Comment on this story
Comment
At the U.S. prison in Marion, Illinois, in a special unit so restrictive it’s nicknamed “Little Guantanamo,” a broad-chested, mustachioed man dubbed the “merchant of death” who speaks at least six languages is serving a 25-year term, after by building an arms smuggling empire that spanned the globe.
His name is Victor Booth. And his native Russia wants him home, very badly. The big question: Why?
Booth, 55, is the most notorious arms dealer of his time, accused of profiting from weapons fueling conflicts in Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
Who is Viktor Bout, the Russian arms dealer who is rumored to be in a prisoner swap?
This week, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said the United States had made a “substantial offer” to Russia to secure the release of two Americans detained in Moscow, WNBA star Brittney Griner and security consultant Paul Whelan. Russian officials have hinted that they expect a prisoner exchange.
There is no doubt that Booth will be the biggest reward for Russian officials who have protested his treatment since his 2008 arrest in Thailand following a Drug Enforcement Administration raid. Steve Zissou, Booth’s New York-based lawyer, warned this month that “no Americans will be exchanged unless Victor Booth is sent home.”
What is less clear, however, is exactly why Russia is so interested in Bout. When CIA Director William J. Burns at the Aspen Security Forum this month was asked why Russia wanted Booth, Burns replied: “That’s a good question because Victor Booth is a badass.”
Although Russia has complained that Bout was ensnared by the DEA, many U.S. officials and analysts believe its anger is not about the merits of the case, but rather about Bout’s ties to Russian military intelligence.
American officials hope that public pressure will lead to the release of the Russian prisoners
“It’s clear that he had significant ties to Russian government circles,” said Lee Wolensky, a National Security Council official in the Clinton administration who led early efforts to tackle Booth’s network.
Although less well-known than the KGB and its successor, the FSB, Russia’s military intelligence agency, better known as the GRU, has a reputation for undertaking bolder and more risky actions. In recent years, she has been accused of everything from hacking elections to killing dissidents.
Additionally, reports suggest that Bout may have close ties to Igor Sechin, a former deputy prime minister of Russia and an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Both Sechin and Bout served in the Soviet Army in Africa in the 1980s.
Booth has denied any such ties to the GRU. He also said he did not know Sechin.
But that silence may be the point. The arms trafficker refused to cooperate with US authorities, despite sitting for more than a decade, isolated and alone, in a cell thousands of kilometers from his home in Moscow. This silence could be rewarded.
“He kept his cool in prison, never exposed anything to the Americans as far as I can tell,” said Russian journalist Andrei Soldatov.
Simon Sarajian of Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs said Booth could never have run such a large smuggling business without government protection, but that he never talked about it. “The Russian government is eager to bring it back to keep it that way,” Sarajian said.
Bout’s release would send a message to others who might find themselves in trouble, said Mark Galeotti, an expert on Russian security: “The motherland will not forget you.”
“The Russians successfully bring [him] otherwise it would be seen as a triumph,” Galeotti said. “And let’s face it, the Kremlin is looking for triumphs right now.
Russian political analyst Tatyana Stanovaya, founder of political analysis group R.Politik, said Putin wanted something deeper than political gain. “We have a special word in the Russian language for people like Booth: ‘svoi.’ It means one of “us”. This is someone who worked for the motherland, at least in [the government’s] eyes.”
Bout, who has said in interviews that he was born in Tajikistan in 1967, studied languages at the Soviet Military Institute of Foreign Languages in Moscow. He said he was forced to learn Portuguese and later sent to Angola to work as a translator for the Soviet Air Force.
Military institutes were key recruiting grounds for the GRU (the more sophisticated KGB, meanwhile, stuck to universities), experts say. And while his ties to Sechin are unclear, both studied Portuguese and overlapped with the Soviet military in Mozambique.
Shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Booth, like many others who saw an opportunity to profit amid the chaos, became an entrepreneur. He used a small fleet of Soviet Antonov An-8 jets to build an air transport business and was apparently willing to take risks others wouldn’t, flying to war zones and failed states.
Booth is also believed to have access to something more valuable than planes: knowledge of the fate of the Soviet Union’s vast weapons stockpiles.
“He was exporting weapons for a decade from places like Ukraine,” said Douglas Farah, president of the national security firm IBI Consultants and co-author of a book about Booth.
By 2000, Booth was one of the most notorious traffickers in the world. He was called the “leading merchant of death” in the British Parliament and was named in UN reports for supplying heavy weapons to a rebel movement in Angola, as well as to Charles Taylor in Liberia, then supporting a deadly civil war in neighboring Sierra Leone.
The extent to which Booth worked for Russian military interests is debated. Farah said he believed that given the scale of the military equipment being moved, such work may have been tacitly approved by the GRU.
Wolensky said Booth had caught the attention of the Clinton administration because he was disrupting peace processes the president supported in Africa.
“In some cases, he was arming both sides of the conflict,” Volensky said.
Amid mounting international pressure, including an Interpol arrest warrant issued in 2004, Booth returned to Moscow.
By this time Booth is believed by many to have retired from his most intensive work in the arms trade. He lived in Golitsyn, a small town outside Moscow. A friend who visited his home in 2008 later noted that it was full of books and, surprisingly, a DVD of the 2005 Nicolas Cage film Lord of War, which was said to be inspired by Booth’s life.
Unfortunately for him, that guest—former South African intelligence agent Andrew Smulian—worked for the DEA.
Booth was later arrested in Thailand, where he was secretly enlisted by the DEA to arrange the purchase of 100 surface-to-air missiles, 20,000 AK-47 rifles, 20,000 cluster grenades, 740 mortars, 350 sniper rifles, five tons of C-4 explosives and 10 million rounds of ammunition for people he believed to be agents of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a rebel group.
The elaborate sting operation sidestepped a key problem in the US prosecution of Bout: he had not broken any US laws. In 2011, a federal court in New York found him guilty of various charges, including conspiracy to kill American citizens.
Russian officials particularly complained about the aggressive and unusual targeting of Booth.
But Bout’s record helped make a broader case that he was no ordinary businessman. When agents posing as FARC buyers said the weapons would be used against US Air Force pilots working with the Colombian government, Booth could be heard telling them they had “the same enemy”.
“This is not a business,” he said. “This is my fight.”
Add Comment