WASHINGTON — Air cargo companies allegedly tied to reputed Russian arms trafficker Victor Bout have received millions of dollars in federal funds from U.S. contractors in Iraq, even though the Bush administration has worked for three years to rein in his enterprises.
Planes linked to Bout's shadowy network continued to fly into Iraq, according to government records and interviews with officials, despite the Treasury Department freezing his assets in July and placing him on a blacklist for allegedly violating international arms sanctions.
Largely under the auspices of the Pentagon, U.S. agencies including the Army Corps of Engineers and the Air Force, and the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority, which governed Iraq until last summer, have allowed their private contractors to do business with the Bout network.
Four firms linked to the network by the CIA and international investigators have flown into Iraq nearly 200 times on U.S. business, government flight and fuel documents show. One such flight landed in Baghdad last week.
The list of the Bout network's suspected clients over the years includes the Taliban, which allegedly bought airplanes for a secret airlift of arms to Afghanistan. The Taliban is known to have shared weapons with Al Qaeda.
CIA officials expressed concern more than a year ago that air cargo firms linked to Bout were cashing in on U.S.-funded reconstruction efforts, but the warning did not reach the Coalition Provisional Authority until May. After conducting its own inquiry, the Coalition Provisional Authority allowed the companies to keep flying, insisting military officials who signed the contracts should deal with the problem. In other cases, officials said it was difficult to know if Bout was behind a particular air cargo firm because he continually changed company names and aircraft registrations.
Other federal officials said they had not known about the ban on dealing with Bout or about the Bush administration's effort to target Bout's network until relatively recently.
In a letter to Sen. Russell D. Feingold (D-Wis.) in June, Paul V. Kelly, an assistant secretary of State for legislative affairs, acknowledged that the department had "inadvertently" allowed contractors to deal with "air charter services believed to be connected with ... Bout." Feingold, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has taken a lead role in investigating Bout's activities.
