Outlaws Inc. (12 page)

Some pilots routinely flew arms, supplies, men, and cash for both sides, and for charities and international agencies like the UN in between. Nor was there any shortage of money. The ready supply of blood diamonds and precious natural resources meant that both militias could afford to pay almost any price for the right crew with the right plane.

One veteran pilot testified to the UN that he'd been approached to make sanctions-busting flights transporting weapons to Angola's UNITA rebel warlord leader Jonas Savimbi for a cool $100,000 a trip. The job was to fly the deadly cargo from Rwanda's capital, Kigali, to a clandestine UNITA base code-named Alpha One. There were to be no place-names or navigation aids at Alpha One, he wouldn't be on anybody's radar, and he would have no ground control. Instead, he would have to rely on his GPS to find the base and locate the runway at night. This pilot refused to make the delivery, he told the UN conference, because “it's not an easy place to get to at night, and they insist on doing it at night.”

Others were less circumspect and paid the price, becoming jungle captives—creepingly aware as the days in captivity passed with no hint of ransom from their employers or pressure from their governments that, as cheap as the weapons they often flew were, they themselves were the cheapest and most expendable resource of all. Some were lucky—comparatively speaking, at least. On May 12 and June 30, 1999, two Antonovs ostensibly under contract to fly aid into government-held towns in Angola were brought down by UNITA. The crews survived the crashes but were abducted from the wreckage by UNITA forces. One year later, five of the aviators—later identified by the Russian Embassy—were discovered half starved and raving in the Zambian jungle after having been loosed half naked into the bush by their captors.

But where many now feared to tread, Mickey looked at it coolly: It was a job, and all jobs have risks. You just have to read them right. And while many post-Soviet crews flew long, dangerous, and thankless missions there for clients like the UN wholly legitimately, for plenty more of his former Soviet military comrades used to flying impossible missions to poorly equipped landing areas, the kind of money they could make—not just from the cargoes they were commissioned to carry by their paymasters, but with their own cash businesses piggybacking those cargoes with side orders of arms, gems, booze, and whatever else they had a market for—was irresistible.

For the pilots, and business kingpins like Viktor Bout and his rival Leonid Minin, 1990s West Africa—Angola, Liberia, Sierra Leone—was hugely profitable. Indeed, so lax and corrupt were the legal and compliance regimes there that they had carte blanche.

One problem for anyone wanting to track down the gunrunners in a place like this is that, all too often, the paper trail leads nowhere. Cargo manifests need only appear to match what's in the hold in terms of tonnage (and the amount of cash on the receipt). And the supposedly watertight end-user certificate (EUC), which accompanies all arms shipments to certify the eventual destination and use of the weapons as evidence that they're not going to end up with any parties under arms embargoes or sanctions, is so easily forged I've made one myself on my laptop in a Ugandan hotel room, using a JPEG downloaded from the Internet, a ministry title I made up, the name of an official I got from the local paper, and the printer in the business center downstairs. It looks pretty good. It won't pass a full background check, like somebody calling the phone number on the government letterhead, or even thinking about it too much. Still, says one seasoned flight manager, “Nobody ever calls to check—why should they?”

In practice, so long as it looks about as good as mine, the cargo will be released, even if it's practically shouting, “Stop me, I'm dodgy.” In 2009, for example, 103 sets of refurbishment kits for 53-65KE submarine attack torpedoes were authorized for export by Montenegro to Macedonia for a civilian project in Central Asia. According to the report of the International Peace Investigation Service (IPIS), “the table of exports states that the kits were ultimately for civilian use in Kyrgyzstan—which, one may recall, is at some considerable distance from the nearest ocean.” (In the copious footnotes the monitor's voice deadpans: “It is also difficult to think of a civilian use for a torpedo.”)

The problem is that a form is always just a form, and that means it's both official-looking and easily copied. When officials finally caught up with Leonid Minin as the 2000s dawned, they would discover just how much of a mockery these ingenious ex-Soviets had made of the entire EUC system. And who can blame them for trying when many countries' EUCs are in effect slightly glorified A4 letters; others' are full, multiple-field, serial-numbered certificates. There's no unified system, and so many flying around that hard-pressed, underpaid, politically appointed customs men in third world airports not only won't know what's genuine and what's not, but lack the resources, time, and will to check and chase each one up, especially given the time differences often involved and the pressure to release cargo and turn crews and aircraft around. More forms to be filled. Stamp. Next.

And if many experienced charter agents seem blind to the capacity for extra cargo (“They are great aircraft,” says one, completely seriously. “One thing, though: If the pilots or technicians say they can fly, you always double-check. We'll work it out and we say, ‘No, you can't fly that,' and they are like, ‘Yes, we can fly it, of course we can fly it.' And we have to tell them, ‘No you
can't
, you're five tons overweight, you bloody fool!' ”), everyone seemed blind to the fact that without global standardization, EUCs were, and remain to this day, almost worthless.

All across Africa, planes were seemingly disappearing in midair only to reappear at impossible locations on the other side of the world. Flights that took off carrying food and shoes for disaster-stricken areas would land in Africa two refueling stops later carrying land mines, attack helicopters, or ammunition for rebel outfits like UNITA or Congolese warlords. These aircrews could—literally—be in five or more places at the same time. Then none at all. They were shape-shifters, masters of disguise and illusion.

Their cocaine runs used African stopovers in out-of-the-way backwaters like Guinea-Bissau and Angola instead of flying directly into Europe from Colombia and Peru because no African government had the planes or radar to detect and catch them, and because bribes were cheaper. And as for the journey there, most of the Atlantic is similarly radar-free, leaving them a clear run from the Cocaine Coast to West African bolt-holes like Sierra Leone and Liberia.

“The shit they pull is unreal, and radar coverage is just the tip of the iceberg,” agrees Bonner, talking on the phone from his base at one of South Africa's own frontier airports. Before I finally caught him, we'd played an e-mail cat-and-mouse played out via one of the Internet's many unofficial message boards for pilots to share rumors—about clients, jobs, locations, aircraft movements, and other crews. I'd been lurking for weeks, and his posts—under a pen name more elaborate than the one he's requested here—had become increasingly preoccupied with ex-Soviet aircrews. The last one, the week before I tracked him down, claimed that “90 percent of all accidents in Africa are Russian-built aircraft. The question is, why? Most are poorly maintained and should not be flying at all.” He claimed to have regularly seen “crews taking kickbacks to overload their aircraft. This is a fact: most of the Russian crews [over here] don't follow the rules of the air.”

Now, with edginess in his voice and the clear, hesitant manner of someone who's not happy at all that he's been talked into an interview, but too polite to hang up and run, he explains what this “deadly bullshit” is. “They know the radar can't see them. We fly on a frequency called 1269, it's the air frequency and it's there for pilots to report their position. In the DRC, even over Brazzaville, they don't even have a transponder [devices fitted in planes as standard since World War II, which emit signals to help identify the plane's location both to air-traffic monitors on the ground and other aircrafts' automatic collision-avoidance systems], and what do you know, the Russians give erroneous positions! They'll radio different airports and tell
each
of them that they're just a few minutes away, and will be landing there shortly! They lie on their radio about their position. Unless something is done, more people will die.”

The effect of lying about their position is that they get priority at their choice of airports. However, there are two side effects. One is the increased likelihood of midair collisions. But the other—and to Mickey this is a very nice side effect indeed—is that different airports will each note down the plane's position. And each time it will be different. So tracking a flight from, say, Entebbe in Uganda to Khartoum in Sudan becomes a strange game of find-the-lady involving all airports and ground-control centers en route, and plenty that aren't. Which of these positions, radioed to a control tower, contains the real “invisible” plane? And which are just ghost planes, positions reported and monitored, then lost?

So it is that our plane, taking off from, say, Southern Sudan, could appear in the night sky over Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Congo, Burundi, Somalia, and Sudan simultaneously. It will eventually land somewhere. But for most, it just fails to show up. So one plane becomes five, flying in different directions to different airports in the darkness, a kind of suspended Schrödinger's cat experiment in which all answers and outcomes are possible until the act of intervention, or until they land the plane.

Even when contact with ground control is established, it's laughably easy to fool. Mickey's most basic trick is so simple and effective it's almost unfair to call it a trick at all. “You're over Africa somewhere, listening to the air traffic on your radio,” he says. “So you don't have any permission. Just tell them you're one of the other planes. They can't see what you look like. Maybe you know a British Airways flight is coming ten minutes behind, and we want to come through some airspace, we just ‘borrow' that flight's permission. We radio and say, ‘Hello, I'm British Airways flight number this or this, can I come through?' ‘Of course.' Ten minutes later, when the real British Airways flight is coming, they say, ‘Hello, I am BA flight so-and-so, can I come through?' Well, the control tower will know what happened. But you are already gone.”

Indeed, using other people's call signs and flight numbers over Africa is, say insiders, “pretty standard—everybody's at it.” And if your radar isn't great—if you have any at all—it's all down to trust.

“In any case, there's a lot of naïveté in places like Africa and Central Asia,” says Brian Johnson-Thomas. “One of the reasons Kazakhstan was so popular as a plane-registration base for dodgy outfits—apart from the fact that they let anyone register—is that its call sign was always Unicorn November, meaning all Kazakh-registered flights began with the letters ‘UN.' So all over Africa, the Caucasus, Asia, South America, a lot of ground staff who didn't know any better just let them do whatever they wanted, thinking they were something to do with the United Nations. They just would see ‘flight UN-1234' or whatever, assume it was the United Nations, and welcome them with open arms!”

As it turned out, they needn't have worried. In addition to rebel militias and traffickers, there was no shortage of governments only too pleased to outsource some of their own dirty work.

 

CHAPTER TEN

Plunder in the Jungle

The Congo, 1997–2000

IF LATE-1990S ANGOLA WAS UNPREDICTABLE and dangerous for airmen, the Congo was another level of madness entirely—a fact that was reflected in the potential rewards. More than anywhere else in the late 1990s, the diamond-rich Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) had promised rich pickings for brave pilots, straight and
na levo
(meaning “on the left-hand side,” the phrase is the Russian equivalent to “under the counter” or “on the sly”) alike. Under the final, Caligula-like madness of President Mobutu, the DRC, then Zaire, also known as Hell on Earth, was falling apart. The man said to have declared his own country's currency void literally overnight simply because he'd taken a dislike to the necktie he was pictured wearing on the existing banknotes (thereby instantly plunging the economy back into a stone age of bartering, looting, and indentured labor) was finally being chased down by his own voodoo.

He'd had a good run. He had $4 billion deposited in a personal bank account in Switzerland (curiously, the exact size of his country's national debt); he'd been feted by American presidents from Nixon on (until the Cold War ended and the invites to canapés at the White House dried up); he'd canceled Christmas and declared December 25 his official birthday; renamed himself the Un stoppable Great Warrior Who Goes from Strength to Strength by deed poll; demanded that the population wear his likeness on their clothes; and dealt with Western businesses only too glad to pay bottom dollar for his country's resources, no matter how they were mined, looted, or hunted.

Now his time was up. He fled in 1997 in a plane organized by none other than Viktor Bout and under heavy gunfire, prompting his son to say admiringly of the Soviet-made hardware, “If that had been a Boeing, it would have exploded!” thus giving ex-Soviet planes the kind of celebrity endorsement no money can ever buy. But by then the damage was done. Both Ugandan and Rwandan forces moved against the country, backing rebel groups and occupying large swaths of hill and jungle territory to the north and east. These groups' rulers, warlords, and the leaders of their loose, semiofficial paramilitaries relied on child soldiers, rape, and narcotics as instruments of fear and control.

For the Ugandan and Rwandan forces, there was just one problem. The Democratic Republic of Congo is nearly ten times the size of Uganda and nearly ninety times bigger than Rwanda. This meant neither army could hope to truly control the vast areas they eventually “occupied”; instead, they focused their energies and troops around strategic targets, like diamond-mining towns and airfields. And, having taken these targets, they quickly found new partners for their import-export start-ups among the commanders of other occupying forces and the rebels they'd been fighting. They quickly found themselves welcomed by rebel warlords, neither as foes nor as liberators, but as customers and potential global distributors.

The only problem the Congolese warlords had always had was the high-risk, high-cost, ad hoc nature of air transport for these things. It was nobody's idea of an efficient export process. So imagine the delight of these rebel leaders when they discovered that far from squashing their rackets, these UPDF and Rwandan forces, with their sudden monopoly—sorry, peacekeeperly control—over the transport infrastructure, mining towns, and air bases, not to mention their regular cargo flights to and from air bases back home like Entebbe and Kigali, were very much men with whom they could do business.

It soon became clear that rather than anything so gross as disorganized plunder, the export and resale of eastern Congo's natural bounty was a key part of Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni's funding strategy for the military action in the first place. Indeed, one of the primary motivations for this Second Congo War (1998–2003) appeared to be the lust for control over the country's most lawless and (not entirely coincidentally) most mineral-rich territory, with even the loosely allied Rwandan and Ugandan forces clashing in a series of lethal firefights around the diamond-mining center of Kisangani in 1999.

The result was war as it might be imagined by Werner Herzog: an arena of charismatic psychopaths, brave leaders, visionary entrepreneurs, and avaricious chancers loaded down with guns, cash, and their own demons, toiling beneath a canopy of jungle foliage and strobe-lit by the regular apocalyptic electrical storms that roam the hills and plains of Central Africa. Generals, privates, and guerrillas alike came to the Congo with their dreams of riches, greatness, and dominion and saw them fulfilled; these things made them monsters. Accounts circulated of isolated indigenous pygmy tribes being hunted down by platoons of privateering troops and eaten as food; of soldiers with get-rich-quick schemes involving the cultivation of narcotics out in the huge, unpoliced hinterland, with plenty of money to go around for those who helped pack, transport, clear, and distribute the gear at the other end.

Just as in the crumbling Union back in the heady early 1990s and the Belgrade of the red businessman, supplier had met consumer in the ultimate free-market party. And it went down just like any entrepreneur worth his salt will tell you it always does: Once the warlords and rebels identified their customer and smoothed out their distribution, all that stockpiled DRC product started to, well, fly off the shelves. And fly it did—on the giant ex-Soviet aircraft flocking to the area as demand for their services exploded.

“It was so different to flying in Europe,” laughs Evgeny Zakharov. “Short runways and no weather! In Europe you've got always your [reports into] weather conditions: Here it's fog; here it's drizzle, there is bad weather. In Africa, you don't have this, you never have a weather report. And no radar. Plus, the runway conditions are very, very bad. And then the manual will say the runway is two thousand meters, but really it's not even fifteen hundred meters, because the other five hundred meters are destroyed by bombs, by wars, or for some other reason—like in Angola, where the runways kept getting destroyed by volcanoes.”

But they were made of stern stuff. And among the respectable entrepreneurs were familiar names. Ukrainian Leonid Minin was busy homing straight in on the natural resources. Viktor Bout, having supplied the Antonov that had spirited the cancer-riddled Mobutu from his wedding-cake palace to asylum in Togo before the mob could get to him, had been operating in these parts for years already and was on hand now to supply the Congolese warlord Jean-Pierre Bemba's army of speed-guzzling teenage soldiers and rebel warlords with Soviet-built Mi-24 gunship helicopters in return for cash from Bemba-controlled diamond fields. There's a story told by Bout biographers Farah and Braun that the helicopters not only helped Bemba steal a march on enemy forces, skip arduous route marches, and travel without fear of ambush, but even became his own private duty-free shopping courier on the rare occasion that his militia found itself camped somewhere remote on a hot night without quite enough cold beer.

The chaos would—had anybody pre-9/11 given a damn what happened in Africa—have provided a useful historical lesson to coalition forces in Iraq and post-2001 Afghanistan on how not to handle their logistical support. Planes flew in and out like taxis, and while there's no suggestion that the crews, charter agents, or operators were doing anything illegal, the lack of system oversight their methods enabled was disastrous. The legitimate objectives of governments, armed forces, and even the UN (whose troops were implicated in 2008 in arms dealing, ivory trading, drug trafficking, and even counterfeit gold smuggling from the eastern DRC) became blurred and softened by their time in the jungle and proximity to so much precious plunder.

Still, financially for all parties, it was boom time: a win-win deal. Except, of course, for the ordinary locals, logged trees, protected species, and anyone the warlords happened to kill with the bullets and guns given to them as part payment by the Ugandan and Rwandan exporter-occupiers.

Well, maybe they weren't the only losers. After all, in late-1990s Congo just as in early-1990s Russia, when powerful, rich, and avaricious men played high-stakes games, it tended to be the innocent, the hardworking, the unwitting, and the unlucky who got caught in the crossfire.

Stray bullets and unfortunate accidents had an eerie habit of picking out Mickey's comrades. Stand on a runway in the DRC today, any potholed, dirt-tracked, litter-strewn, zigzagged, shell-holed runway. Look off to your left or your right, and there are the clues: everywhere, the fossil parts of these big, thundering, flying beasts. Panels and tires are halfway up trees, bolts and patches in ditches. Like the early aviators with their Icarus wings and multidecked canvas and flaming props, these new Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines were falling, exploding, flipping over, nose-diving, breaking up, liquidizing locals, and flying by the duct-taped seat of their pants to get the job done. They were ex-Soviet air force, they'd flown through missiles into minefields and back out again before breakfast, and they didn't flinch from danger.

Sometimes maybe they should have, because the Congo has many ways of reclaiming the cargoes men try to fly out of there. The first to go was an An-12 that caught fire for no reason on landing at Bunia, forcing the crew to jump for their lives. Less lucky were the Il-76 crew that perished a couple of months later in June 1996, taking a chance on an overweight load and a ludicrously patched-up plane. They'd hit a telegraph pole earlier in the day, and the Candid was more tape than metal by the time they loaded up in the Congo. Not unusual, but the heat must have snapped it, and everybody died.

In 1998, Zimbabwe air force jets attacked and destroyed an Ilyushin belonging to Viktor Bout's Air Cess on the ground at dawn in Kalemie.

The next incident suggested one possible cause of the apparently spontaneous combustion in Bunia, when on November 10, 1999, a former-Soviet An-12 loaded to the gills with high-explosive (and now internationally banned) cluster bombs simply blew up on the runway at Mbandaka airport, killing six occupants and spraying the air base with wreckage. It was a disaster that would recur with distressing regularity. At 11:30 A.M. on April 14, 2000, sparks from an air base warehouse fire in Kinshasa spread to a cargo of ammunition, obliterating an Antonov-28 before spreading to other aircraft. Some 109 civilians on the ground are said to have been killed.

Dozens of fellow aircrews from the former Soviet Union were shot down by UNITA rocket and rifle fire over the jungle, and many more fell victim in other ways to their unstable phantom cargoes, with the seemingly spontaneous combustion caused by explosives in the hold, in midair or on runways, always given the benefit of the doubt by the possibility that it might, after all, have been an astonishingly accurate RPG shot that blew the planes up.

But as the 1990s progressed and first Angola, then Rwanda, Uganda, the Sudan, Somalia, Liberia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Burundi, and Sierra Leone all tipped toward chaos and war toward the end of the decade, Mickey admits the cold fact is that in some ways the dangers, even the deaths, helped anyone who wanted to play fast and loose.

For every crash site or shard of wing, just as many planes, crews, and illicit cargoes simply vanished, their fake ID, sketchy, ever-changing registrations and flickering paper trails making it impossible to determine whether they'd crashed or simply been repainted, and were now flying happily under an alias and new, heat-free ID. One Antonov downed in 2000 running arms to Liberia hadn't officially existed for some time, having been registered and deregistered on the very same day in Moldova—a phantom plane, written off as scrapped, flying on regardless through the African mist with its deadly payload, a ghostly
Flying Dutchman
with no home in the world and death at its heels. Rumors of collusion in the smoke-screening by governments persist. On October 30, 2003, UN investigators were turned away from the site of a Moldovan Antonov-28 believed to have been transporting illicit arms consignments that had crashed outside Kamina by “military officers armed with AK-47 rifles and people wearing civilian clothes.” (The Moldovan operator later responded that they had conducted their own internal investigation and were “absolutely certain” they hadn't been running illicit weapons. So that was that cleared up.)

Even if people know where and who you are, there's a good chance in places like Africa you'll get away with it. Doug Farah and
Los Angeles Times
correspondent Stephen Braun reported that Gary Busch, a contemporary of Viktor Bout's, once found that three of Bout's own fleet of planes were using the same tail number and air-operations papers, noting simply that this was simply “the way it was” when trafficking in Africa.

One tail number, three planes, five different reported routes per flight per plane. With up to fourteen “phantom” flights per registered tail number at any given moment, the night skies over Africa, Eastern Europe, Asia, and the Caucasus are full of Mickeys. But which ones do you believe? And which ones do you follow? And how? Radar coverage peters out, leaving gaping abysses over the emptiest parts of the landmass—the mountains, savannahs, and rainforests, the parts least likely to be under government or police control. Borders are long, porous, and frequently unpoliced. “Once you're up,” says Mickey, “you can come down and change things wherever you want, really.”

“The Ilyushin Il-76, even more than the Antonov An-12 or An-24, is made for landing on rough, unprepared runways,” says Brian Johnson-Thomas. And one of its special powers, and what makes it better than any of the American models the world had been using, is that it's designed to load and unload without ground assistance.

One former Il-76 pilot laughs as I ask him about the independence that buys. “If you really wanted to, maybe you could take off with whatever you like on board, wait until you're out of radar range, buy yourself some time by misreporting your position, divert somewhere to make an illicit rendezvous, land, unload your cargo, hand it over, take on something else, take off again, and resume your original flight plan. In the places these guys operate, nobody will notice if you're forty minutes late. Nobody can see where you are, and maybe you've already reported your position as close to your destination, so you might have just meandered a bit. That's how flights take off with one thing on board and land with another. Let's say for the sake of argument, food becomes something naughty, and that something naughty quickly becomes money.”