Outlaws Inc. Page 17
The Drug Pipeline, 2002–2010
THE SOVIET WAR that taught him all he knows is long over. But like a modern-day Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda, the Japanese soldier who evaded capture in the Philippine jungle until 1974, still unaware that Japan had surrendered in 1945, Mickey and all the other men who haunt Afghanistan’s dusty streets and snowcapped mountains still inhabit a world long past for the rest of us. Some of the same bandits and mujahideen fighters haunt the airport perimeters and the dark, chaotic edges of town, shooting at the same giant, screaming silhouettes as they come in to land. Inside those silhouettes, the same group of old comrades watch the place they know better than their own hometown rise up in front of them. Just as they did back then, they can hang that left at the valley, then straighten up and climb over the mountains, even rise and fall, pretty much in their sleep.
Meanwhile, on the ground, the guys running the show might have a different flag, but the ones really keeping the place together, the local business wheels, the shopkeepers, the officials, well, they’re the same too. Governments change, wars start and end and start, but business is always business. Mickey lists the places in town where he knows for a fact that you can buy booze in this dry Islamic country, because he’s spotted his own booze turning up there. The list is long, enough of the names familiar—from tea shops whose refrigerators have false bottoms housing cases of Smirnoff to street hawkers whose lemonade bottles are selectively spiked for the right customer, and restaurants who’ve got themselves designated as charities, the easier to take delivery of important “medical supplies” that may or may not be of a fine French vintage. For Kabul is essentially a Prohibition-era Chicago—one with worse cops, better-armed mobsters, and a bigger racket in City Hall.
This is where personal relationships with regulars count, claims Mickey. “He can sell a bottle of Johnnie Walker for up to two hundred dollars here,” agrees one regular customer, a European expat who asked me not to name him or give any clues as to the location of his discreet—even disguised—drinking den. He’s understandably afraid of police reprisals in a month that’s already seen three city-center “Westerner-friendly” establishments, including the famous aid-worker hangout L’Atmosphere, shut down in a series of heavy-handed raids by the Afghan police. The violent raids shocked many of Kabul’s foreign contingent, used to the blind-eye policy of local law enforcement. Each time, the raids followed a mention in the international press. “Last time it was Newsweek,” says the owner, “which everybody knows President Karzai himself reads closely. You have to be careful who you talk to.”
He explains the supply pipeline. “We get it flown in from the United Arab Emirates—Ajman, neighboring Sharjah, sells pretty cheap alcohol because they know that while Sharjah is Islamically conservative enough to ban alcohol sales, the aircrews can fly as much as they want out through Sharjah airport without any checks at all. And when you get to Afghanistan, customs might find it, but they’ll ask for a bottle here or a bribe there—a lot of Afghan officials, whatever their stripe, are drinkers on the sly—and they’ll take their cut and your aircrews will get their contraband through. Further down the line, we’ll be serving it to Westerners, and to some Afghans, very discreetly, having paid off the police; then every so often they’ll raid us and confiscate the booze. And then they’ll sell it back to us, or they’ll drink it themselves or sell it elsewhere. The whole circle is complete, and everybody gets something out of it, starting with the aircrews, and nobody’s interested in stopping it.”
Running illicit booze is just part of it. The coalition-backed Afghan government has inadvertently made it increasingly attractive to smuggle small arms into the country, too. “Back in 2002, a lot of firearms made their way into Afghanistan, and it was all legal,” says one former NATO soldier. “But then the Afghan government decided it didn’t want foreign companies making money from selling guns in Afghanistan—it wanted to make the money itself by selling confiscated weapons and granting licenses. So now whoever wants a gun has to get one brought in illegally. And that’s where ad hoc runs by ex-Soviet crews like yours come in.”
But there are even bigger-paying opportunities here for any crews enterprising enough to make use of their invisible overweight space and old connections. Narcotics are the one cargo that’s always illegal, never simply illicit or gray, and in an environment controlled by an American-led coalition, it’s almost impossible to catch a trafficker red-handed. But Afghanistan is also the world’s heroin-production giant, circumstantial evidence suggesting illicit air-cargo export is everywhere.
“The real story at the moment is how much drug money makes its way from Kabul to Dubai in cash every day,” says NATO spokesman Dominic Medley, tracing the Kabul-UAE route flown more or less daily by Mickey during his Afghan air-bridge stints.
“Heroin makes everything else, even put together, pale into insignificance,” agrees Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid, who’s lived with the Taliban and seen Afghan cultivation and its supply lines at close hand. “When you’re talking about trafficking in Afghanistan, if you’re talking about arms or bootleg alcohol, you’re talking about relatively small figures nowadays. I mean, there’s a lot of it, but the real money is in heroin. It started coming in and going out again with the Russian cargo planes around the mid-1990s, as well as with passengers on Ariana Airlines and people crossing the porous land borders by road and on foot. But since the invasion, with more planes coming in and going out, the sheer bulk involved is astonishing.”
Indeed it is. In 2009, Afghan finance minister Omar Zakhilwal finally (and reluctantly) confirmed estimates by U.S. officials that around $10 million is smuggled out through Kabul airport every single day on planes. Indeed, that amount is just the actual cash that’s trafficked illicitly: as for heroin itself, reliable estimates, he confessed, are hard to come by, partly because of the fug of chaos and misdirection surrounding the airport. Meanwhile, figures obtained by independent Afghan-focused news agency Skyreporter.com suggest that since the coalition invasion in 2001 and the sudden explosion in flights—passenger, cargo, and military—coming in and out of Kabul, the Afghan heroin export trade’s black-market value has risen from around $1 billion to more than $6 billion—60 percent of Afghanistan’s entire economy.
Afghanistan is not just the world’s biggest producer of opium, but the world leader in cannabis, too, with a yield of 145 kilos of charas—high-grade Afghan hashish—for every hectare farmed. Like the fruit Afghanistan exports, it’s a summer crop with a shorter shelf life than opium, but it yields more cash, grows easily, and, crucially, far less visibly. And for crews whose motto is not just “never fly empty” but “never fly without filling every cubic centimeter of hidden space”—even to the point of painting over the glass rear-gunner bubbles on military models to make it look from outside like a solid-metal aerodynamic feature, while inside it’s big enough to store many thousands of dollars’ worth of charas—the answer doesn’t take too much to fathom.
With the NATO-led occupation, history is repeating itself: In September 2009, an investigation was launched into claims that British and Canadian soldiers had found a way to smuggle opium out of Camp Bastion and Kandahar on huge troop- and logistics-transport planes.
For their part, some Russian diplomats accuse the CIA of complicity in the flow of heroin, in an attempt to “flood Russia.” How, they point out, would the U.S. react if Russia had occupied a country on its doorstep like Mexico, and promptly oversaw a cocaine boom?
As I lift the stones around Kabul, it slowly emerges that forces at work within the Afghan airports facilitate a regular large-volume opium-smuggling cargo operation, too.
Whoever’s smoothing the way, the risks are high; but with the profits Afghan heroin makes (plus no transport costs, and friendly ex-Soviet military faces all over Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and all the way up to Europe), the upside is attractive enough to make the same pipe that Mickey began working twenty-five years ago a popular choice.
This informal sys
tem of allegiances and acquaintances is just one of the things that makes the jobs of men like Danssaert, Hugh Griffiths, and Brian Johnson-Thomas much harder, not to mention the in-country military and NGOs who must try to chart and trace a network of flights, connections, onward routes, cash jobs, and verbal agreements that looks, to the outsider, like pure chaos. In the same way that Leonid Minin’s and Viktor Bout’s paperless “networks” of planes were chartered on nods and winks and paid for in cash—or the Islamic hawala loans that enable money laundering in Sharjah— they work on the basis of a community of trust and shared allegiances.
Still, for some time it was a mystery how so much of it was getting through, along with the cash that buys it, from the poppy fields of Afghanistan, through the UAE of all places, back to Mother Russia and Moscow, gateway to Europe. If it’s a simple drug mafia or smuggling operation, it would seem to be an unusually influential one. It took an investigation by the British newspaper the Independent in 2008 to reveal to the outside world what everybody in Afghanistan already knew: that the flooding of Afghanistan with guns and ammo smuggled in from the former Soviet Union, the influx of foreign businesses and private security companies to Kabul, and the flow of heroin to Russia and Western Europe were not coincidental.
Russian smugglers told the newspaper’s reporters how they were facilitating rendezvous between Russian arms dealers and Taliban drug lords at bazaars in the Tajik desert, the huge no-man’s-land that was once the Soviet-Afghan border and is now an unpoliced wasteland—albeit a wasteland dotted with the same landing strips once used by the Soviet air force’s air-transport and bomber regiments to fly into Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation. Landing strips now used once more by Mickey and the boys, back on their old stomping ground in the same old plane, to refuel, load, and unload. The brokers claimed absolutely no money was involved. “We never sell drugs for money,” boasted one of the smugglers to the newspaper. “We exchange them for ammunition and Kalashnikovs.”
In fact, these Tajik bazaar rendezvous between Russian gunrunners and Afghan drug lords have their own exchange rates, with one kilo of heroin equal to thirty AK-47s. The deal done, the guns will be brought over the Tajik-Afghan border in parts—either in small consignments or in fifteen-ton bulk shipments, in the cargo bellies of overloaded Il-76s, typically marked down as spare auto parts and machinery.
In the course of his investigations, Russian secret service investigator Andrei Soldatov has found evidence that the smuggling pipeline Mickey reminisces about from the Afghan war, complete with old boys from the intelligence network on the ground pushing kilos onto cargo planes, is still there and has been anything but dormant in the intervening years. Only the background he paints is even more curious. Because it turns out some of this smuggling during the Soviet-Afghan war wasn’t quite as secretive as even Mickey had imagined.
“In the late 1980s, the first guy who organized heroin traffic through the Soviet Union to the West was not military intelligence but KGB,” he says. “In Uzbekistan there were some special [-service] guys who decided that it would be good to undermine Western consciousness or Western morality by smuggling heroin and all these things to Western Europe. [The heroin smuggling pipeline then] was a special operation, protected by people from the KGB in Uzbekistan and here in Moscow.”
The pipeline typically runs up into the Urals in Russia, then on to Moscow and St. Petersburg before working its way by land or air through the Balkans and on to Western Europe—90 percent of the heroin injected in Frankfurt, Edinburgh, and Barcelona comes via this route from Afghan fields. But if that pipeline, and the heroin-smuggling network out of Afghanistan toward Russia and Europe, was originally part of a grander scheme, then one day in 1991 it cracked apart just like the Soviet air force, its masterminds simply losing the state agenda and going private.
“Some of [these KGB agents] were still involved in this business in the 1990s,” says Andrei Soldatov. “Only in the 1990s it was not ordered by anyone, it was just corruption—some guys inherited something from the Soviet time. So they just turned it to profit.”
When, in April 2002, authorities in Tver, about one hundred miles to the west of Moscow, arrested an army veteran whom they suspected of being head of a “small but competent” group of four alleged to have sewn up the local heroin market by using “old connections from his military days stationed down in Tajikistan” to import high-grade heroin by air transport, they hit the tip of the iceberg. Now Vasiliy Sorkin, chief narcotics officer in the Moscow administration for internal affairs, claims everyone’s in on this most profitable act—private entrepreneurs, warlords, cargo traffickers, and even their comrades currently serving Russian military—in a way that makes it almost entirely risk-free for the delivery men. Only an estimated 6 percent of all Afghan heroin coming through the Russian Federation is intercepted by police or FSB agents.
Unsurprisingly, witnesses are reluctant to come forward, says Soldatov, with everyone having their piece of the pie to protect. “One colonel described this system in Uzbekistan and the old Soviet channels being used now for smuggling heroin. He served in this unit [which he’s accusing] in Uzbekistan, and he now serves in Moscow, so it looks like he knows something. When I asked him for information, he produced some names. It could be some kind of vengeance against guys who were more profitable than him.”
Perhaps the fear is justified: With former KGB agents and Afghan drug lords combining to fund the trafficking of heroin on planes like Mickey’s, it’s not just General Aminullah Amarkhel and his allies on the Afghan side, or journalists for Moskovsky Komsomolets with exploding briefcases, who have to go into hiding if they poke around the wrong air operation once too often.
One aviation expert and illicit-cargo tracker I interview about it not only asks not to be named at all, even with a pseudonym—“in case people guess”—but wants his countries of residence and origin withheld.
“I’d rather not correct the impression people have that I live in the country I’m most associated with,” he says. “I’ve spoken to people before, even the guys who wrote the Bout report, but I asked them to keep my name out of there. Because I’ve had requests previously to meet me from certain parties who would invite me to meet them for a flight in their Il-76. I had the distinct impression that they were going to open the door for me at thirty thousand feet, without a parachute.”
That sounds like paranoia, and I dismiss it. That is, until I meet a UN investigator one summer morning in the long, platform-side champagne bar at London’s St. Pancras station, hub of the high-speed Eurostar train service linking London to Paris and Brussels. He’s on his way to a NATO conference in Brussels and agrees to meet for breakfast beside the platform. We talk for an hour or more in the high-up, open, glass-sided bar, beneath the vaulted ceiling and Victorian clock, and when I mention the expert’s fears about meetings with some of his quarries in the plane, he chuckles with me over coffee and croissants. But he waits until my tape recorder is switched off at the end of our chat before laying a hand on my elbow and guiding me over to the side of the concourse.
“Now that that’s off, I can talk to you about this,” he says. “A couple of years ago, it seems a guy fell out of a plane like your friend’s, about thirty thousand feet over the Arabian Peninsula. Someone at the destination knew the number of men who had got on, but didn’t see quite as many get off, so he challenged them. The airmen just said, ‘The door came open and he fell out.’ Now anyone who’s been on one of these planes knows that it should be very difficult to just fall out. But still, that’s just what happened. Let’s just say if I were your friend, I’d be very wary of going up in an old plane with anyone who might bear him a grudge. But you certainly didn’t hear that from me.”
And with that he’s gone, leaving me on the platform, wondering about my contact’s invitations to high-altitude meetings. I think about the uncanny efficiency of the Afghan drug pipeline, and I wonder who’s behind it all. Then, for the first time in months, I remembe
r the ski-masked, armed spooks proliferating across the Surcin crash site, wiping away all traces of the men, the plane, and their cargo; the FSB and GRU men haunting Cyprus, the Middle East, and Africa. And I think: I really want, just once, to see the faces of these faceless men, to find out just who, or what, these mysterious forces are.
And then, almost immediately, I catch myself. Really, I’m not at all sure I do.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
There Are Huge Forces
Afghanistan, 1995 and 2010
THE ARTIFICIAL LIGHT FIZZLES as another colleague leaves the office, switching his monitor off, grabbing a stout overcoat, and calling a brief “Good-night” toward the few desk lights that are still illuminated before hunching his shoulders and tasting the first wet blusters of the Swedish autumn night.
The angle-poised lamp, the occasional flicker of a screen reflected in the tall windows and the odd tap of a key or rustle of paper—SIPRI’s own Non-Proliferation and Export Controls report, some dog-eared printouts of recent JPEG photos from the UN, perhaps—are the only clues the security patrols have that the long, pale building overlooking a black expanse of parkland in Solna, just north of the capital, is still occupied. But it is. Because this is the headquarters of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. And at this moment, someone here is sifting through databases, reports, and flight records. And just like me, they’re trying to picture the faces, movements, and motivations behind the results this avalanche of information keeps throwing up.
“The British government even had a specific department that checked out aircraft registration numbers,” says SIPRI’s Hugh Griffiths through the tinny echo of a cell-phone line. He’s working late again, and one of the reasons he’s working quite this late rankles. “They had that department precisely because they recognized that these numbers can tell you a lot about planes, and therefore a lot about who’s taking what where. But they’ve now shut it down, leaving it all up to the likes of us to try and follow these flights and match up the records and figure out what’s going on.” He lets out a short, bitter laugh. “And the reason they gave up is, ironically, that there are so many very distasteful people out there operating these illicit flights.”