Victor Bout:and the Russian Mafia: America’s Business Associates

Some CIA officials have voiced concern about American involvement with illegal arms dealer Victor Bout,and Senator Russell Feingold has expressed deep frustration over continued ties to Bout. It took undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz eight months to answer Feingold’s May 18, 2004 questions about dealings with Bout. It is unclear whether the US really needs his services in Iraq. In the past the CIA has been a major mover of licit and illicit arms and has often worked with private contractors in doing this. Major political figures have been raked off large commissions from these deals. However, there is growing evidence of ties Bout and the Russian Mafia on the part of the US government people close to it in other parts of the world. It may relate to the scramble of western banks to get their share of the vast wealth that has been pillaged from the former Soviet Union. One important function of the intelligence community is assisting American business. The current black economy is so large that these banks believe they must compete for their share of the money laundering business by dealing with intelligence agencies and organized crime. .It was also important to national security that as much of the Russian loot as possible be in banks that supported the dollar rather than the euro. The Russian mob , known also for extortion and the trade, accommodated western bankers with prostitutes, and later produced embarrassing video tapes . The Russian mob has been good enough to deposit 80% of its drug profits in western banks and it has used these deposits to play on the greed of Western capitalists. In 1997-1998, Mobil Oil entered a deal with Atlas Oil, a Russian mob firm, for oil and advanced $45,000,000 before realizing it had been taken. It received not one barrel for its investment. Seymour Hersh covered the scam in a July 9, 2001 article, but Mobil induced other journalists to make the story go away. One internal memo advised doing nothing as Russian mobsters were far more ruthless than members of American organized crime.

Bout has worked with some American security consulting firms since 1994 and was instrumental in placing the Russian mafia in working relationships with some of them. In the Caucuses, , which has had a history of involvement in the drug traffic, has been working with Far West , Ltd. He added that Far West indirectly cooperates with the US government, and these ties to Far West, Ltd in recent years seem to have the apparent approval of the CIA.

Far West is a major Russian mafia operation that provides security consulting and transportation services. It also moves arms and drugs. From 1991 to 2003, Far West is said to have moved 300 tons of heroin into Western Europe. Vladimir Filin, head of Far West, told a Russian interviewer that his firm was co-founded by an important American corporation. He added that Far West indirectly cooperates with the US government.

We cooperate with the American side in the sphere of commercial transportation not on the basis of direct commercial contracts between our agency [Far West, Ltd.] and the U. S. government, but through the intermediary company co-founded by the agency and a private U.S. company, which in its turn also interacts with the U.S. government.

It is difficult to decipher what that means, but the name Halliburton comes to mind. In 2005, he and two other co-founders,Anton Surikov, and Alexei Likhvintsev, visited President Bush in the White House. Thereafter he and his partners relocated to Dubai and Europe to escape possible arrest. Surikov is considered a retired officer of the Russian GRU as well as a political scientist who opposes Boris Yeltsin and President Vladimir Putin. He admits a connection to CIA agent Fritz Ermarth, who served on the National Security Council twice and retired in 1998. At a 2003 conference in Geneva, Surikov was accused of being a CIA man. As late as 1999, Ermarth was arranging for guns and money to reach a Chechen group that also sold drugs in Europe. OneRuslan Saidov ( sometimes Yasenev) , also part of the Russian mafia, also works various sides of the street including Saudi Arabia, and was paid by the CIA in 2004 to eliminate an Arab leader in Chechnyua who was likely to move from Chehnya to Iraq. The Russian mafia often works through Alpha Bank, which is probably its subsidiary. That bank has business relationships with Halliburton. In 1995 a huge drug warehouse controlled by the bank was burglarized in Siberia and the burglary was investigated by Russian security police..

In the Middle East, Far West cooperates with Diligence ,LCC, a private military corporation founded by William Webster, former head of both the FBI and CIA. These firm also work with recently founded New Bridge Strategies, which is headed by Joseph Allbaugh. He was a campaign manager for Governor Bush as well as his chief-of-staff and he later became head of FEMA. Other partners are George H.W. Bush aids Ed Rogers and Lanny Griffith. The firm has close ties to Neil Bush.

The killing of two American Special Forces soldiers and the kidnaping of Russian diplomats in 2006 was involved with a Bout-related black operation that seems to have gone rogue. Team 121 was comprised of Russian, Israeli, and British mercenaries and was supposed to be used combating private militias in Iraq and turning them against one another. The team was created through the combined efforts of Bout, the Olive Group ( a subsidiary of Blackwater in the United Kingdom, and the Bosnian Defense Fund, of Douglas Feith and Richard Perle. That entity works largely through the Riggs Bank and dates back to the days of the first President Bush. It has had clear links to Al Qasser and Bout .Both of these dealers were involved in the drug trade and moving arms to the Muslim rebels. It has been estimated that at one point, the Kosovo Liberation Front controlled almost 70% of the heroin moving into Europe.


Wayne Madsen, a usually reliable reporter, has been strongly hinting that Bout and the Russian-Ukranian-Israeli weapons-smuggling Mafia has ties to Richard Cheney and other people in the White House. Madsen states flatly that Richard Armitage, undersecretary of State, had been involved in shady dealings in Azerbaijan. The former NSA employee also notes that US Special Forces in Afghanistan are heavily involved in the opium trade and are moving shipments through Turkey and the Balkans with the help of the Russian Mafia and Greek criminals. Madsen notes elsewhere that the Turkish Army is also a major drug trader, so it can be assumed that they participate in this trade. Victor Bout is reportedly a major player in this trade. Two of Bout’s big planes have been spotted frrequently in Kabul and also at the US military base in Frankfurt.

It is not clear that the US moved into the Afghan drug trade immediately after its war there. Prior to the war, the US allied with Afghanistan’s chief narcobaron, Ahmad Shah Massoud, who was an opponent of the Taliban. Another drug baron all was Haji Zaman, and the US persuaded the Pakistanis to release from prison his Pakistani partner Haji Ayub Afridi. These men were also tied to t he Russian mafia and some of their profits got to the Chechnyan rebels. It is possible that at that stage, the US entered into these unsavory alliances as a way of weakening the Russian state. However, by 2006, the US was so deeply involved in the Afghan poppy business that there were complaints about Special Forces hogging the trade and working with “Victor Bout. Some point out that Special Forces had provided the muscle to help the CIA move drugs elsewhere and simply assume this was a resumption of business as usual. A more benevolent interpretation from a conservative publication was that the US had to permit the resumption of the opium trade in order to support the dollar. While Madsen suggests that Cheney and others are running some sort of business on their own, it is much more likely that they have just piggy-backed onto a government operated drug trade that serves some national interests. It could just be a repeat and expansion of what happened under Reagan and the first Bush.

On October 22, 2006, the Iraqi government reported that $600 million had been siphoned off in arms deals. Bout and the Russian mafia were not mentioned. One cannot help wondering, if they were involved, and if any high American officials were participating in dividing the spoils.

The more one digs, the more apparent it is that intelligence agencies, sometimes arms of government, some politicians, and the international underworld all swin in the same muddy water and frequently do business with one another.

Victor Bout: The World’s Leading Dealer in Illegal Arms

Viktor Vasilevich Bout ( pronounced “butt” or” bott”) has become the world’s largest dealer in illegal arms , and he achieved this status in a short period of time. Today, the US and the UN officially try to prevent people and countries from dealing with him, yet US contractors in Iraq are still using his services.

Bout is a prominent member of the Russian mafia.. His record of fueling mayhem and murder in Africa and violating US embargoes has led the UN, the United States, and some other nations to join in blacklisting him and forbidding transactions with him Despite its own measures against him , the administration of George W. Bush continues to do business with him and with the Russian mafia.

KGB Major Bout was stati0oned at a Russian base in Angola in 1991.Vic tor was born in Tajikistan in 1967 of Russian parents who had tangential ties to important families, including the Andropovs. He was fluent in six languages. When the soviet empire collapsed in that year, he became an arms dealer, using old Soviet planes Bout started by purchasing three old Antonov planes and soon had 250 to 300 employees, mostly Russians, Ukranians, and Arminians. A Human Rights Watch official said that by 2000 Bout operated the “McDonalds of arms-trafficking.”

He soon became an important figure in the Russian-Ukranian mafia. These underworld people enjoyed the protection of the Russian military and Ministry of Defense. Bout entered business when it was characterized by Yeltsin-era, small, disorganized crime and he would make the transition to Putin- era organized crime ventures. His ties for what passed as the Russian mafia were very important, but he preferred to work as a lone wolf on specific operations .built around his air cargo business.

The Russian mafia had access to a $32 billion weapons stockpile in the Ukraine. It even included helicopters. Even Ukranian president Leonid Kuchma was caught dealing weapons in 1998-2000. Some went to Saddam Hussein. According to the Russian investigators, a worldview drug mega cartel has emerged in which the Russian mafia played a major role. They believe that Yeltsin crime family was an important player in the cartel, and they insist that the Bush family, centered in the current administration, is now a major player. Whether or not that is true, it is known that George H.W. Bush refused to cooperate in an international investigation of Russian mafia money laundering in Switzerland.

These elements participate in a international drug trade that could approach something between $500 million and $1.2 trillion a year. Representatives of its component elements met at the villa of Adnan Khashoggi at Beaulieu, near Nice, France in July 1999. He was once said to the “the richest man in the world.” There were also representatives of Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Germany, the Russian Mafia, and Venezuela. Also present were representativs of the Kosovo Liberation Army, a major drug dealing operation. This cartel deals with Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s deputy, FACA rebels in Columbia, the Kosovo Liberation Army, the CIA, and Russian Military Intelligence(GRU). . Dr. Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat, traces the predecessors of the meta group back to the CIA-sponsored bank BCCI, and before that to cooperative ventures centering in the agency and Myer Lansky. Scott writes that a second drug cartel operates the traffic from Burma into the enterprise zones of southern China, and he has little information on how the two networks might be connected.

With assistance of the Russian mafia, Bout has moved weapons out of the Ukraine and Bulgaria. He soon established a base in Ostend, Belgium and sold weapons to many parties in Africa, to the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, and then to the Taliban. Bout denied working for the Taliban and The Belgians indicted him for money laundering and conspiracy and put out an international arrest warrant. Bouts planes were used for personal transportation before 9/11 according to Andrew Gilligan of the Evening Standard.

Bout moved to Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates , where, he established close business ties to the former ambassador to the US, Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed bin Saqr al Nayhan, a member of the Dhabi ruling family. The UAE plays an important role in the Afghan drug trade as opium is shipped there, where it is heavily taxed, and some of that tax money has made itw way back to terrorists. The Village Voice speculated that the failed Dubai plan to purchase US ports would have made it much easier to get drugs into the U.S. He has found the UAE a convenient place to do business with Abdul Qayyum Shaikh, a major central Asian dealer in illegal arms.

Arms merchants like Bout make it possible by moving huge quantities of illegal weapons to illegal destinations. Bout has also established a major base in Gambia, where he has used his influence to mov e huge quantities of illegal blood diamonds. Later, the US ignored his actrivities in the illegal diamonds trade in return for flying arms to the Northen Alliance when it was fighting the Afghan Taliban. He was also involved in business arrangements with dictator Charles Taylor in Liberia. Again, they were moving diamonds. The diamond gangs are known for killing, , rape and murder. Taylor was a business partner of Pat Robertson, a major figure in the illegal diamond trade, and those diamonds were moved on the evangelist’s “Operation Blessing” aircraft. Bout, who owns about 50 Russian planes, has also supplied Philippine extremists Abu Sayyaf Group It estimated that he has supplied arms for every war and insurgency in Africa in the past decade and a half. Perhaps his greatest achievement was arming child soldiers in Sierra Leon. During the slaughter in Rwanda, he armed the Hutu and also flew in French peacekeepers. He operated many companies and many fronts. The first was Transavia Export Company, founded in 1991. He has been accused by a usually reliable correspondent of supplying Osama bin Laden, but he denies it.

Bout claims that all his ventures are legitimate cannot believed, but a majority might be. One of his businesses is flying frozen chickens to Africa. He has enough legitimacy to enable Vladimir Putin to befriend him. Twice Bout flew UN peace keepers to Somalia and East Timor and he was also active selling arms in Kosovo and neighboring areas. Two united Nations Commissions cited him for breaking embargoes, and the US Treasury in 2005 and 2006 froze his US assets. There is a strong nexus between people like Bout and terrorism.