Gunning for a gunrunner: Viktor Bout, allegedly the world's most notorious arms dealer, was the scourge of Africa for nearly two decades and now he is behind bars--but for how long?

Viktor Vassilyevich Bout, considered to be the world's most notorious arms dealer who has been deeply involved in Africa's conflicts since the 1990s, had an uncanny knack of keeping out of jail. Obsessed with security, in recent years he hardly ever left the safety of Moscow, where according to a wide variety of sources he clearly enjoyed high-level protection.

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But on 29 February 2008, he flew to Bangkok to wrap up what he thought was a multimillion-dollar deal to sell at least 100 Soviet-era Igla surface-to-air missiles (SAMs), helicopter gunships, and other weapons to Colombian rebels represented by a man calling himself "El Commandante".

He checked into the five-star Sofitel Hotel in central Bangkok with his longtime British associate, Andrei Smulyan, alias Andrew Smulian. Five days later, on 6 March, they met what they believed were emissaries of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC). These ostensibly left-wing rebels are heavily involved in the cocaine trade and are fighting US-backed government forces aided by American military personnel.

Shortly after the hotel room negotiations got under way, Bout got the shock of his life when "El Commandante" and two other supposed FARC members identified themselves as agents of the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). They told him he was under arrest for conspiracy to kill Americans and to sell arms to an organisation designated a terrorist group by US authorities. The agents had wired the suite and recorded Bout's every word. He faces a life sentence if convicted.

The long-elusive Bout had been caught in an elaborate sting operation mounted by the DEA and Thai police. The burly Bout should have known better because it was almost a carbon copy of a swoop by the DEA and Spanish police nine months earlier on 7 June 2007. That netted another major arms dealer, a Syrian named Monzer al-Kassar, at Madrid's Barajas Airport when he flew in from the Mediterranean resort of Malaga.

Kassar was also charged with plotting to provide FARC with weapons in a $15m deal. US authorities immediately requested his extradition on the premise that the weapons he proposed to sell, including Igla SAMs, endangered American citizens. He was extradited to New York on 6 June 2008 with his longtime partners, Tareq Mousa al-Ghazi, identified as a Lebanese, and Luis Felipe Moreno-Godoy, a Spaniard.

According to US sources, Smulian was the go-between in the initial stages of the DEA sting operation targeting Bout that began in November 2007, with negotiations conducted in such diverse locations as Copenhagen, Curacao and Bucharest. Bout apparently agreed to risk leaving his Moscow bolt-hole and fly to Thailand, one of America's oldest allies in Southeast Asia, on the say-so of his close associate, who seems to have betrayed him. A few days after Smulian was arrested in Bangkok, the DEA whisked him away to New York where he appeared in court in what seemed to be a plea-bargaining arrangement with the US authorities.

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Bout denies any wrongdoing. He maintains that he was a simple tourist visiting the Thai capital, and that the Sofitel meeting was to negotiate the sale of two cargo planes. Bout appeared in court again in Bangkok on 23 December 2008, but his extradition hearing was postponed until 6 March 2009 at the request of his lawyers. He, however, testified on 22 December and claimed that he was set up by the Americans.

The investigation into his activities could illuminate the dark relationship between many intelligence communities and the criminal syndicates that run the arms-for-drugs trade. To what extent that will happen remains to be seen, but Bout and his associates hold a lot of secrets that involve several governments and intelligence agencies.

Richard Ammar Chichakli, identified by the US Treasury as Bout's financial manager--a title he disputes--believes the Americans seek to silence Bout over his alleged connections to the Bush administration. "There are certain dealings between Viktor Bout and the Bush administration that they don't want to get out," Chichakli said. "He's dangerous for them. They're going to keep him stashed away." Chichakli has not been charged in the Bangkok sting. He joined forces with Bout in 1993 when the arms dealer set up an air cargo business in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, the core of his alleged gun-running business.

At that time, Chichakli, a former US army sergeant who claims to have been a childhood friend of Osama bin Laden in Saudi Arabia, was the commercial manager of the newly established free-trade zone in Sharjah. By 1995, tiny Sharjah, desperate to become a commercial hub like neighbouring Dubai and willing to bend what rules there were, was the nerve centre of Bout's transport empire. The Syrian- born Chichakli, a naturalised American with a home in Richardson, a suburb of Dallas, Texas, claims he severed ties with Bout several years ago. However, he fled to Moscow in April 2005 when his bank accounts were frozen and the FBI and US Treasury agents raided his home.

African connection

Bout has had many competitors in the murky milieu of the arms dealer. But he has something they don't: the world's largest private fleet of transport aircraft that gave him a global reach. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Bout snapped up 50 to 60 propeller-driven Soviet-era Antonovs and Ilyushins at bargain basement prices. He was aided and encouraged, some reports say, by the remnants of the Soviet intelligence establishment, most notably the military intelligence service, the GRU, and the criminal networks set up by suddenly jobless KGB officials with access to the Soviet bloc's massive--and now redundant--arsenal.

These venerable workhorse freighters, often patched up and barely able to take to the air, and the daredevil crews of freebooting Ukrainians, Bulgarians, Russians and other veterans of the Cold War who flew them, gave Bout a massive edge in selling and transporting arms to the warlords who plundered Africa in their murderous multitude of wars over the continent's riches--diamonds, copper, gold, timber and other resources in which Bout was sometimes paid.

As often as not, as in the conflicts in Angola and DRCongo, Bout armed both sides at once. His organisation was so reliable that none of his customers complained too much, as long as they got what they needed. Over the years, his crews--sometimes accompanied by Bout himself--delivered thousands of tons of arms obtained from the massive military inventories available in Eastern Europe after the Soviet collapse or in the war-splintered Balkans, often to makeshift airstrips carved out of the forest.

Bout ran his arms empire through a bewildering network of front companies in the US, the Middle East, Africa and Europe that made outside scrutiny almost impossible. His aircraft were difficult to trace because he kept changing the registration details on his nomadic airlines.

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To do this, he usually used compliant states such as Swaziland, Equatorial Guinea and Liberia, whose former president, Charles Taylor, was one of Bout's key customers who helped cover his tracks. Taylor is now on trial for war crimes at a special UN-backed tribunal in The Hague. Bout eluded arrest for years on charges of violating UN arms embargoes by supplying weapons to African conflicts. He has never been convicted, even though he was wanted by the Clinton administration in the 1990s. He was the subject of a 2002 Belgian arrest warrant for money-laundering and is on the blacklists of the United Nations and the US Treasury Department.

"Viktor Bout no doubt faces some of the most extraordinarily serious conspiracy charges possible for crimes against Americans," Michel Leonhart, acting DEA administrator, said in New York after Bout was arrested in Thailand. "We're one step closer to ensuring Bout has delivered his last load of high-powered weaponry and armed his final terrorist."

Intelligence links

Bout, as with other arms dealers such as the Syrian Kassar, has at various times been stalked by major intelligence agencies. But, given the constantly changing imperatives of the intelligence establishment, over the decades these organisations have frequently used such men, with "plausible deniability," to further the interests of their governments. These agencies have turned a blind eye to criminal activities by such men when it suits their dark purposes.

That could be one reason why the DEA is involved in the cases against Bout and Kassar, and not the CIA or Britain's M16. There have long been suspicions that these men had high-level protection from the CIA which has allegedly used them to provide weapons to unsavoury regimes and rebel groups with whom agency officials, or the US government, did not want to be publicly associated.

For instance, Kassar, according to US court documents, played a role with the Americans in the Irangate scandal, in which Ronald Reagan's White House secretly sold weapons to Iran in the 1980s to free hostages held in Lebanon, then used the profits to fund the Contra guerrillas in Nicaragua.

More surprisingly, the Pentagon contracted Bout to fly arms into Iraq in 2004-5, even though he was wanted for supplying weapons to anti-American extremists like the Taliban in Afghanistan and al-Qaeda. Whether US officials knew he was wanted is not clear; Bout-owned airlines may simply have slipped under the bureaucratic radar amid the chaos in Iraq.

Alex Yearsley of Global Witness, the London-based watchdog group that has long hounded Bout, claims that governments often turned a blind eye to the fugitive dealer's activities. "Due to the complicity of members of the [UN] Security Council in the conflicts that Bout armed, on both sides, there were always politically expedient excuses not to arrest him," Yearsley said.

"He ran an operation that always had plausible deniability. If his planes got caught delivering weapons to rebel movements or sanctioned regimes, they could always claim he was a rogue businessman. On several occasions when he was about to be arrested by one government, another government would find a use for him," Yearsley added. The willingness of Western intelligence agencies to use such people to do their dirty work may be truer than ever now, spurred by George Bush's global war against terror and the great need to penetrate terrorist organisations.

For the last few years, Bout had lived openly in Moscow even though he was wanted by the UN and Western authorities and was clearly under the protection of Russian intelligence. He remained at large because Western governments failed to act together to secure his arrest.

The CIA, or the Pentagon, who used Bout to deliver arms, quite legitimately, to the new Iraqi military, is believed to have scuppered at least two attempts by Britain and Belgium to nab him. According to Douglas Farah, a former Washington Post reporter who has tracked Bout for years, after 9/11 "the once-promising US campaign to scuttle the Viktor Bout network had devolved into bureaucratic schizophrenia". Farah, who covered Africa's wars for several years, exposed Bout's exploits in a recent book, Merchant of Death, which he co-authored with the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Stephen Braun of the Los Angeles Times. They noted: "While the State Department remained committed at least in principle to shutting down Bout's global air transport operation, the Defence Department was enriching it with government contracts and American taxpayer funds."

Also, at that time, the Bush administration wanted to build up relations with Russia under the then-President Vladimir Putin so US concerns about Bout's activities diminished. "Whatever Bout's past misdeeds," Farah and Braun wrote, "even his deals with the Taliban, Bush officials felt they were not worth jeopardising the chance to build a counter-terrorism alliance with Russia. The perception within the intelligence community at the time was that Bout was protected by senior Russian officials, possibly even Putin himself."

Moscow had repeatedly rebuffed demands for Bout's extradition even before relations with the US nosedived over Russia's invasion of Georgia last August. With a new East-West confrontation brewing, it's likely that the Kremlin will do all it can to prevent Bout appearing in open court in the US, where he could potentially be used as a propaganda tool against Moscow. That may explain why in many of the photos of Bout during his court appearances in Bangkok, shackled hand and foot and wearing orange prison garb, he is smiling broadly.