Why the love-in between Bout and the Kremlin? One reason appears to be that he knows a lot about Russia’s covert arms supplies—both official and unofficial—going back decades. In the 1980s, the Portuguese-speaking Bout served in Mozambiqueunder career KGB officer Igor Sechin—who is now deputy prime minister and probably the most powerful man in government after Vladimir Putin himself. When the Soviet Union broke up, Bout quickly moved into the vacuum, supplying Russian weaponry across Africa using old Soviet transport planes. Bout’s20-year careerof supplying weapons to the Taliban in Afghanistan, Hizbullah in Lebanon, Islamists in Somalia, and a plethora of African rebel groups "would not have been possible without state protection,” says Douglas Farah, author of a recent book on Bout. And, he adds, "as Vladimir Putin consolidated the badly fractured intelligence services again over the past several years, Bout was less a rogue agent and more a part of the rapidly expanding Russian arms network.” Bout was spotted in Iran in 2005 and Lebanon in 2006, allegedly delivering Russian weaponsused by Hizbullah in the war with Israel that summer, says Farah. During the same period, his fleet of 50 planes also carried weapons and equipment on contractfor FedEx, Halliburton, and its former subsidiary KBR in Iraq. Bout himself said in a recent statement from Thai prison that "the U.S. is trying to create for me the image of an illegal billionaire and an illegal arms dealer. I have never traded in weapons; I have never sold weapons.”