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

THE UNITED STATES seems to be missing some guns in Iraq. Somehow, the

U.S. military has lost track of 110,000 AK-47 assault rifles and

80,000 pistols that were supposedly delivered from our caches to Iraqi

security forces.

Consider the case of one particular bad guy, Viktor Bout -- a stout,

canny Russian air transporter who also happens to be the world's most

notorious arms dealer

Read:

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

Possible

by Douglas Farah and Stephen Braun

Wiley, $25.95 hardbound, 308 pp.

Reviewed by Steven Emerson

IPT News

September 7, 2007

The ultimate "man in the shadows," Viktor Bout, is an arms dealer.

Operating in the criminal and political underworld, he has generally

managed to keep his name out of the mainstream media. But in this

remarkable and courageous book, two well-respected journalists -

Douglas Farah, formerly of The Washington Post, and Stephen Braun, a

national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times - have ripped the

curtain of willful ignorance away from someone who can only be

described as one of the world's most despicable people. This book is

going to compel you to finish it in one sitting once you start it.. A

non-fiction thriller that is one of the best I have ever read.

"Merchants of death" is a phrase that first appeared in 1934, when the

U.S. Senate carried out an investigation of the role of arms

manufacturers in bringing about World War I. Viktor Bout, however, is

a different sort of businessman, created by a different time. Rather

than running giant factories creating artillery and other armaments

for international conflicts, he has scavenged the massive arms depots

in the former Soviet Union, and then fed the demands of dictators,

warlords and bandits in "low-intensity" combat in the poorer countries

of the world.

Bout's chief area of operations has been Africa - unsurprising

considering the constant outbreaks of new and convoluted

"insurgencies" and other ill-defined hostilities across the continent.

Viktor Anatolijevich Bout was, according to official Soviet records,

born in 1967 in Dushanbe, capital of the then-Communist Central Asian

republic of Tajikistan, although in a radio interview in 2002 he

claimed to have been born in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, another former

socialist possession of the Russians. Other sources say he is

Ukrainian, possibly of German ancestry, perhaps born in Smolensk.

His education is apparently unchallenged: he graduated from the Moscow

Military Institute of Foreign Languages - an obvious training center

for future spies - and went to Mozambique with a military air unit.

The Soviets were intent on bringing the former Portuguese African

colonies into the "socialist camp." Bout likes to say that he fell in

love with Africa, but his affection was lethal. Innumerable innocents

have perished because of his alleged devotion.

Viktor Bout is also fickle in his passions. He enjoys selling weapons

to both sides of the wars in which he does business. In the early

1990s, Soviet Russia was turning into the world's outstanding rust

belt. Airplanes were falling apart, bombs disintegrating, pilots out

of work. What once had been the world's second largest air force was

turning into the world's biggest salvage lot. Bout bought up clunky,

noisy Antonov and Ilyushin aircraft, and made his first major sales of

heavy weapons to the warlords shakily ruling Afghanistan in 1992. The

Russians had been run out of the country and Bout was cultivated by

Ahmad Shah Massoud, the charismatic leader of the Northern Alliance.

But in 1995 the Taliban, enemies of Massoud and his Kabul allies,

captured one of Bout's Russian transports when the pilot was moved to

offer a radio greeting to an acquaintance serving as a flight

controller at the Taliban airport in Kandahar. Bout got out of that by

organizing his crew's escape, but Russian sources claim that the crew

really owed their freedom to Bout's agreement to supply weapons to the

Taliban as well as the Kabul regime.

Bout's activities were then centered in Sharjah, one of the United

Arab Emirates, and he had become a player in other conflicts involving

Muslims. He organized arms shipments from the Shariah-enforcing

dictatorship of Sudan, which brought the world several attempts at

genocide even before Darfur, to the Bosnian Muslims, via Slovenia. The

Clinton administration, sympathetic like most of the world to the

Bosnians, pretended not to notice the traffic, handled through an

entity in Vienna called the Third World Relief Agency (TWRA). TWRA was

honeycombed with Islamist radicals, and in an Islamic replay of

Afghanistan, and anticipation of events today in Iraq, mujahidin from

various Arab countries flocked to the Balkans.

Perhaps Bout's greatest advantage as an entrepreneur was that he was

continuing a supply chain rather than creating a new one. The vicious

"liberation movements" in Africa, the Northern Alliance, the Taliban,

and the warring ethnic armies in ex-Yugoslavia had all been trained

with and used Soviet weaponry for decades. There was no marketing gap;

they knew what they were happy with, and Viktor Bout was happy to

supply them.

The intersection of radical Islam and African gangsterism brought

Viktor Bout to the nightmare landscape of Liberia. Thug-in-chief

Charles Taylor paid Bout in diamonds, which Bout was smart enough to

have checked out by his personal gem expert. The Liberian affair

produced perhaps the only humorous item in this gruesome account of

human corruption - an aviation company called Air Cess. Apparently,

nobody told Bout the meaning of "cess," as in "cesspool," in English.

But he might not have objected, since he was profiting in a swamp of

filth and blood.

Bout's profitable Liberian enterprise led him to provide weapons to

the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in neighboring Sierra Leone.

Sierra Leone and Liberia had both been established in the 19th century

as colonies of freed slaves - the first by the British, the second by

the U.S. But when Bout arrived on the scene, they had other things in

common: Liberia's Charles Taylor was the RUF's patron, both countries

had produced terrorist "child soldiers," and "blood diamonds" had

become the favored currency for high-value commerce - like that in

arms.

As the millennium drew to a close, U.S. and United Nations

investigators began tracing Bout's labyrinthine financial transactions

and transport schedules, but Bout benefited from operating outside the

U.S., as well as from the friendly attention of the Belgian

authorities, who had their own bad history in Africa. His Taliban

contract and other Muslim-oriented ventures, along with his African

blood diamond trade, had put him in the same environment as Osama bin

Laden. By 2000, according to Farah and Braun, then-adviser on

counterterrorism to the White House Richard Clarke called for Bout's

arrest, even considering his "extraordinary rendition." Clarke was

convinced of the case by two dedicated but underappreciated public

servants, Whitney Schneidman of the State Department and Lee Wolosky

of the National Security Council. Wolosky succeeded in getting the

Belgians to issue a warrant for Bout, but Bout fled to Moscow.

In 2005, the U.S. Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC)

announced sanctions against 30 business entities controlled by Viktor

Bout, mainly because of his involvement with the Taliban, and, one

degree of separation away, Al-Qa'ida. But the survival powers of

Viktor Bout are not to be doubted. The authors of this book note that

he may have been involved in the shipment of arms to Hezbollah during

the terrorist movement's war with Israel last year. According to U.S.

military officials, Bout supplied arms to the Al-Qa'ida-allied United

Islamic Courts, or Islamic Courts Union, in its brief seizure of

Somalia and interference in Eritrea.

Many troubling questions remain about Viktor Bout. His reach is

astonishing: Farah and Braun allege that his air fleet was used to

deliver weapons to the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan and Iraq

after the atrocities of September 11, 2001. Last year U.S. Alcohol,

Tobacco, and Firearms agents stumbled on evidence that a small

sporting goods store in Pennsylvania had sold $240,000 in

sophisticated rifle sighting and related technology to a firm run by

the Russian counter-intelligence agency, the FSB. ATF considered that

compelling reason to continue a high-level investigation of Bout.

Bout now lives in a fancy apartment in Moscow, maintaining business

connections among former Soviet officials who have also found the

military-industrial complex created by Communism to be a rich source

of recyclable commodities. Although the United Nations has imposed an

air travel ban on him, he commutes from Moscow, in the words of the

authors of this book, "with ease across. Western Europe and the former

Eastern bloc, ranging from his home base to satellite operations in

Moldova, Belgium, and Kazakhstan and arms depots in Bulgaria and the

Ukraine." He often used surface transport, to evade the UN order

against him, and employs disguises as well as an impressive library of

passports.

In outstanding service to journalism and the public interest, Farah

and Braun have written a book that should be read by everybody

interested in knowing the depths of human greed and its involvement

with terrorism. It is disturbing to imagine how many Viktor Bouts the

collapsed Soviet Union loosed on the world, and whether they might

not, as many fear, end up selling nuclear materials or other weapons

of mass destruction to groups like al-Qa'ida or Hezbollah. Bout's

associates still operate in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the

setting for Joseph Conrad's original Heart of Darkness, on which

Coppola's Apocalypse Now was based.

Viktor Bout has lived in the heart of darkness, a character in a

horrific reality show we could call Apocalypse Forever. As noted, the

reach of Bout's network is staggering. His presence is so pervasive

that when Nicolas Cage starred in the movie Lord of War (2005),

supposedly based on Bout's life, an aircraft used in the production

was one of Bout's Antonovs. Bout professed to be unimpressed by the

film. "Merchant of Death" reads like a thriller, made all the more

amazing by the fact that it is a true story. Kudos to Farah and Braun.

Learn more about "Merchant of Death."

Original item available at: http://www.investigativeproject.org/article/437

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/laoebraun13aug13,0,1196900.story?coll=la-opinion-center

>From the Los Angeles Times

Bad guys make even worse allies

A notorious arms dealer was the wrong person to enlist in the U.S. war

effort in Iraq.

By Stephen Braun

August 13, 2007

THE UNITED STATES seems to be missing some guns in Iraq. Somehow, the

U.S. military has lost track of 110,000 AK-47 assault rifles and

80,000 pistols that were supposedly delivered from our caches to Iraqi

security forces.

It was classic bureaucratic bungling, the Government Accountability

Office concluded last month in a report criticizing the Pentagon's

failure to keep proper records

and track weapons flows. But there may have been another factor -- the

government's dangerous and bumbling use of bad guys.

Consider the case of one particular bad guy, Viktor Bout -- a stout,

canny Russian air transporter who also happens to be the world's most

notorious arms dealer.

When the U.S. government needed to fly four planeloads of seized

weapons from an American base in Bosnia to Iraqi security forces in

Baghdad in August 2004, they used a Moldovan air cargo firm tied to

Bout's aviation empire. The problem is that the planes apparently

never arrived. When Amnesty International investigators tried two

years later to trace the shipment of more than 99 tons of AK-47s and

other weapons, U.S. officials admitted they had no record of the

flights landing in Baghdad.

The missing Bosnian weapons could simply be a paperwork problem (and

it's not certain that they are among the missing weapons the GAO

discovered; they may be an additional loss). But Bout's involvement as

the transporter raises bleak possibilities far beyond bureaucratic

error -- including the possibility that the arms were diverted to

another country or to Iraqi insurgents killing American troops.

That's because Bout is about as bad as bad guys get. For more than a

decade before he landed on U.S. payrolls, Bout's air cargo operations

delivered tons of contraband weapons -- ranging from rifles to

helicopter gunships -- to some of the world's most dangerous misfits.

He stoked wars across Africa, supplying Charles Taylor, the deposed

Liberian president now on trial for war crimes. He ferried $50 million

in guns and other cargo, and he even sold air freighters to the

Taliban, whose mullahs shared their lethal inventories with Al Qaeda's

terrorists in Afghanistan.

Bout also has a well-known record for working both sides of the fence.

His planes armed both the Angolan government in Africa and rebel

forces arrayed against it. He cut weapons deals with Afghanistan's

Northern Alliance government before betraying it by arming the

Taliban.

By the late 1990s, much of this was known to U.S. intelligence, which

had targeted him for an early form of rendition in the hopes of

putting him out of business. But then, just two years after the 9/11

attacks, Bout turned up as a linchpin in the U.S. supply line to Iraq.

Air Force records obtained by The Times show that his planes flew

hundreds of runs into the high-security zone at Baghdad International

Airport, delivering everything from guns to drilling equipment to

frozen food for customers from the U.S. Army to mega-contractor KBR

Inc. The military officials who oversaw his flights knew nothing about

the war-stoking background of the Bout network.

How did Bout go from being persona non grata to a valued U.S.

contractor? Some European intelligence officials believe that Bout

made a deal with the U.S., secretly using his talents to aid the

invasion of Afghanistan and getting a payday as an Iraq contractor.

But there is also ample evidence that U.S. officials simply dropped

the ball when it came to checking contractor bona fides as they rushed

to set up supply lines into Iraq after the U.S.-led invasion in March

2003.

Bout's planes were used as what former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul

D. Wolfowitz described as "second-tier contractors." The Army or the

Army Corps of Engineers would hire KBR or other prime contractors to

fly in supplies, and the firms would then hire Bout planes, either

directly or through air charter services.

One problem was that although the companies had nominal responsibility

to know the background of their hires, no one at the Pentagon seemed

to share in that role. Department of Defense officials should have

known about him -- even if U.S. intelligence didn't share its

knowledge, there was plenty of public information available that

should have soured the military on allowing him into Iraq under U.S.

auspices. Defense officials could have circulated an informal "no fly"

list to make sure that gunrunners like Bout were not hired. But "it

was 'do it now, the fewer questions asked the better,' " said Air

Force National Guard Lt. Col. Christopher Walker, who oversaw the air

operations in Baghdad in 2004.

Once Bout's firms were hired, there also was no follow-up effort to

learn more about their background and performance. There should have

been spot-checks to scrutinize him, but oversight was nonexistent.

By the fall of 2004, however, Bout had been targeted by a Treasury

Department freeze in assets, prompted by a United Nations' effort to

use economic sanctions against Liberian dictator Taylor and his inner

circle -- which included Bout. But weeding out Bout's contracts was

not a pressing problem to the Defense Department -- even after he had

become an official enemy of the U.S. government. ("We're talking about

tens of thousands of contracts," said one Army official.)

Worse, as late as 2005, after Bout's nefarious background and his role

in Iraq were publicly exposed, military officials pressured Treasury

Department officials to hold off on sanctions against his business

empire until he had finished a final run of supply flights to Iraq.

Defense officials now say they have tightened up procedures, but other

government veterans who dealt with the Pentagon on the Bout affair

remain dubious.

The Pentagon has provided few specifics about how it will scrutinize

air transporters in the future. And without any congressional or

public government inquiry into Bout's hiring, there is no pressure for

it to do so.

One thing about the Bout affair is certain. As of mid-2006, his firms

were no longer flying for the U.S. in Iraq. But now he poses a new

problem: "blowback," the blunt term espionage writers like to use for

the deadly consequences of poor spycraft.

When the U.S. turned to the Bout network to mount its Iraq supply

flights, it was already clear that Bout's network had aided the

Taliban's extremist mullahs. How could the U.S. be absolutely certain

he wouldn't fly for our enemies once he had left the payroll?

We couldn't and, apparently, he is.

Last summer, a jumbo Il-76 flying the Khazakh flag swooped down to a

landing in Mogadishu to unload arms for radical Islamic leaders who

briefly seized control of Somalia. It was one of Bout's planes,

concluded U.S. military intelligence officials.

Another bullet-point in a bad guy's resume.

Stephen Braun is a national correspondent for The Times and co-author

with Douglas Farah of "Merchant of Death: Money, Guns, Planes and the

Man Who Makes War Possible."

Copyright 2007 Los Angeles Times |