- The case of former Central Intelligence Agency officer
Edwin P. Wilson recalls the words of the great American thinker, H.L. Mencken:
"Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under."
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- The Wilson case has outraged me for 20 years.
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- In 1982 and 1983, the federal court in northern Virginia
- the same hang-'em-high court the feds now use to try terrorism cases
- along with courts in New York and Texas, sentenced Wilson to a total
of 52 years in prison for selling arms, including 22 tons of explosives,
to Libya. He was also convicted on shaky charges of attempted murder.
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- Wilson, now 75 years old, has served 20 years in a maximum
security prison.
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- I always believed Wilson innocent and spoke to him many
times in prison.
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- "I was framed by the government," Wilson told
me. "They want me to disappear. I know too much."
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- His words shake me to this day.
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- "They buried him alive in prison," a former
CIA official confided to me.
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- Last week, Houston Federal District Judge Lynn Hughes
threw out Wilson's two-decades old conviction. She wrote: "Government
knowingly used false evidence against him," concluding "honesty
comes hard to government."
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- Wilson, a veteran, tough-as-nails CIA field agent who
specialized in running arms and mounting coups, was one of the agency's
old-time "cowboys." In 1971, Wilson officially "retired"
from the CIA and went into business on his own. In reality, the CIA used
Wilson for potentially explosive clandestine deals it wanted to keep "deniable."
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- I first heard of Wilson and his partner, Frank Terpil,
while covering the war in Angola between Soviet and Cuban-backed Marxist
forces and Jonas Savimbi's anti-communist UNITA guerrilla army. UNITA was
secretly armed by South Africa and the U.S., but Washington did not want
to be seen as an ally of the apartheid regime. So the CIA used Wilson and
Terpil to channel arms to Savimbi, using CIA front firms and banks in Asia
and Europe.
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- In the late 1970s, the CIA sent Wilson and Terpil to
Libya to covertly strengthen the regime of Moammar Khadafy. Washington
planned to use the fiery Libyan leader as its strongman in North Africa,
just as it was using longtime CIA "asset" Anwar Sadat in Egypt.
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- Wilson sold Libya C-4 explosives and arms, and sent teams
of ex-Green Berets to train Libyan commandos and "terminate"
some of Khadafy's many enemies abroad. But while the CIA was backing Khadafy,
the new Ronald Reagan administration sought to distance itself from the
soft policies of the Jimmy Carter administration by denouncing Khadafy
as the world's leading terrorist and a threat to America.
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- The CIA was ordered to overthrow Khadafy, putting the
agency in a frightfully embarrassing dilemma. Bureaucratic panic erupted
in Langley,Va. The Libyan operation was ordered immediately shut down and
all records destroyed. As word of secret U.S. backing of Khadafy leaked
out, Wilson and Terpil were cut adrift and proclaimed outlaws. They fled
to the Mideast. In 1982, Wilson was lured by American agents to the Dominican
Republic, kidnapped to the USA, and charged with gun-running.
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- During numerous trials, Wilson maintained he had been
working for the CIA. But he was not allowed to cross-examine CIA witnesses
for "security reasons" - shades of today's terrorism trials.
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- A high-ranking CIA official provided a false affidavit
to U.S. Justice Department prosecutors that the agency "had no knowledge
of Edwin P. Wilson."
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- This was a lie, a fact discovered by Wilson's tenacious
lawyer, David Adler, by poring through 300,000 documents obtained under
the Freedom of Information Act. A lie prosecutors were aware of, found
Judge Hughes, who said the jury would have acquitted Wilson had the government
told the truth.
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- In the early 1980s, an old friend, Ed G., an Iranian-born
American accountant with no intelligence experience, was convinced by the
CIA it was his "patriotic duty" to go to Iran and build a new
agent network in Tehran to replace the one rolled up by the Khomeni revolution.
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- After three years of amateurish spying, Ed's cover was
blown. He fled for his life. On returning to the U.S., Ed called his CIA
controller and was told, "There is no one here by that name, and we
have no record of you." Another disaster was simply erased by throwing
agents to the wolves. Penniless, Ed was reduced to begging money from friends
and finally working as a shoe salesman. Compared to Wilson, he was lucky.
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- It is terrifying to see government's massive weight crush
an innocent man. Wilson became America's "Man in the Iron Mask."
Judge Hughes called the case "double-crossing a part-time, informal
government agent." She aptly used the term "framed" to qualify
this disgusting legal outrage.
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- High Justice Department officials involved in this crime
are today serving judges. They, and the retired CIA official, should be
prosecuted.
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- The Wilson case should remind us of all the Justice Department's
recent and ongoing "terrorism" prosecutions, where individuals,
mostly foreign-born, poor, and uneducated, have the book thrown at them
and are threatened with life terms if they do not confess to crimes. While
truth is the first victim of nationalist hysteria, justice is always the
second.
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- In spite of Judge Hughes' ruling, the U.S. government
refuses to release Wilson and is now considering an appeal. For shame.
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- Eric can be reached by e-mail at
- margolis@foreigncorrespondent.com.
- http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/margolis_nov9.html
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