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

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Four months before Bout got on that flight to Bangkok, Braun and his DEA lieutenants were batting around schemes to bring him down. Through the years DEA operatives have used a variety of sting operations — posing as drug dealers or buyers; acting as money launderers in 1989’s Operation Pisces, against the Cali cartel — but Braun’s group kept coming back to the DEA sting that nabbed Monzer al-Kassar, an illegal arms merchant who supplied terrorist groups in Somalia, Iran, and Iraq. (He was arrested in Spain in June 2007 and his trial in New York started in early November.) DEA informants had posed as members of the FARC Colombian narco-terrorists to lure al-Kassar into a phony deal to supply Dragunov sniper rifles, hand grenades, and grenade launchers.

Braun decided the scheme suited Bout perfectly because Bout had done business with the FARC before, having air dropped 10,000 weapons, mostly AK-47s, to the rebels near the Peruvian border in 1998 and 1999. And because the group’s leaders were wanted in numerous countries, and had limited access to travel visas, the scam would provide the ideal excuse to entice Bout to an extradition-friendly country.

But how smart would it be to run the same scam less than a year after it had been used on al-Kassar? To make that call Braun fell back on psychological insight gained through years of dealing with drug kingpins. “The more arrogant they are, the better off you are,” he says. “Guys like that say to themselves, ‘There’s no way in hell they’d do that a second time.’ ”

The Bout sting went live in November 2007. The DEA put together a team of three trusted informants code-named CS-1, CS-2, and CS-3 (CS stands for “confidential source”). The first man had dealt with Bout in the mid-1990s, when Bout had tried to hire him and Andrew Smulian, a 46-year-old British former military pilot, to air-drop crates of weapons into Chechnya. Smulian and CS-1 had refused, but CS-1 had kept in touch with Smulian. The plan was for him to vouch for the two other informants, who were posing as FARC envoys.

The first operative e-mailed Smulian, saying the FARC had a business proposition for Bout. The Brit responded quickly but told CS-1 just how cautious Bout (who went by the alias “Boris” in these correspondences) needed to be. “Our man has been made persona non-G for the world through the UN,” he wrote in an e-mail on November 25, 2007. “All assets, cash and kind frozen, total value is around $6 billion.” Smulian added: “Of course [Bout has] no ability to journey anywhere other than home territories.”

Braun knew that, of course, but was betting he could make the deal sweet enough to coax Bout out into the open. His operatives pressed for confirmation that Bout wanted in. That December 3, Smulian e-mailed CS-1: “Spoke to Boris, and anything is possible with farming equipment” — code for “weapons.” Game on.

Viktor Bout ran a vertically integrated weapons superstore. He did everything but pull the AK trigger for you.

During the week of January 7, CS-1 met with Smulian in Curaçao, where he introduced the two bogus FARC emissaries, CS-2 and CS-3. As DEA agents listened in, they told Smulian the FARC wanted to buy an assortment of military-grade arms, including armor-piercing surface-to-air missiles, which the rebels would presumably use to shoot down Colombian and American helicopters that swept over rebel-held territory. The DEA knew that if Bout could provide those arms — unavailable to the ordinary arms smuggler peddling handguns and used AK-47s — it would prove he still had access to the top Russian armaments. “Illegal and legal business in Russia are still incestuously interconnected,” explains Mark Galeotti, a Russian crime expert with New York University’s Center for Global Affairs. “For many Russians the distinction between the two is irrelevant. You don’t work on the scale of a Bout just relying on rogue bureaucrats. It’s very likely that Bout retained close links with the Russian state, especially the GRU.”

The decoys gave Smulian $5,000 in cash as a good faith gesture; they also provided him with what they said was a secure cell phone that he should use to contact them.

Days later, on that tapped phone, the DEA heard a Bout associate ask Smulian what the FARC wanted. Smulian replied, “Standard ground equipment…must be good stuff…no rubbish.” A request for what Braun calls “garden variety” armaments was a prosaic touch he thought would lend credibility to his sting. “Everything the FARC and other terrorist organizations buy is all perishable stuff,” he says. “It has a shelf life — you either shoot it or it rots in the wet jungle — so they’re constantly rearming themselves. They have to.”

On January 22, CS-1 met Smulian and a Bout operative in Copenhagen. Bout was very nervous about security. He had instructed Smulian to ditch all his cell phones, receipts, and anything else that could indicate where he’d been or who he’d been meeting with. Bout, who was still in Moscow, was nervous but still eager to deal. At that meeting Smulian delivered Bout’s greeting to the FARC decoys: “Any communists are our friends.”

The next day Smulian told CS-2 that “the whole world was after” Bout and that, fearful of a sting, Bout had shown him pictures of the senior leadership of the FARC and asked Smulian to point out the FARC envoys he’d brought to him. Smulian was not, obviously, able to pick out CS-2 and CS-3. It was a crucial, and dangerous, moment for the DEA operatives. “If you start backing down when faced with a situation like that,” says Braun, “you instantly lose credibility.” CS-1 somehow talked his way out of the “photo ambush,” insisting his FARC men were legitimate. “The operative didn’t flinch,” Braun says with steely admiration. “It was a defining moment in the investigation.”

Smulian accepted the explanation (it’s possible he was bluffing about the photograph) and quickly offered CS-1 and CS-2 a hundred “pieces” — apparently referring to Igla surface-to-air missiles — and said Bout had agreed to air drop the arms directly into Colombia. The payment would be expected on delivery.

By January 23, 2008, the nuts and bolts of the deal were set. The toughest part of the operation — coaxing Bout out of Russia — would now begin

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