Edwin Paul Wilson (May 3, 1928 – September 10, 2012) was a former CIA and Office of Naval Intelligence officer who was convicted in 1983 of illegally selling weapons to Libya. It was later found that the United States Department of Justice had relied on a false affidavit when prosecuting Wilson; as a result, Wilson's convictions were overturned in 2003 and he was freed the following year. Early life Edwin P. Wilson was born to a poor farming family in Nampa, Idaho, in 1928. He first worked as a merchant seaman. In 1953, Wilson earned a psychology degree from the University of Portland. That same year, Wilson joined the Marines and fought in the last days of the Korean War. He was said to have been impressive during his military service and, when he was discharged in 1956 for a knee injury, went to work for the Central Intelligence Agency. CIA career Wilson's first assignments were for the Office of Security; this included a stint in 1956 guarding U-2 spy planes in Turkey. In 1960, the Agency sent him to Cornell University for graduate studies in labor relations. He put this and his knowledge of psychology to use in the Agency's International Organizations Division (IOD) tackling communism in trade unions around the world. Wilson was involved in attempts to destabilize European labor unions, for example, by using methods as diverse as involving Corsican mobsters and using plagues of cockroaches. "Wilson was on the CIA's payroll, and doing the agency's bidding, all the time he was employed by one of the largest labor unions in the United States as its international representative in Europe. He served as an advance man for Hubert H. Humphrey in the 1964 campaign, thus playing an active role in partisan politics, while still working for the CIA." However, Wilson's most valuable time for the CIA was in Special Operations Division (SOD) setting up front companies like Maritime Consulting Associates (1964) and Consultants International (1965), which were used to covertly ship supplies around the world. For example, cargoes included disassembled boats sent to central Africa where they were welded together on the shores of Lake Tanganyika and used to intercept Soviet arms being ferried across the lake to rebels in the Congo; arms to Angola; crowd-control gear to Chile, Brazil and Venezuela; all kinds of equipment for intelligence-gathering facilities in Iran; supplies for a group of dissident