CHAPTER SEVEN
Yugoslavia, 1994–1996
RUMORS OF OFFICIAL, even governmental, collusion with the arms pipeline that had opened up all along the former Soviet lands seemed just that—rumors, the ravings of conspiracy theorists and ousted politicos with axes to grind. But as fate would have it, the world would soon get its smoking gun. The events of the stormy small hours of August 19, 1996—and the dogged, even foolhardy persistence of a small group of local reporters-cum-snoopers determined to uncover the truth—would alert the world to just how influential some of Mickey’s paymasters are. And just how far they were prepared to go to avoid detection.
The Il-76 screams through the humid blue night, a black shape slipping over the Belgrade Hyatt and through the low clouds on the edge of town. It’s silhouetted against the lightning, clearly visible for a split second to drinkers, late diners, and businessmen at the bar of the Hyatt, before it all goes black once more. The shadow roars over the river and dives into the forest of office blocks on the far side. At the very last second, the wingtip rises clear of the tallest high-rise, and the fuel-laden Candid screams on through the city center, low enough to tear aerials from skyscraper roofs. Eyes wide in the black, the pilot peers into pitch darkness beyond the cockpit glass. They’re eyeball-deep in the shit now, and no two-thousand-dollar bonus payment on earth is going to get them out of it.
The pilot is a man named Vladimir Starikov, a jobbing cargo pilot and former Soviet air force comrade of Mickey’s, on a run from Ekaterinburg in Russia, south via his last stop, Belgrade. An old hand, he refuses to panic, but he knows he’s running low on options as he circles his Il-76 endlessly above the darkened streets, blocks, and bridges of Belgrade, searching for a way down. He’s been in tight spots before and he’ll get out of this one just the same.
What had started as just another night flight from Ekaterinburg to points unknown, stopping over for a change of cargo in Belgrade and with another planned in Malta, will, by dawn, become one of aviation’s great mysteries, up there with Bermuda Triangle flight 19 and the disappearance of Amelia Earhart.
The crossroads of East and West are studded with sketchy refueling and off-loading stop-offs; tiny islands like Malta and Cyprus, where import-export is the only business there is, and nobody’s watching. Both were popular with the Yugoslav regime’s gofers. Since the 1970s, Northern Cyprus had been a popular ops base for Middle Eastern terrorists and KGB agents directing “black ops” in the Med and Middle East. “In the 1990s,” reported Zavtra’s Valentin Prussakov, “thousands of ‘redundant’ secret service agents lost no time in shedding their epaulets and going into private business. Many opened offshore companies based on the island, followed by a heavy flow of Russian capital.” But it was not all Russian. By 1996, both islands were much-loved flags of convenience, letterheads, and stopovers for a host of post–Soviet bloc contraband-trafficking boats and planes alike.
For this shadow world of international smuggling, trafficking networks, and secret agents, tonight’s repercussions will continue long after the fires have been put out. But right now, for the pilot and crew, the fight of their lives is just beginning.
Starikov orders up wheels: no wheels. Lights: no lights. He curses the chances. On landing in Belgrade after their inbound flight from Ekaterinburg, he’d headed off for some rest while the crew, and some ground guys, carried out the usual inspection. When they’d told him how the onboard power fizzled and faded, he’d insisted there was no way they could go on to Malta that night as planned. He hates himself now, silently, like they all do, for having been persuaded by the extra two thousand dollars each that the boss had stumped up. But hell, this is 1996. For a bunch of ex-Soviet air force flyboys living job to job, two thousand dollars cash is a whole lot of money for a night’s work.
Sure enough, at 12:25 A.M. on Monday, August 19, 1996, just fifteen minutes after takeoff from Belgrade’s Surcin airport en route for Malta, the onboard electrics on flight PAR-3601 blink, surge, then fail completely, plunging them into darkness. The instruments go dead. The radio fails. At the same instant, the plane’s external and landing lights fail. All instruments are now dead. Desperate calls by controllers on all frequencies are in vain. Just radio silence, and the eerie rushing of the breeze around the control tower. To the ground, the Ilyushin is now a silent blip on their screens.
If the cargo is what pilot and crew had begun to suspect, they must be trying hard not to think about it. Inside what is now a blind-flying 176-ton petrol bomb, they frantically try to bring the electrics back online.
Starikov and his copilot Vladimir Barsenov have forty-four years of flying experience between them. They are coolheaded men, and they and the crew—including a veteran flight engineer, a radio operator, and a navigator—aren’t going down without a fight. Unable to raise ground control on their radio and in the sudden blackness of a powerless cockpit, Starikov knows they have only one choice: to abort the flight and try to bring the 176-ton plane down—packed as it is with 109 tons of jet fuel and a hold that’s way too full of black cargo.
The pilot turns 180 degrees, or as close as he can judge it, and heads back toward Belgrade. If they can find their way back to the city without navigation, ground contact, or lights, he’s hopeful, even in the midnight darkness, of spotting the airport and runway through his cockpit window amid the grid of streets and fields below. Then maybe, just maybe, he can bring this thing down gently.
For three hours, the stricken Il-76 roars desperately in circles above Belgrade, silhouetted against the flashes of the stormy night sky, its instruments still dead and its radio silent, all navigation gone. Even the bulbs by which the crew would normally be able to see and move about the plane are gone, as are the plane’s external lights—including its headlamps. The darkness up there in the cloud is absolute, and Starikov’s only choice is to try to remain low enough to see beneath the storm clouds but high enough to clear the city’s bridges and buildings.
The overloaded Il-76 is now heading back over the crowded capital of Milošević’s mafia kingdom, hidden by clouds and invisible to other aircraft. Inside the iron giant, the crew works in total darkness, or by the meager light of a torch or a cigarette, to bring the systems back online. Using their watches and a magnetic compass, they calculate their entry into Belgrade airspace and descend through the soaking black cloud with a roaring noise that shakes buildings as they pass, way too low. There it is below—Belgrade city center. Descending to 150 meters, they search frantically for their bearings—witnesses see them narrowly miss the top of another building, the twenty-four-story Beogradjanka skyscraper, at around 1:30 A.M. Some lean from windows, try to take pictures, ending up, said one, with nothing more than a dark passing shadow, a blurry Loch Ness photo.” Then the monster disappears off into the suburbs, before screaming in, just as low, for another pass.
Some eyewitnesses claim Starikov’s panicking now, disoriented and scanning the ground, lower and lower, for the airport, while others at Surcin reckon he knows exactly what he’s doing as he keeps passing low over the airport, gauging the ground for landing three or four times, in a clear attempt to raise the alarm. And still the stricken Ilyushin-76 circles, tighter and tighter, lower and lower, not wanting to lose its bearings—over the airport, the city center, and the thronging, partying Hyatt and InterContinental over in New Belgrade—roaring back and forth in what the waiting crash teams now know is Vladimir Starikov’s attempt to burn as much fuel as possible before he takes his final gamble.
At 3:00 A.M., residents see the plane narrowly clear Block 44 in New Belgrade and head low over Bezanijska Kosa, its landing gear lowered. Without electricity the crew have labored desperately in pitch darkness to lower the wheels of the giant plane by hand. At the airport, the fire crews are scrambled. Helpless, they can only watch and wait. Finally, the plane turns 180 degrees over Surcin airport and aims for the runway from the northwest, coming in fast, an earsplitting black shadow.
In a split second, it’s over. When the Il-76 explodes, its wingtip touching the ground and slamming the plane into the fields at the runway’s end, the fireball is so intense that it slams shrapnel and aircraft parts into the control-tower walls, smashing the concrete. Starikov, Barsenov, and anyone and anything else onboard are vaporized, blasted over hundreds of meters of airport land.
And that’s where Vladimir Starikov’s last flight gets really strange. Because instead of investigators, rescue teams, and fire crews, the first forces to the crash area were the secret police. Faces shaded, backed by soldiers, they began to fan out across the area.
The Men in Black worked fast through the dawn, methodically erasing evidence of the plane’s cargo. Witnesses were spirited away, cameras confiscated, recording equipment smashed, residents advised at gunpoint to forget anything that may, or may not, have happened that evening. The agents fanned out along the adjacent motorway, blocking exits and preventing traffic from slowing down as it came within eyeshot of the burning wreckage. The suburb was shut down. The men guarding the perimeter had clear orders: “Not one living thing comes in or goes out.”
By sunrise, they’d turned the runway into an Area 51–like compound: total blackout. But even as the secret police and airport security chased off journalists, a couple of reporters considered tame to the regime were not only allowed through, but invited for an official briefing on the cause of the crash—though the wreckage continued to burn too fiercely for anybody to approach the plane. Something about the wreck of flight 3601 was so sensitive that even Russian diplomats, responding to the news that a Russian plane carrying Russian nationals had crashed, were barred from the site by black-clad men with automatic weapons.
Belgrade-based photographer Igor Salinger, who rushed to the site, had heard the plane on several occasions, enough to become used to its distinctive roar. “I’m used to plane sounds,” he recalls today. “As well as being professionally connected to aviation, I live on the path to Runway 30, around the outer marker.”
This time, he figured something was very wrong from the overhead roaring, even through the fog of sleep. The crash, he says, sounded from his bed “just like a series of distant explosions like … well, kind of like firecrackers.” Salinger fell back into a fitful sleep, waking again as day broke. Pulling on his jeans and jacket and grabbing his cameras, the photographer made his way to the crash site. Something large was burning out past the perimeter, but Salinger found himself barred by a cordon of men in blue uniforms. They were everywhere; alongside the motorway, the pavements, the roads, even the fields where the black twisted mass burned and smoldered. “It was August, so the corn was high—easily man-height —and it helped hide what needed to be hidden,” he recalls. “At that point, you could only see the big ‘T’ of the tail still sticking up.” Salinger tried to get into the Yugoslav Aeronautical Museum, whose windows offered a perfect view down onto the site, but already police and staff had cordoned the building off. Still, he bumped into an acquaintance there—one of the men who’d been clearing the site. The man said something that made Salinger’s blood run cold. And little by little, the truth began to emerge.
“The guy was, let’s say, someone who knew about these things, and he’d seen the wreck,” recalls Salinger. “And all he said to me was, ‘It looks like Qadaffi’s not getting a flypast at his military parade this year.”
Still, Salinger had his work cut out. “The crash site was sealed off for, if I recall, thirteen days,” he says. “Until they had picked up everything that should not be seen.” The photographer finally crept through the farmland and thicket on the far perimeter and managed to snap a few shots; first from a distance, through the corn, and then finally, the wreckage, which the police thought they’d combed and “cleaned” properly. They hadn’t. When he managed to sneak through, he found that among the wreckage were aircraft tires and avionics parts, way too small to be from an Ilyushin.
More men called in to do the “cleaning” of the site began to gossip. They reported seeing 23mm ammunition among the wreckage in large quantities. The cleanup was not as thorough as the authorities hoped. Then avionics parts for Yugoslav-produced Galeb and Jastreb fighter planes, then 23mm cannon ammunition.
On his last visit, desperation at the thought of all evidence being erased that there had ever been a crash, he snatched a burned piece of wreckage from the Il-76: “A sick souvenir,” he admits. It would be something to hold on to when the official denials started.
Opposition newsweekly Vreme’s Russian correspondent in Ekaterinburg, Sergei Kuznetsov, called in some favors from military sources there. They discovered that the doomed Il-76 had, somewhat oddly, been insured by the Russian military. But he was told “that does not mean it was carrying arms … most of our clients are renowned organizations like the Russian Security Service, the General Staff Military Cooperation Department, or President Yeltsin’s transport service.”
Meanwhile, the investigators at Vreme started digging, led by a determined veteran reporter named Milos Vasic—one of the paper’s founders and himself an aviator who’d flown helicopters in Asia in the seventies as a reporter for a news agency. Vasic and his team smelled a rat. So doggedly did he pursue the story—and such were the lengths to which the secret police went to stop him—that today, talking at his home in Belgrade, the sixty-five-year-old with dark “deadline circles” under his eyes laughs himself into a wheezing cough remembering slipping onto a train to Budapest “every time I needed to phone our contact in Russia, so I knew I wasn’t being tapped.”
“Milos has a lot of experience in people going after his head,” grins Salinger. “Because he’s the one who really pokes his nose right in it! I’m just an aviation photographer.” Sure enough, Vasic was a thorn in the regime’s side and was used to its threats, obstructions, and worse. The ruling cadre, he rages as he remembers the danger he and his team endured in their investigation, “was just, ‘Fuck you.’ Just we don’t give a fuck, we can do anything. Anything.”
But in the end, they couldn’t stop the story from gathering pace. And when the truth finally came out, it revealed a world of X-Files-like complexity, secret patronage, state corruption, sanctions busting, and privateering that not even the most paranoid prosecutors had dared to suspect. Only this time there was no conspiracy of Illuminati, no mystical order bent on brainwashing the enemy or enforcing submission to any all-powerful manifesto. Just a dark corner where the worlds of small business and big politics met.
THE NAME TOMISLAV Damnjanovic had never been so much as whispered by the media or investigators before that night. Even now, some investigators call the slim, tanned, and silver-haired Yugoslav Steve Martin lookalike “the invisible man.” He was, all agree, your classic shifty, small-to-middleweight operator. For years, according to an International Peace Information Service (IPIS) report on arms shipments flooding out of the former Yugoslavia, Damnjanovic had “formed part of a transnational cigarette-smuggling network that operated in the Balkans during the 1990s [and] which, according to European Commission documentation, also involved arms traffickers.” His story was summarized in a United Nations Development Programme–funded report compiled by arms-trafficking investigators Hugh Griffiths of SIPRI and another Englishman, Adrian Wilkinson of the South Eastern and Eastern Europe Clearinghouse for the Control of Small Arms and Light Weapons. According to the report, Damnjanovic made his name
… trafficking to rogue states and African dictatorships under UN sanctions while at the same time supplying arms on behalf of some of America’s biggest companies, such as General Dynamics and Kellogg, Brown and Root, before transporting arms for US companies and other arms suppliers such as Taos, Inc., and the network in which he worked supplied Saddam Hussein, Charles Taylor, the Burmese military junta, the Islamic militias of Mogadishu, and Colonel Muammar Ghaddafi’s regime in Liberia. Like the more infamous Viktor Bout, Damnjanovic has chartered planes throughout Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe, supplying everything from humanitarian aid to hand grenades.
Damnjanovic has denied this. Indeed, even amid the mafia hits, crony politics, and chaos of war-torn 1990s Yugoslavia, nothing about his business dealings appears to have been illegal. “Damnjanovic isn’t an arms smuggler exactly,” laughs Salinger. “Just a man in the business who’s found a way to do, as we say in slang, Ilyushin business.”
His story is typical. As an employee of the state-owned Yugoslav national airline JAT throughout the 1980s, he was often stationed in Dubai, where he developed a taste for international high living far from his increasingly fraught home city of Belgrade. As Yugoslavia broke up and Slobodan Milošević’s regime began prosecuting a series of wars in Bosnia and beyond, the UN imposed sanctions that effectively grounded JAT by preventing them from landing outside what was rapidly becoming the former Yugoslavia. By 1992, his JAT office in the Emirates had closed, and Damnjanovic, like Mickey, started scouting for new opportunities. Now used to the luxury of Dubai’s air-conditioned expat bubble, he wasn’t about to head home to a life of sanctions, shortages, rocketing inflation, and war in Belgrade. Especially not now that he’d seen how easy it was to make money flying in and out of the Emirates carrying whatever paid best, to whoever bid highest.
In those heady days in the UAE, everybody was at it, it seemed. Rumors of Sharjah’s next Big Idea—an anything-goes gateway for whatever you’ve got—were rife. Dubai itself was great for anyone with an old plane and an eye for an illicit buck. A transport hub linking Europe and the Caucasus, the Middle East, the Horn of Africa, and Pakistan/Afghanistan, it was a free-trade free-for-all in which seemingly anything, or anyone, could be bought and sold for the right price. Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, the crown prince, was not only the visionary behind the Emirate’s breakneck growth but its major investor, financing luxury hotels, malls, prestige horse races, and airports with equal élan. He was also one of the first to recognize the Taliban’s claims of sovereignty during their pitched battle for Kabul. Under him—though there’s no suggestion that the sheikh himself either knew or approved—the authorities seemed willing to let whatever cargo come and go through Dubai’s once-pirate-infested port and airport, as long as it did so discreetly.
Sharking around Dubai looking for a partner, the slim, smooth-talking silver fox Damnjanovic fell in with a Russian wheeler-dealer and former chief in the KGB who had fetched up in Dubai like many of his former colleagues, keen to make a killing in this haven for hands-off cargo ops, money laundering, and high-class hookers. The two instantly spotted an opportunity in each other: Damnjanovic, to latch on to the Russian’s air-cargo operation and get a foothold in an aviation business that was rising fast; and the former FSB man, an inside line on the boom market for shady cargo. Belgrade was experiencing a mafia boom comparable to Russia’s, and sanction busting was the way to make big, big money.
Quietly, secret police chief Rade Markovic and customs head Kertes began taking a close hand in airport security, Markovic taking orders that came from the very top while Kertes coordinated shipments in and out. And after dusk, the terminal echoed with familiar thunder as Il-76s and Antonovs swept onto the asphalt and lined up alongside those last JAT flights out of the country. Slowly but surely, crews like Mickey’s became the regime’s own deniable conduit for anything Milošević and his cronies wanted done. And as it turned out, their timing was perfect.
Desperately in need of stable foreign currency to finance their government’s coffers, their lifestyles, and their proxy militia armies in Bosnia and Croatia, the Yugoslav regime was also aware that they were in a position to sell certain highly desirable commodities further afield. Salinger recalls a series of fake emergency landings near the smaller Montenegrin capital of Podgorica throughout the 1990s: The forced landing was a favorite pretext for stopping to drop off and load up with black market cigarettes away from watchful eyes, after which they’d fly on, “minor fault” miraculously fixed. They set about organizing a giant smuggling ring, using secret police and customs at Belgrade airport as the quartermasters and foremen, and cargo planes chartered by men like Damnjanovic to take the goods further afield. This was the boom time of the Eastern European cigarette-smuggling pipeline into the EU: The regime bought them cheap and in huge bulk from in-country outlets and suppliers (and, of course, many of the airmen bought their own to sell on the side either locally or in Russia, tax-free to Afghan vets), and transported them by aircraft from Belgrade out to the international twenty-four-hour money Laundromat that was Cyprus. (Damnjanovic and his partner “Misko” Djordjevic relocated to the island themselves in 1994.) They would then usually go on by boat to Greece or Italy, where the local syndicates would hand over cash and distribute them within the EU. Western European smokers in the mid-to-late 1990s would regularly buy cheap cartons in bars and on the street with warnings in Russian, Turkish, or Bulgarian, flown in by Il-76 from the Balkans, duty-free. Everybody won, except the people in a far-off foreign land being shot at by Serb militiamen.
To do all of this, of course, Damnjanovic needed the right planes, and men with his own special brand of the Right Stuff: fearless, highly skilled men just like Mickey and Sergei whose resourcefulness, professionalism, and lack of curiosity about their missions had been bred into them by tough years of military service. Men who could fly them anywhere, with anything, under any conditions—no questions asked. He began making contacts in Ekaterinburg—a highly secretive former KGB stronghold in Mickey’s home region of western Siberia, dotted with former military bases and arms depots.
The city had (indeed, still has) a well-deserved reputation as Russia’s “mafia city,” where anything could be done, or anything (or anyone) made to disappear for the right price. More important, it was home to the obscure Il-76 cargo outfit called SpAir (whose assets, in an interesting footnote, the IPIS/Amnesty report points out would later be transferred to Air Cess, the company started by Viktor Bout) and scores of job-hungry pilots like Starikov and Barsenov.
The flights grew more profitable and more frequent. But still, with the number and scale of its wars—present and planned—spiraling, the Milošević regime wanted more cash than it was making with cigarettes. For a while, though there’s no evidence linking the prodigious narcotics flow to Damnjanovic’s own chartered flights, the famed “Balkan pipe” worked well for many others, with heroin coming from the Caucasus, Albania, Turkey, and Afghanistan and going by land, sea, or air into Europe. Coke and Ecstasy went the other way to feed the Russian new rich and Serb high society. The differentials in cost at purchase and return at sale were enough to make them all good business for the regime, the smugglers, and for Mickey.
By 1994, Damnjanovic and business partner Djordjevic had moved back from Dubai, lingered in Belgrade, and promptly set up an office in Cyprus, where JAT flights carrying bankers and plainclothes cops would bring cases of hard currency to be laundered, night after night and day after day. Virgin cash would be deposited with shell companies in Panama, Israel, Greece, and Albania. Their goods and clean, hard cash would come back, via paper-only companies and shell operations, to Belgrade.
Then there were arms. According to a SIPRI report, it was while in Cyprus that Damnjanovic got the nod from the Serb authorities to start trafficking weapons in an effort to boost their coffers once again.
By 1996, they had turned arms smuggling into a huge business. Milošević’s regime was regularly supplying Qaddafi’s Libya and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, both under tough sanctions, with regular big-money shipments containing everything from antiaircraft systems to artillery and spare parts for Qaddafi’s own fleet of Yugoslav-made Galeb fighter planes, courtesy of the then-Yugoslavia’s state arms manufacturer, YugoImport SPDR.
According to Hugh Griffiths at SIPRI, Damnjanovic’s new outfit Mensus Trade promptly “organized dozens of sanctions-busting flights into and out of Yugoslavia and they became the people to contact when state arms companies or the government needed goods flown in or out, to or from Russia or the Middle East.” He was now a state-sanctioned trader of the kind that, in any other time and place, would have been highly risky; but instead of being arrested, his cozy relationship with the regime gave the Yugoslav government deniability and cover, and him as much business and secret police protection, at home and abroad, as he could wish for. It was a sure thing.
Then, in August 1996, Damnjanovic and Djordjevic called SpAir in Ekaterinburg with a job: fly some jet fighters, in parts, to Qaddafi’s Libya, a “rogue” state already under UN sanctions but desperate for an air force revamp. Phone calls were made between Damnjanovic in Cyprus and Djordjevic in Belgrade, who agreed to accompany this highly sensitive cargo to its ultimate destination to avoid slipups. Starikov, Barsenov, and their Candid had already been making these trips for months. They knew the route, knew their plane, maybe even knew the cargo. They just didn’t know this time would be different.
So it was that Starikov and his Il-76 crew dealt with Damnjanovic and Djordjevic and flew what they were paid to fly—unaware that they were pawns in a game being played by the highest levels of the Milošević regime itself. These gunrunning Il-76 flights to Libya would finance their cadre’s grip on power, their friendly militias and mafia clans, and the campaign of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo that would result in the deaths of many thousands, NATO strikes on Belgrade, and the fall of the regime itself.
But oblivious to any of this, and with a good cash bonus in sight, pilots Starikov and Barsenov flew their Ilyushin Il-76 into Surcin from the Urals. And just after midnight, having executed what the state media claimed was only a technical stopover but what other sources testified was a heavy weapons pickup, and with Djordjevic onboard to make sure the secret cargo was delivered at the other end, flight 3601 took off into a stormy black Belgrade sky bound for Malta and ultimately Libya.
Embargoed or not, it would be a chance for a nice, hot stopover, and hell, North Africa was better than what they were leaving behind in Ekaterinburg for a few days.
Besides, just at that moment Africa and the Middle East were heating up in other ways. There was good money to be made out there. Rumor was that one rather unlikely spot in the Arabian Gulf was becoming a particularly profitable base for ex-Soviet crews and their illicit payloads.