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

DEA Announces Arrest Of Viktor Bout Co-Conspriator

The DEA announced today the arrest of a co-conspirator of "Death Merchant" Viktor Bout (Bout is seen being taken into custody in the above DEA photo). You can read the announcement below:

DEA Administrator Michele Leonhart and Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, announced that RICHARD AMMAR CHICHAKLI, an associate of convicted international arms dealer, Viktor Bout, was arrested yesterday in Australia for, among other things, allegedly conspiring with Bout and others to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (“IEEPA”) by attempting to purchase two aircraft from companies located in the U.S., in violation of economic sanctions that prohibited such financial transactions. In addition, CHICHAKLI is also charged with money laundering conspiracy, wire fraud conspiracy, and six separate counts of wire fraud, in connection with the attempted aircraft purchases. CHICHAKLI, a citizen of Syria and the U.S., was arrested by Australian authorities at the request of the U.S.

“The international law enforcement community has long recognized Richard Chichakli as a key criminal facilitator in Viktor Bout’s global weapons trafficking regime and his arrest means the world is safer and more secure,” Leonhart said. “Bout merged drug cartels with terrorist enablers, and his close associate, Chichakli, worked to ensure they could ship weapons and conduct illicit business around the world. DEA continues to forge strong partnerships worldwide and applauds our Australian police partners.”

Bharara said: “As alleged, Richard Ammar Chichakli consorted with the world’s most notorious arms trafficker in the purchase of aircraft that would be used to transport weapons to some of the world’s bloodiest conflict zones, in violation of international sanctions. Thanks to the cooperative efforts of all of our law enforcement partners, both here and abroad, Chichakli has finally been apprehended and will now face justice.”

According to the Superseding Indictment previously filed in Manhattan federal court and other court documents:

Bout is presently serving a 25-year prison term as a result of his November 2011 conviction in this district for conspiring to sell millions of dollars of weapons to the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (the “FARC”), a designated foreign terrorist organization based in Colombia. Prior to his arrest on those charges in March 2008, in Thailand, and since the 1990s, Bout was an international weapons trafficker. Bout carried out his massive weaponstrafficking business by assembling a fleet of cargo airplanes capable of transporting weapons and military equipment to various parts of the world, including Africa, South America, and the Middle East.

The arms Bout has sold or brokered have fueled conflicts and supported regimes in Afghanistan, Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Liberia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Sudan. CHICHAKLI had been a close associate of Bout’s since at least the mid-1990s, assisting in the operations and financial management of his network of aircraft companies. As a result of Bout’s role in pouring arms into these international conflicts, his relationship with CHICHAKLI, and Bout and CHICHAKLI’s close relationship with former Liberian President Charles Taylor, both Bout and CHICHAKLI have been the subject of United Nations Security Council (“UNSC”) sanctions restricting their travel and their ability to conduct business around the world. In addition, more than 25 companies affiliated with Bout and CHICHAKLI have been listed by the UNSC as subject to similar restrictions concerning their assets and financial transactions.

In 2004, consistent with the sanctions previously adopted by the UNSC concerning Liberia, the President of the United States issued an executive order prohibiting any transactions or dealings within the U.S. by individuals affiliated with former President Taylor. Accordingly, the U.S. Department of Treasury, pursuant to its authority under IEEPA, prohibited Bout from conducting any business in the U.S. In 2005, that prohibition was extended to CHICHAKLI.

The United Nations and IEEPA sanctions encumbered CHICHAKLI’s and Bout’s efforts to conduct business within their existing corporate structures. Accordingly, CHICHAKLI and Bout took steps to form new companies, and to register these companies in the names of other individuals in order to create the false appearance that they had no affiliation with them. One such company – Samar Airlines – was created in 2004, right after the majority of United Nations and IEEPA sanctions became effective. CHICHAKLI and Bout were personally involved in the operational and business affairs and decisions of Samar Airlines, though they held out other individuals as being the officers of the company. In 2007, in violation of the IEEPA sanctions to which they were subject at the time, CHICHAKLI and Bout, acting through Samar Airlines, contracted to purchase two Boeing aircraft from companies located in the U.S.

In connection with the purchase of these aircraft and related services, CHICHAKLI and Bout electronically transferred more than $1.7 million through banks in New York and into bank accounts located in the U.S. They did so through a number of front companies, the assets of which were also owned and controlled by Bout, in order to evade the UNSC’s sanctions regime and IEEPA prohibitions. Upon the discovery that CHICHAKLI was connected to Samar Airlines, the U.S. Treasury Department blocked the funds that had been transferred into the bank accounts of the U.S. aviation companies. The Superseding Indictment charges CHICHAKLI with nine separate offenses:

- Count One: Conspiracy to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers

Act;

- Count Two: Money laundering conspiracy;

- Count Three: Wire fraud conspiracy; and

- Counts Four through Nine: Wire fraud.

If convicted, CHICHAKLI faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison on each of the nine counts. The case is assigned to U.S. District Judge William H. Pauley, III. 

Note: You can read more about Victor Bout in my Counterterrorism magazine piece on the DEA via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2012/05/narco-terrorists-drug-lords-and-death.html 

Former CIA Operative Edwin Wilson Dies At 84

 

CBSNews.com announced the death of former CIA officer Edwin P. Wilson.

Edwin P. Wilson, a former CIA operative who was branded a traitor and convicted of shipping arms to Libya but whose conviction was overturned after he served 22 years in prison, has died. He was 84.

Wilson died Sept. 10 in Seattle from complications from a heart valve replacement surgery, said Craig Emmick, a director at Columbia Funeral Home in Seattle.

Wilson who set up front companies abroad for the CIA and posed as a rich American businessman was convicted in 1983 for shipping 20 tons of C-4 plastic explosives to Libya. At trial, he said he did it to ingratiate himself with the Libyan government at the CIA's request.

A federal judge threw out that conviction in 2003, saying the government failed to correct information about Wilson's service to the CIA that it admitted internally was false.

Joseph C. Goulden, the veteran journalist and author, wrote a book about Wilson called The Death Merchant. 

You can read my Counterterrorism magazine interview with Joseph C. Goulden, in which he discusses Wilson, via the below links:

http://home.comcast.net/~pauldavisoncrime/pwpimages/JosephGouldenQandA.jpg

http://home.comcast.net/~pauldavisoncrime/pwpimages/JGouldenQandA2.jpg

My Q & A With Joseph C. Goulden, The Author of 'The Dictionary Of Espionage' And 'The Death Merchant'

My Q&A with Joseph C. Goulden, the veteran journalist and author of The Dictionary of Espionage and The Death Merchant, appears in the current issue of Counterterrorism magazine.

You can read the interview via the below magazine pages or the below text:

Note: You can click on the above to enlarge.

The IACSP Q&A With Joseph C. Goulden 

By Paul Davis

Joseph C. Goulden (pronounced “Golden”) has enjoyed varied careers as a prize-winning newsman, a best-selling author of non-fiction books, a media critic, and as a consultant and commentator on intelligence, national security and public affairs. 

Before he became a writer, Goulden worked as an underground minor and in military counterintelligence. A native Texan, Goulden worked as a reporter for the Dallas Morning News and later the Philadelphia Inquirer, where he was the newspaper’s chief of the Washington bureau. 

As a newsman, Goulden said he played softball with Fidel Castro and dodged bullets from Castroist guerillas in Guatemala. He has written 18 books, including two highly regarded books on intelligence – “Truth Is The First Casualty” on the Gulf of Tonkin incident; and “The Death Merchant” on rogue intelligence officer Edwin P.Wilson. 

Goulden’s updated “The Dictionary of Espionage: Spyspeak Into English” was recently published by Dover Publications. Peter Earnest, a retired CIA officer and now the executive director of the International Spy Museum, wrote the forward to the updated “Dictionary of Espionage.” 

Joseph C. Goulden was interviewed by Paul Davis, an online columnist (Threatcon) and a contributing editor to the Journal. 

IACSP: Your updated “The Dictionary of Espionage” was recently published. Why did you write the book originally and why update it? 

Goulden:Well, I’ve always read spy nonfiction and I’m a chronic note taker. I started a file of these terms way back, 30, 40 years ago. And suddenly I said to myself there might be a little book here. At the time there was no good dictionary of these terms. The terms were thrown around and made familiar by the Church Committee, and anybody who goes to a James Bond movie knows about them. So I thought I’d check out where these words came from and how they are used and give some anecdotes. It did quite well. 

IACSP: Who is your target audience? 

Goulden:First of all, people in the intelligence community who want some of these things available in a nonclassified form. The CIA, the FBI and other government agencies put out their internal glossaries, but usually those are classified at least Confidential. Secondly, the book is for anybody who is just interested in espionage. That’s a lot of people. 

IACSP: That includes me. 

Goulden: The way this new edition came about was the acquisition editor for Dover Books, which specializes in out of print books, was in Washington last summer and he went by the International Spy Museum and talked to Peter Earnest, who is the executive director, and by coincidence, a good friend of mine. He asked him what book he would like to see back in print. And the way Peter tells me, he turned around and pulled the “The Dictionary of Espionage” off the shelf and said they could sell this book by the hundreds. So this gave me a chance to do an update on it, correct some errors, flesh it out a bit and put in some spy trivia. This is a book where you can sit down and pick any page and find something, I hope, of interest. 

IACSP: Peter Earnest notes in his forward to the book that you’ve known more spies and more about clandestine operations than many of the real spies he writes about. As a journalist you’ve written a good bit about espionage and the intelligence world, am I right? 

Goulden: My main exposure came about in the 1960s. I had an Alicia Patterson fellowship in Guatemala and Mexico. There was a strong insurgency going on in Guatemala supported by the Cubans. I wrote quite a bit about that and I got to know quite a few of the CIA and special ops people on the ground. By the time I got to Washington for the Philadelphia Inquirer, I wrote excessively about the Pueblo, the U.S. Navy spy ship taken in by the North Koreans. And for the last 20 years, I’ve reviewed books on intelligence and espionage for the Washington Times. 

IACSP: Can you tell us a bit more about your background? 

Goulden: I had three ambitions as a kid. I wanted to be a reporter for a big city paper, I wanted to have the Washington bureau for a big paper and I wanted to work aboard. And by the time I was 34 years old, I’d done it all. I had written a couple of books on the side when I was with the Philadelphia Inquirer and I had a little money saved and I had some comp time coming from the Inquirer, so I thought I could make it. If I didn’t I could always go back into newspapering. My book “The Superlawyers” was published in 1972 and the second week out it was on the New York Times best-seller list and it stayed there for 23 weeks, getting up to number three. That gave me the cushion and the courage I needed to keep on doing it full time. 

IACSP: As a Navy veteran who served on an aircraft carrier in the Tonkin Gulf on “Yankee Station” during the Vietnam War, I thought your book on the Tonkin Gulf incident that started the war was interesting. Can you tell us a bit about that book? 

Goulden: The basic story is President Johnson wanted a pretext to go to war in Vietnam and he seized upon the pretext even when the Navy said hold off, let us figure out exactly what happened out there. We’re still trying to do an after action report. The skipper of the USS Maddux told me that he was still sending flash messages off to Washington, trying to get them to slow down, when he looked up and saw jets going overhead to Haiphong. 

IACSP: Is there any one espionage story in particular that you’ve covered over the years that most interest you, even today? 

Goulden: The Alger Hiss case, which I’ve made a long study of. My interest goes back to when Nixon ran for governor of California. He was beaten and ABC News put out a so-called documentary called “The Political Death of Richard Nixon.” Included in the people interviewed was Alger Hiss. Now by happenstance my publisher at the Philadelphia Inquirer, Walter Annenberg, was a director of ABC and owned the ABC outlet in Philadelphia. He raised hell at corporate management and refused to let the outlet air the documentary. There was a great hubbub about censorship and Walter called me up to his office and said OK, it is obvious by some of the mail we’ve been getting that these people don’t have any idea who Alger Hiss was and why this was an important case. I want you to go back and write me a long piece and if it runs two pages of type, that’s OK with me. The Philadelphia Inquirer library had copies of transcripts of both of his trials, which was one hell of a lot of paper. I holed up in an office and I read that stuff nonstop for two weeks and took notes. I wrote an exhaustive study of the Hiss case, which ended with his being found guilty by a federal court jury and sent to prison. We made a big splash out of that piece and I got a very nice note from none other than Richard Nixon. The Nation magazine wrote that Hiss was framed and I wrote several long rebuttal pieces. The Nation later got some Russian general to look at the KGB files during the period the Russians were opening up some of their files. The general reports back that the KGB had nothing about Alger Hiss in their files, therefore he is innocent. 

IACSP: That’s because Hiss was a spy for the GRU, Soviet military intelligence. 

Goulden: That’s the whole thing! By happenstance, this general was working on POW issues and he was in Washington testifying. I was there with another old red-baiter, a guy named Herb Romerstein, and we looked across from one another and as soon as the testimony ended he was coming out and we hit him - one on one side, one on the other. Here are two former PFCs in the U.S. Army cross-examining a three-star general in the Red Army, with a four-star U.S. general acting as an interpreter. We told him Hiss didn’t work for the KGB he worked for the GRU and the Comintern. Did you check their records? No, he didn’t, as he was asked to check the KGB. He went back to Moscow and said the GRU was not releasing information on Hiss. And he retracted what he said about Hiss. Now the New York Times had run the thing on the front page when they said Hiss was innocent. The retraction? What do you think? Way inside. 

IACSP: I believe there are intercepts that absolutely prove that Hiss was a Soviet spy, am I right? 

Goulden: Yes, the Venona intercepts. But the GRU has still not released anything on him. 

IACSP: But it is beyond doubt that Hiss was in fact a Soviet spy. 

Goulden: Case closed. 

IACSP: I’d like to ask about your book “The Death Merchant.” I believe it was the first book of yours I read. In light of the death of Kaddafi in Libya, please tell us about how you came to write the book about Edwin Wilson, the illegal arms dealer? 

Goulden: Edwin Wilson was working as a contract officer for a naval intelligence task force that did reporting on foreign ship movements and such. Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, then the director of naval intelligence, told me that he was down at some senator’s office and there was a weird guy there, a big, strapping fella, and he came over to Bobby and said, you know I work for you. Bobby said, yeah, tell me more. They went to lunch and this guy said, look I know the Navy needs some influence with senators and I can certainly handle that for you. Bobby didn’t say much, just said thanks, I’ll think about it. He went back to the office and checked him out and sure enough he had these Navy contracts. So Bobby burned him on the spot. He kicked him out. Wilson then gets contracts with Kaddafi and he wants Special Forces, DoD men and others to come to Libya to work for him. First thing, the Libyans took their passports. There are three ways to get out of the country; you leave legitimately on a passport, you swim out, or you walk across the desert. Hell, they were trapped. The Libyans start doing all sorts of nefarious things and they could not do a damn thing about it. The irony is, Wilson was making millions of dollars on legitimate military contracts, uniforms and boots and things like that, but he couldn’t resist the dirty part. Things started rolling up on him and people who worked for him went before Grand Juries, and they talked to the FBI, the CIA and all that. The U.S. Attorney’s Office in D.C. had a whole platoon of those guys. The U.S. Attorney allowed me to talk to these guys after they were debriefed. They had a lot they wanted to get off their chest and it was fascinating to listen to them. One person I tried to get to was Wilson, but he ignored me. So he finally gets out of jail and calls me and raises hell for my not getting his side of the story. I said I asked you for an interview and you had a chance to testify, but didn’t. What am I supposed to do, make up your side of it? He called me a dirty name and hung up. 

IACSP: Well, he may not have liked the book, but we did. 

Thanks for talking to us. 

Paul Davis is a contributing editor to the Journal. He can be reached at PaulDavisOnCrime@aol.com  

Meet The New Russian Secret Police, Same As The Old Russian Secret Police

Joseph G. Goulden, author of The Death Merchant, reviewed a new book on the Russian security service called The New Nobility: The Restoration of Russia's Security State and the Enduring Legacy of the KGB (Public Affairs). The book was written by Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan.

Goulden wrote the below:

No one familiar with the security system of the old USSR expected the KGB to dry up and blow away when communism collapsed in 1991. Further, many of us doubted whatever government replaced the Soviet state would make any changes of substance in its intelligence agencies.

Skepticism is proving well-founded. Indeed, the newly constituted security services are more shadowy and powerful than was the KGB at its prime. The Federal Security Service (Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti, or FSB) has flourished under former KGB officer Vladimir Putin - first as president, now prime minister - and the government is top-heavy with his onetime intelligence colleagues.

The book sounds interesting.

You can read the rest of the review in the The Washington Times via the below link:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/mar/22/heirs-to-the-kgb-and-czars-police/print/#