Outlaws Inc. (19 page)

Still, as the 2000s progressed, Viktor Bout's role in Liberia and Angola was becoming more widely known. In late 2000, when British government minister Peter Hain made his impassioned speech to parliament in which he coined the nickname “Merchant of Death” for Bout, he succeeded in scaring the horses, and the subsequent pressure from monitors, NGOs, bloggers, intelligence services, and investigators would see some—though by no means all—of the wildcat crews' operations for the U.S. military come under fire. By 2005, names like Bout and Damnjanovic came under increased scrutiny.

As the spotlight shone brighter on the illicit movement of guns, people, money, and resources around the world, some cargo outfits would move on again, looking for happier, more discreet hunting grounds—places where the skies were still free and where their services were once again in urgent demand. Places they had friends.

For some, that meant a renewed focus on empty, wing-and-a-prayer Africa; for others, the equally radar-free skies of South America.

Only this time, for Mickey, I couldn't escape the feeling that it looked increasingly like a last bolt-hole. In fact, for many of their comrades, these outposts would be the end of the line. And for at least one very high-profile former Vitebsk colleague, this is where the international law-enforcement net would begin to close in.

 

PART V

Back to the Jungle: Central America and The Horn of Africa

 

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

High Times on the Costa Coca

Central America, 1999–2008

AS IT EMERGED THAT al-Qaeda had been funding itself with knockoff CD, T-shirt, and DVD sales, the penny began to drop that terrorism, drug-trafficking, illicit arms, the vice trade, and even copyright infringement might be full and integral parts of a global economy, just as the different parts and divisions of the “straight” economy are.

As eureka moments go, it was a little late, coming to the capitalist West a full decade after Mickey, Viktor Bout, and Leonid Minin had seized on it. But there it was, at last. Post–9/11, the world suddenly began feverishly trying to put the pieces of the international terror puzzle together.

To anyone who'd seen the Miloševi
ć
regime in the last days of Yugoslavia funding guerrilla armies and paramilitary organizations with bootleg cigarettes and illicit weapons smuggled aboard Soviet-era cargo giants, it shouldn't have been a surprise. But a surprise it was. So was the fact that the Taliban was nowhere near running short of money because they controlled the heroin trade, justifying the rather un-Islamic practice of drug trafficking by pointing out that it was for the greater good of bringing the infidel to his knees, using the old tactic of the passing Afghan “well-wishers” who used to throw the odd wrap of heroin or bag of weed into tanks and over garrison walls for the occupying soldiers, hoping it would addict and debilitate them.

Narco-terrorism,
a term coined in Peru in the early 1980s, was the new buzzword, and the rise and proliferation of organizations like al-Shabab, the Janjaweed, Somali pirates, and the Colombian left-wing guerrilla organization FARC began to seem more like a global issue than a local one.

Suddenly, Mickey's flights were no longer simply the concern of aid agencies, businessmen, warlords, and the odd monitor or plane spotter fortunate enough to have a desk in Washington, Antwerp, or Stockholm. Like it or not, even these radarless expanses were plugged into the global ecosystem—albeit an ecosystem overheating on its own wild, freewheeling energy.

These planes may have earned their narco-smuggling stripes back in Mickey's Soviet-Afghan war days, but their route networks have grown, taking in cocaine from Colombia, Peru, Venezuela, and Mexico. As early as 1992, authorities right down through Central and South America had begun noting Central American cocaine cartels forming what one U.S. intelligence report called “formal alliances with Russian organized crime groups.” That year, Colombian authorities had begun recording contact between a Colombian known as “Caliche” whom they suspected was one of the main couriers for the Orejuela cartel, and a man he called “Sylvester” from Russia's powerful Moscow-area
mafiya
, the Solntsevskaya Brotherhood. The two men, it emerged, were setting up a “large-scale distribution network” with the West African states—in which, coincidentally, a large ex-Soviet aviation infrastructure had quickly established itself—turning into popular transshipment points.

By 2001, an intelligence report by the Colombian Administrative Department of Security found that “Russian and Colombian criminal groups have been negotiating shipments of drugs that were paid for with short- and long-range weapons, that were later sold in Central America or directly to subversive groups of the country.”

All this high-volume trade with subversive and criminal groups—meaning, essentially, FARC—would be impossible, of course, without help and official collusion. Which is where FARC's Cold War contact book came in. Through the 1980s, the guerrilla army had sent soldiers abroad for training, commonly to fellow revolutionary communist lands, from the Soviet Union to Vietnam. By the 1990s, the lines of communication and transport between their soldiers and their now-freelance ex-Soviet comrades-in-arms was bearing more profitable fruit.

Moisés Naím, for whom as Venezuela's minister for trade and industry in the 1980s and 1990s, FARC's activities had presented an almost daily challenge, compares the era's Colombian drug-trafficking kingpins like Pablo Escobar explicitly to Viktor Bout. Both, he says, were “Mr. Big” characters in their own particular nascent industries; industries which would quickly become so highly evolved that they would no longer need Mr. Big figures at all.

With the mid-1990s decline of legendary Colombian cartels like Escobar's, the components in the process—shippers and producers—saw they could work in more agile, less public ways and effectively sidestep these powerful middle men, and Latin America buzzed with strange new kinds of sea and air traffic. In Mexico, reports surfaced in 1998 that the Russian mafia was “supplying Mexican drug traffickers with radar, automatic weapons, grenade launchers, and small submersibles in exchange for cocaine, amphetamines, and heroin,” while DEA agents found posing as members of the Russian mafia with three hundred Kalashnikovs going cheap was suddenly an effective way to draw Mexican
narcos
out for a sting.

But an investigation by MSNBC in 2000 not only revealed the extent and richness of the network that made up the South American Connection, but proved to anyone harboring doubts just how mind-bogglingly profitable the business was for the airmen prepared to work the routes.

Recalling Andrei Soldatov's cryptic words about protection for smuggling flights from Afghanistan, U.S. intelligence uncovered “an alliance of corrupt Russian military figures, organized crime bosses, diplomats and revolutionaries” flying regular consignments of weapons to Colombia and returning to the former Soviet Union with their payment—up to forty thousand kilos of cocaine a trip.

According to U.S. intelligence sources quoted in the MSNBC investigation, throughout 1999 Il-76s began taking off from air bases in Russia and Ukraine bound for Amman in Jordan packed with surface-to-air missiles, guns, and ammo. They would refuel in Jordan, “bypassing customs with the help of corrupt foreign diplomats and bribed local officials,” then head off, tracing seemingly crazy routes via the Canary Islands and Guyana to Iquitos, deep in the Peruvian Amazon jungle. There, they would land and unload at remote airstrips, or in some cases even parachute-drop their cargo to Colombian FARC guerrilla detachments. These were lightning operations allegedly coordinated by a committee of men: a rogue officer in the Peruvian army; a notorious fugitive Brazilian narco-trafficker, Luiz Fernando Da Costa, also known as Fernandinho Beira-Mar—or ‘Seaside Freddie'—living in Paraguay's “smuggler city” of Pedro Juan Caballero; and a Lebanese businessman. Despite heated denials from Colombia, in August 2000 the Peruvian government confirmed the smuggling ring's existence, and that each parachute drop to the guerrillas had included around ten thousand Russian-manufactured automatic rifles acquired on the black market in the Middle East.

At the jungle airstrips, the weapons would be unloaded and replaced with cocaine—some of which would be given as payment for the weapons to the Jordanian middlemen; the rest flown back to Russia and Ukraine “for sale there, in Europe and in the Persian Gulf,” at up to fifty thousand dollars per kilo. The sums were staggering. “While most of the weaponry goes directly to FARC,” wrote MSNBC's reporters Sue Lackey and Michael Moran, “a smaller amount is parceled off to other guerrilla groups [including] Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed movement best known for its guerrilla activities in southern Lebanon [via] Arab immigrant communities of Paraguay, Ecuador, Venezuela and Brazil.”

The subtle sophistication of the arrangement—in which every party to the deal was kept remote from almost every other party to make detection more difficult—echoed the loose agglomerations favored by networks like Bout's and Minin's. One U.S. intelligence agent told the reporters the weapons came from “… organized crime and the military. There is a tremendous gray area between the two in Russia and the Ukraine.” Indeed, the scale of the operation, not to mention the sheer nerve, took even the intelligence officers who uncovered it by surprise, drawing comparisons with the scale of “straight” manufacturing businesses. It was, said one in admiration, “a big operation … there are a lot of people involved. It's literally an industry.”

Around this industry, like any other, grew networks of suppliers, secondary service providers, and bottom-feeders. Up and down Central America's coast, the flight paths traced by Mickey and his fellow pilots in their Candids and smaller Antonov turboprops nurture small economies of prostitutes, bent cops, and fixers. But perhaps the most curious of all are the legions of fishermen and farmhands who set out into the wilderness daily before dawn in the hope of finding off-target or jettisoned bales of cocaine from a wayward illicit drop.

“GOOD MORNING TO you all. Ha-ha! It's a beautiful March morning. That was Bob Marley, and this is a message from our sponsor.” There is crackling as someone covers the microphone with a hand, and the sound of the local radio DJ arguing with someone off-mic about which button to press to start the ad. Then they locate the button, and here it comes over the airwaves: a woman's voice, matronly and with a soft Caribbean lilt, urging hungry Belizeans to come to her chicken diner. In the bright coastal sun, the Bakelite radio on the counter of the boat-repair shop loses reception for a moment, and the only sounds are the waves. Then it comes back on as the DJ introduces a comedy song called “I'm Just Another Gringo in Belize.”

It's just the start of another lazy, sun-kissed day on Ambergris, one of the tiny, sandspit-and-swamp cayes—pronounced
keys,
like the Florida archipelago they resemble—off the mainland of this Mayan-Caribbean state. Belize is a tiny coastal country nestled between Guatemala and Mexico on the Central American coastline. Accordingly, the former British Honduras is part coastal paradise, part Mayan hill-and-jungle backwater, and projects the kind of quaint, slow-paced charm we all remember from childhood visits to elderly aunts by the seaside. The waters this side of a long coastal reef glow bright blue, and farther out, where the peasant fishermen ply their trade and the occasional launch zips by on its way up the Central American seaboard toward Florida, they are calm and reassuringly hushed. It genuinely is the last place I'd ever expected, quite literally, to fall over the slit and dissolving remains of a twelve-kilo sack of uncut cocaine someone had left lying on the sandspit beach of the long caye during a dawn walk.

If I'd been able to read the local papers for the couple of months before my arrival in March 2003, I might have had an inkling. On a cloudy Wednesday morning in February 2003, Belizean drug-enforcement agents on a tip-off stormed a field on the Mexico-Belize border and stumbled upon a still-smoldering torched aircraft. But if that was genuinely their first clue that all was not entirely as it should be on the sunny shores of this tiny Central American paradise, perhaps it shouldn't have been. For years, fishermen and farmers up and down the Mosquito Coast have been doubling up as cocaine salvage men, pushing out early in the morning to see what they can rescue from the fields and waters of Belize and neighboring countries like Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras. Locals here earn a matter of pennies a day—yet a handful of those industrious or well informed enough have long been living a Central American rewrite of
Whisky Galore
(Compton Mackenzie's book and subsequent film about a small Scottish island community onto whose beach fifty thousand cases of scotch from a wrecked World War II cargo vessel are washed). Only here, the flotsam comes in the form of shrink-wrapped bales of 100 percent pure cocaine, not bottles of booze.

On a sandy, shark-encircled caye a few kilometers along the Costa Coca just weeks later, I was a passenger on a local fishing boat whose skipper explained to me as he sped right past his fishing waters and into the deeper ocean that it was always worth his while scouting around for the “taped-up plastic sacks of cocaine that the
narcotraficantes
drop into the water at night.” Sometimes, he explains, the
narcos
whose job it is to deliver the drugs to the planes come round the coast at night and attempt to rendezvous with the plane's crew. If they are disturbed, chased by law enforcement, or just paranoid, the easiest thing for them to do is push the cargo over the side, carefully wrapped so that it floats discreetly, in the hope of doubling back and retrieving it when the danger has passed—the big-money equivalent of throwing your joint from the car window. The air trapped in the sacks makes them float, semi-submerged or just below the surface, glinting as the light bounces off the plastic. Often they do return and retrieve their cargo, but there are often stragglers, bales washed away from the rest. These are, says the skipper, “the bales the fishing boats find, mostly. Sometimes from a plane too, though, I think.”

By now it was late morning and my skipper and I were no longer alone: A handful of small dinghies could be seen combing the reef waters and the deeper sea beyond, packed with fishermen hoping to land their own twelve-kilo, plastic-wrapped golden ticket. Up and down the beach, meanwhile, were the sacks that hadn't made it—punctured on impact with the ground, swept out, torn, and washed up again, their precious contents either a dissolving bubbly residue or gone forever.

Back on land, the caye is awash with the stuff, young teenagers selling cocaine—or a hurriedly home-cut version of what the boats or 4 x 4s brought in—for as little as ten dollars a gram on jetties, beach bars, and up and down the sand in a way you'd normally be offered cheap souvenir beach towels or hair braids. One can't help but notice how, among the rows of hovels, rusting pickups, and wooden boats, the occasional spanking-new, tinted-glass Humvee sits incongruously; or the odd rococo home extension with pool among a cluster of poor-but-proud shacks at the end of a dirt road. This is just one of the bizarre local economic glitches—along with a series of microbooms to the cash economy whenever a shipment falls—that attends this particular delivery method to the local arms-for-drugs traders.