Russian state media have speculated for months that Griner, who was detained at a Moscow airport in February on drug charges, and Whelan, who was sentenced to 16 years in a Russian prison on espionage charges he described as a set-up, could are exchanged with Booth. Freedom has long been sought by the Kremlin. But the Biden administration has remained silent on the possibility. Then on Wednesday, Foreign Secretary Antony Blinken offered the first public look at efforts to bring Griner and Whelan home, saying the US had made a “substantial proposal” to Russia. Administration officials would not respond to US media reports that the offer on the table includes a possible prisoner exchange for Bout. Booth’s attorney also would not confirm whether his client was participating in the negotiations. The Kremlin said no deal had been reached “yet”. Bout, a former Soviet military translator turned international arms dealer, has been jailed for more than a decade after being lured to Thailand in a Drug Enforcement Agency sting operation spanning three continents. “Victor Booth, in my eyes, is one of the most dangerous men on the face of the Earth,” Michael Brown, former head of operations for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, told “60 Minutes” in 2010. Viktor Bout sits inside a holding cell at the Bangkok High Court on July 28, 2008 in Bangkok, Thailand. Chumsak Kanoknan/Getty Images Booth, the son of an accountant and an auto mechanic, was drafted into the Soviet Army when he was 18 after playing competitive volleyball as a teenager, according to a New Yorker profile published in 2012. He served for two years in an infantry brigade in western Ukraine, then he applied to the Military Institute of Foreign Languages ​​in Moscow, where he studied Portuguese. Booth insisted to The New Yorker that he was never a spy, but others, including his former partner and former CIA officer, said he had once worked for the GRU, the Soviet foreign military intelligence agency. In 1995, when he was 28, he began spending time in the cargo hangars at Sharjah International Airport in the United Arab Emirates, eventually launching the cargo airline, Air Cess, with a small fleet of Russian planes delivering goods to Africa and Afghanistan. In the years that followed, Bout helped fuel civil wars around the world by providing more sophisticated weaponry, sometimes to both sides of the bloody conflicts. “If I didn’t do it, someone else would,” Booth told the New Yorker. By then, he was on the radar of American and British officials. Peter Hayne, the secretary of state for Africa at Britain’s Foreign Office, sounded the alarm as British soldiers in Africa came under attack from increasingly sophisticated weapons. “Sanctions continue to perpetuate the conflict in Sierra Leone and Angola, resulting in countless lives being lost and maiming taking place. Victor Bout is indeed the master destroyer of sanctions and is a merchant of death who owns air companies that transport weapons and other logistics support for the rebels in Angola and Sierra Leone and take the diamonds that pay for those weapons … aiding and abetting people who turn their guns on British soldiers,” Hayne told the House of Commons in 2000. . The moniker “Merchant of Death” “had come to Hain spontaneously as he read yet another intelligence briefing on Bout’s activities,” according to Damien’s book Operation Relentless: The Hunt for the Richest, Deadliest Criminal in History. Lewis. “It immediately struck a chord and the press picked up the hue and cry.” In the US, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control unveiled sanctions against Bout and his companies that froze assets and prevented any transactions through US banks. However, his business was so hidden by front companies that the US government unwittingly contracted two of his companies to deliver supplies to US troops in Iraq. By 2007, the Drug Enforcement Administration hatched a plan to lure Bout out of Russia with an arms deal that would be hard to refuse. The agency hired an undercover agent to contact a trusted associate of Bout’s about a big business deal. That exchange led to the first meeting between the fake DEA arms buyers posing as officials of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, also known as FARC, and Butte’s associate on the island of Curacao, a few hundred miles off the coast of Colombia . Bout’s partner, Andrew Smulian, traveled to Moscow to present the deal to Bout. Smulian met with secret agents two weeks later in Copenhagen, telling them his business partner liked the deal. Weeks later, Bout was en route to Thailand, thought to be meeting FARC officials to discuss shipping what prosecutors said was “an arsenal of military-grade weapons” to attack US helicopters in Colombia. During a March 2008 meeting in a Bangkok hotel conference room, Booth told DEA informants posing as FARC operatives that he could drop the weapons into Colombia and acknowledged that the weapons could be used to kill Americans. After overhearing the meeting, Thai police and DEA agents stormed the room and arrested Booth. “Game over,” Booth said. Accused Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout arrives at a court in Bangkok October 5, 2010. NICOLAS ASFOURI/AFP via Getty Images He was extradited to the US in 2010 after two years of legal proceedings and convicted of terrorism charges a year later.
Booth was sentenced to 25 years in prison. Now 55, he was expected to be released in August 2029, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons website. “They’re going to try to lock me up for life,” Booth told The New Yorker before his sentencing. “But I will return to Russia. I don’t know when. But I’m still young.”

Caitlin Yellek

Caitlin Yilek is a digital producer for CBS News. Contact her at [email protected] Follow her on Twitter: