The Lord of War

Who is this man?
Variously known as Vadim Aminov, Viktor Bulakin, 'The Embargo Buster' and 'The Merchant of Death', Viktor Anatoliyevich Bout (his real name) is the world's largest dealer in illegal arms. The scope of his dealing activities first hit the Western intelligence radar in 1999. The US National Security Council (NSC), trying to track the vast quantities of weapons from the former Soviet bloc that were fuelling conflicts across Africa, had authorised telephone taps on government and militia leaders in Congo, Liberia, Sierra Leone and other war zones. Cross-referencing the transcripts with satellite pictures and British intelligence, one name kept cropping up: Viktor Bout. Gayle Smith, then the top Africanist at the NSC, emailed her colleagues: "Who is this guy? Pay close attention. He's all over the place."

How did Bout start out in business?
He cut his first deal in 1992 aged 25, when, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, he bought three dilapidated Antonov cargo planes for £60,000 (possibly with the assistance of his wife's father, rumoured to have been a high-ranking Soviet intelligence officer). Initially there was nothing sinister about his business: he set up shop in the United Arab Emirates, shipping tax-free goods home for newly rich Russians. He made a fortune filling his planes with fresh-cut gladioli from South Africa, bought for £1 each, and taking them to Dubai, where he sold them for £50. By 1996, his was the largest air cargo company in the UAE; his planes were criss-crossing Africa, carrying frozen chickens, diamonds, and mining equipment.

How did he get involved in arms dealing?
Bout, a former Soviet military officer thought to have served as a translator in Africa, was uniquely well placed to take advantage of the opportunities presented by the collapse of the USSR. On the one hand the former Soviet states had huge stores of surplus weapons (and cheap aircraft) guarded by underpaid, disgruntled soldiers; on the other, there was a booming demand for arms from old Soviet clients and new militant groups from Africa to the Philippines. In defiance of UN embargoes, Bout shipped around the world not just guns and ammunition but grenade launchers, missiles and attack helicopters. Ukraine seems to have been the source of many of his wares: from 1992 to 1998, an estimated $32m of Ukrainian weaponry disappeared. Allegedly, Bout sold much of it.

To whom did he sell the arms?
"Bout would fly for anyone who paid," an associate of his told the US's Centre for Public Integrity, which has long tracked his activities. One client was Charles Taylor, the Liberian dictator now on trial for war crimes in Sierra Leone (where Bout also armed the brutal Revolutionary United Front). Indeed, he seems to have had a hand in most of the African conflicts of the Nineties. His involvement was in some ways evenhanded - he supplied both Angola's government and its Unita guerillas. In 1997 his planes flew Mobutu Sese Seko, the Congolese dictator, to safety as rebel warlords closed in on him; Bout had armed the rebels. He is also said to have ferried UN aid and peacekeepers to Sierra Leone, Somalia and Rwanda - conflicts he had helped to foment.

What about the rest of the world?
In the mid-Nineties Bout sold arms to the government of Afghanistan and the Northern Alliance, then fighting against the Taliban. In August 1995, the Taliban, from their stronghold in Kandahar, forced down one of his planes, loaded with ammunition. Soon after, Bout emerged as chief supplier of arms and equipment to the Taliban - and, by extension, al-Qaeda - racking up a reported £50m in sales over some five years. "He used the opportunity as a business introduction to the Taliban," says one source familiar with his activities. "He's a very enterprising person." Bout is also said to have armed Hezbollah in Lebanon and the militant group Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines. By 2000, he was 'the McDonald's of arms trafficking', says Alex Vines of Human Rights Watch: a brand known around the world.

Why has it taken so long to catch up with him?
Bout was brilliant at covering his tracks. By re-registering his fleet of planes in different jurisdictions and under different names, and using devices such as forged end-user arms certificates, he evaded Western intelligence for years. Even after his exposure, he ran rings around his pursuers. Following the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Bout's airlines won contracts from the US military and contractors based there. In 2005 a Bout front company was alleged to have been chartered by the RAF to fly supplies to Kosovo. Besides, it is hard to prosecute arms trafficking: breaking UN arms embargoes by selling weapons in conflict zones attracts international condemnation, but is not illegal in many nations. Suspects need to have broken a specific law in a specific jurisdiction before they can be tried. Bout's contacts have kept him safe, too: the Belgian government issued an Interpol 'red notice' for his arrest for money laundering in 2002, but Putin's regime has shielded him: he has lived for years in Moscow, describing himself as an entrepreneur who has been scapegoated.

How was he finally caught?
The Thai police picked him up in Bangkok in a sting operation set up by the US Drug Enforcement Agency: agents posed as members of the Colombian rebel group Farc trying to buy arms. He was arrested under Thai terrorism laws and the DEA now wants to extradite him. Bout's lawyers described the allegations against him as "blah blah blah" and claim he runs an aircraft maintenance company. In 2003 Bout told the New York Times that he would never spill the beans about his work and contacts. "My clients, the governments..." he said, before breaking off and pointing to the middle of his forehead. "If I told you everything, I'd get the red hole, right here."

The CV of an arms dealer
According to his passport, Bout was born in 1967 in the former Soviet republic of Tajikistan, but other sources say he's from Turkmenistan or Ukraine. He is thought to have trained as a military linguist, to be fluent in at least six languages, and to have served in a military aviation regiment, spending two years in Mozambique at the end of its civil war. British Intelligence think he worked for the KGB; by some accounts he was an agent in Angola in 1991 when the USSR collapsed. He has denied links to the KGB.

A plump, squat, dynamic man, Bout is known to be married with a daughter. He hides his murky business practices behind an educated, urbane facade. A vegetarian who likes music and is well versed in philosophy, he claims to be an ecologist, a humanist, a lover of the pygmy tribespeople he has met in Africa, and a patron of the children's charity Unicef His favourite authors are the 'New Age' writers Paulo Coelho and Carlos Castaneda, and he has said that his greatest ambition is to make wildlife films in the Russian Arctic. He appears not to be worried by the moral dimension of arms trading. Guns don't kill people, he has said, it is the people who use them. His life inspired Nicholas Cage's anti-heroic arms dealer in the film Lord of War. ·