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In Texas, two arms merchants face heavy time

One defendant was a dour ex-CIA agent with dark, glowering eyes and a tight-lipped G. Gordon Liddy demeanor. The other was a jovial Englishman who smokes Cuban cigars, drives a $60,000 custom-made Cadillac convertible and cracks jokes about himself as a "good ole boy" who "drills a little oil and raises a little beef on his 2,000-acre ranch near Dallas. Their personalities may differ, but the two millionaires have much in common. Both Edwin Wilson and Ian Smalley were on trial in Texas, in unrelated but remarkably comparable cases, charged with masterminding elaborate arms-smuggling deals in the Middle East.

In Houston, Wilson, 54, was convicted of shipping 20 tons of plastic explosives from the city's Intercontinental Airport to Tripoli in 1977. In Dallas, Smalley, 42, was charged with conspiring to smuggle 100 tanks to Iran and 8,300 antitank missiles to its foe Iraq. Both offered similar alibis: they were motivated by patriotism rather than profit and believed, their lawyers claimed, that they were involved in covert operations sanctioned by the U.S. Government.

Wilson's trial ended Saturday when the jury found him guilty on four smuggling-related charges. After the verdict federal prosecutors asked that Wilson be declared a "dangerous special offender," claiming that he had "offered about $1 million" to a fellow prisoner to kill nine people, including Government attorneys and witnesses who testified against him. If U.S. District Judge Ross Sterling agrees, that could add eight years to Wilson's possible sentence of 17 years in prison.

It was the second of four trials that Wilson faced on charges that he ran an international web of illegal arms deals and terrorist activities between 1976 and 1979. In November he was convicted by a federal jury in Alexandria, Va., of organizing the export of rifles and handguns to Libya. As he did in the first trial, Wilson's lawyer, Herald Price Fahringer, argued that the defendant was a "de facto CIA agent" working undercover to get secrets for his former employer from Libyan Dictator Muammar Gaddafi.

Prosecutors termed the shipment from Houston to Libya the largest illegal movement of explosives ever investigated by the U.S. Jerome S. Brower, a California explosives manufacturer and distributor who is an unindicted coconspirator, testified that Wilson, who left the CIA in 1970, said he wanted "as much as I could get" of cyclotrimethylene trinitramine, a plastic explosive known as C4. Brower said he shipped 42,300 Ibs. in 856 5-gal. cans disguised as "drilling mud," a chemical lubricant used in oil-drilling rigs, from California to Houston, where it was loaded aboard a leased DC-8.

According to the Government's indictment against Smalley, the Englishman conspired to ship 100 vintage 50-ton tanks to Iran by using phony "end user's certificates," which gave the United Arab Emirates as the delivery site. He allegedly planned to buy the tanks from an Army depot in Anniston, Ala. He is also charged with conspiring to ship 8,300 antitank missiles to Iraq.

Smalley, against whom charges are pending in Britain for the illegal sale of 60 tank engines to Iran, faces a maximum term of 70 years and a $61,000 fine if convicted on the U.S. charges. He offered courtroom observers little more than the traditional stiff upper lip. "I've got confidence in the American justice system to find me as innocent as I am," he said. "I'm really not a Bluebeard." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.