Edwin Wilson: out of the shadows
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"I had a couple of villas that were very, very nice," he says. "I had Pakistani houseboys and I had Libyans working for me, typing up proposals in Arabic."
Wilson — often described in newspapers as a "rogue CIA agent" — looks surprisingly good for a 76-year-old man who has spent the past 22 years in prison, much of it in solitary confinement.
He jovially tells stories of his wheeler-dealer days in the '70s, when he was an arms merchant with offices in Libya, England, Switzerland and Washington.
"Friday is a holiday in Libya, so I'd fly Thursday afternoon to Paris, then take the Concorde to Washington," he says. "Because of the time difference, I'd get to Washington before I left Libya — Thursday afternoon. I'd go to the office on Thursday and Friday and work on my farm on Saturday. Sunday night, I'd be back in Libya. I was on a first-name basis with the stewardesses on the Concorde."
Of course, half the cons in prison tell stories about what big shots they were on the outside. But in Wilson's case, it's true, more or less. After leaving the CIA in 1971, he made millions in the arms trade, enough to buy a 2,338-acre farm in the tony hunt country of Northern Virginia, where he entertained congressmen, generals and CIA honchos, sometimes with drunken late-night hunting — shooting deer from a truck equipped with a big aircraft searchlight.
But the fun ended in 1982, when Wilson was lured out of Libya in a sting operation and arrested in the Dominican Republic. In three highly publicized trials, he was convicted of gunrunning, selling 20 tons of C-4 plastic explosives to Libya, and conspiring to kill his prosecutors. By early 1984, at age 55, he was sentenced to 52 years in prison. His many enemies figured he'd never get out.
Wilson swore he'd been framed, that he was working for the CIA all along. And he spent 12 years prying documents out of the CIA and the Justice Department with endless Freedom of Information Act requests.
Last October, his efforts paid off: Citing those documents, a federal judge in Houston threw out Wilson's conviction in the C-4 explosives case, ruling that the prosecutors had "deliberately deceived the court" about Wilson's continuing CIA contacts, thus "double-crossing a part-time informal government agent."
Now, with 17 years cut off his sentences, Wilson is scheduled to be released from prison Sept. 14. He plans to move back to Washington and start a business helping companies maneuver the federal import-export bureaucracy.
"I've lined up a couple of potential clients," he says, smiling.
Charlie Wilson is no kin to Ed Wilson, but the two were friends back in the '70s, when the former Texas Democratic congressman was dating a woman who worked in Ed Wilson's plush townhouse offices in Washington.
"I used to go down there and listen to Ed's stories — war stories and CIA stories," says Charlie Wilson.
Ed Wilson had come a long way. Born in 1928, he grew up poor on a farm in Nampa, Idaho. He worked as a merchant seaman, then earned a psychology degree from the University of Portland in 1953. He served in the Marine Corps in Korea, then joined the CIA in 1955.
As a CIA agent, he spied on European maritime unions before discovering his forte — running shipping companies secretly owned by the agency. Posing as a businessman, Wilson arranged clandestine CIA arms shipments to Angola, Laos, Indonesia, Congo. Meanwhile, he was also hustling up non-CIA business — and making good money doing it. He and his wife, Barbara, a real-estate agent, used his profits to buy farm properties in Virginia.
In 1971, Wilson quit the CIA to run shipping companies for a secret Navy intelligence organization called Task Force 157. By the time he left that job in 1976 to make his fortune in the international arms business, the gregarious Wilson had a network of powerful friends that included Pentagon officials, pols, retired generals and several CIA officials, including Theodore Shackley, the famous "Blond Ghost," who ran the agency's clandestine operations.
"Everything he did had the aura of the CIA," recalls Charlie Wilson. "Certainly he was working with CIA people. They'd come in when we were sipping scotch at 6 at night."
"Charlie Wilson said, 'Why don't we go down and see Somoza?' " Edwin Wilson recalls, sitting in the prison visiting room. "So we flew to Miami to see Somoza, who was there with his mistress."
The prisoner's telling stories again, this one from the late '70s, when Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza was fighting the leftist Sandinista guerrillas who later overthrew him. Wilson drew up a proposal to provide mercenary soldiers for Somoza, then flew to Miami with Charlie Wilson and the congressman's girlfriend. They met Somoza and his mistress in a hotel, but when the dictator started dancing with the congressman's girlfriend, his mistress got mad.
"The mistress takes this goblet of water and she throws it in Somoza's face," Ed Wilson says, laughing. "He was pretty cool about it. He wiped his face off and said, 'It's kind of damp in here tonight.' "
Wilson never struck a deal with Somoza, but he soon found a better customer — Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi.
"The reason I went to Libya," Wilson says, "is that Shackley asked me."
Shackley was an old friend and a frequent visitor to Wilson's farm. Wilson says Shackley asked him to go to Libya to keep an eye on Carlos the Jackal, the infamous terrorist, who was living there. (Shackley died in 2002.)
"I missed Carlos, but I hung around a bit," Wilson says. "They gave me contracts and I stayed till 1982, 'til I got arrested."
When Wilson arrived in the late '70s, the oil-rich Libyans were on a weapons-buying spree. Wilson got contracts to sell them army uniforms, ammunition, explosive timers and 20 tons of C-4 explosives.
"Please put this in there: None of that C-4 was ever used for terrorism," Wilson says.
In 1979, he arranged for an associate to smuggle four American pistols to the Libyan Embassy in Bonn, West Germany. Later, one of the pistols was used to kill a Libyan dissident there. "That I feel bad about," he says.
But everything he did, Wilson claims, was designed to befriend the Libyans so he could obtain information to pass on to Shackley and the CIA. "I was buddying up to them," he says.
He was also making millions of dollars.
In the two years after his arrest in 1982, Wilson went on trial four times.
In Washington, he was charged with soliciting Rafael Quintero, an anti-Castro Cuban with CIA ties, and other Cubans to kill a Libyan dissident. He was acquitted.
In Virginia, he was charged with illegally exporting an M-16 rifle and four pistols, including the one used to kill the Libyan in Bonn. He was convicted and sentenced to 15 years in prison — later reduced to 10 years — and fined $200,000.
In New York, he was charged with hiring a convicted murderer to kill lead prosecutor Larry Barcella and another prosecutor, plus six of the witnesses against him and his wife, who'd filed for divorce. He was convicted and sentenced to 25 years in prison, plus $75,000 in fines.
In Houston, Wilson was charged with illegally exporting the 20 tons of C-4 to Libya. His defense was that he had been working for the CIA. The prosecution responded with an affidavit from CIA Executive Director Charles Briggs, who swore that the agency had no contact with Wilson after 1972.
On Feb. 5, 1983, the jury reached a verdict: guilty on all counts. Wilson was sentenced to 17 years, plus $145,000.
Facing 52 years in prison, Wilson was shipped to the super-max prison in Marion, Ill., and placed in solitary confinement.
He spent 10 years there — "10 years locked down 23 hours a day," he says.
Meanwhile, his wife divorced him. His two sons cut off communication with him. The IRS seized his property, and the man who'd once been worth $23 million declared bankruptcy.
"You'd think that would break him, but it didn't," says his brother Robert, a retired accountant living in Seattle. "He never did give up."
Instead, Wilson bombarded the CIA and the Justice Department with Freedom of Information Act requests, demanding documents about himself. The feds balked. Wilson sued and won.
By 1996, he'd uncovered a Justice Department memo titled "Duty to Disclose Possibly False Testimony. "It described the CIA's Briggs affidavit — which had helped persuade the Houston jury to convict Wilson — as "inaccurate." Wilson filed a motion to overturn the Houston conviction, attaching the memo as evidence.
Federal Judge Lynn Hughes did not grant Wilson's motion, but he did assign a lawyer to handle Wilson's case — David Adler, a former CIA agent.
Under court order, Adler was permitted to sit in a locked vault at the Justice Department and read thousands of documents on Wilson. They didn't prove that the CIA ever asked Wilson to sell C-4 to Libya. But they did document more than 80 contacts between the CIA and Wilson during his arms-dealing days: Shackley asked Wilson to acquire a Soviet missile, and to find a retirement home for a Laotian general who'd worked for the CIA. Another CIA official twice asked Wilson to supply anti-tank weapons for "a sensitive agency operation." The agency proposed using Wilson to secretly sell desalinization plants to Egypt. And so on.
The documents also showed that, within days of the Houston trial, the CIA had informed the Justice Department that the Briggs affidavit was false.
In 1999 Adler filed a motion to overturn Wilson's conviction because "the guilty verdict was obtained through the government's knowing use of false evidence."
Last October, Hughes threw out Wilson's conviction, denouncing the government's "fabrication of evidence." The Justice Department decided not to appeal Hughes' decision — or to retry Wilson.
On the day Hughes issued his decision, CIA spokesman Mark Mansfield released a terse statement on Wilson: "The CIA didn't authorize or play any role whatsoever in his decision to sell arms to Libya. That decision was his, and that is why he went to jail."
David Corn, author of "Blond Ghost," a 1994 biography of Shackley, has a different perspective on the Wilson affair.
"They framed a guilty man," he says. "I think he's a terrible fellow who got what he deserved, but they did frame him."
Wilson's position is simple: He did nothing wrong. All the charges were frame-ups. All the witnesses against him were liars. He spent 22 years in prison for nothing — and the IRS stole his property while he was inside.
"It was just vindictive," he says.
He's happy to be getting out in September but he's a little worried about money.
"I'll have $1,600 a month — $1,000 in Social Security and $600 from CIA retirement," he says. "That means I'll probably have $500 or $600 a month to spend on rent. That'll get me a bare-light-bulb apartment somewhere."
Is he bitter?
"It's really strange but I'm not bitter," he says. "It's just one of those lousy things you get hit by in life. I never look back. I look forward."