International Man of Mystery

"After he was convicted of everything," Barcella says, "he finally called and said he wanted to talk to me."

They met at a U.S. Marshals office in Alexandria. Wilson told Barcella that he'd never plotted to kill him. Barcella didn't believe it. The plot, he says, had been recorded by a prison snitch wearing a wire.

"He said, 'Those guys were lying, they set me up,' " Barcella recalls. "I said, 'Ed, why lie? It was on tape.' "

Ten Years in Solitary

Facing 52 years in prison, Wilson was shipped to the super-max prison in Marion, Ill., and placed in solitary confinement.

He spent 10 years there -- "10 years locked down 23 hours a day," he says.

Meanwhile, his wife divorced him. His two sons cut off communication with him. The IRS seized his property, and the man who'd once been worth $23 million declared bankruptcy.

"You'd think that would break him but it didn't," says his brother Robert, a retired accountant living in Seattle. "He never did give up."

Instead, Wilson bombarded the CIA and the Justice Department with Freedom of Information Act requests, demanding documents about himself. The feds balked. Wilson sued and won. Slowly, over a decade, the documents began to trickle out and Wilson pored over them, searching for evidence that would help free him.

By 1996, he'd uncovered a Justice Department memo titled "Duty to Disclose Possibly False Testimony. " It described the CIA's Briggs affidavit -- which had helped persuade the Houston jury to convict Wilson -- as "inaccurate." Wilson filed a motion to overturn the Houston conviction, attaching the memo as evidence.

Federal Judge Lynn Hughes did not grant Wilson's motion but he did assign a lawyer to handle Wilson's case -- David Adler, a former CIA agent.

When Adler met Wilson in Allenwood, the lawyer told his client that he, too, had once worked for the CIA.

"He jumped up and pushed his chair across the room," Adler recalls, "and he started yelling, 'You people are trying to [expletive] up my case! Goddammit, you people think you can bury me but I'm gonna go down fighting!' "

A guard started toward Wilson. Adler waved him away.

"I let Ed rant and rave for a while," Adler recalls, "and then I said, 'Look, if I was here to [expletive] up your case, would I tell you I'm a former CIA officer?' "

After that, Wilson calmed down.

Under court order, Adler was permitted to sit in a locked vault at the Justice Department and read thousands of documents on Wilson. They didn't prove that the CIA ever asked Wilson to sell C-4 to Libya. But they did document more than 80 contacts between the CIA and Wilson during his arms-dealing days: Shackley asked Wilson to acquire a Soviet missile, and to find a retirement home for a Laotian general who'd worked for the CIA. Another CIA official twice asked Wilson to supply anti-tank weapons for "a sensitive agency operation." The agency proposed using Wilson to secretly sell desalinization plants to Egypt. And so on.

The documents also showed that, within days of the Houston trial, the CIA had informed the Justice Department that the Briggs affidavit was false. Lawyers at both CIA and Justice argued that they had a "duty to disclose" the false testimony to Wilson and the judge, as required by law. But they never did.

In 1999 Adler filed a motion to overturn Wilson's conviction because "the guilty verdict was obtained through the government's knowing use of false evidence."

In response, the Justice Department admitted that the Briggs affidavit was "inaccurate" but claimed that the conviction should be upheld because the CIA had never authorized Wilson's sale of C-4.