Book: Wanted Criminal Flew U.S. Supply Missions in Iraq

Source: ABC News
The U.S. government paid a wanted international criminal roughly $60 million to fly supplies into Iraq in support of the war effort, a new book alleges.
Intelligence officials have considered arms merchant and international trafficker Viktor Bout one of the greatest threats to U.S. interests, in the same league as al Qaeda kingpin Osama bin Laden. Interpol has issued a warrant for his arrest; the United Nations Security Council has restricted his travel.
Yet from 2003 through at least 2005, Pentagon contractors used air cargo companies known to be connected to Bout to fly an estimated 1,000 supply trips into and out of Iraq, according to "Merchant of Death: Money, Guns, Plans, and the Man Who Makes War Possible."
It could have been worse, the authors report. Shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, Bout -- whose arms shipments to the Taliban regime in Afghanistan were believed to have aided al Qaeda -- pitched the CIA a multi-million dollar proposal to help rout the Taliban from the country and capture Osama bin Laden, according to Douglas Farah and Stephen Braun.
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The deal never came together. But Bout found business with the United States in 2003, flying supplies into newly-invaded Iraq as a subcontractor to U.S. military contractors, including Fluor and Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR), the authors say, citing military flight records as evidence. The flights continued even after President Bush signed an order banning Americans from doing business with Bout or his associates, the authors report.
LinkHere

http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/sierraleone/b...
Victor Bout is the poster boy for a new generation of post Cold War international arms dealers who play a critical role in areas where the weapons trade has been embargoed by the United Nations.
Now, as FRONTLINE/World reports in "Gunrunners," unprecedented U.N. investigations have begun to unravel the mystery of these broken embargoes, many of them imposed on African countries involved in bloody civil wars. At the heart of this unfolding detective story is the identification of a group of East European arms merchants, with Victor Bout the first of them to be publicly and prominently identified. The U.N. investigative team pursued leads that a Mr. Bout was pouring small arms and ammunition into Angola, Rwanda, Sierra Leone and the Congo, making possible massacres on a scale that stunned the world.
Despite being pursued for years by a flinty group of private and government arms investigators, a positive visual ID of this United Arab Emirates-based arms merchant only became available when two Belgian journalists ran into him at an airstrip in remote rebel-held Congo. And it was only recently that his name became familiar in the United States, following press reports of his role in arming the Taliban regime in Afghanistan five years ago. If not for this link to Afghanistan, it is probable that Bout would still be a low-profile character in the clandestine world of illicit arms trading.
That accusation and the heat it generated in the media eventually flushed Bout into the open. From the apparent safe haven of Moscow, he gave CNN and the Associated Press, among others, on-the-record, on-camera interviews rebutting the allegations against him.
The case of Victor Bout personifies the exceedingly difficult task of keeping small arms out of the world's bloodiest and most destabilizing conflicts. Perhaps most striking is the fact that while Bout has been accused by U.N. investigators, the press and intelligence sources, no government has yet charged him with gun-smuggling.