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Edwin Wilson: CIA officer who made millions from spying

Edwin Wilson was a CIA officer who fronted companies for the purposes of spying, while making millions of dollars. Eventually branded a traitor, he served more than two decades in prison before a federal judge overturned his conviction for selling explosives to Libya.

Wilson, a former Marine, lived out the lifestyle of a Boys' Own secret agent. He claimed to own 100 businesses in the US and Europe, some real, some of them fronts. At his peak, Wilson was reportedly worth $23 million and assembled a vast property portfolio, with a hunting lodge in England, an apartment in Geneva, a seaside villa in Tripoli, a townhouse in Washington and real estate in North Carolina, Lebanon and Mexico. A noted raconteur, he impressed and beguiled and mixed with the élite, entertaining congressmen, government officials, generals and CIA bigwigs at his 2,300-acre estate in Northern Virginia; he owned three private jets and showered his mistress with gifts.

At a time of rising suspicions about the agency's covert dealings, Wilson came to epito

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Edwin P. Wilson was larger than life—and not just because he stood 6 foot 4, with the build of a former Marine. The CIA operative turned arms dealer lived large, too, using private planes to travel between homes in Switzerland, England, Libya, and Washington, D.C., and boasting that he knew the Concorde flight staff by name. But Wilson’s colorful life eventually landed him behind bars, labeled a traitor and a “death merchant.”

Born into an Idaho farming community, said The New York Times, Wilson joined the Marines and served in the Korean War. Soon he was hired as a CIA agent. After an early job guarding U-2 spy planes, he became an expert in communist union-busting. In Corsica, he paid mobsters to “keep leftist dockworkers in line”; in Soviet Russia, he released cockroaches into the hotel rooms of labor delegates. In 1964, Wilson started a maritime consultancy that the CIA used as a front to monitor shipping, bolstering his income by “nudging up costs and skimping on taxes.” Setting up such firms to benefit his employers while en

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Spartacus Educational

Primary Sources

(1) David Corn, Blonde Ghost: Ted Shackley and the CIA's Crusades (1994)

Wilson spied on labor unions. He monitored cargo shipments leaving Antwerp for Cuba. He paid off Corsican mobsters to lean on communist dockworkers. He returned to the United States, and the Seafarers appointed him a lobbyist in Washington. Then he moved to the International Department of the AFL-CIO in 1963.
The next year, Wilson jumped to the Special Operations Division, which was in charge of covert actions. First, he served as an advance man for Hubert Humphrey's vice-presidential campaign, allowing the Agency to keep tabs on Johnson's running mate. After the election, Wilson opened a front business: Maritime Consulting Associates, an ocean freight forwarder that handled sea logistics for CIA programs. The Agency man in charge of Maritime was Tom Clines, deputy chief of the division's maritime branch.
Wilson ran Maritime Consulting as if it were a regular company. He recruited a figurehead president and worked hard: weapons to Angola, communica