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Money, Guns, Planes, and the Man Who Makes War Possible
Wiley
July 2007
On Sale: July 9, 2007
320 pages
ISBN: 0470048662
EAN: 9780470048665
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Biography
What do the Taliban, indicted Liberian war criminal Charles
Taylor, and the United States government have in common?
They have all done business with the man who put the "blood"
in blood diamonds—a little-known but immensely wealthy and
powerful arms dealer who has flooded Africa and Southwest
Asia with weapons of war. In Merchant of Death, two respected journalists tell the
incredible story of Viktor Bout, the Russian weapons
supplier whose global network has changed the way modern
warfare is fought. Bout's vast enterprise of guns, planes,
and money has fueled internecine slaughter in Africa and
aided both militant Islamic fanatics in Afghanistan and the
American military in Iraq. This fast-paced and terrifying true story reveals that, as
the world celebrated the end of the Cold War, Bout emerged
from a murky post-Soviet intelligence background and quietly
amassed a huge fleet of aging Russian cargo planes. His
intelligence contacts, aircraft, and access to sophisticated
weapons helped him forge lethal alliances across the Third
World. Before long, he sat atop an immense and complex
empire: a relentless international war machine able to
deliver anything from AK-47s and missile launchers to
artillery and attack helicopters, along with millions of
rounds of ammunition, to anyone willing to pay. And pay they
did, in Rwanda and the Congo, in Liberia and Sierra Leone,
in Sudan and Afghanistan, and many stops in between. Merchant of Death also reveals that, despite the efforts of
a small circle of U.S. officials and international
investigators who worked doggedly to shut down Bout's arms
pipelines, the West has done little to dismantle this
incredible transnational empire. In fact, far from attacking
this provider of essential support to despots, insurgents,
and terrorists around the world, the United States paid him
millions of dollars to fly weapons and supplies to the U.S.
military and private contractors in Iraq. Authors Douglas Farah and Stephen Braun detail how, through
his own ingenuity and a staggering lack of resolve in the
international community, Bout has successfully skirted every
attempt to undo his enterprise and flourishes, while the
world's premier intelligence services have largely given up
the chase. The only question that remains is how will his
unparalleled career end? With his arrest, or his retirement
to a lavish, guarded estate in some remote African nation? Compelling and timely, Merchant of Death combines the
technical precision of a Tom Clancy epic with the insights
and ironies of a John LeCarré novel to tell a thrilling and
appalling real-life tale of relentless greed, devastating
warfare, and breathtaking international intrigue.
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