Victor Bout, arms dealer, caught in sting
Victor Bout, the “merchant of death”, was arrested in a joint sting operation in Thailand. The NYT has the story and ran a profile of him a few years ago.
A Russian deep into international arms trafficking, he’s also known for being the “Fed Ex” go-to guy for whatever you need as long as you can pay the price. He’s at the center of three subjects, “airplanes, diamond transport or weapons shipments.” (NYT profile).
The NCS, the CIA, the UN, the Brits, Belgium — have all been trying to get a hold of him for years.
Infamous for his ‘neutrality’ on international problems, he would work for both sides of the street, as Foreign Policy noted in its 2006 piece on him,
“In the 1990s, Bout was a friend and supplier to the legendary Ahmed Shah Massoud, leader of the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, while simultaneously selling weapons and aircraft to the Taliban, Massoud’s enemy. His fleet flew for the government of Angola, as well as for the UNITA rebels seeking to overthrow it.”
And at the same time, “he built his fortune by flying tons of legitimate cargo, too. These included countless trips for the United Nations into the same areas where he supplied the weapons that sparked the humanitarian crises in the first place.” (FP)
Foreign Policy notes, ““If you look at all of Bout’s various escapades, how easy it was for him to move weapons, get end-user certificates, and change aircraft registration,” says Michael Chandler, a retired British colonel who led a U.N. panel on the Taliban and al Qaeda, “you get an amazing picture of how corrupt many parts of the world are.””
And it goes on, “these armed, nonstate actors disregard borders, dispassionately working with the Taliban and the U.S. military and other unlikely bedfellows, breeding instability and violence for personal profit, not ideology. Traffickers like Bout invented new rules as they went along. Rather than being impediments to the flow of weapons, arms embargoes simply allowed them to jack up prices.”
Two thoughts come to mind…first, even if Victor Bout is taken out of the equation, someone else will pick up and carry on; second, what will Bout say, how much info and on whom (no one will come out looking good), in order to mitigate his legal liability?
