In Washington, attention was waning in the absence of concrete results. Bureaucratic inertia had set in. Despite Condoleezza Rice’s earlier interest, the NSC’s activist role developed under the Clinton administration was being reshaped to a narrower policy-coordination role. Clarke’s influence had faded, and he was no longer allowed to sit in on the “principal’s meetings” with cabinet secretaries and directors of the various intelligence agencies, access that enabled him to focus attention and resources on Bout. The Clinton administration’s late-blooming interest in transnational threats had rapidly given way to the Bush administration’s more traditional state-centric view of the world.
By August, in a last-ditch effort to keep the Bout operation going, Wolosky transferred from the NSC to the State Department’s Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL). He had already received two extensions for his stay at the NSC, and was told no more would be forthcoming. Rand Beers, a longtime intelligence and security officer, headed the INL office, and was willing to give Wolosky a home, at least for a short time. Beers would resign from government in May 2003 after leading the NSC’s counterterrorism office and then work as a national security adviser for the presidential campaign of John Kerry.
“It goes without saying that the new administration came into office with a sense that nation-states remained the primary actors in the world and transnational threats were not as important to deal with,” Beers said. “It was not like the administration wanted to stop anything we were doing. They just weren’t interested.”
The British continued to push the State Department and others in the U.S. administration to take more aggressive action, but the Bout hunt was losing momentum. “We were stuck between the FBI not having an investigation open, and not particularly energized to do anything, and the Brits, who were very concerned and were trying to get our attention on it,” Beers recalled. “The Africa bureau continued to be worried by Bout. But nothing happened.”
In late spring Wolosky briefed Stephen Hadley, Rice’s deputy at the NSC, on Bout and global organized crime. He had received the go-ahead to present a full-fledged presidential briefing, but no date was set. Wolosky was scheduled to go to the White House to make final arrangements for the briefing on September 11. But in the chaos of the morning’s catastrophic events, his meeting was canceled.
Soon afterward, Wolosky left the Bush administration, no longer convinced there was any desire to bring Bout in and scuttle his operation. “We knew we were being phased out,” he said. The government’s most determined Bout pursuer saw no future in the chase. The U.S. hunt for Viktor Bout was essentially over, lost in the rubble of September 11.
As American intelligence and law enforcement officials ranged across the world trying to unravel the terror plot, a cryptic correspondence of letters and e-mails began in November 2001 between a U.S. agent in Washington and Viktor Bout’s Africa partner Sanjivan Ruprah, who had immigrated to Brussels. Ruprah wanted the American, an FBI agent working on loan to the CIA, to help overturn the recent UN ban on his international travel.
In return, Ruprah broached a series of ambitious proposals. In a November 12, 2001, e-mail he offered to set up a team of operatives to deliver information on al Qaeda and militant Islamic terrorists across the Third World. Ruprah said his staff would “do their part properly only knowing that I require this info but not why, as they work with me on that basis always.”
“There will be no other person in this loop with me and I would be your only contact,” Ruprah wrote. “It would be fairly easy to for me to deliver data weekly at several points in Europe/MidEast/CIS [Central Asian republics] depending on what you suggest.”
Ruprah pegged his team’s minimum expenses at an exorbitant $252,000 per month. This included $60,000 for “expenses for purchases of info from third parties,” and $30,000 per month for “my personal travel.” He insisted the money would be well spent because the “effectiveness will be very high.” He offered the deal on “an evaluation basis, if you are satisfied at the of the 2/3 month period, then my priority is to proceed to the next phase as per our conversation.”15
As the correspondence continued, Ruprah made an even more astounding offer. In an undated letter believed to be written to the American at about the same time, Ruprah said that he and Viktor Bout would secretly help the United States arm Northern Alliance forces to battle against the Taliban and Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda forces in Afghanistan. “Victor and I have discussed various aspects of cooperation with yourselves regarding Afghanistan, the main area being support of the group opposing the Taliban regime as well as collecting information on O [Osama bin Laden] and his people,” Ruprah wrote.16
Ahmad Shah Massoud, the Afghan warlord whom Bout armed and then betrayed by working with the Taliban in the late 1990s, was dead. He had been assassinated by a team of al Qaeda suicide bombers inside his Afghan hideaway two days before the September 11 attacks. But despite Bout’s earlier arms and cargo flights for the Taliban, Ruprah wrote that “we have very good relationships with the group headed by the late Gen. Massoud, who was a personal friend of Victor’s, also this group is probably known to you is capable of achieving a lot against the Taliban given the right support, logistics and guidance.”
Ruprah had been in contact through much of 2001 with Western intelligence officials, first with the British, then with the FBI. Johan Peleman also met with Ruprah frequently during the period in Belgium. Peleman was aware of Ruprah’s efforts to barter with Western officials, but he was suspicious of what he described as Ruprah’s habit of hyping his information to suit the mind-set of his questioners. “I happened to have a picture of a bottle made out of tin or nickel with uranium or plutonium in it and he became increasingly fascinated with that,” Peleman recalled. “He told Belgian police some tales about radioactivity. Every day I would speak to him he came up with something new.”17
Ruprah had first approached Peleman in May 2001 because of his UN connections, then began dealing with the British and the Americans later in the summer. Ruprah’s relationship with Bout was well documented and should have been known in the U.S. intelligence community, which is what made Ruprah’s efforts on Bout’s behalf so brazen. Yet the contacts were not coordinated or reported to Wolosky or other Bout team officials at the White House, where the effort to have Bout arrested was still under way.18
The correspondence between Ruprah and his FBI contact, who alternately used a pseudonym, “Waters,” and his real first name, “Brad,” proceeded in surreal Alice in Wonderland fashion. It was a looking-glass universe in which the hunted proposed to join forces with his pursuers. Ruprah mentioned nothing of Bout’s previous work for the Taliban and indirect aid to al Qaeda as he touted his Russian partner’s ability to aid the United States in its gathering war in Afghanistan.
Ruprah insisted that he and Bout “could make the necessary arrangements through Dushanbe and Iran for logistical purposes.” With Bout’s help, Ruprah boasted, the Northern Alliance could “advance rapidly & cover 40-50% of the country within 3-4 months given the necessary logistical & technical support, they could also reach Kabul, Herat, in a short time span,” Ruprah wrote. “Importantly they could rout out most of [Osama’s] hideouts as they claim all the known hideouts have been deserted in the last 7-8 days, this would be the most systematic way of locating [Osama] as being on the ground they will get the most accurate info on his movement unless he leaves the country.”19
Such an undertaking, Ruprah explained, would entail a significant amount of weapons and other logistics needs. Ruprah wasted no time proffering an ambitious, multimillion-dollar shopping list that he and Bout would be eager to provide—and Ruprah indicated that one had already been developed in consultations with leaders of the Northern Alliance. The list included: “80-100 6X6 trucks, 6,000 AK47 + 5 million rounds; 1,000 PKM + 2 million rounds; 3,000 RPG7 + 18,000 PG7/OG7; 100 122mm Gun + 8,000 shells; 50 Concurs anti-tank launchers; 40 Igla Anti Aircraft Launchers + 160 missiles
; 4-6 Mi-24 V [helicopter gunships] fully equipped & Crewed; 8-10 Mi-17 [combat helicopters] Equipped and Crewed; 3 An-24/26 cargo/Personnel aircraft crewed; 120 Comms [communications] sets; 40 PortaClinics.”20 It was an impressive arsenal for the first major battle in the war against terrorism.
There was no way for the Americans to know whether Ruprah was telling the truth about his assertions that he and Bout could quickly arm the Northern Alliance. As Peleman had described, Ruprah seemed to have an instinctive ability to adapt to what his questioners wanted to hear. At one point in the correspondence, Ruprah appeared to play on the Bush administration’s suspicions of Iraq. “Tajik/NA [Northern Alliance] believe Iraq partly bankrolled the US Bombings & is currently providing funds to Zawahiri,” Ruprah wrote, referring to bin Laden’s chief deputy. U.S. officials later confided that during one point in the extensive contacts with the FBI, Ruprah also claimed to have details about business dealings between Bout and his Islamic militant clients in Afghanistan. Ruprah’s lawyer Luc de Temmerman later insisted that Ruprah had not made those claims.21
Ruprah did not confine his inside information to terror-related material. Perhaps feeling the need to curry favor to be removed from the travel ban list, he also sent Brad a paper detailing the inner workings of Charles Taylor’s Liberian finances. In a November 11 fax marked “urgent,” Ruprah listed banks, account numbers, and account holders from Riggs Bank in Washington, D.C., to Emirates Bank International in Dubai.22 His level of information and promises of additional insight showed an intimate knowledge of the Taylor regime’s financial structure—contrary to Ruprah’s later public statements that he hardly knew Taylor and had no financial dealings with him.
The communication with the FBI was not a one-way street. There were hints from Brad that a deal was in the works. The FBI agent replied cryptically on November 14, 2001, to one Ruprah missive: “Have received message. Will take for consideration. Meet Friday to discuss. Business should be good for you under current circumstances. Don’t expect an answer before next week re your proposal.” The American agent also said “we’re still interested in specific associates you may have in this country . . . if YOU are familiar with unseamly [sic] business practices. In such a case, we may be interested in working with YOU independent of other associates. Interested? Regards, Waters.”23
There is no clear evidence that the American government ultimately took Ruprah—and Bout—up on the offer to aid in the invasion of Afghanistan. But Western government officials and intelligence agents have talked openly in the intervening years about Bout’s role as if it were well understood that Bout had provided assistance to the U.S. efforts either before, during, or after the invasion.
Several European intelligence officials claimed that Bout’s aircraft were used by U.S. Special Forces and the CIA to fly into Afghanistan in preparation for the landing of Special Forces and CIA teams in October 2001. Bout’s air fleet was well positioned in Sharjah and frequently flew to neighboring Central Asian airfields.
“We know Bout had his aircraft near Afghanistan and made them available to the U.S. efforts almost immediately,” said one European official. “They needed him and he had the only airlift capacity in the region. Why not? Anyone else would have done the same. The deal was, if he flew, the U.S. would leave him alone.”24
Richard Chichakli would later boast that during the Afghan invasion, Bout had organized three flights ferrying U.S. personnel to Afghanistan. Chichakli declined to elaborate on their purpose or when the flights occurred—and later, he disowned the remarks.25
Brian Sheridan, who served as assistant secretary of defense for special operations in the Clinton administration, flatly dismissed the idea that military officials would have hired Bout planes to fly in Special Forces units into Afghanistan. “We would never trust putting our special ops people on anyone else’s aircraft,” Sheridan said. And Michael Scheuer, who had left the CIA’s bin Laden task force before 9/11 but returned immediately afterward, said that to his knowledge, the U.S. intelligence teams that were inserted into Afghanistan before the invasion were flown in on Northern Alliance Mi-8 helicopters operating out of Uzbekistan.
Lee Wolosky, who was still working out of the State Department in the weeks after the terror attacks, said he had been aware that Bout “offered himself up after 9/11, as did many of his ilk, who crawled out of the woodwork, viewing this as a tremendous opportunity to ingratiate themselves to the Americans.” But Wolosky said he never saw any credible information indicating Bout’s overtures were acted on. “I’d be curious to know what his intelligence value could be in the war against al Qaeda. It would require that someone made the determination after 9/11 that he might be helpful in the war against terrorism. We knew he had a relationship with the bad guys so my question is what would his value be and what could he deliver that would be worth setting him up in business with us? From our vantage point, you would have to know those answers in order to justify a trade-off—and I’m not sure that anyone in the U.S. government was in a position to know that. You would only work with him if you knew he had something to offer. But how would we truly know that?”
Even if he did not fly for U.S. forces, Bout and his pilots had other types of assistance they could offer in exchange for forging a future relationship. They had, from years of dealing with all sides in Afghanistan, unique and detailed knowledge of the landing strips and air approach routes inside a country where the United States had virtually no presence for decades. His pilots were among the only ones who regularly flew the terrain, kept detailed maps, and knew how to negotiate the treacherous mountain passes, even at night. It was vitally important intelligence that could aid the United States in its assault on the Taliban. Navigational aid may have been part of a deal with Bout, with the promise of other jobs in the future. “The GRU and DIA people have a working knowledge of each other’s assets,” said a private contractor with intelligence ties. “On both sides they know how to make the approach.”26
Yet soon after hostilities ceased in Afghanistan in January 2002, U.S. Defense intelligence experts were sent to Afghanistan to root through seized Taliban and al Qaeda weapons caches, searching for any evidence that militant arsenals had been provided by the Bout organization. “Everyone’s looking for it,” said one U.S. official involved in the hunt. “Everybody wants the proof. But how do you find it?”
They left without it. When the U.S. experts poked into Afghan caves and storerooms crammed floor-to-ceiling with Kalashnikovs, grenade launchers, and shells, they found few traces of identifying paperwork or records. The caches were little more than dusty, first-come, first-served warehouses where Taliban and al Qaeda fighters grabbed what was available. Many of the guns were of East European issue, but there were Chinese and North Korean copycat models as well. None bore any markings that could lead the Defense experts back to the Bout network.
In the end, the searchers had little choice beyond turning the weapons over to the Northern Alliance or disposing of them. “We just blew them up mostly,” the official said.27
A UN panel charged with monitoring the flow of weapons into Afghanistan, however, found flows of new weapons into the Taliban and al Qaeda remnants in early 2002. Led by Michael Chandler, a no-nonsense retired colonel from the British army, the panel was aggressively seeking to keep the Islamic radicals from gaining access to guns and, even more worrisome, weapons of mass destruction. Chandler, who had come across Bout’s network in Bosnia in the early 1990s and knew of his operations through British intelligence, was receiving information on Bout’s ties to Afghanistan. In January Chandler’s panel wrote that it had “reliable information” that caused concern that “certain individuals, including Victor Bout . . . could have been involved or may be tempted in the future to become involved, in the illegal supply of arms and ammunition to the Taliban, their sympathizers and elements of al Qaeda.”28
On January 25, 2002, Sanjivan Ruprah flew again to Washington, granted a secret waiver by U.S. Immigration to travel de
spite being on the UN travel ban list. He was hustled over to the FBI’s Washington field office headquarters for an interview. The debriefing was voluntary, and Ruprah still hoped for American help in being shunted off the UN sanctions list.29 The interview lasted more than an hour, and FBI agents asked surprisingly few questions about Bout, although that was the ostensible reason for the interview. More time was spent asking Ruprah about his business activities before he got involved in the arms trade. Even so, Ruprah showed a detailed understanding of Bout’s businesses, giving the name of his air companies, front companies, and methods of payment. He pressed the FBI again for help in getting off the travel ban list and help for his family. No commitments were made.
The FBI kept its contacts with Ruprah secret from the Bout task force. The agency also later declined to release copies of its interviews to other federal agencies that had begun looking for information on Bout’s corporate structure in order to freeze his assets. But a transcript of the January interview turned up on Ruprah’s hard drive in Italy, becoming part of the case file.
Soon after Ruprah’s return to Belgium, the net of Belgian justice finally caught up with him. On February 2, he was arrested and his house was raided along with seventeen other offices and homes, including those of four Bulgarians. Among the items found in the raid, according to local press reports, were records of payments from the UNITA rebels in Angola, “passes from Bagram airport in Afghanistan, which could indicate that Bout had done businsess with the Taliban,” and maps of Afghanistan detailing the nation’s military facilities.30
Merchant of Death: Money, Guns, Planes, and the Man Who Makes War Possible Page 24