CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Russia, 2010
A PIECE OF FILM SURFACED on the Internet in 2009. Taken from behind the glass of the conning tower, it shows what looks like a heavily overloaded Il-76 rolling onto the grass verge at the edge of the runway in a bid to get as long a run-up as possible. On the film, you can hear the voices of the Australian observers becoming more and more concerned that the plane won’t make it. When it does finally lift off—having left the runway and begin to touch grass with its tires—the cameraman is heard to lament the fact that “I’m running out of film—gee, I hope I’ve got enough to film the crash.” In another clip taken by planespotters, one voice remarks that “it’s only the curvature of the earth that got that one off the ground!”
But while it looks to outsiders like a miracle every time a plane like this gets airborne, in fact there’s a specific trick to getting a suicidally overloaded ex-Soviet warhorse like this off the ground in time. And, says Mickey without a hint of humor, “It usually works.”
I’ve spent whole flights tensed and petrified, hunched in a full-body rictus in the absolute certainty of my impending fiery demise. I’ve waddled across asphalt afterward like a seasick sailor and waved my arms upward inside the cabin as we cleared a fuel bowser with inches to spare. But I’m still here, so maybe he’s as good as everyone says. And what he says is it’s just like swimming instead of running: Everything takes a little bit longer, is all, which is where experience pays off. You get to know what’s coming up and start avoiding it a good ten minutes before you see it. That way you can do whatever you like—10, maybe even 20 percent overweight. Except he’s wearing a half smile as he says it, though, and in a split second of dreadful clarity I know he’s wondering whether 21 percent might be feasible. Under certain conditions, of course.
In any case, it explains why knowing the Afghan, Central Asian, and Caucasian terrain served him so well; and why Evgeny Zakharov is so keen for his pilots to have their ten thousand hours in Angola or wherever else specifically. When you’re pushing your plane to the limit and beyond, there’s no substitute for knowing what you’re flying into.
It also explains Mickey’s habitual full and free use not just of the runway, or the perimeter track, but of the grass, bare earth, warehouse courtyards, and any other flat surface around the air base he can access to get as big a run-up as possible for takeoff. As one air traffic guy in Entebbe told me, hooting with laughter: “You hear about all these fences and telegraph poles being clipped by wings on takeoff, streetlamps ripped out of the ground—there was another one recently. What you don’t hear is that half the time they were only backing the damn plane up when it happened!”
We’re all right, though. Like Mickey says, “First thing. Know your plane.” And after three decades, he’s more or less married to the Candid and knows exactly what he can get away with.
Still, something’s been bothering me. Listen to Mickey and he’ll tell you it’s his bird; he decides what goes on or doesn’t. But I’m increasingly aware that Mickey’s founding myth about “liberating” an Il-76 and flying it down to Kazakhstan and setting up in business, while undoubtedly true, is some way from being the whole truth. You get used to that, of course—though when even the infamous, exhaustively investigated Viktor Bout himself can answer the question by simply spreading his arms and declaring mysteriously that as a twentysomething air force man, although “I never had a single investor … finding the money was never a problem,” this something that isn’t adding up starts looking like something very, very big indeed. And I’m naturally curious. So after my last try at broaching the subject last night it was made clear to me that there was no way I could realistically push the issue without blowing our comfy-but-tenuous relationship and landing up on the concrete with one bag and no ride, I decided to do some digging.
“Looking at it from a commercial aspect, it’s impossible to survive as an airline without a network of commercial contracts,” says one cargo pilot who’s followed Viktor Bout’s loose network of planes and crews around the world for over a decade, and knows the hangars of Sharjah and their planes and crews well. “The crew often see themselves as independent because—it’s quite common—one aircraft will have a full crew with lots of people, plenty of pilots, more loadmasters than you have fingers on your hand. And they work, fly, and stay together with the aircraft, so it is their plane—they go everywhere in it. They live on their own plane, they live from their own contracts. But they’re all part of a bigger thing somehow.”
“It’s more complicated than everybody realizes,” laughs Peter Danssaert. “Okay, you’d think, it clearly belongs to somebody—but to give you an example from another actual Il-76 crew, the fuselage belongs to one person, but the engines belong to somebody else. So they ‘rent’ the engines from the other party to actually fly this Il-76!”
“Not only do your crew not own their planes,” says Johnson-Thomas, “but nor do their partners, or their employers, or people above them. Almost every single Il-76 in the world is ultimately controlled by one of three people, and they are all very, very high up in countries of the former Soviet Union. And they are powerful men whose names you will never hear.”
This view is echoed by another source who goes further, suggesting that these three men ultimately correspond to three countries—Ukraine, Russia, and Byelorussia—and that they are more or less the same level of men who would have controlled them before the breakup. It seems fantastical until I remember Russia’s wholly state-owned commercial arms business, Rosvooruzhenie, now called Rosoboronexport, in which none other than Marshal Evgeny Shaposhnikov took an advisory role in later life; and how one of the biggest Il-76 operators on UN preferred supplier lists is Byelorussian outfit TransaviaExport (based, ironically, on Zakharov Street in Minsk); state-owned but out there in the cutthroat African, Asian, and Middle Eastern marketplaces with the rest. It was their pair of Il-76s that got shot down over Mogadishu.
Indeed, the extent to which these state operations compete or cooperate with the smaller fish—and, for example, their relationship to men like Mickey or even heavily tracked celebrities like Viktor Bout—is unclear, even to relative insiders. Russian mafia expert Mark Galeotti has tried to follow the paper trail, too. And it’s led him to some very grand, heavily guarded, and firmly shut doors indeed.
“I’ve come across a pattern where, for a bigger business concern, it’s handy to have a ‘tame’ independent out there,” he says, “so when somebody comes in and for business or political reasons their cargo is not something you really ought to be carrying yourself, you also don’t want to say no to the customer. So having these tame associate ‘independent’ operators means you can say, ‘Well, we can’t touch it—but we know someone who can.’ And therefore there’s a deal. It may be that they own it, or sometimes there’s just a relationship there, and the big boys will pass on their business to a small stable of semi-independent operators.
“The most malign ownership pattern, though, is where these so-called independents’ metaphorical mortgages are owned by organized crime. Most of the time they’ll ply very ordinary trade, but then sometimes the cell phone rings and it’s, “We’ve got someone we want to fly out of somewhere very quickly,” or, “There’s a consignment we want to make sure reaches Tashkent.”
Galeotti pauses, mulling something over as a New York siren wails in through his apartment window. “And then, like I say, a lot of these crews are, frankly, deniable arms of military intelligence.”
He stops. I whistle down the line, stunned at the list of potential silent partners in Mickey’s business. The usual suspects indeed: oligarchs, the mafiya, high-ranking commanders in any one of the new armies that rose from the ashes of the Soviet military; the former KGB and now the Russian, Ukrainian, Byelorussian secret service. Quite a networking event for any small-time entrepreneur.
So which one did Mickey choose? Or, to put it another way, who chose him?
THINKING TOO MUCH about that kind of question can give a man a dose of fear wherever he is. I’d advise against it in the strongest terms when in the cannabis-filled cabin of an ancient, jam-packed Il-76 of indeterminate ownership with a long record of home repairs and close shaves. It’s especially not the sort of thing to focus on with a head full of last night’s alcohol and a printout of the Aviation Safety Network’s Il-76 crash-report database in your pocket, as the plane takes off nothing like steeply enough, juddering and swaying all over the sky.
Clearing truck height is one thing, but the hot air rising from the road creates an updraft that, at this altitude, feels like someone’s grabbed both wings in his giant fists and is shaking us to see what happens. Mickey told me always to look forward, through the same glass he sees. But against my will, I do look down. And when I do, something unexpected happens.
As we climb through billowing clouds and level off in the evening sun at twenty-two thousand feet, I get a flash of something else. Call it Mickey’s aerial view—it’s either that or everything I’ve experienced in the past few years flashing before me, and I know which one I’d prefer. Call it what you want; it’s okay with me. Because the noise of the engines in my ears has stopped and suddenly everything’s gone very, very calm.
Here’s what I see down there, scattered among the clouds and rivers and deserts and smeared Perspex.
There’s Andrei Soldatov, over there in Moscow, looking into who’s “protecting” crews like Mickey’s on their flights in and out of Afghanistan and the Caucasus, and wondering aloud whether the government might not secretly want some of that heroin to get through; with him is former Duma minister Anatoly Chubais, trapped in his own small purgatory, forever explaining to anyone who’ll listen that he had no choice: It was either a criminal transition to the free market or no transition at all.
Over here on the left, just above London, is Brian Johnson-Thomas, sharing a beer with Viktor Bout, making father-in-law jokes and talking about how “all the Candids in the world are ultimately owned by three men who are so high up, you and I will never know their names.”
I can see Mark Galeotti, too, way over there in New York. He’s explaining the way the mafia and the state work together, and off each other, and how one or another of them is usually fronting the cash for the pilots. There’s Leonid Minin—acquitted of arms trafficking by an Italian court despite admitting his involvement—complaining to the courts about how much his business has suffered, before he too falls silent.
There’s the UN man in Uganda, watching as the plunder comes and goes. Richard Chichakli is somewhere just out of view, drawing the blinds and talking to his webcam about how he’s being persecuted by huge, shadowy forces. And here’s his old stomping ground below: Sharjah airport, glittering with money and promise, just as it always used to. And like stars spread out below, I can make out the constellations of Baku, Dubai, Kabul, and Rangoon; Tripoli, Mogadishu, Entebbe, Kinshasa shining brightly.
And that’s when it hits me. And it’s not just beautiful: It’s perfect.
The Il-76 is packed like a flying skip and it’s handling like one. Gravity toys with us like a killer whale with a seal in its jaws; it comes and goes, then suddenly grips us and sucks us down before tossing us back up, and I swear the wings are shaking so hard they’re flapping. The whole plane’s wobbling about like a seasick sailor, everyone’s gone tense and quiet until we get through this, and even Sergei’s hanging on to his canvas strap. It’s always the same. We all feel it. Maybe this time it’ll be our turn to make crash-report headlines.
But not me, not this flight. I’ve got a strange opiumlike chill rising over the skin. The hairs on my arms are standing on end, the stupidest grin is building up inside me, and I know from the palms of my hands to the soles of my boots that we’ll be fine. Like Mickey would say, zhizn harasho.
Because I know the secret now, the last secret, the trick behind the greatest, most ambitious, most devilishly simple and brilliantly effective illusion that anyone’s ever pulled off.
Me. Out of all the millions who’ve witnessed it, who fell for it, who became its stooges, its victims, its assistants, its marks, its technicians, its master illusionists, all over the world. I know what they did, and I know how they did it. And if we’re not fine, and our number’s being called, then you’ll hear no complaints from me. Because now that I’ve seen it, I can fall through six miles of sky and die happy.
HOW CLOSE THE mafia, big business, and military intelligence got in the white heat of an imploding Soviet Union surprised everybody—even, at first, the mafiosi, the FSB agents, and the oligarchs themselves. All except, of course, the blue-collar types who did their dirty work.
They came from the returning military—the Afghantsy, of course, but also the hundred-thousand-plus soldiers who found, upon returning from their stations across Eastern Europe, that they were now homeless as well as penniless, around a million of them without pensions.
But they also came from the ranks of the workers; the factory floors that howled and hammered through the night, a corridor of yellow light, iron, concrete, and chemical smoke that lit up the giant, smog-clad industrial suburbs of Ekaterinburg and Tankograd. These were the men who made the machines: Mickey’s classmates, his land-bound counterparts, without the wings to fly or his aerial view. They too were desperate. And like him, they had had just about enough.
Today, two unusually well-kept graveyards, one on either side of Ekaterinburg, tell the story. In the roaring official silence, they are all that now testifies to the cataclysmic levels of gang-related violence, murder, intimidation, opportunism, and sheer commercial flair the 1990s brought to Mickey’s hometown. Russia’s former mob-crime capital boasts not one but two dedicated mafiya cemeteries—lovingly tended by relatives and surviving buddies, popular with tourists seeking a little of the city’s badass thrill at a safe historical distance.
At Vedensky Hills and Vagan’kovo, row upon row of polished marble tombstones depict, in huge, lovingly detailed tattoo-art-style engravings, the Bermuda-shirted, bomber-jacketed bratki—mafia “little brothers”—slain in the privatization gang wars of the 1990s. One is clutching a Mercedes key ring; another’s hand is thrust deep into the pocket of his leather bomber jacket in the classic stickup pose. Brand clothing and luxury goods are prominently depicted. It’s the classic language of capitalism’s dispossessed, from L.A. to London: no education, no prospects, no home of their own, but dripping with designer logos, status symbols, and gold.
In the 1990s, in the same convulsing agonies of a broke, faltering state that set Mickey free, these men saw their chance too.
The heavy industry and arms production for which the area was so infamous—though it had been cloaked in secrecy by the government—was on its knees, and organized crime moved in. One such industrial giant, Uralmash, was the Ekaterinburg region’s major employer. An arms, military-transport, chemical, mining-equipment, and heavy-machinery behemoth, it was responsible for a veritable greatest hits of game-changing Soviet weaponry—from the Howitzer M-30 to the T-34 tank—and in modern times, long-range-rocket and aviation manufacturing. Its ties to Russia’s military and its secret service went deeper than supplier-client; it was, effectively, the Red Army’s own weapons-manufacturing arm. Its employees were revered for their skill and importance.
And increasingly, they were feared too. Even before the Union’s breakup, Uralmash factory workers had their own criminal gang, the Uralmash Boys, whose meager and increasingly sporadic wage packets were, in the 1980s and 1990s, first supplemented, then eventually dwarfed, by the money they made from black marketeering, protection rackets, pimping, fraud, and extortion. And when, in 1991, the company found it couldn’t make the payroll, the Uralmash Boys offered it a loan to tide it over. So, was it an offer the board could not refuse? And if it was, what strings were attached?
This was their route to semilegal status, and it quickly set the pattern across the former Soviet Union. This was a world in which mafia hard men not only influenced, but swiftly took over, chaired, and owned the biggest businesses in the country—including thousands supposedly owned by the state.
“The economic aspects of Uralmash’s activities on their own suggest that the Uralmash Boys were the first to find a productive way to use violence and force to protect investments and guarantee property rights,” wrote Vadim Volkov, associate professor at the Department of Political Sciences and Sociology, the European University in St. Petersburg. “According to police data, the Uralmash Boys were behind around two hundred companies and twelve banks, and partially controlled ninety additional companies, from petroleum processing to cellular networks, car dealerships, and breweries.”
By the mid-1990s, the Russian Center for Social and Economic Policy Analysis published its first figures on organized-crime activity in Russia. They made shocking reading: Criminal gangs either controlled or owned outright forty thousand firms, including two thousand supposedly state-owned companies. German and Czech police had made at least half a dozen stings in which Russian organized-crime groups like the Uralmash Boys, with access to the weapons stockpile, began exporting nuclear weapons components to the West.
For their part, the authorities could—or would—do nothing, partly because they were now stakeholders in the mob’s own business. High-ranking KGB then FSB officers refrained from interfering with the mob’s activities in return for a piece of any state-run business they carved up; intelligence officers failed to turn up for work because they were at their “other” office, wearing a newly purchased Armani suit and negotiating the purchase of a new plane to ferry their merchandise in without fear of hijacks, holdups, or their uniformed colleagues’ roadblocks.
In 1999, in a tantalizing glimpse of the mind-set inside Russian intelligence at the time, former FSB man Aleksander Litvinenko, later assassinated in London when a fellow agent exposed him to radioactive polonium over sushi, wrote: “Our secret services are now at that stage of decay when it becomes hard to deal with direct obligations on account of business commitments.” In other words, they had gone the same way as Uralmash: bought out by vested interests, profitable sidelines, and political paymasters, they were too busy doing business with the bad guys to do their jobs stopping them. In 1994, the Urals Transport and Machinery Works factory built eighty-four self-propelled minesweepers and received funding for the Russian government to finish them, even though there was not a single buyer on the books. Somehow, these arms would find their way out there, even if it wasn’t through official channels. Perhaps even to customers the official channels were banned from dealing with. Somehow they would vanish, and reappear in the third world’s savage frontiers. But how?
For anyone with a few connections in the Russian Bermuda Triangle, now wholly owned by the Uralmash Boys Inc. and their shareholders in the FSB, finding the answer to that question meant lots of money. And that meant blood. As the gang factions fought for control, the violence exploded along with cars, homes, and mail parcels. Ski-masked men concluded buy-outs with Kalashnikovs; ambitious executives suddenly and inexplicably fell from high tower blocks, leaving the way clear for what one jewelry trader called “a state-mafioso economy like Nigeria’s, when state institutions merge with criminal structures.”
These graves, their polished marble and buffed black granite glinting in the morning sun, are all that’s left of the unlucky ones—the ones who got as close to the big payday as owning that Mercedes, or buying those Gucci loafers, before being gunned down. But for the lucky ones, busy moving into legit commerce, rebranding themselves biznesmeny, opening subsidiaries in sunny places with easygoing officials, the paydays were about to get much, much bigger. All they needed to go global, really, was a logistics division. Planes. Big planes. And crack crews, too, men who could fly anywhere and needed work. Now where would they find such a division?
And the union steward, the secret policeman, and the banker paused and looked at each other.
The cabin is lit up by the sun now, and the cinema screen shows nothing but a tunnel of gold and blue heaven ahead. And as well as I can, I’ll explain to you how it plays out.
BACK IN THE early 1990s, that seismic rupture in the fabric of the Soviet Union looked like chaos to the West, and believe me, it looked a whole lot more like chaos when you were there.
“It’s maybe difficult for you to grasp the whole scale of what happened,” Dmitry Rogozin, Russia’s ambassador to NATO, says over tea at the heavily fortified Embassy building in Brussels. I take another sip from my china cup, holding the saucer carefully as an extra insurance against spilling any on the plush carpet that covers the marble-floored anteroom to his office. Grandly framed portraits of epaulette-festooned Russian generals glare down at us—the ambassador, his deputy, me, and our pale, skinny, and clearly very nervous young interpreter. Though I speak a little Russian, and Rogozin speaks some English, this is clearly considered too important to risk misunderstandings.
Rogozin himself is a huge, disarmingly baby-faced bear of a man—clearly confident, proudly controversial, funny, and instantly likable, he’s got “rising star” written all over him; a self-professed nationalist who cut his teeth under General Lebed in the early 1990s, he tells me with a smile he comes from an aviation background, while his brother-in-law is one of the directors of none other than the Ilyushin aircraft-manufacture bureau and plant head office in Moscow. He also counts himself a friend, he says, of Sharpatov, the pilot of the Il-76 captured by the Taliban back in 1995. He tells me how he observed the collapse of the Soviet air force close to the eye of the storm. “It happened twice—in 1917 and in 1991. One after the other, the armies these men belonged to no longer existed. They didn’t know to do anything else. Sure, theoretically, they could go to civil aviation—but that was shrinking too. So they tried to find a role in a state that had split apart. And even if a very few took the criminal way with their activities, I’d rather not call it criminal but ‘gray business.’ ”
The world’s biggest standing army had been split apart, denied funding, and more or less evaporated. But the men needed something. Nobody could figure out just how it had got this bad, this quickly. Their families were living in tents. Near-starvation brought Mickey and his returning comrades to the brink of civil disobedience; there was almost no air force left. Some planes were mothballed; plenty of pilots, engineers, radio operators, loadmasters, navigators, were all desperate for work.
Then came the order, the understanding, from broad-shouldered, much-loved Evgeny Shaposhnikov, commander in chief of the armed forces, soon-to-be representative of the president of the Russian Federation of the state arms-export operation Rosvooruzhenie, and a few years later, chairman of Aeroflot. They were available for work all right, starting immediately, travel no problem. Here came the “liberation” and overnight respray jobs of all those hundreds of aircraft by men, free and enterprising. The best and the brightest sons of Russian, Ukrainian, and Byelorussian air academies and regiments, spiritual sons of Gagarin and of Shaposhnikov’s fighter-ace heroes, took to the sky again, apparently free agents. They were out of the armed forces, out of uniform. They could take jobs or leave them at market rate, and hunt for whatever else they came across.
So, sure, it looked like chaos—disorganized crime, the free market gone wild, as Mickey and the boys ran goods all over the world, busting sanctions, trafficking those conveniently sold-off arms stockpiles in conveniently sold-off planes, arming rebels and governments, and making big, big money. The law of the jungle.
Take the aerial view, though, and you can trace a certain spooky symmetry.
Viktor Bout’s secret flights armed first the Afghan Northern Alliance, then reportedly the Taliban too—almost as if these freelance delivery men could achieve something with commerce that the Red Army hadn’t managed, and arm all mujahideen factions so well they’d annihilate each other! And all the time bringing money in for all those old weapons to a bankrupted treasury, too. It really could not have been planned better if the FSB itself had been involved. It’s tempting to see the masked commando raid on his house in South Africa—so reminiscent of the secret agents who shook down East Line —as a warning to toe the line. And the “mysterious forces” he spoke of who’d plug him if he spoke—who were they? It’s always tempting to speculate. But we know that this was just Viktor Bout, a lone operator, playing fast and loose with the Northern Alliance and then making a deal to get his plane back from the Taliban, not part of a greater plan or anything. So he came by the money from the planes mysteriously. So what.
That was business in Russia.
Then, of course, there were the African wars. Sierra Leone, Angola, Liberia, Rwanda, the Congo, DRC, Sudan, Somalia, Uganda, Tanzania, all full of presidents and rebels more than willing to trade diamonds, gold, coltan, timber, and other precious resources to import-export hustlers—including owner of Exotic Tropical Timber Enterprises Leonid Minin, and taxi driver Viktor Bout—for some of the now-redundant stockpiled weapons these freelance, wildcat operators kept bringing. To the uninitiated, it might seem as if the empty exchequers of the former Soviet Union had found a way to replenish themselves with under-the-counter deals in a way that no state could legally have attempted. But of course we know this was every man for himself. We’re told there was no greater plan. It was business.
Serbia: That was business, all right; these same planes, belonging to the same “network” of aviation outfits, so diffuse and so different but with an odd habit of sharing jobs, people, and methods. Those flights from Ekaterinburg via Belgrade, selling arms to Libya (did they pick up in Belgrade, or were they already full and just making a tech stop there?) weren’t something a government or anybody connected with the establishment could be seen doing, not with UN and U.S. economic sanctions in place and Qaddafi a global pariah for protecting the Pan Am bombers. But they would be very lucrative, undoubtedly; and who knew what private businessmen with shady connections and some cronies in government got up to? These were lawless times, that was all. A series of unfortunate coincidences.
Then came the coalition occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the flood tide of drug money leaving Afghanistan on these privately owned planes—ten million dollars every single day through Kabul alone in 2009—all of it heading to places like ex–Soviet Central Asia, Sharjah and Dubai, home to dozens of crews, networks, and business associates like Mickey’s, where Farah and Braun reported 1,186 bank accounts had been opened by hundreds of different Russians in just one branch alone, suggesting “money laundering on a huge scale.” One wonders who these people were and how much of it worked its way back home every day. In 2004, a diamond smuggler for the mafiya was executed in Dubai along with his entire family. Members of two rival smuggling militias were involved in a massive shoot-out inside one of the emirate’s main tourist hotels in broad daylight. Both incidents bore the hallmarks of professional training. And though these are hugely complex, large-scale operations, again we are led to believe the men are simply rogues, criminals, and lawless deviants.
Now there are arms-for-drugs bazaars down by the old Soviet air bases on the Tajik border, and the steady tide of heroin entering Russia itself. “All of a sudden we hear a lot of declarations about how the threat [from Afghan heroin] is dire, and growing, and something has to be done,” says Soldatov. “It looks like convenient political theater. Someone is clearly giving these flights some protection.”
All those planes, all those crews and their individual sleeping partners, all swarming around the same places—it’s enough to remind you of the good old days, the Air Transport Regiment operations.
I can feel walls dissolving my head. As I shut my eyes, the abrupt end to my exchange with Mickey’s old commander in chief Marshal Evgeny Shaposhnikov crackles back to life:
“Marshal Shaposhnikov, in the mid-1990s, did you know about flights in Il-76 aircraft to supply the mujahideen of Afghanistan with weapons? Or rather, did these flights ever have official (or unofficial) government approval?”
“No comment.”
It’s as if, to misquote W. B. Yeats, each of these falcons could indeed, somehow, still hear the commands of a distant falconer. Perhaps that falconer was no longer a commanding officer; perhaps he’d successfully made the transition to the market economy all by himself, as their boss. Could it be that those three men—former high-ranking Soviets from Byelorussia, Ukraine, and Russia, men whose names we never hear yet who ultimately own every Il-76 in the sky—had suddenly woken up the day the Union was dissolved to discover that, miraculously, they now owned a controlling interest in a fleet of forty Antonov-12s?
Just as Grigory Omelchenko, the former chief of Ukrainian counterintelligence, told Peter Landesman of the New York Times, “Traffickers like Bout are either protected or killed. There’s total state control.”
Those huge forces. The East Line bust came eight years in, but it came courtesy of the FSB—or was it the shadowy Reconciliation and Accord Foundation, shutting down crews, operators, and planes who threatened their monopoly and who, even all these years later, never were identified? Were the secret state and private business one and the same, as Litvinenko said before he, too, got shut down? The FSB, the government, wanting to make money the same way private businesses did. Contacts everywhere. A lot of muscle. All the men and machines. None of the competition. No structure, no comebacks, no contracts, and don’t come to us if your embargo gets broken. Almost too perfect.
At our meeting I broach the subject with Rogozin. He talks, cagily, about the virtues of the men, then about how his recently published memoir, The Hawks of Peace, contains “plenty of bombs” for those who read it in the West. He asks me to read the just-finished English translation. Maybe I can pass it to any interested publishers. And suddenly, time is up. Rogozin stands, envelops my hand in his colossal right paw, and bids me good luck even as I despair at not having got more from him on the nature of this global shadow network. Then, as we part, he looks at me and winks. And smiles as he says to me, in English: “Every Russian has good connections.”
My mind’s racing now. Reagan, Thatcher, Kohl, then Bush, then everybody in the West, got to feel they’d seen off an Evil Empire; “won” a Cold War. But the Soviet air force didn’t break; it bent, reshaped, and re-formed. They are still out there, flying whatever needs to be flown. Just the terms of their contracts have changed. Same company, new logo. All those superplanes, pumped out by a Soviet military-industrial complex as fit for military or commercial use, dual-registered, ready for anything, anytime, anywhere with just a change of insignia. Mickey talking to me for the first time back on that runway: “We just rebranded, though that’s not what we called it at the time.”
And with that simple coat of paint, that change of name, the largest, most elaborate illusion ever staged was finally pulled off. After that, it was all easy. Once you’d turned a whole armed force into a thousand SME businesses and congratulated NATO on winning a game well played, no one was watching anymore. And after that, getting the world’s greatest stockpile of decommissioned weapons to magically change places with billions of dollars in African blood diamonds would be child’s play. Outfits like Mickey’s can do things no state could ever do in its own name—even one as powerful as Russia or as strategic as Ukraine. A black op, an arms run, drug couriers, clandestine human cargo, extraordinary renditions, mercenary drops would be unthinkable for the military. Who commanded it? Who signed the orders? Who authorized the plane? They would be ordered to stop. But for shadowy, maverick SME businesses within businesses, well, who knows what they’re doing?
This was a secret state running its business on the al-Qaeda model: loose affiliations, no pyramids, independent operators reporting to no one. The old way had foot soldiers and lieutenants. The new way just has enterprising solo operators: Mickey.
I remember what Mark Galeotti said the day we talked about the rise of the Ekaterinburg mafia. “Any of the individual players is often going to be very ramshackle and doing things very ad hoc. They might be wily and have street smarts, but they’re not intellectuals. They don’t have business plans or mission statements. However, the organism as a whole and the economy that it represents is often surprisingly sophisticated. It reacts very rapidly. The role of the umbrella ‘gang’? Simply to set the turf rules, to mediate disputes because shoot-outs are bad for business—to maintain security, and a brand name people will respect.”
Then I think of the Il-76 grounded in Bangkok with arms from North Korea. The bust, the uproar, then nothing. The crew were freed to return home to Kazakhstan and Belarus with no suggestion of charges being brought. The owner of the company who chartered the plane down in Shymkent claimed they’d taken holiday and were working na levo. The cargo’s paper trail led the CIA through a trail of shell companies and finally to a man who, it appeared, had never existed, except on paper. You had to love that.
There are huge forces, just like Viktor said, and they’ll bring you in from wherever you get caught out—Kandahar, Bangkok, Darfur.
Outsourcing, it turns out, was the way forward in the East as well as the West. Whole armies of crack aviators, no job too tough or too hush-hush; almost untraceable, and paid by the hour. And maybe, while you’re using them, you can even pick up some info about what they’re carrying for the competition. Soviet Air Transport’s Evgeny Zakharov now: “These ex–air force crews thought like military crews—the order comes, they’ll carry it out.”
In the end, of course, as in the beginning, this is a story about money. It’s what works the magic, blinds the audience, produces rabbits from hats and valuable contraband from seemingly empty cargo holds. It’s what democratizes Soviet regimes, and it democratizes weapons, power, drugs, too.
So a standing air force became a private air force, doing the same job but free of the ideology—pilots “resigning” from one permanent contract, going freelance or taking unpaid leave, and flying off to Angola in the same planes for the same people; people who now bore no responsibility for them. They were now able to break the embargo, run the guns, collect the cash in a way that they could never have managed in government livery. Factory trade unionists, soldiers, generals, ministers, and secret policemen—even Marshal Evgeny Shaposhnikov, commander in chief of the CIS forces, the Soviet Union’s last minister of defense, soldier of distinction—became slick, designer-suited advisors, consultants, CEOs, corporate decision makers at global aviation companies, government-funded export firms, charities, think tanks. There was money coming in, and nothing else mattered anymore. Behind the smoke and mirrors, the invisible networks, the armies turned SME businesses and the regiments now man-with-van outfits: the misdirection, the plotting, and the double-dealing, that’s the simple, banal, everyday beauty of it all.
The Soviet Union didn’t implode because it changed its mind but because it ran out of cash. The truth behind the secret is that there are no sides; there is no right, no wrong, no left or right. There never has been, really. There is just money. And like money, Mickey and the boys will simply flow with the gradient of supply and demand. To talk to them about sanctions is to talk to the wind about treetops, or the waves about drowning men. They are no more essentially good or evil, left or right, moral or immoral, than investment, insurance, advertising, business, politics, journalism, flying, or money itself.
The devil’s greatest trick was making mankind believe he didn’t exist. No wonder the monitors, cops, and spooks have a hard time tracking these men—they’ve been forced to look for plans, for chains of command, for paper trails, for Mr. Big figures. Yet these men have found a way of carrying on without any of that. They don’t have a plan, chain of command, a governing body, a modus operandi, a belief system, allegiances, or a set of rules. Except one: When enough people want them, and when the time and place demands, they will appear. Look at them down there. Mickey, Tatyana, Viktor Bout, and their friends and crewmen and business partners aren’t the horsemen of the apocalypse; they’re just chasing the money like the rest of us. The Soviet Union is gone. Long live the new Union: the one without a name or an anthem, a currency or even a border.
Silently, invisibly, this has become the Union we all live in. Theirs is the invisible empire, mighty in its weakness, invincible in its ethereal nature, hidden in plain view out on the open spaces and empty runways of the world. And if you think you can see them coming, or know what they’ll do next or who they’ll be tomorrow, good luck.
Then I feel a jolt and another shudder, a blast of bright, holy sunshine through cloud and smeared cockpit glass, and we’re clear.
OLD SMUGGLERS DON’T die; they just pull one last disappearing trick.
It sometimes seems to me that Mickey’s whole life had been a series of quiet departures: home and family in the hills, his garrison, Afghanistan, the air force, the Soviet Union, and any place that seemed like it was getting too regulated, too real. And as I think of him, a moment comes back to me with lightning clarity and makes me laugh.
It’s 2007, and I’m standing beside Mickey’s plane on a July morning so hot the secure airstrip perimeter and the minefields beyond are quaking in the haze. While we kick the ground and wait for our friends with the paperwork to show up and take their boxes of cigarettes, whiskey, and whatever else, I can feel the skin on the back of my neck blistering in the sun. Mickey and the boys have hats on, towels round their shoulders, long-sleeved jackets, whatever it takes to keep the sun off; and if it makes them look like bag ladies, not having them is starting to make me look like a burn victim.
We’ve just landed, but the waiting’s killing me. For some reason, we’ve got to meet someone else out here on the perimeter track. Mickey—that ill-fitting captain’s jacket now splitting at the elbow and so worn and shiny it’s starting to glint like it’s wet—looks across the tarmac with that disappointed half smile of his. McKinlay the Canuck is shuffling over; I can hear him grumbling. But the crew seem oddly fidgety, and no one’s making a move to get the fuck out of the heat. There’s not much talk.
McKinlay and I offer to stick around, but Mickey’s not having it. He sends us on our way. We’re heading off, arms full of bags and boxes, across the shelled, cracked runway, picking our way between the tussocks of grass. As we head for the dirt verge to make our shortcut, Mickey shouts to us above the din.
“Hey! Remember …”
We stop, turn back to him, looking very small across the shimmering asphalt. He stops waving.
“Don’t step off the tarmac.”
And with that, he’s gone again.
Mickey’s a master at disappearing acts, just like so many rogue aviators of the Union. Having pulled off the greatest collective illusion in history, these days these unlikely outlaws are more modest; some vanish in a puff of smoke into the sides of mountains. Others disappear into the African Great Lakes, or tropical seas, and the waters and the forty-foot-thick silt beds and stones close over them leaving not a ripple to show they or their plane had ever passed this way. They fly into thick fog, low cloud, dark forests, never to be seen again.
Some take off one day and are swallowed by the air itself, man and two-hundred-ton ship finally escaping the dull pull of the earth, the demands of the paperwork, the cops, the yee-hawing Chechen crazies with their RPG launchers, the business hassles, the border officials, the clients and bosses, the radar and the mujahideen, the FBI, the CIA, the mafia, the fixers, and the congressmen.
Others just want to go home.
After I turned down the offer of a ride to Mogadishu, I never saw Mickey again. For a while he had his other SIM cards. Then his number rang again for a couple of days, but he never answered. Then the tone was gone again and I just heard dead air in the speaker. Those he flew with or for, at least the few I had anything like a lead on, said he’d not been around. Maybe he’d left the business, said one, but I didn’t buy that for a minute. Mickey only really ever felt happy flying; the ground was where it all got dirty. Like he told me once, take the aerial view or go mad and die drunk. So I started to worry. Not all the time, of course—I mean, really I hardly knew the guy—just a nagging sensation partly, I suppose, from feeling I was off the ride. I got into checking out the rumor networks, kept tabs on the air-crash sites. Pretty soon I began to feel like a naturalist on the TV whose tagged elk hasn’t come home with the thaw.
The elk never did show. Like their lives, their deaths are rumors, trails leading off into the fog. Then, about a month before I began collecting together all the notes that eventually became this book, I finally heard Mickey had touched down for good: nothing to do with flying, just a plain old heart attack, back in Russia. And that was it, the way I heard it; no drama, no plane crash, no Viagra, no mafia, no Nubian princesses or bar brawls, no mountainsides or lakes, no flaming engines or Stinger rockets, Janjaweed abductors or Taliban warlords; just what I like to think he always called the Life. Bullets in the air, vodka on the ground. One way or another, they’ll get you in the end.
By last summer Sergei, liveliest of them all, had also bought the farm. The sky took him (of all people; the general feeling is that it beat the bottle by about a week) while he was freelancing on another plane with another crew. Unlucky is what they say, but even the greatest sleight of hand can only hold off gravity for so long. I tend to think of him when I drink too much and regret it, and also on the rare occasions I skip stones, their kinetic energy and lift slowly giving out until they fall. I’m sure he’d laugh if he knew.
Word is that Lev just disappeared one day—he just didn’t turn up for a shift, a perennial favorite of crewmembers chasing bigger bucks. Posted missing, presumed got out in time. The last anyone heard from him, he was muttering about moving to Thailand, flying with smaller planes and setting up in the bar business, but it doesn’t look like he ever got it started—it’s all been way too quiet out there.
Eternally pissed-off Dmitry and whatever friends or strangers made up the numbers flight by flight could still be out there, flying for whoever has the work. I actually spoke to Dmitry on the phone, once, after I left Africa. After all his prickly attitude, he turned out to be the one who told me to keep in touch, and I lucked into him on a call home. He said times had been pretty tough; they’re all banning Antonovs and Ilyushins for being too noisy, too old, too unregistered; plus everyone else was starting to get in on the act.
As it happened, Evgeny Zakharov was saying the same thing at the same time: “You know who kicked us out of the Somalia contract? White South Africans. We were a bargain, but now they’re the bargain fliers in Africa.” The airline owner’s got a weariness about him today, but I can’t help thinking he sounds almost relieved as he says, before we bid good-bye: “Russian pilots are not as attractive as they used to be.”
The phone call with Dmitry was shorter than I’d hoped. He seemed different, younger, more relaxed somehow away from the plane. He said he had been marooned in Asia without a flight out of there for weeks, and he’d realized it couldn’t carry on that way for too long anymore, not financially. He said maybe it’s time he put in some hours as a trainer. Then a woman’s voice was shouting in the background, and he had to go. Now the piece of paper’s gone, but it doesn’t matter. So is my connection to his world. Like the man Wittgenstein said: Even if a lion could speak, you wouldn’t understand what it wanted to tell you.
And the others? Well, if you hear anything, tell me. They’ve melted away, two or three removes too distant for an armchair stalker like me to hope to keep tabs on them. Maybe the bullet in the night got them too, maybe not. I’d like to think maybe they made it through, cheated the most dangerous, nobody-gives-a-damn business on this flyblown planet, and came in for their final landing okay. It’s a phrase a lot of these Eastern flyboys use when they want to say retire, and now I can see why. Say “retire” and you tempt fate, invite smoking engines and moving mountaintops. Retiring is a laughable ambition; landing is something they know they can pull off.
So happy landings, whoever’s left. I like to think you catch a drink together sometimes, by a poolside in Dubai or some back porch in Tatarstan, Thailand, or God knows where, but maybe that’s just me. Are you alive or dead? I guess you get to be both until I track you down and find out. And you know as well as I do, that will never happen. So for now, I just keep looking at the sky.
One day, somebody will write a real book about these men and the dangers they face; the kind of book that makes politicians sit up and listen. And then the whole damn circus will stop; there’ll be no more junk planes, no more deathtraps, no more exploding cargoes, no more cash deals, no more bribes, no more four-day, nonstop operations, and no more of the kind of lives that push men like Mickey to the edge and over. The last of the independents will be unionized, grounded, regulated, the skies made safe, the business brought into line, the men protected. Like the rest of us, they’ll live their lives on CCTV, pay their taxes, get mortgages, join what passes for regular society. One day it’ll happen.
Meanwhile, the clouds keep moving, the rivers flow; the dust blows forward and back; the last free men on earth fly across those great, dark spaces between the radar; and the planes, money, and cargo keep on flowing across the lines we’ve drawn on a few bits of paper.
It’s getting cold. Back home, February’s already here with an easterly wind that chills the bones. Time to go inside, where there’s light. It’s only when I reach the pool of yellow light by the door of my home and look back that I realize how quickly the night can fall here in the Northern Hemisphere. Now there’s just a small point of light crawling high above, making its way across the sky to the northeast. And it cheers me to think that up there, high above the black earth, someone is looking through a cockpit window and thinking about home.
Mickey, if you’re up there somewhere, I’ll see you for that cold Baltika on the other side sometime.
And Sergei, you were right. I worry far too much.