Roaming war zones as a capitalist convert in golf clothes, Bout did business with the third world's cruelest strongmen. His catalog of munitions—rifles, land mines, surface-to-air missiles, and tanks pilfered from poorly secured ex-Soviet storerooms—helped sustain the regimes of Charles Taylor in Liberia and Mobuto Sese Seko in Zaire (now Congo), and fueled the rebel campaigns of Bemba in Congo, Jonas Savimbi in Angola, Paul Kagame in Rwanda, and Sam "Mosquito" Bockarie in Sierra Leone. But what also alarmed U.S. officials at the time—and to this day—was the potential that Bout's planes could carry even more dangerous cargo, such as nuclear material. "We paid particular attention to the WMD issue because of Bout's connections inside the Soviet military," says Michael Scheuer, a former CIA analyst who headed Alec Station, the agency's in-house unit that tracked bin Laden in the late nineties. U.S. counterterror officials knew that bin Laden's Al Qaeda lieutenants had already tried and failed in the early nineties to buy nuclear materials in Sudan, and they were anxious about the Eastern bloc's loose grip on Soviet nukes and radioactive substances. Unlike his competitors—such as the Odessan Leonid Minin, whose weapons trafficking to Liberia in the late nineties ended in his brief incarceration in a Milan jail—Bout had the ideological neutrality and elaborate infrastructure to deliver the goods, making him a new type of transnational threat.
As he amassed his fortune, Bout developed the glowering countenance of a commissar and gained a reputation for being brash, even bullying. During his 2001 tour with Bemba, someone mentioned a biblical verse with an interpretation that seemed to bother the Russian. In front of a crowd of people, Bout—a gifted linguist who speaks fluent English, French, and Spanish—suddenly launched into a loud, extended discourse in French explaining how the verse should be taken and how foolish the interpreter was, stunning the audience into silence. He also lectured Liberia's Charles Taylor like a schoolboy and thought nothing of keeping a coiled killer like Mosquito Bockarie waiting at a Monrovia roadblock. Bout was just as relentless in taking on the freebooting Russian airmen who competed with him. In one celebrated case, his operation boldly spirited away a decrepit Ilyushin plane that had been consigned for use as a Soviet war monument. Former Russian aviation official Valery Spurnov recounted a tale of Bout offering one of his pilots $20,000 to fly a shuddering wreck out to a desert landing in the Emirates, where it was promptly turned into a highway-side billboard. "It was as if he was walking on the edge of the knife all the time," recalls his ex-partner Alexander Sidorenko, a decorated paratrooper who parted ways with Bout in the early nineties. Of course, Bout's hauteur was bolstered by his constant security detail of heavily armed Russians who had served with the special forces of the GRU.
His interview on The Daily Show and Aljazeera
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