Outlaws Inc. by Matt Potter

Author:Matt Potter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA

SLIGHT, MOUSY-HAIRED, AND leather jacketed, Andrei Alexeivich Soldatov looks more like the bass player in an indie band than the scourge of the Russian secret service’s more maverick tendencies. And like Mickey’s opposing angel, he’s also something of a Zelig, popping up at the scene at the most crucial points in the post-Soviet story. At just twenty-one, he became a reporter for the newspaper Sevodnya and paper-hopped, covering the Beslan school siege and massacre and the Moscow theater-hostage crisis. He’s met defectors, followed spies, and uncovered Kremlin complicity in criminal behavior. But now aged thirty-four, it’s as an investigator into the black ops and extrajudicial activities of Russia’s secret service networks, past and present, that Soldatov is best known.

“A lot of these flights in and out of Afghanistan are clearly enjoying some protection,” he agrees. He explains that his suspicions run to the idea that it may in fact be in Moscow’s interests to keep a pipeline for secret cargoes open, and to know what’s in other people’s. He also suspects that a little visible heroin trafficking into Russia itself, with the odd carefully managed seizure here and there, plays into the hands of a Kremlin keen to point out NATO’s inability to stamp out the smack trade at Russia’s back door—perhaps works even as a pretext for greater intervention in Central Asia once more. “There’s a new stage of the Great Game going on,” he smiles, recalling the covert jockeying for military and commercial influence in Afghanistan and India between Britain and Russia in the nineteenth century. So much for disorganized crime.

But if someone is killing, protecting, raiding, or controlling all the traffickers using these flights, and if someone’s letting just enough heroin into Russia to put pressure on NATO to exit Afghanistan, well, the question is, who? And just how high up do you need to go in order to find them?

“I always say to everybody, I’m not the police,” laughs Peter Danssaert when I call on him again, at his office in the dockside quarter of Antwerp, Belgium’s historic diamond hub. This time I need help understanding what looks more and more like secret state collusion and less like a few freelance bad guys. “I’m not in this line of business to put people behind bars or whatever else.”

For Danssaert, these questions are part of what attracted him to the job of researching trafficking flights. “For me it’s a puzzle—you have a problem to solve. If someone tells you there’s an arms flight over here, or some arms are being sent there, for me the motivation is to find out how it’s done, who’s doing it. How does it fit into the bigger picture?

”You see, many times, these arms brokers and freight forwarders who are doing illicit and gray stuff are also doing legitimate stuff. And in a lot of cases, they’re being hired by the same governments to do the same thing legally that they’re doing illegally, or at least the same thing openly that they’re

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