ARMS DEALER

Damien says: “You can’t just go to Tesco to buy a gunship.

“You need really good connections at the highest level and Bout had that.

“There were hundreds of Soviet military aircraft and billions of pounds worth of weaponry in Russia up for sale or theft.” As “the only game in town” Bout supplied both sides in the Angolan civil war and in Afghanistan.

He flew UN food parcels to refugee camps in the Congo then removed the UN logo from his planes, loaded them with weapons and flew straight on to arm the rebels the refugees were fleeing from.

Bout was paid with so many blood diamonds he employed his own gem expert to value the stones.

Damien says: “He was a businessman who sold anything to anyone as long as the price was right. His only rule was ‘never fly empty’. He was completely amoral.”

Bout flew under the radar until 1998, when he sold AK47S to the Revolutionary United Front in Sierra Leone and they used the guns to attack British peacekeeping troops. His cover was blown and Labour peer Peter Hain, then Minister for

hey used their best two undercover agents known as Carlos and Ricardo, former drug dealers who converted to the DEA after being captured.

But they needed someone who could get to Bout. That person was a short-tempered SAS veteran turned bush pilot recruited under the alias Mike Snow.

Mike, known to his friends as The Bear, ran a successful freight business in Africa but lost his fleet and narrowly escaped with his life when an airfield exploded in the Congo in 2001.

A year later, his last plane caught fire and