who would jet off to London to spend his summers from June through September. The diplomat met the sheikh and his aides for tea in his royal business suite.

  “Look, Your Highness,” the diplomat explained as tea servers refreshed their cups, “you’ve got a problem here. This man is moving guns to Africa and his planes are in your airport. We need to have this man stopped.” The sheikh nodded his assent, eyes distant. “He would say he understood, and then nothing would be done,” the diplomat recalled years later. “Months would go by and we’d meet again over tea and I would mention Viktor again and the sheikh would smile and look at us as if he’d just heard the name for the very first time. After about the fourth time, we stopped asking.”39

  As Sharjah’s leaders averted their eyes, Bout’s air operations for the Taliban proceeded apace. The clandestine arrangement with the Talibs was a poorly kept secret among the Russian air cargo workers and pilots at Sharjah and even among Bout’s rivals back in Russia. Valery Spurnov, general director of SpAir Company in Yekatarinburg, learned about the arms flights in conversations with some of his pilots, who were hired in 1997 and 1998 as freelancers for Air Cess in Sharjah. After SpAir was idled following a crash of one of its Ilyushin Il-76s in Yugoslavia in late 1996, Bout lured nearly fifty of the firm’s pilots to the UAE with promises of steady employment and $5,000 monthly paychecks, Spurnov recalled.

  The pilots whispered openly about runs into Afghanistan, delivering arms for the Talibs on Air Cess freighters that had been leased by Ariana. Bout’s ground crews at Sharjah also had unfettered access to the Ariana planes—and their cargo bays—as a result of Air Cess’s maintenance work for the airline. The ground crews were adept at removing tail numbers—to obscure their provenance and make tracking more difficult. The tactic was an old standby—before the Taliban takeover, Western observers reported seeing Antonovs and Tupelovs in Tajikistani colors piloted by Russians and Bulgarians “offloading mortars, small-arms ammunition and missiles” to pro-Rabbani factions.40 One Russian cargo executive familiar with Bout’s Sharjah operation said that Air Cess ran so many flights into Afghanistan for the Taliban that members of his ground crews boasted they “changed numbers on the sides of their planes three times a week. They painted the numbers with water emulsion to make the work of repainting easier.”41

  The pilots were rarely told what they were delivering. But veterans familiar with the signs of ar
ms transport work easily recognized their military cargoes by the telltale green wooden crates they carried and by the crews of Taliban soldiers who off-loaded the containers in Afghanistan. Said one pilot: “We carried stuff which was packed in green, oblong wooden boxes. The boxes were pretty heavy, too. We didn’t ask questions. But what else could it be but weapons?” Bout’s pilots also had to take part in the subterfuge. Many were issued false “Liberia-issued IDs” by Bout’s executives, Spurnov recalled, which masked their identities as his employees. “No one asked about the nationality. For all they cared, the Talibs hired Liberian pilots.”42

  At least one other Sharjah-based air firm was approached to join in the weapons flights into Afghanistan. Igor Abdayev, general manager of Jet Line and a longtime acquaintance of Viktor Bout, said that “several people and companies came to us about this deal to deliver weapons from Albania to Afghanistan.” Abdayev would not name them, but he said he was told “it was legal and the way that they put it, it looked like a pretty legal operation to us.” Abdayev agreed to go in on the arms flights. But when he asked for “a whole package of necessary documents before we take this job,” Abdayev’s prospective partners never delivered them. “We did not do it,” Abdayev said, adding: “But someone else could have.”43