John Jay considers the recent arrest of Viktor Bout (pronounced “boot”), the Quartermaster to the Barbarians, big news, because the international arms dealer has a long history of working as a convenient contractor for the Russians, with built-in plausible deniability for his Kremlin financiers:
So who is Viktor Bout? My blog partner CW can answer that better than I can, since he had a whole series of posts regarding the missing 727 and the networks of Bout on his old blog. In the absence of that archive, or purchasing Braun and Farah’s book The Merchant of Death, the best places to start are here and here. Other treasure troves of information include TheYorkshire Ranter and Ruud Leeuw.
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So how did Viktor get bagged?There is some speculation that one reason Bout has evaded capture is the complicit help of certain highly placed parties in the US and EU who would be embarrassed by revelations from Bout concerning their dealings with him.
This may be true. It is certainly curious that Bout was not arrested on money laundering, arms smuggling, or tax evasion charges that are outstanding against him, despite the fact that Bout’s company pulled a fast one on its American employers and made off with over 200,000 Kalashnikov’s that had been paid for by the US in Bosnia for shipment to Iraqi militias.
In fact, the sting that brought him down was an entirely de novo operation of the DEA:
In the end it was an agency of one of those states suspected of turning a blind eye to Bout’s activities that was the engine behind his capture. According to a source with close ties to the DEA, the operation was so sensitive it was kept secret from other members of the US intelligence community, including high-ranking members of the Justice Department, precisely because of the fear that Bout might be tipped off by elements that the DEA agents feared had protected him in the past. A special unit was set up to run the operation due to ‘war on drugs’ legislation and guidelines, allowed to operate outside the normal protocols that require US government-wide notification.This is probably the first positive dividend I’ve seen coming out of the War on Drugs.
For those people who supported a unified intelligence command in the wake of 9/11, there is some further food for thought in this sordid tale:
Few people, even in the closed world of US intelligence, knew the DEA was tracking Bout, let alone setting him up for an arrest. ‘[The DEA] was laughing at the CIA in their offices,’ because they had arrested someone that was perceived to be working for the agency, said one witness.The question remains — why did this sting succeed where so many others failed? Why did Viktor wind up in Thailand? Bout allegedly has a penchant for signing deals face to face, which may have led to his downfall. Only a few countries are safe for the fugitive, and a previous meeting in Bulgaria was scratched due to international pressure. Thailand apparently remained a safe haven.
According to the Mother Jones report, Bout agreed to meet the DEA agents despite the fact that their photographs did not appear in his intelligence report on FARC commanders. This appears to be a bit sloppy on the part of the usually ultra-paranoid Bout, but may indicate that the financial pressure brought on by asset seizure is beginning to strain Bout’s finances.
Despite his the evident conspiracy-mongering in some of the articles of former Polish Intelligence officer Daytsh, I tend to agree with his assessment that Viktor has been betrayed in a power struggle in Moscow, in the FSB in particular, and his arrest would have been accomplished even in the absence of doubts surrounding his loyalty to the Russian state. Medvedev wants to clear the slate of Putin’s cronies, and if he can simultaneously win a few PR points in the West, so much the better.
The major piece of evidence supporting Daytsh’s claims that Bout was betrayed is the back and forth in the press concerning Russia’s intent to extradite. In the first days after his arrest, the Russian Foreign Ministry. intimated that Russia would extradite Bout. As of today, it seems the Russians are not willing to extradite him despite his direct plea for help. This, to me, indicates that the early overtures in that direction were the remnants of Putin’s network acting in a knee-jerk fashion, and that Medvedev’s new cronies are gradually cutting ties to Bout. More evidence in that regard is the recent arrest of Bout crony and Arbat Prestige Mafia Godfather Semyon Mogilevich in Moscow.
Bout may also have traveled to Thailand under the assumption that his patrons in Moscow would help extricate him from any problems he might encounter. In this he appears to have been mistaken. For now. But I highly doubt that the Russians have begun to put the long term interests of civilization ahead of the short term interests of the kleptocracy in Moscow.
I hope that the US manages to extradite and prosecute Bout, but the real question for me is what becomes of his empire? His older brother Sergei is nowhere near the logistics expert that Viktor has shown himself to be. Hopefully Bout’s network will fall into far less competent hands and slowly rust away. However, I can not help but suspect that Medvedev has someone else in mind to take the title of World’s Greatest Merchant of Death. If so, the threat to civilization from fourth generation warfare will continue to grow.