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

by Douglas Farah

  Along with their suspicions of heroin trafficking, Scheuer and his CIA team also worried that Bout’s deep connections inside the Russian government and military—and his alleged links to Russian organized crime—made him eminently capable of secretly flying contraband nuclear material into Afghanistan. “We paid particular attention to the WMD issue because of Bout’s connections inside the Soviet military,” Scheuer said. Counterterror officials knew that bin Laden’s al Qaeda lieutenants had already tried and failed in the early 1990s to buy nuclear materials in Sudan, and they were anxious about the Eastern bloc’s loose regulation of nuclear weapons and radioactive substances. The sudden appearance of Russian cargo planes deep in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan inevitably set off alarm bells.

  The CIA never received credible reports of WMD material shipped on Bout planes. But intelligence officials briefly fixated on allegations from a senior Afghan official that the Ariana airline had moved shipments of chemical poison for al Qaeda. Citing Northern Alliance and American intelligence reports, Dr. Ravan Farhadi, then the Afghan permanent representative to the United Nations, said that cyanide, ricin, and other toxic substances were flown on clandestine cargo runs from Sharjah to Kandahar. Farhadi, who is the Rabbani government’s UN ambassador and continued in that role through the Taliban era and the Karzai national unity government, told the Los Angeles Times in December 2001 that “many of these poison chemicals were bought from companies in Germany, Czechoslovakia and the Ukraine.” The deliveries, Farhadi said, “were for bin Laden and his people.” The diplomat insisted that U.S. intelligence officials were aware of the shipments, but CIA and military intelligence officials were unable to verify his claim.9

  While intelligence reports on the Bout network’s dealings with the Taliban continued to filter in through the end of 1998, the flurry of official interest in his activities quickly faded. Scheuer said he raised concerns about the Bout flights with several National Security Council officials but got nowhere. “I never got a sense that he was important,” Scheuer recalled. “He was part of the problem we had with the terrorist infrastructure in Afghanistan, but there were so many parts we were dealing with.” U.S. officials were already preoccupied with bin Laden, his al Qaeda organization, and their Taliban protectors, and “no one was going to fall on their sword to get Viktor Bout.”

  Scheuer and Richard Clarke had feuded repeatedly over counterterrorism policy and decision making during the late 1990s, and their acrid relationship has not eased over time. Clarke has not spoken publicly about his involvement in the U.S. effort to scuttle the Bout network, but former colleagues insist he would have moved forcefully if there had been ample intelligence in 1997 and 1998 showing the extent of Bout’s dealings with Islamic militants. “If we had known then that Bout was working with the Taliban, it would have gone right up the flagpole,” said Jonathan Winer. “Dick Clarke would have ginned that up in his terrorist working group. We would have looked hard at using a designation under IEEPA [International Emergency Economic Powers Act] to freeze Bout’s assets. If we had facts showing him working with al Qaeda, definitely—the Taliban, probably.”

  The team of U.S. officials that began targeting the Bout organization in early 2000 was aware of the sparse reports about its flights into Afghanistan, but Bout was considered primarily in his “African context,” Lee Wolosky recalled. “There was a lot of activity but it required people to connect the dots.” Soon after he was given the Bout file, Wolosky had a “gut feeling” that Bout’s operation had some sort of dalliance with militants in Afghanistan. “There were red flags—doing aviation work out of the emirates, flying into Kandahar, flights through Islamabad, flights to certain African areas. This was a logistics network that was linking up with people in caves who had powerful, dangerous ideas.” But strong suspicions were not enough to trigger action.

  When Ariana Afghan Airways was brought up in mid-1999 at NSC and State planning meetings as a possible target for a flight ban as part of a stiff series of sanctions against the Taliban, Bout’s clandestine relationship with the airline was not raised. “His name didn’t come up,” recalled Thomas Pickering, State’s undersecretary for political affairs, who was overseeing the planning sessions.

  Instead, senior Clinton administration officials concentrated on shutting down Ariana. The tipping point had been al Qaeda’s devastating embassy bombing operation in East Africa. Al Qaeda cells in Kenya and Tanzania had plotted for five years and obtained bin Laden’s personal approval, laying low until August 7, 1998. In a coordinated strike, the two bombing teams set off powerful truck-mounted explosions in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, killing 220 people and wounding more than 4,000. The Clinton administration responded with a barrage of seventy cruise missiles on bin Laden’s terror camps in Afghanistan and a purported chemical agent factory in Sudan. The same day as the cruise missile strikes, NSC and State Department officials began high-level discussions to impose a quarantine on the Taliban regime aimed at forcing the mullahs to turn over bin Laden and his terror fighters.

  There was already a trove of actionable intelligence showing Ariana’s use as a terror conduit by al Qaeda, and Taliban officials clearly controlled the airline’s operations. “One airline was servicing Afghanistan at the time and that was Ariana,” recalled Steven Simon, then one of Clarke’s chief counterterror deputies and the senior director for transnational threats at the NSC. “It gave them the flexibility they needed [to deliver arms and carry militant operatives].” 10 Despite the easy movement of Ariana planes from Sharjah, federal emirate officials had begun quietly cooperating with U.S. intelligence, tipping them off to the travels of terror operatives. “We would give them names on a watch list and they would tell us who was moving through the emirates,” Sirrs said. During one excursion into Northern Alliance territory, Sirrs also heard firsthand accounts of al Qaeda’s use of Ariana flights. A captured Yemeni who had joined bin Laden’s jihad fighters in 1997 told of “being flown from Yemen to Afghanistan and then flying back home [through Sharjah] on an Ariana jet. That was an easy way for bin Laden’s fighters to get into Afghanistan.”11

  Although Clarke and other NSC officials were unaware at the time how thoroughly Taliban officials manipulated Ariana to move weapons and terror operatives, they knew enough to press for a tough policy initiative aimed at designating the Taliban regime as a state sponsor of terrorism. Under the plan, the United States would use the threat of embargoes and an international flight ban against Ariana as tools to pressure the Taliban regime to hand over bin Laden. At first the State Department was divided over whether to pursue that aggressive approach or try a new diplomatic effort to end the still-simmering Afghan civil war and persuade the Talibs to accept a national unity government. But by the summer of 1999, the Pickering-led effort to gin up sanctions had begun making headway in the UN Security Council for an arms and financial embargo against the Taliban.12 The idea won swift support from a surprising ally: Russia. “The Russians were out front because of their problems with Chechnya,” said Karl “Rick” Inderfurth, then assistant secretary of state for South Asian affairs. Inderfurth met several times with Russian officials and found them eager to cooperate. “They saw bin Laden as contributing to their problems back home. The attacks we suffered in Africa worried them as well.”

  Even before the Security Council had a chance to take up the proposed embargo, the United States moved unilaterally against Ariana. On July 6, 1999, President Clinton signed Executive Order 13129, imposing a ban on economic transactions between Americans and the Taliban government. On August 10, the United States froze $500,000 in Ariana assets in American banks after Treasury agents scoured the airline’s accounts. Ariana, an American official said tartly, “has supported, or is linked to, the bin Laden network.”

  The mullahs shrugged. Approached by a Reuters correspondent in Dubai, Farid Ahmed sneered at the American pressure tactic. “This is nothing for the airline—$500,000 is nothing,” he said. Ariana’s five weekly flights between Kabul
and Sharjah were running unaffected, he boasted. “Up to now there have been no changes. All operations are normal.” And he insisted that Ariana had no stake in his government’s dismal relations with the West. “This is an airline. This is not in any politics. This is an airline working for civilian people.”13

  There was more punishment in the works. Aided by the Russian delegation, the U.S. lobbying effort at the United Nations met with no resistance. On October 15, the Security Council unanimously voted for a freeze on Taliban assets, a sweeping arms embargo, and a ban on all international flights operated by the Taliban leadership—a measure that effectively shut down all of Ariana’s international flights and allowed only humanitarian routes. Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations, condemned the mullahs for allowing the “sheltering and training of terrorists and the planning of terrorist acts” and demanded that they “turn over Usama bin Laden to the appropriate authorities.”14 The United Nations also issued a list with fifty-nine suspect Ariana and Taliban air force aircraft that were subject to the ban. At least three of the planes on the list were Antonovs that had been sold to the Talibs by Bout-orbit firms in Sharjah.15 But like the earlier sanctions in Africa, the UN embargo was porous. It made no mention of the Air Cess charters that still slipped into Kandahar.16

  By October 2000, after urgent pleadings from Taliban officials for medical and humanitarian supplies, UN officials relented and allowed a single airline to fly between Sharjah and Kandahar for humanitarian supplies and to Jiddah for the annual hajj pilgrimage. The choice pleased the Talibs: Sheikh Abdullah’s Flying Dolphin. “I went to them [UN officials] and said, ‘Gentlemen, I want to fly,’” the sheikh recalled. “It was not a major business. The planes were about half-full, maybe 50-60 people in a big 727.”17 The flights were supposedly restricted to humanitarian aid cargo, relief workers, and Afghans who were being deported from the UAE. Taliban officials touted Flying Dolphin on their official Web site, urging travelers to Afghanistan to use the new service. When U.S. and UN counterterrorism learned that a company linked to the Bout orbit was flying with official sanction into Afghanistan, they immediately grew suspicious, concerned that Flying Dolphin’s cargo might be carrying contraband and militant passengers. “Flying Dolphin was suspected of arms shipments,” a former U.S. official said flatly. “The Brits were convinced of that. They’d come over and brief us about Dolphin’s movements.”18

  In December 2000, two months after Flying Dolphin’s flights began, the United Nations tightened the noose. All nonhumanitarian flights into and out of Afghanistan were banned, and all Ariana international offices were ordered shut down. In January 2001 the Security Council ordered Flying Dolphin to halt its Afghan service. The sheikh fumed. “These arms flights did not happen,” he insisted, adding, “Any time they wanted to inspect, they could have come. But they never looked.”19

  Even after the last scheduled Flying Dolphin plane flew, on January 21, reports persisted that “black charters” still penetrated into Afghanistan. A panel of UN experts led by British military veteran Michael Chandler warned in May 2001 that “no means currently exists for observing and verifying illegal flights in and out of Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, which is one possible way by which arms, terrorists and cash are moving in contravention of the embargoes.” Afghanistan’s harsh mountainous terrain made it “almost impossible,” the experts added, for Iranian air traffic controllers “to spot aircraft on their radars, when they are flown low by experienced and able pilots.”20

  With all air traffic into Afghanistan effectively grounded, Farid Ahmed lowered his profile in Dubai. When the American invasion of Afghanistan started in November 2001, he went underground. Ariana officials suspected that Ahmed had gained access to a company vault in Sharjah where Afghan currency printed by the Russian government had been stored. As the Taliban’s top man in the emirates, Farid also controlled an Afghan account that contained $400,000 in International Air Transport Association fees paid to Afghanistan by other countries for flyovers. Officials of the Afghan coalition government that replaced the Taliban believe that some of the money had been used by the Taliban to buy the Bout network Antonovs.21

  Ahmed briefly surfaced in April 2002. He answered a call to his Dubai cell phone, telling a Los Angeles Times interviewer: “I am not Taliban.” Ahmed conceded that “Russian companies helped us, yes, but only in fixing the planes.” He added that “I have nothing to do with guns.” He then turned over the phone to a companion, who insisted, in quick succession before hanging up, that Ahmed was unavailable, away in Sharjah, living in Kabul, and, finally, unknown to him altogether. Ahmed’s current whereabouts are unknown.22

  Viktor Bout and his brother Sergei remained based in Sharjah, where their planes continued to ply a tidy business, even after the September 11 attacks. Jakkie Potgeiter tracked Air Cess planes flying into the DRC that fall, carrying ammunition to Jean-Pierre Bemba’s rebels and departing with precious metals and timber from the airfield in Bunia. The Bouts also were laying the groundwork to replace Air Cess with a new company, Air Bas, which had a Texas branch incorporated by Richard Chichakli.23

  By the time al Qaeda unleashed its air attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., on September 11, 2001, the cargo planes that Taliban officials had acquired from Victor Bout had long been rendered useless. Spare parts were hard to find after the embargo. Aviation fuel supplies dwindled. Afghan airports were reduced to ghostly, open-air warehouses where once-busy Antonovs sat rusting beside vacant runways. When American B-52s and fighter jets seized control of Afghanistan’s air corridors two months later, the old Antonovs lay prone, stationary targets for the devastating bomb lines that pinwheeled down. The thunderous explosions that decimated Taliban airfields from Herat to Kandahar left the Russian planes in flaming, metal shreds.24 The charred hulks lay exposed in the sun for months afterward, the tattered remnants of the secret fleet that Viktor Bout assembled for the Taliban.

  CHAPTER 9

  Gunships and Titanium

  Ibrahim Bah was furious. He was accustomed to being whisked in to see presidents and ministers at a moment’s notice. Instead, on a sweltering evening in November 1999, he sat in his black Toyota jeep, stalled at a roadblock on the outskirts of the crumbling city of Monrovia. The car was blocked by a group of thugs armed with AK-47s. Even a special driver’s pass signed by the president himself did not help. “Mr. Vic,” a personal guest of Liberian president Charles Taylor, had not informed them that anyone was coming to his residence—and without Mr. Vic’s permission, the goons said, shrugging, no one was allowed through.

  Bah was accompanied by a group of senior commanders of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), the violent rebel group that operated in neighboring Sierra Leone. The RUF leaders knew little of the world beyond their bush battle zones. But accustomed to getting what they wanted by threatening execution or mutilation, they, too, squirmed at being told to wait, unhappy at being on the business end of the guards’ assault rifles.

  The head of the RUF delegation who sat with Bah was General Sam “Mosquito” Bockarie, a former hairdresser who had been credited with turning the RUF from an ineffective, ragtag rebel group into a disciplined and effective force. His troops believed he was endowed with magical powers that made him bulletproof during combat. Bockarie was an enthusiastic proponent of the RUF tactic of hacking off the arms and legs of civilians. He had personally overseen several amputations. Reed-thin and easily excitable, Bockarie was sometimes hard to understand, speaking a rapid-fire, British-accented mixture of English and Krio, the regional dialect spoken among different ethnic groups in the bush. A fine-featured man with a thin, scraggly beard, Bockarie was a publicity hound who regularly used his satellite telephone to call the BBC’s Focus on Africa program to give long and unsolicited interviews and share his thoughts on the war. The program was required listening across the continent as one of the few that dealt exclusively with African news, and Bockarie’s appearances spread his reputation far beyond the R
UF.

  Finally, Cindor Reeves, Bah’s aide-de-camp and Charles Taylor’s former brother-in-law, reached Bout’s chief of security by phone from the car. The guards allowed them through, but more indignation awaited inside the roadblock. Mr. Vic’s personal Russian bodyguards, dressed in black and wearing earpieces, insisted on frisking Bah and his companions before they could enter Villa 31—Viktor Bout’s Liberian home.

  Bout kept the group waiting in his living room for almost an hour before he descended from the second floor. He offhandedly apologized to Bah and Bockarie and their entourage. The forced wait was the final act of a Bout power play. Bout himself blithely barged in on presidents and ministers without waiting for permission. But he often kept other VIPs waiting, demonstrating that in the pecking order of the African imperial court, he was too important and well protected for anyone to storm out or threaten him. Even alpha males such as Bah and Bockarie had to wait until Mr. Vic was ready.

  Bah alluded tartly to his poor treatment, but Bout dismissed the complaints with a tight smile. There were many people, he told Bah, who wanted to kill him. This put his Russian security men in a perpetually bad mood, Bout added, laughing. The trouble at the roadblock, he said offhandedly, was the fault of his Liberian security detail, a simple lack of communication. Then Bout changed the subject. He had a proposition, he told his visitors, that would make them all rich.1