Outlaws Inc. Read online

  We’re led into the back, where crate after balsa-wood crate are stacked on pallets. Every one is stamped with the words HUMANITARIAN AID in English, French, and a selection of other languages, and the logos of pharmaceuticals giants. One ticket says “UNHCR”—the United Nations’ refugee service. He opens it with an eating knife and offers me a box of twenty-four high-grade antibiotic capsules stamped PROPERTY OF UN AID PROGRAMME—NOT TO BE DISTRIBUTED SEPARATELY. With shaking fingers, I hand him five hundred afghanis—about ten dollars. He thanks me and immediately wipes his hands with a wet cloth, assuring me the dose he’s going to give me will begin to work in minutes. I tip my head back and neck a handful of pills, just like the shopkeeper says: three of the red ones, one of the ochre ones, and keep knocking them back—no water, so they stay down—until I stop vomiting. If I can do that, I will be okay.

  Even weak and rambling, I’m curious about these UN packages lying around in a shopkeeper’s back room. Haroun turns from concerned to shuffling and evasive. He knows all too well how the man came by this errant shipment of secure-stored UN aid, but I get him to ask anyway. After a brief chat, he turns back to me. “From the aeroplanes.”

  The shopkeeper looks at me. “God is great,” he smiles. Yet if He moves in mysterious ways His wonders to perform, so does Mickey.

  “None of what goes on should come as a surprise to anyone who’s worked in international aid,” says SIPRI’s Hugh Griffiths. “Up to fifty percent of humanitarian aid in the Sudan and Ethiopia—to give you just two solid examples we know about—gets diverted to rebel groups, often via refugee camps. It’s a mess. Even in places like Kosovo where there’s a high level of international peacekeepers, [smugglers and aid black marketeers] operate.”

  And some of the names cropping up in Kabul, and Baghdad too, even in those early months of optimism and comparative peace, were already rather familiar. Viktor was there, for a start. And as early as 2003, wrote Hugh Griffiths in his UN report, “More than a dozen Moldova-registered, UAE-based companies … involved in arms smuggling with Tomislav Damnjanovic, began tapping into these booming, post-intervention economies, which were flush with foreign funds.” From lords of war to valued partners in the reconstruction, it’s astonishing the makeover a little bit of budgetary pressure from back home in London, New York, and Washington can give to any erstwhile bogeyman.

  But there’s the problem. Because focusing on the illicit activities of fast-and-loose outfits like Mickey’s means stopping them—and if you stop them, you stop a good many of the only outfits with the capability, the know-how, and the balls to get your life-saving medicines, your refugee shelters, your own peacekeepers and their equipment, and the majority of emergency help to where it needs to be. Stop the sinner, and the saint vanishes.

  Added to which, you risk catching plenty of above-the-board operators, planes, and crews in the same dragnet. Besides, as any ghost hunter will tell you, even when you find what you’re looking for, it doesn’t mean you can stop it from disappearing, or even that anyone will believe it exists. Even for dedicated trafficking monitors and plane spotters, these countless Ilyushins and the outfits and men who fly them are ghosts, drifting in and out of sight—almost unstoppable, untraceable, and unpunishable. Meanwhile, to the rest of us, these ghosts don’t even exist.

  Part of the difficulty is just how complex the web of private subcontractors and sub-subcontractors, all vying for lucrative coalition military and UN contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan, has become. And when everyone’s outsourcing, the guy at the top of the chain rarely has any oversight of the agents employed further down. This is the explanation given in retrospect by the Pentagon for its contracts for outfits operated by Viktor Bout and other outfits about whose dealings questions have been raised. But really, by announcing that business rules apply in a military occupation scenario, just what did we expect?

  In War Games, a masterful account of what happens when aid and military campaigns coexist too closely, Linda Polman describes the result as a new shadow state. She calls it Afghaniscam—the huge, aid-driven free-for-all that prevails in countries where military, humanitarian aid, and “local partners” combine, supposedly to achieve reconstruction and the efficient distribution of aid—in practice, to rip off as much as they possibly can in the melee. But it’s not just aid consignments that get diverted, or whiskey that appears from nowhere in the false compartments below Kabul shopkeepers’ meat refrigerators. There are far more valuable cargoes that have a habit of disappearing from Kabul International Airport and its military and logistics sister, Bagram.

  The murk surrounding cargo suppliers in and out of the country that allows UNHCR medical supplies to go straight onto the black market—probably using the old transporter’s trick of writing a percentage of the consignment off as damaged en route, just as Mickey learned to do in the Soviet-Afghan war—is blamed by the U.S. military for the fact that over a third of all the weapons the U.S. procured for the Afghan government and its military and sent to the country are missing. According to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, some 87,000 weapons went AWOL somewhere in transit to Afghanistan because of “accountability lapses in the supply chain,” with a further 135,000 weapons shipped from other countries also having vanished between December 2004 and June 2008. This is the U.S. military. Just think what happens in the case of nonstate actors.

  BACK IN LONDON, I ask if anyone in the aid industry has any clear idea of the amount of “piggyback” cargo that is brought in and out with the humanitarian flights they charter—men like Mickey, delivering fifteen tons here, fifteen tons there. Not many do. Ask monitoring groups if anyone’s ever audited the help-harm ratio of their flights, or the impact of these unofficial free-trade zones that spring up at humanitarian shipping hubs, and the silence is deafening.

  “That’ll be because the answer to your question is, probably not,” sighs Amnesty’s Oliver Sprague, who charts the movement of rogue air operators for Amnesty International from his office on a dusty East London side street. “Because the problem with answering it, if you think about it, is: Who’s really going to want to start digging around in that? It’s one of those questions; you would be a very brave organization if you wanted to start opening those hatches.”

  It’s not necessarily that they don’t want to know what else the crews they employ are carrying, he explains, pointing out that agencies like Oxfam “check every time they want a charter aircraft that they’re not propping up some gunrunning empire.” Indeed, Oxfam’s own logistics people proudly point to the fact that they have a responsible procurement policy that alerts them to known “dirty” planes. But even they accept there’s a limit to what they can do, and that the hidden stuff, by its very nature, is much harder to steer clear of.

  “The way it works for humanitarian flights is this,” says Sprague. “You do an ad hoc charter, you pay for everything: You pay for the fuel, you pay for the crew, a fixed price to deliver you from A to B.

  “Now, that’s fine and dandy. But if you have something like the Il-76, then obviously you’ve got quite a lot of space to play around with. See, most humanitarian goods aren’t actually heavy—you are actually shipping pretty light: stuff like piping and sheeting. You very rarely ship food—you do if you go regional to regional, but you don’t ship food from the UK to Sudan. So that gives you quite a lot of space to put other stuff in—it’s basically cash in hand for the crew. And, well, what can you do about that? Because even if you say that they only had [your cargo on board when they left], they’re probably on quite long runs, and they’re always going to stop off in Benghazi or somewhere else, and you can’t really control what they take on there.”

  Still, when the recent paper prepared for the UN by SIPRI names the International Committee of the Red Cross, Concern Worldwide, Action la Faim, and the Swedish Free Mission as humanitarian aid organizations involved in the hiring of arms-trafficking operations to deliver their aid and personnel in Africa, it’s clear more could be done. In
deed, Gerard Massis, director-general for logistics at MSF (Médecins Sans Frontières), unwittingly echoed Viktor Bout in his response to the allegations, declaring that these flights were “like taxis,” and that there was no way of knowing what else the outfit would be doing either before or after they’d dropped off the aid cargo.

  While Oxfam’s Tricia O’Rourke insists that it’s wrong to assume “dirty” airlines are necessarily cheaper than reputable ones, Sprague points to a huge cost differential. “Let’s say you want to fly something from Manston in the UK to Al-Fashir in the Sudan. You need to use an Ilyushin-76 because not only does it have the capacity you’re after, it can land and unload without any help from ground staff. So you look around. If you’re prepared to use a Moldovan-registered outfit and claim a humanitarian waiver, you’ll get the job done for $70,000, maybe $80,000. But if you’re going to say, No, I need a reputable, silencer-fitted, and thus EU-airspace-compliant Ilyushin-76, then it’ll cost you closer to $150,000. There’s huge pressure on cost for aid organizations, and a lot of their money comes from government, so you can imagine the kind of questions that might get asked when you spend double the lowest quote on a flight.

  “We all know that there are cash-in-hand things, contraband that they want to deliver, but it’s also about positioning the aircraft,” says Sprague. “There’s an incentive for certain companies to want to fly those kind of flights—even if they know they are not the world’s greatest in terms of money, it puts their aircraft in a decent place to go somewhere else next. It makes commercial sense: Sometimes these flights don’t really pay anything, but [it’s next to] an area that could well pay quite a lot.”

  There’s also the problem—and it’s a big problem—that in Mickey’s business, work is so unpredictable and competition drives wages down when the jobs do come. The pilot of that East Wing Il-76 recently impounded by Thailand on its way from North Korea on a sanctions-busting run was, his wife explained to the media, on his first paying job for some time. He’d sat at home for weeks without a flight and was desperate to bring back some wages. Even Mickey, whose own connections keep him more than busy, still doesn’t exactly look like a man dripping in cash, and he’s one of the lucky, flexible, business-minded ones. While the Bangkok crew were released uncharged by Thai authorities, who would blame them if they found an extra way of making those odd flights pay?

  As Mark Galeotti says: “For these guys, business will go to the lowest bid—people don’t care how you do it. And particularly when you’re traveling to places where there are hidden virtues—let’s say you’re flying something in and out of Burma or the Philippines. It gives the flyboys a chance to do a bit of drug trafficking on the sly while they’re at it. And because of that, their rates will be extraordinarily competitive.”

  And so long as the rates are extraordinarily competitive, plenty of people on the side of the angels aren’t about to go looking any two-hundred-ton, Tashkent-made gift horses in the mouth.

  Even monitoring groups like IPIS find the silence around the subject deafening. “We hear about smuggling happening on aid flights,” says Peter Danssaert when I tell him what I’ve witnessed. “But we have to be careful about saying anything in our reports—there’s the feeling that there should be more of it discovered than there actually is.”

  O’Rourke accepts that even the oversight allowed by the best monitoring systems doesn’t rule out illicit cargoes making their way in with aid, or, exceptionally, dirty airlines being chartered. “We have to balance the need to deliver lifesaving equipment into a disaster area as quickly as possible with the availability of a ‘clean’ aircraft or freight company,” she says. “This is a moral and ethical dilemma that Oxfam is not alone in having to deal with. We have the systems in place to help us make informed judgments, but unfortunately the nature of the air-freight industry and the countries in which we work mean it is very difficult to eliminate altogether.”

  Many aid groups counter with some justification that it’s difficult to know what other goods have been transported in planes used by them. Indeed, the more I learn, the more the very ideas underpinning some monitors’ efforts—dirty and clean flights, rogue airlines, good guys and bad guys—start to look impossibly quaint.

  YOU HAVE TO feel for the big NGOs, the Oxfams and the Red Crosses. They’re clearly playing catch-up—able to track and avoid where possible only those outfits that have already been busted, or in some cases those that have shown a disregard for their own standards of blurriness, subtlety, and outright invisibility.

  Yet this is where the beauty of the taxi-driver or postal analogy really comes into its own: It allows everyone, not just Mickey, room for denial should they wish. And where there’s room for denial from authorities charged with some form of regulatory oversight, from customs to aviation authorities to some of the less reputable or experienced NGOs, there’s space for complicity. This is especially true in places like Kabul airport, Entebbe, Kinshasa, and Mogadishu, in which, to use the words of SIPRI researcher Hugh Griffiths, “the monthly payrolls go missing more than they ever actually go missing, if you know what I mean.”

  “Two or more parties are always involved in accepting these ploys,” says my no-name pilot informer, who was involved in the campaign to clean up “dirty” illicit-arms-dealing airports like Sharjah and the old Ostend airport in Belgium. His most recent approach to Sharjah airport was par for the course, he says. “There’s a complicity [in creating just enough doubt] so that people can say, ‘Oh, really? I wasn’t aware.’ I went to Sharjah last February, and I told the authorities there about the things that were going on there with one airline in particular that I saw. The person I spoke with expressed astonishment that this company could be involved in something illegal. Since then, I’ve tried corresponding with him, but he refuses to reply to my e-mails.”

  This sense of “complicity” he mentions crops up again and again, from the blind eye turned to profiteering during the great Soviet arms sell-off to the NGOs prepared to do whatever it takes to achieve their stated goals, and the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy adopted by crews and some operators toward illicit cargo.

  It seems a strange, pervasive force, like the creeping madness of which Kipling and Conrad wrote: damnation one tiny compromise at a time. But perhaps its causes are neither psychological nor moral.

  Perhaps it’s just what the balance sheet says you need to do. Having any empty plane standing on a runway somewhere is a hemorrhage in the wallet you just can’t live with, not unless you’re prepared to write off thousands of dollars a week just for the pleasure of having the thing sitting there. And the huge cost of fuel when you do fly your quarter-century-old, soot-belching superplane means that while you can’t afford parking charges, you can’t afford to fly it empty, either. It’s an odd idea: that Mickey, Viktor Bout, anyone working the gray side of the cargo trade might just have become slaves to the plane they hoped would liberate them, forced into deals they’d rather not do by the demands of their vehicle itself and the pressures of the only business they know. Indeed, Viktor Bout himself talks of being forced to register his planes under flags of convenience and operate in sketchy countries simply because his aircrafts are either banned or encounter paperwork difficulties in more respectable regimes.

  On the plus side, he jokes, at least Mickey’s not in charge of an Antonov An-225—code name Cossack—a plane so large and with such a monstrous appetite for fuel that its carrying ability and fuel capacity alike remain unknown. According to one seasoned British-born loadmaster and flight manager who’s flown both Il-76s and Antonovs into the world’s worst trouble spots, including military, aid, and commercial missions to Baghdad, coalition logistics to Kandahar, peacekeeping forces to Kinshasa, and set-transport job for Michael Jackson’s HIStory tour, “No one’s ever actually been able to find out for sure how much fuel the Cossack will hold. They’ve got the manufacturer’s calculations, but they’re always out by a bit. And the An-225 is so massive that no one’s
ever managed to completely fill the fuel tanks up before departure! In any case, no one’s ever going to have the money to fill up with that much aviation fuel either.”

  Built for the Soviet space program back in 1988 to hold the USSR’s space-shuttle counterpart until it was high enough to fly solo, only one of these monsters of the skies even exists; a second was started on three separate occasions, but all three times the factory ran out of material, time, or cash and abandoned work. Another Briton, thirty-year-old Aaron Hewit, remembers traveling on it as part of a small detachment ordered to accompany some “heavy kit” to the top-secret Operation Jacana offensive by combined Royal Marines, Australian SAS, Norwegian FSK, and U.S. Special Forces in 2002. “It was so big, the first we knew that we were airborne was the aircraft listing to aft and we all fell about the place,” he recalls. “Then on landing, I remember seeing Bagram directly below, but the following three to four minutes are somewhat lost on account of the fact I lost all bearings and possibly even consciousness. The nose dropped, the aircraft fell at an alarming rate, and suddenly we were on the floor.”

  With its caving ladders between floors, ocean-liner-size compartments, and flip-top nose, the 225 is the butt of plenty of jokes—from Sergei especially, who finds it an excellent thing—but the jokes mask a stark economic reality for the whole business: The bigger your plane, the less picky you can be about the kind of thing you let on board.

  Then again, for crewmen on the lookout for a little extra personal cargo unknown to charterer, client, or anyone else, a big plane can make the contraband a very tempting line too. Especially in a place like Afghanistan.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Afghan Black