When Major Christopher Walker landed at Baghdad International Airport in August 2003 to oversee the largest U.S. Army air cargo operation since World War II, as many as 60 civilian planes from around the world were touching down each day to replenish supply lines and rebuild Iraq. At the airport's freight field, Walker, 37, watched as forklifts scuttled in and out of storage bays like motorized beetles, unloading Humvees, disassembled oil rigs, surgery equipment, frozen food, bulletproof vests, and a ceaseless issue of mail and courier packages. With the military's own cargo planes already at capacity and the conditions too dangerous for private American firms, defense contracting officials had turned to air companies based in neighboring Middle Eastern airfields—often hiring Russians, who flew by the seat of their pants and fit right in with the airport's cowboy environment. Their ancient cargo planes were also better suited than newer American models for the pocked runway and perilously steep flight angles into the airfield. "They could take bad runways, crash landings, and keep on flying," says Walker. "Airbuses and Boeings were just not built for that kind of wartime stress." But one morning in late spring 2004, Walker flicked on his laptop and saw an urgent e-mail from his superior. There appeared to be an embarrassing problem. State Department and congressional officials in Washington were up in arms about a British newspaper story claiming that one of the Russian air firms delivering goods to U.S. forces belonged to Viktor Bout, the world's most notorious arms dealer.
Scanning back over daily flight logs on his computer, Walker—a trim, unflappable longtime Air National Guard officer—bristled each time the name of Bout's flagship air firm, Irbis, popped up on manifests from the central U.S. air command base in Qatar. The 37-year-old Russian had somehow pulled off an astonishing metamorphosis: from hunted international criminal—in the same league as Osama bin Laden—to secret delivery man for the Pentagon. For years, U.S. officials had been tracking Bout in an effort to ground his vast air transport enterprise, which flooded the world's killing fields throughout the nineties with endless shipments of everything from black-market AK-47s to massive helicopter gunships and fueled the bloody slaughter of tens of thousands. But now that same logistical prowess—a durable armada of 60 planes that could also carry legitimate freight such as food or humanitarian supplies—made Bout's network vital to U.S. troops in Iraq.
Every year for the past decade, as many as 500,000 people have been killed in sputtering, obscure regional wars that have eroded international stability from Congo to Colombia—most of them with portable assault rifles such as the AK-47. The profligate use of Russian-designed weapons and ammo creates a constant demand for resupply, and Bout has armed almost every warlord and militant who can afford it. He was the single largest supplier of guns to the Revolutionary United Front and its child soldiers in Sierra Leone, stoking horrific campaigns of mass torture, rape, and amputation. Bout also armed warring factions in Afghanistan in the late nineties, nimbly working for the Northern Alliance government while covertly selling planes and weapons to Taliban militants, who shared them with Al Qaeda. Whereas rival international gunrunners provided merely the arms and the false documents authorizing their transfer, Bout alone offered a full-service package, including the planes that could deliver them to the riskiest war zone. As a result, the paunchy, flint-eyed ex–Soviet military officer with a drooping brush mustache—who inspired the 2005 Nicolas Cage film Lord of War—has made hundreds of millions of dollars and remains the most lethal figure in the global arms trade.
