Convicted arms dealer Viktor Bout has begun serving his 25-year federal prison sentence at the medium-security federal prison at Marion, Ill. A federal prison locator confirmed today that Bout was transferred to Marion from the U.S. Bureau of Prisons’ transfer facility in Oklahoma City, where he has been housed for more than 10 days. Bout had been previously held in two detention centers in New York, where he was convicted last November on four conspiracy counts related to his attempt to sell weapons to undercover informants posing as South American terrorists.
The prison site shows Bout will be eligible for early release on December, 15, 2029, when he would be approximately 61 years old. The Russian foreign ministry is pressing to have Bout serve out his American sentence in a prison in his homeland under an exchange permitted under a U.S.-Russia treaty. That prospect appears remote — certainly not before the November U.S. presidential election.
In other developments, newly-released CIA documents made available by George Washington University’s National Security Archive reveal how dependent Osama bin Laden was on secret cash shipments funneled on Ariana Airlines — the Afghan national airline controlled in the late 1990s by Taliban militants and aided by Viktor Bout’s air cargo network. A once-classified June 9, 1999 National Intelligence Daily warned that bin Laden was using Ariana flights from the United Arab Emirates to restock his cash reserves.
“Bin Laden has come to rely on cash shipments aboard Ariana flights from the UAE as a key method of obtaining spendable funds,” the CIA report warned. The agency urged harsh sanctions on Ariana but also cautioned that “closing of Ariana’s UAE offices would force them to find alternative — and most likely less secure — carriers, routes, and methods for moving Bin Laden’s cash. The money changers might be forced to hire third-country airlines, private aircraft, and possibly fly the cash to Pakistan for overland delivery to Afghanistan — a slowe and riskier method.”
The U.S. and United Nations did impose sanctions on Ariana later in 1999, ordering its international offices to close and shutting down all international flight routes. “Merchant of Death” describes how Viktor Bout’s network aided Ariana by secretly selling the company a dozen air cargo planes and also by aiding the Taliban in clandestine flights into the country after sanctions were imposed.
Bout has long insisted that he never aided al Qaeda or the Taliban despite evidence to the contrary. At his 2011 trial, a federal jury convicted Bout of trying to sell anti-aircraft missiles and other weapons to informants posing as members of the FARC, a South American narcoterrorist group.
–1999-06-09 — “NEAR EAST: UAE: Imposition of Sanctions Could Disrupt Bin Laden’s Finances,” National Intelligence Daily, Central Intelligence Agency