Russia's Man Of War: My Crime Beat Column On Viktor Bout, AKA, 'The Death Merchant'

I doubt that former President Biden read “Trump: The Art of the Deal.” If he had, I suspect that he would not have authorized the swap of Russian international arms dealer Viktor Bout for Brittany Griner, an American woman professional basketball player who was sentenced to a Russian prison for nine years for possession of vape cartridges that contained hashish oil.

Back in April 2012, then-DEA Administrator Michele M. Leonhart announced that Viktor Bout was sentenced to 25 years in prison for conspiring to sell millions of dollars’ worth of weapons, including hundreds of surface-to-air missiles and over 20,000 AK-47s to the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (the “FARC”), a designated foreign terrorist organization based in Colombia. Bout had been arrested in Thailand after a DEA-led sting operation caught him negotiating a deal with a DEA asset posing as a FARC representative. He had been convicted on November 2, 2011 of all four counts for which he was charged.

According to Ms. Leonhart, Bout understood that the weapons would be used to kill Americans in Colombia.

“The crimes Viktor Bout committed represent the worst-case scenario for modern law enforcement--the merger of criminal international narcotics cartels with their terrorism enablers,” Ms. Leonhart said. “But his sentencing today also reflects the best of modern international law enforcement-- sophisticated, determined, and coordinated. Thanks to the extraordinary efforts of criminal investigators and prosecutors in the United States, Thailand, Romania, Curacao and elsewhere, the ‘Merchant of Death’ has finally been held to account in a court of law for his years of profiteering from death and misery around the world.” 

Cathy Scott-Clark, a British journalist and author, offers an in-depth look at the Russian arms dealer in “Russia’s Man of War: The Extraordinary Viktor Bout.” Traveling to Russia, she secured a series of interviews with Bout, his wife and daughter and some of his associates.

“Bout insisted that during the early days, when he flew weapons to dictators and murderous rebel armies all over Africa, he was simply a businessman helping post-colonial proto-communist liberation movements defend themselves in government-to-government deals,” Ms. Scott-Clark writes in the book. “The West was often arming the other side of right-wing regimes and authoritarian rulers. Amid the decay that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union and the atomization of its client states rose warlords and new political fronts. Bout, who flew carriers into these new conflicts, claimed he was not responsible for what warlords and presidents did with the weapons, and he denied profiting from blood diamonds or arming child soldiers. He was simply a logistician, not the buyer, the seller, or the wielder of arms. His specialty was identifying “sweet spot” opportunities to make money with his air fleet, and he had fully intended to continue until someone stopped him.

“The U.S. government saw things differently. The CIA, FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and Departments of the Treasury and Justice blamed Bout for hundreds of thousands of deaths—for arming rampaging militias, who raped and tortured—even though the United States was by far the world’s most prolific arms supplier. By 2023, Washington would be exporting $238 billion in arms a year, including almost unimaginable sums to Israel. In almost all locations where Bout had ventured, the United States had been arming the other side, often using proxies and cut-outs to transship weapons invisibly. Sometimes, they would be competing to assist the same side, and to claim the same assets in payment, mining concessions, or precious stones.”

Ms. Scott-Clark notes that by the time Bout was 30, he was a multimillionaire and was known throughout the world as the “merchant of death.”

“He was a KGB officer, agent, or asset, doing the Kremlin’s bidding and endangering the West, said the White House. He was a terrorist facilitator and fire-lighting numerous conflicts raging across sub-Saharan Africa and beyond, said U.N. weapons inspectors. He was an amoral master criminal and the world’s most prolific arms trafficker, according to the U.S. State Department, Interpol, the CIA, and MI6. At first, he enjoyed the notoriety, but later it cost him his fortune and his liberty. The more Bout protested his innocence, the more the West denounced him. After 9/11, the U.S. National Security Council described him as the second-most dangerous man in the world after Osama bin Laden. In 2005, Nicholas Cage portrayed Bout in the Hollywood blockbuster Lord of War.”

Ms. Scott-Clark strikes me as biased against the U.S., but to her credit, she offers a counterbalance to her interviews with Bout with extensive interviews with DEA special agents and other U.S. officials who took Bout down. 

Russia’s Man of War: The Extraordinary Viktor Bout

Cathy Scott-Clark 

Hurst, $34.99, 360pp