Today, Explained - The prisoner swap for Brittney Griner

Episode Date: December 8, 2022

US officials are sending the “Merchant of Death” — a notorious arms dealer named Viktor Bout — back to Russia in exchange for the WNBA star’s release. We revisit our conversation with author Douglas Farah, author of “Merchant of Death: Money, Guns, Planes, and the Man Who Makes War Possible.” This episode was produced by Hady Mawajdeh, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Paul Mounsey, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained   Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A month ago, standing together with her wife, Sherelle, in the Oval Office, I spoke with Brittany Griner. Big news for Brittany today. She's safe. She's on a plane. She's on her way home. After months of being unjustly detained in Russia, held under intolerable circumstances, Brittany will soon be back in the arms of her loved ones, and she should have been there

all along. What President Biden did not mention Thursday morning was who the United States had to give up to get Greiner back, the merchant of death. These are hard deals. Victor Boot is a real horrible criminal. Brittany Greiner, Paul Whelan, they're innocent Americans. So when you do these trades, they're uncomfortable trades. One of the greatest athletes alive for one of the most notorious arms dealers in history. In the wake of this historic prisoner swap, we're revisiting a Today Explained episode from August on the merchant of death, Victor Boot.

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Visit connectsontario.ca. Today, today, explain. So let's just get right out the gate with this question. Victor Boot for Brittany Griner, fair trade? I don't think it's a fair trade, but I think it's a necessary trade. I think that Victor has actual blood on his hands for many conflicts and has done horrendous things or empowered people to do horrendous things for the years he was trafficking in weapons to Charles Taylor in Liberia, the RUF in Sierra Leone, Laurent Kabila in Democratic Republic of Congo, the Northern Alliance, and then the Taliban in Afghanistan. So there's nothing fair about it in terms of absolute justice. But I do think that he is not in a position to wreak a lot more havoc in his life. And I think Brittany Griner is in significant danger in Russia because

of her sexual orientation, because of who she is, and because of the prize that the Russians have in her that it's worth the trade at this point to bring her back. This is Douglas Farah. He's the co-author of Merchant of Death, Money, Guns, Planes, and The Man Who Makes War Possible. It's the definitive book about Victor Boot. It came out a few years after Lord of War, which is the definitive movie about Victor Boot, in which a Victor Boot-type arms dealer is played by Nicolas Cage. We assume by this point you're familiar with Brittany Griner,

one of the greatest basketball players alive, but in case you've never seen the movie or haven't yet read Douglas' book, we asked him to tell us about Victor Boot. Victor Boot came out of the Soviet intelligence structures. He was working in Africa as a young man, late 20s, early 30s, when the wall goes down. Thousands and thousands of West Germans come to make the point that the wall has suddenly become irrelevant. And he has this incredible bolt of lightning moment, road to Damascus moment, where he realizes that there are all of these aircrafts sitting around the former Soviet

Union that no one's flying because no one has money for fuel. And there are all of these weapons depots where there are massive amounts of weapons, where the guards aren't being paid, where you can buy, you know, boatloads of AK-47s or light anti-tank weapons or rocket-propelled grenades, essentially for a song. We're sold by the kilo.. They're second-hand weapons, but they're still okay. So he began flying the aircraft to the United Arab Emirates. From the United Arab Emirates, set up a distribution hub where he could fly to get the weapons, bring them back, and then start distributing around to all the wars

that were breaking out in Africa at this point is where he initially got started. Victor began in the late 1990s, 96, 97, 98. Bout interwove his arms trafficking empire with a seemingly innocuous logistics business. His clients included rebel groups and militias from Congo to Angola and Liberia. In Afghanistan, he sold guns to Islamist Taliban insurgents and their foes in the pro-Western Northern Alliance. It could have started earlier. No one knew who he was for a long time. By the late 1990s, Boot was a legend in the shadowy world of illicit arms dealing, so elusive that the only two pictures that surfaced of him back then were taken without

Boot's knowledge by a Belgian photographer. I was hearing as a reporter the name Victor delivering weapons, the Brits, the UN, other people had picked up that there was somebody supplying these weapons. But I don't think anybody really knew until the British parliamentarian stood up in British Parliament and called him the merchant of death and publicly identified him. That was the first sort of coming out of Victor Boot as a public figure at that point. What makes him the Merchant of Death? It's such a incredible, powerful, and horrifying title. Was he wildly successful in comparison to other arms dealers around the world?

Oh, without question. He could move this stuff and drop it with pinpoint accuracy to any desert, to any jungle, to any other remote place in the world, right into the hands of what I refer to as the potpourri of global scum. Many people could sell you lots of AK-47s across Africa. I was living there in the times of the war and covering the wars. It wasn't hard to acquire crappy old Soviet weapons. It wasn't hard to acquire a few hand grenades. But what Victor Boot brought to the table was the ability to deliver attack helicopters, deliver anti-tank weapons that could be fired through entire villages

and burn a village down with one shot. The fact that you could bring in high-caliber machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades, no one else could do that. After the wall came down, $32 billion worth of arms were stolen and resold from Ukraine alone, one of the greatest heists of the 20th century. The primary market was Africa, 11 major conflicts involving 32 countries in less than a decade, a gunrunner's wet dream.

And so as he built his reputation, both sides of the same conflict would hire him on numerous occasions. So in what was then Zaire, you had Mobutu, the dictator who had been there a long time, being chased out of office by Laurent Kabila's forces sweeping across the DRC. And Victor was selling weapons to both sides. And while Kabila's forces were trying to kill Mobutu literally as he was fleeing the country, he flew out of the country on Victor Booth's aircraft. So he had armed the people who were trying to shoot down his own airplane. And the president, and that's what made him so incredibly successful, was that he could do all of that.

And one of the questions I asked, and my co-author asked a lot of people, why did both sides tolerate this? Why didn't someone kill him, right? If you're explaining to me. And they were like, well, you don't kill the mailman. Bleak. He's the one person who could deliver. You just don't kill the mailman. Like, are you stupid? And I was like, well, maybe I am. But that was consistently the answer. He did what he said he would do at the price he said he would do it at, and that made him unusually successful.

Who was his supplier this whole time? Is it just Russia? It was the entire former Soviet bloc where all of these arsenals had been abandoned. Ukraine wasn't the only former state with an unpaid army and stockpiles of guns. There was Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Belarus, all there for the taking. So if someone showed up and paid the commander $1,000 and said, I'll take this load of weapons out, thank you very much, fine. And most of the Soviet-era major arsenals had airstrips built into their facilities, so he could land there, load up, and fly out.

And it was, you know, apparently a relatively easy process. It sounds like he did a lot of dirty deeds, especially on the continents of Africa. Does his involvement in them play a central role in accelerating the conflict or accelerating the end of the conflict? How important a player is he in these conflicts? His ability to supply weapons to some of the worst warlords on the planet was, I think, transformational for those wars. Elevating bloody conflicts from machetes and single-shot rifles to AK-47s, not by the thousands, but by the tens of thousands. When these wars started, most people had hunting rifles and machetes and they were nasty and they were palacious but when you add ak-47s and light

anti-tank weapons and rpgs obviously the human toll escalates dramatically he transformed these young adolescent warriors into insidious mindless maniacally driven killing machines that operated with assembly line efficiencies. Victor Boot, in my eyes, is one of the most dangerous men on the face of the earth. On the face of the earth. Without a doubt. Do we have any idea the amount of people he armed? Do we have any idea the amount of people he armed?

Do we have any idea how many people his arms may have killed? I don't think anyone's ever done that calculation. But if you look at the wars, you have Liberia, you have Charles Taylor, which are tens of thousands of victims of that war. And neighboring Sierra Leone, where they're fighting over weapons, the group supported by Charles Taylor, another tens of thousands. He was in the Angola conflict, arming both sides of that conflict. He was in the Democratic Republic of Congo, arming both sides of that conflict. He then was supplying weapons to the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan and then to the Taliban.

So I mean, I think, you know, easily tens of thousands of people were directly impacted by the weapons that were being supplied by Victor Booth. Douglas and I were mostly talking about Africa and the Middle East, but I asked him about something that's often overlooked when people talk about Victor Booth's resume. He was, at times, an ally to the United States. And Douglas said this is one of the primary reasons he thought this trade should be on the table, whether just or not. The most recent case where American officials and American private security firms were colluding with Victor Boot was during the Iraq war. In fact, during the Iraq conflict, when hardly anyone would fly supplies to U.S. troops on the ground, Victor Boot flew hundreds of missions for U.S. and British and other forces into a war zone that was very important to us.

And as my co-author Steve Braun documented in the book, American officers who were making those decisions understood who Victor Boot was. In fact, they publicly acknowledged it at one point. But their trade-off and their conversations with us was, do we let our people on the ground die from lack of ammunition and food because this guy is a criminal? Or do we deal with the criminal and get the people on the ground what they need? So how does he end up imprisoned in the United States? Initially, there is a arrest warrant put out for him by Interpol,

the international police, a red notice for his arrest. He goes back to Moscow. On what grounds? On what crime? Weapons trafficking and violations of numerous laws in Belgium, primarily, where he had had a hub of operations. And so he goes back to Moscow, 2001, 2002. And then over time, the U.S. intelligence services and the British and others who were monitoring him began to pick up clear indications that the FARC rebels in Colombia, who at this themselves to intermediaries, Victor Booth, as FARC, convinced Victor Booth that they were, in fact, FARC, and got Victor Booth against long odds to actually travel to a country, Thailand, that had an extradition treaty with the United States, which seemed preposterous when it happened because he was always very cognizant of whether there were extradition treaties or not. For some reason, he decided to go to Thailand. And then he said

in the meetings with the undercover agents that, you know, he wanted to give them weapons. He hated Americans. He knew the weapons would be used to kill Americans. Wow. He said all that? Eduardo and Comandante talk about how they want sniper sites for the rifles that they have so that they could, quote, start blowing the heads off American pilots. Booth's response immediately is yes. They let him run for a while because he was on such a roll. And that's what ultimately he's convicted in the U.S. of trying to sell arms to a designated terrorist organization, the FARC, knowing that the weapons could be used to kill Americans. That's what he's ultimately brought down for. Do his lawyers present in his defense the fact that the United States did business with him?

That was raised in the trial, but not as a significant point because the trial focused very narrowly on the events that led to the arrest in Thailand. Victor Boot wrote to the judge basically saying, look, I've also worked for the U.S. companies. I've flown 140 flights. They've paid me six million dollars. And so why would you be convicting me? You know, the way the case was structured, they didn't charge him with a lot of other stuff. He was only defending that particular charge related to that particular incident. And so he was convicted. And he's sentenced to 25 years in a federal prison in Marion, Illinois. When does he start serving that sentence? 2011. Over the course of these 11 years, has Russia ever made any stink

about his imprisonment? Constantly, yes. From the very beginning, they have. They have had their Congress, their Duma has issued numerous declarations asking for his release. Every time a U.S. person has been arrested, they've always raised the possibility of an exchange for Victor. So yes, this is certainly not the first time they've raised the issue of trading for Victor Boot. But this is the first time they might actually get him back. It's the first time we know that the U.S. has actually considered doing anything like that. Yes, I think it's the first time one could say that he may actually go back. You're listening to a conversation with author Douglas Farah that we originally ran on Today Explained back in August of this year. We dug it out of the archive the second we heard that Brittany Griner was swapped for Victor Boot today. More on what this trade means for the

awkward business of international prisoner swaps in a minute on the program. easier thanks to their digital picture frames. They were named the number one digital photo frame by Wirecutter. Aura frames make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame. When you give an aura frame as a gift, you can personalize it, you can preload it with a thoughtful message, maybe your favorite photos. Our colleague Andrew tried an aura frame for himself. So setup was super simple. In my case, we were celebrating my grandmother's birthday. And she's very fortunate. She's got 10 grandkids. And so we wanted to surprise her with the order frame.

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who we spoke to back in August when the news of this trade first hit. That's when I asked him who concocted this trade, one of the best basketball players who's ever lived for one of the most notorious arms dealers who's ever lived. I don't know, and I think I would like to know. I remember when, because my co-author and I were talking, he was sending me messages, he was monitoring everything,

and I was traveling and saying, they're talking about Victor Boot now, they're talking about Victor for Greiner. In the coming days, I expect to speak with Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov for the first time since the war began. I plan to raise an issue that's a top priority for us, the release of Americans Paul Whelan and Brittany Greiner, who've been wrongfully detained

and must be allowed to come home. And I was like, what? He said, that might actually be serious. And I was like, what? But Douglas was pretty sure this originated somewhere near the top. I don't know who was behind it on the U.S. side. I think the fact that Secretary Blinken sort of owned it a few days ago clearly shows it was made at a very senior level. It wasn't some cowboy out there thinking creatively and trying to do something. We put a substantial proposal on the table weeks ago to facilitate the release. Our governments have communicated repeatedly and directly on that proposal. And I'll use the conversation to follow up personally and, I hope, move us toward a resolution.

How are we supposed to wrap our heads around how insanely lopsided this is? Your rough estimation is Victor Boot may be responsible for the deaths of, I don't know, tens of thousands of brown people and Brittany Griner maybe smokes some weed once in a while? I don't think it's a fair trade. I have gone out of my way in talking about this and in our book and the other things to point out how absolutely horrific what Victor Boot did, what he enabled people to do over a period of years.

And you talked about the tens of thousands of deaths, but there are equal number more of rapes. There are that many burned villages. There are that many children who were kidnapped, often forced to kill their own parents, burn their own villages and become child soldiers. So I have no illusions about who Victor Boot was. My main point is that he could be up for parole in a couple of years anyway. He's no longer, I don't think, going to be able to function in the world he helped create at that time. And Brittany, as a gay woman, well-identified, being held in society,

where at least the upper echelons are extremely anti-gay, anti-LGBTQ community. So that's a significant risk. And if you can get her out without causing the rest of the world significant damage, it should be considered. I don't think it's that Victor Boot did anything like Britney did. She clearly has done nothing remotely comparable. Is there any fear amongst people like yourself who've covered Victor Boot or perhaps from the United States government at this point that Victor Boot could sort of rearm and re-up his supply and reestablish himself as a prolific arms dealer? I think not, because I think he was the product of a specific moment in history when everything aligned for the ability to take out weapons and aircraft in a chaotic world. Putin in Russia no longer presides over a chaotic world. He has everything extremely regimented. Everything that Victor Boot was doing with the Taliban, with the Northern Alliance,

with Charles Taylor, was predicated on a personal trust between him and those leaders. You can't just walk into places and start selling weapons and doing those things. All of those networks have disappeared. Those people are no longer engaged. He has none of those contacts left. I asked Douglas if a trade like this encourages more detainments of big, famous Americans. Is someone going to kidnap LeBron or Nick Cage the next time they're in unfriendly territory? I think that's a very real concern, and I do not minimize that.

I believe we're sending the message that it is good business to deal in the capturing, kidnapping, detaining of American citizens. I just don't think this is the right way to go about it. My basic premise with Russia is that they are so far off the rails in regard to international law and human rights. They're going to grab whoever they're going to grab, whether there's a trade or not. They're operating now in their own logic, which is why they invaded Ukraine and have done all these things. I do think the question about other countries, particularly China, because they're a big country and can do it, may give this pause. And I think that that is something that has to be considered.

And it has to be considered by people who want to travel to these areas as well. I mean, I don't think anybody in their right mind right now would want to travel to Russia as a basketball player or a tourist because the risk is too high. But I don't think that will change if they give Britney back. You know, I don't think that that basic equation will change. Swapping prisoners, of course, isn't a new practice. We even saw one earlier this year between Russia and the United States,

and we covered it on the show with Trevor Reed. Is it ever even? Are these trades ever sort of comparable crimes or suspected crimes or accusations or whatever it might be? No, I mean, they really aren't. If you look, you know, you have the Palestinian-Israeli swaps all the time where you get hundreds of people out of prison in exchange for three students. Numerically, it may not be equal. But I think, again, in situations like that, you look at the preponderance of what brings the most good to the most people. At the end of the day, you have to calculate, are Americans better off and their security better off by doing the trade than not?

But ultimately, the president of the United States has to make that decision. And I think in this case, it's the right decision. But I don't think you can look at it in terms of absolute fairness because in this case, it's the right decision. But I don't think you can look at it in terms of absolute fairness, because in this case, it is horrendously unfair. Do you think there's something that these sort of international prisoner swaps teaches us about how the world works? Well, I think it shows that every country has specific interests that it wants to protect and defend.

And I think one of the things I would like to think about with the United States in this particular case is we are willing to show compassion and a level of mercy that Russia would never be able to share in a similar situation. I don't think it makes us necessarily morally superior or anything like that, but I think that being able to show compassion, especially when a sentence has been served. Victor Booth's been in for 11 years. He was actually held since 2008 in really crappy conditions in Thailand, so he has those three years added onto it. So I think that the sum of what he has paid, if he stays in prison here and gets out in two years,

if we can just do it now and get Brittany back and save her life in a way, I think to me that is an act of mercy for Victor and an act of compassion for Brittany. Douglas Farah is one of the authors of Merchant of Death, Money, Guns, Planes, and The Man Who Makes War Possible. We spoke back in August of this year.

President Biden said this morning that Britney Greiner would be home within 24 hours, but Paul Whelan remains detained in Russia. Sadly, for totally illegitimate reasons, Russia is treating Paul's case differently than Brittany's. And while we have not yet succeeded in securing Paul's release, we are not giving up. We will never give up. Our show today was produced by Hadi Mawagdi, edited by Matthew Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and Victoria Dominguez, and mixed by Paul Robert Mounsey. We used some tape from 60 Minutes. Thanks, 60 Minutes.

I'm Sean Ramos for M. This is Today Explained.