TOM LEONARD: Griner's safe but the 'Merchant of Death' is free

2022-12-08

TOM LEONARD: Griner’s safe but the same can’t be said for the rest of the world… ‘The Merchant of Death’ wreaked havoc and misery across the globe — now he’s free to start all over again

‘Moments ago I spoke to Brittney Griner. She’s safe, she’s on a plane, she’s on her way home.’

Mr Biden today gave a triumphalist White House address at which he was joined by Ms Griner’s wife Cherelle.

But the deal comes at a heavy price.

It was supposed to have included another American detained by Moscow – corporate security executive and former US Marine Paul Whelan who fiercely denies Russian claims that he’s a spy.

His sister, Elizabeth, said she was ‘crushed’ to see the fuss Mr Biden made of the Griners’ case when at least 55 other families including hers are in a similar situation and ‘who would like to have that same degree of attention’.

Meanwhile, Mr Biden said nothing about America’s side of the bargain and, in fact, left the room as a journalist repeatedly tried to ask him what Russia had got out of the swap.

Well, Russia gets the notorious international arms dealer Viktor Bout and it’s fair to say that while Griner may be safe now, the same can hardly be said for the rest of the world.

Griner’s crime was to be caught with vape cannisters containing cannabis oil in her luggage when she flew into a Russian airport in February.

Bout’s offences are infinitely more serious and in fact some fear he will now start to commit them all over again.

Well, Russia gets the notorious international arms dealer Viktor Bout (above) and it’s fair to say that while Griner may be safe now, the same can hardly be said for the rest of the world.

A Belgian journalist who ran across him by chance in the Congo bush in the late 1990s managed to take the only two known photos of him that existed at the time.

The shadowy Tajikistan businessman and alleged Soviet spy famously dubbed the ‘merchant of death’ wrought untold havoc and misery across the world, including in Afghanistan and Africa where his arms were allegedly used to kill American and British troops.

He was serving a 25-year-sentence for conspiring to sell tens of millions of dollars in weapons US officials said were to be used against Americans.

The mere prospect of his release had angered anti-arms trafficking campaigners and those involved in his capture who predicted he would get back into the murderous business.

Michael Braun, the ex-DEA chief who masterminded Bout’s capture, has said that releasing him wouldn’t just be a ‘slap in the face’ to those who risked their lives to bring him down. Everyone in the spook world, he says, knows there’s no such thing as a ‘former’ Russian intelligence officer.

Freeing Bout – who reputedly kept a photo of Vladimir Putin in his cell at US Penitentiary Marion in Illinois and believes Ukraine shouldn’t exist as a state – would pose a major threat to the US and its allies, he added.

According to Kathi Austin, founder of the Conflict Awareness Project and who tracked Bout for years: ‘Putin is certain to weaponize Bout in areas of the world where the Merchant of Death has a proven track record.’

And Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, warned that releasing him could compromise future efforts to clamp down on rogue arms dealers.

Bout’s release is certainly a huge victory for a man who went to such great lengths to protect himself.

No matter how lavish the accommodation laid on for him by his grateful clients, Bout preferred to bed down at night with his helicopter crew, sleeping as close as possible to a chopper that was ready to fly in minutes. In his line of work, a fast getaway was essential.

And as the world’s most notorious international arms dealer, he ‘got away’ for decades with supplying ruthless warlords, terrorists and criminals with weapons that allowed them to inflict untold suffering across the globe.

Bout inspired Nicholas Cage’s arms dealer character in the 2005 feature film Lord of War, whose facetious boast that he supplied ‘every army but the Salvation Army’ could almost have been said of Bout who often supplied [itals]both sides in a conflict. There’s also a lot of Bout in the supposedly pukka arms dealer Richard Roper in John Le Carre’s The Night Manager.

He did this by exploiting the vast arsenals that were left behind by the collapse of the Soviet Union, so that he provided everything from 100,000 assault rifles at a time to helicopter gunships and surface-to-air missiles.

He was dubbed the ‘merchant of death’ by British foreign minister Peter Hain and the ‘personification of evil’ by a senior US diplomat – even though Bout was so adept at covering his tracks that even the American government unwittingly used his private fleet of 30 transport planes.

Bout had a unique reputation for being a ‘one-stop shop’ for the world’s worst warmongers: he could get anything for anyone and, crucially, transport it anytime and anywhere.

Until his arrest in 2008 following an extraordinary sting operation in Thailand, Bout, 55, earned hundreds of millions of pounds from clients who allegedly included Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi, the Taliban and even al-Qaeda. In Afghanistan, weapons sold by Bout were almost certainly used against British and US troops.

His most devastating effect was on Africa, where he turned machete-wielding thugs into killing machines armed with rockets, machine guns and assault rifles. Even if he wasn’t there in person, said a senior US official, Bout ‘slaughtered hundreds of thousands of innocents with his weapons’. He would mostly be paid in so-called blood diamonds, mined in war zones and sold to finance wars.

Since 2011, when he was convicted in New York of conspiring to kill Americans – selling anti-aircraft missiles and aiding terrorists, and given a 25-year prison sentence – Bout had been behind bars in the US and the world had been spared his poisonous services.

But then Secretary of State Antony Blinken took the unusual step of revealing publicly that the US had made a ‘substantial proposal’ to Moscow for the release of two Americans in Russian prisons. One was Brittney Griner and the other was Paul Whelan.

The news dismayed those who knew anything about Bout. Lord Hain, who called Bout a ‘merchant of death’ after seeing British troops in Sierra Leone coming under attack from boy rebels armed with his assault rifles, told the Mail: ‘He was always a Kremlin favourite and should remain behind bars.’

And if his life is certainly worthy of a Hollywood thriller treatment, his origins in a sleepy backwater of the Soviet empire remain wreathed in mystery.

At 18, he was conscripted into the Soviet army (above, left) and spent two years in western Ukraine. He later studied at the Military Institute of Foreign Languages in Moscow, which experts say was a ‘breeding ground’ for Soviet spies.

A car mechanic’s son who desperately wanted to see the world beyond his central Asian home, he is fiercely intelligent and has a gift for easily picking up languages (he partly learned English by listening to ABBA records).

At 18, he was conscripted into the Soviet army and spent two years in western Ukraine. He later studied at the Military Institute of Foreign Languages in Moscow, which experts say was a ‘breeding ground’ for Soviet spies. He has denied being one although others are convinced he joined the GRU, Soviet military intelligence.

The disintegration of the Soviet Union between 1989 and 1991 provided all sorts of opportunities for enterprising Russian criminals, particularly those who could find a market for the vast amount of munitions the Warsaw Pact had amassed.

Bout had an advantage here as he had the planes, having set up an airfreight company, Air Cess, in the city of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates.

At first, he chiefly transported gladioli, cashews and frozen chickens around Africa and Asia. When Bout realised there was a far more lucrative demand for guns, he went into partnership with a Bulgarian arms dealer so he could supply them. Well-connected behind the old Iron Curtain – an early friend was Mikhail Kalashnikov, inventor of the ubiquitous AK-47 assault rifle – Bout was so successful that the CIA and MI6 were starting to hear about him in west Africa in the mid-1990s. Not that they had a face to put to the name. With icy blues eyes, a baby face and a distinctive bushy moustache, he was a man who did his best to stay in the shadows.

A Belgian journalist who ran across him by chance in the Congo bush in the late 1990s managed to take the only two known photos of him that existed at the time. He described Bout as ‘really intelligent’ and able to talk about anything, from the Bible to free trade zones. He added: ‘However, he is not charming and he does not have humour.’

He didn’t have any scruples either. Monstrous war criminals like Liberian leader Charles Taylor were reportedly among his personal friends. He sold weapons to absolutely anyone, exploiting the so-called ‘grey market’ to move arms that had been produced and sold to him legally but which he then re-sold [itals] illegally.

While dealing arms is not inherently illegal, Legitimate arms transactions require a document called an ‘end-user certificate’, which identifies the buyer. Many of Bout’s clients were banned from purchasing weapons by international sanctions. Those sanctions can be busted by either forging end-user certificates or buying them from a corrupt government.

Bout was sometimes the only transport option available and would later claim he also transported UN peacekeepers and French troops. However, he concealed his identity behind a complex web of front companies so baffling that even the Pentagon accidentally hired his planes to transport supplies to its troops in Iraq.

By the time the US and other countries had sufficient evidence to put out warrants for his arrest, they couldn’t get at him as he was living in Moscow, able to live in plain sight under a regime with which his accusers say he is intricately connected. In a rare interview in 2003, Bout insisted he did nothing illegal.

However, even Bout had a softer side, claiming his great dream was actually to film wildlife documentaries. His wife, Alla, insisted he was a much-maligned, loving family man and devout Christian.

It hardly mattered what the outside world thought of him as he rarely left Russia. Then in 2007, the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), which had notched up a string of remarkable coups in catching supposedly uncatchable villains, was asked to target Bout.

They came up with Operation Relentless: two undercover agents posing as members of FARC, a communist guerrilla group in Colombia, approached him with a multi-million dollar order for ‘farming equipment’, which was code for weapons. They eventually managed to lure him to Bangkok where he was arrested by Thai police – they recorded Bout saying he was happy with the anti-aircraft missiles that he was supplying being used to kill the US pilots flying helicopters for the Colombian military. ‘The game is over,’ he calmly told US agents.

Russia did its utmost to recover him, insisting he was innocent, but he was extradited to New York and put on trial under intense security.

Given how much effort the Kremlin put in to freeing Bout, it’s hard to imagine that Putin – facing an arms supply nightmare in Ukraine – won’t have worrying plans for him now.

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