AP

This November 16, 2010 file photo shows Victor Bout being led off a flight from Bangkok to New York during his extradition to face trial charges of transporting weapons.

Ivor Powell

AT THE start of proceedings against Russian arms trafficker Viktor Bout – the “Merchant of Death” – in New York, State prosecutor Brendan McGuire opined “this is not a complicated case, it’s all on tape”, and suggested that the jury should not have a lot of trouble reaching a guilty verdict.

The jury spent only eight hours deliberating a case that had taken more than a decade to bring to court. Bout was guilty on all four counts: conspiracy to kill US nationals and US officials (two counts), conspiracy to deal in anti-aircraft missiles; and conspiracy to provide material and support to a designated terrorist organisation.

In a textbook entrapment operation played out between December 2007 and March 2008, undercover operatives of the US Drug Enforcement Agency had brought him to rights.

They had him willingly, even enthusiastically participating in a plot to provide the notorious Fuerzas Armadas Revolucinarias de Colombia (Farc) with hi-tech military grade material; making sketches of the surface-to-air missiles he could supply for use against US planes overflying Farc’s guerrilla bases and the cocaine plantations and operations used to fund its campaign against the Colombian government; spelling out how he would airdrop armaments – including 100 surface-to-air missiles, 740 mortars, 20 000 to 30 000 AK-47s and 10 million rounds of ammunition – in a desolate corner of Colombia using combat parachutes.

They had him offering to launder Farc’s drug money through Russia against a consideration of 40 percent of the currency’s face value. But most of all they had him declaring “we have the same enemy” when talking to DEA undercover operatives he believed were commanders of a mortal enemy of the US administration, and was therefore motivated to go the extra mile.

In the face of such declared hostility to the US, it was going to take a lot more than attorney Albert Dayan’s defence to the effect that Bout was stringing the DEA’s agents along and interested only in offloading two cargo planes on them to get a thin-skinned US jury to doubt the merits of the case. On Wednesday they turned in a unanimous verdict of guilty on all charges, dooming Bout to a mandatory sentence of 25 years – and possibly life – in prison.

It became clear that there was far more at stake than just the misadventure of a rogue entrepreneur crossing the line of international probity and UN sanctions in search of a quick profit.

While the trial was under way, a letter was written from the Russian Duma attesting to Bout’s good character and questioning the motives of targeting Bout. After the verdict was returned, the Russian Foreign Ministry was seeking his return to the motherland, claiming Bout had been exposed to exceptional political pressure by the US.

The key to understanding the Russian response might lie in an under-reported piece of testimony by Bout’s former associate Andrew Smulian, who served as the unwitting middleman between the DEA’s undercover agents and Bout in an entrapment operation orchestrated by a South Africa-based aviator designated in the trial literature as CS-1.

Smulian said he had been taken to Bout’s private Moscow office in what seemed to be an official military complex. Overnight, on learning what the DEA’s undercover operatives were looking for, Bout was able to secure surface-to-air missiles he said were available for immediate delivery. He specified these were especially effective against US helicopter gunships like the Apache. Bout was also in a position to offer the Farc rebels their own helicopter gunships for a price.

But the role played by the Americans – and by the South African security establishment – also bears scrutiny.

There are clear indications that while Bout was operating out of South Africa in the 1990s, his activities would have been on the radar of the South African intelligence establishment.

As was confirmed in the New York trial, Bout’s then associate – later his Judas – Smulian, was, at the time that he set up a chain of air freighting businesses for Bout in South Africa for him to ferry his deadly cargos to African hot spots, an asset of South African intelligence.

The South African government failed conspicuously to act against Bout and his South African-based operations despite urgings from, among others, the UN and British government minister Peter Hain.

Instead, regular cargoes in violation of international sanctions made their way, unhindered, to African trouble zones, most noticeably to the Unita rebels in Angola.

Sentencing is scheduled for February 8.