Tom Pasquarello’s phone started buzzing around 7 a.m. on Thursday.
“Did you hear the news?” a friend asked.
“What news?” Pasquarello responded.
The news turned out to be the undoing of one of Pasquarello’s proudest achievements from his tenure as a regional director with the Drug Enforcement Agency. The U.S. had released the notorious Russian arms trafficker who Pasquarello helped take down 14 years ago with an audacious sting operation.
Viktor Bout, the so-called “Merchant of Death” and the inspiration for the 2005 Nicolas Cage film, “Lord of War,” is who Russia received back from the U.S. on Thursday in a prisoner swap for American basketball star Brittney Griner. Bout, 55, was serving a 25-year sentence in an Illinois federal prison on charges of providing weapons to terrorists and conspiring to kill Americans.
To Pasquarello, freeing Bout early was a troubling decision with potential “huge repercussions.” The former DEA agent argues that the U.S. State Department has a responsibility to figure out how to bring Griner and other wrongfully detained Americans home without offering a prisoner exchange or making other major concessions.
“I’m kind of in disbelief that someone with the potential to orchestrate arms deals that can kill Americans anywhere in the world would be traded for a prisoner,” Pasquarello told Yahoo Sports on Thursday. “I think this sends a terrible message that the U.S. will negotiate, that the U.S. will make concessions and that, if an American is held overseas, there’s always the potential that the U.S. will acquiesce to the demands of people like [Russian President Vladimir] Putin and bail them out.”
Pasquarello’s personal connection to Bout may color how he views Thursday’s prisoner swap, but he is hardly alone in his assessment that the Biden administration gave up too much to get Griner home. Other foreign policy experts also wince at the obvious imbalance between Bout’s crimes and Griner’s.
The U.S. alleges Bout smuggled military-grade weapons to rogue leaders and insurgent groups across Africa and beyond, elevating conflicts from machetes and one-shot rifles to grenade launchers and AK-47s. Russia alleges Griner flew into Moscow on Feb. 17 with vape cartridges containing less than one ounce of cannabis oil in her luggage.
Yuval Weber, an expert on Russian military and political strategy, told Yahoo Sports that Bout’s release may “incentivize rogue state and non-state actors to kidnap or imprison on trumped-up charges more Americans.” Weber also expressed concern that Bout might reprise his former role as an operative who exported arms to Russian allies at the Kremlin’s bidding.
“In sports terms,” said Weber, a distinguished fellow at Marine Corps University's Brute Krulak Center for Innovation and Future Warfare, "we just traded a GOAT first-ballot Hall of Famer who still has many years of productivity left for a hometown Division III star."
Exactly how big a threat is Viktor Bout? The answer depends on who you ask. Russian state media calls him a “businessman” and an “entrepreneur.” His former website said he’s a “born salesman with undying love for aviation.” A longtime DEA agent once described him as “one of the most dangerous men on the face of the Earth.”
Bout’s rise to prominence began during the early 1990s when he astutely saw opportunity amid the chaos of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Piles of weapons and ammunition lay discarded in dusty warehouses. Military planes sat abandoned on Soviet runways because there was no money for maintenance or fuel, and no one to fly them.
Relying on military and intelligence connections he had previously made, Bout acquired several Antonov cargo planes known for their heavy airlift capacity and ability to land in treacherous terrain. Those became the starting point for a private fleet of more than 50 Soviet cargo planes and a network of air-freight companies that hauled goods to and from far-flung conflict zones.