Manhunt.

• Author: Easterbrook, Gregg

Manhunt.

Peter Maas. Random House, $18.95. The story of Edwin P. Wilson, the CIA agent who grew rich selling arms to Libya, is fast becoming a much-told tale, in part because he is one of the few real life people who conform to Hollywood notions of the "typical' CIA operative. Peter Maas, author of Serpico and The Valachi Papers, takes up the subject Seymour Hersh, Bob Woodward, Steve Kurkjian and Ben Bradlee Jr. of the Boston Globe, and many other reporters have taken up before. Besides spinning a clear and readable narrative of the case, Maas contributes new evidence that the CIA knew exactly what Wilson was up to all along and did nothing.

One day in the mid-1970s Wilson and his partners were shipping Qaddafi 42,000 pounds of plastic explosives--"[Wilson crony Jerry] Brower was about to command almost every pound of C4 that was commercially abailable in the United Staes, and nobody had noticed it.' Then they sent 500,000 miniature detonators for letter bombs--"even Wilson was stunned by the number.' Then handguns and M16 rifles for the next day. Eventually these slime helped Libyan military men arrange for the murders of anti-Qaddafi dissidents. All the while Wilson was living in a multimillion-dollar estate at the center of Virginia's fashionable horse country, ostensibly on his civil servant's salary.

Far from concealing his luxury, Wilson advertised it, frequently inviting high-ranking CIA officials to his estate. None seemed to suspect a thing, the same way Washington Mayor Marion Barry had a deputy mayor, a wife, and several other prominent members of his administration driving Mercedes Benzes and otherwise living lives far beyond their means without his ever suspecting the teeniest, tiniest little thing before they were hauled into court. Washington is a city of denied realities, and reality-denying mechanisms kept the CIA from moving against Wilson and also helped the FBI and the Justice Department bungle the case, until a determined prosecutor named Larry Barcella finally seized on a technicality to start Wilson's downfall. The CIA also decided it was better to let Wilson keep going than to damage the careers of those officers who had failed to stop him earlier.

CIA officials weren't the only ones who had the evidence of Wilson's crimes repeatedly waved in their faces. Hubert Humphrey was an occasional guest at Mount Airy, the Wilson mansion. Senators Strom Thurmond and John Stennis, Rep. John Dingell, and others came, too. But...