Long considered the largest arms dealer in the world and sentenced in 2012 to 25 years in prison in the United States, Viktor Bout could return to Russia very soon as part of a prisoner exchange agreement, notably against the basketball player Brittney Griner.
Is Viktor Bout “the lord of war”, the biggest arms dealer in the world, as many have presented him, or just a simple business manager who rented out his devices without knowing what they were carrying, as he still asserts today?
Ten years after his conviction by American justice, he could now be the subject of an exchange of prisoners against basketball player Brittney Griner, recently sentenced to nine years in prison, and former soldier Paul Whelan, who is serving a sixteen-year “severe regime” prison sentence in Russia for “espionage”.
A young GRU officer
Born in 1967 in Dushanbe, the current capital of Tajikistan, Viktor Anatolyevich Bout is the son of a mechanic and an accountant mother. At school, in the Soviet system, he very quickly demonstrated a passion and a good predisposition for foreign languages, especially Esperanto, which he imagined becoming the world language.
After his schooling, he left to do his military service in the Red Army before continuing his studies at the Military Institute of Foreign Languages in Moscow, an institution which notably trains future agents of the GRU, the General Directorate of Military Intelligence of the soviet army.
A true polyglot, he then worked as an officer in the Russian Air Force, where he was an interpreter. In 1987, he left the borders of the USSR for the first time, heading for Mozambique for a two-year mission (he speaks Portuguese). A trip that will forge a passion for the African continent and that will allow him to forge links that will be very useful to him later. It was there that he met his future wife, Alla Protassova, then married to a journalist, whom he married her in 1991. He also traveled to Angola before returning to the USSR, more precisely to Belarus, where he attended to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The discovery of a new world
The end of the Soviet era is for Viktor Bout, as for many of his compatriots, marked by a period of euphoria. Everything seems possible to him, even if he hasn’t really had a job since he resigned from the army. ” Every day was a new adventure, we never knew if we were going to find food or what would happen. We were living in the moment “, he explained in a documentary made in 2015 for Arte.
It was at this time that he smelled the bargain. Because in a post-Soviet Russia in complete disrepair, opportunities run the streets. Viktor Bout then creates a food import business which will quickly allow him to make connections and earn money. In 1993, after a trip to the Netherlands, he decided to move to Belgium to create a new company there with one of his friends.
They buy their first plane: an Iliouchine Il-76, a medium and long-range military transport plane, four-engine, of Soviet manufacture. As he confided, the idea was then to rent these old Soviet planes, to in turn rent them three times more expensive. And it is with Angola that he signs a very lucrative contract. The company will quickly file for bankruptcy, but that allows it to see all the possibilities related to this type of activity.
From a simple entrepreneur to the largest owner of a fleet of private planes
After Brussels, Viktor Bout moved to the United Arab Emirates, to Sharjah, in the free zone. A choice that will pay off. Globalization was in full swing in 1994 and business was booming for freight companies like his. Its aircraft fleet is growing very rapidly and deliveries to the former Soviet republics are increasing. Money flows freely for the Bout family, which is growing at the time with the birth of their daughter.
But behind this freight activity hides another, much more lucrative one: the sale of arms, even to countries subject to embargoes. Africa concentrates most of its activities (Liberia, Sierra Leone, Angola, Rwanda, Democratic Republic of Congo among others), but it also does business in Colombia, Sri Lanka, the Philippines and Afghanistan where it delivers arms to Commander Massoud’s Northern Alliance.
One of its planes was also intercepted in August 1995 by the Taliban, and it took a year of negotiations before its three pilots and their aircraft, which was carrying 30 tons of ammunition, managed to return to the United Arab Emirates. Viktor Bout has always denied having worked with the Taliban or al-Qaeda, even if CIA reports claim the opposite.
Africa, Viktor Bout’s playground
The African continent will make the reputation of Viktor Bout. He who managed to weave networks in the former republics of the Soviet Union – in Bulgaria, Ukraine or Moldova, in particular – to acquire there at unbeatable prices weapons, armored vehicles and even helicopters, will do the happiness of the armed groups and the misfortune of the populations. And even if he also continues to transport food products or consumer goods, which allows him to have a legal activity and to justify the presence of his planes, it is indeed the sale of arms that will make his fortune.
In Angola, he manages to sell arms to both sides: the government army and Unita. In Liberia, he forged close ties with Charles Taylor. In Zaire, he helps Mobutu to leave the country, then arms and trains Jean-Pierre Bemba’s men. Viktor Bout multiplies the playgrounds and even manages to work for the French army in 1994 by helping transport troops for Operation Turquoise. It will also transport food for the WFP (World Food Programme).
Activities that allow it to be presentable in the eyes of the international community. In the meantime, he moved to South Africa, while maintaining his base in the United Arab Emirates.
Iraq, the beginning of the end
In the early 2000s, the name of Viktor Bout came up more and more frequently in reports from Western intelligence services. This increasingly awkward presence forces him to pack up, leave the United Arab Emirates and return to Russia, but it does not prevent him from pursuing his business.
After the attacks of September 11, 2001 which struck the United States, it began to become a target of choice. But its impressive fleet of cargo planes allows it to gain a few years of respite. In 2003, after the invasion of Iraq by the United States, its planes thus helped the American army in terms of logistics, provoking the astonishment of certain American soldiers who knew the pedigree of Viktor Bout. The pattern is repeated in Afghanistan. And in December 2006, his company also helped the UN after the terrible tsunami that affected many countries in the Indian Ocean. But the noose tightens and the CIA makes it one of its main targets.
Under United Nations sanctions, targeted by an international arrest warrant, Viktor Bout manages to escape probable arrest thanks to his multiple identities and different passports. His high-placed contacts within the Russian authorities probably had something to do with it either. And in particular his friend Igor Setchin. The current Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian Federation, close to Vladimir Putin, met Viktor Bout in Mozambique in the 1980s, when he too was serving in the Soviet army. He would be one of his main contacts in the Kremlin.
The adventure ends in 2008, when Viktor Bout is arrested in Thailand after a DEA operation. Members of the US anti-drug agency pose as members of the Colombian guerrilla Farcs, considered a terrorist group by the United States, during a meeting organized in Bangkok. An agreement for the delivery of arms and ammunition has been made. Thai police then proceed to arrest him.
Extradition and sentencing in the United States
Viktor Bout is first imprisoned in Thailand. After a showdown with Thai justice, he is finally extradited to the United States in November 2010. An extradition deemed illegal by Moscow, which demanded his release. Prosecuted for arms trafficking with the Farcs and conspiracy against American nationals, Viktor Bout was found guilty on November 2, 2011 and then sentenced by a federal court in New York to 25 years in prison, the minimum sentence for the crimes attributed to him.
Since then, “the merchant of death” as he is nicknamed has continued to proclaim his innocence. According to him, he did not know that his customers carried weapons and ammunition in the planes he rented to them. An exchange for Edward Snowden had been mentioned for a time, but discussions between Washington and Moscow went no further.
If the exchange with basketball player Britney Griner and former soldier Paul Whelan materializes, his return to Russia would make the happiness of his relatives and his allies in the highest circles of the Kremlin. It would also mark a real failure for American and international justice against the one who is regularly presented as the biggest arms trafficker in the world, to the point of having inspired the character played by actor Nicolas Cage in the film. Lord of War (2005).