Outlaws Inc. Read online

  “Nobody knows anything,” laughs another African flight manager. “Companies all get someone else to choose the planes and crew for them. And if there’s a problem, you think they really wanna know they’ve got a trafficker on the payroll? No, thank you! I mean, it’s always someone else’s job. We all work like that. I think during Watergate, they called it ‘plausible deniability’: ‘Oh, we didn’t know. We’ll fix it, we’ll get rid of them.’ In the meantime, they get to use the cheapest bidder, because they’ve got a budget to meet, overheads. What do you expect?”

  Eastern bloc pilots touting openly for illicit arms-trafficking business while dressed in a UN aircrew uniform—business from someone in the employ of the UN no less—shows nothing if not a can-do attitude to business. This was Danssaert’s own Matrix moment, when he says he began to understand just how pervasive and open the practice was. And it provides a tantalizing hint as to just what else, what other ad hoc deals and frankly air-bending cargo origami might be possible, when nobody was looking. Like everything in this shadow world of phantom airmen, arms traffickers in United Nations clothing, and disappearing two-hundred-ton aircraft, says Danssaert, you could get used to appearances being deceptive; if only you knew how they’d be doing it next time you tried to stop them.

  But what Danssaert’s Uganda encounter also means—apart from being very funny—is that the pilot was flying for the UN, wearing UN insignia, and taking orders for illicit arms deals on the side from anyone who approached him in a hotel foyer. This was a new pattern: no longer would the world be separated into good guys and bad guys, “clean” and “dirty” flights. The traffickers were intertwining themselves with operations—from peacekeepers to charities—that were so far above suspicion that they could do whatever they wanted with those extra tons, and nobody would ever know.

  MICKEY, MOSTLY TACITURN (at least with me) and permanently beat looking, certainly doesn’t look like part of an amazingly adaptable, agile trafficking organism. What he looks like is a working man from a regiment, or a factory: someone who would happily doze away his day in front of the television with a six-pack of beers at his side, given a chance at retreating back into the simple life. In some ways, it might just be the perfect–and completely unconscious–disguise.

  There’s another curious footnote to the many layers of disguise and informal camouflage connected to Leonid Minin’s bust, though. Aviatrend, the outfit Minin had been using to transport weapons from Ukraine to Africa, and who had been accepting payments through Chase Manhattan bank as late as June 7, 2000, is listed on the Aviation Safety Network’s database as having ceased to exist in 1998. Talk about adaptable.

  And adaptability was the name of the game. By the time of Leonid Minin’s bust, Mickey and his crew were flying the same routes in West Africa as they always had anyway, only for the new clients in town: the UN, the global media, and the charity bandwagon.

  Then, on a clear September morning in 2001, two planes hijacked by that other loose, agile global network, al-Qaeda, hit the World Trade Center.

  And suddenly everything changed yet again.

  PART IV

  High and Wild: Afghanistan to Iraq

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The Boys Are Back in Town

  Afghanistan, 2001

  THE COLORS BEHIND MY EYEBALLS are clearing. Mickey and Doug, my Canadian fellow stowaway, are already out and walking round the plane, Mickey stopping and idly kicking the giant plane’s twenty wheels one after the other, with a roll-up on the go and a look of quiet satisfaction. I can’t stand up without wanting to puke. Doug is having his own difficulties.

  “Holy shit! Hey, Mickey! You’d better look at this, the tires on your landing gear are looking pretty thin.”

  “Let me see. You think those tires are thin? No. No. That’s not thin.”

  “What … come on, man, I can see metal! Are you gonna change them?”

  “No, no. Why should we change the tires? We will change them when they burst.”

  “You … oh, Jesus. And when do they burst?”

  “Hmm. Usually when we land.”

  It’s vintage Mickey. At least fourteen of the Il-76’s giant tires are in the advanced stages of dangerous baldness, melting away or shredded to ribbons, but the pennywise logic of the small business says they’ll make it just one more flight before they all blow out on touchdown.

  Every man handles his near-death experiences in his own way. I’m focusing on stopping my lower legs from shaking, while the hitherto taciturn Canuck is in a state bordering on euphoria and can’t stop talking. Around me, even the crew are rubber-legged and fresh with cooling sweat as they emerge blinking into the glare of the Afghan morning. Only Mickey himself looks like he’s just finished a long, dull shift in a Moscow taxi, droopy faced and yawning. Having edged the Il-76 into the landing bay, past APCs and over gaping holes on an Afghan runway that would have been condemned and shut to air traffic anywhere else in the world, and while we gathered our brains together, he’d shaken on some suit trousers, taken his jacket from the hook, and stepped down the plank.

  Out on the asphalt I pace the shadow side of the plane, eyeing the frontier runway’s comings and goings. The bullet-pocked terminal building bears the sign WELCOME TO KABUL in meter-high red lettering, cracked and fading. Next to the lettering is a gigantic portrait of Ahmad Shah Massoud, local warlord and scourge of Taliban and Soviet invaders, blown up by suicide bombers on the eve of 9/11. Goateed and beatific in his ragged cap, he looks like Bob Marley up there. There’s another Soviet-age giant to the left, a turboprop Antonov. All aircraft look far less impressive close up—check your favorite airline’s bright livery from less than twenty feet, and chances are you’ll be horrified by the mass of dents, rust spots, and missing rivets—but this An-12’s rapidly passing from workhorse to knacker’s yard. It’s a patchwork of masking tape and rusting rivets with soot under the wings. Conscious of being watched by two clean-shaven young Afghans in drab green fatigues, I turn and head back to the Candid.

  Mickey shuffles into view, blinking slowly at something on the number-four engine like a middle-aged builder preparing a job quote, and I call to him. “So what happens now?”

  “Customs,” comes back over the asphalt. Two impossibly young-looking types in shirtsleeves are padding toward us from the crater-pitted terminal. Behind me on the Il-76’s cargo ramp, someone sniggers.

  THE WORLD POST–9/11 was suddenly a very different place for cargo kingpins, straight and crooked alike. That’s not to say it was worse. With the fall of Afghanistan to U.S.-led coalition forces in November 2001 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003, a huge, complex ecosystem of military, humanitarian, business, diplomatic, and media interests swiftly established itself in both. And they were ecosystems that required unimaginable daily quantities of supplies, personnel, and plant.

  First came the coalition military, then NATO, the UN, aid organizations, and a tsunami of businesses in their wake, from Halliburton to the suppliers of the newly printed, non-Saddam Iraqi currency. Like Viktor Bout and Tomislav Damnjanovic, Komi-born technician Sergei Ivanov was one of the many who heard the clarion call put out by charter agents toting big contracts.

  Just the wrong side of fifty, Ivanov comes from a small village in the Komi region of Russia on the northwestern slopes of the Urals. For twenty years, a decade on either side of the Soviet Union’s disintegration, he was an airport-maintenance technician at a somewhat careworn cargo and military airfield in the backwater city of Syktyvkar. But in 1999, the Antonov An-24 and Tupolev Tu-134 cargo-plane repair specialist received an offer way too good to refuse—wages of between two thousand and three thousand dollars a month—and relocated to Angola, patching up planes for the migratory flocks of former Soviet crews drifting across the continent. But the occupation of Iraq was an opportunity too good to pass up.

  “That was crazy work!” he recalled to Syktyvkar-based Zyryanskaya Zhizn reporter and human rights activist Ernest Mezak. “We were ferrying money acro
ss the country, notes of Iraqi currency—all the old bills with Saddam on them had to be removed, and we’d fly in and distribute the replacement cash.”

  And there was plenty of that cash flying about figuratively, too—the key reason Iraq and Afghanistan suddenly became so popular again as destinations, and even expat havens, for the lost boys of the old Soviet air force. “The food and living conditions there were brilliant!” said Ivanov. “Iraq’s not ‘starving Africa.’ We got $50 a day per diems at that point—and by the next shift, incidentally, that figure had already doubled to $100, several times more than we got in Africa.”

  Things were looking up for Mickey at this time, too. Back in the world he knew—or at least close to Sharjah and the former Soviet Union turf of Central Asia and the Caucasus again—these Eastern European outfits seemed to have come in from the cold somewhat, at least as far as the U.S. was concerned. They enjoyed the free fuel laid on for suppliers to the U.S. military, and some respectable and established outfits like Byelorussia’s TransaviaExport airline even made UN “preferred supplier” status.

  Mickey recalls the swift-turnaround nature of the work. There was a permanent rush on: a whole series of new-build military and refugee camps needed supplying, equipment needed shifting, and among the rubble, revolution, and reconstruction, business was kabooming and new humanitarian imperatives were emerging. Everything needed transporting now. No wonder the pay was so good, whether you were working for a legit organization like Ivanov—these giant operations with august names like TransaviaExport, Volga-Dnieper, and Soviet Air Charter—or one of the paper outfits with resurrected planes and sketchy pasts that sprang up every day when times were fat.

  As for Afghanistan, it was, after all, old ground for Mickey: There’s a good chance he was coming and going from Kabul airport before the young men walking across the asphalt to check our papers were even born. And this time around, in 2003, give or take a few gray hairs, a paint job, and a sharp new dress code, he says that nothing much has changed.

  And as it turned out, in Afghanistan I would soon get my own first experience as a buyer of “ghost” cargo coming in on another giant cargo plane.

  I WAKE WITH a jolt. A watery dawn is breaking over the almond trees outside the window of our Kabul guesthouse. I can’t stop shaking. I’m soaked head to toe, and at first I tell myself it’s the terrors again, the night sweats that have been plaguing me since Mickey’s dive-bomb through Missile Alley a few days back. But I’m freezing cold, and bloody. The sheets are covered in vomit, sweat, and, most worryingly, lots of blood. I stagger out into the hallway where there’s a rudimentary bathroom and collapse on the floor, still and helpless under the washes of light-headedness and exhaustion, before the next wave slams my head forward with its force. And this is where the first of a series of revelations about Mickey’s aid credentials hits.

  The recent coalition invasion achieved two things in Kabul. One was the dissipation and regrouping of Taliban forces. The other was the final knockout blow to the local infrastructure. The city had already been stripped of its clerical class by Taliban diktat (since all questions of law and civil rule were to be referred to a sharia council of mullahs for adjudication, the Taliban reasoned, there was no need to staff structures of state and municipal power such as ministries, council offices, or courtrooms). But with the coming of coalition troops, any remaining semicompetent Taliban-side staffers were purged, and local warlords were invited onside to become part of the new chain of command.

  “That caused huge problems,” says Hugh Griffiths. “It basically meant that anyone wanting to do business in Afghanistan needed to pay off the warlords first. I’ve heard of instances where organizations had to put relatives of these warlords on the payroll in order to be allowed to get their job done unmolested.”

  So the government and civil infrastructure had been crippled. The transport infrastructure, too. Then there was the power and fuel infrastructure—the reason that ingenious Russian outfit’s secondhand Il-76 is still collecting dust somewhere in the Taliban-held badlands of Helmand. But until this moment, I’d never really thought about the plumbing and drainage.

  The chief reason for the waves of dysentery and diarrhea humanitarian reports talk about is as simple as that. It’s also one of the most visible items on anyone’s reconstruction agenda: People notice their toilet working in a way they don’t notice a new minister. The occupying forces were intent on being seen to improve things, and quickly. That meant a huge, urgent call for large cargo lifters to bring hundreds and thousands of tons of building materials very quickly by air. At the same time, the sudden influx of military needed all their supplies in a hurry too—everything from rations to batteries and fuel to bullets. Then there was the humanitarian emergency: Refugees from the fighting needed shelter; mass movements into small safe havens, out of the lawless countryside and into the cities, meant nobody had enough food. And as I’ve just discovered, the plumbing’s shot and people get dysentery or worse. All over the world, NGOs were scrambled by coalition governments keen—no, desperate—to ensure they didn’t end up footing the entire bill. They wanted, said Donald Rumsfeld, to invite “nonstate actors” to play a valuable role.

  Even before he’d finished that sentence, phones began to ring from Belarus to Benin. The second Soviet invasion of Afghanistan had begun. And this time round, the West and Mickey’s crew were all marching in together, under one big, green-backed capitalist flag.

  You don’t really “scramble” a cargo plane like the Candid—not unless you’re trying to get it off some runway before an attack—but right now you could almost hear the thousands of combined tons of Uzbek and Ukraine-made engineering screaming as the payloads were hauled up the ramp and the engines went into overdrive. Like a dusty, landlocked Dunkirk, in that first headlong rush Afghanistan was the next stop for pretty much anyone with a piece of machinery that could get airborne, and the more cargo you could carry, the better.

  Mickey’s team found themselves at the front of the queue for aid work. They knew the country, the conditions, the runways, the places that could, at a push, be made to serve as runways. They knew the trade hubs and the Missile Alleys. And unlike a lot of crews, they were up for it. It was, shrugs Mickey, “Nichevo”—nothing at all. He’s flown, he jokes, more over Afghanistan and Central Asia since 2001 than he did in the years he was actually stationed there. It was great—flying straight jobs on reputable charters—and the money was comparatively good, both with the extra payments and the money they made for Mickey Inc., filling the extra spaces in their plane with smokes, booze, and all the other stuff you’d sell your soul for in Afghanistan or out.

  For coalition governments, the possibility that these airborne goods ships bound for Afghanistan and, just a few months later, for Iraq might hold a few plague rats was either far down their list of priorities or an embarrassing secret best not talked about, even though Peter Hain, a member of Tony Blair’s own cabinet, had put two and two together back in 1999, and in November 2000 had thundered to Parliament about Viktor Bout, this “merchant of death who owns air companies that ferry in arms … and take out diamonds,” and announced that “all the countries that are allowing him to use their facilities and aircraft bases to ferry that trade in death … are aiding and abetting people who are turning their guns on British soldiers.”

  He was talking about the cargoes which UN investigators reported his planes had been taking in and out of Sierra Leone and Angola. But even as the newspapers snapped up the story about this thrilling new bad boy of the international cargo game, then beat the drum for invasion, one of his planes was quietly transporting Taliban gold out of Afghanistan to a safety deposit box in the UAE.

  By the time Baghdad had fallen and the second wave of the coalition-sponsored cargo gold rush had begun, nobody thought to ask whose Il-76s and Antonovs were collecting free “preferred supplier” fuel vouchers out there on the runways of Bagram and Baghdad. Then again, there was a lot to do, and quickly: medi
cine, rebuilding, security, shelter, and, of course, infrastructure like roads, communications, drainage. Plumbing. I understand that. Because curled up in a pool of my own blood and puke on the clay floor of a waterless bathroom in Kabul, I get just a small glimpse of the dilemma of an aid organization. And if this is what I think it is—amoebic dysentery—then I could use somebody’s help, too, fast. And I’m not going to be too fussy about their CV.

  By midmorning Canuck Doug and a young Afghan fixer named Haroun are awake and increasingly concerned. Haroun wants to get me treated fast. “My cousin’s outside in his car,” he says. “We’ll get you some medicine.” I’m half carried out to the front step and bundled into a car. The journey through Qala-e-Fatullah—formerly a middle-class suburb, now a dusty and rundown enclave still preferred by Westerners in the absence of much competition—doesn’t take long but is still too long for me, and within seconds of starting out I’m retching and puking through the dust-caked window of the yellow Toyota taxi.

  “Are we going to the hospital?” I moan, trying to keep control of my innards.

  “No!” says Haroun, clearly horrified. “We need somebody who can help.” I haven’t the strength to argue and faint in the back, waking as we pull up outside a shop.

  “This is good,” says Doug the Canuck, a seasoned Afghanophile. “I think I know what’s gonna happen next.”

  The ramshackle exterior is daubed in Dari’s Arabic script. In common with seemingly all shops in Kabul, the shop sells the usual mix of snacks, Afghan pop cassettes, and hardware. Inside it’s cool, but I can hardly stand. Haroun explains the situation while I lie in the doorway with a piece of plastic in lieu of a bucket. The shopkeeper looks at me and smiles. He has just the thing. He swaps glances with Haroun and signals for them to carry me out to the back, downstairs, and through a labyrinthine network of corridors, all lined with cardboard boxes and tea-chest-style crates.