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

by Douglas Farah

  In April 2000 the RUF finally launched the major offensive that Bout anticipated, a strike aimed in part at taking the rutile mines. But in early May, after several units of the RUF broke camp and marched toward the rutile mines, the rebels made a colossal mistake, impulsively taking more than five hundred UN troops hostage. The blunder drew immediate condemnation and global media attention. But much worse for Taylor and the RUF, it also provoked the intervention of soldiers from Great Britain.

  British prime minister Tony Blair sent British navy ships to the coast of the former colony, carrying several thousand elite paratroopers, along with helicopters and Harrier fighter jets. The force had carte blanche to use whatever means necessary to keep the RUF at bay.

  Taylor, uncharacteristically, had misplayed his hand. Anxious to recover and earn international goodwill, he offered to mediate the dispute between the rebels and the United Nations, while denying any direct ties to the RUF. The bid was accepted, and soon the Reverend Jesse Jackson and others were leading delegations that Taylor hosted with great fanfare. The UN hostages were released in small groups. But at the same time the British, with U.S. support, began an unprecedented effort to electronically monitor Taylor’s communications with the RUF.

  Directing satellites at the Liberia-Sierra Leone border, British intelligence officials soon heard Taylor personally directing RUF operations and timing the release of UN hostages. The British also obtained photographs of Liberian military trucks moving weapons to RUF allies in Sierra Leone, unmasking Taylor’s lie that he had no formal relationship with his proxies next door. The information was shared with the United States, with its interests in Liberia, and with the French, who monitored Guinea. For the first time the superpowers had learned the full extent of Taylor’s involvement with the RUF, weapons trading, and the illicit sale of diamonds.46

  Like Taylor, Bout had misread international and local conditions. He had placed too much faith in the RUF and in Mosquito Bockarie. The RUF general had tried to prepare the assault sooner, but not long after his 1999 meeting with Bout, Bockarie lost control of his troops after a major rift with Foday Sankoh, the RUF’s supreme commander.

  Sankoh, who had trained under Gaddafi, was a short, pudgy, demented former army corporal and photographer who had commanded the RUF child soldiers before Bockarie. A wild-looking figure with matted hair and a tangled beard, Sankoh was an ineffective field commander who claimed to receive military instructions from mysterious voices audible only in his head. Sankoh’s 1997 arrest in Nigeria had allowed Taylor to promote Bockarie, giving him day-today control of RUF combat operations. But in early 2000, as a result of the United Nations-brokered peace talks, Sankoh was freed. Deeply jealous of Bockarie, Sankoh suspected his one time protégé of cheating him out of his share of the diamond revenue generated by the RUF’s slave labor. Bockarie, who claimed to have magic strong enough to cause bullets to bounce off his head, was scared enough of the old master’s threats that he fled to Monrovia, where Taylor gave him a well-appointed compound.

  Without Bockarie at the head of the invasion force, Bout’s plans for the mine raid collapsed. As the UN troops were freed and British peacekeepers solidified their presence, Taylor’s iron hold on Liberia weakened—as did Bout’s. But Taylor’s setbacks in Sierra Leone in early 2000 actually proved to be a short-term boon for Bout. With tactical support from the British, tacit agreement from the United States, and the blessing of the French, a group of rebels in neighboring Guinea calling itself Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD) began a military campaign to oust Taylor. Led by some of Taylor’s former commanders, the LURD was little better than the regime it sought to replace. But the growing strength of the rebels forced Taylor to go on a buying spree to rearm his own forces. As always, Bout was willing and able to help.

  On July 7, 2000, senior U.S. diplomat Thomas Pickering flew to Monrovia to meet Taylor and formally express the displeasure of the Clinton administration with his meddling in Sierra Leone. As he landed at Roberts International Airport, Pickering noticed a plane on the far side of the tarmac. It was a large Il-76, one of Bout’s cargo planes. As long as Taylor intended to keep his iron grip on Liberia, he would need the services of the ultimate fixer.47

  CHAPTER 10

  “Get Me a Warrant”

  Lee Wolosky joined the Bout task force in March 2000, not long after a group of National Security Council and State Department officials met in the Old Executive Office Building to discuss the eroding situation in Africa. Wolosky did not attend, but Gayle Smith, the NSC’s director for African Affairs, who was in on the session, followed up with an e-mail to Richard Clarke, asking if he had someone on his transnational threats staff who could coordinate the effort to tackle unimpeded weapons flows into the continent. Clarke chose Wolosky.

  Smith felt the effort needed a fresh set of eyes. Still haunted by the 1993 ambush of Special Forces peacekeepers in Mogadishu, the Clinton administration remained gun-shy about committing American troops to Africa. But Smith was keen on providing other means of assistance to UN peacekeepers in Sierra Leone who were struggling with a violent resurgence by RUF rebels. A New Year’s lull had given way to sporadic violence, and UN monitors had reported that RUF units were refusing to disarm and had begun mining contraband diamonds at an unprecedented pace. In February the UN Security Council decided to double the size of its multinational mission in Sierra Leone from 6,000 to 12,000 troops; the total would eventually reach 17,500.

  Despite promises to disarm under a United Nations-brokered peace agreement, the RUF was stocking up with new and better weapons and openly challenging UNAMSIL troops. Some of the weapons came from hijackings of truckloads of guns and mortars from UN troops, but that did not account for the bulk of the RUF’s massive new arsenal. As the weapons flowed in, hundreds of RUF combatants went through the surreal motions of leaving their old weapons at United Nations-led disarmament areas and then picking up new guns back at their bases. Witney Schneidman’s team suspected that Bout’s operation provided many of the weapons, emboldening rebel leaders in their refusal to abandon their lucrative diamond fields. Ground reports were just as gloomy in Angola, where human rights groups warned of a rising toll in civilians executed by both Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA guerrillas and government forces.1

  Near the end of the Africa meeting, Smith and Witney Schneidman raised the Bout network’s role in keeping violence in the region at the boiling point. Their comments were almost afterthoughts, but as the officials sifted through possible policy options, they concluded that targeting the Bout organization might prove effective in squelching the flow of weapons into the battle zones.

  “We raised the issue of Viktor Bout and connecting the dots in terms of arms sales,” Smith recalled. “It would be hard to imagine even any temporary stability with the steady supply of arms coming in.” They had a receptive audience. Susan Rice, who headed State’s Africa desk, was already convinced of the perils Bout’s operation posed from the status reports she had heard from Schneidman. Rice viewed the growing effort to target Bout as a “no-brainer. He was a bad guy doing bad stuff in a volatile region. His fingerprints were everywhere.” Undersecretary of State Thomas Pickering, who chaired the meeting, agreed that Bout’s activities had to be countered. Pickering and the other senior officials present decided “it would make sense to try and shut down his operation,” Smith recalled.

  Smith wanted the NSC to add muscle to State’s diplomatic heft. She figured she would get a receptive hearing from Clarke, whose access to the White House and law enforcement, she felt, could jump-start the process.2 “Can’t we do something about this guy?” Smith messaged.

  Clarke summoned Wolosky and, showing him the e-mail, assigned him to join the effort to counter Bout’s arms operation. Wolosky got an even stronger nudge during a follow-up meeting of top NSC officials chaired by Lieutenant General Donald Kerrick, the deputy to National Security adviser Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger. Kerrick also wanted Bout put out of business,
and emphasized his interest to the gathered officials. “When Kerrick mentioned it to us at the deputies meeting that reinforced it,” Wolosky recalled. “It quickly got out in the bureaucracy that Kerrick was behind it, and that really strengthened our position.”

  Wolosky had been only vaguely familiar with the spiraling chaos in West Africa. But Bout’s Russian background and the long tentacles of his worldwide logistics network intrigued the new NSC hire. The rapid expansion of Bout’s business empire mirrored the rise of Russian plutocrats that Wolosky had warned about in his Foreign Affairs essay. Wolosky felt instinctively that Bout, like the oligarchs, had to be confronted by strong American countermeasures.

  The question was how to do it. There was no evidence in the spring of 2000 that Bout’s network was operating on U.S. soil or illegally trading in American weaponry. To shut his organization down in Africa, the United States would need cooperation from foreign allies. Schneidman and his small team of intelligence analysts had already begun to lay out the groundwork for one possible policy option, pursuing Bout with help from South African authorities. The Russian’s short-lived effort to fly out of South Africa in 1997 and 1998 had ended abruptly after his gated estate was allegedly invaded by grenade-wielding thugs. Bout had fled Johannesburg and shut down his Air Pass cargo airline. But U.S. officials had learned that South African intelligence agents and members of the government’s elite anticorruption “Scorpions” unit were investigating Bout’s Africa operations.

  Bout and his planes were gone, but the South Africans’ aborted 1998 attempt to charge his Air Pass operation with 146 civil aviation violations suggested that Pretoria had the political will and the investigative resources to take further action. Schneidman had extensive contacts in the South African government and felt they would be receptive. Starting in spring 2000 he began setting aside time during diplomatic stops in Pretoria and Johannesburg to consult with officials there about mapping a strategy against Bout.

  For much of the spring and summer, Wolosky boned up on the classified stores of material that Schneidman and his intelligence team had amassed. During the mornings Wolosky often wandered into Clarke’s office, where he and other NSC deputies swapped tips from their respective fiefdoms. The Bout effort was only part of Wolosky’s portfolio. He had joined Clarke’s operation expecting to spend much of his time working on money-laundering cases tied to Russian organized-crime groups. Bout’s case provided glimmers of that issue, but he also juggled other aspects of transnational crime, from drug trafficking to financial offenses. While Clarke had other deputies who specialized only in counterterror affairs, Wolosky found his cases often overlapping with theirs.

  The Bout network’s arms flows concerned him, but what alarmed him more was the logistics threat posed by the Russian’s air fleet. He had been briefed about the Bout planes sighted in Kandahar and Air Cess ground crews working on Ariana planes at the Sharjah airport. “We couldn’t directly link him to al Qaeda at that point, but there were red flags that concerned us,” Wolosky recalled. “He was dancing around the edges.” Bout’s global reach gave him a capability that no other private air force rivaled. “They could almost run certain airports and essentially did. They carried men around on their aircraft with guns. They moved armed helicopter gunships, and they did this as an organization. That is not a thing you see every day. When you see photos of those activities, you typically equate them with governments, not private organizations. That becomes very compelling. This is not the government of Ukraine, this is a private organization that will work for whomever hires them.”

  Wolosky did not have Schneidman’s deep knowledge base in African affairs, but made up for it with his insights into Russia’s free-market tumult and its shadow oligarchs, mobsters, and apparatchiks-turned-capitalists. The two men took turns chairing the task force’s strategy and informational meetings with intelligence analysts and officials from other agencies. Wolosky tended to the national security arena and to the action-oriented corners of government—Justice, Treasury, Commerce—that worked with the NSC on transnational threats. Schneidman concentrated on diplomatic realms, making the case to British and South African officials that an aggressive, coordinated approach against Bout could pay off for their interests. Wolosky’s impatience sometimes flared, but his occasional differences with Schneidman had more to do with the divisions among agencies than personality shadings. “We were at loggerheads at times, but we had a good working relationship,” Wolosky recalled. “I wanted things done right away and done aggressively.”

  Schneidman, too, moved urgently. He had acted early on to contact the international police agency Interpol, about U.S. concerns over the Russian’s organization. And he had quickly passed word to State officials to place Bout’s name and his multiple aliases on the department’s international watch list. The warning went out to customs and immigration agents working in border posts and airports and to diplomats abroad who handled travel documents. If Bout tried to enter the United States for any reason, the alert was designed to raise alarm bells before he could slip into the country.

  The contacts were made quietly. The task force’s work remained strictly classified, an enforced silence aimed at keeping Bout in the dark about the sweeping electronic surveillance aimed at him and the growing American effort to scuttle his empire.

  By spring 2000, Bout was no longer operating in anonymity. In March the UN Security Council publicly singled out him out for his extensive involvement in supplying weapons and matériel to UNITA forces in Angola, flagrantly violating a seven-year-old arms embargo. In assessing why the sanctions were so weak, a panel of UN experts headed by Robert Fowler, a former Canadian diplomat, placed the blame on air cargo firms that repeatedly loaded up with weapons in East European airports. Planes had made repeated clandestine runs into African landing zones, using forged or unauthorized transshipment documents to escape scrutiny by aviation and security officials.

  Bout’s air firms were not the only exploiters. The panel also named several other suspected European arms dealers. But the report went to great lengths to detail the outlines of Bout’s operation, from its Sharjah hub to its satellite landing points stretching from South Africa to Bulgaria. “Victor Bout is known to operate with a number of partners, some of whom are also believed to be involved in sanctions busting activities on behalf of UNITA,” the UN report warned. “Further investigation and exposure of these connections should be a high priority for future sanctions enforcement actions.”3

  Much of what the Fowler panel knew about Bout had been supplied by Johan Peleman. He was brought on under contract in the fall of 1999 to help the UN experts learn more about how air cargo firms were evading the embargo. Hired as a consultant to deliver a “profile of Bout,” Peleman went on a whirlwind tour of the far-flung capitals where the arms network had laid down roots. He dug up transit documents in Luanda, Angola. In Switzerland he pressed for banking records. In the UAE he badgered aviation officials to learn more about Bout’s plane holdings. The emirates’ director of civil aviation claimed to be surprised about the presence of Bout’s fleet and promised answers. None came. As his circle of informants grew, Peleman learned that Western intelligence agencies were on the Bout trail. Belgian and Dutch agents were employing wiretaps to learn more about the arms routes in the Great Lakes region, in the DRC and Rwanda, while British intelligence officials, concerned about the United Kingdom’s mounting plans to deploy paratroopers in Sierra Leone, had done the same in West Africa.4

  Peleman went to London early in 2000 to sound out British officials on what they could confirm about Bout’s operation. Three men in suits met him in a small room at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. When he tried to exchange business cards, the men had none to offer, but they acknowledged working for MI-6. Hoping to swap information, Peleman noticed they carried copies of The Arms Fixers, a book he had coauthored on the arms trade. But the MI-6 agents insisted they had little to offer and seemed skeptical when Peleman summarized his research
showing the Russian’s prominence in Africa. “They assumed I was an amateur,” he recalled later. He returned to Antwerp with few new leads.

  The British had reasons for keeping their cards hidden. By spring 2000, the Labour government under Tony Blair was seriously considering sending a contingent of peacekeepers to Sierra Leone, a former crown colony, to augment the United Nations’ six thousand troops—a force supplied by Nigeria, Ghana, India, Kenya, and Guinea. Britain had already backed Sierra Leone’s previous efforts to counter the RUF, first using African peacekeepers, then relying on Sandline International, a mercenary force, to reinstate the government by force after a 1998 coup. Neither effort had blunted the RUF’s growing strength. By spring 2000 the UN bastion was nearly overwhelmed, and both MI-6 and Defence intelligence officials were analyzing security issues that troops might confront on the ground in Sierra Leone. Viktor Bout’s weapons pipelines were a prime topic.

  “He was institutionally sexy because he was a force protection issue,” said the analyst familiar with British intelligence work on the Bout organization. “That meant the military was on board. And the [diplomatic] problems also meant the foreign office was interested as well. On Bout, the British government was ahead of the curve.”5

  But foresight had not led to action. While MI-6 kept tabs on Bout’s organization through the late 1990s, British diplomats took no policy initiatives against him or even mentioned his name. That changed with the involvement of Peter Hain, the minister of state for Africa at the Foreign Office. Hain was a veteran Labour Party politician who was active in the 1980s and the early 1990s as a campaigner against the separatist apartheid policies of South Africa’s white-dominated government. Soon after Hain joined the Foreign Office in June 1999, he learned that MI-6 and the Defence ministry had compiled extensive files on the Bout network’s role in ferrying in weapons into Africa. “I was very aware we had all this intelligence and nothing was being done,” Hain recalled. “Why do we have it,” he asked the analysts, “if we are not going to use it?”