On 6 October 2024, the Wall Street Journal reported the sale of a large consignment of Russian AK74 assault rifles to the Houthi rebels in Yemen. Full auto AK74’s might seem like a pretty big deal on this side of the pond. In that part of the world, however, AKs are simply background clutter. If you want to make a splash in today’s news cycle, you’d best at least be peddling pilfered Novichok nerve agent or a few dozen man-portable surface-to-air missiles.
Kalashnikov Currency
CJ Chivers made an exceptionally insightful observation in his seminal book, The Gun, about the history of the AK rifle (a truly great read, by the way). He said that you can tell a lot about a place by the price of a full-auto Kalashnikov assault rifle. If full auto AKs are ludicrously expensive or unobtainable, then settle down, buy a house, and enroll the kids in Little League. If you can trade into a GI AK for a healthy chicken and a couple of dog-eared copies of Hustler Magazine, then flee while you still can. Particularly in the less-respectable corners of Africa and the Middle East, AK rifles are like cell phones—everybody has one.
What caught my attention in this article was not that the Houthis were getting a bunch of sparkly new Kalashnikovs. It was Viktor Bout, the guy who brokered the sale. In certain circles, that guy is a legend.
Big Screen Cred
In 2005, Andrew Niccol released a film starring Nic Cage, Jared Leto, and Ethan Hawke titled Lord of War. The film carries a 62% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It returned $72.6 million against a roughly $50 million investment. However, don’t believe any of that. Lord of War was a simply magnificent movie. Second only to Raising Arizona, it was my favorite Nicolas Cage film ever. Cage’s character, a Ukrainian arms dealer named Yuri Orlov, was loosely based on Viktor Bout.
The filmmakers claimed that five different contemporary gun runners inspired Orlov. However, Bout tops that list. Bout was the original Merchant of Death.
Origin Story of Viktor Bout
Despite our keeping Viktor Bout in an American federal prison for a decade, nobody is sure where he came from. The UN claims he was born in Dushanbe, Tajik SSR, Soviet Union, in January of 1967. He has an older brother named Sergei.
Following the implosion of the USSR in 1991, Bout obtained Russian citizenship. He has held at least four passports. Bout served in the Soviet military, but nobody knows in what capacity. He has a natural gift for languages. The man is fluent in English, French, Portuguese, Tajik, Farsi, Dari, Zulu, Xhosa, and Esperanto. He no doubt speaks Russian as well. Several of these languages he mastered while in prison.
Bout was alternately rumored to have been a Lieutenant Colonel in the Soviet Army, a Major in the GRU, a Soviet Air Force officer, and a KGB operative. Regardless, his facility with languages and natural audacity opened doors that would have otherwise remained closed. Viktor Bout is what happens when you are really smart, pathologically driven, and born without an operational conscience.
A Most Deplorable Wanderlust
Soviet military service took Bout to Angola in the 1980’s. That’s where he learned Zulu and Xhosa. While in Africa, he discovered that there was money to be made in transporting and selling weapons. Once the Iron Curtain fell, Bout left the military and bought himself some airplanes.
His first purchase was three Soviet-surplus Antonov An-12 cargo planes. The days immediately following the dissolution of the Soviet Union were the Wild West in that part of the world. The central government had essentially evaporated, and local military commanders found themselves in possession of truly vast amounts of military equipment. Much of that, they sold to anyone with cash. Bout scared up a little folding money and stepped into that vacuum to find a buyer’s market. With product to move, Bout struck out across Africa peddling his wares.
Details
Those first three Antonov An-12s were soon joined by four An-8s as well as an unknown number of massive Il-76 jet-powered cargo planes. At the apogee of his enterprise, he owned and operated some sixty aircraft and employed 300 people. Bout used these planes to move weapons and ammunition to anyone with money.
For a really smart guy who was not afraid of the law, the world was his oyster. As an example, Bout forged end-user certificates purportedly for Togo and used them to avail himself of vast numbers of Bulgarian automatic weapons. He then flew these guns down to Africa and armed anyone who could afford to take his calls. In many cases, Bout sold weapons to both sides of a conflict.
The Clients of Viktor Bout
Bout’s client list sounds like the guest register at a psychopath convention. He stepped into the power vacuum in Libya after the death of Gaddafi in 2011 and quite literally made a killing. Bout was spotted in Teheran chatting up the mullahs. He made regular sorties into Afghanistan, but he always claimed to be selling to the Northern Alliance rather than the Taliban. However, consider the source. I’d be willing to bet he lies a lot.
Bout sold guns to Bosnian government forces during the violent deconstruction of Yugoslavia. His airplanes were used to move weapons under a falsified Zairean end-user certificate into nearby Angola to equip the UNITA savages operating there. Bout helped arm Hezbollah in the lead-up to their 2006 war with Israel. He also moved quite a lot of merchandise to Charles Taylor’s mini-monster child soldiers in Liberia. Along the way, Bout did business with almost everybody, including the United States. He supposedly made $60 million off of Uncle Sam’s flying equipment into Iraq in support of Coalition operations there.
Occupational Hazards
It’s not possible to sell that many guns without getting your hands bloody. Laundering the proceeds of that enterprise took talent. Though he did, miraculously, avoid getting slaughtered by some agitated warlord someplace, Bout eventually ended up on the radar of the American Justice Department.
In addition to his natural proclivity for languages, Viktor Bout has a criminal’s mind. He moved constantly, shifted assets between companies, some more legitimate than others, and re-registered his airplanes as needed to deflect attention from what they were being used for. Along the way, he lived in such disparate places as Russia, Rwanda, South Africa, Syria, the UAE, Belgium, and Lebanon.
Believe it or not, the guy is married. He met his wife Alla Vladimirovna Bout in 1980 in Mozambique. Their daughter Yelizaveta was born 14 years later.
I’ve been married for 37 years myself. My wife is sweet, smart, and devoted. That woman would have justifiably dumped me like a dirty shirt had I dragged our family all over the world running guns and fleeing Interpol.
Bout’s Luck Runs Out
In 2008, the US government paid an informer to contact Bout claiming to be a representative of the Colombian communist rebel group FARC. FARC is a mob of Marxist-Leninist lunatics who have terrorized Colombia since 1964. This informant engaged Bout to deliver 100 9K38 Igla surface-to-air missiles along with a buttload of anti-armor weapons via parachute to pre-arranged locations in the Colombian jungle. When Bout flew to Thailand to close the deal, he was met by Thai law enforcement officers on the strength of an Interpol Red Notice initiated by the Americans.
Not Your Average Dummy
As I said, Viktor Bout is a smart guy. He deftly dragged his feet through the Thai legal system, delaying his final extradition to the US until 2010. On 2 November 2011, Bout was convicted of a wide variety of charges including conspiracy to kill Americans, wire fraud, money laundering, and illegally purchasing airplanes. He was sentenced to 25 years in federal prison.
The following year, Bout was interviewed for the New Yorker. He said, “They will try to lock me up for life. But I’ll get back to Russia. I don’t know when. But I’m still young. Your empire will collapse and I’ll get out of here.” He also claimed that, if the same standards were applied across the board, every American gun shop owner would be in prison.
Bout Didn’t See This Coming
And so things remained…for a decade. Despite being represented by the law firm of former US Attorney General John Ashcroft, Bout lost his various appeals. He had his legal fees paid by Pravfond, a sleeper organization funded by the Kremlin. Throughout it all, he took his mail at the federal penitentiary in Marion, Illinois.
And then WNBA star Britney Griner was apprehended at the Sheremetyevo International Airport in Moscow with less than a gram of hashish oil in a vape pen. That insanely stupid faux pas earned her a $16,301 fine and nine years in a Russian prison. The typical sentence for a Russian citizen caught with the same stuff is fifteen days.
Griner quite vocally hates America. She once said, “I honestly feel we should not play the national anthem during our season. I think we should take that much of a stand.”
Eventually, President Biden struck a bargain with Putin to trade the ungrateful basketball activist with the vape pen weed even-steven for Viktor Bout, the Merchant of Death. The original proposal was going to include US Marine Corps veteran Paul Whelan as well, but he got negotiated out of the deal. Whelan was serving sixteen years on a trumped-up charge of espionage. Whelan did eventually gain his freedom some 18 months later as part of another fairly one-sided exchange.
The Rest of the Story
Viktor Bout returned home to a hero’s welcome. He voiced support for the invasion of Ukraine and promptly entered politics, winning a seat in the Legislative Assembly of Ulyanovsk Oblast. Now he also appears to be hawking AK74 rifles to the Houthis in his spare time.
READ MORE: Dipprasad Pun: A Remarkably Dangerous Little Man
Viktor Bout is a weird guy. A vegetarian atheist who claims to share views with Jesus, Krishna, Buddha, and Zarathustra, Bout thrives in the darkest corners of the Information Age. Driven, connected, amoral, and brilliant, Viktor Bout seems an interesting swap for a dope-smoking, America-hating, LGBT-activist basketball player. Personally, I think Joe Biden might have gotten played.
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