Edwin P. Wilson
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Edwin P. Wilson (born 1928) was a former CIA officer who was convicted with illegally selling weapons to Libya. It was later found that the United States Department of Justice and the CIA had covered up evidence in the case.
Wilson was born to a poor farming family in Idaho. His father died of cancer when he was twelve and Wilson worked his way through a degree in psychology. In 1953, he joined the Marines and fought in the last days of the Korean War. He impressed in the marines and, when he was discharged in 1956, he went to work for the Central Intelligence Agency. His main role for the CIA was setting up fake companies that would be used to covertly ship supplies around the world. As director of these fake firms, which also conducted legitimate business, he amassed a great deal of money. After 15 years with the CIA, he moved to naval intelligence and brought his companies along with him. He retired in 1976 and went fully private, continuing to run the businesses he had built for the CIA, the largest of which was Consultants International. He amassed a fortune of the some 20 million dollars mainly in the arms trading business.
In the 1970s, he became involved in dealings with Libya. At the time, a strict sanctions regime was in place against Libya and the country was willing to pay a great deal for weapons and materiel. Wilson began conducting elaborate dealings and guns and military uniforms were smuggled into the country. Wilson also recruited a group of retired Green Berets to go to Libya and train its army. The Libyans used Wilson's provisions to advance their interests around the world. In 1979, a gun that Wilson had arranged to be delivered to the Libyan embassy in Bonn was used to assassinate a prominent dissident. The next year, one of the Green Berets assassinated another dissident in Colorado. Wilson states that he regrets these incidents and had no prior knowledge of them. He states that he was still working for the CIA and his supplying of weapon to the Libyans was an attempt to get close to them and gain valuable intelligence.
The most dramatic deal, and the one that brought Wilson to the attention from the U.S. government, was for some twenty tons of military grade C-4 plastic explosives. This was a massive quantity that was equal to the entire US domestic stockpile. Most of Wilson's connections were still under the impression that he was working for the CIA and a wide network in the United States supported his actions. The explosives were assembled by a California company and hidden in barrels of oil drilling mud. They were flown to Libya aboard a chartered jet.
After a lengthy investigation by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (then with the US Treasury Department), Wilson was indicted by the US Justice Department for firearms and explosives violations. However, he was in Libya, which would not extradite him. Wilson was very unhappy in Libya, and the Libyans were suspicious of him and he feared for his safety. The prosecutors knew this and they sent a con-man with links to the CIA named Ernest Keiser to convince Wilson that he would be safe in the Dominican Republic. Wilson flew to the Caribbean, but upon arrival was arrested and flown to New York.
He was put on trial four separate times. He was found not guilty of trying to hire a group of Cubans to kill a Libyan dissident. He was found guilty of exporting guns, including the one used in the Bonn assassination, and of shipping the explosives and sentenced to 15 years in prison for the former and 17 years for the latter. While awaiting trial, he approached a fellow prisoner attempting to hire him to kill the federal prosecutors. The prisoner instead went to the authorities and they set Wilson up with an undercover agent. The agent taped Wilson hiring him to kill the prosecutors, six witnesses and his ex-wife. In a subsequent trial, he was sentenced to an added twenty-four years in jail for conspiracy to murder.
Wilson's defence to the Libyan charges was that he was working at the behest of the CIA. The CIA gave the DOJ an affidavit stating that after his retirement he had not been employed directly or indirectly by the agency. The CIA later informed the DOJ that it should not use the affidavit at trial, but the prosecutor Ted Greenberg decided to use it anyway.
While in prison, Wilson campaigned vigorously for his innocence and repeatedly filed Freedom of Information Act requests with the government. Eventually he found information linked to the memo and hired a new lawyer. His lawyer was David Adler, a former CIA agent who had clearance to view classified documents. Adler spent long hours poring through thousands of files and eventually found eighty incidents where Wilson met on a professional basis with the CIA and proof that the CIA had indirectly used Wilson after his retirement. No evidence showing that the CIA knew of or had approved the explosives shipment was found, but a judge ruled that the prosecution had acted improperly. In October 2003, Wilson's conviction on the explosives charge was thrown out. Wilson was released from prison on Sept. 14, 2004.
