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Bout and Braun both have combat experience within the same theater of the global war on terror. And at least for a brief time, they were on the same side.
In 2003, shortly after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Braun was assigned to the Coalition Provisional Authority to help create a border patrol and police forces for the new Iraqi government. He spent three months in the chaos of post-invasion Baghdad. At the same time, the manically entrepreneurial Bout was flying U.S. matériel to the war zone as a subcontractor for FedEx and KBR, a subsidiary of Halliburton, the company formerly headed by Vice President Dick Cheney. The Pentagon paid Bout’s companies millions of dollars. One of them, Irbis, flew 142 flights in Iraq that were billed to U.S. taxpayers. (In 2006, President Bush signed a U.S. ban on doing business with Bout.)
No ideologue, Bout was also supplying the Taliban in Afghanistan. Ironically, right after 9/11 the arms trafficker contacted the CIA and FBI and volunteered his services in their battle against the Taliban. The agencies negotiated with him for several months but the upshot of those talks is unknown. What is known is that from 1998 to 2001, Bout sold planes to the Taliban, which at that time was pinned down as a result of UN sanctions and often unable to move men and matériel around the country or bring in supplies. The U.S. government claims Bout made $50 million from the deal.
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As the sting operation progressed, Bout was finally in Braun’s crosshairs yet he still was just out of reach. CS-2 and CS-3 stressed to Smulian the need for a face-to-face meeting with the Russian, and Smulian agreed to bring him to them in Romania. That country seemed ideal for both sides: It was a former Soviet satellite, and it had an extradition treaty with the U.S. If Bout showed his face in Bucharest, the DEA presumably had assurances from the Romanians that he would be arrested.
The conspirators soon convened in Bucharest, but Bout didn’t show. The operatives told Smulian that without the Russian, the deal was off. In black market deals, middlemen like Smulian often run their own scams; demanding to meet the source only made good business sense. Their “paranoia” lent further credibility to the sting. Smulian picked up his cell phone, punched in a number, handed the phone to CS-3, and told him it was Viktor. They were finally talking to Bout. He assured them he was coming. Soon.
As the conspirators waited in frigid Bucharest, Smulian kept feeding them tidbits of the deal. Bout would send his plane from Nicaragua to Guyana and drop the weapons in the Colombian jungle en route. The planes would be crewed by Bout’s men, and they would drop 200 crates using parachutes.
There was one sticking point: Despite his stellar contacts in the Russian government, Bout was having trouble getting his visa for Bucharest. Romanian authorities intercepted a call he had placed to a Romanian associate asking for help. The associate agreed to intercede but warned Bout that just weeks before, a Romanian news show had mentioned that he and Bout had done business in the past. The DEA doesn’t know if that spooked Bout or if he simply wasn’t able to get his visa in time. For whatever reason, though, Bout was still in Moscow while Braun’s operatives were staring at the ceiling of their hotel rooms in Bucharest.
After trying to lure Bout to Romania for 12 days, Braun faced a crucial decision. Pulling out the agents might doom the sting, but staying too long could make the “Colombians” appear overeager. The DEA wanted Bout to be the one chasing the deal.
On February 7, CS-2 spoke to Bout by phone and assured him the FARC was still interested in the weapons but that they couldn’t stay in Bucharest any longer. Bout said he would need two or three weeks to finalize the deal and find a place to meet. Then Braun pulled the informants out.
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Despite the setback in Bucharest, Braun pushed ahead. “There was no talk of making a midcourse adjustment,” he insists. “You can’t flinch when things get dicey.” On February 21, CS-2 told Bout that he and CS-3 would be traveling to Thailand within the next seven to 10 days for other business and suggested they try to meet there. (Thailand has a strong extradition treaty with the U.S. and had cooperated with major criminal cases in the past, even sending a former parliament member to the U.S. in 1996 for prosecution on drug charges.) Four days later Bout finally took the bait. The two sides agreed to meet at Bangkok’s Sofitel Hotel on March 6.
Bout boarded the flight to Thailand on that snowy night with Mikhail Belozersky, a thickset bald man who some believe was a bodyguard. As the two Russians sat on the flight to Bangkok, Braun made a final call to his lead agent in Bangkok and gave the green light for the takedown.
Bout and Belozersky reached the Sofitel just before noon. Bout checked into his suite on the 14th floor and made an afternoon reservation for a conference room. Braun’s men and Thai plainclothes police — who had been staking out the hotel since 5 am — slipped into the lobby one by one and mingled with the crowd.
Bout went up to his suite. Several hours later he emerged, dressed in an orange polo shirt and tan khakis. He went to a hotel bar and met with Belozersky and two others, presumably CS-2 and CS-3. “One of them called himself Carlos,” Belozersky later told a Russian news website.
The men then took an elevator to the 27th floor and walked into the conference room Bout had reserved. Whether by design or accident, it wasn’t yet ready; hotel workers were still stocking it with food. The Thai police commander saw his chance and 50 cops converged on the room, guns drawn. They rushed toward Bout, who reportedly murmured, “The game is over,” and surrendered.
Thirty seconds later five plainclothes DEA agents arrived and began interrogating the two Russians. As they were hustled through the lobby Belozersky saw the fake FARC envoys again. “They seemed quite relaxed and satisfied,” he later noted, ruefully.
Soon after the arrest and long before sunrise on the U.S. East Coast, Mike Braun awoke when the phone rang in his Victorian-style home in suburban Virginia. He rolled over and snatched it from its cradle. The first call had come to him, as promised. “My wife wasn’t very happy,” Braun recalls, smiling. “But I was ecstatic.
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December 15th, 2008 at 5:14 am
A reader’s closer examination of “Taking Down Arms Dealer Viktor Bout” will find the circumstances surrounding the arrest of Viktor Bout in Bangkok as disturbing as I do.
Bout was obviously arrested extrajudicially, that is, by agents of a foreign government (the US) on the soil of another country (Thailand). Bout has never been accused of any crime in Thailand, where he still languishes in remand prison. Bout’s arrest took place in Thailand because of close police relations of the two countries. It is still far from clear whether he can be legally extradited under Thai law.
Bout was arrested by a cabal of American DEA agents though he was never accused of any drug crimes anywhere. So we have the DEA acting as world police not so much of actual crimes but of morals.
How is the DEA’s elevation to world thought police different from the racketeering the US often invokes against so-called organized crime?
Most importantly, Bout is accused of making private profit using the same lucrative business model of many governments. The USA is, after all, the world’s biggest arms merchant and has a long history of selling to both sides. Can’t stand the competition?
I am not defending the arms trade. It’s time to stop the merchants of death, the lords of war, whether they are called illegal or are sovereign states. The world needs peace not war.
CJ Hinke
Bangkok, Thailand
[Reply]
Guerrillero Reply:
August 15th, 2009 at 9:21 am
yes, you are right CJ countries like the states have a long record of double standard regarding things that are on their interest. i am not supporting the arms trade either, but i believe that that kind of abuse of power has to be stop.
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December 15th, 2008 at 5:40 am
I missed the fact that Bout’s so-called nemesis in the DEA retired to work for an outfit called SPECTRE. The acronym was also used for Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion, nemesis to James Bond.
Pity he didn’t choose SMERSH. The whole Viktor Bout “takedown” is far more Man from U.N.C.L.E.!
CJ Hinke
Bangkok, Thailand
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December 22nd, 2008 at 11:10 am
Amen, CJ!! I had the same thoughts while reading the article!! Who made the DEA or the USA the world’s policemen? If we (Yes, I am an citizen of the US) are to be the world’s policemen, shouldn’t we have some better standards then we have be showing over the past 25 years! Mr Bout is certainly no angel, but who Braun represents is no better.
FA Lesh
PA, USA
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December 22nd, 2008 at 5:19 pm
It explains in the article that the U.S. Gov’t has expanded the DEA’s scope of enforcement… please people, read before making stupid assumptions about ‘morality police’
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December 26th, 2008 at 3:46 pm
Adrian, if you read our statements, we did read and comprehended the DEA’s repsonsiblity, we were disagreeing that it is the correct action for the US to be taking!! The discussion was not “is this in the DEA’s scope”, but is this in the USA scope of responsibility!
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January 14th, 2009 at 1:43 pm
Not everything is simple in this world. If not the US, then who? The Thai’s lack the capacity and the Russians the desire. I know it’s probably more satifying to wring your hands and criticize the US. I noted neither of you worried much about the Russian complicity or the lives taken by the weapons he’s sold world-wide.
I don’t know if the US ought to perform this policing action, but much like countering piracy in shipping lanes world-wide, someone has to do the job and no one else is stepping forward.
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August 10th, 2009 at 12:58 pm
I’ll be there tomorrow at the criminal court to observe the final hearing. Here we go again…
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October 23rd, 2009 at 8:10 pm
In a January 2005 letter to Congress, then-Assistant Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz admitted the Defense Department “did conduct business with companies that, in turn, subcontracted work to second-tier providers who leased aircraft owned by companies associated with Mr. Bout.”
At the time, Bout was already a wanted international fugitive. Intelligence officials had considered Bout one of the greatest threats to U.S. interests, in the same league as al Qaeda kingpin Osama bin Laden. Interpol had issued a warrant for his arrest; the United Nations Security Council had restricted his travel.
But that didn’t stop U.S. government contractors from paying Bout-controlled firms roughly $60 million to fly supplies into Iraq in support of the U.S. war effort, according to a book released last year by two reporters who investigated Bout. And it didn’t prevent the U.S. military from giving Bout’s pilots millions of dollars in free airplane fuel while they were flying U.S. supply flights.
From 2003 through at least 2005, Pentagon contractors used air cargo companies known to be connected to Bout to fly an estimated 1,000 supply trips into and out of Iraq, according to “Merchant of Death: Money, Guns, Plans, and the Man Who Makes War Possible” by Douglas Farah and Stephen Braun. A Pentagon spokesman confirmed to the authors that the military gave 500,000 gallons of fuel to Bout’s pilots.
In an interview Thursday, Farah said he understood Bout may have worked on behalf of the U.S. government as recently as last year.
Breckenridge Colorado
http://www.luckymountainhome.com/
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