Outlaws Inc. by Matt Potter Read Free Book Online Page A

for discreet, speedy transportation to satisfy.
    Suddenly, and to this day exactly how remains a mystery, these men with no money of their own and a few solid army connections were in business. They flew whatever came their way, from that first “liberated” Candid in Kazakhstan to whatever hastily assembled patchworks of leased engines and borrowed airframes someone had losing money on a parking berth and wanted crewed. They flew for others and flew whatever unlisted cargo they could for themselves: pilot fish for the new breed of sharks that were suddenly circling international waters. And they soon found they had three “invisible” competitive advantages that would prove crucial as their business activities grew.
    The first was a vast, loyal contact network. With ex-Soviet military and crew stationed everywhere from the coast of Afghanistan to Angola, they enjoyed the benefits of the world’s biggest old-boy club. For discreet missions at short notice, reliable recommendations—preferably not just for capable crew, but the right sort of people—were often the only way to staff up extra charters. And reliable connections on the ground at destination were often the only way to ensure customs could either be successfully negotiated—or negotiated with.
    The second subtle advantage enjoyed by ex-Soviet airmen taking to the privatized skies was a deep knowledge of mission terrain that went way beyond most other pilots’. Between 1979 and 1991, Soviet Il-76 pilots made more than 14,700 flights into Afghanistan, transporting 786,200 service personnel and 315,800 tons of freight. Soviet support for proxy regimes in Africa, Asia, and Latin America like Angola, Cuba, Afghanistan, Korea, Vietnam, and Chile throughout the Cold War meant a large number of the pilots knew more about the airstrips, weather, terrain, and even local infrastructure, customs, and connections than anyone quite realized.
    The killer difference, though, was in these DIY import-export barons’ relationship with their aircraft. After all, having trained, graduated, captained, and seen active service in Il-76s throughout their careers, often fixing engines by hand and stripping down the interiors to accommodate more men or equipment under duress and in sometimes extreme conditions, they knew their plane like it was part of them. And that meant they knew its hidden secrets.
    Today, British aviation consultant Brian Johnson-Thomas sits on the UN’s panels of experts on the traffic in destabilizing commodities throughout the world. But as an investigative journalist and former flight manager, he’s witnessed these crews’ sheer grit, talent, and ingenuity up close. He’s also come to admire them, cautioning me when we meet that they are among the finest aviators he’s ever seen, and “certainly no worse than anyone else when it comes to moral choices.” A strapping, white-bearded fiftysomething with a soft Celtic burr and a tweed jacket, he cuts an incongruous figure among the bony, glazed faces of the former Soviet crews and deathtrap planes with whom he flew for years for NGOs and monitoring groups. This experience has given him a rare insider’s view of their operations … and their hardware.
    â€œPeople who don’t actually fly them don’t realize that Il-76s especially have all these hidden advantages to them,” he says. “For example, they can load and unload, land and take off without any ground assistance, so whatever you do, you don’t need anyone else’s help. But the real surprise for me was the hidden spaces. Nobody ever looked beyond the cargo hold—not once—but it’s an open secret among the crews that there are all these spaces down in the belly of the plane. You’re flying these things all over the world, and nobody but you knows that there’s a good fifteen tons of stowage beyond what it says on the operator’s