The Bout Enigma - Eyeopener Report

Source: Corbett Report and Boiling Frogs Post
James Corbett

Is the “Merchant of Death” a spy, a stooge, or a patsy?

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TRANSCRIPT AND SOURCES:

When alleged arms dealer and so-called “Merchant of Death” Viktor Bout was convicted in a Manhattan federal court room earlier this month on charges of conspiracy to kill US citizens, the verdict came as a surprise to few who had been watching the case unfold. Since his apprehension in Thailand in 2008 in a DEA sting and his subsequent extradition to the US in 2010, few have doubted that prosecutors would convict Bout, who has been deemed one of the world’s most-wanted men since a series of reports by the UN Security Council beginning in 2000 accused him of arming dictators, fueling wars and enabling war crimes everywhere from Angola to Somalia to Liberia to Afghanistan.

The American media, perhaps unsurprisingly, never fails to mention “Lord of War,” the 2005 Nicolas Cage film which is said to be a fictionalized version of Bout’s own story, in attempting to describe Bout’s case.

But exactly like a Hollywood action movie, Bout’s defenders allege that the case against him has been all style and no substance. Instead, they point to this man, Johan Peleman, often billed as a UN expert in illegal arms trading, who Bout’s defenders claim invented the charges against him.

From there, they say, the invented tale of the Bout boogeyman was picked up on and furthered by journalists like Douglas Farah and Stephen Braun in their book “Merchant of Death.”

There are certain aspects of the Bout case that all sides agree on. That he was born in Tajikistan in 1967. That he had a gift for languages. That he served in the Soviet-era military. And that after the fall of the Soviet Union he moved to Africa, starting his own airline flying cargo into and out of some of the most remote and difficult to access countries in the world.

From that point, the stories diverge wildly, with the US, the UN Security Council and others accusing Bout of becoming the kingpin of the largest arms smuggling operation in the world, and Bout’s defenders claiming it was all a setup.

But if Bout is the innocent victim of a vast conspiracy, a mere patsy set up to take the rap for these crimes as his defenders allege, the question is why. Earlier this month, I had the chance to put that question to Bilderberg researcher and bestselling author Daniel Estulin, who spent six months meeting with Bout while he was in custody in Thailand awaiting extradition to the US. According to Estulin, the key to understanding the Bout case is not Bout himself, who he alleges is a pawn in a much larger game, but the players who are positioning the pieces on the board.

There are indications, however, that Bout is neither the lone wolf criminal mastermind alleged by the prosecutors in his case nor the innocent patsy in a geopolitical power struggle as alleged by his defenders. The strange tale of Bout’s incredible success in the cargo running business point to another possibility altogether: that Bout was in fact a spy, working for Russian intelligence.

Purveyors of this theory point to Bout’s training at the Military Institute of Foreign Languages, a prime recruiting ground for the GRU, the Soviet military intelligence agency. It also explains the easy access to aircraft and military hardware that Bout was said to enjoy, the very thing which gave him his leg up in the first place and allowed him to establish his fleet.

It would also explain the persistent allegations of his ties to the KGB, the Soviet spy agency who, it has been alleged, he was working for in Angola, when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

A 2003 article in the New York Times painted a portrait of Bout as a protected asset in a much larger operation. It quoted a British arms investigator saying “Bout is encouraged by Western intelligence agencies when it’s politically expedient.” It quotes the former chief of Ukranian counterintelligence as saying that arms traffickers are either protected or killed: “There’s total state control,” he said.

Yet another trail of evidence points to a different possibility altogether: that Bout has in fact been working with, and been protected by, high-ranking officials in the US government.

Indeed, a 2004 LA Times report exposed how Bout’s companies had been used by US government contractors, including Halliburton subsidiary KBR, even after an Executive Order forbidding such contact. In the 1990s, Bout himself admits to having been hired by the French government to fly French troops in to Rwanda. His companies have also been employed by NATO forces in Afghanistan and the United Nations in Sudan.

Ultimately, the question of who Viktor Bout is, and what role he really played in this alleged arms smuggling, is an enigma. And like every enigma, there is a mystery at its heart, Bout himself, who did not even take to the stand in his own trial. All we have from Bout are extracts that are alleged to have come from his diary, published by a Russian daily last week. In them, Bout compares himself to the protagonist in Kafka’s “The Trial,” the poor put-upon K., a man who is put on trial for charges he never learns of brought by accusers he never sees.

Perhaps it is fitting that Bout has countered the media’s equation of him with Nicholas Cage’s fictional character by reference to a different fictional character. But in this labyrinth of illusion, the public, as usual, is asking whether there is any reality behind this fiction, and, if so, how we will ever discover it.