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

by Douglas Farah

  Bout had reached the height of his power and influence in Africa at the time of the meeting. After several years of building from the ground in Liberia, he was operating on a scale grander than anything he had tried before. His venture into South Africa had failed, but it had not adversely affected his business in the rest of Africa. Many of the planes in his Sharjah-based air fleet were now registered in Liberia, a result of well-placed friends running the registry. Other aircraft had been tied to pliant registries in Swaziland, the Central African Republic, and Equatorial Guinea. There were enough wars and legitimate deliveries to keep the money flowing. His affairs in Afghanistan were booming, too, as both the Taliban and the Northern Alliance continued their arms buying sprees. His air cargo fleet was so large—now more than sixty planes—that Bout could afford to spin off a small flotilla to the Talibs. He was constantly on the move, looking for new opportunities.

  Although his main African base was now Liberia, Bout still amassed new opportunities farther east and south, in Uganda and Rwanda. Both nations were enmeshed in the intractable fighting in the DRC. After initially helping to install Laurent Kabila as the successor to Mobutu, the two nations turned on the hapless rebel-turned-president and sent troops to occupy large swaths of territory where they began extracting caches of diamonds, timber, and other resources to finance their military occupations.

  Ignored by the outside world, the armies gouged rudimentary airstrips out of the bush. Airlift capacity was essential both to keep the troops supplied far from their home bases and to fly out the natural resources being plundered. The most prized resource was coltan, a rare mineral suddenly valuable for its use in the manufacture of cell phones, computers, electronic goods, and even the U.S. stealth bomber. The boom in coltan would later go bust, but the mineral was in great demand at the time, but only within reach of the rugged cargo planes operated by the Bout network.

  A UN investigation found that about 70 percent of the coltan exported from the DRC was mined by the Rwandan army near Kigali and Cyangugu and that “Rwandan military aircraft, Viktor Bout’s aircraft and small airline companies were used in the evacuation of the coltan.”2 Shortly after leaving South Africa, Bout bought a large compound in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda. Soon there were so many Russian pilots coming and going from the large, heavily guarded house with heavy iron gates that locals referred to the place as “the Kremlin.”3

  In Uganda, too, Bout’s business was thriving, and he occupied another large house there. A UN investigation labeled his aircraft and flights in Uganda as part of a “transnational criminal group.” In early 1998 Bout bought a dormant Ugandan airline company called Okapi Air, a move that gave him the right to use Okapi’s landing licenses and routes across the continent. He quickly changed the airline’s name to Odessa and was again flying virtually undetected. Entebbe’s airport became one of his chief hubs for refueling and transshipping weapons to his other African customers. Bout’s aircraft also flew as Planet Air, a company that frequently filed flight plans for Bout’s aircraft as its own. Planet Air was owned by the wife of a senior Ugandan military official, ensuring that Bout’s activities were not detected.4

  Air crews would regularly drop off weapons in the DRC, then fly east, to Lake Tanganyika, one of the Great Rift Valley Lakes bordering the DRC and Tanzania.5 There his crews would load their aircraft with fresh fish and fly the cargo to Europe for a handsome profit. UNITA rebels in Angola kept Bout’s planes flying regularly between Burgas, the center of Bulgarian weapons production, and Lomé, Togo, for transshipment to the rebels, or else straight into Savimbi’s remote strongholds. In return, Bout reaped packages of diamonds worth millions of dollars. Savimbi had a safe in his office with seven shelves in it, mostly filled with the precious stones. When his weapons were delivered, he would open the safe and take out a handful of diamonds, place them on a scale, and pay the merchant by weight of the stones. A few paces away, two Lebanese working for Savimbi would offer to buy the diamonds for cash.

  “You would get a bag of stones and you can sell them for dollars, or you can take them with you,” said Gary Busch, who was an acquaintance and competitor of Bout in Africa. “That is how you got paid, and Viktor Bout flew many flights for Savimbi.”

  Among all the deals that Bout cinched in Africa in the 1990s, none loomed as outlandish as the rapacious proposal that Bout unveiled to Ibrahim Bah and Mosquito Bockarie at his Monrovia villa in November 1999.

  Bout’s proposition was simple and astonishing: he would supply the RUF with badly needed weapons and ammunition at no cost if the rebels used the arms for a specific military mission that would benefit the Russian and his partners. Bout wanted the rebels to launch an attack across the border into southwestern Sierra Leone and take over a group of abandoned mines.

  It was a drastic new step for Bout, a crossing of a moral Rubicon that augured ambitions far beyond weapons deals. He was urging direct military action that would bring him an economic windfall, offering his military wares as compensation for the seizure of foreign territory. As with his willingness to supply the Taliban two years earlier, his effort to launch a strike into Sierra Leone marked another defining passage in his amoral business dealings and his grandiose dreams.

  The Sierra Leone mines produced rutile, a titanium ore used in paint pigments and welding rods. It is relatively rare, but easy to extract, making it a lucrative commodity. In the 1980s the owners of the mines, the Sierra Rutile Company, had been the largest U.S. investment in West Africa outside of the petroleum industry. The mineral ore generated half of Sierra Leone’s foreign export earnings and often outpaced diamond profits.6

  The mines were about eighty-five miles southeast of Freetown, outside an area where the RUF normally operated. The RUF had attacked the facilities in 1995, then withdrew. But the attack had led the company to evacuate its employees and suspend operations. Now Bout saw an opportunity to restart the vacant mines and reap a healthy profit. He told Bah that he had investors lined up from Russia. But production could not start unless the RUF took over the mines and provided the necessary security afterward.

  Bout was confident he could get what he wanted from both Bah and Bockarie. Since at least 1995 Taylor had been reluctant to let Bout deal directly with the RUF, preferring to control all the deals himself. Bout had repeatedly raised the issue of the rutile mines with Taylor, only to be told that patience was needed. Finally, Bout had convinced Taylor to allow him to make his proposal directly to the RUF leadership.

  The day before meeting Bout, Bah had arranged for his aide Cindor Reeves to fly by helicopter to the border town of Foya, a RUF stronghold near the Liberian border. There he picked up Bockarie and the others. The RUF delegation then visited Taylor at his White Flower residence on the outskirts of Monrovia. Taylor told Bockarie, whom he treated as a son, to go ahead with whatever Bout asked. His reasoning was that the deal would make them rich, allowing them to acquire all the weapons they needed to finally end the lingering military stalemate and United Nations-imposed cease-fire in Sierra Leone.

  Taylor confided that the move would speed his ultimate goal of creating “Greater Liberia,” a stretch of real estate that encompassed the diamond mines of eastern Sierra Leone and bauxite reserves in southern Guinea. Bout drove a hard bargain and his lack of respect was bothersome, Taylor told Bockarie, but the payoff was huge.

  But when Bockarie and Bah sat down with Bout, they cautioned that the RUF did not have enough troops or weapons to both penetrate deeply into Sierra Leona and then hold the mines. UN peacekeepers had begun to deploy in Sierra Leone to enforce a tenuous cease-fire between the RUF and the government, a presence that made large-scale military activities more hazardous.

  Bout asked Bockarie how long it would take the RUF to take over the mines if he had all the weapons he needed. If that were the case, Bockarie replied, they could carry out the mission in three to four weeks.

  Bout seemed pleased. He was anxious to get started as soon as possible. He asked for a lis
t of the matériel needed and, as a parting gesture of goodwill, gave $10,000 for the “boys,” as the RUF troops were universally known. Within a few weeks, several Bout-supplied helicopters landed in RUF territory and unloaded the first down payments on the deal. Not only did Bout arrange weapons, he also supplied rice, shoes, uniforms, and communications equipment.7

  Bout could not have done what he did in Africa without reaching into the highest echelons of the continent’s governments and militaries. Access required relying on an international cast of fixers. Some of them were as nominally powerful as the heads of state they courted, bullied, enriched, and fleeced. But Bout remained at the top of the pyramid of African influence because he had access to guns and the ability to deliver them. Bout may have needed fixers to get to the Big Men, but both the fixers and the Big Men needed him even more.

  Bout first met Ibrahim Bah, perhaps West Africa’s most accomplished fixer, in Burkina Faso in the early 1990s. Bah had been a star alumnus of Muammar Gaddafi’s terror training camps and came to the fore in Jonas Savimbi’s rebel structure. Those origins provided Bah with a long and checkered career in combat and deal-making. 8

  Bah, who also used the alias Balde, was a Senegalese whose birth name was Bocande. Born in 1957, Bah fought in the Casamance rebellion in Senegal when he was in his early twenties, then made his way to Libya for special forces training. A handsome, soft-spoken man with a deeply cleft chin and small ears, Bah had studied Islamic theology in Egypt, and in the mid-1980s joined the mujahideen in Afghanistan for almost three years. He returned to Libya in 1985, then fought for two years with Hezbollah in Lebanon before returning to Libya to help Gaddafi train the future leaders of West Africa’s failed revolutions. The RUF of Sierra Leone gave Bah the rank of general, and he led an RUF column on its first combat operation. He also became one of the few people Charles Taylor trusted.

  Bah had access to clients Bout needed. Bah retained close ties to Blaise Compaore, the president of Burkina Faso, and a host of other government leaders on the continent. “I have traveled with presidents, but I have never seen someone treated with the respect and fear that Bah was treated with,” said a business associate who traveled with Bah to several West African capitals in the late 1990s. “He could get an interview with any president or minister just by picking up the telephone. He would fly into a capital city, go straight to the palace, and walk right in.”

  Intelligence reports listed Bah as a native of Burkina Faso, Niger, and elsewhere. Because of his vast experience in the world outside of West Africa and his gift for languages (he speaks French, Arabic, English, and several African languages), he often handled diamond sales for both Taylor and the RUF. Bah also had one of the few government-granted diamond licenses in Liberia, allowing him to sell gems on his own. By late 2000 he had brokered a deal with al Qaeda operatives to sell them diamonds from RUF-controlled territories. Those sales ended abruptly on September 10, 2001. Like Bout, Bah operated out of the public eye and had a deep aversion to having his picture taken. When the Washington Post ran Bah’s picture on its front page on November 2, 2001, linking him to al Qaeda diamond sales, Bah was more upset about the photo than about the allegations. 9

  Bah also played several different sides of the complex game of survival in West Africa. He had ties to the U.S. intelligence community and provided intelligence reporting for the Special Court for Sierra Leone, a United Nations-backed court set up to try Taylor and others for crimes against humanity.10 And Bah’s relationship with Bout, which would later turn into a partnership, would pay off handsomely.

  Bout also worked with Sanjivan Ruprah, another of Africa’s well-connected fixers. The two men met in Burkina Faso, where Ruprah, a Kenyan British citizen, was an operator with ties to a variety of mercenary groups politely known as private military companies (PMCs). Ruprah also had a host of mining interests, particularly in the DRC, and dabbled in civil aviation. He was married to the sister of one of the leaders of a Rwandan-backed rebel group in the DRC, a relationship that gave him, and later Bout, access to that market. Ruprah was also an acquaintance of both Bah and Taylor, and an accomplished tennis player who loved to read John Grisham novels and Deepak Chopra self-help books.11

  Described as an “arms broker” in a UN report, Ruprah managed to work several sides of African conflicts for profit. He directed the Kenyan office of Branch Energy, a company that had, in the early 1990s, negotiated to obtain control of diamond mining rights in Sierra Leone. According to a UN investigation, the company also introduced a private military company, Executive Outcomes (EO), to the Sierra Leone government in 1995.12 EO was largely made up of white, former Special Forces troops from South Africa and Zimbabwe, and was a pioneer in offering soldiers for hire in African conflicts. The group often operated in mineral-rich areas and used subsidiary companies to take over the concessions that were used to pay for their services.13

  Ruprah, like Bah, operated in the shadows of different networks that pumped diamonds and other commodities to Europe and the United States in exchange for weapons. After brokering deals with Branch Energy on behalf of anti-Taylor forces, he then worked with Taylor when the opportunity arose. His joint work with Bout was extensive, but Ruprah also separately hatched his own deals. In 2000 a UN investigation into the DRC found that Ruprah was involved in a massive counterfeiting operation to print new notes to finance diamond deals.14

  Several of Bout’s African associates say it was Ruprah who introduced Bout to Taylor in Burkina Faso in the early 1990s. Ruprah has given different times for his first meeting with Bout and insisted that he had no role in introducing Bout and Taylor.15 Ruprah told the FBI that he first met the Russian in 1996, hiring Bout to fly diamond-mining equipment for him from South Africa to the DRC. He later changed his story, saying he met Bout in April or May 1998 in Johannesburg. Ruprah also said he “literally ran into Bout” in Entebbe, Uganda, in 1999 and saw him socially several times that year. But he also told the FBI that he had worked with Bout in 1996, 1997, and 1998 in Zaire and Rwanda. He described himself as a “business friend” rather than a partner of the Russian.16 While Ruprah now staunchly denies having a close personal relationship with Bout, eyewitnesses in Liberia said he was constantly at Bout’s villa when Bout was in town and occasionally spent the night there.

  In addition to working together in Liberia, Bout and Ruprah had extensive contacts in the DRC, where Ruprah had mining interests. They jointly exploited and moved coltan and other minerals under the protection of Rwandan forces.17 Ruprah said that Bout was reluctant at first to discuss his weapons deals, but soon came to talk about them openly. In his interview with the FBI, Ruprah rattled off the models and the prices of weapons ($195 per AK-47) that Bout supplied to Taylor. Over time, Ruprah also became a primary source of UN investigators, and spoke on the record to them about Bout’s operations.

  Ruprah was vital to Bout’s operation for several reasons. Besides knowing his way through the political jungle of much of Africa, he was Bout’s entrée into another circle of powerful economic brokers—the Lebanese community that runs a large swath of businesses across West and Central Africa. Members of this merchant community of several hundred thousand, which is largely Shi’ite Muslim, dominated the illicit diamond trade in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Angola, and the DRC. The Lebanese merchant class retained strong ties to Lebanon, and all sides of Lebanon’s recent civil wars have been funded in part through the sale of the diamonds they moved.18

  Almost as soon as he arrived in Monrovia in 1999, Ruprah was given an official commission that also made him valuable to Bout. Ruprah was made an official agent of the Liberian civil aviation registry, a government post.19 It seems highly unlikely that he could have obtained such influence in a matter of weeks after arriving in Liberia for the first time and meeting Taylor just once, as Ruprah has claimed.20 Taylor’s Liberia was open for business, and just about anything, from protection to diplomatic passports and aircraft registrations, were up for sale.

  Ruprah was
also was given a Liberian diplomatic passport under the alias of Samir M. Nasr. And he was awarded with the title of deputy commissioner of maritime affairs, working under Benoni Urey, an Israeli Liberian who was a close Taylor crony. The maritime position gave Ruprah a central role in overseeing the Liberian International Shipping and Corporate Registry (LISCR), a Vienna, Virginia-based company that handled the flags of convenience registrations of ships from around the world. The Liberian registry is second in the world only to that of Panama in ship registrations. The company also handles the registration of some forty thousand offshore Liberian companies. Throughout Liberia’s traumatic wars the registry, under different managers, kept generating a steady stream of some $20 million a year in government revenue, one of the few reliable sources of income the country depended on.21

  Ruprah would not say directly how he came to be involved in the aviation registry. But in November 1999 he was authorized in writing to act as a “global civil aviation agent worldwide” on behalf of the Liberian Civil Aviation Regulatory Authority.22 Ruprah said he got involved because “I was asked by an associate of Victor’s to get involved in the Aviation registry of Liberia as both Victor and him wanted to restructure the same and they felt that there could be a financial gain from the same.”23