SECRETES IN A FLIGHT MANIFEST: THE MAKING OF A TRAITOR
BY ATEM GAI DE DUT
In December 2018 when I first made contact with helicopter maker Kazan, I was not certain what I was going to find. Kazan had been building helicopters, designed at its Mil Moscow plant, since 1961, three decades prior to the fall of the Soviet Union.
For two weeks, I waited for their staff to get back to me and when they did, it was via a phone call. And the conversation was not pleasant because of the nature of what I needed.
According to Kazan, The Ugandan People’s Defense Force (UPDF) did not buy the helicopter from them. The M1-712 which the Ugandans would later tag as 605 was procured from Russian Helicopters, a secondary market operator based in Bolshaya Pionerskaya, an inner suburb of Moscow…