CHAPTER ONE
Over Kabul
THERE IS NO WARNING, just a sickening upward lurch as we abandon our flight path. A red light goes on in the cockpit. The instruments say we’re over Kabul, but that we’re suddenly climbing, not landing, and that we’re doing it too fast and too steep.
“What’s going on?” I ask in Russian, but Sergei, one of the seven-man crew, can no longer hear me over the scream of the four engines tearing our dangerously overloaded giant up and out of what should have been our runway approach and almost vertically into the night. In the dim light of the freight hold, his face is a mask. Under my feet the greasy, gaffer-taped, twenty-year-old, 176-ton metal tube shakes, groans, and pops.
Then he looks at me and leans in close. “Missiles,” he shouts, as if pointing out a house where he once lived, or a roadside bar. “Here’s where they start shooting.” For the first time I notice he stinks, not just of the usual sweat and oil, but of booze. I’ve seen the news stories: vague one-liners about unexplained cargo-plane crashes in Africa, Russia, the Balkans. Blamed on RPG launchers on the ground, vodka in the air.
“Jesus! Who?”
He shrugs. “Mujahideen. Rebels. Soldiers. You never know. But always somebody.” He closes one eye, an imagined potshot. Then he grins. “Mikhail is a top pilot, though. He knows the airstrip from the war. He’s got this method where he lands by climbing up high over the airport, then sort of dive-bombing the runway like a corkscrew.”
Sergei laughs. “You don’t get shot down that way. His trick is knowing when to pull up out of the dive. Incredible! You watch.”
But suddenly we are at peace. The plane levels off. The engines are almost hushed now, and despite the pressure, bursting ears, fear, and humpback-bridge dizziness, an odd feeling of almost euphoric weightlessness washes up from the soles of my feet.
It takes a moment for me to register the sudden downward tilt, to see the lights of Kabul in the cockpit glass. The ground is laid out like a map, dead ahead, where seconds ago there were stars.
The Soviets used the Il-76 in cosmonaut weightlessness training—the infamous “Vomit Comet” flights. It would execute a series of parabolic climbs and dives in which the descent was marked by an upward anti-gravitational push in the cabin. Extremely dangerous to execute—in a Candid, at an approach angle of 20 percent or more, stalling is a real risk—these dives from high altitudes in which the pilot would attempt to pull up just before the nose hit the tarmac are said to have resulted in a number of messy deaths and the spontaneous redecoration of many more flight decks. As we plummet earthward and my stomach passes upward, not just through my mouth but through the top of my skull, it’s unclear which of these things will happen first.
Against my better judgment, I lean out to look over the pilot’s shoulder. Mikhail is hunched forward like a man reading on the toilet, or praying. Either way, I’m with him. The ground is more than very close now; it’s just yards from the nose. Pull up. For God’s sake, pull up. But it’s too late. Involuntarily, my fists clench, legs kick out, eyes shut. Fuck. This is it. We’re going down.
“SOME PEOPLE DELIVER letters for the post. That’s me—just a postman. Only the parcels are heavier.”
I don’t really know how I’d expected an outlaw aviator and international gunrunner to look, but Mikhail is definitely—almost comically—not it.
Heavy-boned, gray, and stooping, he looks fifty, maybe more. His gaunt, ashen face carries a permanent expression of mild disappointment more suited to anti-smoking ads in hospital waiting rooms than wanted posters at the UN. His enormous hands are cracked, filthy, and horn-nailed; he’s wearing a gray boilersuit, battered cap, and army-surplus boots. Sitting on the parched earth of another third world airstrip after an aid run, cadged cigarette already on the go, he looks for all the world like a car-factory worker on his break. It’s just gone seven in the morning, but already the hot dust is, he grumbles, making him thirsty for a Baltika.
Not, on appearances, quite the Han Solo–style maverick I’ve fantasized about riding the skies with.
But if Mikhail—whom I soon take to calling Mickey, first to his good-humored annoyance, then his resignation—makes an odd outlaw, he makes an even odder businessman. An Il-76 pilot all his adult life and a product of the Soviet military—via a childhood in the Urals, his local air force training base back in Russia, then the massive Vitebsk military base in Belarus and the Military Air Transport Regiment to which it was attached, then Central Asia—this squinting, chain-smoking veteran of the bloody, desperate last days of the Soviets’ Afghan war is blue-collar right down to the sloping shoulders and alcoholic sweat. Yet here he is, he says: partner in a highly profitable air-transport business spanning the Emirates, Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe, whose operations in the world’s worst trouble spots put them beyond the sharp end of the global free market.
Mickey (not his real name—it’s understood that his real identity, his past, even the details of his plane, will remain a secret) and the crew have flown together for more than a quarter of a century. As Soviet air force pilots, navigators, gunners, engineers, and loadmasters, they flew more than three hundred hostile missions over the same Afghan mountains, villages, plains, and cities they specialize in navigating today—and in the same plane.
“When the USSR started to break apart,” Mickey explains, “well, some of us saw the weather change and took our chance to do something different.” That something was a dramatic escape from the military and a bid for a piece of the private-enterprise pie. “It wasn’t difficult. We knew some people, and when they ‘acquired’ a military plane, we flew it down to Kazakhstan and, you might say, rebranded.” He suddenly looks embarrassed at this corporate-sounding phrase. “Naturally, not a word we used, but it turns out that’s what it was.”
Good-bye, Red Army star and CCCP livery; hello, anonymous, no-logo gray paint and primer. “We were,” he smiles awkwardly, “suddenly biznesmeny”—to Russian speakers, the word is full of the carpetbagging mafioso connotations of those wild times. “And today we are the A-Team.”
Call them and the twenty-four-hour, no-questions-asked elite crew will fly whatever you’ve got to wherever you want it in one of the largest planes on earth, danger no object—if the price is right.
“We operate as private transport for all sorts of things,” says Mickey. “We fly a lot of freight. Military things. And a lot of aid.”
Which has had the effect of turning Mickey, his men, and their “partners”—a shadowy group of men Mickey is reluctant to discuss and whom it will take me nearly a decade to pin down—into rather reluctant saints, too. Because from Pakistan to Somalia and from famines to tsunamis, Mickey’s crew and their battered, twenty-year-old Ilyushin are the first into disaster areas with lifesaving humanitarian relief. Chartered by everyone from NGOs to Western governments, they are regarded as agile, responsive, and—largely thanks to their background in commando drops—able to get more aid closer to more hazardous, harder-to-access disaster zones than anyone else. If the money is right.
Their unorthodox methods, guts, and sheer chutzpah have made these aircrews legendary, and made them the men to call when—in the words of the A-Team themselves—you’ve got a problem and no one else can help.
John MacDonald is a Surrey-based chartering agent, one of the middlemen who take the initial job specs from armies, aid organizations, importer/exporters, and private individuals and find the planes and the aircrews to do them. Despite coming from a long line of aviation specialists and having “seen it all,” he laughs as he recounts one wildcat Il-76 team job that left the American military command in southern Afghanistan breathless with admiration, knowing they’d been hoodwinked by a five-man crew of Russians and their shadowy network.
“The U.S. military had this huge generator they needed to get to an airfield site they were planning in the south. This was a remote area, and aside from a few pockets of U.S. troops, it was completely under bandit control. There was no fuel available for miles around the landing spot, and none of the outfits we approached would touch it with a barge pole. They all kept saying, ‘We’ll never get out again, how can we take off from an unprepared airfield with no fuel?’
“The job was priced at between $60,000 and $70,000, but one day there’s a phone call from these Russian guys. They said, ‘We’ll do it, but it’ll cost you $2 million, in advance.’ The Americans didn’t really have a choice by this stage, so they paid. And sure enough, right on time, this ex-Soviet air force crew flew in, with the generator, in this battered old Il-76, unloaded the generator, then sat down for a leisurely smoke.
“Just as all the Americans were wondering how on earth they were going to fly out again, there’s a cloud of dust and up clatters this old minibus driven by some Afghan bloke—and these airmen just get in and drive off. The Yanks were all going, ‘Hey, how will you get the plane back?’ And the crew just said, ‘We won’t. It’s an old one—we only bought it for this job, and we’re ditching it here.’ Half a million dollars it cost them, and they held it together with string just long enough to land, then cleared off $1.5 million in profit and left it to rust. It’s still there.
“Everyone just applauded them—the U.S. guys in command, us, and charterers the world over. Not just for the flying, but for the incredibly sharp business mind that could hatch this. It was truly beautiful.”
Mickey laughs when I tell him this story, but points out that flying dangerous missions, under fire, into hostile lands where the airports may or may not have been destroyed is “more or less what we were brought up to do.” Still, like the potential rewards, casualties are high—together, maverick Il-76 and Antonov transport outfits court one of the highest civilian fatality rates since the dawn of aviation history.
And for anyone even thinking about shadowing these guys on their missions as I am, the roll call of death makes for especially sobering reading. In 2009 alone, two Russian-manned Il-76s collided above Makhachkala, near the Chechen border; an entire ex-Soviet crew and all passengers were killed when an Il-76 blew up midair over Uganda; a Ukrainian Antonov-12 bound for Entebbe crashed on takeoff in Luxor, killing all on board; and another crew was wiped out attempting a crash landing in the Congo. As I write this, in November 2010, another An-12 has just crashed with all hands dead in Sudan, and Pakistan’s news network is showing a mysterious Georgian-registered Il-76 on an aid run to Sudan bursting into flames over Karachi, killing all eight Russian and Ukrainian crew. And that’s comparatively good going: Of all the world’s Antonov-12s—the Soviet military’s second-most popular cargo plane—just under one in seven have been destroyed by accidents and disasters.
Mickey stops me. “Yes, of course there are risks, just like any job—don’t make too much of them.” He ranks the dangers, counting them off on his fingers like a man remembering ex-girlfriends—“Tiredness, enemy fire, stupid errors, overloading, mechanical failure, bad conditions, bad cargo, bad luck”—but adds that “alcohol and bad living have killed just as many men in the business as flying.”
Over the years, he says, they’ve learned what not to do. They never approach an airport in Afghanistan or Africa on a standard landing approach, for example, having been attacked too many times by rocket launchers on the perimeter, so they climb and either corkscrew down over the runway or dive steeply onto the tarmac. “There are things you don’t forget once you’ve done them in a war.”
A recent United Nations report compared the crews to swallows: migrating great distances guided by mysterious commands and principles, rarely landing, and whenever possible avoiding contact with others. Missions are rumors, routes and stopovers often remaining unconfirmed until you’re already in the air, cargo arrangements and contents kept deliberately fuzzy to preserve deniability on all sides.
“In Kabul,” explains Sergei, “we know we’re picking up mail and fruit for South America. When we get there, who knows? Maybe we’ll collect washing machines for Morocco, and there someone will tell us to pick up humanitarian aid for Congo, then fish for Europe or bricks for Iraq.”
This keeps turnaround and “ground time” to a minimum, and profits high. But it also has the effect of keeping their visibility and contact with the authorities low.
It seems insane, I tell Mickey: Why risk their lives on missions like this, in aircraft that were made before most of today’s Red Army recruits were even born, aircraft held together with rust, for nothing more than the standard $120 per hour (for pilots) and $55 per hour (crew) plus per diems and board?
Mickey enjoys the life, he says. “I became a pilot because I love flying. So that’s my life. I can choose most of what I do. The people are nice. It’s a job.” He does that modest Mickey shrug thing again. “Zhizn harasho.” It’s all good.
I believe Mickey. He comes across as a decent, reliable man trying, like all of us, to carve something out for himself. But I also know a couple of things that he’s omitting to mention in what, at this stage, is just a casual conversation.
Because as they line up anonymously on runways, jungle tracks, and military air bases across the world beside the hundreds of aboveboard, legitimate operators with their own liveried ex-Soviet warhorses, there’s a shadier side to some of these crews, to a fair few of the outfits they fly for, and to their missions. Theirs is work that means big money—millions upon millions of dollars—changing hands, often through elaborate networks of bank accounts in places like Cyprus, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, and Dubai. And this money doesn’t come from aid organizations, the U.S. military, the UN, or anyone else whose real name appears on the receipts.
Because, according to recent reports by the United Nations and monitoring groups like the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Amnesty International, and the International Peace Information Service—the world’s elite trafficking detectives—many of these phantom pilots, in their “untraceable, migrating flocks of Ilyushin Il-76 planes,” are also the key channel for the illicit transport of “destabilizing commodities” like narcotics, banned weapons, mysterious diamonds, arms to illegal or terrorist armies, and secret supply lines to rogue regimes looking to bust sanctions. They, and their even more elusive network of business partners, have over the past two decades fueled the growth of the global black market, the rule of warlords, and the rise of the mafia, in Eastern Europe and far beyond.
It’s a tantalizing glimpse of the other world these men inhabit—a world in which nothing is as it seems. One in which a hold full of blankets bound for a disaster zone can apparently transform, midair, into fifteen tons of land mines for the local rebel militia or bootleg goods for the local mafia. One in which a man can be savior and warmonger at the same time, and the very flight that’s full to capacity with doctors and medicine can also magically conjure up the Kalashnikovs that will, within days, be used to execute the patients. A world in which the words mercenary, pilot, aid worker, and trafficker have become dangerously interchangeable.
“The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” The tagline and refrain of the 1995 Bryan Singer film The Usual Suspects describes the methods of fictitious Hungarian trafficker, murderer, and crime lord Keyser Söze—a shape-shifting master of disguise whose murderous wake is obscured by rumor, myth, and the failure of the authorities to grasp his endless subtlety, resourcefulness, and determination. To this day in Italy and the United States, Mafia trial juries are flummoxed into making acquittals at the highest level by defense attorneys’ arguments that there really is no such thing as the Mafia—that it’s just a fantasy projected by Hollywood and a few overzealous and deluded prosecutors onto what really are discrete, one-off crimes unworthy of further investigation.
Even the existence of the most talked-about movement of the twenty-first century is in dispute. Many investigators contend that the very idea of a formal organization called al-Qaeda is primarily an American invention; that the phrase al-Qaeda was first brought to the attention of the public in the 2001 trial of Osama bin Laden and the four men accused of the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in East Africa, although there “was no organization,” wrote BBC documentary journalist Adam Curtis for his series documenting neocon policy, The Power of Nightmares. “These were militants who mostly planned their own operations and looked to bin Laden for funding and assistance. He was not their commander.” He points to evidence that bin Laden had not used the term al-Qaeda to refer to the name of a group itself until after September 11th, “when he realized that this was the term the Americans had given it.”
In fact, these investigators claim that the idea of the organization was promoted by the U.S. Department of Justice post–9/11 because in order to charge bin Laden in absentia, they needed to use the existing Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, which in turn meant they needed to demonstrate he was the head of an organization that could be commanded. Because if he commanded it, it could be uncovered, monitored, disrupted, and stopped. In the words of one senior U.S. State Department official, “When all you’ve got is a hammer, the whole world looks like a bag of nails.”
To U.S. prosecutors and public officials of all stripes, whose very existence hinges on structures of affiliation, allegiance, command, transparency, and accountability, the alternative—that people, goods, and historical forces are conducted by a motive power over which they have no influence or oversight—verges on the literally unthinkable. Because without control and command, any movement becomes diffuse, shape-shifting, threatening, and fundamentally unassailable: Al-Qaeda becomes a state of mind. The Mafia becomes a series of unfortunate coincidences. Osama bin Laden becomes Keyser Söze. And, like Mickey says, “I’m just a postman.”
To most of us—from you and me right up to the charities themselves, the Pentagon, international law enforcement, and the UN—this twilight world of migratory cargo and global networks of rootless, unaccountable, nonunionized, go-anywhere-carry-anything airmen, each with a briefcase full of different life stories and enough ID to prove every single one beyond doubt, simply does not exist. We put a coin into a charity jar or sign a direct debit form, and we trust that what we send gets to where we’re told it will go. In our world, what goes into a container at one end of a journey is what comes out at the other. Hammer it in, see the same nail come through.
So the idea of airmen declared dead after a crash apparently rising to take control of a plane in a different part of the world, or massive cargo aircraft disappearing midair, only to turn up at the same instant thousands of miles away a different color, and with a different life story and owner, is the stuff of spine-chilling bedtime stories and David Copperfield Vegas TV spectaculars. And like the ships that carried the Black Death along with their grain, any connection between the goods we knowingly send and the growth of black markets, terrorism, the mafia, the narcotics trade, brutal regimes, civil wars, and global instability is, for most of us, so obscure, so off the radar, that it doesn’t even register until it’s too late.
Luckily, there are some men and women, at the UN and international monitoring organizations, who’ve put cause and effect together and are tasked with tracking, disrupting, and halting the underground movement of contraband. But 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.
That is, until we see them for ourselves. I only became aware of these phantom aircrews, clandestine flights, and deadly cargo by accident—or rather, by a series of accidents—that led me from the last days of Soviet collapse, through a job advertising arms deals, to the mafia heartland of Milošević’s Serbia.
As a young journalist, filing freelance reports from around the world for the BBC while holding down a day job on business magazines about Eastern Europe, I’d already seen the implosion of the old Soviet Union up close. While in Moscow and St. Petersburg in 1992, I’d watched spellbound the everyday effect on people’s lives as the system, the rule of law, the economy, the whole Soviet dream went into meltdown, seemingly almost overnight.
Suddenly, the wide, classical prospekts of St. Petersburg became dark and dangerous places. Office workers and factory hands began stripping lightbulbs, chairs, fittings, ornaments, and cables from their workplaces and heading out into the squares to sell them alongside the householders hawking their belongings. I witnessed one waiter stealing his own restaurant’s cutlery while serving guests.
But if it looked like chaos, there were also tantalizing hints of new, more organized forces at work. The mafia groups were already all-powerful—a well-intended clampdown on alcohol by President Gorbachev between 1985 and 1987, culminating in partial prohibition, had both sunk the state coffers in a country where alcohol is often more a career than a pastime and allowed a countrywide black market for smuggled, stolen, and homemade vodka, wine, and other booze to take root and grow out of control. Now, even amid the masses of patched-up vans and backfiring Ladas, one could see here and there conspicuously shiny Japanese-made jeeps with tinted glass, guarded or ridden shotgun by hulking, shaven-headed, ex-military types.
The Chechen mafia took over Moscow’s exclusive, thirty-two-hundred-room “foreigners-only” Hotel Rossiya next to St. Basil’s Cathedral, and I watched as they shook down guests and directed their army of bruised, overcoat-clad prostitutes to work the filthy lifts and hammer on guest rooms, attempting to sell sex, heroin, and amphetamines they called cocaine.
Meanwhile, on Moscow’s lively Arbat Street, bony AWOL soldiers sold off liberated army gear—their uniforms, supplies, live bullets on the roll. Western defense analysts were already hurriedly trying to place and trace the last known locations of the billions of tons of explosives, bullets, nuclear and biochemical material, and military technology now lying loose and unguarded and very much for sale.
A lifelong Russophile, I was horrified. But in a funny way, I was fascinated too. This dangerous, dirty place on the verge of anarchy, full of the dark antiglamour of desperation and violence, was everything my middle-class home wasn’t. And most of all, I was curious. What will these people do now? In a place this powerful and this unstable, what happens next?
Back in London and struggling in journalism, I worked briefly in a dead-end job at a journal publisher, whose titles included a defense trade magazine and several Russian business titles. Though the publishers can’t have known it and ran them in good faith, I couldn’t help noticing how occasional ad pages seemed to function as discreet clearinghouses for any MiG-29 fighter planes or bits of other hardware that Russian, Kazakh, Ukrainian, or Byelorussian biznesmeny or impoverished state concern had acquired and wished to convert into currency. Taking copy of the “We are your ideal partner in Russia for sell top military plane” variety, dictated by a man who only ever referred to himself as “The Contact” over a crackly phone line from a dacha* in the Caucasus seemed to fit, somehow, with what I’d seen myself a year or so earlier. None of them ever paid for their ads.
But with their dachas and deals, these men were clearly at the top of the tree: the winners from the big shake-up. I couldn’t help wondering about where that money was going. About who could possibly have a use for all these Soviet planes. And about who was going to fly them. What ever happened to all those regular Joes down below?
Then in 1998, I found myself in what was left of a rapidly disintegrating Yugoslavia—the war in Bosnia over, the NATO intervention in Kosovo imminent—on what I hoped would become a freelance piece for the Sunday Telegraph. And with the currency collapsing and the Serb mafia and regime cronies holding court in the hotels of Belgrade, I considered myself pretty well versed in Eastern European anarchy. I thought I’d seen it all before.
What I hadn’t prepared myself for was the first glimmering of an answer to the questions I’d been asking myself all along.
* We became quite friendly eventually, and he posted me a photo of the interior, log-clad with huge animal skins stretched out on the walls and rifles above the door.