Vicktor Anatoliyevich Bout (aka: The Merchant of Death)

Only 40 years ago, early in the Cold War, in 1967, Vicktor was born to Russian parents in what is now Tajikistan. Viktor was a very intelligent young man. He joined the Soviet military and then attended and graduated from the Military Institute of Foreign Languages, in Moscow. He also went to a Russian military college and earned a degree in economics. He served as an interpreter in a military transport aviation regiment in what is now Belarus and even translated for U.N. peacekeeping forces in Angola in 1987. When the Soviet Union fell and the military was left in disarray, Viktor Bout was a lieutenant. A very smart lieutenant indeed.

Rather than going home jobless, Viktor took advantage of the chaotic situation. There were military aircraft and supplies that were no longer being used by the now defunct military so Viktor used his language skills and his already large network of international connections to go into business. Now, little is known about exactly how the young (24-year-old) lieutenant managed to assume a fleet of aircraft and start his international import/export business but many journalists who have interviewed him believe he is simply the front man for a much larger organization that includes supporters from both the Russian government and organized crime. In fact Bout himself has even intimated that he has worked for many governments and prides himself on how he keeps quiet about with whom he does business. Gayle Smith, a former Africanist for the National Security Council has been quoted as saying the following about Viktor Bout:

"Had he been dealing in legal commodities, he would have been considered one of the world's greatest businessmen."

Viktor is happy to make much of his start in flying day-old gladiolas from Africa to Dubai for a huge profit, but those were just training runs. Soon he'd be flying leftover AK-47s from forgotten armories in the eastern block to despots and terrorists in Africa. The big difference with Viktor was that he wasn't a Cold War era gun runner who worked for only one of the world powers and sold arms to be used in proxy wars. Viktor, although born and raised in the Soviet Union during the height of the cold war, was and is a true capitalist. He'll sell to anyone - even both sides in the same war. After all, for a man like Viktor, war is money and choosing sides simply means limiting one's possible income.

You see, Viktor is the WalMart of the arms trade. Whatever you need, be it AK-47s, ammunition, heavy weapons, or any of the many land, air or sea vehicles of war, Viktor has the connections to get them and the infrastructure established to deliver them. Unfortunately, men like Viktor, of whom there are very few in our world today, have become a necessary evil. Not only has Viktor delivered guns, ammo and vehicles of war to groups like the RUF and the Taliban but he has also delivered U.N. Peacekeepers to those same areas to suppress the threats created by those armed groups. If you consider this, it can actually make a bit of sense. After all, who better to safely deliver peacekeepers than a man whose aircraft are already armored, can land and take off from just about any patch of dirt in the world and is seemingly nobody's enemy. In fact, the aircraft that first flew American military and their supplies into Baghdad during Desert Storm II were not American. They were Viktor Bout's cargo planes, Antonovs and Ilyushins from the old Soviet Empire.

It is a complicated world we live in.