NewYork Times August 17, 2003




Christopher Anderson/VII, for The New York Times

Now see the dailyoberver.gm and tell me how Yahya operates? Yahya is a
tribalist,play the divide and rule game without knowing the best way to do
so.I will come on that with another article.Today OPTV is fighting the war
against terrorism and we must expose leaders like Yahya to the United
States.He was very close to Charles Taylor and Mobuto and is therefore
damaged goods for West Africa


ARMS AND THE MAN
(Page 2 of 11)
''Bout was brilliant,'' Gayle Smith said recently. ''Had he been dealing in
legal commodities, he would have been considered one of the world's
greatest businessmen. He's a fascinating but destructive character. We were
tryi
ng to bring peace, and Bout was bringing war.''

C.I.A. and MI6 agents on the ground in Africa first picked up Bout's scent
in the early 1990's, when his fleet of planes began crisscrossing the
continent. In the early days, they transported gladiolas; later, frozen
chickens and then diamonds, mining equipment, Kalashnikov assault rifles,
bullets, helicopter gunships and even, Bout says, U.N. peacekeepers, French
soldiers and African heads of state. The names of the men Bout came to
count as his personal friends and customers included Massoud, Mobutu,
Savimbi, Taylor, Bemba. It was not until the summer of 2000 that the N.S.C.
realized it had stumbled on not only the most prolific arms trafficking
operation in Africa, the Middle East and Afghanistan but probably the best
connected (and protected) private-weapons transport and brokering network
in the world.

Smith and others took
 their information to Richard C. Clarke, then the
chief of counterterrorism for the N.S.C. ''Get me a warrant,'' Clarke
responded.

But because Bout's reputed crimes were committed outside United States
borders, the N.S.C. had no U.S. law to use on him. Instead, the N.S.C.
initiated an operation that drew on the resources of intelligence agencies
in at least seven countries and sparked cabinet-level diplomacy on four
continents. Belgium issued its own warrant for Bout's arrest a year later --
 not for arms trafficking but for crimes related to money laundering and
diamond smuggling. In the end, the pursuit failed. Victor Bout is still at
large, a fugitive from international justice. But unlike Osama bin Laden
and Saddam Hussein, he lives in plain sight -- in Moscow, under the
apparent protection of a post-Communist system that has profited from his
activities as much as he has.

He has also
 evaded journalists, U.N. investigators and watchdog
organizations like Human Rights Watch. Until now, the only publicly
available photo of him was secretly taken by a Belgian journalist in March
2001 on an airstrip in Congo. His only statements have been brief denials
of his role in arms trafficking. He walked out of a CNN interview in March
2002. That same month, six weeks after a Los Angeles Times article
connected Bout to shipments of arms and recruits to the Taliban and Al
Qaeda, he released a statement in which he described himself as a father,
husband, entrepreneur -- and a scapegoat. Since then, he has been silent.

Though Bout denies his involvement in arms trafficking, he has been
persistently and publicly linked to weapons shipments, charges supported by
paper and money trails, confessions, eyewitness accounts and multiple
intelligence reports. The longer Bout has remained out of the reach of
in
ternational law, the bigger his legend has grown. In many ways, he is now
the public face of a giant international criminal structure.

In the eight months between the time I first asked Bout for an interview
and when he finally granted it, I came to understand the general shape of
the political and criminal twilight that conceals the commerce of arms
trafficking. In June, I laid out some of what I believed in a letter. Two
days later, Bout called and asked me to come to Moscow.

lowers, that's where it all started,'' Chichakli said. It was midnight, and
we had moved on from the hotel lounge to an Italian restaurant in downtown
Moscow full of people drinking vodka and eating pasta and pizza. Bout
ordered a carrot juice and an arugula salad. ''He's a vegetarian,''
Chichakli said. ''He's an ecologist. He believes in saving the rain
forest.''

Bout nodded. ''I've been giv
en a chance to reinvent myself.'' It was not
immediately clear why he had chosen to see me. He seemed intrigued by his
legend, yet wanted simultaneously to fan it and diminish it.







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BINNEH S MINTEH
NE
W YORK UNIVSERSITY

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