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

by Douglas Farah

  Luc de Temmerman, a lawyer hired by Ruprah, put out a garbled statement in Ruprah’s defense. The lawyer acknowledged Ruprah’s contacts with U.S. officials and said that Ruprah had been asked to obtain information on al Qaeda. While saying that Ruprah had a “privileged relationship” with Liberia’s Taylor and that he knew Bout, De Temmerman maintained his client had done nothing illegal. He said Ruprah had provided authorities with information about his “conversations with Victor BOUT concerning unpaid debts of [Rwandan president] Paul Kagame and DRC rebels. These debts amount to more than $21,000,000 for the lease of airplanes in the rebel areas and pillaging of the Congolese soil. KAGAME refuses or cannot pay these debts.”31

  Responding to accounts in the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times quoting federal officials that Ruprah had offered information about Bout’s aid to Islamic militants in Afghanistan, De Temmerman insisted that “at no time Sanjivan Ruprah could give any usefull [sic] information about a possible relation between AL QAEDA and a RUSSIAN ARMS DEALER (BOUT).” He added that Ruprah “was approached by the FBI-CIA and the UNITED NATIONS and given the assignment to obtain information about al QAEDA through his own network.”32

  Ruprah was jailed in a bleak Belgian federal prison in downtown Brussels. His only visitors were De Temmerman and Ruprah’s sister, Simi, who came from London to support him. Ruprah kept up his correspondence with Brad, pleading for aid in getting released. In a May 2002 handwritten letter, Ruprah told the FBI agent that “I am receiving news very regularly on matters we discussed last when we met. I will continue to do so. I would appreciate any form of formal/informal pressure from you and your people if possible on the authorities here, should you feel comfortable with that.”

  The whole affair was a giant misunderstanding, Ruprah complained to the agent. “I have only been questioned once on my association with Victor (and that was the first time I was questioned),” Ruprah wrote. “Subsequently there has been no further questions regarding Victor as there is no evidence of any association between us in the year (94-96) that Victor was living in Belgium when he is meant to have broken arms laws here.”33

  Ruprah asked if he could cite Brad to Belgian authorities as a “concerned friend” to speed the U.S. official’s visit to him in prison. It is not known if the agent agreed, but Ruprah was suddenly freed on bail two months later, on the condition that he report regularly to the authorities. Ruprah took off to Italy, where he was rearrested on August 2, only to be again freed on bond in September. He fled to Africa, where he remains.

  Ruprah’s arrest was only the first phase by Bout’s European pursuers, who had been angered by his extensive U.S. contacts. Fearing the Americans might move to protect him, the Belgians said nothing to Washington about their next step.

  On February 18, 2002, the Belgian Foreign Ministry quietly issued an Interpol red notice accusing Viktor Bout of money laundering and illegal weapons trafficking. The four-year investigation led by Dirk Merckx had finally led to an arrest warrant charging Bout’s organization with funneling more than $32.5 million in laundered payments through Belgian corporations between 1994 and 2001. But there was no immediate American response; the task force once headed by Wolosky and Schneidman had been disbanded.

  The Interpol notice required officials in any country where Bout was residing to apprehend him and turn him over to Belgian authorities. Bout was presumed to be still based in Sharjah, but to ensure that he was not tipped off, the Interpol action was not announced publicly. European intelligence officials scrambled to come up with a plan of action to nab him before he could slip back to the safety of Russia and its cozy official krisha protection.

  The British joined the Belgians in a plan dubbed “Operation Bloodstone.” In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, Hain had sharpened his campaign of rhetoric against Bout. In Febuary 2002 Hain told the London Sunday Telegraph that the Bout organization had been “supplying the Taliban and al Qaeda. He must be put out of business.” From British intelligence reports, Hain recalled later, he had been aware that Bout’s network was “supplying the Taliban on a commercial basis quite early on.”34

  European intelligence networks were already monitoring Bout’s movements in Moldova, Cyprus, and other countries he visited in flagrant violation of the UN travel ban. There was solid intelligence in late February that Bout was going to be on an aircraft flying from Moldova, one of his new hubs, to Greece. When Johan Peleman got wind of the operation, he put a bottle of champagne on ice for the moment that Bout’s arrest was announced.

  An encrypted message was sent by British intelligence field agents as soon as the aircraft took off, alerting superiors in London that the plane was on the way, in order to prepare for the arrest in Athens. But shortly after the message was sent, the aircraft suddenly veered off its flight plan and disappeared into nearby mountainous terrain. About ninety minutes later it reappeared on the radar screens tracking its movements and landed in Athens. Greek and British special forces and intelligence agents boarded the aircraft, only to find it empty except for the pilots and a few other passengers. Less than twenty-four hours later, Belgian intelligence reported a confirmed sighting of Bout in the DRC.

  “There were only two intelligence services that could have decrypted the British transmission in so short a time,” said one European intelligence official familiar with the operation. “The Russians and the Americans. And we know for sure it was not the Russians.”35

  Bout returned to safety in Moscow, where he could count on the protective eaves of his krisha in the intelligence apparatus. It was the closest he had ever come to being caught.

  CHAPTER 12

  “We Are Very Limited in What We Can Do”

  The public leaking of the Belgian arrest warrant sparked an immediate spate of media coverage. Several newspapers had already linked Bout’s air network to the Taliban, and the Belgian criminal case against him launched a new wave of stories.1 Besieged, the Russian finally broke his long silence. On February 28 he appeared for a live interview at Radio Echo Moskvy in Moscow, one of the city’s most popular stations. Sitting down with an interviewer for two hours, Bout strongly denied any ties to al Qaeda and the Taliban.

  He compared the accusations against him to the cartoonish plot of “Lemonade Joe,” a Czech cowboy parody film popular in the Eastern bloc. In Bout’s eyes, he was the quarry, hunted by a Western “cowboy who rides around the African jungle, through prairies and deserts in Afghanistan and pulls off anything he wants. And every day I am amazed at this plot, like a thriller. What else will they come up with? Which terrorist organization have I not yet helped?”2

  In his wounded tirade, he launched into elaborate conspiracy theories, depicting his predicament as part of a larger anti-Russian agenda driven by old Cold War rivalries. “You see, in relation to Russians there is always bias and double standards,” Bout said. “For example if a Russian businessman works somewhere abroad he is very easily labeled Russian. Next comes the word mafia, then weapons, then something else. It is very difficult to fight off.... They can’t catch bin Laden. Naturally they have to come up with another idea, to say the Russians are to blame. Here is Viktor Bout. Let’s catch him.”3

  During the interview, a bulletin from the Interfax news service arrived and was promptly read on the air by Bout’s interviewer. “The Russian bureau of Interpol has announced that it has been seeking Viktor Bout, suspected of having supplied weapons to the Al-Qa’ida organization, for four years,” the announcer said. “[Interpol] spokesman Igor Tsiroulnikov declared: ‘Today we can say with certainty that Viktor Bout is not in Russian territory.’”4 Then the interviewer returned to Bout, whose presence had just been denied by his own government. Embarrassed Russian officials later backtracked from the denial. A new statement claimed “there is no reason to believe that this Russian citizen has committed any illegal actions.”5

  In the days afterward, Bout kept up the pace, appearing from Moscow on CNN and other TV stations, the only times he has e
ver gone public on television to defend himself. He declined to answer most direct questions about the specifics of his business dealings, preferring sweeping denials of all charges and bristling when pushed to answer specific points. On March 4 he released a statement through Chichakli, his U.S. partner, saying that he had remained silent for years in the face of the “barrage of allegations” because he felt responding would only legitimize them.

  “I have been silently watching my family, friends, associates and the countries that provided me with an opportunity to conduct honest business, hurt and harassed and the cargo business I spent years to build dissipate into dust,” Bout said. “All of this occurred without a shred of evidence other than the questionable testimonies of thugs and untrustworthy characters that directly benefited from having a scapegoat.”6

  “For the record, I am not and never have been associated with al Qaeda, the Taliban or any of their officials, officers or related organizations,” Bout wrote. “I am not nor are any of my organizations, associated with arms trafficking and/or trafficking or the sale of arms of kind [sic] anywhere in the world. I am not, nor is any member of my family, associated with any military or intelligence organizations of any country.”7

  Bout painted himself as an honest businessman hounded by news organizations that “have recklessly and intentionally fabricated stories which continue to snowball away from reality.... I appeal to you to reexamine the story and use nothing more than common sense to separate fact from fiction.”8

  In a subsequent interview Bout maintained he had only one passport, from the Russian Federation, and that Russian intelligence had never questioned him about his activities. He deflected questions about his business, including where he obtained his original aircraft. “Are you conducting an investigation or a journalistic inquiry?” he bristled when asked about how he started. “You shouldn’t intrude in the area of relations that I don’t have the right to reveal according to my contracts and my obligations.”9

  Asked about Afghanistan, he replied: “Afghanistan? Yes, we delivered large quantities of freight before the Taliban arrived,” Bout said. “According to 1997 figures, we were second only to Lufthansa in freight deliveries. We worked with the legitimate and internationally recognized Rabbani government. We delivered consumer goods—90 percent were textiles, various types of equipment, bearings, furniture.”10

  In the post-September 11 world, the Bush administration had little interest in involving itself in Belgium’s efforts to arrest Bout or in media investigations into Bout’s prior ties with Islamic militants. Russia was rapidly emerging as a key country to be courted in the administration’s efforts to build a global consensus to fight al Qaeda. Russian Federation president Vladimir Putin himself was immersed in a bloody war in Chechnya, where the independence movement was led by al Qaeda-affiliated Islamic groups. Whatever Bout’s past misdeeds, even his deals with the Taliban, Bush officials felt they were not worth jeopardizing the chance to build a counterterrorism alliance with Russia. The perception within the intelligence community at the time was that Bout was protected by senior Russian officials, possibly even Putin himself. Making Bout an issue could damage the chance to advance other issues higher on the bilateral agenda.

  In late May there was a direct opportunity for U.S. officials to raise the issue of the Bout network during Bush’s state visit to Moscow for a series of talks with Putin. But Wolosky was no longer around to provide a thorough briefing, and Condoleezza Rice was more concerned with lining up Russia’s support for the war on terrorism. Even if Bout had been the militants’ enabler, bringing his name up at the summit risked provoking Putin at a moment when Russia was needed as a stalwart ally, senior Bush administration officials felt. “We are very limited,” a U.S. national security aide to Rice explained, “in what we can do.”11

  As U.S. and British intelligence assets that once monitored Bout were redirected to other targets, Bout was relatively free to go about his business, including recementing his ongoing ties to the tottering Taylor regime in Liberia. The loss of former partners such as Ruprah barely seemed to slow Bout down.

  The only real scrutiny came from journalists and the UN panels, which continued to monitor the movements of Bout’s aircraft with brutal efficiency. But with no enforcement mechanisms other than the globally mandated but rarely used travel bans, the UN could be easily ignored.

  From June 1, 2002, to August 25, six large weapons shipments totaling 210 tons arrived at Roberts International Airport in Liberia. They fueled the last gasp of Taylor’s crumbling rule, allowing him to hold out almost another year before being driven to seek asylum in Nigeria. Most of the weapons were flown by an Il-76 owned by a company named Jetline, registered in Moldova, which in turn had leased the aircraft from the Bout-controlled Aerocom, also based in Moldova.

  The shipments originated in Belgrade. Most of the flights refueled in Libya en route. The sellers used a series of fake EUCs from Nigeria procured by a Yugoslavian company called Temex to make the shipments appear to be legal. The pilots filed false flight plans, indicating the Nigerian Ministry of Defense in Lagos, rather than Liberia, as the final recipient of the cargo. The cargo was often labeled “mining equipment” rather than weapons. Front companies such as Waxom in Liechtenstein were used to further confuse the trail.12

  Slobodan Tesic, one of the infamous weapons brokers in the Balkans, organized the sales for Bout’s network, even flying to Monrovia to meet with Taylor to set up the deal.13 The companies he used, Temex and Waxam, were not unknown in the world of international sanctions busting. For several years Tesic, through the same two companies, had quietly been working with Saddam Hussein to update Iraq’s military arsenal, including technology to build cruise missiles, in clear violation of UN sanctions.14

  The Liberia shipments contained million of rounds of ammunition, thousands of rifles, missile launchers, antiaircraft guns, spare parts for helicopter gunships, and countless other weapons. Bout was still interested in maximizing his profits as well. The return flights in several cases included stopovers to pick up lucrative loads of fresh fish to deliver in Slovakia.15

  Bout also was expanding his activities in two of his previous haunts, Sudan and Libya, where he had companies and carried out charter businesses. His brother Sergei opened several businesses in Sophia, Bulgaria.

  But even as Viktor Bout was issuing the new denials, elite European intelligence units were picking up ominous indications that Bout’s network had not completely severed his ties with the radical Islamic groups in Afghanistan. As the Taliban fell, its holdouts and al Qaeda stalwarts had sent waves of couriers to move their jeopardized treasury of gold ingots and other valuables across the border for safekeeping in Pakistan. Some of the gold, as well as new stores acquired by trading opium, were quietly shipped by air from Pakistan to the UAE and Iran, and then on to Sudan. At least some of the aircraft being chartered to fly the gold shipments and other products belonged to Viktor Bout’s companies.16

  The militants’ use of gold as a currency was not unusual. Gold had a special place in the financial architecture of the Taliban and al Qaeda, as well as among the general populations of the Arabian Peninsula and Pakistan. The metal was a traditional measure of wealth, and a stable holding in the face of the often volatile currency fluctuations in the region. The Taliban collected much of its taxes and donations in gold, and bin Laden offered rewards in gold for killing his enemies. On May 6, 2004, in an audiotaped message, bin Laden had offered “a reward equaling ten thousand grams of gold to he who kills the occupier [Paul] Bremer or his deputy or the commander of Americans in Iraq or his deputy . . . and five hundred grams of gold to he who kills a military or a civilian from the slaves of the General Assembly in Iraq.... Due to the security situation, the payments of the rewards will be at the earliest opportunity, by leave of Allah.”17

  The gold supplies were the takings of what one Pakistani businessman knowledgeable of Taliban financing called a “commodity-for-commodity exchange,” w
ith the Taliban and al Qaeda trading opium and heroin for gold. When the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, according to Pakistani intelligence officials, it actively engaged in opium and heroin production, and allowed al Qaeda to raise funds through taxing the cultivation of poppy, the raw material for heroin.18

  The reports of Bout company aircraft involved in aiding the flow of gold for narcotics heightened suspicion among European officials monitoring Afghanistan that Bout’s enterprises had long been involved in drug trafficking—an allegation they were never able to prove, but one they could not dismiss. Further concerns of a drug connection surfaced in 2003 when an Antonov 26B aircraft, later traced to Bout’s Aerocom company, landed on a remote jungle road in the sleepy Central American country of Belize and later was found abandoned.

  A report by the Drug Enforcement Administration revealed that on August 29, 2003, the aircraft landed one and a half miles from Belize’s remote border with Mexico, a favorite cocaine trafficking route for Colombian drug cartels. “After landing, the aircraft’s landing gear became stuck in the mud and it was unable to take off,” the report said. “Before the aircraft was abandoned, several individuals arrived at the landing site, and picked up the crew and 10 bales of suspected cocaine, and departed for Mexico.”19