Edwin Wilson: The Fall Guy
An Embarrassed CIA Lied to Convict an Innocent Man
(This essay is adapted from Washington Babylon: From George Washington to Donald Trump, Scandals That Rocked the Nation.)
Edwin Wilson was born in 1928 in Nampa, Idaho, which is about a half-hour drive west of Boise. His family was dirt poor. He was bright, energetic, and entrepreneurial. He was always looking for ways to improve his position in life.
As a young adult, Wilson tried his hand at being a merchant seaman and then an Oregon lumberjack before attending the University of Portland. After graduation, he was commissioned through the Marine Corps Officer Candidates School and was sent to South Korea. While in South Korea, he suffered a serious injury requiring transfer back to the United States to be medically discharged.
While on an airline flight, Wilson told the man sitting next to him of his injury and his desire to remain in the Marine Corps. That passenger recruited him to join the new spy service, the Central Intelligence Agency. The agency was started only eight years earlier in 1947. In those days, CIA headquarters was located near the National Mall, adjacent to the State Department.
In October 1955, like all other employees, Edwin Wilson joined the CIA as a covert employee. His first assignment was providing support and security to a U-2 spy plane based in southern Turkey. After several years, Wilson’s request to join the clandestine service was approved. He was sent to college to get a graduate degree and then completed his training as a clandestine officer.
In 1964, Wilson was given a temporary assignment of providing advance services for vice-presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey. This gave Wilson the opportunity to rub elbows with powerful and influential Washingtonians. These connections would pay dividends for him throughout his professional life.
After the presidential election, Wilson’s experience as a merchant seaman was put to use when he was sent on a clandestine mission to Belgium to set up a CIA front company, Maritime Consulting. The shipping firm covertly transported everything from industrial products to weapons systems, to clients ranging from guerilla groups to established governments.
Wilson founded a second CIA front company in 1969 named Consultants International. It performed the same services, but on a much grander scale.
In 1971, Wilson left the CIA for a new clandestine service that was just starting. He was a perfect fit. The Office of Naval Intelligence was the first military intelligence service to launch its own clandestine organization. At Task Force 157, Wilson would be doing nearly the same thing he did for the CIA.
Task Force 157 started a pair of front companies named World Marine, Inc. and Maryland Maritime Company. Under Wilson’s management, the two companies monitored commercial merchant activities and conducted intelligence collection in ports worldwide. Wilson even purchased ships to be converted into spy platforms.
At both the CIA and Task Force 157 front companies, Wilson booked commercial shipping contracts when there was a lull in government assignments. It was thought to lend credibility to the cover stories that these were legitimate businesses. Wilson also pocketed the profits from the commercial contracts, with the apparent knowledge and approval of his supervisors.
The front companies’ side business was very good, and Wilson quickly became a millionaire. He purchased a nearly 500-acre estate near the scenic horse country of Middleburg, Virginia. In a matter of years, Wilson purchased three contiguous properties, creating an estate of nearly 2,500 acres, which he named Mount Airy. His neighbors included billionaire Paul Mellon, Senator John Warner and wife Elizabeth Taylor, and Washington Redskins owner Jack Kent Cooke.
While Wilson was traveling for Task Force 157, his wife, Barbara, was entertaining guests at the Mount Airy estate. The guest list was a who’s-who of Washington power players, including Vice President Hubert Humphrey, Republican Congressman Silvio Conte of Massachusetts, and Democratic Congressmen John Murphy of New York, Charles Wilson of Texas, and John Dingell of Michigan. Senators Strom Thurmond of South Carolina and John Stennis of Mississippi, a Republican and Democrat, respectively, were also frequent visitors. This provided Wilson opportunities to lobby Congress on matters critical to the CIA and Task Force 157.
Also among Wilson’s regular guests were countless CIA officials, including Theodore Shackley, the deputy director for clandestine operations. Even though he had left the CIA some years earlier, Wilson was often in the company of agency employees.
Task Force 157 was closed down in 1976, and this led to Wilson striking out into private industry and partnering with Frank Terpil, another former CIA employee. They launched Inter-Technology Transfer to ship electronics, weapons, and munitions to third-world nations. One customer with a big checkbook and a long shopping list was Libyan strongman Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. In addition to the arms export business, Wilson’s company hired former Green Berets to run training camps for the Libyan army. Wilson told the former Green Berets they were CIA employees.
Business was going well for Wilson and Terpil until 1980. The two partners and Jerome Brower, who owned a California-based explosives firm, were indicted on several federal charges over arms smuggling and supporting terrorist activities related to a 1976 shipment of explosives. Wilson, who was visiting at the time, remained in Libya after he was indicted.
After the indictments were announced, CIA officials denounced Wilson as a rogue former agent and claimed that any CIA employees who had been working with him had also gone rogue.
In June 1982, Wilson was lured to the Dominican Republic as part of an elaborate con. Wilson claimed an official US letter promised him immunity from arrest if he would agree to meet in a neutral location to discuss his case. Instead, Dominican officials immediately turned over Wilson to US Marshals for transport to New York.
Five months later, in November, Wilson was convicted of arms smuggling charges in a lightning fast, two-day trial. In his defense, Wilson claimed he was a contract employee for the CIA, and his activities were undertaken with the full knowledge of the agency. The CIA asked him to undertake military sales, Wilson maintained, in order to conduct intelligence collection against various countries.
A three-and-a-half page sworn affidavit from the third highest-ranking CIA official, Executive Director Charles Briggs, denied the agency had ever worked with Wilson after he left the agency in 1971. Wilson’s attorney claimed that he was denied court permission to introduce evidence showing that Wilson worked for the CIA.
Wilson was sentenced to fifteen years in prison. The prosecutor labeled him a “merchant of death.” He was convicted of arms smuggling in a second trial in January 1983 and sentenced to seventeen years in prison. In a third trial in March 1983, Wilson was acquitted of conspiracy to murder a Libyan dissident. At his fourth trial in October, he was convicted of soliciting the murders of at least six people, including federal prosecutors and prosecution witnesses. He was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison. It was expected that Edwin Wilson would spend the rest of his life behind bars.
Wilson’s partner, Frank Terpil, fled the United States after the indictments were handed down. In 1981, Terpil was tried in absentia for arms smuggling. He was convicted and sentenced to fifty-three years in prison. In 1995, it was learned he had sought refuge in Cuba.
The first ten years of Wilson’s incarceration were spent in solitary confinement. He passed his time by filing countless Freedom of Information Act requests for documents to bolster his claim that his gun running was done at the behest of the CIA. By late 1999, he cobbled together enough documents to definitively prove that what he was saying was true.
In January 2000, the Justice Department admitted it knowingly introduced false testimony at Wilson’s second trial. CIA Executive Director Charles Briggs’s sworn affidavit was a lie. Most of Wilson’s shipping of arms and explosives was done under contract with the CIA. Documents showed that the CIA contacted Wilson at least eighty times after he left the agency.
The CIA contracted with Wilson to send weapons to Libya as a ploy to conduct intelligence collection. There were tense relations between the United States and Libya following the 1969 coup d’état by Gaddafi. The Libyan dictator shut down Wheelus Air Base in the capital city of Tripoli. At the time, it was the largest US military facility outside of the United States.
In 1979, three years after Wilson began shipping arms to Libya, the United States declared Libya a state sponsor of terrorism. The CIA’s sending of weapons to Libya was in direct violation of US policy. In 1980, when federal prosecutors stumbled upon Wilson’s 1976 arms shipment, rather than admit the agency was operating in contravention of US interests, the CIA made Wilson the fall guy and falsely testified it was ignorant of Libyan arms shipments.
It would not be until October 2003, nearly four years later, that Wilson’s request to overturn his 1983 conviction was heard in federal court. US District Judge Lynn Hughes tossed the arms-smuggling conviction, scathingly noting “about two dozen government lawyers” were involved in the false testimony and that he questioned their “personal and institutional integrity.” Hughes further rebuked the government by writing, “America will not defeat Libyan terrorism by double-crossing a part-time, informal government agent.”
Wilson was released in 2004 after serving twenty-two years in prison. His wife divorced him while he was incarcerated. He was now penniless. He lost his property and personal possessions when the federal government seized them.
Not only had the CIA lied to the court, but Justice Department officials knew of the falsehood and consciously decided not to inform Wilson or the court, despite ethical and legal obligations to do so. The seven federal prosecutors involved in Wilson’s trials were implicated in the deceit, Wilson’s lawyer claimed. At least one of the prosecutors had a hand in drafting the false CIA affidavit.
Wilson’s attempt to fully clear his name was dealt a blow in 2007. He filed a lawsuit against eight people involved in the false affidavit and coverup. A federal judge dismissed the lawsuit, claiming that the former CIA executive director and the seven federal prosecutors had immunity despite any possible wrongdoing.
Edwin Wilson died broke and living with relatives in 2012 at the age of eighty-four.
Mark Hyman is an Emmy award-winning investigative journalist. Follow him on Twitter, Gettr, and Parler at @markhyman, and on Truth Social at @markhyman81.
His books Washington Babylon: From George Washington to Donald Trump, Scandals That Rocked the Nation and Pardongate: How Bill and Hillary Clinton and their Brothers Profited from Pardons are on sale now (here and here).