flickering pictures

If you didn’t know who he was, you’d swear he looked more like a merchant of used cars. Or plaid suits. Or kielbasa maybe. Anything but semi-automatic rifles, grenade launchers, helicopters, surface-to-air missiles, armour-piercing rockets, “ultra light” airplanes, unmanned aerial vehicles, anti-aircraft guns and armoured vehicles, with a client list that includes guerilla groups and despotic governments the world over.

If U.S. and U.N. allegations are true, Viktor Bout doesn’t care much for politics and never picks sides in a conflict, and has happily supplied factions that were at war with each other, as with the Taliban and the U.S.-backed Northern Alliance in Afghanistan.

From the Guardian:

If extradited to the US and convicted he faces life imprisonment on indictments including conspiracy to kill US citizens and providing material support to terrorists.

The charges are based on conversations recorded at a Bangkok luxury hotel in March between Bout and US Drug Enforcement Agency agents who were posing as Colombian Farc rebels. Washington lists Farc as a terrorist group.

[…] Bout maintains he has been held unlawfully on “fabricated American accusations”. He stands accused of being a global gun-runner to Africa, the Middle East and South America, running a fleet of cargo planes since the early 1990s. His exploits were the template for the 2005 movie Lord of War, in which Nicolas Cage portrayed a Russian arms smuggler.

Bout’s backstory is apparently a mystery even to U.S. intelligence, and what little we do know reads like a real-life spy novel. Sorry for the long quote, but this is compelling stuff — Douglas Farah, who co-wrote a book about Bout’s exploits, says:

Viktor Bout was a unique creature born of the end of Communism and the rise of unbridled capitalism when the Wall came down in the early 1990s. He was a Soviet officer, most likely a lieutenant, who simply saw the opportunities presented by three factors that came with the collapse of the USSR and the state sponsorship that entailed: abandoned aircraft on the runways from Moscow to Kiev, no longer able to fly because of lack of money for fuel or maintenance; huge stores of surplus weapons that were guarded by guards suddenly receiving little or no salary; and the booming demand for those weapons from traditional Soviet clients and newly emerging armed groups from Africa to the Philippines. He simply wedded the three things, taking aircraft for almost nothing, filling them with cheaply purchased weapons from the arsenals, and flying them to clients who could pay. His background is difficult to ascertain. He is said by U.S. intelligence officials to be the product of an “immaculate conception.” He was not, and then he was. He has provided no stories of his youth, very few personal details. He was, according to his multiple passports, born in 1967 in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, the son of a bookkeeper and an auto mechanic. He graduated from the Military Institute on Foreign Languages, a well-known feeder school for Russian military intelligence, and is known to have a true gift for languages.

Bout is no small-time pistol-pusher, and is alleged to have sold weapons to governments and warlords in Afghanistan, Angola, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Kenya, Liberia, Libya, the Philippines, the Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Swaziland and Uganda.

According to Farah, he was even hired by U.S. government contractors to run “hundreds, and perhaps a thousand” missions in Iraq:

Bear in mind most of these flights occurred after President Bush had signed an executive order making it illegal to do business with Bout, because he represented a security threat to the United States. […] The Air Force cut him off immediately, but other branches of the military continued to use him.

No way am I going to defend this guy, and if the allegations are true, the man deserves to rot. but if he serves his life sentence as everyone seems to expect, I wonder what happens to all the weapons that he would have sold? Do they get sold by smaller gunrunners instead? Whose hands do they fall into? Since another weapons smuggler (or several) will almost certainly step in to meet the international demand, and since the Taylors and Talibans of the world will find a way to buy their weapons anyway, might it actually have been better to let Bout do business, with the undercover D.E.A. agents tipping off the authorities when a terrorist group or a particularly despotic government places an order?

Maybe a better question is: would more lives have been saved by infiltrating his operation or by putting him behind bars? Or does it even make a difference?

Image via the Guardian.

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