SAS veteran who caught the world’s biggest arms dealer
TRUE CRIME OPERATION RELENTLESS by Damien Lewis (Quercus £20) BRIAN VINER
ON MARCH 6, 2008, a billionaire called Viktor Bout stepped off an aeroplane in Bangkok. His arrival in Thailand marked the beginning of the final chapter of Operation Relentless, a huge international collaboration to catch one of the world’s most wanted men, also known as the Merchant of Death.
Bout, who had been given his nickname in the House of Commons, of all places, was walking into a meticulously laid trap.
Damien Lewis’s account of how that trap was sprung, and of how Bout made his fortune in the first place, reads like a thrilling work of fiction — the obvious parallel being the arms dealer Richard Roper from John le Carre’s The Night Manager — as the criminal activities whisk us from Copenhagen to the Congo to Curacao in the Caribbean.
There are wire taps and explosions and even gnarled old fortune-tellers. Yet it is all true.
In 2008, Bout was 41. He was a mechanic’s son from Tajikistan who had made his vast fortune in air freight, in part by transporting cashews and gladioli.
Nuts and flowers hardly explained why Peter Hain, then a Foreign Office mi n i s t e r, had denounced him in Parliament eight years earlier as a merchant of death. But Bout’s cargo planes also ferried millions of dollars’ worth of weapons to armies who were sworn enemies of the West, including the Taliban.
Bout was not driven by ideology; it was all just (extremely lucrative) business. Indeed, when it suited him, and them, he also carried supplies for the British and American governments. He even put his planes at the disposal of UN peacekeepers.
Nevertheless, he was the world’s most prolific and dangerous arms dealer, arming rebels throughout central Africa with tens of thousands of AK-47 assault rifles ( whose inventor, Mikhail Kalashnikov, was Bout’s friend). He could even source surface-toair missiles, which Lewis describes as the ‘ holy grail for terrorists and narco-traffickers’.
In 2005, when Nicolas Cage starred in a (rather poor) movie about an evil weapons tycoon, called Lord Of War, his character was modelled on Bout.
Inconveniently, Bout rarely left Moscow, putting him beyond the reach of all the law- enforcers who for years dreamt of catching him. He had to be teased out.
In the end, the agency that lured him to Bangkok, where he thought he was about to seal a multi-million- dollar arms deal, was the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).
It was aghast at the sophisticated weaponry that Bout was supplying to the drugs cartels. And nor was he averse to transporting narcotics himself. The mantra that made him rich was: never fly empty. If his planes landed on remote airstrips stuffed with weapons, he wanted them stuffed with something else when they left. The DEA wanted him just as badly as MI6 and the CIA. The reason it succeeded where others had failed was that it had the foresight to engage the help of a maverick Englishman, a former SAS soldier who had also run an air-freight company in Africa.
This was Mike Snow, a barrelchested adventurer nicknamed The Bear, not on account of his size or strength, but because of a fur coat he’d worn as a child in the North-East of England.
Snow knew Bout, but it was his friendship with the billionaire’s trusted, English-born associate Andrew Smulian, another entrepreneur based in Africa, that the DEA hoped to exploit.
An elaborate sting was set up, whereby Snow claimed to be working for a Colombian rebel militia. With an unwitting Smulian as middleman, they ordered a major supply of weapons from Bout, including surface-to-air missiles. But the ‘rebels’ Snow introduced to Smulian were DEA agents, including the agency’s star undercover operative Carlos Sagastume, a drug-runner from Guatemala who had converted from poacher to gamekeeper. The entire operation, in another of this extraordinary story’s many bizarre details, was run by a certain Lou Milione, who had previously been an actor, appearing with Tom Cruise in the 1983 film Risky Business.
THIS was an even riskier business. Bout was a ruthless operator who would do anything to evade capture. But even he had a softer side.
International arms-dealing was not really what Bout wanted to do. A keen amateur film-maker, his actual burning ambition was to make wildlife documentaries for the Discovery Channel.
Instead, he is currently serving 25 years in a U. S. federal penitentiary. As soon as he landed in Bangkok that day to meet Smulian, Snow and the ‘rebels’, the DEA knew it would finally be able to nail him.
When they raided his hotel with a posse of Thai police, Bout stayed remarkably calm — unlike his tough Russian bodyguard who started crying because the handcuffs were hurting his wrists.
There were still some twists to come in the dramatic story of Viktor Bout. Extraditing him from Thailand, for example, took more than two years. But it was the end of Operation Relentless.
At last, the Merchant of Death was brought down by The Bear.