Rabbit hole stuff:
Victor Bout, 37, was born in Soviet Tajikistan, became the leading international arms dealer, and has his own air fleet, flying out of Dubai. "He delivers not only small arms, but whole weapons systems, including attack helicopters. The '90s were big for him, dealing to many Congolese factions, UNITA. A lot of the weapons came from Bulgaria, via Togo..."
Bout became linked to Charles Taylor through Sanjivan Ruprah, a
Kenyan, in 2000. Ruprah was a biz partner of Bout's, and has two Liberian passports...Bout and Ruprah got some diamond mines in exchange for their services...Bout was happy to take diamonds in payment for his lethal loads to Liberia, Congo and Angola. He had even tried to set up a diamond export business in the Congo...
By the late 1990s US intelligence officials had discovered another Bout tie that worried them far more: possible weapons supplies to the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.
Lee Wolosky, the Clinton-era NSC director for transnational threats...noticed that Bout's name popped up in almost every conflict the NSC was tracking, from the African wars to the Philippines...
I'll summarize - he was supplying the Afghan government before the Taliban took over, and then switched sides. He did this from his base in the UAE - one of the governments that recognized the Taliban, along with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. It was a financial and gold clearinghouse. He also supplied parts to Ariana Airways and the Taliban airforce. Ariana was a vital link in the Taliban and Al Qaeda's financial network. He also flew charter flights to Taliban HQ in Kandahar.
The Clintonistas were upping the pressure on the UAE to boot Bout, but the Bushies dropped the ball. After 9/11, "Suddenly he was back on our radar screen in a very significant way. His importance suddenly loomed very large."
...At Belgium's urging, Interpol issued a red notice on Bout for illegal weapons trafficking on February 25, 2002...
warandpiece.com
Wednesday, March 09, 2005
Bout Continues to Fly, and the Pentagon's $293 Million Contract with Mercenaries (Which May Explain Bout)
From my sources on the ground in the region, it seems that Viktor Bout's Aerocom continues to fly for the U.S. military, using the call sign designator "MCC." While it seems somewhat incredible that nine months after the State Department circulated a letter to the rest of the U.S. government telling them not to deal with Bout, and specifically that company, that he continues to enjoy the largess of U.S. taxpayer dollars. But there is an emerging story that may explain Bout's longevity and the inability/unwillingness of the Department of the Defense to cut him loose. It is a bit convoluted, but here goes:
Last year, in a move noted only in passing by the U.S. press, the Pentagon awarded the largest security contract in Iraq to a new company, Aegis Defense Services Ltd, a British firm. The three-year contract is worth $293 MILLION, to coordinate security groups there and provide security to diplomats and others. Aegis is run by Tim Spicer, a familiar name in the world of African mercenaries and illegal gun runners. His long and rather checkered past seem to have been ignored by the Pentagon, including his blatant violation of international arms embargos. But the Pentagon says the Brits, to whom Spicer is very well known, raised no objections. A good review of Spicer's past can be found in the Nation, but here is a brief recap:
Spicer is a former British officer who, beginning in the mid-1990s, pioneered the modern incarnation of Private Military Companies (PMCs), which is a nice way of saying mercenaries. He helped found Sandline International, a PMC that claimed to only fight on the side of good guys. In 1997 he was paid $36 million to help surpress a rebellion in Papua New Guinea, and move that backfired and ended in a coup and the collapse of the government he was hired to protect.
His most notorious outing was in 1998, when he imported some 30 tons of weapons into Sierra Leone, obsentibly to help restore the ousted government there. The move directly violated a U.N. arms embargo Britain had pledged to uphold. As Peter Singer of the Brookings Institution wrote, however, Spicer's "client in the case was described by Robin Cook, the British foreign minister, as 'an Indian businessman, traveling on the passport of a dead Serb, awaiting extradition from Canada for alleged embezzlement from a bank in Thailand.' When Mr. Spicer told the press that the British government had encouraged his operation, it nearly brought down Prime Minister Tony Blair." (Singer's complete and excellent analysis of the cost of privatizing our military, which ran as an op-ed in the New York Times, can be found here).
But that is not all. One of Spicer's main business partners in the 1990s was Anthony Buckingham, and oil entrepreur with interests in Africa. Together they founded Executive Outcomes, a forerunner of Sandline (see above). One of Buckingham's interests in Africa was Branch Energy in Kenya. On the board of directors of Branch Energy was Sanjivan Ruprah, international arms dealer and frequent partner of Viktor Bout. As Ray O'Hanlon wrote in the the Sept. 29, 2004 issue of Irish Echo, "there is only one degree of separation between Ruprah and Tim Spicer, Buckingham being the connecting dot. This is not to suggest a direct link between Ruprah and Spicer, but suffice it to say, all these individuals have been swimming in the same opaque sea."
Could it be that our tax dollars paying a British mercenary almost $300 million also provide the umbrella and protection under which Bout continues to fly despite the protestations of the State Department and obstensible U.S. policy? One of Aerocom's main businesses now seems to be flying U.S. contractors around Iraq and the Middle East, an activity Aegis has a direct interest in and some say over.
douglasfarah.com |
