(Thomas Polgar (far right) takes command of the CIA station in Saigon, January 1972. At left is former Station Chief Ted Shackley, heading back to a new assignment in Washington. In the middle is General Creighton Abrams, head of the Military Assistance Command Vietnam).
The re-entry thing after the trip has been a challenge. I almost fell walking out of a gas station in Toledo and think I pushed things a little too hard and too soon.
I couldn’t deal with the contents of the storage warehouse, so I called my brother yesterday and suggested one last mutual trip Up North to deal with the stuff. The manifest indicated there were appliances and stuff that have to be dozens of years old, or new from the reconstruction, and I do not have the strength yet to horse them around. He agreed in principle, and we need to find an extended weekend before the snow flies.
I did not get to the morning story yesterday- and it increasingly looks like I won’t get to it this morning. I was working on extended treatment of my discussion with my 93-year-old drinking buddy Mac. He feels he needs oxygen now, so his mobility has been restricted, mostly to his one-bedroom condo and the dining room on the second floor of The Madison, the assisted living facility near my office. I stopped by to check on him Tuesday, and we had the usual wild romp through the Nation’s Spook attic that started with Eddie Wilson.
He was a rogue from the old days of CIA and Naval Intelligence, and his specialty was the establishment of front companies to cover clandestine operations. He died earlier this month, and Mac recalled meeting him on time at the NIS Headquarters in Rosslyn.
(Eddie Wilson)
In the day, Eddie was pretty famous, and after leaving CIA, he wormed himself into the Naval Intelligence HUMINT organization called “Task Force 157.” In February 1976, then-RADM Bobby Ray Inman was the new Director of Naval Intelligence. He discovered what Eddie had been up to, which included dubious undercover business deals. A few months later Wilson was asked to leave ONI, and Admiral Inman pulled the plug on TF 157.
That is where our pal Big Smoke was working, which was part of the long conversation. Wilson continued to run the companies he had established while at Langley and for the Navy. The largest of these was Consultants International, and over the next few years he amassed a fortune of over $20 million. This enabled him to buy a 2,338-acre farm in Northern Virginia, where he often entertained his close friends Ted “The Blonde Ghost” Shackley and Tom Clines, who were still active CIA officials.
(Thomas G. Clines, Ted Shackely’s Deputy for operations in Laos).
Eddie was becoming a liability, though, and was a classic example of a man who knew too much.
Eddie managed to spring himself from the slammer after 22 years on some FOIA documents that indicated that he had been framed by his former employers. Not that he was innocent- he just wasn’t guilty of what they convicted him for. And the guys he worked with, who transitioned from Government Spooks to retired contractors and made an awful lot of money doing some things for some very unpleasant people.
I aspire to that myself- retirement, that is- and I had a glass of wine from Mac’s refrigerator and we talked about all sorts of stuff. Consequently, I have an extended story about him and Langley in the ’70s and early ’80s when Edwin Wilson and the Blonde Ghost and some other of the rogue Agency operatives were still walking around free.
Looking through the archives about them, I suspect had more to do with the high-profile killings of the 1960s, and who later were identified in doing all manner of things in their retirements from the government. Arms, murder, smuggling-all that sort of stuff.
Mac has some ideas about that. We were at Willow once when he was still driving and getting out and he leaned over to me at the bar and confided in a low voice “LBJ did it.”
I said, “Duh.” And he looked surprised that such a dark supposition he had held so long was part and parcel of the lens through which many of us view the 1960s. LBJ unquestionably had the motive and the opportunity, but he needed someone to pull the trigger. Looking through the life of Eddie Wilson made me realize that he was the scapegoat for a grab-bag of military and Cuban and CIA Spooks who decided to make him the fall guy for their various enterprises, which may have included High Treason.
I don’t have any particular insight into that, and no new theories. They all sound crazy, but of course, it was the 1960s and things were crazy. It was Eddie Wilson’s passing that brought it all back.
I told Mac the story I heard in one meeting in a safe-house years ago, and connected some dots that may (or may not) be related. There was so much to account for.
The Agency specialized in the establishment of front companies and enterprises like Air America in SE Asia. It also had its tendrils deep into the Cuban emigre community. In the 1990s the refugee flotillas that Fidel permitted to leave A team from Langley was dispatched to Miami, since they needed a sympathetic media outlet to carry the semi-subliminal messages necessary to set the stage for public support for something that was going to happen clandestinely.
The Spooks met with the station manager of a Hispanic-oriented radio station, and got around the to the delicate matter of inserting the messages and stories that Langley deemed necessary. The men from Washington were very serious. They were quite surprised when the station manager rocked back in his chair in laughter.
“I wondered when you guys would be back. Don’t you know you own this place?”
Eddie Wilson was one of the originals, along with Richard Secord and the Blonde Ghost and the assorted Cubans. Eddie’s passing this month may indicate the passing of the generation national security outlaws who made the Cold War what it was.
I will get to that tomorrow, with another tale of the time Mac and me and the scary Spooks actually intersected- me just starting out, he about to start this third career as a caregiver, and The Boys getting into some serious legal problems.
The Boys are back this morning. Not really, of course, but their ghosts are.
Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com