CIA agent who led a playboy life while carrying out clandestine operations, such as selling arms to Libya, before being hung out to dry
It would surely stretch the imagination of any writer of fiction to invent so improbable a character as Edwin Wilson — a renegade American secret agent and arms dealer who sold 20 tons of C4 plastic explosives to the terrorist regime of President Gaddafi and built up a business empire founded entirely on his relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency.
A swaggering 6ft 4in ex-Marine from a poor farm family in Idaho, Wilson in his prime was a larger-than-life, wheeler-dealer with an apartment in Geneva, a seaside villa in Tripoli, Libya, a town house in Washington and a 3,300-acre estate in Virginia hunting country where he entertained generals, senators and CIA colleagues.
He kept a mistress he called “Wonder Woman” on whom he lavished every luxury; he owned three aircraft and claimed to own 100 corporations in the US and Europe, some real and many of the others shells as cover for his espionage. He was reportedly once worth $23 million.
Wilson, in the late 1970s sold a huge quantity of powerful explosives — almost the whole of America’s stockpile — which were flown out of Houston in barrels marked “oil-drilling mud”. He also recruited a group of retired Green Berets (US special forces) to go to Libya and train military and intelligence officers.
This irresponsible operation, supposedly carried out with CIA backing, was intended to ingratiate the US with the Gaddafi regime with the aim of building up the Libyan leader as a US intelligence asset in North Africa. Libyans were even trained in how to make terrorist explosive devices, and Wilson also supplied guns to Libya, one of which was used to murder a prominent Libyan dissident.
During the first Reagan administration this policy was reversed and Gaddafi was denounced as the world’s leading terrorist. The CIA was ordered to overthrow Gaddafi, and all records of the previous policy of co-operating with Wilson were destroyed. Wilson became the scapegoat. He was cut adrift from the agency and declared an outlaw. Fearing arrest, he went into hiding in 1982 but was lured from his haven in Libya by a CIA con-man who convinced him he would be safer in the Dominican Republic.
Once there he was arrested and brought back to the US where he was sentenced to a total of 52 years’ imprisonment by four different courts for among other things selling explosives to Libya and attempted murder.
Interviewed in prison by the reporter Eric Margolis, he declared: “I was framed by the Government. They wanted me to disappear. I knew too much.”
Throughout his 22 years of imprisonment, mostly spent in solitary confinement, Wilson worked to prove his innocence. He hired a new lawyer, a former CIA officer who had clearance to view classified documents and who found 80 incidents where Wilson had met the CIA on a professional basis.
In 2003 a federal judge threw out his two-decade old conviction, stating that the government “knowingly used false evidence” against Wilson.
Wilson’s sole defence was that he had all along been working for the CIA in the service of his country. Documents unearthed by Wilson showed that the agency, despite its denials, had continued to engage in significant contact with Wilson throughout his clandestine career.
The judge added: “America will not defeat Libyan terrorism by double-crossing a part-time informal government agent.”
Edwin Paul Wilson was born in 1928 in Nampa, Idaho. He worked as a merchant seaman before attending the University of Portland where he received a degree in psychology in 1953. He then served in the US Marine Corps in Korea. After discharge in 1955 he joined the CIA.
He was one of the agency’s old-time “cowboys”, using dirty tricks to destabilise European labour unions and setting up front companies. He became involved in the civil war in Angola when the CIA used him to secretly supply arms to the rebel leader Jonas Savimbi at a time when the US did not want it known that it was backing an ally of apartheid South Africa. He officially left the CIA in 1971 but only to join Task Force 157 of the Office of Naval Intelligence, another super-secret outfit.
In 1976 he went freelance but continued his contacts and clandestine operations with the agency until he was driven out into the cold and arrested. Right up to that time he was used by the Agency for operations it wanted to be “deniable”.
Wilson was finally released from jail in 2004 and, bankrupt and divorced, lived in poverty with his brother in Seattle on social security.
David Corn, the author of a biography of the CIA boss who sent Wilson to Libya, summarised the essential paradox of the Wilson story: “I think he’s a terrible fellow who got what he deserved, but they did frame him.”
Wilson is survived by two sons.
Edwin Wilson, CIA operative, was born on May 3, 1928. He died on September 10, 2012, aged 84
Decorated Soviet Army general who aligned himself with Yeltsin in the break-up of the USSR and rose to be Russian Defence Minister
Pavel Grachev was a senior Soviet army officer who became Russia’s Minister of Defence under President Boris Yeltsin. He came to prominence as an influential commander in the Soviet Union’s Afghan campaign. The later failure of the first Chechen campaign brought an end to his career.
Pavel Sergeyevich Grachev was born in 1948 in the village of Rvy in the Tula region, just south of Moscow, the son of a locksmith and a dairy farm worker. He joined the Soviet Army in 1965, graduating with honours from the Ryazan Higher Airborne Forces Command School in 1969, a qualified German-language interpreter and Airborne Troops platoon commander. After some command experience, he continued his training at the Frunze Military Academy, graduating in 1981. He served as commander with the Airborne Troops in the Baltic, but most notably as commander of the 103rd Guards Airborne Division in Afghanistan. He was honoured as a Hero of the Soviet Union in 1986 in recognition for his service and the minimal losses that were incurred by units under his command in combat in Afghanistan.
The Afghan campaign made Grachev’s reputation as a soldier, but it was his role in the 1991 coup attempt that brought him into the realm of politics and led ultimately to his appointment as Defence Minister.
When hardliners sought in August 1991 to resist Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms, which for them meant the collapse and dismemberment of the Soviet state that they had taken solemn oaths to serve and protect, the Defence Minister Dmitry Yazov, a Second World War veteran, ordered Grachev’s troops to be deployed in Moscow to protect strategically important sites.
Grachev obeyed the orders but, crucially, took no further action. When the coup attempt collapsed, he was seen as having declared his loyalty not to the new state, Russia, but to Boris Yeltsin. He rose quickly, becoming Defence Minister in 1992 after brief periods as chair of the RSFSR Defence and Security Committee and deputy defence minister.
When the 1993 constitutional crisis came, culminating in a dangerous stand-off between President Yeltsin and the Russian Parliament, Grachev ordered his troops to fire on the parliament building, the White House, despite months of holding out for balance and a neutral army. In so doing he decisively backed Yeltsin against his opponents, leaving himself open to the oftrepeated charge that he was more loyal to the president than to the country.
In Russia in the early 1990s great liberalisation went hand in hand with rampant corruption that spread throughout all the chief agencies of state. It was a chaotic, lawless time.
Foreign influence in many areas went unchecked. Separatists in Chechnya received funds, equipment and training from external powers. Gorbachev had sent in troops to quell separatism in the Baltic states. They failed. Yeltsin faced a serious separatist threat in the country’s south and ruled that the issue could be resolved only by force.
However, the army was weakened, like the other institutions of state. Warehouses and weapons stockpiles were poorly protected, and supplies found their way from Russian storage facilities to Chechen separatists even as military intelligence indicated that they were preparing to make a violent claim for independence.
The web of conflicting personal interests at the heart of power in Yeltsin’s Russia had a direct impact on the development of any strategy of government. There was little co-ordination between political and military initiatives, which had disastrous consequences for the Russian Army during the first Chechen campaign.
As casualties rose, Grachev increasingly became the target of criticism. He was widely represented as the brutal commander responsible for sending untrained, ill-equipped conscripts to the front line as cannon fodder. He felt he had been unfairly made the scapegoat for the disastrous campaign.
Amid much criticism, he retired as defence minister in 1996, after four years in office. He then served as chief military adviser to the general director of Rosvooruzhenie (now Rosoboronexport) until he retired in 2001.
He remained a controversial figure. Some praised him for taking a visionary approach to the Russian military-industrial complex — insisting on the need for privatisation, and for holding the army together at a time when every other institution of state had all but collapsed. Others viewed him solely through the prism of Yeltsin’s partisan political world, his success in Afghanistan dwarfed by his presiding over the bloodbath in the Caucasus.
Grachev died after being in hospital with acute high blood pressure. He is survived by his wife, Lyubov Alexeeva, and their two sons.
Pavel Sergeyevich Grachev, soldier and politician, was born on January 1, 1948. He died after a short illness on September 23, 2012, aged 64