Brittney Griner and the Merchant of Death

Russia seeks to trade for the man who kept the secrets

On March 6, 2008, agents of the US Drug Enforcement Agency, backed by the Royal Thai police, forced open the door of a five-star Bangkok hotel room to capture one of the most prolific and elusive weapons peddlers in the world at the time. He was Viktor Bout, then 41, a former member of the collapsed Russian air force and known by a plethora of nicknames including the Lord of War.

Bout has been largely forgotten by the world, moldering in a US prison since 2011. But it appears he has not been forgotten by the Kremlin. And the bargaining that is going on to trade him for the US Women’s National Basketball League star Brittney Griner, who has been sentenced to five to 10 years in a Russian prison for entering the country with two vials of hashish oil for pain relief – a minor offense elsewhere – demonstrates the asymmetry of Russia’s strategy to recover valuable people captured by western powers, critics say: arrest minor offenders, hold them until opposing forces are willing to pay to get them back.

It is uncertain if the Russians jailed the 205 cm-tall Griner, one of America’s brightest female athletes, in order to get Bout back. But in Griner, they have a real prize, along with a couple of other run-of-the-mill Americans. That Bout’s name has surfaced 15 years after he was arrested for trying to sell a planeload of weapons to FARC guerrillas in Colombia in what turned out to be a DEA sting makes it likely.

Who exactly is – or was – Viktor Bout?

He came into existence in the 1990s with the collapse of the Soviet Union, leaving the Air Force as a lieutenant colonel, took command of four rickety Antonov An-8 aircraft and set up an air freight business called Air Cess, which along with shadowy companies under other names and jurisdictions expanded to 30 to 60 planes and employed up to 300 people, according to various news articles.

A polyglot who spoke six languages, he seems to have been everybody’s go-to fringe operator, earning the nickname ”Sanctions Buster” for evading United Nations arms embargoes in a half-dozen western African countries including Angola, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Congo. He was legally providing air freight services to France and the United States as well. He maintained he was only flying innocent items like ice cream, flowers, and UN personnel.

Eventually, he would branch out as an arms supplier seemingly to half the planet including Afghanistan, dabbling in civil wars everywhere he could cause mischief including in Yugoslavia when the country imploded into several different smaller ones. By 2004, he seemed to be everywhere, establishing a bewildering web of companies under assumed names in borderline countries.

How much of that mischief was at the behest of the Russian government is unclear. Most observers believe he couldn’t have expanded his empire to its zenith without the covert help of governments.

But it is clear that after his arrest in Thailand in 2008, the Russians put on a last-ditch effort to keep him from being extradited to the United States. As Asia Sentinel reported at the time, “As badly as the US wants Bout in an American courtroom, the Russians want to keep him out of it – and some other countries might well want him dead. Security has been increased at the Bangkok jail where he is being held amid rumors of a possible assassination attempt. There are concerns that Bout was supplying plausible deniability to many nations involved in the arms trade to rebels and unsavory governments around the world.”

Whether Bout was connected to Russian arms sales “is unknown at this point,” as we reported at the time. “However, since the end of the Cold War, Russia has allegedly continued to supply arms to countries as variegated as Syria, Iran, Venezuela, Myanmar and Sudan, seemingly immune to ethical debates that affect the industry elsewhere."

The Bout affair nearly paralyzed Thai diplomacy, with both Washington and Moscow among Thailand's major trading and security partners – prior to China’s emergence as the major player. The US had at that point provided training to its armed forces since the 1960s, supported its previous dictators and democratically elected governments and offered large-scale investment including a healthy flow of imports and exports. Russia at that time emerged as a growing business partner by attempting to sell warplanes, helicopters, petroleum and other strategic items – and sending thousands of Russian tourists to Thailand's tropical beaches.

When eventually a Thai court agreed to extradite Bout to the US, Russia's Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov exploded with anger, calling it a "non-legal decision, a politically motivated decision, that Thailand's court made." The decision, “according to information we dispose, was made under strong pressure from outside, and this is sad." he said, without mentioning the United States.

Even after the verdict, the Russian government continued to push to keep him in Thailand. “One thing is for sure, the last thing Russia wants is Bout on American soil, spilling his guts after getting a taste of American justice meted out in a federal courthouse," Michael A. Braun, chief of operations in 2007 for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, was quoted as saying.

Nonetheless, Bout was ultimately shipped to the US and was convicted of trying to sell the weapons to what he thought were FARC guerillas. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison on the FARC charge, it was reported at the time, but his business operations were so slippery that the US couldn’t pin anything else on him.

The US apparently has got nothing from Bout, who has sat in a federal prison in Marion, Illinois, since his conviction without revealing anything about the vast network of enterprises he put together to sell arms – and which most observers say he couldn’t have set up without the help of the post-Soviet Russian government.

“He kept his cool in prison, never exposed anything to the Americans, as far as I can tell,” Russian journalist Andrei Soldatov told the Washington Post. That is why the Russians, years after his conviction, are seeking to trade Beverly Griner for him.

Photo credit: Washington Post