Outlaws Inc. (6 page)

Not that it was easy from the start. Just three years on from evacuating Kabul under enemy fire and having being laid off by the military with a single, one-off payment of 150 rubles in lieu of all back pay, the abrupt arrival in this wild new existence of sun, sex, and self-interest came, he admits, as a bit of a headfuck—not just to him but to everyone.

The airmen found ways of coping. Many drank, heroically and often, then less heroically and more often. Some, like Mickey's pal Artem, succumbed full-time to the heroin they'd first tried in Afghanistan, becoming thoroughly unreliable “ghosts.” These ghost airmen were a common sight in those days, he says. They OD'd on tower-block staircases, turned up dead in the thawing snow plowed from the railway sidings or under lake ice in spring. The more resilient often washed back down to the 'stans, where they took to opium full-time and worked as fixers.

There were other roads. Some clued-in vets from his regiment fell in with the new
mafiya
gangs springing up across the erstwhile Union, acting as hired muscle, security, drivers, whatever it took. Some got religion, got jailed, or got the fuck out of the country. Aeroflot, suddenly flush with private suitors and cash, soaked up quite a few ex-servicemen—including the erstwhile commander in chief Evgeny Shaposhnikov himself, who would become the firm's director in 1995. Others got entrepreneurial, got settled, and went into business, stayed on the straight and narrow and gritted their teeth. Or they used other skills to start new lives as plumbers, shoe salesmen, and truck drivers.

And some, like Mickey, just kept flying. Hitting forty and still handsome in a lanky, sloping-shouldered way, he simply enjoyed seeing the world, revisiting some of the places he'd last seen in service, and living a little. So long as they were a few bucks ahead of the game and doing the thing they knew best, it was a good life. As Mickey tells it, with a matter-of-fact wave of his cigarette and that eyes-to-the-floor shrug, “There is no plan. Just me, the plane, the next job. I just do it.” Then he laughs. “Take the aerial view, or you can go crazy.”

It's a truism that the turbulent breakup of the Soviet Union created a power vacuum in which crews like Mickey's could thrive. But a stockpile is just a stockpile making small change on Arbat Street, an Il-76 cargo plane just a chunk of metal, and even a Vitebsk
mafiya
boss lording it over his local neighborhood with all the guns he can sell is just a hostage to fortune—until you match supply to demand. And in the freewheeling 1990s, so full of newly independent countries and post–Cold War movements struggling to be born, the demand was out there, all right.

It was time to go international.

 

CHAPTER FIVE

The Birth of the Global Network

Russia, 1993

LIKE SOME LOST TRIBE in search of a promised land, these privatized Soviet crews and their networks of partners, agents, bosses, and fixers scattered across the globe. The vast majority were simply earning a buck any way they knew, doing it honestly and transparently, and founding a wave of aviation outfits, legitimate blue-chip names like Volga-Dneiper and Heavy Lift, that span the world today, making sure Pentagon ordnance, rock bands' stage sets, humanitarian relief, and giant wind turbines get to wherever they're needed. And with them, across the world, a whole ecosystem of shadowy contacts and fixers sprang up with what—had anybody been looking at the time—would have seemed uncanny, almost unnerving speed.

Their choice of start-up HQ locations in Africa and the Middle East was about more than the need for Mickey and his like to enjoy a nice spot of distinctly un-Siberian sun and a change of scene. And it will come as no surprise if I tell you there are very few marble corporate offices with brass plaques on the door.

“There's no doubt the real reason was strategic,” says international monitor Hugh Griffiths. At just thirty-seven, the young Englishman is a researcher at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, whose work in monitoring these mushrooming private airlines has seen him cause more ripples at the UN than many heads of state manage in a lifetime. He's become the scourge of the destabilizing commodities trade.

Lucrative aid and reconstruction contracts, he explains, as well as security and peacekeeping supply jobs will always go to places hit by the double-whammy tragedy that famine, terror, earthquake, or humanitarian disasters bring. Because for every shock, in which food, clean water, shelter, or medicines become scarce, there's an aftershock. This is the critical phase in which institutions break down: Corruption, violence, profiteering, and the law of the gun hold sway.

“The UAE, for example, is a main way-station and hub for the Afghan air bridge, and for aid to the Middle East and South Asia. Places like Uganda and Kenya are the only game in town for flights to Angola. That places them right where they need to be for aid flights and for anything else they might want to take to or from these countries.”

Still, international monitors were for many years baffled at the way small arms and black-market goods find their way into disaster zones so quickly—and local resources, from cash and looted treasures to opium, find their way out.

But just as every complex ecosystem evolves parasites, it will evolve predators, scavengers, and masters of disguise and diversion. And, in among the jobbing airmen seizing their chance at a new life, there were others—legitimate businessmen and rogue operators, too, who cannily registered their planes in known-quantity countries with notoriously lax, obscure, or corrupt record-keeping and monitoring regimes like Georgia and Kazakhstan and set up their businesses in the Arabian Gulf and across sub-Saharan Africa. Once there, they formed a whole new class of altogether more freewheeling business owners. And the story of the most celebrated of them, an old air force comrade of Mickey's no less, is the key to understanding just what Mickey did next.

JUST OVER AN hour's drive east from Mickey's old air base at Vitebsk, the green, mossy earth smells of fresh rain and birch resin. Russian, Polish, and German cars, open-topped trucks and transcontinental container lorries hiss and spray along the cracked wet blacktop of the E141 auto route, bound for the Russian border city of Smolensk.

Slow down, indicate right, and pull over. Get out of the car, step off the hard shoulder, away from the whooshing traffic and into the trees, and the dripping silence quickly closes in. Giant, raggedy crows flap and peck over the soft forest earth. The abandoned shells of German Tiger tanks stand immobile and rusting, though even they are now rotting into these giant, misty birch forests through which they once advanced, clanking and roaring.

In the Forest of Katyn, the ghosts are piled six-deep in some places; in others, pieces of human debris turn on twigs in the wind. Either way, it's not a place you want to be after dark. Between 1942 and 1943, under the leaves and dirt, the bodies of as many as twenty-two thousand Polish army officers, writers, lawyers, engineers, and teachers were found, piled several deep in hastily dug pits twelve miles west of the city. On the orders of Stalin's secret police, they had been massacred in the woods in one single day of almost industrial slaughter in April 1940. And here, amid these same birches, they lay—alongside Ukrainian and Byelorussian comrades executed simultaneously and in their hundreds, in Smolensk's main industrial abattoir, and in the NKVD secret-police headquarters in town. The Katyn massacre still poisons Polish-Russian relations, and the ghosts still bring travelers to their deaths.

On April 10, 2010, the Polish president, dozens of war veterans, and the entire top tier of Poland's government were killed en route to a remembrance ceremony for the victims of the massacre. The Tupolev Tu-154M plane of the Thirty-sixth Air Transport Regiment, lost in the fog and attempting to reroute to Smolensk, hit the birches and disintegrated. Of the eighty-seven passengers and crew, not one survived. Photographs show the smoking wreckage of one of the engines, nestled among the birches on the forest floor, precisely twelve miles west of town. It looked like something that had found its way home.

Like Mickey's old base across the border in Vitebsk, Smolensk is home to a colossal military-transport air regiment—the combat-ready Il-76s of the 103rd Military Transport Air Regiment—and a famous Soviet-era military academy. The Military Air Defense Academy of the Land Forces of the Russian Federation is Russia's crack rocket and antiaircraft artillery training school—the first line of defense against the airborne aggression from the West on which, until 1991, the Soviet Union was betting its bottom ruble. Today its recruits play their part in the deployment of Russian forces abroad as well as in defense of the homeland. But unknown to most recruits and enlisted men, the academy was also the scene of one of the most bizarre heists in modern Russian history.

Sometime in the mid-1990s—details are understandably hard to come by—it was decided by the authorities that a fitting statue should be installed in tribute to the academy's graduates and their work for Russia's armed forces. Calls were made, permissions granted, and the military, with thanks to the snappily branded Ilyushin-Tashkent Aviation Production Association down in Uzbekistan, donated a suitable installation: a giant, pristine Il-76 aircraft to stand proudly as a piece of mighty, industrial-age sculpture at the entrance gates. It was a huge, jaw-dropping symbol of Russia's adventures abroad, a reminder of just what was possible. The authorities and military top brass trumpeted this coup. But on the day of the great unveiling, the installation was nowhere to be seen. Because someone—someone who'd been tracking the progress of the Il-76 statue very closely indeed—had other ideas. According to investigators Douglas Farah and Stephen Braun, somewhere en route to the academy, the warplane simply vanished.

Tantalizing details slowly emerged, though even they were sketchy. It appeared that, having first persuaded an official somewhere along the line between factory and delivery to redesignate the plane as scrap metal, the audacious would-be owner then helpfully arranged to take the seventy-two tons of “scrap” off their hands, diverting it to a third destination—and then re-registered it in a loosely regulated regime and flew it off on its first job. Anywhere else, it would be the crime of the century. In the context of free-for-all early-to-mid-1990s Russia, with entire, security-policed payroll trains disappearing from the rails between stations, tanks firing on Parliament in an attempt to steal the newborn state itself, and tons of military ordnance vanishing on reaching Chechnya, it was depressingly
normalno
—another day, another screw-over.

“Of course, there was the big sell-off of military equipment—but theft is the other big way in which planes got ‘liberated,' ” says Mark Galeotti. “Never underestimate the sheer amount of malfeasance in the former Soviet Union at that time. A lot of kit got written off as ‘destroyed,' and just disappeared when units were being transferred back to Russia from far-flung locations. It's horrific how much. Even before the Soviet Union collapsed, much of the kit that was being brought back from East Germany seems to have ‘got lost' in transit. Estimates of how much vary dramatically, but the main ones were things that had practical civilian use. According to one figure I've been given, half of all the Soviet armed forces' motorbikes disappeared! Because that's something you can literally just wheel down to the local bar and say, ‘Anyone like to buy a motorbike?' And admittedly, RPG-7 grenade launchers are a bit trickier.”

Clearly, he says, given the difficulty in selling an Il-76 in a bar, whoever got the installation written off as “destroyed” then flew it away, having had what Galeotti calls a “practical civilian use” in mind for it.

It's a mystery that's likely to remain unsolved. Dmitry Kholodov was the last Moscow investigative journalist to launch an inquiry into the fake “scrapping” of large items of military equipment for black-market purposes, having written a series of articles about the possible involvement of none other than Defense Minister Pavel Grachev. He was passed a briefcase purportedly containing documentary evidence but the moment he clicked open the lock, he triggered a booby-trap bomb that blew him to smithereens and turned his office at the
Moskovsky Komsomolets
newspaper a bloody shade of burnt. So nowadays, those who may know are understandably circumspect about naming names when it comes to “scrappage” stunts like the life-size Il-76 sculpture that simply flew away.

But some names do keep rising through the murk. And whoever you ask—airmen or businessmen, cops or robbers, inside or outside the industry—you don't ask for long without hearing the name of a one-time comrade of Mickey's at the Vitebsk base whose career mirrors Mickey's own in some ways, while showing the difference a white-collar background, impeccable connections, and boundless ambition can make: an officer and army translator named Viktor Bout.

There are as many different biographies of this most controversial figure as there are people who'll claim to have had a brush with him. But for such a cause célèbre, so frequently photographed, he's still curiously difficult to pin down.

As far as anyone knows for sure, he is, or may be, any one of the following: Vitebsk airbase veteran; model businessman; ex-colonel; fairly low-ranking military translator; maverick aviator; illicit arms trafficker; friend to dictators and warlords; philanthropist; conduit for Colombia's FARC militia; black marketeer; Merchant of Death; innocent victim of a smear campaign on the part of embittered former business contacts, including ambitious arms-trafficking monitors, CIA-run rival cargo businesses, and the U.S. government; rogue FBI double agent; pawn in the Bush-Cheney administration's war games; valued partner to the U.S. reconstruction effort in Iraq; embargo breaker; puppet; delivery man; elusive phantom. Some say it's likely that at different times he's been all of the above. And as one
Guardian
reporter wrote on his 2008 arrest, “If Viktor Bout did not exist, a thriller writer would have invented him.”

It would be tempting to say that the only thing anybody really knows about Viktor A. Bout is that his name is Viktor A. Bout, but even that's not always been true. He's carried at least five different passports and could at any moment have been Viktor (or often Victor) Buyte, Butte, Butt, Budd, Bulakin, Boutov, Bont, or Byte. Or Vitali Sergitov, or Vadim Markovich Amonov. Or simply “Boris.”

Though his Web site, one of his passports, and a home video he recently put online all locate his birthplace as Dushanbe, in the former Soviet state of Tajikistan deep in the Central Asian crossroads between Russia and Afghanistan, he's claimed in a radio interview that he was born in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, on the shores of the Caspian Sea. Then again, no less a source than Interpol had information (used in his arrest warrant) that he came from Smolensk itself. Another Interpol warrant put him down as a Ukrainian. Ukraine's Director of Military Programmes Leonid Polyakov, meanwhile, calls him a Russian born in Kazakhstan. Even the Russian government, having identified him as a Russian citizen and cooperated with attempts to extradite him for years, turned around in 2006 and tartly announced he wouldn't be extradited, as he'd never actually been a Russian citizen at all—then fought his extradition from Thailand to the U.S. and, after his extradition was finally ordered in 2010, announced it would do everything it could to “bring him home to his Motherland.”

Ironically, the only thing one can really be sure of is that at the time of this writing, Bout had never been convicted of a single crime; even his harshest critics admit that, while they'd rather he didn't do what he does, none of it has been illegal. Whether that will still be the case when his trial is concluded is for others to decide. But only a fool would bet with the odds on a man like Viktor.

Bout is prominent enough to have enjoyed Armani-clad lifestyle-shoot treatment in the
New York Times Magazine
as well as having the world's most august intelligence agencies on his heels for over a decade. Which makes the degree of uncertainty about him incredible. Either Interpol, the CIA, the UN, and the U.S. and Russian governments are all comically inept (which is by no means out of the question), or someone's been constructing a pretty big smokescreen.

In fact, Bout's story is a white-collar version of Mickey's own: an operation founded with the purchase of ex-Soviet military Antonov An-8 planes in the same Big Bang that spun and spat Mickey, Sergei, and the rest across the globe. “Upon the collapse of the Soviet Union,” says his Web site, “Victor decided to leave the military service and start his own aviation business, the field he was always fascinated by. And with some help from his family and his wife, Victor was able to purchase four Antonov-8 cargo aircraft that became the core and starting point of his fleet and his business.”