PROFILING A SCOUNDREL THE SORDID ACCOUNT OF AN EX-CIA AGENT'S DESTRUCTIVE CAREER

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP09S00048R000100020001-0
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: August 16, 2011
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: August 29, 1984
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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ARTICLE APPEARED PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER
Cc1; FAOF 29 August 1981
Profiling
a scoundrel
The sordid account
of an ex-CIA agent's
destructive career
By Stephan Salisbury
t-Q-t. S ' Wu,,
57. years for his activities. ? John Heath was a bomb expert
The extraordinary rise 'and fall of hired to train Lib
i
yans
n the use of
Edwin Wilson has now been chroni- explosives smuggled into the coun-
T T T ASHINGTON - In the shadow land of the rio,d J
oseph
V world of night, a man who wheeled and
V dealed, slapped backs, raked in cash and
vanished into smoke and mirrors.
In the realm of international renegades, he was a
Fagin's Fagin, an unredeemed Macheath who parlayed
his dismissal from US. intelligence into a fortune of
more than S20 million. At his height, Wilson sidled
through Libya's corridors of power, peddling illicit
explos:ves, guns, assassins and anything else he could
con M_oammar Khadafy into buying.
He was duplicitous, crude and ruthless, and his clan-
destine deals snaked over the globe. And when, he
finally was captured and held for trial in 1982, Wilson
plotted the' murders of prosecutors, witnesses and his
estranged wife. "Take her off somewhere and break her
neck," be told a jailhouse conspirator turned informant.
How much would he pay for the hit, "She's worth
1=u.00i." Wilson snapped
In 1983, the S6-year-old former agent was sentenced to
Z, ti Itij, Zin
Simon and Schuster. It is as sordidVa now homeless, unemplo
yed, broke is
tale as anyone is likely to come upon anathema to the U.S. government he
this publishing season.` once served.
"My agency friends kept telling me ? Mai. Gen. Richard 1'. Secord, for-
that this guy is really rogue," Goul- mer deputy assistant secretary for
den said the other day as he relaxed defense, was falsely linked to a Wil-
in his book-crammed office here. "He son operation. Despite the fallacious
is not what he claims' to be - still nature of the charges, Secord s ca-
tied to CIA. He's just somebody who's reer was ruined. He took early retire-
a crook." ment in 1982.
Goulden, who boasts',.a library of ? Eric Wilson, Wilson's youngest
1.200 books related to intelligence son, was unwittingly roped into as-
matters and who calls himself a sassination plots by his father. He
"spook buff," was intrigued by the was charged with conspiracy, a].
Wilson saga. So when one of Wilson's though he was later acquitted.
most important associates spilled the The list could go on and on. No one,
beans during a long afternoon inter. apparently, was safe from Wilson's
view, Goulder. knew he had the mak? destructive tentacles
ings of a black drama' "I talked to a shrink aboul him at
And in this drama, the victims lay length," said the 50-year-old Goul-
everywhere. den, a former reporter for The In
"The human debris is one of the qutrer. "This guy concluded ... that
great tragedies of the story." Goul. Wilson: was psychotic, a sociopath
den said. "Some of these peopie - who didn't care about the dtflerence
their lives will never be reconstruct- between right and wronc. a person
ed who is not prone to commit a viola
Take a few examples from Wilson's crime himself but who would not
business associates, government ac- hesitate to encourage somebody else
quaintances and farm]} to do it. And, further. he would not
? Waldo Duhberstein, an elderly' take responsibility for his actions
Defense Intelligence Agency analyst ?
who purloined classified material Wilson started innocuously
for Wilson and ultimately for the enough. He joined the CLA in 1955 as
Libyans, shot himself to death upon a junior security officer watching
discovery. over U-2 spy planes Subsequently,
? Kevin Mulcahy, one of Wilson's under the cover of the AFL-CIO s
earliest recruits and son of a respect- Seafarers International Union he
ed intelligence office.,r,,drank him. graduated to gathering intelligence
self to death after tell ing;prosecutors on the European labor movement.
his story.
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IBut `.Wilson's greatest skill, be soon Indeed, Wilson never passed up an
discovered, was in setting up compa- opportunity for manipulation.
nies that would use legitimate bus!- Shortly after leaving naval intelli-
ness as a cover for intelligence activ- gence, he met Frank Terpil, a former
(ties in operating these businesses, CIA agent with extensive contacts in
called proprietary companies in the Libyan government. Awash in oil
agency jargon, Wilson began to learn money and bedazzled by sophistical-
what be would need to know for his ed Western armaments, Libya was
future illegal operations ripe for illicit maneuvering and
Under CIA tutorship. as Goulden would prove a sinister and sandy
writes, Wilson learned "how to in- heaven for Wilson and Terpil.
corporate a company through front Over the next several years, the
men so as to conceal its true owner- former agents sought to procure a -
ship, bow to use post office boxes and frightening arsenal for Khadafy. Wil-
mail drops, how to route money son hired former intelligence agents
through a succession of domestic and Green Berets, explosives ex-
and foreign bank accounts so that perts, renegades, drunks and misfits
neither origin nor destination could to cto cbeal arry out his bidding. He
often often
be traced"
Wilson was soon running a num- vided them with marked-up inferior
ber of such international companies goods and occasionally gave them
for the agency and running them what they wanted.
well - be turned a profit. But in 1970 One of Wilson's earliest deals, in
or 1971, he used one of them as Goulden's view, also probably was
collateral for a private real estate his most frightening. In 1977, Wilson
loan He was caught. dismissed and -smuggled about 20 tons of C4 plastic
promptly hired by U.S. naval intelli- explosives from the United States to
gence to set up even more interne- Libya in canisters marked "oil drill-
tional businesses. ing mud." C-4 is a substance much
Wilson was off and rolling He coveted by terrorists - a chunk the
made powerful friends. such as Sens. size of a brick can blow up a house.
John Sienr.is (D.. Miss ). John Mc. "This to me is the most horrible
Ciella^ (D.. Ark.) and Strom Thur- thing." Goulden said. "Every time I
mood (R., S ,C ), and for the next read a story about a bomb explosion
several years used covert govern- in London, something the PLO has
mer,i operations for great personal done, something the IRA has done. I
gain. Wilson's government "sen-ice" think of that 20 tons of plastic that he
came to an end, however, in 1976 shipped out to Libya and which the
when he tried to bribe Rear Adm. Libyans distributed all over Europe.
Bobby Rai Inman. Inman, to his Sur- The Harrods explosion in Lon-
pr ;sc. wa: honest. don( right before Christmas was
No matter. Wilson had enough in- some of Wilson's C4."
ternational and government con- Wilson hired killers to go after
tacts now, enough expertise and Khadafy's political opponents. Wil-
cap:tal to go it alone. Strangely, the son mercenaries flew combat flights
Nev) allowed him to retain control into neighboring Chad, Wilson oper-
of one of his covert companies, Con- atives carried out terrorists activi-
sultants International, a worldwide ties, Wilson contacts in the U.S.
trading operation. government provided Middle East in.
o no doubt
In a very real sense, then, Wilson telligence for Kbadafy,
the Soviets
simply transferred to the private sec- passed g
tor his agency expertise and his co-
vert business.
"While the extent of Mr. Wilson's
criminal activities were exceptional
... he was the product of a system
that for the sake of secrecy trained
people to conduct government busi-
ness through private corporations
and the' e couraged then: to blur
the dis iricnor.," Philip Taubman
wrote it: a review of Goulden's boo},
in the tiew York Times. "It was also a
system that, until the Wilson case,
lacked adequate safeguards to pre-
vent former agents from manipulat-
ing their connections for personal
gain "
All of this did not go unnoticed by
federal authorities, as early as Au-
gust 1976, former Wilson operatives
were talking to the CIA. But the
agency was extremely slow to act
"The CIA people argue that 'he was
not one of us after 1971,' " Goulden
explained "'Congress has made it
very clear that we have no internal
police function. We are not a prose-
cutorial or investigative agency in
the United States.' They turned it
over to Justice and washed their
hands of it....
"I guess the easy way out is just to
say, 'OK, we got rid of the guy, so
what the hell else can we do? He
doesn't belong to us, hasn't belonged
to us for five years. Why bring up
more history that people can hit us
over the head with?' "
It was not until 1981 that federal
investigators began to unravel Wii.
son's labyrinthine network of deals,
bit squads and intelligence-peddling
And 'its was not until the following
year that Wilson was lured out of
Libya with a bogus offer to rejoin
US intelligence as a kind of "super-
spook"based in the Caribbean.
Yet,despite the fact that Wilson is
now locked away. despite the fact
that stiffer controls have been
placed on agency proprietary comps
nies,`Goulden is profoundly worried
by, the case.
"The Ten Commandments no long-
er provide enough moral law for our
world," be lamented. "You used to
think; they pretty well covered every
situation. But they don't. And I think
we're going to see a lut more of his
genre come along - if not out of CIA,
then, out of other agencies.
"Man's propensity for violence, for
terrorism, is something I think is
going to be haunting us a long time."
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