Who Did Edwin Wilson Really Work For?

Ed Wilson's Revenge:  The Biggest CIA Scandal in History Has Its Feet in the Starting Blocks in a Houston Court House

From the January, 2000 issue of From The Wilderness
by Michael C. Ruppert

"Reprinted with permission, Michael C. Ruppert and From The Wilderness Publications, www.copvcia.com, P.O. Box 6061-350, Sherman Oaks, CA, 91413. 818-788-8791. FTW is published monthly, annual subscriptions are $50 per year." 

The following is written after examining more than 900 pages of documents, in four volumes, filed since last September, in Houston Federal Court, by attorneys representing former CIA operative Edwin P. Wilson and the United States Department of Justice. As strange as it may seem, FTW assures you that there is a document on file or an on-the-record quote to support everything we now tell you.

On February 2, 1983, the Houston trial of former CIA agent Edwin P. Wilson, on Federal charges that he had unlawfully sold explosives to Libya, hung at a truly precarious moment. In chambers, the Judge hearing the case had refused to allow a CIA witness, using the pseudonym William Larson, to testify using a false name. The CIA, and prosecutors like aggressive Northern Virginia Assistant United States Attorney (AUSA) Ted Greenberg, relying on investigative materials produced under the direction of Washington, D.C. AUSAs Larry Barcella and Carol Bruce, were also concerned about limiting Wilson's ability to cross examine Larson for "security" reasons. Larson's intended testimony would have included statements that, according to CIA records under Larson's care, Ed Wilson had not been a CIA employee or done any work for the Agency since 1971.

According to Barcella, who gave a detailed interview to FTW for this story, the Judge's ruling raised serious security concerns for the Justice Department. The CIA records issue still needed to be addressed from another angle - and quickly. Wilson's defense had already made the case that the CIA had known and sanctioned the activities for which he was now on trial. That position needed to be countered in the rebuttal phase before the case went to the jury. Time was running out. 


 Ed Wilson stood accused of shipping 42,000 pounds of the plastic explosive C-4 directly to Libyan dictator Moammar Qadaffy in 1977, and then hiring U.S. experts - former U.S. Army Green Berets - to teach Qadaffy's people how to make bombs shaped like lamps, ashtrays and radios.  Bombs were actually made, and foes of Qadaffy were actually murdered. This was the ongoing crime that had made Wilson, and his still-missing accomplice, former CIA employee Frank Terpil, the most infamous desperadoes in the world. C-4, according to some experts, is the most powerful non-nuclear explosive made. Two pounds in the right places can bring down a jumbo jet. Hence, 42,000 pounds would be enough to bring down 21,000 jumbo jets. C-4 is highly prized on the world's black markets and is much in demand. It is supposedly very tightly controlled where it is manufactured - in the U.S.

At the time it was shipped from Houston International Airport, in 1977, the 42,000 pounds of C-4 represented almost the entire United States domestic supply. It had been collected for Wilson by one California explosives distributor who collected it from a number of manufacturers around the country. Surprisingly, no one had officially noticed. Wilson had, in earlier and subsequent deals, also sold a number of handguns to Qadaffy, and several had been used in assassinations of Libyan dissidents in a number of countries, including the United States. It was these and other firearms violations by Wilson, including a scheme to ship more than a thousand M16 rifles to Qadaffy, that had put the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF) and Larry Barcella on Wilson's trail back in late 1977.

That investigation, which resulted in a 1982 Virginia conviction, led to the discovery of the C-4 shipment to Qadaffy. By January of 1983 Barcella and a team of dedicated BATF agents had been on Ed Wilson's trail for five long years. Barcella, in Houston as an observer and advisor, had been "twiddling his thumbs most of the time," but he did testify as a witness.  He was, by virtue of his role as the originator of the cases, "the institutional memory" of DoJ. Ted Greenberg had, from the other side of the Potomac in Alexandria, taken over other investigations stemming from Wilson's activities which led eventually to the Eatsco scandal. That investigation involved Wilson cronies Tom Clines, Air Force General Richard Secord, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Eric von Marbod and the legendary Ted Shackley.

The Covert Reach of Brown Brothers Harriman

For immediate release: December 21, 2004

Richard W. Fisher will become President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas effective April 4, 2005. The appointment of Mr. Fisher was announced today by Ray L. Hunt, Chairman of the Bank's Board of Directors. Mr. Fisher will succeed Robert D. McTeer, Jr., who resigned November 4, 2004, to become chancellor of the Texas A&M University System.

Mr. Fisher, 55, is currently Vice Chairman of Kissinger McLarty Associates, a strategic advisory firm chaired by Henry Kissinger, the former Secretary of State of the United States of America. As President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, Mr. Fisher will head one of the 12 regional Reserve Banks, which with the Board of Governors in Washington, D.C., make up the Federal Reserve System, the nation's central bank. He will participate in meetings of the Federal Open Market Committee, a principal policy-making body in the Federal Reserve System, and during 2005, and every third year following, will be a voting member of that Committee.

The Dallas Reserve Bank serves the Eleventh Federal Reserve District, which includes all of Texas, as well as portions of Louisiana and New Mexico. The Federal Reserve is responsible for managing the country's money supply, supervising banks and depository institutions, and serving as fiscal agent for the federal government. The Federal Reserve also provides services to depository institutions.

Ray Hunt, from second family of H.L. Hunt

Ray Hunt, Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, said, "We are extremely pleased with the fact that Richard Fisher will soon be joining us as our new President. Richard possesses a superb knowledge of the nation's economic and monetary system and his direct personal involvement in a number of very important international economic treaties and activities make him uniquely qualified to provide the very forward-looking leadership for which the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas has become known."

Mr. Fisher graduated with honors from Harvard in economics, earned an MBA from Stanford, and studied engineering at the U.S. Naval Academy and Latin American politics at Oxford University. He began his career as a banker at the private bank of Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. At Brown Brothers, Mr. Fisher was assistant to Robert Roosa, a former senior official of the Federal Reserve and Under Secretary of the Treasury who had trained several leading financial officials, among them Paul Volcker, who went on to become Federal Reserve Board Chairman before Mr. Greenspan.

In 1977, Mr. Fisher was "loaned out" by Brown Brothers to serve as Assistant to the Secretary of the Treasury during the Carter Administration, where he worked on issues related to the dollar crisis of 1978 and 1979, then returned to Brown Brothers to found their Texas operations in Dallas. In 1987, he created Fisher Capital Management, an investment advisory firm, and a separate funds management firm, Fisher Ewing Partners, which focused heavily on investing in distressed banks, savings and loans, and thrifts. He sold his controlling interests in both firms when he again joined the government in 1997.

From 1997 to 2001, Mr. Fisher served as Deputy United States Trade Representative with the rank of Ambassador. Ambassador Fisher oversaw the implementation of NAFTA, negotiations for the Free Trade Area of the Americas, and the initiation of the U.S.- Chile Free Trade Agreement negotiations. He negotiated several major agreements on behalf of the United States in Asia, including the Bilateral Trade Agreement with Vietnam signed by President Bush, the U.S.-Korea Auto Agreement of 1998, and the initiation of the Free Trade agreement with Singapore, and was a senior member of the team that negotiated the bilateral accords for China and Taiwan's accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO). Under an agreement struck between President Clinton and Japanese Prime Minister Hashimoto, Ambassador Fisher co-chaired the U.S.-Japan Enhanced Initiative on Competition and Deregulation which led to significant changes in the financial, telecommunications, commercial and legal sectors of the Japanese economy.

Biography-Roosa

"I am excited at the prospect of working for the brilliant staff at the Dallas Fed. This is a homecoming in more than one way. I started my career at Brown Brothers as the assistant to Robert Roosa, a legendary figure in both the Federal Reserve System and the U.S. Treasury. He and the partners there taught me the bond, stock, and foreign exchange markets and the investment trade. It was Mr. Roosa's ardent wish that someday I would 'pay it back' by joining the Federal Reserve, which he considered the 'purest form of public service, above and beyond the reach of partisan politics.' He is probably grinning up in heaven right now," said Mr. Fisher.

RICHARD W. FISHER BACKGROUND

Richard W. Fisher is Vice Chairman of Kissinger McLarty Associates, a partnership with Henry Kissinger, the former Secretary of State for Presidents Nixon and Ford, and Mack McLarty, former White House Chief of Staff in the Clinton Administration. He additionally serves in an honorific capacity as Senior Advisor to the law firm of Covington & Burling, and as Senior Advisor to FCM Investments, an SEC registered investment advisory firm he founded in 1987 and sold outright in 1997.

Mr. Fisher has served on numerous for-profit and not-for-profit boards throughout his career, ranging from the U.S-Russia Fund and the University of Texas Investment Management Company (UTIMCO) to the Institute for Contemporary German Studies and the Dallas Museum of Art. Presently, he is a Director of Electronic Data Systems Corporation (EDS), the Brookings Institution, the American Council on Germany, and the Pacific Council. He is a member of the Trilateral Commission, and immediate past Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations' Congressional Roundtable on International Trade & Economics. He is Chairman of the American Assembly and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

From 1997 to 2001, Mr. Fisher was Deputy United States Trade Representative with the rank of Ambassador. During this period, Ambassador Fisher oversaw trade policy for Asia and the Pacific and the Americas. He represented the U.S. at both the 1999 New Zealand and 2000 Australia Ministerial meetings of the 21-member states of APEC. Ambassador Fisher negotiated the U.S.-Korea Auto Agreement of 1998; the U.S.-Vietnam Bilateral Trade Agreement, which was signed by President Bush in 2001; and the initiation of the U.S.-Singapore Free Trade Agreement. He was a member of the team that negotiated the U.S.-China agreement for Chinese accession to the World Trade Organization and, separately, the bilateral aspects of Taiwan's accession. He chaired the American delegation for the Enhanced Initiative on Competition and Deregulation of the Japanese Economy for three years, an exercise that resulted in significant changes in the structure of Japan's telecommunications (the deregulation of NTT's telephone monopoly), housing, energy, health care, legal, retailing (the "Large Scale Retail Store Law"), and financial sectors.

During his tenure at USTR, Ambassador Fisher oversaw the implementation of NAFTA, the largest trading relationship of the U.S., accounting for 40% of U.S. exports and 30% of U.S. imports. He had oversight responsibilities for the development of the Free Trade Area of the Americas, representing the U.S. at the Ministerial level for multilateral negotiations with the 33 nations involved. He negotiated numerous high-profile issues throughout the hemisphere, including the deregulation of Telmex, the removal of Canadian restrictions on U.S. magazine publications, the protection of U.S. companies' intellectual property rights in Argentina and Brazil, and the initiation of the U.S.-Chile Free Trade Agreement.

Throughout his tenure at USTR, Ambassador Fisher served as Vice Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC). He was also a member of the National Intellectual Property Law Enforcement Coordination Council.

Before joining USTR, Mr. Fisher was Managing Partner of Fisher Capital Management and Fisher Ewing Partners from 1987 through 1997. With $500 million in equity capital, both firms specialized in buying claims to publicly-traded assets selling significantly below true value in securities markets of the U.S., Europe and throughout Asia; Mr. Fisher resided in Tokyo in 1990. Fisher Ewing's fund created in 1989, Value Partners, earned compound returns of 24% per annum until Mr. Fisher joined the government.

Previously, Mr. Fisher was Senior Manager of the private banking firm of Brown Brothers Harriman and Co., where he began his career in 1975 as an assistant to Robert Roosa specializing in fixed income and foreign exchange markets. He served in the U.S. Treasury Department from 1977-79 as Assistant to the Secretary of the Treasury, then returned to Brown Brothers to found their business in Texas, which he managed until 1987 before creating his own firms.

Mr. Fisher is a first generation American. He is equally fluent in Spanish and English, having spent his formative years in Mexico. He attended the U.S. Naval Academy ('67-'69), graduated with honors from Harvard in economics ('71), read Latin American politics at Oxford ('72-'73), and received an MBA from Stanford University ('75).

Throughout his career, Mr. Fisher has maintained his academic interests starting in 1982-84 when he served as Chairman of the Trustees of the Stanford University Business School Trust. Subsequently, he chaired the Board of the Institute of the Americas at the University of California at San Diego; was Adjunct Professor at the L.B.J. School at the University of Texas where he taught a second year Masters degree course "Governing America in the New Century;" was a Trustee of the Institute for Contemporary German Studies at John Hopkins University and also of the School for Advanced International Studies; and served on the Visiting Committees of Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and the Center for International Affairs. He was a Weatherhead Fellow at Harvard in 2001. He was recently elected an Honorary Fellow of Hertford College at Oxford University, and serves on the Stanford University Graduate School of Business Advisory Board.

Mr. Fisher took leave of his senses in 1993 and ran for the United States Senate as a conservative Democrat. To his surprise, he won the nomination in a run-off against an incumbent Congressman and a former Texas Attorney General, but garnered only 1,639,615 votes (38%) in the general election of 1994 to the Republican incumbent. "I labored briefly in the vineyards of partisan politics," Mr. Fisher said, "but all it yielded was prune juice. I was a lousy politician."

[Au contraire! He achieved his intended purpose of assuring the election of Phil Gramm. There was a rumor going around during the campaign that Fisher had never even registered to vote prior to running for the Senate, and, therefore, had never voted. His one claim to fame was that he had worked for the investment bank set up by former Democrats' moneybags, Averell Harriman--not much to recommend him, since Harriman's partner was Prescott Bush, father of George H.W. Bush and grandfather of future President George W. Bush!]

Mr. Fisher has been married for 31 years to Nancy Miles Collins. They have four children: Anders (Harvard '99; Stanford MBA '04), Alison (Harvard '02), James (Harvard '06), and Texana (Harvard '07).

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James Mitchell Collins (Congressman from Texas, 1968-83) was Richard Fisher's father-in-law. Fisher's wife, Nancy, had been a contestant in the Miss Teenage Beauty Pageant in Dallas, owned and created by Bedford Wynne and Clint W. Murchison, Jr.