Outlaws Inc. (36 page)

By last summer Sergei, liveliest of them all, had also bought the farm. The sky took him (of all people; the general feeling is that it beat the bottle by about a week) while he was freelancing on another plane with another crew. Unlucky is what they say, but even the greatest sleight of hand can only hold off gravity for so long. I tend to think of him when I drink too much and regret it, and also on the rare occasions I skip stones, their kinetic energy and lift slowly giving out until they fall. I'm sure he'd laugh if he knew.

Word is that Lev just disappeared one day—he just didn't turn up for a shift, a perennial favorite of crewmembers chasing bigger bucks. Posted missing, presumed got out in time. The last anyone heard from him, he was muttering about moving to Thailand, flying with smaller planes and setting up in the bar business, but it doesn't look like he ever got it started—it's all been way too quiet out there.

Eternally pissed-off Dmitry and whatever friends or strangers made up the numbers flight by flight could still be out there, flying for whoever has the work. I actually spoke to Dmitry on the phone, once, after I left Africa. After all his prickly attitude, he turned out to be the one who told me to keep in touch, and I lucked into him on a call home. He said times had been pretty tough; they're all banning Antonovs and Ilyushins for being too noisy, too old, too unregistered; plus everyone else was starting to get in on the act.

As it happened, Evgeny Zakharov was saying the same thing at the same time: “You know who kicked us out of the Somalia contract? White South Africans. We were a bargain, but now they're the bargain fliers in Africa.” The airline owner's got a weariness about him today, but I can't help thinking he sounds almost relieved as he says, before we bid good-bye: “Russian pilots are not as attractive as they used to be.”

The phone call with Dmitry was shorter than I'd hoped. He seemed different, younger, more relaxed somehow away from the plane. He said he had been marooned in Asia without a flight out of there for weeks, and he'd realized it couldn't carry on that way for too long anymore, not financially. He said maybe it's time he put in some hours as a trainer. Then a woman's voice was shouting in the background, and he had to go. Now the piece of paper's gone, but it doesn't matter. So is my connection to his world. Like the man Wittgenstein said: Even if a lion could speak, you wouldn't understand what it wanted to tell you.

And the others? Well, if you hear anything, tell me. They've melted away, two or three removes too distant for an armchair stalker like me to hope to keep tabs on them. Maybe the bullet in the night got them too, maybe not. I'd like to think maybe they made it through, cheated the most dangerous, nobody-gives-a-damn business on this flyblown planet, and came in for their final landing okay. It's a phrase a lot of these Eastern flyboys use when they want to say retire, and now I can see why. Say “retire” and you tempt fate, invite smoking engines and moving mountaintops.
Retiring
is a laughable ambition;
landing
is something they know they can pull off.

So happy landings, whoever's left. I like to think you catch a drink together sometimes, by a poolside in Dubai or some back porch in Tatarstan, Thailand, or God knows where, but maybe that's just me. Are you alive or dead? I guess you get to be both until I track you down and find out. And you know as well as I do, that will never happen. So for now, I just keep looking at the sky.

One day, somebody will write a real book about these men and the dangers they face; the kind of book that makes politicians sit up and listen. And then the whole damn circus will stop; there'll be no more junk planes, no more deathtraps, no more exploding cargoes, no more cash deals, no more bribes, no more four-day, nonstop operations, and no more of the kind of lives that push men like Mickey to the edge and over. The last of the independents will be unionized, grounded, regulated, the skies made safe, the business brought into line, the men protected. Like the rest of us, they'll live their lives on CCTV, pay their taxes, get mortgages, join what passes for regular society. One day it'll happen.

Meanwhile, the clouds keep moving, the rivers flow; the dust blows forward and back; the last free men on earth fly across those great, dark spaces between the radar; and the planes, money, and cargo keep on flowing across the lines we've drawn on a few bits of paper.

It's getting cold. Back home, February's already here with an easterly wind that chills the bones. Time to go inside, where there's light. It's only when I reach the pool of yellow light by the door of my home and look back that I realize how quickly the night can fall here in the Northern Hemisphere. Now there's just a small point of light crawling high above, making its way across the sky to the northeast. And it cheers me to think that up there, high above the black earth, someone is looking through a cockpit window and thinking about home.

Mickey, if you're up there somewhere, I'll see you for that cold Baltika on the other side sometime.

And Sergei, you were right. I worry far too much.

 

Author's Note

While Mickey's world is one that bears a striking resemblance to the world we live in, it is a world that straddles not only the ambiguities in national and international law but also lines of loyalty and conduct in personal, command, legal, and business relationships. It has been made very clear to me several times in the course of researching and writing this book that the disclosure of the identities of many of the men herein would potentially lead not only to serious implications (for them and their continuing employability), lawsuits (from them), or unwelcome attention and even criminal charges (against them), but to exposure to serious harm.

For these reasons, and in many cases the trust placed in me by these men and women, the names and characters, not only of the man, men, and combination thereof whom I have elected to call Mickey and his crew, have been changed, scrambled, and composited, along with enough physical, business, geographical, and biographical details to make them wholly unidentifiable—and although Mickey and Sergei are now dead, it is out of respect to them and their associates, as well as regard for the small world in which they operated, that I adhere to this policy there, too. For the same reason, and because flight plans are filed and kept, I have changed dates and locations for the action around flights and destinations in almost all cases. (To be clear: None of the men who could be this pilot was named Mikhail, Misha, Mickey or anything like; they were not from Siberia or Vitebsk, and the real Mickey's features have been altered to render him unidentifiable. So if you think you recognize him, Sergei, or any of the others from the physical description, name, personal history, flight paths, airplane details, or by patching together flight times and places, you are mistaken, and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is a coincidence.

Otherwise, throughout the text I have changed or withheld other names only when expressly asked either for a pseudonym or to be quoted off the record for that contribution or part of his or her overall contribution. In some instances I have changed and/or withheld names gained in conversations and interviews long ago for other projects, simply because I believe that not to do so would have been to compromise the individual and betray his or her trust.

For all of these reasons and more, and with apologies to the aviation-hardware buffs out there: Even though I make no suggestion that their employers, colleagues, or other contacts are involved in or even necessarily aware of any of these activities on a corporate level, I have also elected not to specify the precise models of the planes on which I was privileged to have been invited, nor their businesses, numbers, or distinguishing features by which they can be identified, and enough locations and dates have been altered to render them securely anonymous—and such inconsistencies as that entails are acknowledged. For legal reasons, I have in many cases withheld identifiers.

It is worth noting that the term
Russian
is used by many—especially in Africa, Arabia, and the Far East—including by Russians themselves (Evgeny Zakharov calls the Tajik and Ukrainian planes Russian here), as a cover-all for people from largely Russian-speaking Slavic countries of the former USSR. While this blurring is deplorable (ask any Welshman, Scotsman or, heaven forbid, Irishman who's been called English abroad), it is understandable, and as the strange cases of Viktor Bout and Leonid Minin show, such blurring is often positively encouraged by the men themselves.

My policy has been to correct infelicities of language in my interviewees, cutting out stumbles over words and repetition—this has simply been done for clearer reading, and not to change the sense. For instance, Richard Chichakli refers to “the Eastern Bunny” in his original letter to me, and in person, many of the airmen's conversation is almost as littered with pauses, vocab questions, and malapropisms as my Russian.

Finally, the men who form the core of this narrative are also what used to be called Soviets, simply because they were the ones in the eye of this particular hurricane, and they are the ones whose lives I glimpsed. They are men—no better or worse than any others—and indeed they could be, and just as often are, Americans, British, Germans, Ugandans, Moroccans, South Africans, Chinese, Dutch, French, Mexicans, Italians, Congolese, Brazilians, you, me.

 

Acknowledgments

My thanks to the many friends, aviators, monitors, fellow travelers, and experts who gave their time, and sometimes more, even at risk to their personal safety, generously. And most of all, my friendship and gratitude to the crews, and to Mickey's crew—Mickey and Sergei especially, wherever they are.

Special thanks:
First and foremost, my thanks to the crewmen with whom I flew, drank, and talked.

Thanks to:
Marshal Evgeny Shaposhnikov, Nikolay Viktorovich Korchunov, Brian Johnson-Thomas, Milos Vasic, Igor Salinger, Nigel Tallantire, Katya Stepanova, Ambassador Dmitry Rogozin, Peter and Ira, Evgeny Zakharov, Martin Ssebuyira, Ilya Neretin, Iain Clark, John MacDonald (and his Secret Friend), Moisés Naím, Ernest Mezak at the Komi Memorial Commission of Human Rights, Linda Polman, Andrei Soldatov, Mira Markovic, Aaron Hewit, Arthur Kent, Andrei Lovtsov, Sharren (Shazz) Glencross, Terry Bonner, Dr. Mark Galeotti, Richard Chichakli, Dominic Medley, Ahmed Rashid, Dmitry Tarasevich, Tatyana Parkhalina, TRAFFIC, Andrey Formin, Patrick Matsiko wa Mucoori, Peacock at
Red Pepper,
Kigongo at
New Vision
, Sarah Robson, Kevin O'Flynn and Oksana Smirnova at the
Moscow Times
, Branislav, Planecrazi, Dr. Christopher M. Davidson, the Embassy of the Republic of Byelorussia in Great Britain, Alexey Zaytsev, Haroun, Tricia O'Rourke, Jock, Andrew Hirsch, Dean Fitzpatrick, Savita Singh, Rachel Butters, Boris, Zayna, Jamie, Gordana and Natalya, Ian Belcher, “The Antonov Man,” Hugh Griffiths at SIPRI, Damian Clarke at Olympus, “A” at Ilyushin, the nice guys at the MONUC compound (you know who you are), the amazing, elusive
Vreme
writers who worked with Milos Vasic on that story, Jovan Dulovic, Ilija Vukelic (Belgrade) Branko Stosic (Moscow) and Sergei Kuznetsov (Ekaterinburg), who worked with Milos Vasic at Vreme and whose investigative brilliance, along with Vasic's, formed the basis for my account of the Surcin crash, and the countless crews, ground staff, witnesses, researchers, and businesspeople who have given their time freely and gone to greater or lesser lengths to contribute, and have trusted me to use their input responsibly. I hope I have not let you down.

Without whom this book would not have been possible:
Peter Danssaert of the International Peace Information Service (IPIS) generously put his time, assistance and expertise at my service at several crucial moments over the course of this book's gestation, and I am endlessly grateful. Jane Mulkerrins, Doug McKinlay, Humfrey Hunter at Hunter Profiles, Clare Conville, Jake Smith-Bosanquet, Susan Armstrong and Henna Silvennoinen at Conville & Walsh. Ben Adams, Michelle Blankenship, Nathaniel Knaebel, Patti Ratchford and, copy editor Will Georgantas at Bloomsbury USA. Ingrid Connell, Bruno Vincent and Ali Blackburn at Pan MacMillan, Juergen Diessl at Ullstein, Alan J Kaufman, David and Linda Potter, Richard Hamilton, Laura Cope, Alisdair Donaldson, Jeremy Points, Jacqui Grice, Ron Piper and the mysterious Mr E. You know who you are. Most of all, very special thanks to my wife Lila, whose help with the countless interviews conducted for this book has been invaluable, and whose patience and belief made it possible.

THE FAMILIES OF THE CREWMEN WHO DIED IN MOGADISHU

A charitable fund has been set up by the company who employed the crew of Candid EW-78849, shot down over Mogadishu in 2007, to help support the families of the slain Byelorussian crewmen. For information on how to contribute, visit www.transaviaexport.com.

 

Bibliography

Further reading, and books to which, to a greater or lesser extent, I am indebted:

PRIMARY BOOK SOURCES

Although my focus and conclusions differ from the authors', I am deeply indebted to the research carried out by Douglas Farah and Stephen Braun in
Merchant of Death
.

For their expertise on the planes and their history and specifications, as well as stories of the exploits and mishaps seen by the planes and their crews, I am similarly indebted to the excellent series of guides by Dmitri Kommisarov and Yefim Gordon, the most essential of which (to me) are mentioned below.

My account of the Belgrade crash owes much to the work of the newspaper
Vreme
—not just the reporters mentioned above, but the entire organization.

Alexeivich, Svetlana.
Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from a Forgotten War.
London: Chatto & Windus, 1992.

Armstrong, Stephen.
War PLC: The Rise of the New Corporate Mercenary.
London: Faber & Faber, 2009.

Barrand, Jude, and Dominic Medley.
Kabul: The Bradt Mini Guide
. Chalfont St. Peter, UK: Bradt, 2004.

Bowden, Mark.
Killing Pablo
. London: Atlantic Books, 2001.

Boyles
,
Denis.
African Lives: White Lies, Tropical Truth, Darkest Gossip, and Rumblings of Rumor—from Chinese Gordon to Beryl Markham, and Beyond
. New York: Ballantine, 1989.

Bulgakov, Mikhail.
The Master and Margarita
. London: Picador, 1989.

Collin, Matthew.
This Is Serbia Calling.
London: Serpent's Tail, 2001.

Conrad, Joseph.
Heart of Darkness.
London: Penguin Classics edition, 2007.

Davidson, Christopher M.
Dubai: The Vulnerability of Success
. London: C. Hurst & Co., 2009.

Farah, Douglas, and Stephen Braun.
Merchant of Death
. New York: Wiley, 2007.

Feifer, Gregory.
The Great Gamble: The Soviet War in Afghanistan
. London: Harper Perennial, 2010.

Gilby, Nicholas.
The Arms Trade
. Oxford: New Internationalist, 2009.

Glenny, Misha.
McMafia: Seriously Organized
Crime. London: Vintage, 2008.

Goldman, Marshall.
Oilopoly: Putin, Power & the Rise of the New Russia
. Oxford: Oneworld, 2010.

Hatfield, James.
Fortunate Son: George W. Bush & the Making of an American President
. London: Vision, 2002.

Hobsbawm, Eric.
Bandits.
London: Abacus, 2001.

Hoffman, David E.
The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy
. New York: Anchor/Random House, 2010.

Holdsworth, Nick.
Moscow: The Beautiful and the Damned.
London: Andrew Deutsch, 2003.

Klebnikov, Paul.
Godfather of the Kremlin: The Decline of Russia in the Age of Gangster Capitalism.
New York: Harcourt, 2000.

Klein, Joe.
The Natural: The Misunderstood Presidency of Bill Clinton.
New York:
Doubleday,
2002.

Kommisarov, Dmitri, and Yefim Gordon.
Antonov An-12: The Soviet Hercules
. Hinkley, UK: Midland Publishing, 2007.

_____
,
Ilyushin 76: Russia's Versatile Airlifter
. Hinkley, UK: Midland Publishing, 2001.

Lanning, Michael Lee.
Mercenaries.
New York: Presidio Press, 2005.

LeBor, Adam.
Miloševi
ć
.
London: Bloomsbury, 2003.

Litvinenko, Alexander (with Yuri Felshtinsky).
Blowing Up Russia
. London: Gibson Square Books, 2007.

Meyer, Karl E.
The Dust of Empire: The Race for Mastery in the Asian Heartland.
New York: Public Affairs, 2004.

Naím, Moíses.
Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers and Copycats Are Hijacking the Global Economy
. London: Arrow, 2007.

Parsons, Anthony.
From Cold War to Hot Peace: UN Interventions, 1947-94.
London: Penguin, 1995.

Polman, Linda.
War Games: The Story of Aid and War in Modern Times
. London: Viking, 2010.

Rashid, Ahmed.
Taliban
. London: IB Tauris & Co., 2000.

Robbins, Christopher,
Kazakhstan: The Land that Disappeared
. London: Profile, 2008.

_____
Air America
. London: Corgi, 1988.

Rogozin, Dmitry.
The Hawks of Peace.
Unpublished manuscript, 2010.

Schroeder, Matthew, Dan Smith, and Rachel Stohl.
The Small Arms Trade
. 2007.

Soldatov Andrei, and Irina Borogan.
The New Nobility: The Restoration of Russia's Security State and the Enduring Legacy of the KGB
. London: Public Affairs, 2010.

Stiglitz, Joseph.
Globalization and Its Discontents
. London: Penguin, 2003.

Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
Armaments, Disarmament and International Security: SIPRI Yearbook, 2009
. Stockholm: SIPRI, 2009.

Taylor, Brian D.
Politics and the Russian Army: Civil-Military Relations 1689–2000
. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Transparency International.
Preventing Corruption in Humanitarian Operations: A Handbook
. Berlin: Transparency International, 2010.

Vaisman, Alexey, and Pavel Fomenko.
Siberia's Black Gold: Harvest and Trade in Amur River Sturgeons in the Russian Federation.
Cambridge: TRAFFIC Europe, 2006.

SELECTED REPORTS

Amnesty International.
Democratic Republic of Congo: Arming the East,
2005.

_____
.
Blood at the Crossroads: Making the Case for a Global Arms Trade Treaty,
2008
.

Danssaert, Peter, and Brian Johnson-Thomas. Disarmament Forum.
Illicit Brokering of SALW in Europe: Lacunae in Eastern European Arms Control and Verification Regimes
, 2009.

Finardi, Sergio (TA), Amnesty International.
Dead on Time: Arms Transportation, Brokering and the Threat to Human Rights
, 2006 .

Finardi, Sergio, Brian Johnson-Thomas, and Peter Danssaert. IPIS vzw (21 December 2009):
From Deceit to Discovery: The Strange Flight of 4L-AWA;
and IPIS vzw (8 February 2010):
From Deceit to Discovery: An Update.

_____
. IPIS (3 December 2010):
Mapping the Labyrinth: More on the Strange Weapons Flight of 4L-AWA.
Available at ipisresearch.be.

Griffiths, Hugh, and Mark Bromley. SIPRI/SEESAC,
Air Transfers and Destabilizing Commodity Flows
, 2009.

_____
.
Stemming Destabilizing Arms Transfers: The Impact of European Union Air Safety Bans
, 2008.

Griffiths, Hugh, and Adrian Wilkinson. UNDP, SEESAC,
Guns, Planes and Ships: Identification and Disruption of Clandestine Arms Transfers
.

IPIS vzw: All Party Parliamentary Group on the Great Lakes Region:
Arms flows in Eastern DR Congo,
2004.

Mercury Public Affairs LLC, on behalf of its foreign principal His Highness Sheikh Khalid bin Saqr Al Qasimi.
Ras Al Khaimah: A Rogue State in the UAE?
,
(2010).

_____
.
Ras Al Khaimah: Gateway to Trade with Iran
.

Reports of the Group of Experts Submitted by the Security Council Committee Established Pursuant to Resolution 1533 (2004) Concerning the Democratic Republic of the Congo, 2004–2010.

Reports of the Monitoring Group and the Panel of Experts on Somalia and Submitted Through the Security Council Committee Established Pursuant to Resolutions 751 (1992) and 1907 (2009) Concerning Somalia, 2002–2010.

Reports of the Security Council Committee Established Pursuant to Resolution 1267 (1999) Concerning Al-Qaida and the Taliban and Associated Individuals and Entities, 1999–2009.

Reports of the Security Council Committee Established Pursuant to Resolution 1521 (2003) Concerning Liberia, 2003–2010.

Reports of the Security Council Committee Established Pursuant to Resolution 1591 (2005) Concerning the Sudan, 2005–2010.

Reports of the Security Council Committee Pursuant to Resolutions 751 (1992) and 1907 (2009) Concerning Somalia and Eritrea, 2005–2008.

SEESAC/UNDP. Western Balkans Parliamentary Forum on Small Arms and Light Weapons.
Analysis of National Legislation on Arms Exports and Transfers in the Western Balkans,
2006.

Wood, Brian, and Johan Peleman.
The Arms Fixers
. Peace Research Institute, Oslo, 1999.

NEWSPAPERS AND PERIODICALS

I am particularly indebted to Serbia's V
reme
, whose investigation into the Belgrade crash and its significance laid the foundations for so many subsequent monitoring reports as well as the account here; and
Zyrianskoe Zhizn
, whose tireless chasing (by activist-reporter Ernest Mezak) of the causes and motivations surrounding the crashes of Russian airmen in Africa, and statements from authorities and airmen, have shaped my understanding of their world. Ernest, thank you for your generous assistance. I also owe a debt of thanks to the
New York Times
for the quality and foresight of the interviews with Damnjanovic and Bout, and
The Guardian
for its arms dealers series. Others: the
Moscow Times, Pravda, Sovershenno Sekretno, Take-Off, Current Digest of the Post-Soviet Press, Kommersant, Moskovsky Komsomolets
(Moscow),
St. Petersburg Times
(St. Petersburg),
Zyrianskoe Zhizn
(Komi),
Vreme, Politika, VIP
(Belgrade), the
Guardian
, the
Independent,
the
Times,
the
Economist, International Who's Who
(UK), the
Independent,
the
Daily Monitor, New Vision,
the
Eye
(Kampala),
Foreign Policy,
the
New York Times
,
Washington Monthly
,
An-Novosti/Antonov News
(from the Antonov Aeronautical Scientific/Technical Complex, Ukraine),
Afghan Daily
(Kabul),
Gulf News, Gulf Today
(UAE)

ONLINE RESOURCES

Afghan newswire
:
www.pajhwok.com

Amnesty International: www.amnesty.org

Aviation Safety Network Database of the Flight Safety Foundation: www.aviation-safety.net

Ethical Cargo: www.ethicalcargo.org

International Peace Information Service: www.IPISresearch.be

The Professional Pilots' Rumour Network: www.pprune.org

Registan news source in English for Central Asia: www.registan.net

The South Eastern and Eastern Europe Clearinghouse for the Control of Small Arms and Light Weapons (SEESAC): www.seesac.org

Stockholm International Peace Research Institute: www.sipri.org

SOME OF THE PEOPLE IN THE BOOK

Air Cess: www.aircess.com

Viktor Bout: www.viktorbout.com

Richard Chichakli: www.chichakli.com

Adam Curtis: adamcurtisfilms.blogspot.com

Mark Galeotti's excellent blog: www.inmoscowsshadows.wordpress.com

Arthur Kent's documentary news channel: www.skyreporter.com

Doug McKinlay: www.dougmckinlay.com

Amb. Dmitry Rogozin: www.rogozin.ru

Andrei Soldatov's index on Russia's secret state: www.agentura.ru

The Yorkshire Ranter: www.yorkshire-ranter.blogspot.com

Evgeny Zakharov's Soviet Air Charter: www.sovietaircharter.com