Outlaws Inc. (8 page)

Even clients who see what they shouldn't are persuaded to look the other way for the blink of an eye it takes to make the switch. Brian Johnson-Thomas has fond memories of one crew who never missed an opportunity to double their upside, even if it meant contravening a few rules—including, seemingly, the laws of physics.

“They were the guys who managed to make two whole Lada saloon cars simply vanish inside the plane,” he laughs. Johnson-Thomas was flight managing for an NGO at the time, taking forty-five tons of blankets by Candid to a humanitarian emergency. “I had to hook up with an Il-76 and its crew who had been doing another job, but were now free and were being diverted with the blankets into the disaster area,” he recalls. Johnson-Thomas arrived at the landing-berth rendezvous and waited. The aircraft arrived, the ramp came down, and to his surprise, Johnson-Thomas saw two large Russian-made Lada cars sitting inside, where the aid was supposed to go.

“I said, ‘What's all that about?' ” he remembers. The loadmaster explained: At that point, Ladas were actually cheaper in the West than they were in Russia, and you couldn't get the spare parts back home—so they were buying secondhand Ladas in the West, taking them back to Ulyanovsk, and cannibalizing them for sale.

Johnson-Thomas was having none of it. They were absolutely full up to maximum capacity and beyond with the official load, he explained. The Ladas would have to stay behind.

“I said, ‘Look, I'm afraid the aid cargo's got to go in there, and there's no room for your dodgy Ladas,' ” he laughs. “But the navigator just took me aside and said: ‘Captain Brian, please: You go next door, you have a beer, and when you come back in one hour, you will not see any Ladas. And I will give you balance sheet, and I promise you, it will be good enough to pass.'

“Well, what could I say? So that's what I did. And when I came back, the blankets, the aid boxes, they were all in, and the cars had vanished.
Nothing
. Oh, they were there all right, somehow, but they were hidden, and true to their word, they'd made the balance sheet ‘good enough to pass.' And that's all it ever has to be.”

As a model, it's remarkably simple, the equivalent of the small-town cab driver dealing cannabis from the glove compartment with or without the say-so of Control. Only for a battered Toyota, substitute an even more battered Soviet air force flying machine. So simple, in fact, that anyone remotely capable of standing back and looking at the free-for-all that was developing could have seen what would happen, even before Il-76 crews like Mickey's started being downed by RPG-toting pirates in the Horn of Africa, blown up in Angola, and kidnapped by the Taliban—and before all that contraband spilled from the stockpiles onto the battlefields and urban jungles.

But nobody
was
capable of standing back. For the West, this was the peachy-keen 1990s. The Cold War was over. Now let the markets self-regulate and bring peace and prosperity. Never mind the fact that the living standard in Russia itself had plummeted since free-market reform. Never mind that life expectancy was falling. Never mind the bloody conflicts from Nagorno-Karabakh to Rwanda. Unfettered movement of goods across borders had to be applauded, not hindered. These were birth pangs for a new universal order of peace and prosperity in which the angels of the free market would make this the best of all possible worlds. In America, the Clinton administration was so sold on this vision that even when they were told about the mafia takeover in Russia, they dismissed the evidence: One report was returned from the desk of Vice President Al Gore with “a barnyard epithet”—reportedly the word
Horseshit
—scrawled across the front.

At the same time, across starved, bankrupted early-to-mid-1990s Russia, a phenomenon called “shuttle trading” was taking shape. Using the newfound freedom to travel and the last few rubles they could scrape together, Russians took overnight buses to Turkey, Greece, or Italy to buy cheap, but to many still impossibly exotic, tablecloths, dresses, plates, whatever, and sell them back home at a small profit, having paid off the customs men at the border. It was a return to the Middle Ages; a Silk Road stalked by killers. The casualty toll was enormous: In the yellow light of the night stations and coach terminals, muggers and cutthroats picked off the traders, and bent police and border guards would routinely steal the gear and the money. Rapes, beatings, and killings of shuttle traders were common.

Mickey's team, he cheerily admits, were a bit like shuttle traders. The difference was they had the plane, so they could sidestep the hassles and turn it into a high-volume business. The fact that transport costs were soaked up by the shipper of the stated cargo and they could cover distances their grounded compatriots could only dream of made their business within a business irresistible and devastatingly profitable—especially since new orders could be telephoned through often at a moment's notice, and practically any time before the plane doors shut.

Others were having the same idea. Suddenly, demilitarized crews and their Candids were flying weapons and contraband in and out of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus for everyone and anyone—including the newly named Taliban, whose fighters had only a couple years ago been shooting Il-76s out of the sky but who now reportedly became valued customers for arms and ammo shipments.

Rumors of official toleration of, even involvement in the booming illicit and sanction-busting arms trade—by government, big business, the foreign intelligence GRU, the KGB, or its successor the FSB—have never completely disappeared. Throughout the 1990s, the authorities in Russia, Ukraine, and Byelorussia appeared to have bigger fish to fry: Simply regaining control of their armies and maintaining civil society took precedent over chasing down smugglers. Besides, weren't they clearing the former Red Army's own stockpiles, and emulating the best capitalist tradition of entrepreneurship in doing so?

 

CHAPTER SEVEN

Rogue State

Yugoslavia, 1994–1996

RUMORS OF OFFICIAL, even governmental, collusion with the arms pipeline that had opened up all along the former Soviet lands seemed just that—rumors, the ravings of conspiracy theorists and ousted politicos with axes to grind. But as fate would have it, the world would soon get its smoking gun. The events of the stormy small hours of August 19, 1996—and the dogged, even foolhardy persistence of a small group of local reporters-cum-snoopers determined to uncover the truth—would alert the world to just how influential some of Mickey's paymasters are. And just how far they were prepared to go to avoid detection.

The Il-76 screams through the humid blue night, a black shape slipping over the Belgrade Hyatt and through the low clouds on the edge of town. It's silhouetted against the lightning, clearly visible for a split second to drinkers, late diners, and businessmen at the bar of the Hyatt, before it all goes black once more. The shadow roars over the river and dives into the forest of office blocks on the far side. At the very last second, the wingtip rises clear of the tallest high-rise, and the fuel-laden Candid screams on through the city center, low enough to tear aerials from skyscraper roofs. Eyes wide in the black, the pilot peers into pitch darkness beyond the cockpit glass. They're eyeball-deep in the shit now, and no two-thousand-dollar bonus payment on earth is going to get them out of it.

The pilot is a man named Vladimir Starikov, a jobbing cargo pilot and former Soviet air force comrade of Mickey's, on a run from Ekaterinburg in Russia, south via his last stop, Belgrade. An old hand, he refuses to panic, but he knows he's running low on options as he circles his Il-76 endlessly above the darkened streets, blocks, and bridges of Belgrade, searching for a way down. He's been in tight spots before and he'll get out of this one just the same.

What had started as just another night flight from Ekaterinburg to points unknown, stopping over for a change of cargo in Belgrade and with another planned in Malta, will, by dawn, become one of aviation's great mysteries, up there with Bermuda Triangle flight 19 and the disappearance of Amelia Earhart.

The crossroads of East and West are studded with sketchy refueling and off-loading stop-offs; tiny islands like Malta and Cyprus, where import-export is the only business there is, and nobody's watching. Both were popular with the Yugoslav regime's gofers. Since the 1970s, Northern Cyprus had been a popular ops base for Middle Eastern terrorists and KGB agents directing “black ops” in the Med and Middle East. “In the 1990s,” reported
Zavtra
's Valentin Prussakov, “thousands of ‘redundant' secret service agents lost no time in shedding their epaulets and going into private business. Many opened offshore companies based on the island, followed by a heavy flow of Russian capital.” But it was not all Russian. By 1996, both islands were much-loved flags of convenience, letterheads, and stopovers for a host of post–Soviet bloc contraband-trafficking boats and planes alike.

For this shadow world of international smuggling, trafficking networks, and secret agents, tonight's repercussions will continue long after the fires have been put out. But right now, for the pilot and crew, the fight of their lives is just beginning.

Starikov orders up wheels: no wheels. Lights: no lights. He curses the chances. On landing in Belgrade after their inbound flight from Ekaterinburg, he'd headed off for some rest while the crew, and some ground guys, carried out the usual inspection. When they'd told him how the onboard power fizzled and faded, he'd insisted there was no way they could go on to Malta that night as planned. He hates himself now, silently, like they all do, for having been persuaded by the extra two thousand dollars each that the boss had stumped up. But hell, this is 1996. For a bunch of ex-Soviet air force flyboys living job to job, two thousand dollars cash is a whole lot of money for a night's work.

Sure enough, at 12:25 A.M. on Monday, August 19, 1996, just fifteen minutes after takeoff from Belgrade's Surcin airport en route for Malta, the onboard electrics on flight PAR-3601 blink, surge, then fail completely, plunging them into darkness. The instruments go dead. The radio fails. At the same instant, the plane's external and landing lights fail. All instruments are now dead. Desperate calls by controllers on all frequencies are in vain. Just radio silence, and the eerie rushing of the breeze around the control tower. To the ground, the Ilyushin is now a silent blip on their screens.

If the cargo is what pilot and crew had begun to suspect, they must be trying hard not to think about it. Inside what is now a blind-flying 176-ton petrol bomb, they frantically try to bring the electrics back online.

Starikov and his copilot Vladimir Barsenov have forty-four years of flying experience between them. They are coolheaded men, and they and the crew—including a veteran flight engineer, a radio operator, and a navigator—aren't going down without a fight. Unable to raise ground control on their radio and in the sudden blackness of a powerless cockpit, Starikov knows they have only one choice: to abort the flight and try to bring the 176-ton plane down—packed as it is with 109 tons of jet fuel and a hold that's way too full of black cargo.

The pilot turns 180 degrees, or as close as he can judge it, and heads back toward Belgrade. If they can find their way back to the city without navigation, ground contact, or lights, he's hopeful, even in the midnight darkness, of spotting the airport and runway through his cockpit window amid the grid of streets and fields below. Then maybe, just maybe, he can bring this thing down gently.

For three hours, the stricken Il-76 roars desperately in circles above Belgrade, silhouetted against the flashes of the stormy night sky, its instruments still dead and its radio silent, all navigation gone. Even the bulbs by which the crew would normally be able to see and move about the plane are gone, as are the plane's external lights—including its headlamps. The darkness up there in the cloud is absolute, and Starikov's only choice is to try to remain low enough to see beneath the storm clouds but high enough to clear the city's bridges and buildings.

The overloaded Il-76 is now heading back over the crowded capital of Miloševi
ć
's mafia kingdom, hidden by clouds and invisible to other aircraft. Inside the iron giant, the crew works in total darkness, or by the meager light of a torch or a cigarette, to bring the systems back online. Using their watches and a magnetic compass, they calculate their entry into Belgrade airspace and descend through the soaking black cloud with a roaring noise that shakes buildings as they pass, way too low. There it is below—Belgrade city center. Descending to 150 meters, they search frantically for their bearings—witnesses see them narrowly miss the top of another building, the twenty-four-story Beogradjanka skyscraper, at around 1:30 A.M. Some lean from windows, try to take pictures, ending up, said one, with nothing more than a dark passing shadow, a blurry Loch Ness photo.” Then the monster disappears off into the suburbs, before screaming in, just as low, for another pass.

Some eyewitnesses claim Starikov's panicking now, disoriented and scanning the ground, lower and lower, for the airport, while others at Surcin reckon he knows exactly what he's doing as he keeps passing low over the airport, gauging the ground for landing three or four times, in a clear attempt to raise the alarm. And still the stricken Ilyushin-76 circles, tighter and tighter, lower and lower, not wanting to lose its bearings—over the airport, the city center, and the thronging, partying Hyatt and InterContinental over in New Belgrade—roaring back and forth in what the waiting crash teams now know is Vladimir Starikov's attempt to burn as much fuel as possible before he takes his final gamble.

At 3:00 A.M., residents see the plane narrowly clear Block 44 in New Belgrade and head low over Bezanijska Kosa, its landing gear lowered. Without electricity the crew have labored desperately in pitch darkness to lower the wheels of the giant plane by hand. At the airport, the fire crews are scrambled. Helpless, they can only watch and wait. Finally, the plane turns 180 degrees over Surcin airport and aims for the runway from the northwest, coming in fast, an earsplitting black shadow.

In a split second, it's over. When the Il-76 explodes, its wingtip touching the ground and slamming the plane into the fields at the runway's end, the fireball is so intense that it slams shrapnel and aircraft parts into the control-tower walls, smashing the concrete. Starikov, Barsenov, and anyone and anything else onboard are vaporized, blasted over hundreds of meters of airport land.

And that's where Vladimir Starikov's last flight gets really strange. Because instead of investigators, rescue teams, and fire crews, the first forces to the crash area were the secret police. Faces shaded, backed by soldiers, they began to fan out across the area.

The Men in Black worked fast through the dawn, methodically erasing evidence of the plane's cargo. Witnesses were spirited away, cameras confiscated, recording equipment smashed, residents advised at gunpoint to forget anything that may, or may not, have happened that evening. The agents fanned out along the adjacent motorway, blocking exits and preventing traffic from slowing down as it came within eyeshot of the burning wreckage. The suburb was shut down. The men guarding the perimeter had clear orders: “Not one living thing comes in or goes out.”

By sunrise, they'd turned the runway into an Area 51–like compound: total blackout. But even as the secret police and airport security chased off journalists, a couple of reporters considered tame to the regime were not only allowed through, but invited for an official briefing on the cause of the crash—though the wreckage continued to burn too fiercely for anybody to approach the plane. Something about the wreck of flight 3601 was so sensitive that even Russian diplomats, responding to the news that a Russian plane carrying Russian nationals had crashed, were barred from the site by black-clad men with automatic weapons.

Belgrade-based photographer Igor Salinger, who rushed to the site, had heard the plane on several occasions, enough to become used to its distinctive roar. “I'm used to plane sounds,” he recalls today. “As well as being professionally connected to aviation, I live on the path to Runway 30, around the outer marker.”

This time, he figured something was very wrong from the overhead roaring, even through the fog of sleep. The crash, he says, sounded from his bed “just like a series of distant explosions like … well, kind of like firecrackers.” Salinger fell back into a fitful sleep, waking again as day broke. Pulling on his jeans and jacket and grabbing his cameras, the photographer made his way to the crash site. Something large was burning out past the perimeter, but Salinger found himself barred by a cordon of men in blue uniforms. They were everywhere; alongside the motorway, the pavements, the roads, even the fields where the black twisted mass burned and smoldered. “It was August, so the corn was high—easily man-height —and it helped hide what needed to be hidden,” he recalls. “At that point, you could only see the big ‘T' of the tail still sticking up.” Salinger tried to get into the Yugoslav Aeronautical Museum, whose windows offered a perfect view down onto the site, but already police and staff had cordoned the building off. Still, he bumped into an acquaintance there—one of the men who'd been clearing the site. The man said something that made Salinger's blood run cold. And little by little, the truth began to emerge.

“The guy was, let's say, someone who knew about these things, and he'd seen the wreck,” recalls Salinger. “And all he said to me was, ‘It looks like Qadaffi's not getting a flypast at his military parade this year.”

Still, Salinger had his work cut out. “The crash site was sealed off for, if I recall, thirteen days,” he says. “Until they had picked up everything that should not be seen.” The photographer finally crept through the farmland and thicket on the far perimeter and managed to snap a few shots; first from a distance, through the corn, and then finally, the wreckage, which the police thought they'd combed and “cleaned” properly. They hadn't. When he managed to sneak through, he found that among the wreckage were aircraft tires and avionics parts, way too small to be from an Ilyushin.

More men called in to do the “cleaning” of the site began to gossip. They reported seeing 23mm ammunition among the wreckage in large quantities. The cleanup was not as thorough as the authorities hoped. Then avionics parts for Yugoslav-produced Galeb and Jastreb fighter planes, then 23mm cannon ammunition.

On his last visit, desperation at the thought of all evidence being erased that there had ever been a crash, he snatched a burned piece of wreckage from the Il-76: “A sick souvenir,” he admits. It would be something to hold on to when the official denials started.

Opposition newsweekly
Vreme
's Russian correspondent in Ekaterinburg, Sergei Kuznetsov, called in some favors from military sources there. They discovered that the doomed Il-76 had, somewhat oddly, been insured by the Russian military. But he was told “that does not mean it was carrying arms … most of our clients are renowned organizations like the Russian Security Service, the General Staff Military Cooperation Department, or President Yeltsin's transport service.”

Meanwhile, the investigators at
Vreme
started digging, led by a determined veteran reporter named Milos Vasic—one of the paper's founders and himself an aviator who'd flown helicopters in Asia in the seventies as a reporter for a news agency. Vasic and his team smelled a rat. So doggedly did he pursue the story—and such were the lengths to which the secret police went to stop him—that today, talking at his home in Belgrade, the sixty-five-year-old with dark “deadline circles” under his eyes laughs himself into a wheezing cough remembering slipping onto a train to Budapest “every time I needed to phone our contact in Russia, so I knew I wasn't being tapped.”