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31-10-2008: THE RISE AND FALL OF VIKTOR BOUT

The Rise and Fall of Viktor Anatolyevich Bout, the biggest political prisoner of today. For the readers amoung you that have never heard about Mr. Bout, I will give a little introduction.

Viktor Bout was born in Dushanbe (the capital of Tajikistan) during the Soviet Union. He served in the USSR Military and probably even under the GRU (a worldwide Russian secret intelligence service). Before the colapse of the Soviet Union he was stationed in Angola. He is known to speak at least 6 languages fluently, including Russian, Portuguese, Uzbek, English, French and Swahili. In many stories he is referred to as ‘The Merchant of Death’. Little was known about this man but due to the investigation of several intelligence agencies, NGO’s and private persons there are some facts that are certain. I will base this text on the true facts and will leave things in the middle when not sure.

After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, chaos broke out in all its former states and in a lot of allied communist countries. Around that time, some clever persons with the right connections tried to bend the ruling chaos towards their pocket, to eventually benefit from it. With the idea in their head of ‘stick to what you know’, some made fortunes. Viktor Bout was one of them. His line of business happened to be the Military and more specific, the African continent.

Because of the communist ideology, entrepreneurship was never promoted in the USSR and business was something new to each of its members. No predefinded rules, business-ethics and history in this matter naturally created an atmosphere of ‘business is business’, whatever the actual traded good is.

So in his mid-twenties, full of energy, ideas and intellectual capacity, young Viktor had the right kind of network and background and lived during the right period to eventually emerge as the biggest and brightest merchant of arms and military materiel that history has ever seen. Getting his weapons and planes from all remote and abandoned military bases across the former USSR, he funelled them to Africa mostly but also to Afghanistan.

In Afghanistan he is known to have delivered goods to both sides of the pre-‘Operation Enduring Freedom’ era. He did similar things in Africa and in many cases the ‘customers’ knew about it but Viktor was their only reliable delivery man, so with their arms tied behind their back, they ignored that fact and kept on doing business with him no matter what. Mr. Bout had a reputation on delivering his goods on time, whatever the circumstances his planes and pilots may have to manoeuvre in. For anyone familiar with heated conflicts, this is quite an achievement. Delivering was hard not only because of the physical circumstances but also because of the UN-enforced weapon-embargoes on some countries. Falsifications of end-user-certificates and other documents where however easily made and, as it seems, where only theoretic barriers put up by bureaucrats behind their desk.

Operations ran trough several transit-airports worldwide. He used them to refill for gas and meanwhile to help to erase the trail behind the provenance of the goods he cargoed. Those airports are known to have been in Bulgaria, South Africa, Belgium, the UAE, Sierra Leone, etc

Through a myriad of front-companies with on-paper directors from all over the world he succeeded for a long time to get his name out of the picture. Various investigators sometimes travelled half the world to interrogate people and mainly find fake adresses, moved offices, unexistent directors or just to try to catch up and follow the trail that his shifting operations left. At any time, Viktor Bout owned a fleet of about 60 heavy cargo planes, wich had shifting tailnumber and registration shifted constantly.

Over the years, many people involved in the investigations around Viktor Bout thought that some high-placed persons (mainly in the US and Russia) were keeping their hands above his head so that he could handle his businesses without huge inconveniances. This was their belief cause Mr. Bout was one of the big reasons that wars could still be faught on a continent like Africa. He was the means that kept them going. Basically, it would have been easy to bring an end to all this by arresting just one man, the mastermind behind the scenes. But the many agencies from various governments never got to the point of even getting close to him. They lacked resources, manpower and the proper authorisations to conduct their work.

In fact, Viktor Bout was on many occasions an ally of the United States, funneling weapons to embargoed countries and bringing chaos in those areas. This way, nobody could point fingers towards the US and still, ‘things got done’.

This assumption gets all the more acceptable when you take into account that during the first years of the occupied-Iraq, the same American Government that was supposedly trying to catch ‘The Merchant of Death’ relied on companies owned by Viktor Bout to make deliveries of goods all-over Iraq. Only his fleet of cargo-airplanes and only his, mostly Russian, pilots dared to get mixed-up in the roughness of a battlefield. The US denies now that it knew at the time that it was dealing with Bout’s companies. How can they not have known? Every accredited company dealing with the US in Iraq gets overloaded with requested documents, company history and all of this goes trough several levels and needs approvals of high-ranked military personnel, and this over and over again during many shipments and years of deliveries. They were not single flights, but hundreds, worth many millions of dollars and there was nobody who knew? He almost got away with all of it. The Afghan dealings, the rebels and dictators in Africa that he supplied, etc. Untill recently (March 2008), after a several months long operation, he was caught in Thailand because the CIA set him up. Mr. Bout thought he was dealing with high-level leaders of the Colombian FARC but in fact, they were undercover agents pretending to be rebels. This arrest was quite surprising and came at a time where dealings around his persona appeared to be calm. Before his arrest, Viktor Bout lived his last couple of years as a free man in Moscow, the capital of the mighty Russian Federation. International attempts to extradite him failed because the Russian Government didn’t aknowledge his wrongdoings and therefore let him lead his public life openly. The Russians may have supported him indirectly too by unofficially approving his dealings with corrupt Generals of the Military who sold their guns, helicopters, plane and ammunition to him. After the weapon race of the Cold War, the Military had too much of them stored anyway and it was ageing. A man like Mr. Bout could help them get rid of some of this military build-up and they would then be able to inject this new capital into the economy or into their pockets, who knows what happened. It was the Russian era known as ‘The Crazy Nineties’.

After using Viktor Bout as a tool, the US decided that they had enough of him and that it was time to take him in. This is quite surprising, given their past ‘relation’ with the man. He is being accused for terrorism, a word that is often used nowadays even though his dealings cannot really be named as such. Osama bin Ladin can be called a terrorist, no doubt, but I think it is a dangerous thing to broaden the meaning of the word and apply it on Viktor Bout. For the moment Mr. Bout is therefore the biggest political prisoner in custody and is awaiting his extradition to the US in a Thai cell.

Mr. Bout is a hot topic in international courts nowadays. Even the Court in The Hague would like to judge him in the trial around former Liberian President Charles Taylor where he would be accused of conspiracy.

All this taxpayers’ money needed to catch him and trial him, while he was long time ‘supported’ in a way could be well-used for other purposes. After all, he is just a man with great intellect and a hell lot of planes who does business ‘creatively’.

Gepubliceerd door Denis Van den Weghe op 31-10-2008

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