Outlaws Inc. (17 page)

One aviation expert and illicit-cargo tracker I interview about it not only asks not to be named at all, even with a pseudonym—“in case people guess”—but wants his countries of residence and origin withheld.

“I'd rather not correct the impression people have that I live in the country I'm most associated with,” he says. “I've spoken to people before, even the guys who wrote the Bout report, but I asked them to keep my name out of there. Because I've had requests previously to meet me from certain parties who would invite me to meet them for a flight in their Il-76. I had the distinct impression that they were going to open the door for me at thirty thousand feet, without a parachute.”

That sounds like paranoia, and I dismiss it. That is, until I meet a UN investigator one summer morning in the long, platform-side champagne bar at London's St. Pancras station, hub of the high-speed Eurostar train service linking London to Paris and Brussels. He's on his way to a NATO conference in Brussels and agrees to meet for breakfast beside the platform. We talk for an hour or more in the high-up, open, glass-sided bar, beneath the vaulted ceiling and Victorian clock, and when I mention the expert's fears about meetings with some of his quarries in the plane, he chuckles with me over coffee and croissants. But he waits until my tape recorder is switched off at the end of our chat before laying a hand on my elbow and guiding me over to the side of the concourse.

“Now that that's off, I can talk to you about this,” he says. “A couple of years ago, it seems a guy fell out of a plane like your friend's, about thirty thousand feet over the Arabian Peninsula. Someone at the destination knew the number of men who had got on, but didn't see quite as many get off, so he challenged them. The airmen just said, ‘The door came open and he fell out.' Now anyone who's been on one of these planes knows that it should be very difficult to just fall out. But still, that's just what happened. Let's just say if I were your friend, I'd be very wary of going up in an old plane with anyone who might bear him a grudge. But you certainly didn't hear that from me.”

And with that he's gone, leaving me on the platform, wondering about my contact's invitations to high-altitude meetings. I think about the uncanny efficiency of the Afghan drug pipeline, and I wonder who's behind it all. Then, for the first time in months, I remember the ski-masked, armed spooks proliferating across the Surcin crash site, wiping away all traces of the men, the plane, and their cargo; the FSB and GRU men haunting Cyprus, the Middle East, and Africa. And I think: I really want, just once, to see the faces of these faceless men, to find out just who, or what, these mysterious forces are.

And then, almost immediately, I catch myself. Really, I'm not at all sure I do.

 

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

There Are Huge Forces

Afghanistan, 1995 and 2010

THE ARTIFICIAL LIGHT FIZZLES as another colleague leaves the office, switching his monitor off, grabbing a stout overcoat, and calling a brief “Good-night” toward the few desk lights that are still illuminated before hunching his shoulders and tasting the first wet blusters of the Swedish autumn night.

The angle-poised lamp, the occasional flicker of a screen reflected in the tall windows and the odd tap of a key or rustle of paper—SIPRI's own Non-Proliferation and Export Controls report, some dog-eared printouts of recent JPEG photos from the UN, perhaps—are the only clues the security patrols have that the long, pale building overlooking a black expanse of parkland in Solna, just north of the capital, is still occupied. But it is. Because this is the headquarters of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. And at this moment, someone here is sifting through databases, reports, and flight records. And just like me, they're trying to picture the faces, movements, and motivations behind the results this avalanche of information keeps throwing up.

“The British government even had a specific department that checked out aircraft registration numbers,” says SIPRI's Hugh Griffiths through the tinny echo of a cell-phone line. He's working late again, and one of the reasons he's working quite this late rankles. “They had that department precisely because they recognized that these numbers can tell you a lot about planes, and therefore a lot about who's taking what where. But they've now shut it down, leaving it all up to the likes of us to try and follow these flights and match up the records and figure out what's going on.” He lets out a short, bitter laugh. “And the reason they gave up is, ironically, that there are
so many
very distasteful people out there operating these illicit flights.”

While the responsibility for logging and checking aircraft registration, along with airworthiness and safety checks, should lie with an individual country's civil aviation authority, the reality, especially in developing economies and states with high levels of corruption, is never quite that simple. He sighs, clearly frustrated at the task faced by the monitors in nailing even the worst, most cocksure smugglers. “They're everywhere, and they're unbelievably confident. I mean, these are people who'll offer you raki and slivovitz at ten in the morning when you go to see them for a meeting about their activities. And they're all getting around any attempt to keep tabs on them by registering their planes in lax regimes like Kazakhstan, where there's no transparent, consistent, and reliable record keeping. So all the global databases, like the British one, are being utterly defeated by the lack of transparency in these unregistered countries. It's crazy—we know what they're doing, but they're always one step ahead.”

I can understand the frustration of men like Griffiths, and even more so those like Peter Danssaert of Antwerp's International Peace Information Service, whose concern—and research on behalf of clients like Amnesty International and the U.N.—has taken him deeper, into covert government involvement in the gray economy these flights serve. “As I explained to the European Commission,” notes the Belgian researcher, “many of these illicit transfers, and/or diversions of weapons, could not take place without at least one government knowing about them, and another turning a blind eye.” He adds drily: “That's most likely the reason funding can be difficult to secure. Government involvement, or at least turning a blind eye, is the second taboo in our little world, after the connections between aid flights and arms smuggling.”

This makes a difficult job into one constantly threatening to become impossible. I find Mickey hard enough to pin down, even in close conversation over a beer. The idea of trying to tackle thousands and thousands of planes, consignments, crews, clients, and cargoes every day more or less forensically seems positively quixotic.

But as Danssaert describes the slippery customers and the brazen operations; the wormholes that keep opening up and swallowing them without trace again and again, just as the net is closing around them; and the obstacles faced by researchers at IPIS, Amnesty, and within governments, I can't help thinking it seems more than merely crazy how the traffickers are always “one step ahead.”

No, not just crazy. Somehow, it seems positively uncanny—almost as if there are more powerful forces at work, throwing a spanner in the works of the monitoring and policing agencies.

And if that's the case, then the idea of poster boys like Bout and Minin as public enemies—lords of war, striding round the globe engendering chaos and destruction all by themselves—starts to seem not merely misguided but like a hugely successful red herring.

After all, Leonid Minin's coke-and-girls party was a present to himself, celebrating the successful shipment of 113 tons of small arms to West Africa. That's a lot of guns, enough to get noticed by law enforcement, even the remaining Ukrainian military.

But then, it wasn't as if nobody back in Ukraine had noticed long ago. In the mid-1990s, Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma ordered a parliamentary commission to investigate the rate at which arms went missing from his bases. The report found that of Ukraine's $89 billion in military stocks in 1992, by 1998 $32 billion had mysteriously evaporated.

No sooner was the report ready, however, than the commission was mysteriously closed down. All seventeen volumes of work disappeared. The head of the commission, General Oleksandr Ignatenko, was court-martialed and stripped of his rank. The only publisher willing to go public about the findings, a Kiev newsletter editor named Sehry Odarych, was ambushed one night outside his apartment, shot in the leg as a warning, and told as he writhed in pain against the wall of the block, “Stop getting mixed up in politics, or we'll eliminate you.” The attackers simply vanished and were never found. The police informed Odarych he'd shot his own leg in a bid for attention, though he didn't have a gun.

The secrecy around the upward connections of operations like Mickey's is often so deep and tightly enforced that it's only when things go wrong, as they did in Belgrade for Starikov and Damnjanovic, that a crack appears for a brief moment and we gain a glimpse of the forces at play.

Indeed, but for one incident, involving an Il-76 flight into Afghanistan in the mid-1990s, even the little we know about the smuggling routes from coalition- and NATO-occupied Afghanistan might never have come to light. And if the flight had gone as planned, it's possible we may never have heard of Viktor Bout or the men with no names for whom he may or may not work.

But the flight did not go as planned. And the story, even as it continues to emerge today, is one of the more curious tales in gunrunning history.

IT IS A sunny Sunday in Moscow. Young, successful, fresh-faced, and sharply dressed, film producer Ilya Neretin is the guy behind 2010's Russian record-smashing, true-story action blockbuster
Kandahar: Survive and Return
, about a gunrunning Il-76 crew's kidnap and escape from the Taliban in 1995.

The film's great—a swashbuckling, hyper-real yarn full of grit and suspense. I'm not surprised it went down so well in a resurgent Russia, just as the Rambo films did in a gung-ho 1980s America determined to reclaim some of its self-confidence even at the expense of factual reportage. But I'm interested in the story, and in its background. The men were flying a mission for Viktor Bout, but there has always been talk of darker dealings about their run to Kandahar that day; and if I can understand who these other, publicity-shy forces are with an interest in Il-76 missions like this, then perhaps I can begin to put Mickey's work in context.

We chat at length—about the film, about the state of the country then and now, about Neretin's recent private travails, about the pleasures and pains of filming in Morocco (Kandahar's body double), and about the long strange trip Russia has been on since 1991. I like Ilya a lot: He's great, easy conversation; he pulls mother-in-law stories and wisecracks out of nowhere; and though I've been chasing him for weeks for this chance to speak with him, he's got that rare ability to make you feel as though he's been bursting to get together with you for a chat for ages. And while he's telling me about the film—and the challenges involved in getting a full Il-76 and crew over to Morocco—he laughs all the time.

He likens the crews he met—the original guys, on an arms-smuggling mission for Viktor Bout to Afghanistan, and the team of Byelorussian daredevil cargo dogs he had to call to fly the Candids on film—to cowboys.

“What happens to these guys on their missions, and the captured crew especially, it's just like a western,” he says. “In westerns, the heroes say, ‘This is my land. There is no government, no police, nobody can help me—only I can do it, alone.' Our Ilyushin-76 crew on this flight came to understand that. Look around: Taliban, arms dealers—there's only enemies. In that situation, we might say the Taliban are the red Indians. So if I want to keep my freedom, or my land, as they say in westerns, I have to do it myself.”

It's a picture of crews like Mickey's I'll encounter time and again—called cowboys as an insult by those who believe they cross the blurry line between business and criminal activity too often, and as a compliment by those who know them for their self-reliance and toughness, like real-life High Plains drifters. But Ilya's words are also a shocking summation of the post-Soviet mind-set that spawned Mickey. No government, no police, and it's help-yourself time: Call it anarchy or call it Reaganomics.

Ilya is a breath of fresh air in a lot of ways. After months of wrestling information from insiders who'd rather not talk at all, I find him charming, irreverent, and wisecracking, and his interest in the crews mirrors my own. “The human story is … interesting, I think,” he agrees. “We're talking here about the taxi drivers.” Then he goes off on a tangent about a visit from his mother-in-law. There's a lot of laughter.

We've been talking for a while, and I'm feeling pretty comfy with him. I mention that I'm actually looking into the story of these crews—not just their lives but their role in spreading humanitarian aid, peacekeepers, guns, and drugs, hope, and darkness around the world.

Then I tell him it's an interesting connection in the film, that the Il-76 there was chartered by Bout.

Ilya stops me, but doesn't say anything for a moment or two. “Matt, you and I, we know what kind of world we live in, I think,” he says, finally. “Look, Matt, I will tell you this. There are so many ‘Mr. X' figures ruling this world. And Mr. Bout is a prince. But there are
kings
. If you sell arms, you will do it, if some high-up guy will cover you. My aim wasn't to get to the truth about all that. That's for prosecutors.” Then he adds: “And journalists.”

Then, suddenly, he has to go. I contact him again, but—apart from a few dating-scam e-mails obviously sent by a Trojan virus on his computer—I never hear back from him.

So I do some more digging. And that's when I discover the other side of the story of this crew's daring escape. Because the whispers are true: There's more to the story of the captured crew than his script, or he, is letting on.

Yes, this recently privatized crew of former Soviet pilots were forced down in their Il-76 and diverted to Kandahar by the Taliban back in 1995 while making an illicit arms run to the Northern Alliance—just as in the movie. And just as in the movie, they were kept hostage by the Taliban for over a year.

It's all correct, just as it happened in the film. The Russian government tried to negotiate at first, but the negotiations stalled. As the weeks became months, hope began to fade and the crew began to take matters into their own hands. They hatched a plan, talking to their captors themselves and convincing them that, as well as the cargo, the plane itself—now simply gathering dust and peeling on the airfield runway—was quite a catch, worth millions on the open market, and more as the Taliban air force's very own military-cargo transporter. But, they said, without regular maintenance and the occasional firing of the engines, it would be useless. A complex, regular maintenance regime needed all seven crewmembers, they said. And, for the first few check-ups—all conducted under armed guard—they showed the Taliban just how to do it.

By Friday, August 16, 1996, after more than a year of captivity bordering on slavery, the guards had become relaxed enough for four of them to disappear for prayer, leaving only three guarding the crew. The pilot, Vladimir Sharpatov, saw their chance. Saying only, “We need to start the engines,” the crew pushed past their captors, locking them out of the Ilyushin and starting the jets to taxi down what, by any estimation, was nowhere near enough runway for takeoff.

This is where the plane and its air force–veteran crew showed their true mettle, lifting the wheels just as runway became rock and heading not north to Russia—Sharpatov knew the Taliban would have fighter planes patrolling the air corridor by now—but west to Iran, and then on to their home away from home, Sharjah, flying just meters off the ground to evade Taliban radar. Less than three days after the heavily bearded, dazed, and exhausted crew landed at Sharjah, the fed, rested, shaven, and medically treated crew arrived home in Russia to a heroes' welcome. Three days more, and the crew were decorated with Order of Orange and Hero of the Russian Federation medals by Russian president Boris Yeltsin.

That's what happened, and it's all true. In Russia, indeed, the action film's portrayal is fast taking its place in the canon of historical fact. Dmitry Rogozin, formerly leader of Russia's Narodna (“Homeland”) party, now Russia's ambassador to NATO, even calls the film a “documentary”; he has become friends with Sharpatov, whom he calls a national hero, “like a pop star.” Well, like Mickey, Sharpatov's a brave and resourceful man. He deserves hero status.