Profiling the 21st Century's 'Merchant of Death'

DATE July 11, 2007 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: Journalists Douglas Farah and Stephen Braun, authors
of "Merchant of Death" on the preeminent contraband weapons dealer
Victor Bout
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

This is the story of the world's preeminent contraband weapons dealer, Victor
Bout. His global network of arms and planes has made a fortune catering to
insurgencies, civil wars and murderous strongmen around the world. His
clients have included the Taliban and Islamist militias. Bout is Russian and
built his network by taking advantage of the Soviet Union's collapse. In
2000, American intelligence officials designated Bout the highest-ranking
international target other than the leaders of al-Qaeda, yet his organization
was contracted to fly weapons and supplies to the US military and American
private contractors in Iraq.

My guests are journalists Douglas Farah and Stephen Braun, authors of a new
book about Bout called "Merchant of Death." Farah is the former west African
bureau chief of The Washington Post and wrote a previous book about al-Qaeda's
financial network. Braun is a Pulitzer Prize-winning national correspondent
for The LA Times.

Douglas Farah, Stephen Braun, welcome to FRESH AIR.

Let's start with a sense of the magnitude of Bout's weapons supply network,
the kinds of wars and civil wars, invasions, insurgencies, terrorist groups
that he's armed over the years.

Mr. DOUGLAS FARAH: Well, I think what makes Bout so remarkable is that he's
armed just about everyone all around the world from the FARQ in Colombia to
Charles Taylor in Liberia to Jonas Savimbi in Angola to the Taliban in
Afghanistan, and working for Muammar Qaddafi out of Libya, flying into the
Philippines for the Abu Sayyaf group. So it's a fairly large and expansive
network. At its peak it had over 50 aircraft, and that's more than most
national air forces have. So he was a character with considerable reach and
great airlift capacity.

GROSS: Did he have any politics or ideology behind who he arms, or has he
sometimes armed both sides in a conflict?

Mr. FARAH: He often armed all sides in the conflict. PRC, where you had
several sides fighting, he was on every side. In Angola, he armed both the
government and the UNITA rebels; in Afghanistan he armed the Taliban as well
as the Northern Alliance. Essentially he was the most amoral, nonpolitical
purveyor of weapons, I think, that the world has ever seen. There seems to be
no ideology at all to what he does. It's simply a money-making enterprise.
And at the same time he's flying for the United Nations, he's flying
humanitarian missions, he's flying for the US government, he's flying for the
British government, all more or less simultaneously in a rather extraordinary
display of complete open-mindedness as to who his clients might be.

GROSS: Which, I'm sure, has made him a very wealthy man.

Mr. FARAH: Indeed.

GROSS: Perhaps what will be most interesting to Americans right now is the
role that Victor Bout played in Iraq. What is that role?

Mr. STEPHEN BRAUN: Victor Bout's flights into Iraq started in mid-to-late
2003 and continued at least as late as the end of 2005. Hundreds of flights
came in flying. All sorts of military supplies, tents, personnel, oil,
equipment, you name it. And a number of airlines continued sort of shifting
names, but he had a, it was a fairly central role in enabling the post-war
military supplier in reconstruction.

GROSS: So, I mean, here he is, perhaps the world's biggest arms dealer. Who
was contracting him? Was it the Pentagon? Was it private military
contractors?

Mr. BRAUN: It was both. The Pentagon, through what they described as
second-tier and third-tier contractors, private contractors the same way. In
other words, there would be--for example, there was a big contract with Fed Ex
for a period, and he did a lot of--his planes did a lot of the flying for Fed
Ex, but again, this is something where the government, at least, had the
responsibility to at least know who was flying for them, and you got dozens of
these contracts.

Mr. FARAH: I think what's important to note is Halliburton and KBR were also
among his largest contractors at the early part of that period, when he was
flying.

Mr. BRAUN: That's correct.

GROSS: Was he surreptitious enough so that like when KBR or Halliburton hired
him, they could say, `Well, oh, we had no idea it was a Victor Bout company.
We just know it was like this company with another name. Who knew who he was
connected to it'?

Mr. BRAUN: Well, here's the deal. I mean, his organization is much like
certain international narcotics organizations. It relied on entities that
continually shifted their names, shifted their locations, but at the same
time, by the time the Iraq War started, there was a lot of open source
information out there in which people knew about some of these companies. For
example, there was a company named Air Bass that had already surfaced as a
fairly well-known Bout flagship. While this company was flying openly into
Baghdad during that period, it wouldn't have been very hard--if government
agencies that did the contracting for the Pentagon had done their homework,
they would have known that this was his operation. Either they didn't care or
they decided that in fact he was their man.

GROSS: Were Americans buying arms from him, too? Or just using his planes?

Mr. FARAH: As far as we can determine into Iraq, it was the aircraft, the
airfreight capacity that he offered. And one of his other tricks, going back
to the previous question, was that he knew that the air operators that were
running the flights into Baghdad were operating essentially on six-month
rotations, and so by the time a new guy came in, figured out who Bout's new
companies might be, tried to blackball them probably in the fifth or sixth
month and left, he would simply re-register his companies, come back to the
new flight controllers as a new company and start again. And the pressure to
get the goods in and out of Iraq was such, and is such, that it's very
difficult for those people, in fairness, to monitor all this all the time.
But the truth is, they made no effort to do so.

GROSS: Now, the Bush administration issued an order. Was this in 2004, 2005?

Mr. FARAH: July 2004 was the first executive order.

GROSS: Yeah. Describe what the order said.

Mr. FARAH: The order said that, because Bout had been deeply aligned and a
critical partner to Charles Taylor in Liberia, that no US citizen or
government entity could do business with Bout or any of his companies in any
way, shape or form under a Liberia executive order that went out at the time.
Then in May of 2005 the official office Treasury Department Office of Foreign
Asset Control put out another list naming Bout again and 30 of his companies
and several of his closest associates as being people who would have their
assets frozen in the United States and, again, saying that it is illegal to do
business with them or any of their subsidiary companies in any way, shape or
form. And as Steve said, we documented through early January 2006, which is a
full seven months after the second order came out, way over a year after the
first order came out, where they were still happily doing business illegally
with him.

GROSS: But after the Treasury Department froze, you know, wanted to freeze
his assets in April of 2005, you say that the freeze was actually delayed.
How come?

Mr. FARAH: The implementation of the freeze was delayed because the military
asked the Treasury Department to delay it because they were using Bout planes,
and they knew they were using Bout planes at that point to fly in critically
needed--they argued--weapons and other supplies, and so they asked the
Treasury Department to please exempt them from punishment for breaking the
Treasury Department ban so they could finish using him to bring in what they
thought were critical, what they described as critical supplies.

Mr. BRAUN: Kind of what you had here was this fascinating arrangement where
you had one branch of the government in effect saying, `Anybody who does
business with Victor Bout is subject to criminal sanctions,' while another
branch, the Defense Department, was enriching him to the tune of millions of
dollars in US taxpayer money.

GROSS: You know, you write in your book that in a world that President Bush
starkly divides between those who are either with us or against us in the war
on terror that Victor Bout has become both. You know, he's armed Islamic
terrorists and, at the same time, we've used him.

Mr. FARAH: Well, I think that's one of the most fascinating things about
this, is when we traced Bout, his first known weapons deliveries in illegal
circumstances were into Bosnia to radical Islamic militants fighting in the
first Bosnian war in 1992, and then he carries over into the Taliban in the
late 1990s, and, as I say, the FARQ in between there in Colombia, the
revolutionary armed forces of Colombia. And yet, he was happily used by, not
only the US government--you have to say the United Nations has used him
extensively; he would often fly relief supplies into war zones where he was
arming both sides of the conflict. So talk about taking maximum advantage of
the situation when you can arm both sides, create a disaster, and then make
millions of dollars flying relief into the disaster you helped to create, it's
a pretty spectacular way of viewing business opportunities.

GROSS: My guests are journalists Douglas Farah and Stephen Braun, author of
the new book "Merchant of Death." We'll talk more after a break. This is
FRESH AIR.

(Announcements)

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guests are journalists Douglas Farah and
Stephen Braun. They're the authors of the new book "Merchant of Death." And
the book is about the Victor Bout network, and Bout armed the Taliban,
al-Qaeda, African civil wars, insurgencies. He's the preeminent figure in the
multibillion-dollar illegal weapons trade, and his planes flew in supplies for
Americans in Iraq.

In January 2005, Paul Wolfowitz, who was then deputy secretary of defense and
had been an architect of the Iraq war, he acknowledged that there was an Iraqi
connection to Bout, but he put it in a kind of roundabout way. He said, `Both
the US Army and the coalition provisional authority did conduct business with
companies that subcontracted work to second-tier providers who leased aircraft
owned by companies associated with Mr. Bout.' What is he saying there?

Mr. FARAH: He's saying that they used Victor Bout's companies and they
didn't want to admit they did it. This is in response to a letter from
Senator Russell Feingold, who had asked questions in committee hearings about
the use of Bout aircraft. And while the State Department answered almost
immediately and had then cut off all contact with Bout flights, the Pentagon
dragged its answers out for many months, dragged the response time out for
many months before answering at all, and when they did, they came back with
this. And their explanation was, essentially, that they did not have to
monitor who the people below their first-tier contractors were. In other
words, they were not responsible for anything that might happen below the
level of directly contracting Halliburton or FedEx or KBR.

GROSS: So...

Mr. BRAUN: Right. In fact, it took them nine months to answer, and in the
intervening period, there was just utter silence from DOD.

GROSS: Do you have any estimate of the amount of money Victor Bout made
working for American contractors and the military in Iraq?

Mr. BRAUN: It's hard to know, but we did learn that at least some of the
flights that he contracted with private contractors went to the tune of around
$60,000 or so, some more, some less. We know of upwards of two to 300 flights
that for certain his various air firms flew in that period. But we've also
heard estimates from others who were involved in the air cargo industry and
worked in Iraq that his firms may have flown as much as 1,000 flights over
that period. If that's the case, you're looking at close to $60 million.

Mr. FARAH: I mean, one of the fascinating things was that one of his
companies, when it was flying into Iraq, was offered and given, with no
questions asked, essentially a credit card that allowed them free Air Force or
US military fuel at any stop in Iraq. So not only were they paying them, they
were giving them free aviation fuel to fly his flights for a period of time
there. So he got, really, the best of all worlds.

GROSS: So, is Victor Bout still doing work in Iraq for Americans?

Mr. FARAH: I doubt it at this point. I think it's become too politically
costly for him, unless he's radically restructured into companies that are
even more difficult to fly. One of his distinguishing characteristics was the
use of the same aircraft in different companies again and again, and now
especially the large cargo flights, the Ilyushin-76s and things had been well
enough identified that I think it would be difficult for him to continue to do
that. And if it happened now, one would hope that there would be some
criminal sanction imposed on those who were using him.

GROSS: What's the status of the United States' efforts to close him down?

Mr. FARAH: Well, they're essentially nonexistent, except for a small group
of people in the Treasury Department. There's no one left in the US
intelligence community, either in the military or the CIA, who are dedicated
full time to Victor Bout. This changed a little bit in the eastern Horn of
Africa, when the Somali conflict was blowing up late last year and into this
year, because they tracked the flights bringing weapons into the Islamic court
unions--the radical Islamist groups, they were fighting for control of
Somalia--directly back to Bout, and that sparked off a large-scale
investigation in the Horn of Africa. The joint task force in the Horn of
Africa that's monitoring that. But essentially aside from when he's on their
radar screen causing direct havoc in an area where the US has critical
interest, there's very little effort left.

GROSS: Did his people try to intimidate you when you were breaking this
story?

Mr. FARAH: They were aware over time of some of our sources and went after
them in rather unpleasant ways. There's one particular case where they made
life particularly difficult for one person who had been one of his inside
people in Liberia, and made him and his girlfriend pay--we don't know the
ultimate fate of what happened to them, but they're no longer available to us
to talk to.

Us directly? No. One of his associates, Richard Chichakli, who's an
American-Syrian citizen who worked with him extensively, has set up a blog
essentially to attack us and say what liars and fabricators we are. But I
think at this point, that's the extent of what we've experienced.

Mr. BRAUN: Right. Just as a point, as well, Chichakli is one of the
associates who was also named in the Treasury order, and soon after his assets
were frozen, he left the country and showed up in Moscow and for a while in
Syria, but he essentially is attacking us and...(unintelligible)...the
Treasury people and the Bush administration from abroad.

GROSS: Well, my favorite part of that story, though, is after the United
States froze Chichakli's assets, he flew to Moscow with a frequent flier
ticket.

Mr. FARAH: Yes, right. He couldn't get any money because his assets were
frozen and he had an account overseas where he flew to in Egypt and collected
the money there and then went onto Moscow and then went to Damascus for a
period of time and is now apparently back in Moscow, where he maintains fairly
cordial relations with Victor Bout.

GROSS: Let's go back to the beginning of this story. Victor Bout basically
filled a vacuum at the end of the Cold War. He's Russian. What was the
vacuum he filled when the Cold War ended?

Mr. BRAUN: Well, when the Cold War ended, the former Soviet Union had
extensive arms pipelines that ferried materiel through favorite rebel
movements and their favorite dictators in Africa and elsewhere in the Third
World. When the Soviet Union, communism, began to collapse, those pipelines
still existed. There were personnel who were involved in them. There was
money behind them. But there was no longer an ideology behind them, so what
replaced them was this new sort of capitalistic movement, if you will, and
people stepped into the fore and began to realize that a lot of those
movements were still clamoring for Eastern European arms, and as a result of
that, what Victor Bout pioneered was this melding of the enormous weapons
inventory that the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc had and this incredible
air force, airplanes that were just sitting idle at airports throughout Russia
just waiting to be used.

Mr. FARAH: In a sense, I think it was the perfect storm for him because
there were aircraft that couldn't fly because they didn't have any gasoline,
money for maintenance or fuel, and weapons supplies guarded by people who were
no longer receiving salaries and so with a little bit of money, you could get
the system working again, going to people, as Steve said, who were still
clamoring for the weapons. So he had easy access to aircraft, which was
vital, especially in Africa, where there's no other way to move large
quantities of goods and weapons, and he had access to the weapons. And many
of these weapons factories throughout the Soviet bloc have air strips directly
in the storage areas so you could land there. It's essentially door-to-door
service. You could land there, load up, and door-to-door deliver to Charles
Taylor or Jonas Savimbi or anyone else you wanted to.

And so it was very efficient, and he could sell, at least initially, at
below-market cost because all he had to do was pay the guards to let him load
up the AKs onto his aircraft and fly out. He didn't have to pay market value
for what those AKs were, and so it was this perfect combination of events.
And what people say, who worked with him, was that lots of people were looking
at this and he was the only one who saw the opportunities and sort of seized
them and ran, and we traced his first things in 1992--his first sales, and
that was right as--you know, right after the wall came down. And he was 25
years old at the time. He was a pretty smart guy.

GROSS: So was he able to get access to planes and ammunition just by bribing
people?

Mr. BRAUN: Well, he used whatever means necessary. A number of Russian
acquaintances suggested that he moved money around to get access to planes,
but in many cases, you have to understand, these planes were essentially
reduced to scrap. In one celebrated case, there was an airplane that was
about to be consigned and used as a monument in a small Soviet town suddenly
disappeared, and the reason that it disappeared was that it ended up in Victor
Bout's flotilla and was soon flying for him back and forth on all kinds of
circuits. So he did what he had to. And these planes came incredibly
cheaply, and he used whatever means necessary to get hold of them, and, you
know, by the mid-to-late 1990s, he had 60-odd Antonov Ilyushins flying these
circuits all throughout the Third World.

Mr. FARAH: Now, he also had backing from remnants of the Soviet military
intelligence establishment, which is where he came out of, and it's clear that
he had protection from those people while he moved this, and he probably, at
least in the early days, was sharing profits with a group of people who could
give orders to allow him into certain military bases and facilitate his access
to the aircraft that he might not otherwise have had.

GROSS: Douglas Farah and Stephen Braun will be back in the second half of the
show. Their new book about weapons dealer Victor Bout is called "Merchant of
Death." I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(Announcements)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

We're talking about the Russian arms dealer Victor Bout, who built a huge
illegal international network supplying civil wars, insurgencies, militias,
and murderous strongmen around the world. The US has been his client too.
Bout's network flew weapons and supplies to the US military and American
private contractors in Iraq. My guests are journalists Douglas Farah and
Stephen Braun, authors of a new book about Bout called "Merchant of Death."
Bout is Russian and built his network after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Now, how has Bout dealt with his rivals in the contraband weapons world?

Mr. BRAUN: Well, he--at various times he has cut deals and worked with
others. You have to remember, what he has that few others have is, while most
other arms dealers, basically they can source the arms, you know, cut the
deal, maybe provide the illegal documents that allow them to get from point A
to point B, what he can do is he has this, you know, essentially, it's a
full-service operation, where he not only can outsource the arms and the
documents, but he moves them. And, you know, if you're an arms dealer and,
you know, you ultimately often have to work with him to get those arms to the
place where you need them to go...

Mr. FARAH: Yeah.

Mr. BRAUN: So, you know, at times he'll work with them. At times he'll be
rivals. It's a business where alliances are constantly breaking apart and
solidifying and then breaking apart again.

Mr. FARAH: But there are very few instances where anyone talks about him
getting violent or going after his opposition in a physical sense. He does
co-opt them in, and it's clear in the early days in Africa, he was not the
biggest player, but he became the biggest player, like Steve said, because he
had the aircraft to do it. But he essentially just brought people into his
operation or ran them out of business by taking away their customers, but you
know, he doesn't have a lot of blood on his hands directly in the business
competition sense.

GROSS: So, one of the places where he established an important base was in
the United Arab Emirates, and one of his tricks in making money was, after
he'd drop off a load of guns, he'd load up with commodities to sell someplace
else.

Mr. BRAUN: Oh, he...

Mr. FARAH: That was--yeah, that was one of, I think, when he moved from
being sort of an arms trafficker and working for other people to making
significant money was when he realized that that was the potential that
existed. And so you see him flying into the Democratic Republic of Congo and
loading up on coltan, which is a mineral that's used in making cell phones and
computers and loading up with timber, loading up out of Angola and Liberia
with diamonds, and also flying food, frozen fish, frozen chicken. Sort of
anything that needed to be moved, he could move. And once he figured out that
no plane ever needed to fly empty in Africa, that's when his financial
fortunes took a great surge forward.

Mr. BRAUN: He's kind of like Milo Minderbinder, the character in "Catch-22,"
who, wherever--you know, he takes planes that were being used on bombing runs
and they come back and they're filled with eggs or Egyptian cotton. But
essentially what he masterminded was the circuits where his planes would fly,
for example, out of Belgium, where they had a base for a while, and then
they'd stop in Bulgaria and they would pick up an arms shipment and they'd fly
into Africa, and then they'd leave Africa with perhaps, as Doug as saying,
coltan or chickens or whatever. And then they might stop in UAE, fly out with
some other cargo--it could be arms, it could be whatever--land in Afghanistan
and fly out of there with, say, lumber or carpets. But wherever--you know, in
each circuit he was making money and that's the object of good air cargo men.

GROSS: When you look at, you know, a civil war, an insurgency, can you look
at the arms being used and tell if those arms came from Victor Bout's network?

Mr. FARAH: Well, you can't tell the direct numbers usually, because they're
incredibly difficult to trace and most the weapons are fairly old, but what
you can do in Liberia and Sierra Leone and in the Congo is look at the
upsurges in fighting and track those very closely with the deliveries that we
know Victor Bout was making. For example, in '98-'99 in Sierra Leone, the
Revolutionary United Front, whose signature atrocity was hacking off the arms
and legs of men, women and children and the mass rape of women as a weapon of
control, they take off when Victor Bout starts delivering weapons to them, and
you can look--chronologically, they match up very closely. They had--one of
their major operations was called Operation Pay Yourself, where they
essentially looted the capital. They had a series of horrific operations that
really decimated--the human cost of those, which I was witnessing when I was
covering Sierra Leone for The Washington Post, is really devastating, and that
you can track directly with his weapons deliveries.

GROSS: Do you feel some kind of like personal connection to him and a
personal interest in covering his network because you covered wars in which he
supplied a lot of the arms and he made some of that mayhem and catastrophe
possible?

Mr. FARAH: Well, I would say, yes, honestly. I covered wars in Central
America and elsewhere for 20 years, but there was nothing that carried the
emotional impact of the wars in Sierra Leone, in Liberia, where, I think, you
have the use of child soldiers, extensively, knowing that those weapons came
from him and the types of atrocities and the absolute ruthlessness of the
rebel groups, particularly in Sierra Leone. If you look at their main
sponsor, who was Charles Taylor in Liberia, the destructive nature of those
wars and spending time in the amputee camps with, you know, two-year-old
children who have their arms lopped off because some crazed teenager was given
a gun and told to go do this, is just--it's very emotionally quite difficult.
And it, yes, it did give me a sense that I really wanted to bring about some
sort of explanation for how this system works and why people like Victor Bout
not only survive but thrive as well.

Mr. BRAUN: Right, and it's not--you have to remember, it's not simply Victor
Bout operating alone in a world that's arrayed again him. There are,
obviously, governments--it is in their interest, you know, not to have him
around. But at the same time, it's also been in their interest at various
times to use him. So all of the governments, including ours, do, you know,
bear a responsibility here in allowing him to continue to flourish.

GROSS: Now, there have been times when he's flown humanitarian missions, you
know, when his network has, for example, he flew humanitarian aid to the
tsunami victims. He flew UN relief supplies for refugees during African
conflicts that he was actually arming. Like, why would he do that? Does he
want to have the image of a good guy? Does it help preserve his cover? Does
it help win over people who would otherwise be his enemies? Like, what's his
motivation?

Mr. BRAUN: Well, remember, all of those flights, he's making money.

GROSS: Oh, right.

Mr. BRAUN: He's not doing this...

GROSS: Excuse me.

Mr. BRAUN: He's not doing this to be a world-class altruist. But,
certainly, you know, he can point to those flights, you know, with a certain
amount of pride and say, `Well, you know, I was part of that, you know, I've
aided, you know, in these charity operations.' But he also uses those, and the
few times he has spoken in public, you know, he insists that number one, he's
a businessman. Number two, he, you know, has worked for legitimate
governments and has participated in these operations. Why, you know, then, do
the United States at various times, the UN at various times, why are these
organizations out to get him? And I mean it sort of plays well into his own
excuses and arguments.

GROSS: My guests are journalists Douglas Farah and Stephen Braun, authors of
the new book "Merchant of Death." We'll talk more after a break. This is
FRESH AIR.

(Announcements)

GROSS: My guests are journalists Douglas Farah and Stephen Braun, authors of
a new book about the world's preeminent contraband arms dealer Victor Bout.
The book is called "Merchant of Death: Money, Guns, Planes and the Man Who
Makes War Possible."

Why has it been so difficult to stop Victor Bout's arms network?

Mr. FARAH: Well, I think it's because it goes in so many different
directions and he does provide a vital service in certain areas that would be
difficult--where other people have difficulty operating. And, like you said,
the tsunami relief. And if you wanted to fly into Afghanistan right after the
9/11 attacks on the United States, whose pilots had the only working knowledge
of the functioning air strips in Afghanistan because they'd been flying in and
out of their for years? Well, it was, unfortunately, Victor Bout's people.
If you wanted people who were willing to take risks and fly into dangerous
situations in Iraq with airplanes who could withstand the really bumpy and
unfinished runways there, US planes couldn't do it. You needed old Antonovs
that could stand up to that sort of beating, and who had them? Victor Bout.
If you want to fly into the jungle air strips of, you know, Angola, who's
available? Well, Victor Bout is.

And so I think he's--in my assessment, it's the complete amorality of what
he's willing to do that allows him to flourish. Because he will work with
governments as well as every bad guy around who can pay him, he's made himself
indispensable in the world weapons market and other markets. The relief, the
moving of UN peacekeepers. All of those things, he's just spread himself so
broadly and so well, that he's too valuable to too many people to really be
put out of business.

GROSS: You write that you think that only the Russians can really stop him.
Why?

Mr. FARAH: Well, because he is a creature of that society and of that
system, and as long as he's useful to them, they will keep him going, because
he provides them with a lot of opportunities. And if you look at the conflict
between Hezbollah and Israel last year you have huge amount of new Russian
weapons showing up in the hands of Hezbollah. The new armor-piercing missiles
that they were using and things. And Russia has other strategic interests
that diverge sharply from what the US interests are around the world, and I
think you'll see them increasingly showing up on other sides of conflicts
again, and Bout is incredibly useful there. But he's under the protection of
groups in Moscow, and no one is going to go in and get him unless the Russians
let that happen, and so far there's no indication that that will happen.

Mr. BRAUN: Right, there was--they had an opportunity in 1992, when the
Belgians indicted him--not indicted him, they issued an arrest warrant through
Interpol...

Mr. FARAH: That was 2002

Mr. BRAUN: Excuse me, 2002, and there was an opportunity then, and the
Russian government declined to make him available to the Belgians.

Mr. FARAH: Well, not only did they decline to make him available, they
declared flatly that he was not on Russian territory when...

Mr. BRAUN: When he was.

Mr. FARAH: ...when he was giving an interview two blocks from the Interpol
office in Moscow for two hours, a two-hour live interview, explaining his take
on the world and how he was innocent of all charges, while the Interpol notice
went out saying that he was not on Russian territory, so there's a bit of a
dysfunctionality there.

GROSS: Yeah. You mentioned that Richard Clarke, when he was working for the
National Security Council, saw Bout as a real problem and wanted to shut down
his network. When the Bush administration came to the White House, Clarke
told Condoleezza Rice about the importance of shutting down Bout and saw her
as an ally and she acted like an ally, but then you say the Bush
administration kind of lost interest in Bout.

Mr. FARAH: Well, essentially, yes, and that was, I think, largely due to
9/l1. Condoleezza Rice is a Soviet expert and they did a presentation for
her. One of the first presentations she got as national security advisor to
President Bush was an array of satellite photographs taken of Victor Bout
aircraft lined wing-to-wing on the airstrips in the United Arab Emirates,
where he was operating, and she expressed a real desire to move forward with
this. The NSC was supposed to be preparing a major briefing for the
principals to go after Victor Bout, and it was scheduled for September 11th,
2001, and then that briefing never took place.

GROSS: Well, you know, one of the things I find really frightening about the
whole Victor Bout story is that, OK, the Cold War ends and he's able to bribe
people and so on to do what he needs to do to take advantage of all these old
weapons and old planes that are just kind of hanging around the Soviet Union.
So what does that mean about another really kind of smart, ambitious,
underground person and all the nuclear weapons that are hanging around the
Soviet Union?

Mr. BRAUN: That's the great peril that a number of members of the Clinton
administration--Clarke and some of his aides and some folks in the
intelligence community--worried about as well, was that, you know, to get that
materiel moving, you need some sort of logistic system that would do it. And
people like Lee Wolosky who was the man that Clarke picked to go after Bout,
these are the things that Wolosky and others worried greatly about was that
what Bout provided not only was this dispersal of arms but he had worldwide
logistics operation unrivaled by any other group and he was basically willing
to work for the highest payer, and the concern was that, you know, Bout's
operation could potentially do that. They've never been able to definitively
link his operation with nuclear materials, but, you know, there was a period,
certainly in the late '90s, early 2000s when there was real concern.

GROSS: Do you know who Bout is arming now?

Mr. FARAH: Well, the US military believes he was arming the Somali Islamist
groups in the recent fighting. The Israelis say they have a strong, good
sighting of him, a confirmed sighting of him, in Lebanon during the fighting
between Hezbollah and Israel last summer, so he doesn't appear to have retired
out of any business, and he has reportedly shown up in South Africa again in
the not-too-distant past in the last several months. He seems to operate
between Cyprus, Moldova and obviously Russia, where he lives in Moscow. He's
under a UN travel sanction, which means the UN has put out a list saying these
particular people are not allowed to travel outside of their home countries,
but that doesn't seem to stop him. We documented at least five passports that
he had at one time, and he probably has many more now, so he's able to travel
relatively unimpeded.

GROSS: Let me ask you what will sound like a simplistic question, but what is
the moral of the Victor Bout story?

Mr. FARAH: I think the moral of the Victor Bout story is that the world has
changed very, very quickly, and the methods of keeping up with terrorists and
financial criminal networks in weapons delivery systems have changed virtually
not at all. And we are decades behind in understanding how the new world
order operates. We don't understand criminal networks. Our intelligence
community is still woefully short on human intelligence, and we have yet to
define in critical ways what our strategic interests are.

And I think these great gaps in knowledge where we still look at the world as
it was in 1945 or 1965 are going to catch up with us in very serious ways and
already have through the networks that Victor Bout has armed in different
parts of the world, where we do have strategic interests. And I think our
inability to come to grips with how quickly the world has changed and the
growing dominance of nonstate armed actors around the world, people who no
longer respond to state pressure, is one of the critical issues of our time
that we're simply not equipped to deal with yet.

GROSS: You've done a lot of work researching Victor Bout's network of arms
and planes and how he's armed conflicts around the world and even flown in
supplies to Iraq on behalf of the American military and American contractors.
Most people have never heard of him, and I guess I'm wondering why you think
his network isn't a bigger story, particularly his network's former
connection, in Iraq?

Mr. BRAUN: Well, I think part of it is that the war on terror has just sort
of sucked up all of the, if you will, the oxygen. And so when we look at the
world, we tend to look at it in terms of terrorism, and we rarely look at the
structure that aids, in some cases, that terrorist effort.

But also, in a broader sense, we don't--in Africa, for example, as have always
been, both in terms, at least, through the 1990s, was just sort of a secondary
impulse both for the White House and, to a degree, journalists, as well. I
think now it's sort of incumbent on us to, you know, to look beyond, you know,
the terrorism filter and try to understand, you know, what these systems and
how these systems aid those movements.

GROSS: Well, I want to thank you both very much for talking with us. Thank
you.

Mr. FARAH: Thank you, Terry.

Mr. BRAUN: Thank you very much.

GROSS: Douglas Farah and Stephen Braun are the authors of "Merchant of
Death." Farah is the former west African bureau chief of The Washington Post.
Braun is a Pulitzer Prize-winning national correspondent for the LA Times.

Coming up, our film critic David Edelstein reviews the new "Harry Potter"
film. This is FRESH AIR.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Review: David Edelstein on the film "Harry Potter and the Order
of the Phoenix"
TERRY GROSS, host:

"Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" is the fifth film to be made from
J.K. Rowling's blockbuster series of books about an orphaned boy wizard, his
magical prep school and his evil nemesis, Lord Voldemort. The film opens only
10 days ahead of a major publishing event, Rowling's conclusion to the saga.
Film critic David Edelstein has a review of the latest "Harry Potter" movie.

DAVID EDELSTEIN reporting:

As the mania builds for the seventh and last book in J.K. Rowling's Harry
Potter series, the question hangs: Will Harry get whacked? Ten days ahead of
its release comes the fifth movie, "Harry Potter and the Order of the
Phoenix," which douses the final embers of childish wonder. Here is a
landscape of sexual frustration, madness, fascism and death. This is not a
family movie. It's not even Gothic horror, like the last Potter movie, the
chilling "Goblet of Fire."

"Order of the Phoenix" is practically Orwellian. The palette is grainy and
dank, the faces gray, the hero's alienation festering. It's quite a change
from director Christopher Columbus' Christmas-y first movie, "Harry Potter and
the Sorcerer's Stone," which hardly began to suggest the pagan energy and
anger out of which Rowling's series was born.

The books have been slammed by literary poobahs like Harold Bloom, but I love
their balance between enchantment and dread. "Order of the Phoenix" is in
some ways an improvement over Rowling's novel, which is mired in Harry's
angst, and builds to a climatic wand-off better ogled than read. That climax
is an eye-popper.

The director, David Yates, made the great British miniseries "State of Play,"
a literate newspaper drama with a vein of sublimated violence. Here he lets
loose with horrific montages to evoke his hero's estrangement. A fixture in
Harry's nightmares is Lord Voldemort, played by Ralph Fiennes, his features
primordially putty-ish. Hogwarts' headmaster Dumbledore, played by Michael
Gambon, has turned frosty and elusive. The oddly paranoid Ministry of Magic
has mounted a campaign through its Pravda-like newspaper to discredit the
notion of the dark lord's return from limbo along with Harry's credibility.

Above all "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" is dominated by Imelda
Staunton, best know for Mike Leigh's "Vera Drake," overacting gleefully as the
latest and most bloodcurdling Defense against the Dark Arts teacher Dolores
Umbridge. A stand-in for the Ministry, she metes out ghastly punishment with
a smile of mocking gentility and palpably loathes her students' youth and
freedom.

(Soundbite of "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix")

(Soundbite of music)

Ms. IMELDA STAUNTON: (As Dolores Umbridge) Your previous instruction in this
subject has been disturbingly...

(Soundbite of a thump)

Ms. STAUNTON: (As Dolores Umbridge): ...uneven. But you'll be pleased to
know from now on you will be following a carefully structured,
Ministry-approved course of defense of magic. Yes!

Ms. EMMA WATSON: (As Hermione Granger) There's nothing in here about using
defensive spells.

Ms. STAUNTON: (As Dolores Umbridge): Using spells? Ha-ha! Well, I can't
imagine why you would need to use spells in my classroom.

Mr. DANIEL RADCLIFFE: (As Harry Potter) We're not going to use magic?

Ms. STAUNTON: (As Dolores Umbridge): You will be learning about defensive
spells in a secure, risk-free way.

Mr. RADCLIFFE: (As Harry Potter) Well, what use is that? If we're going to
be attacked, it won't be risk-free.

Ms. STAUNTON: (As Dolores Umbridge): Students will raise their hands when
they speak in my class. It is the view of the Ministry that a theoretical
knowledge will be sufficient to get you through your examinations, which,
after all, is what school is all about.

Mr. RADCLIFFE: (As Harry Potter) And how's theory supposed to prepare us for
what's out there?

Ms. STAUNTON: (As Dolores Umbridge): There is nothing out there, dear. Who
do you imagine would want to attack children like yourself?

Mr. RADCLIFFE: (as Harry Potter) Oh, I don't know. Maybe Lord Voldemort.

(Soundbite of whispering)

(End of soundbite)

EDELSTEIN: The movie irons out a few of Rowling's intriguing dissonances,
among them the morbidity of Harry's godfather, Sirius Black, played by Gary
Oldman. It also doesn't solve the problem of Harry's beloved, Cho Chang,
played by Katie Leung, still a cipher, even in the course of a smooch with
Harry heard 'round the world. But there is a marvelous turn by a young
actress new to movies, Evanna Lynch, as the queerly introverted Luna Lovegood.
This flake flutes her lines, but not always on key. The supporting cast is
the usual embarrassment of British riches, plus Helena Bonham Carter, as a
cackling she-demon. Among the standbys, Alan Rickman as the supercilious
Snape barely opens his mouth; the lines wheeze out like the low base of a
bellows.

The central trio--Daniel Radcliffe's Harry, Emma Watson's Hermione and Rupert
Grint's Ron--is now on the far side of puberty, which makes me a little sad,
but there's no stopping the wheel. Their aging brings thoughts of their
mortality. Having confidently proclaimed that David Chase would not kill off
Tony Soprano too early, I'm loathe to predict what the final Potter book will
bring. But "Order of the Phoenix" has me worried. How can Harry defeat
everything murderously repressive in the world without making the ultimate
sacrifice?

GROSS: David Edelstein is film critic for New York Magazine.

If you want to catch up on programs you've missed, you you can download
podcasts of our show by going to our Web site, freshair.npr.org.

(Credits)

GROSS: I'm Terry Gross.
Transcripts are created on a rush deadline, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of Fresh Air interviews and reviews are the audio recordings of each segment.