Merchant of war grounded

NIS, Serbia — For the past four years, Tomislav Damnjanovic has played a crucial role in the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since 2003, he has delivered millions of rounds of ammunition, guns, grenades and mortars to the governments of Iraq and Afghanistan.

His aircraft have even been used to shuttle supplies between U.S. bases in Iraq, saving troops from having to make hazardous trips by land.

But it was not always so.

For Damnjanovic, the work has been an unexpected twist in a career dominated not by serving U.S. interests, but by dodging law-enforcement agencies, and by smuggling weapons to U.S. opponents and countries under U.N. sanctions, such as Libya, and to other parts of Africa.

He also admits to being a crucial part of a sophisticated cigarette-smuggling operation in Europe that was backed by the former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic, which cost European taxpayers millions of dollars in unpaid revenues.

The details of a career that goes back more than 15 years have been slowly unfolding, as U.N. investigators and, most recently, a group of researchers financed by the United Nations in Belgrade have pieced together flight plans, manifests and bank accounts, as well as what they say are falsified documents.

Despite his bonanza with his newfound U.S. partners, the investigators allege that Damnjanovic, who is based in Belgrade, has continued to flout U.N. sanctions, supplying weapons to an Islamist group in Somalia that the United States says is linked to al-Qaida. As with all other accusations of illegal dealings, Damnjanovic denied any involvement.

The evidence is amassed in investigations led by the U.N. sanctions committee, as well as in a recently published report by the South Eastern and Eastern Europe Clearinghouse for the Control of Small Arms and Light Weapons, a research center supported by the United Nations and based in Belgrade. The information is being shared with customs and law-enforcement agencies on a restricted basis.

By his own estimate, the companies Damnjanovic ran flew more than 50 flights from Cyprus to Montenegro in the late 1990s carrying more than 1.5 million packs of cigarettes in a trade supported by Milosevic's government and by the authorities in Montenegro. The cigarettes were then smuggled into Italy, EU law-enforcement officials said.

Damnjanovic said he had no involvement with the smuggling aspect of the operation. "My part was all official," he said. But he added with a smile: "I think they had to go somewhere."

In 1996, a plane charted by Damnjanovic that was carrying spare parts for Libyan fighter jets crashed outside Belgrade. His main business partner was killed. Weapons exports to Libya were prohibited under U.N. sanctions at the time.

Over the past decade, weapons shipments have made up a vast majority of his business as he has worked through a series of companies, all based in Belgrade. His latest is named Tomisko, in recognition of his late business partner, Tomislav Miskovic.

Documents obtained by U.N. officials and the Belgrade research center, which were published in the center's guide, show a continued pattern of companies managed by Damnjanovic that have flown weapons to regions under U.N. sanctions.

In 2002, Damnjanovic sent a consignment of weapons — including AK-47-type rifles, rocket launchers, anti-personnel mines and millions of rounds of ammunition — to Liberia, falsifying documents to make it appear that Nigeria was the destination, according to the new report.

Documents signed by Damnjanovic, and obtained and published by the research center, show that the weapons were flown to Liberia, which was then under U.N. sanctions as punishment for encouraging the civil war in Sierra Leone by supporting rebels there in a gems-for-arms trade deal.

In the same year, the report states, millions of rounds of ammunition shipped by Damnjanovic to Rwanda were probably intended for Congo.

"What I did was completely official," Damnjanovic said in response to the documentation on the Rwanda shipment.

"What somebody else does with the weapons when they get there is up to them," he said.

According to the report's authors, despite evidence against Damnjanovic and other traffickers, they have come to be seen as an essential part of the supply chain for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Damnjanovic said that all of his current contracts were commissioned by companies working for the Defense Department in Washington, and he now flies everything from construction material to cigarettes to Iraq for the Pentagon.

Hugh Griffiths, who wrote the report with Wilkinson, said law-enforcement agents did not have the mechanisms in place to track potential arms smugglers, and that they failed to communicate properly with one another.

"Neither defense contractors nor the military have a profiling system in place which would allow them to identify actors such as Damnjanovic and the others in these clandestine networks," Griffiths said.

The U.N. investigators suggest that in 2006, at the same time he was supplying weapons for the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan, Damnjanovic supplied 45 tons of weapons to the Islamic Courts Union forces in Somalia, which the United States says have links to al-Qaida.

Damnjanovic said the flight was carrying clothes and shoes and was somehow confused with the arrival of a similar aircraft carrying weapons.

Throughout his career it has been a similar tale. No law-enforcement agency has ever tried to bring charges against him, and he has seen his fortunes grow steadily, from being an employee of Yugoslavia's national airline in the early 1990s to becoming the owner of his own company and an Ilyshin II-76, a supersize Russian freight carrier.

But now, perhaps, his past is catching up with him.

The Serbian government recently rescinded his airline's license to carry arms shipments, thereby curtailing a substantial part of his work.

"Everybody wants to wash their hands of it," he said, suggesting that the government knew all along of his activities.

And so, in late September, Damnjanovic gave a farewell party in Nis for some of his crew and staff members. He told them he would restructure his company and try to compete in the European freight market — legitimately, he said.