Viktor Bout Says U.S. Prison System Inspired by Nazis in TV Interview

In his first public interview since his release, Viktor Bout, the Russian arms dealer nicknamed "the Merchant of Death," told state television about his time behind bars and said the U.S. prison system was inspired by Germany's Nazis.

Bout, a 55-year-old former Soviet military officer, was serving a 25-year sentence in the United States before he was freed in exchange for U.S. basketball star Brittney Griner as part of a high-level prisoner swap on December 8.

He was sentenced in April 2012 after being convicted of conspiring to kill U.S. citizens and officials, selling millions of dollars of weapons to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), and aiding a terrorist organization.

Bout gave his first interview to Russia's RT television network and was interviewed by Russian national Maria Butina, who spent 18 months behind bars in the U.S. for conspiring to act as a clandestine foreign agent in this country.

Butina, who has her own show on the state-run network, began the interview by asking Bout about his time in prison, after erroneously introducing him as being "imprisoned solely because he's Russian."

"You spent quite a long time in solitary confinement. How did you do it, what helped you get through it?" she asked.

"One time I read an interesting book with a very interesting premise: Your conditions are basically neutral. Our attitude makes them either very negative or positive. As the English say, it's either tormentor or your mentor," Bout began.

"Who created the U.S. prison system? The Nazis. They were moved to the U.S. in Operation Paperclip. After their experiments, they wrote that this is how you break people and get what you want," he said.

Operation Paperclip is the name given by the U.S. and its allies to a secret mission in 1944. Its purpose was to locate and preserve German weapons and involved the recruitment of top Nazi scientists, doctors and engineers by the U.S., which brought these individuals into the country.

Journalist Annie Jacobsen, author of Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program That Brought Nazi Scientists to America, said in a 2014 interview that the mission's purpose was to "find out Hitler's biological weapons, his chemical weapons and his atomic weapons."

There is no evidence that the operation mentioned by Bout inspired the U.S. prison system.

"Do you know how I started my every day? Upon waking up, I wildly laughed for five minutes. I laughed wildly, hysterically," Bout told Butina. "You're smiling, you're laughing, and it gets to them more than anything when they see you aren't ripping out your hair, not scratching your own face, not trying to write on the walls in blood."

He went on to complain about the food he was given, saying that it's "not really even food, based on Nazi practices."

"It's all especially planned, down to every detail. There are no coincidences," he said.

Asked by Butina what he ate in U.S. prison, Bout lamented about the repetitive menu.

"It's a standard menu in the Federal Bureau of Prisons, it doesn't change," Bout said.

"Just imagine, for the entire 12 years I spent there, every Wednesday is a hamburger with overcooked fries, every Thursday, it's chicken, like 'Bush legs'—they're so gigantic it can't even be possible."

He added: "Imagine not tasting garlic for 10 years, dill, parsley, wild strawberries. Can you imagine?"

The notorious arms dealer also took the opportunity in his interview to praise Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Ukrainian invasion he launched on February 24.

"I am proud that I am a Russian person and our president is Putin," he said. "I know that we will win."

Bout was arrested in 2008 after a sting operation led by U.S. drug enforcement agents in Thailand, in which they posed as potential buyers from the FARC. Bout's extradition was requested by then-U.S. Ambassador to Thailand Eric John and subsequently ordered by a Thai appeals court.

He has been described by the Justice Department as one of the most prolific arms dealers in the world.

Newsweek has contacted the Biden administration for comment.

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