Outlaws Inc. (23 page)

Still, the picture even she paints of that generation's progress across the continents after the motherland set them free without a paycheck or a pension is a sobering one. She talks me through a lineup of her family friends and what's happened to them since they first came out here to fly cargo. There they were, young and strong, smart cookies and crack aviators, mechanics, loadies, and navigators. And then, like Iggy Pop's Dum Dum Boys, they begin to fall in a grim roll call of casualties. Bad luck, bad calls, and the wrong plane.

“There's this guy, he died in the Antonov crash in Luxor a couple of years ago. He's one of the guys at the bottom of Lake Victoria—yeah, that was one of Evgeny's crews. Some got kidnapped in the DRC, nobody ever paid the ransom. Another one's dead, another just disappeared, I don't know what happened to him …”

The crews all know one another from way back, she says. From the same towns, they've all been colleagues, and friends, flying the same planes for years all over the world. Then they came to Africa and worked as hired hands—different planes, different crews. A huge number are dead or missing.

I'm stunned for a moment, recalling Mickey's first conversation with me, the way he counted these devils down on his fingers, like a man biding his time here in this world before bowing to the inevitable and heading off into the water, the fire, and the hereafter with one of them. Here they are, his brothers gone before. It's like a family tree in horrible, inverted negative, in which instead of one common ancestor multiplying to produce generations of offspring, the logic is reversed and a whole generation of men produces a single heir, the sole survivor of twenty years of flying these foreign skies.

It pisses Katya off, she says, that all this work can be done and all these sacrifices made by good men in the name of getting their job done, and at the end of it, “all people want to talk about is gunrunning, like that's the only thing they're carrying.”

She reminds me that nobody ever wants to investigate these air operations, or the crews' fifteen tons of cash cargo, when they're using them to take more food to more starving refugees than any other crews, aviation outfits, or airlines, big or small, could ever hope to match; or that without their constant flights here and there, on- or off-record, much of places like East Africa would simply grind to a halt.

This is not just a figure of speech. In 1960, when Belgium granted it independence, the Democratic Republic of Congo (then called Zaire) boasted ninety thousand miles of navigable roads. By 1980, independent for two decades and with the highway-maintenance budget having quadrupled, there were only six thousand miles. By 2006, Kemal Saiki, a UN spokesman briefing the media on a passenger plane crash, said that the Democratic Republic of Congo did not even have two thousand miles of roads and that for many people, traveling around the country by aircraft, using small, wildcat aviation outfits, is the only option. Today, with just a few hundred kilometers of road left outside of the capital Kinshasa, people and goods find themselves back where they were in the late 1800s, chugging slowly down overgrown rivers in perilously overloaded barges straight from Conrad's
Lord Jim
.

In Uganda, the most stable, most developed country in the region, there used to be trains. Today, following a disastrous attempt at privatization, the service is suspended indefinitely, tracks now overgrown with weeds and covered with mud, and even having become home to expanding market squares and auto-repair shacks.

Even when you
can
travel by land, you're hostage—often literally—to thieves and bandits. Here, transport companies build in a margin of 33 percent of their goods that they assume will be stolen before the cargo reaches the recipient at the other end. That, of course, means higher prices for the surviving merchandise—both to compensate for these losses and to pay higher insurance premiums. And often that means the produce is priced out of the market. Simply nobody at the other end—in an area in which poverty is legion—can afford to pay a whole third higher than the market price. So they either go without or they steal and buy on the black market. The whole cycle begins again.

American reporter Denis Boyles came out here in the 1980s and interviewed one of the last of the Air America generation, an American bush pilot named George Pappas, tooling his beat-up DC-6 from conflict to conflict, chasing the sweet deal at the end of the rainbow. One of Pappas's clients, a Zairean businessman, told him, “The pilots here are like sharks. They make excuses and wait until we need them very badly, and then they raise their rates. It is very difficult, very expensive.” Boyles claims to have been informed by one of these pilots that “ninety percent of the cargo he carries is, one way or another, contraband.” The real number, he says, was even higher.

In Africa, whatever you're carrying, you skip a whole lot of trouble, paperwork, and danger—as well as bandits, bribes, police, and military roadblocks—if you take it by air. As one small ad for a reputable Ugandan plane operator in Kampala's local freebie the
Eye
says: “You've a meeting in Arua. It's a 7-hour drive at least [and] you'll get home at night, exhausted.
If
you arrive home. Because 2,334 people died and 12,076 were injured on our roads in 2008. So charter a plane and keep your accountant happy. After all, how much is your life worth?”

Even in Russia itself, according to assassinated FSB whistleblower Aleksander Litvinenko, the secret police favored private-enterprise pilots with military experience for the
really
sensitive jobs, like moving explosives around the country from air base to air base. So prone to theft, prying, and graft were the road and rail networks that the chance of some small-time crooks nicking their consignment from a lay-by, only to stumble across the whole plot, was a chance they were unwilling to take.

But still, to many the idea of a connection between the business of states—wars, insurgencies, government policy—and these chaotic rogue cargo men seemed casual at best. They were hustlers, after all; man-with-van enterprises, nothing more. But suddenly, one afternoon in a luxury hotel in Bangkok, all that seemed to change.

On March 6, 2008, more than two dozen Royal Thai Police, in a sting operation orchestrated by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, swooped down on a conference room on the twenty-seventh floor of a gleaming, steel-and-glass Sofitel hotel in the Thai capital and promptly arrested Viktor Bout, handcuffing him at gunpoint and holding him in one of the suites before taking him off to jail. In its indictment, the DEA charges that during a well-planned sting, Bout incriminated himself in a plot “to sell millions of dollars' worth of weapons [rumored to be Russian SA-model shoulder-mounted surface-to-air missile launchers and attendant ammo] to the Colombian narco-terrorists … the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) to be used to kill Americans in Colombia.”

Russian diplomats were livid, calling his detention politically motivated. The Americans were jubilant. But there would be more twists to come than either could possibly have realized.

The indictment, which charged Vikter Bout with nine offenses including money-laundering conspiracy and wire fraud as well as trafficking, continued: “An international weapons trafficker since the 1990s, has carried out a massive weapons-trafficking business by assembling a fleet of cargo airplanes capable of transporting weapons and military equipment to various parts of the world, including Africa, South America, and the Middle East. The arms that Bout has sold or brokered have fueled conflicts and supported regimes in Afghanistan, Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Liberia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and Sudan.”

Perhaps someone had been watching the skies over Latin America quite closely through the 2000s after all.

Then, just three months later, in July of that year, the Africa–Latin America connection was blown wide open, hitting headlines across the world when a Soviet-crewed Antonov seized in Sierra Leone as a result of an American investigation was found to contain a staggering six hundred kilos of cocaine belonging to a Venezuelan
narcotraficante
group using Africa as its distribution hub. At fifty thousand dollars a kilo, there's silly money for anyone with a rusty cargo plane and who knows the value of discretion.

Ironically, it seems the
narcos
know what the world's NGOs, governments, and international peacekeeping organizations have been slow to realize: that if you want a job done professionally and with no conflict of interest, it never pays to squeeze your suppliers. Crewmen seem to have been paid well for such journeys: The captured leader of Venezuela's infamous mob, the Valencia-Arbelaez organization, which was smashed by undercover U.S. DEA agents after it purchased a $2 million plane to run monthly flights between Venezuela and Guinea, claimed he was “paying my pilots $200,000 to $300,000 per trip.” He could afford to: The cost of ex-Soviet cargo aircraft for sale and charter had, according to the
Moscow Times
, “plummeted because of the financial crisis.” Reporting the bust, the
Moscow Times
discovered that “The [
narcotraficante
] gang hired a Russian crew to move the newly purchased plane from Moldova to Romania, and then to Guinea. Fuel and pilots were paid for through wire transfers, suitcases filled with cash and, in one case, a bag with $356,000 in euros, left at a hotel bar.” No wonder men like Mickey can be talked into making a few extracurricular no-questions trips.

Again, the Russian Foreign Ministry thundered that it considered the pilot to have been “kidnapped,” not arrested by the United States. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin himself weighed in, telling the U.S. it had “overstepped its mark.”

But between the lines, maneuvering of a more subtle kind was taking place. One operation down, one plane impounded. For investigators, prosecutors, and politicians, it must have felt like nailing jelly to a wall. Worse for the growing number of agents and monitors bent on proving and shutting down men like Bout, in their eagerness or frustration, the failures and lapses in their methods that Peter Danssaert had warned about began cropping up again. Ironically, this time it was the aviators who were edgy about shadowy conspiracies.

What Bout's associates, and indeed the Russian government, claim is a politically motivated U.S.-led smear campaign against him has resulted in a bizarre situation in which both sides are crying foul and alleging dirty tricks on the part of the other. In a message from his hideout, where he's taking refuge from CIA interest in him on what he claims is a trumped-up case, Bout's close associate and “brother” in business Richard Chichakli, who oversaw Sharjah's open-door boom time—tells me: “Victor Bout is just a person who may or may not have done wrong. That can be put to a trial in a court of law—and the U.S. will not have, nor will ever provide a ground for, an impartial trial. They have already spent more than $400 million on [hunting him down] and they cannot, just cannot, come up empty-handed. The politics says Victor should go to jail or die, and that will justify the action, make the great American experts look good, and give credibility to the U.S. and its stories. The evidence I have says exactly the opposite, and the U.S. government knows that.”

Indeed, Chichakli—who, despite being the subject of many and varied allegations, has yet to be convicted of a single crime, and who points out on his Web site that the presumption in his case appears to be “innocent until
proven guilty
investigated”—claims the same covert political forces who'd like to see Bout behind bars or dead are playing some very dark games with him. He points to the fact that his apartment was broken into in 2009.

“The attack on my apartment in Moscow was the strangest thing, given that computers and documents were the primary target,” he says. “Who took it and why? Possibly the U.S. intelligence; could be the Russian intelligence, or [maybe] the Easter bunny.” Then he drops a hint that there's more to the game than anyone yet knows: “Whoever took the things knew that I have a backup; they just wanted to know what I have available, and who should be worried about getting exposed. The funny thing is that they will never know, because what I have is what is keeping me alive at either side of the equation.”

The plot thickened further in 2010 when a public-relations and lobbying company in New York and D.C. called Mercury LLC appeared to have issued a press release linking Bout to trafficking operations from the UAE.

Entitled “Ras Al Khaimah: A Rogue State Within the UAE?,” it was seemingly issued on behalf of an exiled sheikh with designs on a victorious return. Yet when I contacted them about the release, they stonewalled. Then one employee denied that the release had anything to do with them (despite having their company letterhead at the bottom). Requests for clarification have so far gone unheeded.

The really curious thing is that Mercury LLC is a key part of the U.S. corporate-lobbying machinery, with access to U.S. Congress and legislators; and if they were also involved in a campaign to destabilize an emirate by “linking” it to lots of bad guys, it would be absolutely perfect if someone were arrested in a blizzard of publicity—someone like Viktor Bout, given Public Enemy Number One status and quickly “linked” to Ras al-Khaimah via a mysterious press campaign.

For their part, Bout's prosecutors, monitors, watchers, and opponents claim that he appears to be in denial, pointing to the masses of arms flights in and out of sub-Saharan Africa and Taliban-held Afghanistan he operated through the 1990s and early 2000s. They point to the charges on which he's been incarcerated and extradited to the U.S., still unproven at this time of writing—an alleged offer by Bout to procure missile launchers and drones for FARC “to kill Americans with.” His defenders contend meanwhile that as the source of much of the world's cocaine and seasoned phantom-flight charterers themselves, FARC are just convenient bogeymen in a cynical DEA set-up.