Meet the ‘Merchant of Death’ Freed by the Biden Administration
After months of negotiation, the Biden administration on Thursday freed convicted notorious arms trafficker Viktor Bout in exchange for U.S. basketball star Brittney Griner, who has been detained in Russia on drug charges.
Bout had been serving a 25-year prison sentence in the U.S. In April 2012, he was found guilty of conspiring to kill Americans and U.S. officials, acquiring and exporting anti-aircraft missiles, and aiding a terrorist organization.
For his illegal weapons exploits, the notorious criminal earned the moniker “Merchant of Death,” inspiring the Hollywood film Lord of War, starring Nic Cage.
Bout was arrested and extradited from Thailand in 2008 in a sting operation conducted by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency. DEA agents secured a meeting with Bout by posing as members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, a U.S. designated terrorist group, interested in buying tens of millions of dollars of arms.
During the trial, Bout maintained his innocence, saying he “never intended to kill anyone” and “never intended to sell arms to anyone.” But prosecutors argued that Bout was aware the weapons he sold would be used against Americans. Beyond sourcing the arms throughout his criminal career, Bout physically transferred them to buyers too, using a fleet of Soviet-constructed planes.
“There’s a lot of armed traffickers out there,” Rob Zachariasiewicz, a now retired DEA agent who helped apprehend Bout in Thailand, told ABC7News. “The difference with Mr. Bout was he owned his own fleet of private aircraft. People can argue: Was he the biggest arms trafficker? I look at him as one of the biggest arms transporters.”
From the fall of the USSR until his arrest in 2008, Bout violated numerous arms embargoes, including in Liberia, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, Congo, and Libya. Jonathan Winer, a senior official in the State Department during the Clinton administration who was steeped in knowledge of Bout’s arms ventures, told Yahoo News that Bout was once the second-most-wanted man in the world, after Osama bin Laden.
Bout got his start in the arms trade by selling weapons to participants on both sides of the Angolan civil war in the late 1990s, undermining U.S. efforts to bring the conflict to a peaceful resolution. Witney Schneidman, who became aware of Bout’s involvement in the Angola conflict while serving as deputy assistant secretary of state for African affairs, called him “the personification of evil.”
Bout was “directly undermining our efforts to bring peace,” Schneidman told the New Yorker in 2014.
In 2010, John Brennan, Obama’s deputy national-security adviser for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, said in an interview that capturing and trying Bout was crucial to thwarting the flow of illegal arms sales to dangerous terrorist entities.
“Victor Bout is somebody who for two decades was responsible for arms trafficking and supporting terrorist organizations on multiple continents– South America, in Africa and in Asia,” Brennan said.
Prosecuting him, Brennan said, was very important so “we’re able to stop these illegal arms traffickers from carrying out their activities, which are undergirding the ability of terrorist organizations and other groups to carry out attacks nationwide.”
Similarly, Eric Holder, attorney general under the Obama administration, said in 2011 after Bout’s conviction was announced that it was a major success of the justice system and government agencies that he was brought to justice.
“One of the world’s most prolific arms dealers is being held accountable for his sordid past,” Holder said at the time. “Viktor Bout’s arms trafficking activity and support of armed conflicts have been a source of concern around the globe for decades. Today, he faces the prospect of life in prison for his efforts to sell millions of dollars worth of weapons to terrorists for use in killing Americans.”
