Russia’s Man of War. By Cathy Scott-Clark. Hurst; 424 pages; $34.99 and £25
ONE OF THE stranger diplomatic scenes took place on the tarmac of an airport in Abu Dhabi in December 2022. Brittney Griner, an American basketball player, arrested by Russia ten months earlier for possessing cannabis oil, shook hands with Viktor Bout, a notorious Russian arms dealer. Ms Griner dined on steak and Coke as she flew home. Mr Bout, returning from 15 years in American custody, was offered vodka. Was it one of history’s most reckless prisoner swaps?
Mr Bout, the subject of “Russia’s Man of War” by Cathy Scott-Clark, an investigative journalist, is best known by his nickname: the “merchant of death”. An American prosecutor described him in 2012 as “international arms-trafficking enemy number one”, who had spent decades “arming some of the most violent conflicts around the globe”. “Lord of War”, a film from 2005, based its cocky and amoral gun-runner protagonist, played by Nicolas Cage, on Mr Bout. “I supplied every army but the Salvation Army,” is how the film pithily sums up his business strategy.
Ms Scott-Clark’s book is timely. In February the Trump administration exchanged a Russian money-launderer, Alexander Vinnik, for Marc Fogel, an American teacher who, like Ms Griner, was arrested in Russia for possession of cannabis. Last year the Biden administration swapped several Russian convicted criminals in American jails to secure the release of Evan Gershkovich, a blameless journalist at the Wall Street Journal, and others.
The Bout-Griner trade was controversial even within the Biden administration. That was partly because of Mr Bout’s notoriety. Kevin McCarthy, then Republican leader in America’s House of Representatives, called his release “a gift to Vladimir Putin and a threat to American lives”. It created an incentive for despots everywhere to seize Americans as de facto hostages. It also violated the custom that swaps involve similar sorts of prisoners—spies for spies, or criminals for criminals. Mr Biden had originally asked Russia to hand over other detainees, including Paul Whelan, a former marine, but folded under pressure from civil-rights and gay-rights activists. (Ms Griner is black and gay.)
“Russia’s Man of War” is richly reported and detailed. There have been several previous biographies of Mr Bout. This one benefits from rare extensive interviews with him—though an arms trafficker is perhaps not the most reliable narrator. Ms Scott-Clark describes sneaking into Russia on a tourist visa, meeting Mr Bout in an art gallery in downtown Moscow and facing his “hound-dog gaze” for the first time. When interrogated by a Russian intelligence officer at the airport on another trip, she calls Mr Bout and hands the phone to the officer, who, panicked, promptly backs off. Ms Scott-Clark has also spoken to an impressively wide range of American and European officials, including politicians, prosecutors and spies.
Mr Bout is a Zelig-like figure who pops up at key moments in modern Russian history. Born in Tajikistan, on the fringes of the Soviet empire, he started his professional life as a Russian military interpreter, training at a language academy with close ties to the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency. He was due to be sent to Afghanistan, which the Soviet Union invaded in 1979. Instead, when a recruit for the Portuguese section of the academy was caught drunk, Mr Bout swapped with him.
It was a fortuitous switch. He cut his teeth in Mozambique, mixing with Soviet soldiers and pilots, an experience that later helped him navigate the market to rent cargo planes, pilots and maintenance crew in Angola (also a former Portuguese colony). Soon he was earning $70,000 per plane each month. “By 25 I was a millionaire,” he boasts. “By 30 I had an empire.”
Mr Bout sent weapons to Mobutu Sese Seko, the kleptocratic president of Zaire (now Congo), and to Afghan warlords during the civil war of the 1990s, using airports in Belgium and the United Arab Emirates as hubs. In 1995 one of Mr Bout’s aircraft vanished over Afghanistan. It had been nabbed by the Taliban, which held the plane and its crew hostage. A year later the crew wrested control of the aircraft, switched on its engines and took off, skimming over trucks on the runway. The audacious escape buoyed Mr Bout’s reputation, with Boris Yeltsin, then Russia’s president, calling to offer congratulations.
Is Mr Bout the supervillain portrayed by American prosecutors? He argues he is just a middleman: “Is the rental car company responsible if you put a gun in the car to go kill somebody?”
Ms Scott-Clark concludes that, though Mr Bout is certainly unlikeable, he is just one grubby arms dealer among many. She draws a comparison with Erik Prince, an American mercenary mogul and founder of Blackwater, who, she notes, also sold arms to resource-rich countries in Africa and was also accused of violating multiple UN arms embargoes. (Mr Bout and Mr Prince even allegedly used the same arms supplier.) Surprisingly Shira Scheindlin, the American judge who sentenced Mr Bout to 25 years in jail, seems to agree with Ms Scott-Clark, expressing regret at having to hand down such a long punishment, which was the minimum required by law: “I thought it was so unfair. He was not the head of Hamas. He was not a terrorist.”
Mr Bout was caught in a sting laid by America’s Drug Enforcement Administration in Thailand, in which he was tricked into promising to sell Stinger anti-aircraft missiles and other weapons to Colombian rebels for use against Americans. But, as Ms Scheindlin observed at his trial, he was unlikely to have pursued such a deal in the first place without the sting.
Let’s make a deal
People can and will debate whether Mr Bout posed a direct threat to American lives, but he has certainly put many others around the world at risk—above all, civilians caught up in the civil wars fought with his weapons. He probably still does. After the swap, he pursued a career in politics and appeared on various right-wing American podcasts. But in October it was reported that he was back to his old tricks, selling arms to the Houthis, a rebel group in Yemen that has been firing missiles at cargo ships in the Red Sea. “If I needed to be of any help to my country,” he tells Ms Scott-Clark, “I would answer those calls.”
Donald Trump denounced the Bout-Griner swap as “crazy and bad”. He later described Mr Bout as a “great arms dealer”, and dismissed Ms Griner as an unworthy beneficiary who had not stood during America’s national anthem. But that did not stop Mr Trump from conducting his own lopsided deal shortly after taking office in January. The lesson, perhaps, is that democracies tend to value their people more highly than autocrats value theirs, allowing the latter to drive harder bargains.
More prisoner swaps surely lie ahead. Mr Trump appears set on normalising ties with Mr Putin, not just over Ukraine but also a range of other issues. “Major Economic Development transactions…will take place between the United States and Russia,” he promised last month. There are still at least ten Americans locked up in Russia. Mr Putin is sure to haggle over them for all they are worth. ■
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