A Terrorist for Our Times

By Patricia Blake

THE DEATH MERCHANT by Joseph C. Goulden

Simon & Schuster; 455 pages; $17.95

In 1982, when former CIA Agent Edwin Wilson was awaiting trial for having masterminded the biggest arms-smuggling operation in U.S. history, he spent his time plotting the assassination of two federal prosecutors and six potential witnesses against him. For that crime Wilson was sentenced to 25 years in prison. In addition, he received 32 years for smuggling explosives and weapons to Libya.

Because of a technicality, Wilson was spared prosecution for the murder contract he had put out on his hated former wife, the mother of his two children. "Take her off somewhere and break her neck," he told a prospective hitman, who went to the authorities. Wilson specified that he wanted Barbara Wilson's corpse stripped of her jewelry, especially her big diamond ring. "It's my good-luck piece," he said. "I want it back." Asked what he would pay for the job of killing her, he replied, "She's worth $250,000."

Characters willing to wipe out anyone who gets in their way are ordinarily found in overheated fiction. Yet Joseph Goulden's riveting account of the Wilson case makes such villainy seem chillingly plausible. Goulden, a respected investigative reporter, who has written twelve books of non-fiction (The Superlawyers, Korea), suggests that Wilson's character was formed by a harsh, cold father and a childhood spent on the rough edge of poverty in Idaho. Young Wilson showed a flair for manipulating other people, without undue regard for affection or morality; this trait aided his work as an operative for the CIA and the Office of Naval Intelligence. By the mid-1970s, Wilson had achieved a shadowy prominence in Washington. As Goulden tells it, scores of Government officials, Congressmen and Pentagon officers were mesmerized by the not-so-secret agent's lethal charm.

More alluring still was the promise of big deals and easy money that Wilson laid before dazzled guests at his 3,000-acre estate in the Virginia hunt country. Some enthusiastically accepted jobs in his flourishing export business. To those who wondered how a man who said he was a Government employee could be raking in so much cash and whether the whole setup did not reek of illegality, Wilson had a ready reply: his vast arms business in the Middle East was an officially sanctioned cover for his real work, which was gathering intelligence for the CIA.

Wilson never could substantiate that claim in court. But it fed already widespread suspicions about U.S. intelligence practices and influenced the only acquittal that the arms dealer received after his empire went to smash. At his 1983 trial for attempting to hire three Cubans to assassinate a Libyan dissident in 1976, one of the Cubans testified that he had indeed worked with Wilson in both the CIA and Naval Intelligence, albeit before Wilson had put out the murder contract. The reaction of a member of the predominantly black jury appeared to reflect public opinion at the time: "This seemed like some kind of spook deal when all dudes were lying on one another. They ought to go make some of them James Bond movies."

The scenario that Wilson tried to hide behind does not survive Goulden's scrutiny. The author presents convincing evidence that his antihero was fired by the CIA in 1971 and by Naval Intelligence in 1976, both times for financial improprieties. Wilson was thus a private citizen when he began to amass a fortune by illegally selling weapons to Libyan Dictator Muammar Gaddafi. Wilson's brazenness boggles the mind. He fed Gaddafi's delusion that immense quantities of military hardware would guarantee the leader's two stated objectives: the destruction of Israel and the murder of all exiled opponents of his regime. Gaddafi did not realize that sophisticated arms and naive zealots do not always mix. The former Green Berets Wilson recruited to train Libyan soldiers and prospective assassins quickly learned this lesson. After a few weeks in Tripoli, one pilot who had been hired to teach the intricacies of U.S. Chinook helicopters told his boss, "These rug-heads have 20 Chinooks now. The rate they're going, they'll be out of aircraft in a month. They can't fix 'em, they can't fly 'em--hell, this is some kind of Camel Air Force."

Goulden gives such farcical moments their due, but he never lets them obscure the darker and more devastating effects of Wilson's dealings. The arms shipped to Gaddafi immeasurably strengthened the one world leader who is wedded to international terrorism. By no means all the weaponry Gaddafi received misfired. A Libyan student at Colorado State University was shot and maimed by one of Wilson's hitmen; other dissidents scattered across the world live in fear of Wilson's bullets. Though history is full of criminals as wicked as Wilson, this man is clearly not in the classic mold. As he emerges from Goulden's prescient book, he can be seen as the archetype of the future: the merchant of death in the age of terrorism. --By Patricia Blake

"Wilson lived austerely. He would ask someone flying down from London to bring him a suitcase of food items not available in Libya. The typical shopping list would be canned frankfurters, Velveeta processed cheese, peanut butter and honey. Wilson read chiefly spy novels, with Robert Ludlum his favorite author. The nonfiction book he liked the most--and insisted upon employees' reading--was Will, the autobiography of Watergate conspirator Gordon Liddy--"My kind of guy," Wilson called him. He drank more and more--a quart or more of flash [a potent moonshine] a day. John Heath, who lived in the villa during the final days in Tripoli, is convinced that the sustained heavy drinking eventually affected Wilson's mind. 'Ed had the reputation as someone who could hold it. But nobody can "hold" flash. It knocks you off your ass and then it knocks you off your brain."