On the Trail of the Elusive Victor Bout

On the Trail of the Elusive Victor Bout

Hunted by Interpol, the Russian 'merchant of death' who helped arm the Taliban and al-Qaida is alive and well in Moscow

by Stephen Smith, Additional reporting by Afsane Bassir Pour in New York, Natalie Nougayrede in Moscow, Jean-Philippe Remy in Nairobi and Jean-Pierre Stroobants in Brussels
The Guardian Weekly
April 17, 2002

A 35-year-old Russian, Victor Anatolyevich Bout, is believed to be the main supplier of arms to the Taliban and the al-Qaida network. According to United States and British intelligence, he was delivering weapons -- and even toxic gas -- to Kabul until just before September 11. With the global war against terrorism at its height, one would imagine him to be a desperate and hunted man.

Not so. Despite being on Interpol's wanted list since February at the request of the Belgian police, he has revealed his whereabouts: he is alive and well -- and apparently under no risk of arrest -- in Moscow. His aim seems to be to trigger counter-investigations, of which he would be both the instigator and the subject. The shadowy Bout is looking for media exposure.

Peter Hain, the British minister for Europe, said in February that Bout was a "merchant of death" who supplied rebel or terrorist forces with arms in exchange for diamonds, and that he had also been the arms supplier of the Taliban and al-Qaida. "We are determined to put him out of business," Hain added. The United Nations has been trying to do just that for years, but with little success. In several reports detailing investigations into "blood diamonds" and into the violation of sanctions imposed on countries or armed factions in Africa, the UN has denounced Bout as a global mafioso who has ignored national borders and played cat and mouse with governments and their laws.

In December 2000 the UN revealed various well-financed and well-connected international networks that were capable of carrying illicit cargo all around the world without arousing suspicion. An organisation headed, or at least apparently controlled from outside, by an eastern European, Victor Bout, fell into that category.

The "eastern European" was in fact born in Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, on January 13, 1967. An army officer of Russian nationality, Bout graduated from Moscow's prestigious Military Institute of Foreign Languages. In addition to Russian and his native Farsi, he speaks fluent English, French and Portuguese.

He first drew attention to himself in 1990 in Angola, where he was working with teams of Soviet helicopter pilots. Three years later he had set up in business. When the military-industrial complex of the Soviet Union crumbled, he bought up, on the tarmac of Cheliabinsk airport, 10 Antonovs, one Ilyushin and a Mi-8 helicopter "for peanuts", according to Valery Spurnov, a former civil aviation inspector.

The purchase marked the birth of a pirate air fleet of about 60 aircraft chartered or owned by Bout that flew under various flags of convenience. Liberia, already the country with the second-biggest merchant navy in the world after Panama, was a favourite country of registration.

At the Bureau of Maritime Affairs in the Liberian capital, Monrovia, a Kenyan Asian, Sanjivan Ruprah, executed the necessary official formalities on behalf of Air Cess, the first and largest of Bout's companies in Liberia, Swaziland, the Central African Republic and Equatorial Guinea, which eventually slotted into one another, with frequent name changes.

Bout's aircraft, registered in one country but operating in another with bogus flight plans, led a furtive existence. When it looked as though an aircraft was about to be checked, it took only a few hours to change its country code with the help of people such as Michael Harridine, who runs an aircraft registration bureau in Kent in England and has long been known as "the Mozart of re-registration".

After its beginnings in Africa, Air Cess moved in 1995 to the Belgian port of Ostend. It changed its name to the Trans Aviation Network group (Tan). For two years, business was very good.

A 1998 report by the Belgian secret service estimated that profits from the firm's arms exports to Africa amounted to $ 50m -- although a UN expert regarded that estimate as "exaggerated". But Bout made money both as a middleman and as a transporter.

Within a single year Tan carried out no fewer than 38 flights from Burgas, a Bulgarian port on the Black Sea, to Togo, which was then the main transit point for supplies to the Unita rebel movement in Angola.

Bout's Belgian period came to an end in the summer of 1997, just after he had bought a villa on the outskirts of Ostend. The US-based Human Rights Watch had drawn the attention of the Belgian authorities to Bout by denouncing him as the supplier of arms to Hutu extremists in eastern Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), who had fled Rwanda after the genocide of 1994.

Bout shifted part of his aircraft fleet to Africa. In order better to sell arms to penniless clients, he began to specialise in trafficking "war diamonds" via Kisangani, the stronghold of the rebel Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD).

A sister, since deceased, of Alphonse Onusumba, then head of the RCD, was married to Bout's associate Ruprah. According to a Lebanese diamond merchant, the value of Congolese, Angolan and Sierra Leonean diamonds illegally exported from Kisangani was in excess of "$ 100m a year". When there was a coltan "rush" in eastern Congo, the smuggling of that hi-tech mineral added another string to Bout's bow.

When he left Ostend, Bout chose the United Arab Emirates (UAE) as his new base of operations. From Sharjah, Dubai and Ras al-Khaima, he refocused his activities on eastern Europe, where he set up a charter company, Ibis, and on Central Asia, particularly Afghanistan, where he had already done business with the anti-Taliban mojahedin.

As a result he had been locked in a year-long dispute with the Taliban: on taking Kandahar in 1996 they seized an aircraft he had chartered. The plane, which belonged to Aerostan, a company based in the Tatar capital, Kazan, was carrying arms that had been loaded in Albania and were bound for Burhanuddin Rabbani's Afghan forces.

Was it while he was negotiating the release of his impounded aircraft and its crew that Bout switched sides and began doing business with the Taliban? The CIA and the British MI6 intelligence agency think so. The fact is that he met the Taliban leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, at that time. After Kabul fell to the Taliban in 1998 Bout was in charge of maintenance for the Afghan airline, Ariana Airways, and the Taliban's fleet of Soviet-made fighters.

Several charter flights a week were organised between Dubai and Kandahar. The company in charge of that air link, Flying Dolphin, belonged to a former UAE ambassador in Washington, Abdullah Bin Zayed, who was one of Bout's business associates. Bout had helped Bin Zayed to register another of his transport companies, Santa Cruz Imperial, in Liberia.

The UAE was one of the three countries in the world that recognised the Taliban regime. In November 2000, despite US pressure at the highest level, Abu Dhabi refused to close down Bout's operations on its soil. By then, the US had already spent eight months carrying out secret investigations into networks of arms traffickers.

Those investigations cranked into action again after September 11, but did not result in Bout being formally charged. However, the arms dealer decided to lie low. He might have succeeded in escaping attention had not the linchpin of his empire come to grief this February. Belgian police arrested Ruprah at Uccle, near Brussels. The Kenyan Asian, who is the same age as Bout, was on the UN list of persons forbidden to travel because of their involvement in arms or diamond trafficking in Africa.

But that was not why the Belgian police were after Ruprah. Officially his crime was that he was in possession of forged identity papers and had been involved in forging currency: large quantities of Congolese francs were due to be printed in Argentina and transported to eastern Congo, where they would have been put into circulation in RCD-controlled areas.

The charges may have been a pretext to put Ruprah behind bars. He was suspected of being Bout's associate in Africa -- something his lawyer, Luc de Temmerman, denies. To the annoyance of the Belgian secret service, Ruprah had been in close contact with CIA agents.

What was the CIA doing negotiating with a friend of Osama bin Laden's main arms supplier? When Bout was supplying the Northern Alliance with arms, he may have been of service to the Americans, who were then unwilling to be seen to play too prominent a role in Afghanistan. An intelligence source suggests the CIA may have been bargaining to provide not only Ruprah but also Bout with impunity and a green card in exchange for information on al-Qaida's network.

According to that scenario, the Belgian police, who had almost completed their own investigations, brought those contacts to an end when they arrested Ruprah. The same source claims that while travelling on a private plane in western Europe in February Bout escaped arrest by Belgian police because he had taken the wise precaution of including in his itinerary a stopover that did not appear on his flight plan.

Whatever the truth of those reports, Bout somehow felt that it was time to raise his profile. On February 28 he burst into the studios of a private Moscow radio station. A journalist, Vladimir Barfolomeyev, interviewed him live at some length before reading out an Interfax news agency story that had just come in. It said: "Interpol's office in Russia has announced that for the past four years it has been looking for Victor Bout, who is suspected of having supplied the al-Qaida organisation with arms. A spokesman . . . said, 'Today, we can definitely say that Bout is not on Russian soil.'" The agency story caused some hilarity in the studio. A few days later, on March 4, the Federal Security Service (formerly the KGB) issued a communique: "There are no grounds for believing that this Russian citizen has committed illegal acts." The same day Bout agreed to be interviewed by Le Monde, which was told where the meeting was to take place just half an hour before the agreed time.

Bout was sitting in the back room of a Japanese restaurant, far from prying eyes, in the company of two women and a bodyguard. He tried to look relaxed, but did not seem entirely confident that he was well protected.

He expressed himself in somewhat halting French. He launched into a long series of denials: no, he had never worked for al-Qaida; no, his father-in-law was not a former deputy head of the KGB but "a teacher at a technical college"; no, he had never done business in arms or diamonds, but he had "transported French soldiers, when they were deployed in eastern Zaire in 1994. Does that count as arms trafficking?"

Bout is rather like Mr Arkadin, the anti-hero of the eponymous film and novel by Orson Welles, in that he wants to put someone on his track in an attempt to come to terms with his elusive identity. "I had to say that I was here and that I was not afraid," he insisted, swearing he had always lived at the same address in Moscow. "If they're looking for me, I don't understand why they can't find me."

But why hadn't he given himself up to the Belgian police? "I'm waiting here. It's as though I were on holiday. If the people on the case in Belgium are professionals, their investigations will naturally be completed." March 26

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