Gun Baby Gun: A Bloody Journey Into the World of the Gun (39 page)

Certainly, Ukraine has played a major role in the proliferation of small arms around the world. With the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, Soviet military units left the lands they had occupied and headed home. As they headed for Moscow, countless guns were left unsecured and ripe for the picking. As much as 2.5 million tons of ammunition and as many as 7 million small arms and light weapons were left behind in at least 184 depots.
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In Odessa, the imperial city of a million people, some 1,500 standard freight cars of ammunition were abandoned.

All in all, it worked out at about one hundred firearms being left
for each Ukrainian soldier.
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And so this newly liberated country began to offload its assets. Over the next six years, there was a reported $11 million sales of small arms from Ukraine – most likely a fraction of the real amount shipped out.
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In addition, when Ukraine gained its independence, its arms industry had to rethink who to supply next. Ukraine once accounted for about 30 per cent of the weaponry production of the Soviet Union, and there were about 750 defence industry enterprises with a staff of 1.5 million to feed.
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This windfall inheritance and skilled workforce means today Ukraine is the fourth-largest arms exporter in the world, with about $1.3 billion sales.
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In turn, this industry created a highly efficient and secretive export system, one made up of opaque relationships between gun manufacturers, dealers, cargo companies, customs officials and off-shore financial services. This was why I had booked a ticket there.

Six kilometres south of the provincial city of Nikolaev, set between stony fallow fields and the thick, slow-flowing spread of the Volga River, is a little-known port. It lies fenced behind dense lines of barbed wire. A man-made forest further blocks your view of it. But as you get closer you catch glimpses of armoured bunkers and guards glaring at you from watchtowers and beyond. From the right location, you can even make out the outline of heavy loading cranes and thick earthen berms built to absorb the shock of an explosion. But if you venture too close, you come up against armed men with stony faces. There was one entrance, and there was no way I was getting in.

I had never expected to, really. This wasn’t the place for prying eyes. But the one thing those shipments of small arms that had left Ukraine had in common was that all began their journeys here, in Oktyabrsk. And it was not just those three. This port had reportedly been the point of origin for repeated weapons shipments to over a dozen countries, many with a reputation for brutal repression: Sudan and Myanmar, Venezuela and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iran and Angola.

Today, it is estimated that up to forty weapon-filled vessels leave these private docks every year.
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Even their website shows military cargo awaiting loading.
⁷¹

At least Oktyabrsk was true to its past. For many years, it was a top-secret Russian naval installation. It was from here that Moscow sent missiles to Havana in 1962, triggering the Cuban nuclear missile crisis. And, despite being in Ukraine, Oktyabrsk is, as reported in the
Washington Post
, ‘functionally controlled by Russia’, run by a former Russian navy captain and owned by an oligarch with close ties to the Kremlin.
⁷²

This possible link to Russia was, to me, an intriguing one. After all, the Ukrainians were embroiled in a nasty standoff in the east with pro-Russian Crimeans. Why would there be so many arms shipments coming out of a Russian-run port in the heart of this country?
⁷³

I had emailed a few shipping companies to ask for an interview to find out more about this trade, but the same thing that happened with the gun companies in Vegas happened here. Nobody replied. But as many of these companies had headquarters in Odessa, two hours’ drive to the west of Oktyabrsk, paying them a visit seemed my best chance of getting someone to explain these shipments of arms to me a little more. So that’s where I headed.

The photographer’s voice could just be heard above the roar of the fountain, and the bride shrieked as the wind picked up and sent a spray over her. Her hair was tight on her head and pulled back her features, making her look stern. She came over and asked me to get off the bench I was sitting on, so that she could get a better picture. Her bridesmaids, all dressed in the blue and yellow of the Ukrainian flag, stared at me. I wasn’t going to ruin the photo opportunity, so I moved.

Starting my visit to Odessa with the sight of a wedding felt apt. After all, it has a strong reputation as a place to find love. My internet
searches for the shipping companies that operate out of here ran constantly up against a tide of adverts for young brides and the promises of a lonely heart being filled.

But love was not the only relationship that flourished here. Everywhere you saw signs of the coming-together of business and trade. Above the airport’s passport control were three adverts for freight service companies, one showing a lorry fitted with aircraft wings. Others highlighted offshore financial services. Speed and discretion were the key offerings here.

Once it was grain merchants that had made Odessa the fourth-richest city in the Russian Empire. Now its exports had diversified. Women and guns were new lures that hooked people here. I smiled at the posing bride and walked down to the docks. Small groups of Japanese tourists had left their cruise-ship and were being shown around. I passed them, listening to their guide explaining how Odessa was a city of immigrants – more European than Russian, of course – and I carried on down through a shaded park filled with broken concrete steps and on to the port.

The Black Sea spread into the glare of the morning sun, and across the bay a line of rust-metal ships were slowly being unloaded. Unlike in Oktyabrsk, you could see here cranes swinging endless containers through the warm sea air. The screech of tortured metal sounded, and other cranes stood unmoving, like mute robots, idling beside ships with glittering names such as the
Bosphorous Queen
. But this queen had long ago lost her regal shine and listed lightly against the dock, decaying in the sharp light.

There was nothing to see here that revealed Odessa’s gun trade to me. I pushed back, up the Potemkin Steps, the formal entrance-way to the city, past heavy men encouraging tourists to pose with white-tailed eagles, and made my way to Number 10 Bunina Street.

At this address stood Odessa’s most renowned shipping company, Kaalbye. It was a firm that prided themselves on shipping high-value military cargo. The US Navy’s Military Sealift Command once hired them to transport mine-countermeasure vessels to Japan and a coastal security ship to Cyprus.
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And their fleet certainly transported cargo from Oktyabrsk.
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I passed through Odessa’s charming, decaying neo-classical streets, until I came to the address – the Maritime Business Centre – a ten-storey building of glass and secrets. Three men stood in the foyer, one of them with a pistol on his hip. I asked for Kaalbye shipping and they showed me to a small office on the side. There sat a young woman, dressed casually in jeans and a T-shirt. She gave me a bright smile as I walked in. I explained that I had emailed the company and no one had answered, so she told me to follow her and led me past the armed guard to a discreet lift at the end of the corridor.

Taking out a key, she pushed the button for the top floor, and the door closed. When it opened again, we were met by two kitsch statues: Poseidon and Mercury in gold gilt. They stood in front of two gaudy panels of painted glass – maps of the ancient seas – flanking heavy double doors that led on to a reception. Entering, it felt like stepping into Alice in Wonderland’s study: seven doors branched off to hidden rooms, and in between them badly painted seascapes were hanging on wood-panelled walls. An early medieval galleon stood in a glass cabinet opposite a silver globe – an attempt at refined taste that fell short.

Behind a thick, marble-topped reception desk was a carefully coiffured woman staring at me strangely. She was dressed in a purple dress that would have looked in place at a cocktail party. I walked up and explained I was there hoping to see one of the directors. She looked pleased and told me that everyone was on holiday. She was sorry, there was nothing she could do.

My attempt to get an interview had failed, so I left a number and was escorted out. But no director called me. Instead, I got a phone call from their lawyer. His name was Andrew Friedman, with an ‘expertise defending investigations involving . . . foreign corrupt practices . . . export controls and contractor corruption’.
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‘I am representing Kaalbye shipping,’ he said. ‘I represent the company in litigation in the United States.’

‘Right, so how can I help?’ I was in the dark. Did they need a lawyer to give me an interview?

‘Because there is pending litigation over what has been written about them – they are going to decline to comment. There was a research firm in the US that wrote a report . . .’

‘In what context?’ I asked, interrupting him. I was annoyed.

‘In the context of arms shipments.’

‘Where?’ I said. I must have sounded like an asshole, but he was getting to me.

‘It’s online if you search,’ he said.

The research firm he spoke about was called C4DS, a Washington-based investigative unit. C4DS had claimed Kaalbye was connected to an arms transfer to Angola in 2001; to an unknown shipment from Russian to Syria in 2012; and to a transfer of arms from Russia to Venezuela in 2012.
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I wasn’t sure what that had to do with me and told him as much. I said I wanted to interview Kaalbye about legal armament shipments – that was all. I had no evidence that they were doing anything wrong.

‘They are going to decline to comment.’

‘Why would you need a lawyer to call me up to tell me that?’ I said.

‘I am not in any way trying to intimidate you. I am doing it because my client asked me to call you to let you know . . . rather than just kind of silently ignore you.’

It was a courtesy call to tell me that I wasn’t going to get an interview. And, oh, by the way, we are suing someone. It felt heavy-handed, but I guess when you start looking at the international shipments of weapons, you don’t meet pushovers.

And that was it. My attempt to get some clarity on how guns are legally traded ended with a lawyer on the phone. Heaven knows what I was going to run up against when I started looking at the illegal trade.

13. THE SMUGGLERS

Catacombs and criminals in Ukraine – anarchy in Somalia, shopping in Mogadishu’s market for AK47s – human rights abuse in Northern Ireland – how governments get involved in gun smuggling – the Second Amendment’s long reach – the plea for no more US guns in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico

In early November 2013 the Greek coastguard intercepted a Sierra Leone-flagged cargo ship called the
Nour-M
near the Imia islets of the cobalt-blue waters of the eastern Aegean. Allegedly, there were 20,000 Kalashnikov assault rifles on board, along with 32 million rounds of ammunition. The ship had left Ukraine a few days before.
¹

According to the vessel’s captain, Hüseyin Yilmaz, their final destination was the Libyan port of Tripoli. He said the
Nour-M
’s cargo had been purchased by their Ministry of Defence, and all was above board. But Greece’s media reported differently.
²
They said that the Syrian port of Tartus was listed as the ship’s final destination by marine traffic systems, and the captain had typed Syria into the navigation system, changing it to Libya only after his boat was challenged.
³
If this was true, then the ship was breaking an arms embargo.

Like so much in the world of smuggling, it will be hard ever to know the truth. The
Nour-M
was intriguingly to sink within thirty days of its seizure, battered into the depths by a storm off the port of Rhodes.
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The Greek authorities have never clarified what happened to the 20,000 rifles.
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But if, as the authorities and media suspected,
the
Nour-M
was indeed smuggling arms out of the Black Sea, it would have been part of a long tradition of Ukraine’s involvement in international illicit activities, one that was focused around the urbane streets of Odessa.