Background to Bout's Release

The U.S. and the Russian Government have arranged and completed the prisoner exchange of their citizens, Griner and Bout). Both have returned to their homelands and families. This exchange has generated comments about an imbalance in the value of the two releasees- one a basketball player and the other a convicted arms merchant. There are speculations in the world’s media that the release of Victor Bout would (a) turn loose a dangerous weapons supplier who might continue to ply his trade again; (b) help Vladimir Putin to quell the levels of opprobrium vented against him by the Russian military through arranging Bout’s release; and (c) allowing Putin to claim that this unequal trade meant that Putin did better out of the exchange than Joe Biden. These are not simple speculations. There is some truth to all of them, but there is much more to the analysis which has escaped examination.

It is relatively easy to analyse the Griner case. She was a basketball player caught in possession of a banned substance, however tiny the amount, and tried in a court and sent to prison. These were Draconian steps by the Russian government but not atypical of the Russian legal system in which justice and fairness have always been surpassed by political expedience. She was made into a commodity to be traded with the U.S. for Russian political advantage. They were able to use her to free Bout from the last two years of his sentence. They refused anything but a one-for-one exchange, so other U.S. prisoners were not included.

The career of Victor Bout is very different than Griner’s., and a description of what he did, who facilitated his work, and who benefited from his work has largely escaped public awareness and debate. Most importantly, this question is not only about Bout himself but encompasses a far wider subject of the fortunes and misfortunes of the Russian military after the end of the Soviet Union and the need to sell the stockpiles of military equipment which were stocked in Russia at the end of the Warsaw Pact and the troops return to Russia.

The Russian Military After The Soviet Union

The end of the Soviet Union saw the return of the hundreds of thousands of Russian troops dispersed throughout the nations of the former Warsaw Pact. They returned to Russia to find inadequate housing, a huge build-up of spare equipment, especially aircraft. There was also an insufficient supply of cash to pay for proper food and housing for these soldiers. The giant military production machine was unable to function well under these new conditions.

Under the Soviet system factories were operated at the command of the state. For example, aircraft frames were produced from primary metals delivered from state-owned aluminium smelters, titanium producers and copper smelters. These primary metals were assembled into armaments in state-run factories under designs produced by state-run planning and design bureaus. With the fall of communism these state-run factories found themselves on their own. There was no central planning of production; there was no guaranteed supply of raw materials or subassemblies; there was no capital accumulated to buy electric power or to pay for transport or labour. There was no real price for goods or services. The defence industry was not immune to the problems which beset the rest of post-Soviet industry.

The sensitivity of the arms business, coupled with the need for high-cost engineering, research and development budgets meant that there was a need for a continued level of concentration of the industry under a single umbrella. The Russian arms trade recovered very slowly from the first dark days after the fall of communism. This was achieved by the centralisation and integration of supply by a single entity of a state patronage capital company Rosvooruzhenie (now called Rosoboronexport). This State Company for the Export and Import of Armaments and Military Equipment was established 25 Nov 1993 by Presidential Decree.?Rosvooruzhenie became the Russian state arms export company and built an alliance among factory directors in the arms industry under its control. Individual companies like Ilyushin, MiG, Sukhoi, Tupolev and Yak retained some autonomy in their design bureaus and suppliers, but their management ranks were filled with ex-military personnel attached to Rosvooruzhenie, as were the arms manufacturing and naval equipment suppliers.

Initially Rosvooruzheniye hoped to continue its ‘captive market’ in the former Warsaw Pact nations, but this was not to be. Many of the Eastern European states were more attracted to Western aircraft and arms. Those formerly captive markets avoided buying Russian weapons systems because Russian military technicians would come with them as part of the deal. There was a small appetite for this.

As a result, Russian arms exports hit bottom in the early 1990s, dropping from a plateau of $22 billion in 1987 to only $1.7 billion in 1994. Conversion of defence plants to civilian production did not offer a practicable solution. Throwing defence workers out of work in the name of efficiency appeared unacceptable to the Russian government as there was nowhere else for these workers to go. With its markets closing, production falling, and workers unpaid, at the end of 1993 President Boris Yeltsin created the state monopoly, Rosvooruzhenie, to take over the marketing, financing, sale, and delivery of Russian military equipment and thereby re-impose order on the Russian arms industry's chaos

Yeltsin’s act cut off the Russian military, the Defence Ministry, and Defence Minister Pavel Grachev from the arms trade by placing Rosvooruzhenie under the oversight of the president's Security Service and his own chief bodyguard Aleksandr Korzhakov (an important ex-KGB figure). The army had shown itself unwilling or unable to stop soldiers selling off their equipment to anyone with cash. Korzhakov, Yeltsin's confidant and the power behind the throne in the Kremlin, had ultimate authority over Russian arms exports and, more importantly, over the billions of dollars in revenue those exports would generate.

The sale of Russian military equipment became the best hope for generating money into the new economic system. The leaders of Rosvooruzhenie decided on a plan to turn their military hoard into cash. There were several key players in this business, including Ukrainian traders, like Vladimir Rabinovitch, who took up the challenge. They began to explore supplying this equipment to scores of small wars which were catching fire across Africa. To do this effectively, they needed transport, preferably air transport. These had to be Russian planes and Russian pilots in that they were picking up these goods for delivery from sensitive military bases.

Although the market for these items was in Africa, many of the overseas transport hubs for this business were set up in Sharjah. Later, the transport companies obtained Air Operating Certificates from African states and moved their planes there. Soon the African airways were full of Ilyushin 76, Antonov 12 and LET 410 planes. The wave of African civil wars in Angola, Mali, Liberia, Sierra Leone, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Chad, Central African Republic, Sudan and Ethiopia required the supply of relatively unsophisticated weapons – exactly what the Russians (and the Ukrainians) were able to supply in bulk from their overflowing stores. This is where Victor Bout entered the picture.

Victor Bout and African Aviation

It is important to note that Victor Bout did not start off his career as a major transporter of arms by just showing up with a plane and offering his services to the Russian military entrepreneurs. Victor was a graduate of the Russian’s elite language school; a school in which many of the KGB and GRU graduates spent their earliest training. Victor went to Africa as a translator. He worked initially in Angola under the guidance of Igor Sechin, now Putin’s Chief of Staff, and some others from the GRU. He also spent some time in Mozambique and Zambia, whose major external political figure was Grogoriyevich Vassili Solodovnikov the primary Russian authority on Africa and an ardent supporter of liberation movements across the African continent. Solodovnikov was particularly engaged in the strife in Angola, the liberation movements in Zimbabwe and South Africa. He was from an academic background and attempted to control the rivalries between the KGB, the GRU; and Mischa Wolf’s Stasi representatives in effecting a coherent Soviet policy towards Africa.

When Victor’s term of service ended, he went back to Moscow. With the support of his friends and colleagues in the GRU he was enlisted in the business of disposing of the great horde of weapons which returned to Russia after the end of the Warsaw Pact. He was offered a deal that would allow him to act as a transporter for this equipment to Africa on behalf of the Russian military and Rosvooruzhenie as the trader in these goods. Vadim Rabinovitch handled most of the sales from the Ukraine.

He centred his operation in Sharjah, a neighbouring emirate of Dubai straining under debt at the time, as a base for much of his fleet, even though the planes were registered in third countries — like the Ilyushin, flying under the flag of the Central African Republic; ostensibly as Air Cess and other names. The sales deals were made directly by Rosvooruzhenie with the competing customers in Africa and Bout’s companies would arrange the transport. Rabinovitch used his own company (as part of the Odessa Network) to ferry his armaments to Africa, under the control of Leonid Minin, whose arrest in Milan on drug charges allowed police to discover more than $35,000 in cash, a half-million dollars in diamonds, and more than 1,500 documents detailing a tangled web of business dealings in oil, diamonds, timber and gun shipments to Africa for Rabinovitch.

Bout began to prosper and added more planes. It is difficult to explain to the world of analysts and reporters how he did this. Are we supposed to believe that a young man, just back from translating in Africa, had the means to buy or charter one or more Ilyushin 76s for this business? Victor had returned to Moscow with funds enough to purchase lunch for the crew of one plane for a month, but certainly not the hundreds of thousands to charter an IL76 or the millions to buy one. He was given control of these planes to use by the Russian government in support of their efforts to sell the stockpile of arms. These were not Victor’s planes. He did not own them. They were chartered to the company which used them, and which had a valid Air Operators’ certificate which would permit them to fly. These were chartered under the terms of an ACMI (Aircraft, Crew, Maintenance and Insurance) charter. Bout merely had to guarantee 60 hours flying time per month. That is how he got the plane(s) to start. It was a good arrangement for both sides.

There was a lot of work to do as running an airline has many rules. The passage of airplanes across the world’s skies is highly regulated. Each aircraft has to be registered in a jurisdiction whose civil aviation inspections procedures are recognised and accepted. Each aircraft must follow a rigorous schedule of maintenance and each major part of the aircraft has a time life assigned to its, engines, airframes, etc. The International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) and the International Air Transport Association (IATA) are the major bodies which regulate which aircraft, pilots and crew are licensed to fly and which also monitors the Billing & Settlement Plan (BSP) and Cargo Accounts Settlement Systems which collect money for the international use of the airways. Each operator of an aircraft must have an Air Operator’s Certificate (AOC) which is registered in an ICAO recognised country. Each AOC has one or more aircraft listed on its AOC which requires the Air Authority of the AOC-issuing country to inspect the aircraft and be responsible for its condition, insurance, pilot suitability, crew licensing and scheduling.

Before an aircraft can take off with cargo or passengers there is a mountain of paperwork and preparation which must be completed. The air spaces of the world belong to the country below it. Before one can fly into an airspace the local aviation authorities must give permission and be paid for ‘overflight’ or ‘landing’ rights. If there is to be a landing, either for fuelling, technical reasons or discharging or loading cargo permission must be arranged in advance. There is a window of time assigned to each passage to or through the national airspace and all aircraft are controlled in that airspace by instructions from the national Air Traffic Control (ATC). Air traffic control is provided by ground-based controllers who direct aircraft on the ground and in the air. The primary purpose of ATC systems worldwide is to separate aircraft to prevent collisions, to organize and expedite the flow of traffic, and to provide information and support for pilots and navigators. Most ATC controllers are civilian operators. There is a separate military ATC system which can operate in tandem with the civil ATC but this is usually only in areas with frequent and continuous military aviation.

Most importantly there are strict rules which govern the passage of military aircraft, both in wartime and in the peaceful transit of neutral states. It is very difficult to get permission for the military overflight of non-combatant states. Normally all aircraft must file a flight plan before each flight. Flight plans are documents filed by pilots or a Flight Dispatcher with the local Civil Aviation Authority prior to departure. Flight plan format is specified in the ICAO Doc 4444. They generally include basic information such as departure and arrival points, estimated time en route, alternate airports in case of bad weather, type of flight (whether instrument flight rules or visual flight rules), the pilot's information, number of people on board and information about the aircraft itself. Military aircraft must file a different type of flight plan (the DD 175) which, in many cases, is a confidential document. It is very difficult for civil ATC operators to monitor military flights of foreign aircraft. Their military control their own military flight plans and separations domestically. The U.S. uses Military Assumes Responsibility for Separation of Aircraft (MARSA). Most military authorities have little interest in disclosing to neutral states the cargo and personnel aboard their military aircraft as they pass through international airspace.[i]

How Business Was Generated And Conducted

As Bout’s companies increased their capacity and flow, he felt it would better to operate closer to the market. He moved his planes and operation to South Africa (Lanseria) and some smaller bases in West/Central Africa. While in Sharjah Bout met with Richard Chichakli, a Syrian ex-soldier and ex-intelligence entrepreneur who later became a U.S. citizen. Chichakli had succeeded in turning Sharjah into a free-trade zone. He then worked with several of the companies in Sharjah to create businesses in Africa. In particular he became friendly with Victor Bout and an advisor and partner with Bout in his airlines, Air Cess, Air Pass and Centrafrican Air. Bout moved his operational base to Africa. Initially Bout’s airlines moved Russian arms and materiel from Russia (often via free-trade Sharjah). This business created the opportunity to engage in more civil transport as the planes returned from their deliveries and had free space. Chichakli, and a number of freight forwarders in Africa, saw the opportunity of cargo space available and offered cargos for Bout. It became a proper business, with a commercial presence.

However, many of these cargos he transported were not only Russian arms, but they were also ammunition and military supplies from a variety of sources. The wars in Africa were supplied with weapons and ammunition from a range of sources. Denel in South Africa was a major supplier to Savimbi in Angola at Alpha and Charlie bases. They also supplied arms and ammunition in large quantities to Rwanda and Uganda in their war against the Democratic Republic of the Congo. While Bout delivered Russian weapons to the MPLA of Angola he also delivered arms to his enemy, Savimbi. The French government sent official arms and ammunition to the Ivory Coast to support the French troops maintaining their U.N.-sanctioned division of the country into two zones. These arrived on French military Transall planes. At the same time the French also used Bout’s planes to deliver arms and ammunition to the rebels fighting the legitimate Gbagbo government of the Ivory Coast.?The Libyans used private contractors like Bout to supply weapons of war to Charles Taylor in Liberia and to Foday Sankoh in Sierra Leone along with the French. The French and the Libyans bolstered the totals of Russian-sourced weapons with stockpiles at Bamako in Mali, Franceville in Gabon, Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso and N’Djamena in Chad.

It has become a trope of the current analysis of Bout’s behaviour that he sold weapons to both sides of the conflict. That belies the fact that this was the very nature of arms traffic in Africa; a market conducted by Russia, France, Serbia, the Czechs, the East Germans, the Libyans and some corporations who supplied arms to their political friends and, at the same time, fostered sales to the rebel or opposition groups at the same time. Out of courtesy, one can leave out the deliveries of U.S. equipment and ammunition to Savimbi and others in Southern Africa; supporting the fight against the MPLA in Angola and SWAPO in Namibia by co-ordinating the U.S. efforts with sanctioned South Africa; including its activities in the Caprivi Strip with a U.S. run airline, WIGMO in the DRC.

The U.S. set up the CIA-proprietary air company Southern Air Transport (SAT). The Southern Air Transport was a CIA-owned and operated airline. Based in Miami, Florida, Southern Air Transport owned the world's largest commercial fleet of L-100 Hercules cargo planes. It provided humanitarian aid in the battle for Somalia. Between 1984 and 1986 the airline delivered 'humanitarian' aid to the CIA-backed Nicaraguan Contras under a government contract. But it was also part of a covert network that supplied arms to the Contras at a time when the US Congress had banned such aid. SAT's role would have remained secret but for an occupational hazard. In October 1986 a transport plane traced to SAT was downed over Nicaragua and the sole survivor, Eugene Hasenfus, told his captors that the mission was backed by the CIA. Mr Hasenfus's story eventually led to the unravelling of an even bigger scandal that became known as the Iran-Contra scandal.?Southern Air was a key player on the Middle East side of the affair. In 1986 SAT planes, with their special 'oversize cargo capabilities', transferred 90 tons of TOW anti-tank missiles from Texas to Israel from where they were delivered to Iran as part of the Reagan administration's arms-for-hostages exchange. It seems a bit hypocritical and a bit na?ve to focus on Bout as a supplier of weapons to both (or more) sides when many governments were doing the same.

It is important to understand how requests for the delivery of arms were generated. Initially, Bout was informed by the Sharjah operators (Russian operatives and local ?Sharjah military-politicos operating as Flying Dolphins). They set up the initial shipments and provided the cargo. As these deliveries took place Bout became well-known as a reliable transporter. When his business was operating for about eight months he moved his operational headquarters to Africa, with a main office in South Africa using the Lanseria Airport as a hub.

When Bout moved to South Africa, he received offers of freight from more than just his Russian arms traders. There is a network of ‘irregular cargo’ freight forwarders in operation in Africa who sent out telexes (now emails) listing cargos which were available for pickup and delivery from the various supplying and buying entities. Bout found that this network allowed him to keep his planes busy, even when the Russians and Ukrainians didn’t have anything pending. The company Bout used as a freight representative was Norse Aviation, run by Deirdre Ward. Norse received dozens of telexes offering cargo for pickup or delivery and circulated these to Norse’s clients. Bout and others examined these and bid for the business. Ideology was not really a question for Bout; merely if the proposed movement allowed him to maximise the capacity of his fleet and avoid ballast passage to a new destination.

In addition, the recipients of the cargo often asked Bout and others about their capacity to source various items for them. Traditionally when a quote is given for the freight by air the freight is paid three days in advance of the flight.?The actual cargo sale is between buyer and seller and not the responsibility of the transporter. The money paid for the cargo does not go to the air operator. The cargo interests may ask the transporter to pick up the payment for the goods for them (in Africa this was often in uncut diamonds or gold bars). Generally, in these commodities for payment, the system allows a local trader (mostly Lebanese) to buy the diamonds or gold and give the transporter dollars to take back to the cargo interests. For many years these traders used the gold and diamonds to help fund various Islamic causes. This was not often the case with the French, South Africa and the Libyans. They paid by bank transfer to the cargo interests.

While Bout stated in his testimony that he was only a transporter not a trader, that would have been true in his early days, but less accurate as his business matured. Bout didn’t have the money to buy arms for sale; still less to offer credit to rebels and the assorted terrorist riffraff to deliver unpaid guns and bullets to clients who have not yet paid him and then hope they let him fly away with their money. There were always cargo interests involved, governmental, or commercial who took the cargo risk and set up the payment arrangements. Bout certainly arranged some of the trades and profited from the trade as well as the freight, but he didn’t assume the entire risk of the transaction.

In fact, Bout became well-known for undertaking the riskier flights. He had several contracts with the U.S. Department of Défense to deliver weapons to Iraq and to Massoud’s ?Northern rebels fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan. He used to joke that he got the business to fly weapons to Kandahar and elsewhere in the country because his Russian pilots had been flying in Afghanistan for years doing the same business for the Russian Ministry of Defence. In 2007, the Los Angeles Times reported that the U.S. government and its contractors paid Bout-controlled firms roughly $60 million to fly supplies into Iraq in support of American forces, describing Bout as a "linchpin" for American supply lines in Iraq.[ii]

The Arrest and the DEA Sting

Victor Bout may be a clever, sophisticated and charming person by all accounts but he, and his backers, demonstrated a monumental ignorance of the events which preceded his arrest. He didn’t read the newspapers or watch the television accounts of the DEA sting of a famous “Prince of Marbella”, Monser Al-Kassar, a major, world-class arms dealer whom the Paris Match called “one of the most powerful businessmen in the world”.

Al-Kassar, a Syrian, sold arms primarily in the Middle East and Europe. He was tried for supplying arms to the hijackers of the Achille Lauro. In 1987, investigations into the Iran-Contra scandal found that al-Kassar had been paid 1.5?million British Pounds Sterling by someone in the U.S. government to sell arms to Nicaraguan Contras; delivered by SAT. According to an article in the New Yorker the money for this came from "a Swiss bank account controlled by Oliver North and his co-conspirators."[iii]

Al-Kassar then moved his focus to Europe. In 1992, al-Kassar made arms sales valued in the millions of USD to Croatia, Bosnia and Somalia ibn violation of United Nations arms embargoes to all three countries.

After 9/11 it became clear that there was a need to move against wild cards, like Al-Kassar and Bout for their operations int the arms trade. In 2006, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) decided to put together a sting to trap al-Kassar, code-named "Operation Legacy". They enlisted a Palestinian known to Al-Kassar who arranged a meeting. At this meeting the DEA used two Guatemalan collaborators, posing as FARC rebels from Colombia, who needed a range of weapons to use against American troops in Colombia. Things progressed with further meetings in which the Guatemalans had hidden cameras and recording devices which captured the terms of the agreement with Al-Kassar to supply the FARC with their list of weapons. The DEA invited Al-Kassar to Romania to pay him for the transaction. It was later moved to Madrid, At Madrid they arrested Al-Kassar and charged him with conspiring to kill Americans, supplying terrorists, obtaining anti-aircraft missiles and money laundering. Al-Kassar was extradited to the United States., Al-Kassar was convicted in federal court of five charges, among them money laundering and conspiring to sell arms to suppliers for FARC. He was sentenced to 39 years in prison.

It was a bold, clever and successful operation by the DEA; taking a major arms dealer out of the picture and jailing him. It was so successful they decided to try the same operation in pursuit of Victor Bout. Instead of using a Palestinian to entrap Bout they used two people from his work in Africa. The first to contact Bout was Andrew Smulian. Smulian was an unsuccessful businessman who worked occasionally for Bout. Smulian had moved from South Africa to East Africa where he thrived little better. He went to Bout and asked for his help. Bout had already retired from the business and had returned to Moscow. His brother, Sergei, had taken over the business and Victor thought it was a good time to return to Russia. Smulian contacted Victor and said he had a big deal in the works and needed Victor’s help. Smulian then said that Mike Snow would like to join the transaction to assist with the transport. Mike Snow was a regular feature of South African cargo shipping, mostly armaments. He flew a Canadair Swingtail CL-44 on regular flights to the DRC where he brought arms and equipment from Denel and Armscorp to Mobutu in Zaire (later DRC). He and Kiki were the regular delivery service for the mercenaries in the DRC and Savimbi. Bout knew him.

They arranged a meeting in Curacao where Smulian and Snow tried to get Bout’s agreed to meet with representatives of the FARC (from Colombia) to arrange the supply and delivery of weapons to Colombia. Bout said that he had no experience in flying in Latin America, but they convinced him that it was not difficult. He wouldn’t have to land but could parachute the equipment from his planes to safe enclaves controlled by the FARC. Bout went back to Moscow, where he had discussions about arranging the supplies from local suppliers. The DEA followed the Al-Kassar playbook and worked with Snow to bring Bout to Romania for a face-to-face talk with DEA agents posing as representatives of the FARC. This didn’t work out so, after a short interval, that meeting was moved to Bangkok. When Bout reached Bangkok, he was met by Smulian and Snow and taken to a hotel where he met the DEA officers pretending to be FARC representatives. They had produced a shopping list of weapons they required and had made that list available to Bout before the meeting. At the meeting Bout said that he could fulfil the request. At that point the DEA agents signalled to the Royal Thai Police and, on the 6th of March 2008 arrested Victor Bout.

There was an initial resistance by the Thai Police to agree to extradite Bout to the U.S. There were several preliminary hearings, and, on 11 August 2009, the Bangkok Criminal Court voted not to extradite Bout to the U.S. The U.S. appealed that judgement and on the 20th of August the verdict was overturned, and Bout was sent to the U.S. for trial. A jury at a federal court in New York found Bout guilty of the conspiracy charges and the judge sentenced Bout to the minimum term of twenty-five years for selling weapons to a U.S.-designated foreign terrorist group. The judge, Shira Scheindlin, ruled that the minimum sentence was appropriate because "there was no evidence that Bout would have committed the crimes for which he was convicted had it not been for the sting operation. Bout actually did not supply or deliver anything to the FARC nor commit any crime in the U.S. He was enticed by the sting to conspire to do so.

The DEA was on a roll. First it caught and jailed Monser Al-Kassar with a sting. Then the used a variant of the sting to trap and capture Victor Bout. Then, believe it or not, they used another version of the same sting to entrap and capture yet another Russian pilot in Africa delivering arms. Konstantin Yaroshenko was a relatively low-level Russian pilot flying for others in Africa. He was not a great success in his work when he met a friend called Paddy McKay who knew of a major arms project coming up in Liberia. This friend introduced Yaroshenko to a man who called himself Nabil Hage, in Kiev in March 2010. Hage said Yaroshenko could make millions of dollars if he agreed to help transport large shipments of cocaine that would be coming from South America into Liberia. Most of the drugs would be going to other destinations in Africa or Europe, but some would be going to the U.S., Hage said, according to court documents. Yaroshenko, intrigued, purportedly agreed to hear more.[iv]

Yaroshenko had fallen into the same DEA trap. The two confidential informants, McKay and Hage, were the touts for the DEA sting. This time it wasn’t supplying weapons to the FARC, it was flying in planes with cocaine from Colombia to create a Monrovia hub for a worldwide market for cocaine, run by convicted drug dealer, Chigbo Umeh, who had the political and police connections in Liberia to operate with impunity. They arranged to meet and Umeh told Yaroshenko, he needed help to physically move the drugs. When the two met in May 2010, they struck a bargain: Yaroshenko would arrange for the transport of more than four tons of cocaine from Venezuela to Liberia for $4.5 million. He’d make an additional $1.2 million to transport some of the drugs on to Ghana, where he was told Hage would arrange to send them on to suppliers in the U.S., according to prosecutors.[v]

It was a mistake for Yaroshenko to make that agreement as McKay and Hage and the DEA moved in to arrest Yaroshenko and Umeh, with the participation of the Liberian authorities. He was taken from Liberia and flown to the U.S. for trial on a single felony conspiracy charge relating to the proposed smuggling plot.

At his trial the defence attorneys argued that this was a case of entrapment. His attorneys argued that the U.S. government had violated a slew of international laws and that Yaroshenko had essentially been entrapped by the DEA. The lawyers said the DEA had recruited him for the illegal activity and then purposefully made mention of a portion of the drugs going to the U.S. just so the involvement of American law enforcement and courts would be justified. “Manufactured jurisdiction,” they called it. His lawyers emphasised that “This man had never set foot in the U.S”. He continued, “As in this case, the DEA agents travel across the globe to perform the function of the world’s police, but in reality, they act as a lawless gang”. [vi] The Russian Government attempted to intervene, but they were not successful.

But both Yaroshenko’s legal strategy and Russia’s loud public relations push failed to free him. He was convicted in April 2011 and sentenced to 20 years in prison. He appealed the case but lost that as well.

The Russians did not seek to exchange Yaroshenko at the time of the Bout-Griner exchange, but he offers an opportunity in a trade for Paul Whelan.

Is Bout A Danger to the U.S.

It is difficult to see why the Twitterati are concerned about Bout becoming a danger to the U.S., citing the possibility of his working with the Wagner Group. Bout’s krysha is led by Igor Sechin, one of Putin’s closest allies, his Chief of Staff and the head of Rosneft, the Russian oil company. He worked with Bout in Mozambique and Angola. Sechin assisted Bout in his early endeavours. Sechin is one of the “oligarchs in epaulets” who came to Moscow after working with Putin in St. Petersburg. He is the leader of an important faction of the ‘siloviki’ and often in conflict with Yevgeny Viktorovich Prigozhin, who leads his own faction as well as the Wagner Group. Bout is likely to become a member of the Duma, probably for the Liberal Democrats.

He is a talented man, but his skills are replicated by hundreds of younger men. The arms market is not what it was as the ability to supply engineers and armourers to service modern weapons is more important than the ability to deliver them. It was a foolish and deadly mistake for Bout not to pay attention to the news that the DEA ran the sting against Al-Kassar.

The DEA created a model of entrapment that worked; and probably continues to work. They did their job in removing bad guys from the market but, as in the Yaroshenko case, they get perilously close to breaking the rules on entrapment. There is far more to the Bout release than the general public believes as they deal in moral absolutes, ‘good guys vs. bad guys’. However, in all honesty, Al-Kassar, Bout and Yaroshenko are ‘bad guys’ and the world is bit safer with them not carrying on their business. This doesn’t mean that there isn’t a major trade in arms, merely that most of that trade is done now, mainly by governments, using tax dollars. There is no end to this business.

[i] See https://www.academia.edu/5096801/Uncivil_Aviation_in_Africa for a fuller description of the African air cargo business.

[ii] "Bad guys make even worse allies" . Los Angeles Times. 13 August 2007

[iii] The Trafficker – The Decades-Long Battle to Catch an International Arms Broker , Patrick Radden Keefe , The New Yorker , February 8, 2010

[iv] https://abcnews.go.com/International/twisted-tale-alleged-russian-smuggler-floated-potential-prisoner/story?id=60420220

[v] Ibid

[vi] Ibid