Manhunt

Forget James Bond, Peter Maas' Manhunt shows what a dirty business espionage can be. Edwin P. Wilson sent more than 40,000 pounds of C-4 explosive, firearms, and ex-Green Berets to Muhammar Qaddafi's regime and establishing a terrorist training school in Libya. Those very same explosives were used to support enemies in attacks aimed at the former colonial powers. Did the CIA know about it? You bet. At his Virginia estate, Wilson hosted Ted Shackley, a legendary spook, and other budding Iran-Contra figures like Thomas Clines and Maj. Gen. Richard Secord. Wilson was their patsy. The blurb describes him as the Great Gatsby of the spy world, but he really was a dangerous blowhard who remained outside the reach of U.S. law for years with the help of the fortune he amassed selling arms overseas. A dedicated prosecutor, Larry Barcella, and his team of federal agents finally coaxed him out. Wilson went to prison arguing that he was working for the CIA all along, and after 20 years, he assembled enough evidence to convince a federal judge that he might be telling the truth. A prosecutor named Ted Greenberg had suborned a perjured CIA affidavit denying that Wilson had anything to do with the agency. What's amazing about Manhunt, published in 1986, is that this isn't much of a surprise to the reader. Bottom line: Well-written and extremely well reported, Maas' Manhunt should be on the shelf with other nonfiction spy classics like Wilderness of Mirrors.

The author is a great storyteller and provides an inordinate amount of details concerning the rougue CIA that is being tracked. It really is amazing how Mr. Maas was able to pull this all together in a great read like this.

Maas is a good story teller and he keeps your attention the whole while as he takes you from the beginnings of Wilson's thirst for money at age 8 to his acquisition of prime property in the Washington, D.C. area as a result of his secretive and illegal dealings with foreign powers. Though CIA senior officers were members along with him in phoney corporations he set up to conduct his "import-export" business), any official connection to the CIA while all this was going on isn't clear. Yet the prospect of any CIA connection to Wilson's shipments of thousands of pounds of C-4 (plastique) to Libya and Mohamar Kaddafi is, indeed, very troubling. As the author pointed out, when jets started falling out of the air (Lockerbie) and discos blowing up (Rome), you couldn't help but feel that if not for Wilson, many of these things might not ever have happened. It seems that whereever 20th century evil was to be found, the CIA was either right there, or not too far behind.This doesn't give you any great insights into the inner workings of the world of spooks, but it is certainly an interesting read and does afford at times a look at how the Justice and State Departments work--or fail to work.