The Spy Who Stayed in the Cold

A witness against a CIA rogue dies mysteriously in Virginia

Kevin Mulcahy was to the "Company" born. His father was in the Central Intelligence Agency for 28 years, and young Mulcahy's first job was as an electronics expert for the CIA. Last week Mulcahy, 40, died as Company men sometimes do in spy fiction: in the cold and dark, of causes unknown.

Mulcahy was found lying on the doorsill outside a motel cabin in rural Virginia. An autopsy showed that he had been drunk and was suffering from bronchial pneumonia and emphysema; however, no one of these conditions alone caused his death. Even so, his passing would have been unremarkable were it not for the difficult, dangerous crusade that Mulcahy had pursued for the past six years. Almost singlehanded, he had persuaded the Government to investigate and prosecute Frank Terpil and Edwin Wilson, two former CIA employees who made fortunes during the 1970s outfitting terrorist squads from Londonderry to Libya. Terpil remains a fugitive, but Wilson goes on trial this month, and Mulcahy, who worked for the pair in 1976, was to have testified against him.

At week's end the local Virginia police and the FBI downplayed the possibilities that Kevin Mulcahy was murdered. So did his father. "Foul play? I don't think so," said Donald Mulcahy, 64. "If these guys" wanted to kill Kevin, he figured, "they would have done so long ago."

Kevin was the oldest of six Mulcahy children, and the first of four to follow their father into the CIA. (None work for the agency any longer.) He was 21 at the time, and specialized in high-speed communications and computer technology. Five years later, in 1968, married and the father of two sons, Mulcahy quit for the far higher pay of the computer industry. The jobs got better and better, but his drinking problem and marriage got worse and worse. There was a divorce.

By the mid-1970s Mulcahy had managed to pull himself together. Then he ran into Edwin Wilson; Mulcahy signed on with Wilson's Washington-based arms-export firm. For a time, Mulcahy thought the company was a sub rosa CIA enterprise.

When Terpil and Wilson ordered him to procure a lightweight guided antiaircraft missile for Libya, Mulcahy balked. In the firm's files he found startling evidence of international terrorism-for-hire, including a plan to train and equip hitmen in the Libyan desert. Mulcahy quit and went to the authorities. The Government's investigation of Terpil and Wilson was frustratingly slow. But Mulcahy, often obliged to live in hiding and disguise, persevered, talking for hundreds of hours to federal investigators and providing them with incriminating documents taken from Wilson's office.

A year ago Mulcahy became a minor celebrity after the New York Times published an account of his dealings with Wilson and Terpil. He appeared on television news programs and talked to publishers about writing a book. Last fall in Colorado, at the trial of a Wilson associate for attempted murder, Mulcahy became friends with Fort Collins Policeman Ray Martinez.

In June, when Wilson was caught in a complicated trap set by federal agents, Mulcahy phoned Martinez. "I have to be careful," Martinez recalls his saying, "because [Wilson] will probably have someone looking for me." Mulcahy's life suddenly soured. Depressed and drinking again, he talked with friends about suicide. Martinez got another call last month from Mulcahy: "He seemed paranoid and on the run."

Six days before he died, Mulcahy rented a spartan one-room cabin at the Mountain View Motel Court in the sylvan Shenandoah Valley. Last Monday he drunkenly fired a shotgun at his cabin door, and the motel owner suggested he leave. Mulcahy lugged five suitcases, three of them packed with his files on Wilson and Terpil, out to his pickup truck. The motel owner locked the door and left; Mulcahy apparently stayed. Early the next morning, after a chill night of 40DEG temperatures, his body was found slumped against his cabin. His pants were around his ankles. Inside the cabin were a dozen empty wine bottles.

"Kevin's entire life," suggested one federal investigator who knew him, "was centered on bringing Ed Wilson to justice. When he believed that had been accomplished, he was lost." Assistant U.S. Attorney E. Lawrence Barcella Jr., who is prosecuting the Wilson case, insists that "Mulcahy's death is not going to affect at all our ability to go forward." (Oddly, last spring a lesser prosecution witness disappeared near the Bahamas after his fishing boat exploded. An FBI probe declared the sinking an accident.) Nearly five years ago, when Mulcahy was the only witness the Government had, he was an ambivalent informer. "I'm not going to go to court," he told a federal prosecutor, "and testify publicly against those guys." The troubled crusader, it turned out, was right.

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