Men's Journal

The Enforcer: For DEA agent Michael Braun, seen here in his DC office, snaring Bout was the capstone to a 34-year career. Photo credit: photo by Christopher McLallen

Viktor Bout seemed untouchable — shielded by the Kremlin while making deals with terrorists, guerrillas, and despots from Angola to Afghanistan. But then a DEA bulldog nabbed him with a daring sting that took five months and more than 100 agents. Now comes the hard part: keeping him in jail.

by Stephan Talty

Snow drifted down from a malevolent black sky as a stocky, mustachioed man arrived at Moscow’s airport on the evening of March 5, 2008. He carried a suitcase packed with warm-weather clothes — polo shirts, khakis. On his way to the gate he passed kiosks selling international newspapers with front-page stories about a daring military raid on Colombian rebels bunkered in Ecuador. Those headlines must have unsettled him, because he was on his way to meet representatives of the very rebel army that had just been ambushed and lost 20 of its guerrillas. Or so he thought.

He passed through the security gate, manned by Russian soldiers carrying semiautomatic weapons, without incident. He had chosen carefully among his five passports. The names on them varied, but they were all versions of his given one: Viktor Bout. He had spent years carefully blurring almost every trace of his past, but what is known is that he’d served in the Soviet military in the 1980s, working as a navigator, training commandos for its air force, and flying to Angola to act as a translator.

Bout was traveling to Bangkok that night, to all appearances as an ordinary businessman escaping the long Moscow winter for the beaches of Thailand. He was a businessman — a fabulously successful one — but what a nasty business: Bout was the most powerful illegal arms dealer on the planet (and a wanted man on most of it), and he was en route to his next black market deal. Colleagues have described him as brilliant yet boorish, an intimidator with a dazzling head for numbers and an encyclopedic knowledge of classic Russian literature. Most agree he has a cold-blooded eye — and instinct — for beautiful deals. The National Security Council’s former African expert, Gayle Smith, once said that if Bout had gone straight, “he would have been considered one of the world’s greatest businessmen.”

Thailand is notorious for its lax immigration security and baroque levels of corruption, which gave the mercurial Bout (pronounced “boot”) a degree of confidence. Still, this trip presented significant risk for him. He was straying outside Russia, where his connections in the government and military intelligence had kept him out of prison for more than a decade. Bout was flying to Bangkok for a secret meeting with guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the quasi-communist narco-terrorist outfit has that used murder, kidnapping, and other forms of terror in its decades-long war against the Colombian government. He was looking to become the rebels’ chief arms supplier, a very lucrative proposition.

But why leave Moscow? Bout was flying to Bangkok because he was curiously old-fashioned: He liked to do business man to man, to grip his customer by the hand, look him in the eye. His nickname, after all, was “the Mailman” because he always delivered, often in person.

Bout’s talent for high-profile deals had a downside. By supplying AK-47s, rocket launchers, and helicopters to everyone from African revolutionaries to the Taliban, he’d become much too famous. In 2004 he was put on the United States Treasury’s Specially Designated Nationals list, locking down his accounts in American banks. He had been a model for Nicolas Cage’s character in the 2005 film Lord of War, about a notorious gunrunner pursued by an Interpol agent. Bout quickly became the truculent face of postmodern crime, which is global, borderless, and hyperviolent.

As Bout boarded that plane, he was leaving his safe base and stepping back into an anarchic world partly of his own making, in which anything could be had for a price. Including him.

—-

Eight time zones away, in Washington, DC, warm spring rain pinged off the black-tinted window of the office of Michael Braun, chief of operations for the Drug Enforcement Agency. Tall, with a shaved head, a goatee flecked with silver, cobalt blue eyes, and a lean physique, Braun is 55 but looks years younger. To call him passionate about America’s security would be painting him in faint pastels. He relishes chasing down bad guys and claims that getting paid to do it makes him “one of the most fortunate people on the face of the Earth.” He wears a heavy DEA signet ring, and just as he did when he was a field agent, carries a .40-caliber Glock.

Braun works in a small office dominated by a poster of Uncle Sam pointing an accusatory finger: “We’re at war. Are you doing all you can?” On this day Braun had a target in his sights: Viktor Bout.

It might seem surprising that it was the DEA stalking Bout, but after 9/11, Congress expanded the agency’s power to go after all manner of criminals who operate overseas (see “The DEA vs. the Terrorists,” below right). Fueled by the Bush administration’s escalating war on drugs, the DEA has quietly become an international enforcement powerhouse, with a $2.1 billion budget and 10,000 employees, including 5,000 agents in the field and 87 foreign bureaus — even more bureaus than the FBI has. “Only wonks on K Street are aware of the agency’s new powers,” says Allen St. Pierre, executive director of NORML, a marijuana legalization foundation and frequent critic of the DEA. “The government saw a chance to marry the agency’s unpopular war on drugs with the newly popular war on terror.”

Braun has a simpler way of explaining what he does: His job is to arrest a “global potpourri of scum.” Bringing down Bout would be one of the biggest arrests in the agency’s 35-year history. By last March, Braun had been chasing Bout for months, and the endgame of his sting — code-named Operation Relentless — was drawing near. After an agonizing series of feints and twists, Braun had finally managed to lure Bout into a trap. A small DEA team, the point in an operational spear that had involved 100 agents worldwide over the previous five months, was waiting in Bangkok’s sweltering early morning heat, ready to pounce.

Before Braun locked up his office for the night, he punched in a number on his secure phone. The call was to the lead DEA agent in Bangkok. He and Braun spoke briefly, and the field agent (whose identity cannot be revealed for security reasons) assured Braun that everything was in place, that Bout was about to step into their trap. Before hanging up, Braun gave his agent one last order: “I want the first call.”

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