CHAPTER NINE
West Africa, 1995–1999
AFRICA HAD BEEN A REMOTE PLAYGROUND for the superpowers throughout the Cold War. But as the face-off ended, Russian, American, and Cuban troops and supply lines to regimes and factions in places like Angola melted away too. Suddenly, power was up for grabs, and the spoils rich. U.S. commentator Karl Maier wrote of Angola: “Ideology is being replaced by the bottom line, as security and selling expertise in weaponry have become a very profitable business. With its wealth in oil and diamonds, Angola is like a big swollen carcass and the vultures are swirling overhead … lured by the aroma of hard currency.”
He was right. Only the dark shapes circling overhead and scenting the rich pickings weren’t vultures.
For a West that had been brought up to believe that any minute now the Russians were coming, the sight of a tidal wave of contraband-carrying, bar-destroying, free-market Soviet air force veterans screaming into the erstwhile “Free World” through the 1990s on giant army transport planes was a shock, to say the least. Indeed, it’s difficult today to appreciate just how deeply spooked pilots and those few observers from Stockholm, New York, London, and Brussels who were watching must have been by the sudden arrival and proliferation of this new breed of crumpled Han Solos and loadmastering Chewbaccas in their deafening, battered, soot-pouring, low-flying Millennium Falcons.
Even to the former Air America pilots whose barnstorming solo cargo operations they were quickly displacing over Africa and to a lesser extent Asia, the methods of the “flying legionnaires”—avialegionery, as they became known in Russia—appeared both insane and inscrutable. These established bush pilots throughout Africa, Central America, and Asia had reputations of their own as “anywhere-anything-anytime” DC-10, DC-6, and Hercules operators on God’s own mission for the CIA. They were semimythical characters themselves, immortalized in Christopher Robbins’s Air America, with names like Earthquake McGoon and Showershoes Wilson.
Seasoned charter agent John MacDonald, now only in his early thirties, remembers a family friend his mother and father would simply call Non-Sched Fred. “They called him that,” laughs MacDonald, “because in all his years in aviation throughout the world, he’d never once set foot on a scheduled flight. He used to scare the pants off you for laughs, flying fully laden into tight canyons and trying to go under waterfalls. You’d look out of the cockpit window and all you’d see would be a wall of water, right up until the last second, when he’d just make it over.”
These men, and therefore the CIA, had pretty much held the logistics of the developing world in their palms for years. But suddenly they had fearless, highly skilled competitors who were cheaper to boot. And within a couple of years, the old guard was on the ropes.
Russian émigré Evgeny Zakharov is a former pilot himself who left his home in Russia with a business partner named Yuri Sidorov in the heady mid-1990s and opened Volga-Atlantic, a cargo outfit in South Africa with a technical base in Namibia, chartering planes all over the continent for the UN and private clients alike. The operation is said to have had official blessing from the Russian authorities and set the standard for professionally run operations amid the chaos of a warring continent. Indeed, Zakharov is one of the aviabiznesmeny with a reputation among crews and technicians alike for successfully resisting the pressures to cut corners and push for overload.
Zakharov and Sidorov had different plans and split the company into two, with Sidorov going on to found his own start-up operating in the skies over Africa, and the employees choosing to either stay or leave with him. For his part, Zakharov now runs a leading, and highly respected, Johannesburg-based Il-76 and Antonov cargo outfit called, with a typical nostalgic flourish, Soviet Air Charter. We talk on the phone and I can feel his excitement as he remembers the men who flew for him in those first years. “This first generation were all ex–air force crews,” he nods. “That meant they thought like a military crew, too—the order comes, they’ll carry it out. Whatever it takes. No problem.” Indeed, that military mind-set would soon prove crucial in landing big— and often highly dangerous—UN routes for companies like Zakharov’s.
Still, these were early days, and to their chagrin, even these on-the-level fliers found themselves tarred with the same brush as their wilder comrades by a West struggling to come to terms with a culture, and with practices, with which it had had no dealings for three generations. And while Mickey shrugs it off today, in plenty of towns the pitchforks were most definitely out for these high-cheekboned, freewheeling, apparently anything-goes strangers.
Xenophobia played a part—how could it not, when their most closed of societies opened its gates and they marauded forth? These post-Soviet flyboys, suddenly everywhere and dealing with everyone, whether they were in line with U.S. interests or not, were the Oriental Other—fathomless, fascinating, sinister, and semimythical men at one with their aircraft, descendants of the fearsomely skilled steppe horsemen mistaken for centaurs by the ancient Greeks. And the long-ingrained Soviet-style vagueness and aversion to transparency didn’t help. Anyone looking to pin them down to definite answers about cargo, arrival times, place of registration, anything at all, was going to be disappointed.
“This smoke-screening instinct runs deep in the less official side of Russian business,” says Mark Galeotti. “It was the Russian mafia who invented the so-called vampire phone at about the same time: a very fancy piece of kit, where every time you rang a number on this mobile, it would scan any nearby phones and clone one of their numbers. So that every time you phoned, you’d seem to be someone else’s mobile. And that was particularly malign, because it was almost impossible to tap it, for the authorities. But for me that really encapsulates the modus operandi. If in doubt, your default is just to be a bit confusing. And I have a great fondness, bless them, for these well-meaning Westerners who think you can work in these terms and understand what the hell is going on. It’s absolutely second nature.”
In some ways, Mickey freely admits, war-torn Africa “seemed like home” to his crew for a while. The huge rewards on offer were hard to refuse, not just from armies like Angola’s UNITA rebels but from the region’s guerrilla presidents: men like Liberia’s American-educated Charles Taylor, president from 1997 until 2003, when he was forced to resign and was indicted on a number of counts including his use of child soldiers during the conflict in neighboring Sierra Leone, campaigns of destruction and mutilation against civilians, and the use of slave labor to mine “blood” diamonds. Or the DRC’s megalomaniacal Mobutu Sese Seko and his successor, Laurent Kabila. (The Congo’s great hope, a former Marxist guerrilla who’d been friendly with Che Guevara, took power after the despotic Mobutu’s overthrow.) Everyone, it seemed, had cash—often the plunder from territorial raids against their neighbors—to throw around. Together with the fat contracts on offer from humanitarian organizations, it meant the perfect storm of cash and conflict.
This was a prime stomping ground for some of the bigger beasts, too. Viktor Bout bought up a small aviation outfit in the DRC called Okapi Air and renamed it Odessa, coincidentally, after Leonid Minin’s key home turf in Ukraine. In a move to give himself a measure of official cover, not to mention the protection of a “sponsor” on the continent, Bout then completed a masterstroke, forming a partnership with the wife of a lieutenant general in the Ugandan army who obligingly filed the flight plans for the ex-Soviet crews Bout sourced, just to make doubly sure they weren’t scrutinized.
The move was typical, not of the aviabiznesmeny, but of the local authorities, who realized that these air outfits could be the answer to their prayers. Corrupt, covetous, and keen on keeping favor with strategic allies, they quickly became key partners, making up the bulk of any “secret” cargo shipments.
For businessmen, aid organizations, air-transport outfits, and mercenaries alike, it was every man for himself and follow the money. And while the world looked on and saw aid, people, explosives, ammo, and guns flooding in, money and diamonds flooding out, and Russian-made planes at every airport, joining the dots and trying to keep tabs on exactly who was flying what to where was impossible. This was a land in which the words mercenary, aid transporter, trafficker, and businessman were dangerously interchangeable.
For the pilots and crews, the money to be made flying between these newly privatized Soviet outposts was good. But the cost was often higher—between ten and twelve of these crews were shot down by rebels every year in Angola alone. Unfamiliar terrain and conditions took out just as many of that first wave.
“I’ve got many, many stories of very experienced pilots who have a lot of experience, but no experience in Africa,” Evgeny Zakharov tells me in summer 2010. The former pilot from Volgograd saw and employed large numbers of these migratory airmen at the helm of his own series of companies operating Antonovs and Il-76s over Africa from his base in Johannesburg. “They come into Africa and crash because they don’t know their job. Now all the captains are fifty-three years old because they’re very experienced, they’re from the Afghan war. But … you can build an operation, and you can have your ten thousand hours—some pilots think this is good experience. But that’s nothing compared to ten thousand hours in Angola.”
Through the 1990s, they gravitated in the hundreds to the West African former Portuguese colony, then in the grip of a bloody civil war between UNITA (a militia propped up by the U.S. until the end of the Cold War) and the MPLA (their rivals, backed by the Soviets). And while both sides had stopped officially backing anybody, Russian logistics and Secret Service operatives remained, alongside Cuban troops, until at least 1994, withdrawing only as the UN moved in. But as the official support ended, the knockoff-priced Soviet arms and ammo—and equally cheap transport for any cargo or troops either side had—flooded in. As in Serbia, they were fat times when illicit cargoes, both military and civil, were flown in and out of the combat zones. Many crews came to grief. But more thrived, whether by flying for shady, gunrunning, embargo-smashing operators like Bout, straight-up outfits like Zakharov’s, or men like Mickey, who would double his official runs with his own cargo business within a business.
However they operated, there was one crucial ingredient to success down in Africa, the third c in that perfect storm of cash and conflict: chaos. Because while Europe and the Middle East were cluttered with air bases, radar positions, borders, and regulations—another Cold War hangover—in the vast, empty, and undeveloped spaces of Africa, no one could see anything. Planes, armies, cash, guns, gold could all seemingly teleport themselves from one location to another if you knew how. And men like Mickey quickly learned how to turn vanishing to a fine art.
The chimeric vagueness about location, ID, and cargo he cultivates is possible partly because of the lack of coordination between countries, agencies, and monitoring organizations. And for all the bold initiatives put forward by peace monitors and regulators, that opacity, that brokenness, is baked into the system.
Like financial regulation, the close monitoring of cargo is something that’s not really in the interests of a lot of countries to do well, especially if there’s a benefit to the regime—financial, military, personal—in what’s coming in and out on planes like Mickey’s. This principle finds its most expert practitioners in Africa, in some ways the last bastion of freedom for such crews.
“In places like Africa, and to an extent Central Asia, because they’re so porous and there tends to be quite a lot of corruption, it’s very, very easy to fly whatever you want through,” says one veteran South African pilot who hitched rides with veteran Soviet crews from Angola to Addis back in the 1990s. “And because there’s no continuous radar coverage for most of Africa, let alone parts of Asia, you’re invisible as soon as you leave the radius of whatever airport or airfield you set off from.” From that point on, the position of the plane is whatever the radio operator says it is.
Even Uganda’s Entebbe airport—the UN base for East Africa and the biggest, best, and busiest airport in the region—doesn’t have any radar at all some weeks. There is a joke among Russian and Ukrainian aviators in sub-Saharan Africa:
Q: “What is the radar like at [name here] airport currently?”
A: “There? Oh, he’s a little fellow, about sixty, and likes a drink in the afternoon.”
It really is that ramshackle. For anyone who wants to monitor what the boys are doing—or what anyone’s doing over large swaths of sub-Saharan Africa, the Caucasus, and South Asia—these flippant comments tell an inconvenient truth. Aviators in Africa could, and to some extend still can, get away with murder.
And they did. Throughout the 1990s, there was a sense of freedom bordering on gold fever in Angola despite its RPG fire and its live volcanoes spewing deadly lava and ash over airstrips and planes alike. The freedom came from a combination of remote landing strips—and Il-76s and An-12s were particularly suited to taking off and landing on unprepared or rough jungle airstrips—lack of official oversight and regulation, the almost complete absence of radar, and the interest of all parties concerned, from the crews to the regimes who hired them and the warlords and traffickers they did business with, in cloaking their activities in secrecy.
Veteran African freight pilot Terry Bonner is a U.S. native who’s been flying cargo over South, East, and West Africa for over a quarter of a century and has developed a grudging respect for the ex-Soviet crews. “Whatever you say about these guys,” he says, his gravelly East Coast voice catching with admiration, “these Soviets are the best pilots I’ve ever seen, period. They can get to places nobody else can land in, and they can do things nobody else can do with their planes.”
Some pilots routinely flew arms, supplies, men, and cash for both sides, and for charities and international agencies like the UN in between. Nor was there any shortage of money. The ready supply of blood diamonds and precious natural resources meant that both militias could afford to pay almost any price for the right crew with the right plane.
One veteran pilot testified to the UN that he’d been approached to make sanctions-busting flights transporting weapons to Angola’s UNITA rebel warlord leader Jonas Savimbi for a cool $100,000 a trip. The job was to fly the deadly cargo from Rwanda’s capital, Kigali, to a clandestine UNITA base code-named Alpha One. There were to be no place-names or navigation aids at Alpha One, he wouldn’t be on anybody’s radar, and he would have no ground control. Instead, he would have to rely on his GPS to find the base and locate the runway at night. This pilot refused to make the delivery, he told the UN conference, because “it’s not an easy place to get to at night, and they insist on doing it at night.”
Others were less circumspect and paid the price, becoming jungle captives—creepingly aware as the days in captivity passed with no hint of ransom from their employers or pressure from their governments that, as cheap as the weapons they often flew were, they themselves were the cheapest and most expendable resource of all. Some were lucky—comparatively speaking, at least. On May 12 and June 30, 1999, two Antonovs ostensibly under contract to fly aid into government-held towns in Angola were brought down by UNITA. The crews survived the crashes but were abducted from the wreckage by UNITA forces. One year later, five of the aviators—later identified by the Russian Embassy—were discovered half starved and raving in the Zambian jungle after having been loosed half naked into the bush by their captors.
But where many now feared to tread, Mickey looked at it coolly: It was a job, and all jobs have risks. You just have to read them right. And while many post-Soviet crews flew long, dangerous, and thankless missions there for clients like the UN wholly legitimately, for plenty more of his former Soviet military comrades used to flying impossible missions to poorly equipped landing areas, the kind of money they could make—not just from the cargoes they were commissioned to carry by their paymasters, but with their own cash businesses piggybacking those cargoes with side orders of arms, gems, booze, and whatever else they had a market for—was irresistible.
For the pilots, and business kingpins like Viktor Bout and his rival Leonid Minin, 1990s West Africa—Angola, Liberia, Sierra Leone—was hugely profitable. Indeed, so lax and corrupt were the legal and compliance regimes there that they had carte blanche.
One problem for anyone wanting to track down the gunrunners in a place like this is that, all too often, the paper trail leads nowhere. Cargo manifests need only appear to match what’s in the hold in terms of tonnage (and the amount of cash on the receipt). And the supposedly watertight end-user certificate (EUC), which accompanies all arms shipments to certify the eventual destination and use of the weapons as evidence that they’re not going to end up with any parties under arms embargoes or sanctions, is so easily forged I’ve made one myself on my laptop in a Ugandan hotel room, using a JPEG downloaded from the Internet, a ministry title I made up, the name of an official I got from the local paper, and the printer in the business center downstairs. It looks pretty good. It won’t pass a full background check, like somebody calling the phone number on the government letterhead, or even thinking about it too much. Still, says one seasoned flight manager, “Nobody ever calls to check—why should they?”
In practice, so long as it looks about as good as mine, the cargo will be released, even if it’s practically shouting, “Stop me, I’m dodgy.” In 2009, for example, 103 sets of refurbishment kits for 53-65KE submarine attack torpedoes were authorized for export by Montenegro to Macedonia for a civilian project in Central Asia. According to the report of the International Peace Investigation Service (IPIS), “the table of exports states that the kits were ultimately for civilian use in Kyrgyzstan—which, one may recall, is at some considerable distance from the nearest ocean.” (In the copious footnotes the monitor’s voice deadpans: “It is also difficult to think of a civilian use for a torpedo.”)
The problem is that a form is always just a form, and that means it’s both official-looking and easily copied. When officials finally caught up with Leonid Minin as the 2000s dawned, they would discover just how much of a mockery these ingenious ex-Soviets had made of the entire EUC system. And who can blame them for trying when many countries’ EUCs are in effect slightly glorified A4 letters; others’ are full, multiple-field, serial-numbered certificates. There’s no unified system, and so many flying around that hard-pressed, underpaid, politically appointed customs men in third world airports not only won’t know what’s genuine and what’s not, but lack the resources, time, and will to check and chase each one up, especially given the time differences often involved and the pressure to release cargo and turn crews and aircraft around. More forms to be filled. Stamp. Next.
And if many experienced charter agents seem blind to the capacity for extra cargo (“They are great aircraft,” says one, completely seriously. “One thing, though: If the pilots or technicians say they can fly, you always double-check. We’ll work it out and we say, ‘No, you can’t fly that,’ and they are like, ‘Yes, we can fly it, of course we can fly it.’ And we have to tell them, ‘No you can’t, you’re five tons overweight, you bloody fool!’ ”), everyone seemed blind to the fact that without global standardization, EUCs were, and remain to this day, almost worthless.
All across Africa, planes were seemingly disappearing in midair only to reappear at impossible locations on the other side of the world. Flights that took off carrying food and shoes for disaster-stricken areas would land in Africa two refueling stops later carrying land mines, attack helicopters, or ammunition for rebel outfits like UNITA or Congolese warlords. These aircrews could—literally—be in five or more places at the same time. Then none at all. They were shape-shifters, masters of disguise and illusion.
Their cocaine runs used African stopovers in out-of-the-way backwaters like Guinea-Bissau and Angola instead of flying directly into Europe from Colombia and Peru because no African government had the planes or radar to detect and catch them, and because bribes were cheaper. And as for the journey there, most of the Atlantic is similarly radar-free, leaving them a clear run from the Cocaine Coast to West African bolt-holes like Sierra Leone and Liberia.
“The shit they pull is unreal, and radar coverage is just the tip of the iceberg,” agrees Bonner, talking on the phone from his base at one of South Africa’s own frontier airports. Before I finally caught him, we’d played an e-mail cat-and-mouse played out via one of the Internet’s many unofficial message boards for pilots to share rumors—about clients, jobs, locations, aircraft movements, and other crews. I’d been lurking for weeks, and his posts—under a pen name more elaborate than the one he’s requested here—had become increasingly preoccupied with ex-Soviet aircrews. The last one, the week before I tracked him down, claimed that “90 percent of all accidents in Africa are Russian-built aircraft. The question is, why? Most are poorly maintained and should not be flying at all.” He claimed to have regularly seen “crews taking kickbacks to overload their aircraft. This is a fact: most of the Russian crews [over here] don’t follow the rules of the air.”
Now, with edginess in his voice and the clear, hesitant manner of someone who’s not happy at all that he’s been talked into an interview, but too polite to hang up and run, he explains what this “deadly bullshit” is. “They know the radar can’t see them. We fly on a frequency called 1269, it’s the air frequency and it’s there for pilots to report their position. In the DRC, even over Brazzaville, they don’t even have a transponder [devices fitted in planes as standard since World War II, which emit signals to help identify the plane’s location both to air-traffic monitors on the ground and other aircrafts’ automatic collision-avoidance systems], and what do you know, the Russians give erroneous positions! They’ll radio different airports and tell each of them that they’re just a few minutes away, and will be landing there shortly! They lie on their radio about their position. Unless something is done, more people will die.”
The effect of lying about their position is that they get priority at their choice of airports. However, there are two side effects. One is the increased likelihood of midair collisions. But the other—and to Mickey this is a very nice side effect indeed—is that different airports will each note down the plane’s position. And each time it will be different. So tracking a flight from, say, Entebbe in Uganda to Khartoum in Sudan becomes a strange game of find-the-lady involving all airports and ground-control centers en route, and plenty that aren’t. Which of these positions, radioed to a control tower, contains the real “invisible” plane? And which are just ghost planes, positions reported and monitored, then lost?
So it is that our plane, taking off from, say, Southern Sudan, could appear in the night sky over Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Congo, Burundi, Somalia, and Sudan simultaneously. It will eventually land somewhere. But for most, it just fails to show up. So one plane becomes five, flying in different directions to different airports in the darkness, a kind of suspended Schrödinger’s cat experiment in which all answers and outcomes are possible until the act of intervention, or until they land the plane.
Even when contact with ground control is established, it’s laughably easy to fool. Mickey’s most basic trick is so simple and effective it’s almost unfair to call it a trick at all. “You’re over Africa somewhere, listening to the air traffic on your radio,” he says. “So you don’t have any permission. Just tell them you’re one of the other planes. They can’t see what you look like. Maybe you know a British Airways flight is coming ten minutes behind, and we want to come through some airspace, we just ‘borrow’ that flight’s permission. We radio and say, ‘Hello, I’m British Airways flight number this or this, can I come through?’ ‘Of course.’ Ten minutes later, when the real British Airways flight is coming, they say, ‘Hello, I am BA flight so-and-so, can I come through?’ Well, the control tower will know what happened. But you are already gone.”
Indeed, using other people’s call signs and flight numbers over Africa is, say insiders, “pretty standard—everybody’s at it.” And if your radar isn’t great—if you have any at all—it’s all down to trust.
“In any case, there’s a lot of naïveté in places like Africa and Central Asia,” says Brian Johnson-Thomas. “One of the reasons Kazakhstan was so popular as a plane-registration base for dodgy outfits—apart from the fact that they let anyone register—is that its call sign was always Unicorn November, meaning all Kazakh-registered flights began with the letters ‘UN.’ So all over Africa, the Caucasus, Asia, South America, a lot of ground staff who didn’t know any better just let them do whatever they wanted, thinking they were something to do with the United Nations. They just would see ‘flight UN-1234’ or whatever, assume it was the United Nations, and welcome them with open arms!”
As it turned out, they needn’t have worried. In addition to rebel militias and traffickers, there was no shortage of governments only too pleased to outsource some of their own dirty work.