"THE GAME WAS UP FOR THE MERCHANT OF DEATH"

HOW TO CATCH A RUSSIAN ARMS DEALER

- LOUIS HARDIMAN

In March 2008, US authorities pulled off a remarkable sting against Russia’s most infamous arms dealer. We spoke to his biographer to find out how.

Viktor Bout's meeting with Ricardo and Carlos of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) was drawing to a close. “I want to finish off these gringo sons of bitches,” Ricardo blurted out across the Bangkok Sofitel conference room. “They're not going to kill us in our sleep anymore!” Bout, known to many as the ‘Merchant of Death’, responded: “We're together, and we have the same enemy... it is not business, it’s my fight. I've been fighting the United States for 10 to 15 years.” These words would lead the Russian arms dealer to spend the next 32 months in a Thai prison, followed by 12 years in US custody, convicted on narco-terrorism conspiracy charges.

Ricardo and Carlos were informants in a sting led by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). Here, Cathy Scott-Clark, an award-winning investigative journalist and the author of Bout’s biography Russia’s Man of War, speaks to History of War about the undercover operation. “After 9/11, the DEA was struggling because all the money was going to the ‘War on Terror’ and the CIA,” she says. “The people who ran the DEA dreamed up an idea of creating narco-terrorists as a new bad-guy concept.” The DEA could now lure its targets into conspiracies with FARC and other drug-funded terror organisations.