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The war between Israel and Hizbollah was three days old when American intelligence spotted a bear-sized man with a moustache and hangdog face meeting high-ranking Hizbollah officials in a safe house outside Beirut.
With Israeli F-16s roaming the skies above the city and military commanders growing increasingly desperate to find and kill high-value Hizbollah targets, the sighting should have been a watershed moment.
Those high-ranking Hizbollah officials, it is now widely believed, were, in all probability, meeting the man who apparently supplied them with their high-tech weapons: Viktor Bout, the world's biggest arms dealer.
It was, it appears, another close escape for the man known as the "Merchant of Death", who had spent more than a decade fuelling wars across the world by being able to deliver weapons to anyone, anywhere, at almost any time. And that might not have been his greatest talent, for he also had shown an uncanny ability for avoiding arrest, despite having Interpol, the United Nations and half a dozen nations' intelligence services tracking his empire of air cargo transports and weapons delivery services.
Until last week that is - and his arrest by Thai authorities on suspicion of attempting to ship arms to American agents who were posing as Farc rebels in Colombia.
The story of Viktor Bout has been an instructive modern parable of private enterprise and war and globalisation's bandit fringes. It is a story too that casts a bleak spotlight on the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, whose relationship with Bout was - at the very least - ambiguous. The Russians, it appears, protected Bout, even while he was being sought under an Interpol warrant, while individuals within the CIA (if not the organisation itself) appear to have been prepared to discourage other US agencies from going after Bout as long as he was useful.
Far from being a shadowy figure, Bout was well known. The character of Yuri Orlov, played by Nicolas Cage in the film Lord of War in 2005, was based in large part on him. For now, however, the heavy-set former Soviet Air Force officer is languishing in a Thai jail and protesting that he visited Bangkok as an innocent tourist, even as the US is preparing a case for his extradition.
He will no doubt be ruing the fact that he was the victim of a classic sting - lured from hiding by the offer of supplying missiles to Farc by a paid informer of the Drug Enforcement Administration, which had been pursuing him for his links to the drugs trade, apparently acting independently of the CIA.
The pursuit of Bout alleged in the US indictment reads like a Robert Ludlum novel as the agency directed its informers through meetings from Copenhagen to Curacao and Bucharest in an elaborate charade that targeted at first a claimed Bout associate, Andrew Smulian, as the go-between for the fictitious deal. As the performance unravelled, Smulian slowly filled in the crucial details before spelling out Bout's name to one of the informers at a meeting in Copenhagen and identifying him as the man known as 'the merchant of death'.
Through January and February, Bout firmed up his end of the deal - for 100 Igla surface-to-air missiles and armour-piercing rocket launchers that would, according to the fictitious plan, be dropped by parachute by Bout's air crew at designated landing spots in Colombia. Bout was persuaded he was dealing with senior Farc leaders and, invited to Thailand by a man calling himself "El Comandante", Bout broke cover. The trap was sprung.
Viktor Bout, arms dealer, was one of a kind. His rise was based not only on his ability to procure the kind of weapons his clients needed, but on running his business with the kind of reliability that would not seem out of place in a listed City of London firm.
Bout's emergence, experts recall, was sudden. One US official marvelled to Douglas Farah, an intelligence consultant and former journalist, who co-wrote the book Merchant of Death, published in 2007, about Bout's life and his many inexplicable escapes, that his arrival as a major arms broker was "sort of like Jesus. He suddenly appears on the scene miraculously, as a full-blown character".
Known to hold numerous passports - most of which put his birth in 1967 - Bout's history prior to coming to the notice of the international community in the African and Afghan wars of the 1990s seems to be intentionally murky. In rare interviews, Bout admits to having attended Moscow's prestigious Military Institute of Foreign Languages in the late 1980s, considered a training ground for military intelligence officers, and it is widely believed that he served as a translator in Africa for the Soviet air force.
It was with the collapse of the Soviet Union that Bout apparently saw his opportunity. Management of its vast stockpiles of small arms and other weapons were in a state of anarchy as unpaid officers and soldiers sold off whatever they could. Bout soon set up a series of small transport companies based in Belgium and the United Arab Emirates through a complex series of corporate structures that US officials have described as being modelled on drug cartels, designed to obscure ownership and operations.
At the core of these companies was a small number of huge Soviet transport aircraft that could negotiate poorly monitored developing world airspace and easily handle the rugged landing zones throughout Africa and Asia. This fleet eventually expanded to more than 60 and is called by many aviation experts the largest private fleet of Soviet-era planes in the world.
Apparently speaking more than half a dozen languages, Bout was able to operate in the grey and black markets, shipping anything, using the Emirates city of Sharjah as a major operations hub. While much of his early cargo was legitimate, including flowers, chickens - even UN peacekeepers - Bout is alleged by Interpol to have built relationships with the suddenly unpaid and poorly monitored Russian army officers in control of the weapons stores and soon built a business delivering these weapons around the world.
His first markets were the wars in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Democratic Republic of Congo and Angola. Supplying the warlords of these conflicts would lead to a series of UN, American and European sanctions being imposed on Bout, beginning in 2002. He often equipped both sides, most famously in Afghanistan, where he supplied the Taleban and Ahmad Shah Massoud's Northern Alliance troops, often using the same flights to drop off weapons to the different combatants.
Despite having his assets frozen, his operations in Belgium and United Arab Emirates exposed and his planes tracked by a diligent band of human rights groups, journalists and furious diplomats, Bout continued to operate with close to impunity.
He managed it through an ever-morphing series of front companies that allegedly managed the fleet of Soviet-era transport planes. Among contracts to deliver men, equipment and weapons was one to deliver Fed-Ex parcels to Baghdad in 2004 on behalf of an American Government that considered him a criminal. Bout delivered aid too - to both the south Asian tsunami victims in 2004 and Pakistani earthquake zone in 2005 - and shuffled UN peacekeepers and weapons into Darfur.
That Bout's life has been one of close calls is without question, but none it seems closer than the scrape in Lebanon in 2006. Anecdotal evidence supplied by Israeli and other intelligence sources claim that following the alleged sighting of Bout, GPS co-ordinates were passed from the Americans to the Israelis. And what is known is that on the sixth day of the war, in the early morning, nearly 20 guided bombs descended on a three-storey home inside the Bourj al-Barajneh refugee camp, a kilometre or so from Hizbollah's obliterated military headquarters.
Claims about Bout's links to Hizbollah are supported by reports seen by Douglas Farah. "There were serious intelligence reports that Bout was in Beirut during the fighting between Hizbollah and Israel in the summer of 2006 and that he was the purveyor of much of the modern Russian armaments Hizbollah used to great effect in that conflict," Farah said last week.
But while Bout's exploits as an arms dealer of choice to a host of unsavoury regimes and groups appears largely beyond dispute, what is more puzzling is how he got away with it for so long. The answer, according to many long-time Bout experts, intelligence officials and US government sources, is that there exists a case that his ability to get into the world's most troubled regions and deliver exactly what he promised made him an invaluable ally to more powerful interests than African warlords and diamond smugglers.
Alex Yearsley of the London-based Global Witness, the organisation that led the charge against both Bout and his partners for trading weapons throughout Africa, often in exchange for contracts for natural resources, believes his ability to evade arrest reflected not simply a lack of will by certain nations but a crass exercise in realpolitik.
"On several occasions when he was about to be arrested by one government, another government would find a use for him," he says.
Bout's activities fell under increased scrutiny over the past five years, particularly after the revelations that he had been given contracts to serve the Iraqi occupation. UN travel sanctions and moves by the US Department of Treasury to freeze his assets and complicate his business operations limited his business, according to US Government documents. But based in Moscow, Bout was able to continue until his arrest.
Yearsley echoes many when he says it appeared he was under the protection of the Russian Government.
"He seemed to have a very high level of protection in Russia, living there a happy and a free man despite Interpol 'red' notices and Belgian arrest warrants. He was used by [Vladimir Putin] to wind up the Western liberals and make some Russian generals rich," he said.
In a meeting last northern autumn, one European intelligence official was openly cynical that he would ever be caught.
"Arrest Bout? Nobody wants to. Even my own government eventually shut us down. There's been a decision to hassle him with sanctions to keep him in line but everyone needs him at some point, or might [need him]. Plus he'd just be replaced by someone else and they could be worsed. "As long as he stays quiet and remains useful, he can do this indefinitely."
In the end it was an agency of one of those states suspected of turning a blind eye to Bout's activities that was the engine behind his capture.
According to a source with close ties to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the operation was so sensitive it was kept secret from other members of the US intelligence community, including high-ranking members of the Justice Department, precisely because of the fear that Bout might be tipped off by elements that the DEA agents feared had protected him in the past.
A special unit was set up to run the operation due to "war on drugs" legislation and guidelines, allowed to operate outside the normal protocols that require US Government-wide notification.
The strong suspicion that elements in US and other Western intelligence services supposed to be pursuing Bout were occasionally protecting him - no evidence suggests an official policy to protect Bout - is supported by an American diplomat who had tracked Bout as part of investigations into the trade in Russia's post-Cold War arms stockpiles.
The diplomat described how efforts to track or harass Bout in the late 1990s and early 2000 by small-arms control experts at the State Department would eventually draw the ire of certain CIA officials, resulting in angry phone calls to the diplomat's superiors demanding that they back off.
But the diplomat was emphatic that he did not believe the agency actively or officially worked alongside Bout, but rather traded information with him, making him a useful, if unappealing, occasional asset.
Farah believes that Bout's willingness to work with Islamic organisations such as Hizbollah and the Islamic Courts in Somalia, probably helped speed his demise. "He was no longer useful to the US and had shown a willingness to work with those directly opposed to US vital interests. This moved at least a portion of the US law enforcement and intelligence community to make him a high priority target."
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