The notorious Russian arms dealer is back in the spotlight after it was reported that the US offered to use him in a prisoner swap for WNBA star Brittney Griner and former Marine Paul Whelan, two high-profile Americans held by Russia. Much of Booth’s early life, including the place and date of his birth, is a mystery. According to his biographers, he was born in 1967 in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, the son of an accountant and a car mechanic. Trained as an interpreter at the Soviet Military Institute of Foreign Languages in Moscow, Bout spent some time with the Soviet military working as a translator in Angola in the late 1980s, rising to the rank of lieutenant, according to his website. He first rose to prominence in the turbulent early days after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. There, he enjoyed two major advantages that launched his career as an arms dealer: access to a large fleet of Soviet-era aircraft and a huge stockpile of surplus weaponry. . During his decade-long career, Bout is believed to have armed the Taliban and the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, the Revolutionary United Front in Sierra Leone, Charles Taylor’s regime in Liberia, Unita in Angola, various Congolese factions and Abu Sayyaf, a militant Islamic group in the Philippines. Along the way, Bout, who is said to speak six languages, became known as one of the world’s most wanted men, with several international arrest warrants issued against him. In 2002, the Los Angeles Times profiled Bout, citing a former US government official who described him as “the Donald Trump or Bill Gates” of arms smuggling. Viktor Bout is held by Thai police after his arrest in 2010. Photo: Apichart Weerawong/AP His larger-than-life persona was further enhanced with the release of the 2005 crime drama Lord of War, starring Hollywood star Nicolas Cage, which is believed to have been loosely based on Booth’s life. Bout was finally arrested at a luxury hotel in Bangkok in 2008 in a spectacular US sting operation in which undercover agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration posed as Colombian Farc rebels, catching him on camera trying to sell weapons for use against Americans. Four years later, he was sentenced in a New York court to 25 years in prison. When the prosecutor said he had agreed to sell guns to kill Americans, Booth shouted, “That’s a lie! God knows this truth.” His defense attorney, Albert Dayan, said U.S. officials targeted his client because they were embarrassed that Bout’s companies had helped deliver goods to U.S. military contractors involved in the Iraq war. Others also questioned the severity of his sentence. The judge, Shira Scheindlin, who presided over his case, later said Bout “got a hard deal.” “If you asked me today, ‘Do you think 10 years would be a fair sentence?’ I would say yes,” Scheindlin said. At the time, Russian officials, who unsuccessfully sought to prevent his extradition to the US, criticized the conviction as “baseless and biased”, adding that Moscow “will take whatever is necessary to repatriate Viktor Bout back to his homeland by any means within the framework of international law”. Bout’s relationship with Russia’s political elites, experts say, is as murky as his arms-dealing career. “He seems to be well regarded and respected in military intelligence,” said Andrei Soldatov, a Russian investigative journalist and security expert. But, Soldatov added, Bout’s exact ties to Russia’s security services remained a mystery. Soldatov said it was very likely that Bout had worked for the Russian GRU intelligence service during his time in Angola. “The very fact that he could be involved in the exchange shows his value to the security services,” Soldatov said. Booth has spent 12 years behind US bars and is said to be serving his sentence alongside a number of prominent American neo-Nazis and white supremacist extremists, including Christopher Cantwell. Subscribe to First Edition, our free daily newsletter – every morning at 7am. BST According to Politico reporter Chris Miller, who exchanged letters with Cantwell, Bout recently declared that Ukraine should not exist as a country and kept a photo of Vladimir Putin in his prison cell. In Moscow they never forgot him. His case has become a cause célèbre in Russia, and senior officials have repeatedly pushed for his release. Last year, the Moscow Municipal Chamber exhibited 24 of his artworks in prison, including some self-portraits behind bars with his signature moustache. Vladimir Zherebenkov, Whelan’s lawyer, said Thursday that Russia had offered in 2020 to swap his client for Bout, an offer he said the US rejected. If he returns to Moscow, Bout is likely to receive a hero’s welcome similar to that enjoyed by Anna Chapman, the Russian spy who took part in a 2010 prisoner swap. And while much of his life will remain shrouded in secrecy, his career as an arms dealer is perhaps best depicted in the 2014 documentary film The Notorious Mr Bout. Using an impressive collection of home videos Bout made during his business trips, the filmmakers paint a picture of a shrewd operator who carried weapons for years and was finally undone by the post-9/11 crackdown on the arms trade.
