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

by Douglas Farah

  That associate was Michael Harridine, a British citizen to whom Taylor had given control of Liberian aircraft registry in 1997, which was operating out of Kent, England.24 Harridine also ran the air registry of Equatorial Guinea, another favorite place for Bout aircraft registration.25 Taylor, Bout, and Harridine cast their net even wider in hopes of attracting aircraft to the Liberian registry. Another “registered agent” for the registry was Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed al Saqr al Nahyan, the UAE royal whose air firms had joined Bout’s companies in selling planes to the Taliban. The sheikh registered aircraft from two firms, Flying Dolphin and Santa Cruz Imperial, in Liberia. UN investigators found that the sheikh was “a business associate of Viktor Bout,” and both of al Nahyan’s air firms had also registered aircraft in Swaziland, where Bout’s aircraft were also registered.26

  Well positioned in Africa, Bout moved to expand his operations across the Atlantic Ocean. In late 1998 Bout branched his arms delivery operation into South America, aiding an entirely new terrorist group—the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). The former Marxist army was the oldest insurgency in the Western Hemisphere, but it had devolved into a violent criminal organization that thrived on its increasing involvement in the cocaine and heroin trades that had made Colombia infamous.

  As the group’s ideological drive withered at the end of the Cold War, the FARC’s leaders embraced the dark side of capitalism’s law of supply and demand—the drug trade—with a vengeance. By the late 1990s the FARC was collecting hundreds of millions of dollars a year for protecting the coca plantations and cocaine laboratories that were run by Colombia’s drug cartels. Able to field a force of some seventeen thousand combatants, the FARC also raised millions of dollars a year through kidnappings and extortion. The guerrillas controlled few urban areas, but their supremacy was almost unchallenged in the thousands of square miles of Amazonian jungle in the southern and western sections of Colombia. The government seldom had a presence in the rural areas of the country, and the FARC protection of the coca fields that were planted under the jungle canopy offered peasants a chance to make a tidy living. The guerrillas watched over jungle laboratories that turned coca alkaloid to pure cocaine, and they patrolled the airstrips used by the sophisticated, high-speed aircraft that carried the white powder to addicts on several continents, from the United States to Russia.

  Because of their criminal activities the FARC was routinely condemned by human rights groups and hoisted onto the U.S. State Department list of terrorist organizations. In the immediate years before al Qaeda surfaced with catastrophic results, the Clinton administration embarked on a multibillion-dollar program called “Plan Colombia” to combat drug barons and the FARC. With their huge cash reserves, the leaders of the FARC responded by shopping for weapons across the globe. By 1998 they were on a major spree to upgrade their arsenal.

  It is not clear how the FARC’s leaders found Bout’s transportation network, but between December 1998 and April 1999 an Ilyushin Il-76 belonging to one of Bout’s front companies flew at least four circuitous flights from Jordan to Peru, carrying some $78 million in weapons that appeared to be legitimately purchased by the Peruvian government.27 The AK-47s were East German in origin, but they had been purchased by Jordan in the mid-1980s and kept in storage.

  En route over the FARC-controlled jungle in the southwestern corner of Colombia, the Bout planes would dive to three thousand feet, dumping out cases of AK-47s. The crates were equipped with two main parachutes and two emergency parachutes to ensure a soft landing. The boxes were also equipped with GPS devices so they were easy for the guerrillas to locate in the dense jungle near the Peruvian border. All told, the flights dropped about ten thousand weapons to the rebels, enabling them to greatly enhance their military capabilities.28

  “Suddenly the FARC has new AKs, courtesy of those airdrops,” recalled State veteran diplomat Thomas Pickering. As the department’s number two person at the time, Pickering was responsible for monitoring the situation in Colombia. “We traced them [the weapons] to East Germany. We wondered who was giving the FARC new weapons and suspected Bout. It was unbelievable.”

  The operation was audacious because the jungle drop zones were blanketed by United States-supplied radar. Yet the flights were never interdicted. Investigators in Peru alleged that after dropping the weapons, the planes were loaded with cocaine and flown back to Russia, where the narcotics were then shipped throughout Europe. The investigators eventually threw suspicion on Peru’s police chief, Vladimiro Montesinos, for providing fake Peruvian EUCs to Jordan that were used to make the arms purchases. Montesinos was a longtime CIA asset, and for years he had successfully cultivated the image of a staunch antiguerrilla hard-liner. But as later investigations revealed, Montesinos was also one of the most successful con men on the continent, taking money from anyone who would pay for his protection. Only a fraction of the arms Montesinos bought were for the FARC. The rest appeared to have been diverted to his own security forces and other armed groups on the continent. Montesinos is currently serving thirty years in prison for a variety of drug and weapons trafficking charges.29

  Even as his flights stretched from the jungles of Colombia to the crags of Afghanistan, Bout’s primary focus remained Africa. Nowhere on the continent was his influence greater than in Liberia under the despotic rule of Charles Taylor.

  Bout’s villa in Monrovia was at his sole disposal during frequent week-long visits to Taylor to discuss weapons sales. Five elite guards of the Liberian Special Security Service and ten from the Antiterror Unit (ATU) manned the two roadblocks on the rutted road to the villa. Bout kept his own security forces in a separate villa, an almost unheard-of privilege. Bout’s pilots were housed in the main buildings of a nearby run-down hotel that was owned by Gus Kouwenhoven, a Dutch national and Taylor confidant who would later be imprisoned in Holland as the first person convicted of breaking a UN arms embargo.

  Taylor was the ideal partner for Bout. Bout had stayed close to Taylor as the warlord’s fortunes waxed and waned, sometimes leaving the future dictator small gifts of several thousand dollars. When Taylor campaigned for Liberia’s presidency in 1997, the relationship deepened. Taylor became the odds-on favorite because Liberians were terrified that if he were defeated, war would flare again. The mordant slogan that carried him to victory was “He killed my ma, he killed my pa—I’m going to vote for him.” According to eyewitnesses, Bout traveled with Taylor to kick off his campaign in Nimba County.

  Once in office, Taylor accorded Bout the highest possible accolade for a business partner—he dubbed Bout his “pepper bush,” a colloquial expression meaning something dear to the heart that no one else could touch. “Taylor would say that Bout was the root of his pepper tree and that without the roots, the tree dies,” recalled Lawson Plaque, who helped with Bout’s security. Taylor told his guards that their job was to “keep the insects and parasites from around the pepper tree,” Plaque said. That meant that even those close to Taylor, such as Bah, were not allowed past the security men, whose meager salaries were supplemented by monthly donations from Bout.

  By January 1999 Bout’s aircraft were running circuitous routes from the Balkans and East European countries into Monrovia, the Liberian capital. From there, the planes would fly on to Taylor’s rebel clients in Sierra Leone, the RUF. One U.S. intelligence official reported that a Bout aircraft, in conjunction with planes from Skyair and Occidental Airlines—a partly Belgian-owned by United Kingdom-run charter company—was used “to ferry arms from Bratislava, the Slovak capital, via Liberia and Gambia to bush airstrips” for the RUF. The report added that “Victor BUT has usually leased his freighter aircraft to other operators so he could claim ignorance of such dealings.”30 Two months later, another consignment, of sixty-seven tons of weapons for the RUF from Ukraine, arrived via Burkina Faso.31

  Taylor controlled access to Roberts International Airport, Liberia’s only international airfield. The field’s battle-scarred cluster of air traff
ic control buildings oversaw a fitful spate of regional flights each week. The main airport building had been burned to the ground during the civil war. But Roberts International had several advantages for Bout’s planes. It was almost thirty miles from Monrovia, so it was far from the prying eyes of diplomats and others in the capital. More importantly, it had been built by U.S. forces in World War II to help ferry troops and supplies for the North African and Italian campaigns. Because it was built to handle heavy transport aircraft, it was ideal for Bout’s Il-76s and other large air freighters. Taylor could keep prying eyes off Bout’s operations, provide security, and make sure there were no repeats of unpleasant incidents like the raid on the Russian’s home in South Africa.

  Still, Taylor was uneasy with the minimal scrutiny Roberts International received. In 1999, Taylor took Bout to his private farm in Gbanga, an estate that was lit gaudily like a Christmas decoration all year long while neighboring peasants went powerless. Taylor showed Bout a partially finished airstrip and said he was hoping to finish its construction soon so he could switch Bout’s landings to the more remote field. Hard beside Taylor’s farm was the main training camp of Taylor’s infamous Antiterrorism Unit.

  Taylor paid either in diamonds, which Bout accepted without hesitation, or in cash or wire transfers. In turn, Bout slaked Taylor’s insatiable appetite for weapons, night vision equipment, and other matériel. The sophisticated equipment was vital to ensuring the military viability of the RUF and the loyalty of Taylor’s own troops. Taylor was so pleased with the supplies that he regularly offered Bout young women he had slept with. The meaning was not lost on the Taylor’s Liberian aides—trifling with Bout was tantamount to offending the president himself.

  By 1999, eager for a strategic advantage in firepower and mobility against his enemies, Taylor told his arms connections that he wanted combat helicopters. Worried about a looming invasion of the rebel troops from neighboring Guinea, Taylor ordered Sanjivan Ruprah to find gunships that could be delivered quickly. Ruprah contacted a group of Israeli arms merchants and bought two civilian helicopters that were not in violation of the arms embargo. But Taylor wanted the copters converted for combat, and found to his dismay that they could not be reconfigured to mount guns. Taylor demanded two more helicopters that could be easily converted.

  Ruprah turned to Bout. The Russian recommended Soviet-built helicopters, good for both transport and easily equipped with machine guns and rocket launchers. The cost would be $500,000 each. Ruprah’s share would be 10 percent of the deal, or $100,000 if both helicopters were acquired.32

  Taylor had a long list of other weapons he wanted Bout to acquire, including machine guns, mortars, rocket-propelled grenades, and millions of rounds of ammunition.33 Ruprah claimed that these requests were routed through him. But it is unlikely that Taylor needed a middleman to make arrangements with Bout. Cindor Reeves and other eyewitnesses say Taylor met regularly with Bout and passed on his weapons request in direct meetings in a private sitting room at his White Flower residence. Lawson Plaque, Bout’s chief bodyguard, took notes, in part to make sure that the RUF shipments were kept separate and billed separately from Taylor’s Liberian requests.

  While Bout went in search of the helicopters, Ruprah set up a front company in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, that served as a non-Liberian destination for lethal cargo. The company, Abidjan Freight, would be used for several weapons movements that ended up in Liberia. In June 2000 Ruprah also set up an airline called West Africa Air Services, which leased planes from San Air, a Bout company in Sharjah, and from Renan, a Moldovan airline that used Bout planes.34 West Africa was an airline set up for “smuggling operations only,” a UN investigation found. Pilots said the person overseeing its operations as its aircraft flew in tons of weapons and ammunition in subsequent months was “Mr. Sanji.”35

  Bout found helicopters for Taylor and several tons of spare parts in the remote republic of Kyrgyzstan. Tons of weapons were found in other former Soviet bloc countries. After purchasing fake EUCs from Guinea and Côte d’Ivoire, Bout’s planes began to haul the goods to Liberia in a series of flights in July and August 2000.36 The plane he used for the main transportation was an Il-76 that had been registered in Liberia in 1996, then subsequently reregistered in Swaziland. When it was decertified there, Bout reregistered the craft in the Central African Republic as part of Centrafricain Airlines. However, the same plane often flew with a registration from the Republic of Congo.37 With the Il-76 tail number TL-ACU, it registered its flight plans as “Entebbe-Robertsfield-Abidjan,” with the final destination to be Ruprah’s fictitious company. Instead, the deadly cargo was left in Liberia.

  “This aircraft and an Antonov made four deliveries to Liberia, three times in July and once in August 2000,” a UN investigation found. “The cargo included attack-capable helicopters, spare rotors, anti-tank and anti-aircraft systems, missiles, armored vehicles, machine guns and almost a million rounds of ammunition. The helicopters were Mi-2 and Mi-17 types.”38 Viktor Bout had delivered again.

  A separate investigation noted wryly that “It is difficult to conceal something the size of an Mi-17 military helicopter, and the supply of such items to Liberia cannot go undetected by customs authorities in originating countries unless there are false flight plans and end user certificates, unless customs officials at point of exit are paid to look the other way. The constant involvement of Bout’s aircraft in arms shipments from Eastern Europe to African war zones suggests the latter.”39

  Bout insisted on payment as the helicopters and weapons were delivered. This forced Taylor to dip into the only cash he had on hand—the LISCR shipping registry funds that were normally paid into specific government accounts.

  On June 21, 2000, LISCR, at the written request of Benoni Urey, transferred $525,000, via Standard Charter Bank, to San Air General Trading, Bout’s main holding company in Sharjah. This coincided with the delivery of the first helicopter. Two weeks later, on July 7, another transfer of $400,000 was put through the same route.40 LISCR officials were later formally reprimanded by the UN investigations for lack of “due diligence” in making the payments to a nongovernment bank account, contrary to normal practices.41

  The pace of the weapons deliveries accelerated as the year progressed. Ruprah kept a running tally for Bout on what each weapon cost, how much each pilot was paid, how much their insurance coverage cost and what it covered, and how much Taylor owed Bout. The files outlining these payments were among the trove of documents found on Ruprah’s hard drive when he was arrested by Italian police in early 2002. The Italian authorities in Monza, near Milan, printed out reams of incriminating documents showing how close the business relationship between Bout and Ruprah had become.42

  Despite Bout’s continued success, there were gathering clouds. Old African ties that once eased access for his business deals were starting to turn acrimonious. One hint of trouble came in January 2000, during a summit of African presidents held in Libreville, Gabon.

  When the president of the Central African Republic, Ange-Félix Patassé, made his entrance, several of his fellow heads of state congratulated him on his fine new presidential jet. They were impressed by the Ilyushin Il-62 they had seen sitting on the runway. It was painted with the flag of Patassé’s nation, and its tail carried the number TL-ACL, a Central African Republic registration. There was only one problem: the plane was not Patassé’s. The aircraft had been used by the delegation from Gambia. Deeply embarrassed, Patassé ordered an investigation into the origins of the plane as soon as he returned home.43

  The investigation found that the Il-62 belonged to Viktor Bout and was operating on a forged “temporary” airworthiness certificate. On January 24, 2000, the Central African Republic ordered Bout’s arrest and also the arrest of Bout’s local manager and the CAR’s civil aviation director. Bout was in Bangui, the capital of the republic, when the arrest warrant was issued. But he managed to escape, resurfacing shortly afterward in Liberia.

  The investi
gation found that Bout and his local partner had fabricated airworthiness certificates, air operator permits, and certificates of registration for several aircraft. Among the illegally registered craft found were the two helicopters Bout later used to buy beer for rebel leader Bemba in the DRC. Most of the aircraft holding the false registrations had been decertified by Swaziland a few months before.

  The Il-62 that set off the investigation had been purchased by a company called Gambia New Millennium, run by a man named Baba Jobe. Baba Jobe, in turn, was a close friend and business associate of Ibrahim Bah, the RUF liaison for Taylor. Jobe had also been trained in Libya when Bah and Taylor were there. The papers of the transaction showed the aircraft was sold by Mr. Victor Bout, general manager of Centrafricain Airlines. The money was paid into the Standard Chartered Bank account in Sharjah of Transavia Travel Agency, a Bout company.44 Gambia New Millennium would later run significant amounts of weapons for the RUF.

  But Bout’s luck, while shakier, still held. On June 16, 2000, Doungovo, the director of civil aviation, was sentenced to a year in prison. Bout was sentenced in abstentia to a two-year prison term, and the Central Africa Republic issued an international arrest warrant for him. But suddenly, on June 28, the court reversed itself in Bout’s case, acquitting him of all charges. No official explanation was ever given for the sudden change of heart of the judicial authorities.45