It’s a chocolate mousse with cream on the top

So: the Viktor Bout trial chunters on, as does the tirelessly priapic news coverage.

I’m studiously avoiding the debates about whether the DEA sting operation created a legitimate basis for Bout’s extradition or trial in the US; whether his own testimony was coerced by DEA agents threatening him with Midnight-Express-style abandonment in a Bangkok jail; whether he really is the ‘Merchant of Death’ or just Death’s DHL Courier.*** These arguments are legally important, but they tend to distract from the genuinely interesting stuff: what the trial is telling us about the business of the network of people around Bout and his collaborators, and thus about the wider business or arms trading and its logistics.

One fortunate consequence of the pre-trial jurisdiction/admissibility row, though, has been that a number of interesting transcripts and evidential annexes have already been filed with the court since May, even before the hearings proper have started. Quite a lot of this hasn’t really been reported at all, even though it’s technically in the public domain. The new docs suggest several new connections in the Bout universe.

In no particular order, six things I thought were interesting:

[Caution: this is probably only of interest to the two arms trade geeks who occasionally read this blog.]

1. Friendship never ends: there’s a surprise guest appearance from Peter Mirchev of the Bulgarian-based arms brokering firm Kas Engineering. When I first got into small arms trading (research, not practice), Kas were already part of arms trading history: named as having provided (perhaps unwittingly) the Kalashnikovs airdropped over Purulia in the 1995 Peter Bleach case; and as having shipped arms on Togolese end-user certificates between 1996 and 1998, some of which the UN’s Angola Sanctions monitoring mechanism claimed ended up with UNITA in Angola in the late 1990s. Back to Bout: the prosecution claims that a series of emails from 2007, found on Bout’s laptop, detail a prospective $38m arms deal (end-user not mentioned) with Kas Engineering via a Hungarian bank; and a second RFQ for BMP-3 fighting vehicle gun barrels. The DEA goes on to claim that Bout told his testifying co-conspirators that he intended to get Igla MANPAD anti-aircraft missiles for the (fake) FARC buyers from Mirchev in Bulgaria. In the transcript from Bout’s final meeting with the fake-FARC reps in Bangkok, at the point where they’re discussing anti-aircraft missiles, Bout says [in English] “Because I spoke with, er, Peter and I will also go for to see him”.
   
   Of course, even assuming that the prosecution’s evidence is correct, Bout could nonetheless have been blagging about MANPAD availability from Bulgaria. But even the proposition: MANPADs for terrorists? From (EU member state) Bulgaria?? From Kas Engineering??? Really???? The whole thing just feels so…late 1990s. When they were done arms dealing for the day, did Viktor and his Colombians celebrate by going out dancing to Steps and then sitting down to watch the latest Ally McBeal?
   
   That said, I’ve always been struck by the longevity of arms dealers’ careers. Some of the most active UK arms dealers today were flogging guns to the Stasi in the 1970s. (There’s a lovely vignette in the summary testimony of Bout’s alleged co-conspirator, Andrew Smulian, where he describes going with Bout to the UAE arms fair in 1997 to meet both Mirchev and Mikhail Kalashnikov, inventor of the Kalashnikov assault rifle, who’s been Izhmash’s cheery Ronald MacDonald figure for years. Getting to shake the ageing General Kalashnikov’s hand at arms fairs used to be as predictable as meeting Sylvester McCoy at a Dr Who convention – a guaranteed part of the ticket price, but not as exciting as getting chatted up by Tom Baker). What’s more interesting is that these guys seem to continue to do business perfectly happily from jurisdictions that have ostensibly cleaned up their export control acts since the wild west days of the 1990s – like the UK or Bulgaria. Perhaps the dealers have cleaned up too. Or maybe they’re just better at getting round the rules.



2. Our friends still want to do business with dodgy people: The rest of Bout’s alleged recent arms dealing career is also a blast from the past. The prosecution’s Memorandum of Law describes 2007 emails between Smulian and Bout about arms deals allegedly proposed by contacts of Smulian, on behalf of those notorious members of the axis of evil
   
   • Tanzania (“a multifaceted [investment] project…among other things, the provision of military hardware to the Government of Tanzania, construction and development, telecommunications equipment, and minerals and gas exploration….satellite and surveillance equipment, air equipment, helicopter gunships, patrol boats, tanks, and other military-related hardware”)
   
   
   • and Kenya (“the provision of military-related equipment to a contact in Kenya for the benefit of the Kenyan government”).
   
   Hmm. After millions of dollars in US export control outreach programmes, surely US-friendly East African governments are really supposed to have cleaned up their arms procurement acts by now and not be tendering from people on UN sanctions lists? Of course, there’s no clear evidence they knew that Bout was to be involved. But Smulian’s pedigree (Air Pass etc.) should have been enough to ring alarm bells. Equally, Smulian’s mates might have been bullshitting about their prospects of getting the deals – but they were reportedly good enough for a Tanzanian People’s Defence Force (TPDF) official to travel to visit Smulian to discuss.
   
   (There are more traditional customers here as well: a Skype-chat between Bout and an unnamed individual discussing a prospective deal for AT-14 Kornet anti-tank missiles to Libya.)
   
   
3. Remember who your friends are: There are further inklings about how the DEA’s undercover agents made themselves convincing to Smulian and, ultimately, Bout. From the memoranda from Bout’s lawyer, it appears that the approach to Smulian was made by an ‘undercover operative’ named Michael Snow, playing the role of an aircraft broker who flogs some mysterious South Americans a Moldovan Antonov-12 and then contacts Smulian and Bout when the South Americans want some more serious hardware. The transcripts featuring Snow during a restaurant meeting in Curacao with the fake FARC contacts are awesome: he seems to be straight out of central casting for a Frederick Forsythe film adaptation, playing a grizzled ‘this is Africa’ aviation veteran who says things like “if it wasn’t for me, he’d be left in fucking Africa to fucking rot…what you say? I’m fucking deaf…oh, merci beaucoup madame…I must show them how to make a proper crème brulee.” (I’m not making this up. In fact, the whole dessert schtick is brilliant: in the middle of talking about arms smuggling to Angola, Snow gets the fake FARC rebel commander “Carlos” to discuss his pudding:
   

   CARLOS: It’s a chocolate mousse with cream on the top.
   
   SNOW: But they never burnt it properly.
   
   CARLOS: No, because they got the ice-cream on the top.

   
   Serious pros. I’m wondering whether Snow was so ludicrously convincing because he actually *was* a grizzled ‘this is Africa’ aviation veteran. I’m not sure who he is, but there was a Captain Mike Snow who flew for the ill-fated Africargo in eastern DRC during the war in the early 2000s. No idea if it’s the same guy. It’s presumably not impossible that someone flying there around that time might have bumped into Bout at that time when Bout was reportedly hanging around in the eastern DRC.
   
   
4. New friends…from Iceland? The prosecution also names a new co-conspirator in the FARC deal: one Jon Gylfason, based in Tanzania, who - according to the prosecution – pitches up to Smulian with the Tanzania proposal and a TPDF contact, travels to Moscow to meet Bout, and continues to act as a messenger between Smulian and Bout during the fake-FARC negotiations. I’ve never heard of Gylfason, although I now have some ideas about who he might be. Sounds lcelandic, which is also tangentially suggested by the fact that Smulian communicates with Bout using an Icelandic root-domain email address (development@xnet.is) which he says was “set up for Jon by his buddy who owns the server”, and which he says deletes the emails after they’re sent.
   
   
5. Good old friends: There’s been much supposition and speculation about Bout’s ability to sit in Moscow all the way through the 2000s and not be bothered – an ostensible immunity often attributed to alleged high-level friends in the Russian government. That government’s subsequent efforts to argue against Bout’s extradition from Thailand have fuelled this geopolitical speculation further. From affidavits filed with the Thai court, reproduced in the US case filings, some of this speculation, at least, seems to be true: there’s one from a Russian Duma member, Serge Ivanov, who says that he met Bout for coffee in Moscow before he went to Thailand; and that after his arrest the Duma issued letters to Thailand and President Medvedev in March and September 2008 requesting Bout’s assistance and release.



6. Other old friends (or maybe new ones): Finally, two new bit-players not yet identified. When discussing an aircraft from Moldova, Smulian refers to the country as ‘Paul’s place’. And when emailing Bout about a prospective trip to discuss the fake-FARC deal, Smulian proposes that Bout sends ‘A from your side’.
   
   Who’s Paul, and who’s ‘A’? Any thoughts?
   
   
   
   (Picture from the dependable Brick Arms. Lego weapons for all occasions)
   
   ----
   *** I’ve never been convinced that Bout, as some of his mythmakers would have it, was really the biggest arms dealer going in Afghanistan and West Africa, single-handedly keeping the Taliban in business and Charles Taylor up to his Rolex in child soldiers’ blood. Nor am I at all convinced by the arguments from the other side, that Bout just did logistics (including arms) and never dealt arms himself: documentation already presented in the current pre-trial proceedings and by Richard Chichakli in his 2006 civil suit against OFAC, if genuine, strongly suggest that Bout has long been involved in setting up real arms deals.
   

Good graphs

UK national debt has been discussed and written about everywhere, but the message still isn't really getting through. Even in capital letters.

UK PUBLIC DEBT IS NOWHERE NEAR "RECORD" LEVELS.

Which means that the current level of spending cuts are nowhere near "inevitable".

I'm not going to bore the three people who read this blog with a discussion of the merits and demerits of UK spending cuts and tax rises. We know all this. And I'm basically economically illiterate anyway. This is a call-out for a communications strategy.

This much we all know already:

(1) the Coalition government has, somehow, successfully sold the public the idea that the cuts are a natural fact like gravity, rather than a political fact like Margaret Thatcher's hairdo.

(2) They've done this by saying, endlessly, that the national debt is the biggest it's ever been.

(3) Which is technically true: except that any chancellor, at almost any time since 1900, can say that national debt is the largest it's ever been.



See!

(4) This is OK because the size of our economy is, er, almost always the largest ever, and growing continually. So the observation is basically meaningless.

(5) In fact, net national debt AS A PROPORTION OF GDP is lower than at any time between 1920 and 1970; and interest payments on that debt are lower than at any time between 1920 and 2000. This doesn't mean it's not rising worryingly, and needs ultimately to be reduced. And in the boom periods after the 2nd world war when we were building the welfare state and public debt was still massive we had, er, quite a lot of American aid. But it does show graphically that the cuts don't need to be anywhere near as deep or fast as they are: and that this speed and depth isn't sound fiscal policy, but a purely ideological effort to decimate the state etc. etc.





So: how can the British left get the British public past the GCSE-business-studies-level mistake that was the basis for the Chancellor's last budget speech?

I reckon one good start is these *brilliant* graphs courtesy of the *brilliant* (and politically conservative) UK public spending website.

Between now and Mayday I'm going to wear these on my FOREHEAD if necessary.

ps. I know, I know - the bond markets (thanks Jon). Markets schmarkets, that's what I say.

No, Dong

So. Johnnie Walker-loving mass murderer Kim Jong-il may be dying. Although it's obviously difficult to tell - he was apparently dying from a stroke in 2008. And from fatal pancreatic cancer in 2009. He's such a tease.

The real question, of course, is whether it's actually going to make any difference if the loveable little Nork-knome kicks it? Media coverage of the Democratic People's Republic seems to suffer more acutely than that of any other country from 'dictatoritis': the implausible belief that the intractability of an international crisis is entirely due to the fact that a single uncompromising psychopath has, despite the political handicap of judgement-obscuring mental illness, somehow managed to seize and maintain control of an entire nation. Just displace Kim and his unhinged family, goes this line of argument, and a new dawn rises over Pyongyang. And while we've all learned to love to hate Bashir, Saddam, Uncle Bob, nowhere has international strategy bought into a dictator's own personality myth as completely as in the case of North Korea.

It seems to be North Korea's 'crime as foreign policy' that encourages the Team America theory of Korean IR. The ballistic missile proliferation. The mass currency forgery. The dodgy Ilyushins laden with weapons on their way to Iran. They all make it easier to think of North Korea as a country captured by a single mad criminal family. In fact, states captured by mafias and crime dynasties (rather than wider elites) seem to tend to be weak states with a lot of ungoverned political space (think central Asia), not highly controlled autocracies like North Korea. Why shouldn't we see the Korean situation instead as something much more common: a state with a corrupt but comprehensive government apparatus, a predictably self-interested elite, locked like others into an intractable but familiar strategic deadlock with a militarily competitive neighbour?

Ballistic missile testing is a case in point. When the Norks test a missile, as in 2009, the Security Council does a Chapter VII nut. Quite right too. It's not often remarked, though, that South Korea also likes ballistic missiles. Enough to have a clandestine procurement programme. It's just that no-one talks about it like that, because it's called a 'civilian space programme', and it does ostensibly useful things like launching 'satellites for climate change research' (so that's all right then). Everyone's very sympathetic when South Korean ballistic missile (sorry, satellite launch vehicle) tests blow up. As in June this year, when South Korea's KSLV-1 rocket exploded moments after take-off. How did the BBC report it?

South Korea's first launch of the two-stage KSLV-1, in August last year, failed to place its satellite payload into the proper orbit.

Four months previously, an attempted space launch by North Korea was deemed to have failed when the US reported that both rocket stages had fallen into the Pacific Ocean.

The North's launch was seen as a cover for a long-range missile test, and prompted UN sanctions.

Pyongyang had voiced irritation at the South's rocket development, but most other powers in the region accepted that its attempt was part of a peaceful civilian programme.

But space rockets are, um, ballistic missiles. Few space programmes are purely civilian or commercial. Even if they genuinely have civilian objectives, they're always developing countries' ability to launch warheads too. Is it any wonder that North Korea gets a bit priapic (and vice-versa, of course)?

Interestingly, as everyone was comiserating earlier this year about South Korea's rocket test failure, a little-reported Florida court case opened an interesting window into South Korea's space programme. It's a grubbily instructive little tale.

According to the court papers: Juwhan Yun, a South-Korean-born naturalised US citizen running a New Jersey-registered company called Blue Hill Corporation, was arrested in April 2009. In May 2010 he finally entered a guilty plea, admitting to brokering a series of illegal arms deals - illegal because Blue Hill Corporation was completely unregistered as an arms broker. Yun had apparently acted for the Korean government to procure everything from Nike missile components, Russian Sukhoi-27 fighter jets, and US-made F-5 and F-16 parts, to an 'RD-180 propulsion system', also from Russia. According to correspondence between Yun and a confidential informant quoted in the investigating agent's affidavit, the RD-180 propulsion system was intended for the KSLV-2, the successor rocket to the KSLV-1 'climate change research satellite' launch rocket that failed this year. Yen apparently told the informant's company that Russia had recently refused to sell the RD-180 rocket engines to South Korea.

While insisting he wanted to do 'legitimate business', Yun appears to have been trying to make arrangements for technology transfer to South Korea in spite of the Russian refusal: leveraging the informant's Russian contacts to obtain RD-180 manuals and technical documentation from Russia, and then trying to find a "retired expert/specialist with much experience at the right job" - apparently approaching a scientist at the University of Central Florida's Aerospace Program - to teach the South Koreans how to nativise the RD-180 rocket engines.



In his post-arrest statements Jun stated that he was working for a "subcontractor for the KSLV programme". The company isn't named in the court papers, but we are coyly told that "a check of public source information via the internet verified that the company identified by Yun is listed as a member of the Korea Defense Industry Association and was previously involved in the Altitude and Orbit Control Subsystem and the Propulsion Subsystem development for the Korean KOMPSAT-1 satellite." It doesn't exactly require a super-sleuth to repeat the googling. Which company? Well I wouldn't want to libel anyone, but, um, think of one of South Korea's largest conglomerates, rhyming with "Whanwha".

If Yun was telling the truth, then it's nice that South Korea's leading industrialists, and its government, were still doing business with him. Because he has some serious form: here he is in 1989,

just after being sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison (and barred permanently from the US arms brokering register) for yet more illegal arms trading. This first time round, Yun had similarly set up shop in the US to buy munitions for South Korea, and ended up acting as an agent for a South Korean trading company while negotiating with a notorious UK arms dealer to buy bombs filled with Sarin nerve gas that Yun told his contacts were for sale to Iran (the deal never went through).

Hmmm. Clandestine ballistic missile procurement? Government-linked arms procurers trying to flog nerve gas to Iran on the side? Which Korea would that be then?

I'm not trying to equate North Korea with South Korea. For instance, the South Korean government doesn't like human rights very much, but it's yet to preside over the starvation of several millions of its citizens.

Nor are South Korea's government, companies or agents unusually dodgy. The point is simply that all governments under military and strategic pressure get involved in this kind of dodgy stuff. The Korean stand-off is a conflict like many others, with aggression, clandestinity and strategic deadlock on both sides. Its resolution, equally, is likely to require political movement on both sides - compromise, not a lucky bout of pancreatic cancer.