http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3600
The Merchant of Death [1/5]
By Douglas Farah, Stephen Braun
November/December 2006
Russian entrepreneur Viktor Bout has made millions as the world's most
efficient postman, able to deliver any kind of cargo-especially illicit
weapons-anywhere in the world. How was he able to build his intricate
underground network? By exploiting cracks in the anarchy of globalization.
In many ways, Viktor Bout is a prototypical, modern-day, multinational
entrepreneur. He is smart, savvy, and ambitious. He's good with numbers, speaks
several languages, and knows how to seize opportunities when they arise.
According to those who've met him, he's polite, professional, and unassuming.
Bout has no known political agenda. He loves his family. He's fed the poor. And
through his hard work, he's become extraordinarily wealthy. During the past
decade, Bout's business acumen has earned him hundreds of millions of dollars.
What, exactly, does he do? Former colleagues describe him as a postman, able to
deliver any package virtually anywhere in the world.
Not yet 40 years old, the Russian national also happens to be the world's
most notorious arms trafficker. He, more than almost anyone else, has succeeded
in exploiting the anarchy of globalization to get goods-usually illicit
goods-to market. He's a wanted man, desired by those who require a small
military arsenal and pursued by law enforcement agencies who want to bring him
down. Globe-trotting weapons merchants have long flooded the Third World with
AK-47s, rocket-propelled grenades, and warehouses of bullets and land-mines.
But unlike his rivals, who tend to carve out small regional territories, Bout's
planes have dropped off his tell-tale military-green crates from jungle landing
strips in the Congo to bleak hillside runways in Afghanistan. He has developed
a worldwide network of logistics, maneuvering through a maze of brokers,
transportation companies, financiers, and weapons manufacturers-both illicit
and legitimate-to deliver everything from fresh-cut flowers, frozen poultry,
and U.N. peacekeepers to assault rifles and surface-to-air missiles across four
continents.
Arms Around the World
What would the global flow of weapons look like without Viktor Bout?
Dozens of traffickers wait in the wings. more...
His client list for weapons is long. In the 1990s, Bout was a friend and
supplier to the legendary Ahmed Shah Massoud, leader of the Northern Alliance
in Afghanistan, while simultaneously selling weapons and aircraft to the
Taliban, Massoud's enemy. His fleet flew for the government of Angola, as well
as for the UNITA rebels seeking to overthrow it. He sent an aircraft to rescue
Mobutu Sese Seko, the ailing and corrupt ruler of Zaire, even though he had
supplied the rebels who were closing in on Mobutu's last stronghold. He has
catered to Charles Taylor of Liberia, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Colombia, and Libyan strongman Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.
Bout's customers are not exclusively corrupt Third-World leaders. He
built his fortune by flying tons of legitimate cargo, too. These included
countless trips for the United Nations into the same areas where he supplied
the weapons that sparked the humanitarian crises in the first place. He's done
business with Western governments, including the United States. Over the past
several years, the U.S. Treasury Department has tried to put Bout out of
business by freezing his assets and imposing other sanctions on him, his
business associates, and his companies. But the Pentagon and its contractors in
Iraq and Afghanistan have simultaneously paid him millions of dollars to fly
hundreds of missions in support of postwar reconstruction in both countries. In
an age when the U.S. president has divided the world into those who are with
the United States and those who are against it, Bout is both.
International officials believe that Bout's business practices-in
particular, his refusal to discriminate among those who are willing to pay the
right price-are, in fact, illegal. Peter Hain, then the British Foreign Office
minister responsible for Africa, stood in Parliament in 2000 to lash out
against those violating U.N. arms sanctions. He singled out Bout, dubbing him
Africa's "merchant of death." But Bout's deals often fall into a legal gray
area that global jurisprudence has simply failed to proscribe. It's not for
lack of trying. His peripatetic aircraft appear in little-noticed U.N. reports
documenting arms embargo violations in Liberia, the Democratic Republic of the
Congo, Angola, and Sierra Leone. U.S. spy satellites have photographed his
airplanes loading crates of weapons on remote airstrips in Africa. American and
British intelligence officials have eavesdropped on his telephone
conversations. Interpol has issued a "red notice," requesting his arrest on
Belgian weapons trafficking and money-laundering charges.
Yet Bout has managed to elude authorities over and over again. Laws
simply do not address transnational, nonstate actors such as Bout. His most
egregious illegal acts have included multiple violations of U.N. arms
embargoes, a crime for which there is no penalty and for which there is no
enforcement mechanism. Today, Bout lives openly in Moscow, protected by a
Russian government unconcerned by the international outcry that surrounds him
and his business empire.
International man of Mystery
Much of Viktor Bout's early history is either unknown or of his own
making. He is married and has at least one daughter; that much is true. His
older brother Sergei works for him. But any other personal information is
clouded in mystery. Even his place of birth is unclear. According to his
official Russian passport, Bout was born on Jan. 13, 1967, in the faded Soviet
outpost of Dushanbe, Tajikistan. But during a 2002 radio interview in Moscow,
Bout said he was born near the Caspian Sea in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan. A 2001
South African intelligence report lists him as Ukrainian. He is known to carry
more than one passport and use an array of aliases, including Vadim S. Aminov,
Victor Anatoliyevitsch Bout, Victor S. Bulakin, and the sardonic favorite of
his American pursuers, Victor Butt.
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