The Spectator in Solitary

By Frank Trippett

He lives in a 12-ft.-square concrete cubicle, entombed beyond the reach of daylight in a special solitary-confinement corridor of the fortress-like maximum-security U.S. Penitentiary at Marion, Ill. There, behind a steel door slotted for the passage of meal trays, Prisoner No. 08237054 spends his days peering at a tiny black-and-white television set, watching with fascination the proceedings of the Iran-contra hearings in Washington.

Prisoner No. 08237054 is Edwin P. Wilson, 59, the freebooting former CIA agent who has served five years of a 52-year sentence for providing arms and explosives to Libyan Ruler Muammar Gaddafi and plotting to kill his federal prosecutors. One reason for his absorption with the TV spectacular is that he knows so many members of the cast and has such a definite opinion about them. Many of his former associates, says Wilson, ought to be exactly where he is.

The isolated cell block holds just six other prisoners (one of them is former Soviet Spy Christopher Boyce). With a roughhewn, 6-ft. 5-in. physique, Wilson exudes a sense of physical power despite his confinement. He is eager to talk about what he claims were his professional and commercial ties with several of the individuals implicated in the sub-rosa schemes run by Lieut. Colonel Oliver North. In particular, Wilson mentions retired Air Force Major General Richard Secord and former high-level CIA Officials Thomas G. Clines and Theodore G. Shackley. All of them, he says (and has said previously to prosecutors who did not believe him), were partners of his in deals carried out by Eatsco (for Egyptian American Transport & Services Co.), which he financed for Clines and the others in 1978 in order to reap millions in Middle East arms deals.

Subsequent investigations by the Department of Defense Inspector General's office and the Justice Department established that Eatsco had skimmed some $8 million in unearned profits from the weapons sales. The company paid over $3 million in penalties, and Clines, who ran Eatsco, paid $110,000 in fines for filing false invoices with the Pentagon. Secord and Shackley, who Wilson claims were silent partners in the affair, denied any involvement with Eatsco. Secord, then Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East, was briefly suspended from duty in 1982; he was reinstated but soon resigned his commission because, as he told the Iran committee, "the fact that I was cleared didn't seem to make any difference to anyone."

) Although the Iran-contra hearings are not directly concerned with Eatsco's operations, committee investigators have privately interviewed Shirley Brill, a former CIA administrator and companion of Clines'. Brill informed the investigators last week that Clines told her that Wilson, Secord, Shackley and Erich von Marbod, a former Defense Department official, were partners with him in Eatsco. Von Marbod, who retired from the Pentagon in 1981 at the same time that the Eatsco inquiry began, has not been implicated in the Iran-contra scandal.

Buried in his sunless cubicle with his cot, his toilet and his TV, Edwin Wilson seethes, "It is to this bunch of sharks that Ollie North tied himself." If North and others in the Government are sincere in their claims of patriotic motives for their selling arms to a terrorist nation like Iran, says Wilson, then they are victims of "unscrupulous people whose only allegiance was to money." But Wilson does not believe the patriotic pieties he hears on television from the likes of Secord. Says the prisoner: "If I'm guilty, they're guilty. If I got 52 years for what I shipped, Ollie North ought to get 300 years."

With reporting by Jonathan Beaty/Marion