Beyond Justice

An accused spy is dead

Waldo H. Dubberstein was such a valued analyst of intelligence information that the Defense Department had asked him to work well past normal retirement age. He finally quit the Defense Intelligence Agency last year at the age of 74, after devoting most of his career to highly classified duties. A specialist in Middle East affairs, he also knew which targets in the Soviet Union would be hit under ultra-secret Pentagon war plans if a nuclear holocaust were to erupt.

Seemingly wholly devoted to his esoteric profession, Dubberstein lived a personal life that could have been scripted by John le Carre. He had abandoned his wife of 41 years, fallen in love with a woman of 32, and had been sharing her modest apartment in Arlington, Va.

In a far more sinister role, Dubberstein had apparently made clandestine connections with former CIA Agent Edwin Wilson, who has been sentenced to 32 years in prison for a series of convictions on charges of smuggling arms and explosives to Muammar Gaddafi's terrorist government in Libya. Last week a federal grand jury indicted Dubberstein on charges of selling U.S. secrets to Libya for more than $32,000. Wilson's threat that if the Government prosecuted him other intelligence officials would be drawn into the same net of allegations was thus fulfilled.

Dubberstein was accused of giving Wilson, or his associates, classified information about the Middle East between 1977 and 1979. He also was said to have failed to inform his superiors, as required, that he had traveled to Libya in 1978 for a meeting with Libyan intelligence officers to discuss the deployment of military forces in the Middle East.

Last Friday Dubberstein failed to appear for his arraignment in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va. Assuming he had fled, Judge Albert V. Bryan Jr. issued a warrant for his arrest. Dubberstein, however, had not turned fugitive. His body was found in his friend's apartment, where, investigators said, he had put a shotgun to his head and killed himself. That was no confession of guilt, of course. But it was a tragic way of pleading nolo contendere.

Dubberstein's death was the third in a series of fatalities involving men who had become entangled in Wilson's shadowy world of international intrigue. Rafael Villaverde, another former CIA agent, disappeared and was presumed to have been killed when his boat exploded off Florida in April 1982. He had told authorities that Wilson had offered to pay him to kill certain Libyan dissidents. Former CIA Agent Kevin Mulcahy was found dead, apparently of natural causes, outside a motel cabin in rural Virginia last November. He had worked for Wilson's arms-exporting firm and had blown the whistle on its illegal weapons shipments. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.