CIA agent who led a playboy life while carrying out clandestine operations, such as selling arms to Libya, before being hung out to dry
It would surely stretch the imagination of any writer of fiction to invent so improbable a character as Edwin Wilson — a renegade American secret agent and arms dealer who sold 20 tons of C4 plastic explosives to the terrorist regime of President Gaddafi and built up a business empire founded entirely on his relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency.
A swaggering 6ft 4in ex-Marine from a poor farm family in Idaho, Wilson in his prime was a larger-than-life, wheeler-dealer with an apartment in Geneva, a seaside villa in Tripoli, Libya, a town house in Washington and a 3,300-acre estate in Virginia hunting country where he entertained generals, senators and CIA colleagues.
He kept a mistress he called “Wonder Woman” on whom he lavished every luxury; he owned three aircraft and claimed to own 100 corporations in the US and Europe, some real and many of the others shells as cover for his espionage. He was reportedly once worth $23 million.
Wilson, in the late 1970s sold a huge quantity of powerful explosives — almost the whole of America’s stockpile — which were flown out of Houston in barrels marked “oil-drilling mud”. He also recruited a group of retired Green Berets (US special forces) to go to Libya and train military and intelligence officers.
This irresponsible operation, supposedly carried out with CIA backing, was intended to ingratiate the US with the Gaddafi regime with the aim of building up the Libyan leader as a US intelligence asset in North Africa. Libyans were even trained in how to make terrorist explosive devices, and Wilson also supplied guns to Libya, one of which was used to murder a prominent Libyan dissident.
During the first Reagan administration this policy was reversed and Gaddafi was denounced as the world’s leading terrorist. The CIA was ordered to overthrow Gaddafi, and all records of the previous policy of co-operating with Wilson were destroyed. Wilson became the scapegoat. He was cut adrift from the agency and declared an outlaw. Fearing arrest, he went into hiding in 1982 but was lured from his haven in Libya by a CIA con-man who convinced him he would be safer in the Dominican Republic.
Once there he was arrested and brought back to the US where he was sentenced to a total of 52 years’ imprisonment by four different courts for among other things selling explosives to Libya and attempted murder.
Interviewed in prison by the reporter Eric Margolis, he declared: “I was framed by the Government. They wanted me to disappear. I knew too much.”
Throughout his 22 years of imprisonment, mostly spent in solitary confinement, Wilson worked to prove his innocence. He hired a new lawyer, a former CIA officer who had clearance to view classified documents and who found 80 incidents where Wilson had met the CIA on a professional basis.
In 2003 a federal judge threw out his two-decade old conviction, stating that the government “knowingly used false evidence” against Wilson.
Wilson’s sole defence was that he had all along been working for the CIA in the service of his country. Documents unearthed by Wilson showed that the agency, despite its denials, had continued to engage in significant contact with Wilson throughout his clandestine career.
The judge added: “America will not defeat Libyan terrorism by double-crossing a part-time informal government agent.”
Edwin Paul Wilson was born in 1928 in Nampa, Idaho. He worked as a merchant seaman before attending the University of Portland where he received a degree in psychology in 1953. He then served in the US Marine Corps in Korea. After discharge in 1955 he joined the CIA.
He was one of the agency’s old-time “cowboys”, using dirty tricks to destabilise European labour unions and setting up front companies. He became involved in the civil war in Angola when the CIA used him to secretly supply arms to the rebel leader Jonas Savimbi at a time when the US did not want it known that it was backing an ally of apartheid South Africa. He officially left the CIA in 1971 but only to join Task Force 157 of the Office of Naval Intelligence, another super-secret outfit.
In 1976 he went freelance but continued his contacts and clandestine operations with the agency until he was driven out into the cold and arrested. Right up to that time he was used by the Agency for operations it wanted to be “deniable”.
Wilson was finally released from jail in 2004 and, bankrupt and divorced, lived in poverty with his brother in Seattle on social security.
David Corn, the author of a biography of the CIA boss who sent Wilson to Libya, summarised the essential paradox of the Wilson story: “I think he’s a terrible fellow who got what he deserved, but they did frame him.”
Wilson is survived by two sons.
Edwin Wilson, CIA operative, was born on May 3, 1928. He died on September 10, 2012, aged 84
'Бій відлунав. Жовто-сині знамена затріпотіли на станції знов'
