The man who armed the Taliban
Victor Bout has sold weapons to many embargoed nations including Afghanistan
By STEPHEN BRAUN, JUDY PASTERNAK and JOHN DANIZSEWSKI
The files on Victor Bout in government agencies around the world brim with accounts of how he hunted game with rebel leaders, threw parties on jungle landing strips and consorted with dictators to build his business empire.
For a decade, his armada of aircraft has hauled almost anything for a price: fish, coffee, relief supplies, flowers and heads of state.
International authorities say the 35-year-old Russian also operates the world's largest private weapons transport network carrying military goods as small as Kalashnikov assault rifle rounds and as large as helicopter gun-ships. Bout's businesses have been blamed for arming civil wars throughout Africa, despite international embargoes.
"Victor Bout is like the Donald Trump or Bill Gates of arms trafficking," said a U.S. defence department official. "He's the biggest kid on the block"
Now a Los Angeles Times investigation has uncovered evidence that Bout and several of his associates helped the Taliban build an air fleet that secretly delivered weapons, equipment and recruits during a crucial period in the late 1990s. The hard-line Islamic regime bought air freighters from Bout-linked companies and painted some of them in the colors of Afghanistan's national airline so that cargo could be delivered without attracting notice. The deals were arranged while the Taliban battled opposition forces for power and the ruling mullahs' patron, Osama bin Laden, launched his holy war against Americans.
The revelations provide significant details of how the Taliban and bin Laden's al-Qaida terrorist organization imported armaments wielded in combat against American soldiers. The accounts also provide a close-up view of how weak arms trafficking laws and poor international coordination can hamper the war on terrorism.
U.S. authorities say Bout — with operations scattered from the United Arab Emirates to the United States — embodies a new class of global enablers with the resources to serve terrorists. Although not affiliated with any known faction, Bout is considered a "transnational threat" by the U.S. government, posing danger through his worldwide reach.
Over the last three years, the United Nations has condemned him. The White House worked quietly to build a case against him. The U.S. secretary of state urged South Africa's president to prosecute Bout. A ranking British foreign ministry official denounced him in Parliament. Belgium is seeking his arrest.
But Bout has become a master of fast exits. He fled Belgium and South Africa soon after police opened investigations into his flights. And he slipped out of the Emirates before U.S. and British officials focused on his dealings with the Taliban.
He remains a free man in Moscow, sheltered by a Russian government skeptical of the allegations against him. He declined repeated interview requests through intermediaries over the last several months.
To put together a picture of Bout and his operations, the Times conducted interviews with more than 75 military, diplomatic and government officials in Afghanistan, the United States, the Emirates, Russia, Europe and Africa, as well as with air industry workers and Bout associates in those nations. Afghan officials corroborated their accounts with a thick stack of documents from the deposed Taliban government.
Bout in the beginning
Victor Bout's known biography is sparse. A native of Tajikistan, he is a Soviet military veteran fluent in at least five languages.
In an interview with a Russian newspaper, Bout portrayed himself as a hard-working, misunderstood and much-slandered businessman, the son of a car mechanic and a bookkeeper who went to a school for military translators and emerged from the army with the rank of lieutenant before going into the air cargo trade.
The financing of his aviation network remains murky. But he found a gold mine in surplus weaponry. Russia's discarded stockpiles "have tremendous value to warring countries in Africa and anywhere you need guns," said Jonathan Winer, a former deputy assistant U.S. secretary of state for international enforcement in the Clinton administration. "It's capitalism, comrade."
——————————''——————————
Victor Bout is like
the Donald Trump or
Bill Gates of arms
trafficking. He's the
biggest kid on the block.
U.S. DEFENCE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL
——————————''——————————
Alexander Sidorenko, a decorated former Soviet paratrooper, recalls Bout working as a trade representative in Luanda, Angola, when the Soviet empire collapsed in 1990. Bout joined him, leasing and buying planes until the two men split in 1994. "If he had a hobby, it was money," Sidorenko said.
By the late 1990s, Bout had gained a reputation for toughness and nerve.
"Bout was always ready to work under any risk," said Valery Spurnov, general director of SpAir Aviation in Yekaterinburg, Russia, and a former Soviet civil aviation official. Bout spirited off reconditioned Antonovs, "which were nothing more than piles of scrap metal," Spurnov said.
What separates Bout from his competitors, Western authorities said, is the size of his network. As of April, U.S. officials have linked to Bout at least 60 planes, a private cargo wing dwarfing all others in the Third World, registered from Aruba to Cambodia.
The U.S. state department says Bout's companies have 300 employees. His pilots, mostly Ukrainians and Russians, reportedly have been paid as much as $10,000 US for each hazardous run into war zones. Several Antonovs have crashed, including two that were shot down on African flights in the early 1990s, killing all aboard, Spurnov said.
Short-lived Bout companies have operated on four continents. Among their names: Transavia, Air Pass, Centrafrican, San Air, GET, IRBIS and Air Cess, the flagship that U.S. officials say Bout has entrusted to his brother Sergei.
"He's a wheeler-dealer who operates very effectively in a part of the world where scrutiny is poor," said Alex Vines, a British arms expert for the UN.
Bout's primary arms work is transport, U.S. and UN officials say, but they say Ms operation also brokers weapons from stockpiles across Eastern Europe.
Bout's clients
U.S. and UN officials say Bout and other arms suppliers airlifted thousands of assault rifles, grenade and missile launchers and millions of ammunition rounds into Africa. Clients of Bout's companies, U.S. and UN officials say, included rebels or governments in Sierra Leone, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia, Tanzania, Burkina Faso, Uganda and Sudan. In Libya, he developed a working relation-ship with Colonel Moammar Gad-hafi, they say, and in Angola, Bout's ventures armed insurgents and army regulars.
The first hint of Bout's work
Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida allegedly bought weapons despite an international embargo forbidding arms sales to Afghanistan.
came to U.S. officials in distant snatches of Russian picked up in 1995 intercepts of African phone conversations. Thumbing through transcripts, US. officials noticed a name repeated in chatter about weapons shipments in the Great Lakes region of Central Africa.
The pronunciation varied, matching alternative spellings used on five Russian passports that the UN alleges Bout has carried. Sometimes, he was Bout; at other times, he was Butt, Boutov, Budd or Bouta.
At the time, Bout seemed a minor player in the continent's tribal and power struggles. But as months passed, "We started seeing his fleet in all parts of Africa," a U.S. official said.
The United Nations has accused him of violating embargoes in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Angola. The African conflicts covered by the sanctions are not wars in the conventional sense but anarchic slaughter. Toting Kalashnikovs and rocket-propelled grenade launchers, teen-age fighters spray hundreds of rounds at a clip. Civilians have died by the tens of thousands. Missiles have been fired at planes carrying relief supplies.
A Bout company serviced and chartered aircraft for Gadhafi for several years, U.S. officials said. Bout also provided assistance when Gadhafi negotiated the release of six European hostages held in the Philippines by Abu Sayyaf, an Islamic rebel group whose leader had trained in Libya. The dictator hired a plane provided by Bout to deliver the freed captives and later portrayed Libya's intervention as a humanitarian act that warranted an end to international sanctions.
Performing such errands "got [Bout] in good standing with heads of state, and it was good for business," said Lee S. Wolosky, who monitored Bout for the National Security Council until July.
The UN and the U.S. imposed bans on military aid to the Taliban in 2000. When a UN team was asked last year to examine how weapons entered Afghanistan, Bout's name surfaced again.
Bout catered to the opposition Northern Alliance, flying in tons of ammunition when it ruled in the mid-1990s, former alliance officials said. He stopped working for the alliance when the Taliban seized power in Kabul, the capital, in September 1996.
"He was working for us," said Abdul Latif, Bout's main arms contact in the alliance. "And then he was working for the Taliban."
In Afghanistan
Whenever the Northern Alliance found its stock of ammunition running low, Latif said, he would bring suitcases stuffed with cash to Victor Bout. Between 1992 and 1996, when the alliance governed Afghanistan, Bout-leased Ilyushins carried tons of ammunition to troops fighting the Taliban and other factions.
Bout's arms prices were "very expensive," said Ahmed Muslem Hayat, a former aide to the defence minister. "One shell for tanks was $60. And from Russia, officially, they were $10."
The alliance had to deal with Bout, Hayat said, because the Russian government would not sell arms to them, preferring not to take sides in the Afghan civil war. But the Russians also did not interfere with Bout, who holds Russian citizenship. His flights "did not violate international laws," said veteran Russian diplomat Zamir Kabulov.
On Aug. 3,1995, Bout's furtive business was "outed" by his future clients, the Taliban.
A Taliban fighter forced down a Bout-leased Ilyushin carrying 3.4 million Kalashnikov rounds as it neared the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar. Taliban soldiers seized the munitions and took the seven-member crew hostage.
The Russian government sent Kabulov, at times accompanied by Bout or his brother Sergei, to negotiate for the crew's release.
After waiting a year, the prisoners laid plans for a break In August 1996, Kabulov said, Bout arranged with Iranian air traffic controllers for a clear air corridor to the Emi-rates. According to Russian accounts, the crew overpowered guards and flew the Ilyushin to freedom.
Shortly afterward, U.S. officials say, a Bout company started doing business with the Taliban.
Within weeks, a 25-year-old Taliban mullah met in a Sharjah hotel room with representatives of cargo companies owned by Bout and an associate to obtain supplies for the fundamentalist Islamic movement, said a former official of the Afghan airline Ariana, who was present at the meeting.
The mullah, Farid Ahmed, and other Taliban officials were seeking planes, tires, spare parts, engines, oil, hydraulic fluid — all essential for starting up their own air cargo operation.
They were soon scouring air cargo offices at the Sharjah airport, shopping openly because the Emirates was one of only three nations that recognized the Taliban. Ahmed soon found reliable suppliers in companies owned by Bout and the Emirates' Sheik Abdullah bin Zayed al Saqr al Nahyan, described by the United Nations as "a business associate of Victor Bout."
Between 1998 and 2001, Ahmed bought five planes from two companies — Vial and Air Cess — that authorities say Bout controlled.
Bout founded Air Cess in Liberia, said U.S. and UN officials. These officials say that at some point in the 1990s, he transferred its daily operations to his brother, Sergei. A man contacted by the Times who identified himself as Sergei Bout declined to discuss details of his business.
Spurnov, the Russian air executive, said that Bout also provided pilots to the Taliban. Spurnov said about 50 of Ms pilots were hired by Bout companies in the late 1990s. Spurnov said some told him of repeated runs hauling green crates, standard containers for Eastern European-made ammunition and weapons, into Afghanistan. The flights, he said, continued even after 1995, when Russian aviation companies were notified by their government that they no longer could fly into Taliban territory. But the rule didn't apply to Bout because his companies Were licensed in Sharjah.
Five more planes were sold to the Taliban by Flying Dolphin and Santa Cruz Imperial, which were owned by Abdullah, a former Emirate ambassador to Washington, D.C. Santa Cruz Imperial has been accused by the United Nations of
trafficking arms to Angola.
The sheik angrily insisted in ah interview that he "had no clue" why Afghan records detail sales of five of Ms Antonovs to the Taliban. He said he knew Ahmed and Bout but never worked with them. He said former "Russian partners" owned the planes, but he would not name them.
Working in the same cargo terminal as Bout's Air Cess, Ahmed remained a visible figure in Sharjah until shortly after the Taliban's collapse in November.
Armed airline
Five of the planes sold to the Таliban — all Antonov-12s — became important tools in the covert arm-ing of the movement's forces,
"It was special aircraft," said an Afghan air force brigadier who recalled watching the planes in action. And their purpose "was secret," he added.
The Antonov-12s had been registered as civilian planes but were actually property of the Taliban air force. As they took custody of the Antonov-12s, Taliban officials ordered the planes camouflaged in the colours of Ariana Airlines.
The Taliban's new acquisitions flew in heavy artillery and assault rifles, said the brigadier, a senior military intelligence official who served with the Taliban until he was dismissed in a purge in 2000.
On several occasions, the brigadier said, he watched the Antonov-12s being unloaded at an air base in Kabul. He saw heavy artillery, Kalashnikovs, aerial bombs and Russian BM-21 Hurricane rocket batteries.
A U.S. defence official said that American forces have since retrieved BM-21s from Taliban and al-Qaida storehouses in Afghanistan and are working to trace their provenance.
On other trips from the Emirates and Pakistan, the brigadier said, the planes brought "armed Taliban." The Antonovs shuttled back and forth several times a night, he said, ferrying as many as 800 to 1,000 recruits to Kabul and Kandahar.
The airlift made possible by the plane sales kept the Taliban supplied as the Islamic movement worked to tighten its grip on the nation. Within months, the Taliban took the strategic northern enclaves of Mazar-e-Sharif and Taloqan. By 1999, it controlled about 90 per cent of Afghanistan.
All of the planes were placed on the civil air registry at the command of the Taliban aviation minister, Mullah Aktar Mohammed Mansour, who also ran the Taliban air force. Mansour reportedly was killed in a U.S. airstrike in October.
Mansour's underlings did not object. "From the legal point of view we should not have done it," a senior Afghan official said. "But what could you do? The minister ordered it, and we had no choice."
All the Afghan officials interviewed by The Times declined to be identified in print. Having endured the Taliban's five-year rule, many said they fear terrorist reprisals for speaking out. But they decided to answer questions, some said, to distance both the airline and the Afghan government from the Taliban scheme.
The officials bolstered their accounts with an inch-thick stack of documents left behind by the mullahs. The records show the serial numbers for each of the 10 planes sold by Bout and bin Zayed and the dates they entered the Afghan civil air registry. In addition, two other planes purchased during this period could not be linked to Bout or bin Zayed.
Among the documents was a detailed protocol, signed by both aviation ministry and Ariana officials, outlining their plan to paint some of the air force turboprops as Ariana planes. The file also included false Ariana ID cards for four Taliban pilots.
The goal was to fly to destinations outside Afghanistan without interference, an Ariana official said. The plan worked, according to Afghan officials who were aware of the flights and air industry workers who saw the turbo-props on Sharjah's runways.
Afghan officials said five remaining planes were sold to Ariana, and they too might have been used to ferry weapons.
But Dr. Ghanem Hajri, the director-general of the Sharjah Airport Authority, insisted that no military cargo went out on Afghan-bound flights. The planes carried only "general cargo," he said, and were "thoroughly checked and rechecked by our security services."
The secret fleet ended up decimated by American bombs. On a military runway in Kabul, two blackened, shredded Antonov-12s lie in piles of metal scraps, angry sculptures rusting in the sun. The tail and wing fragments still bear Ariana's blue-and-white colours.
