The Spy Who Was Left Behind
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CONTENTS
A Note on Georgian Names
Key Players
CHAPTER 1 Death on a Lonely Road
CHAPTER 2 “Do They Think We’re Idiots?”
CHAPTER 3 The Testimony of Two Spies and a Housewife
CHAPTER 4 An Obscure Hint
CHAPTER 5 Mr. American Lawyer
CHAPTER 6 Hometown of a Spy
CHAPTER 7 The Thief in Law
CHAPTER 8 “The Americans Knew Everything”
CHAPTER 9 A Visit to the Prosecutor General
CHAPTER 10 “No One Interviews Marina”
CHAPTER 11 A Georgian Education
CHAPTER 12 “You Need to Get That File”
CHAPTER 13 A Letter from the American Ambassador
CHAPTER 14 The Search for the Real Killer
CHAPTER 15 “They Beat Me”
CHAPTER 16 Official Interrogations
CHAPTER 17 A Reporter’s Questions
CHAPTER 18 Confessions of an Old Soldier
EPILOGUE The Spy Who Was Left Behind
Photographs
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Appendix Time line of Aldrich Ames’s CIA career from 1983 to his arrest for espionage
Index
This book is dedicated to my father, Captain Angelo Pullara, USAF.
He died so that someone else could live.
A NOTE ON GEORGIAN NAMES
At first glance it might seem like almost everybody in Georgia is related because their names sound so similar—all those -dze’s and -shvili’s. However, these suffixes are merely the Georgian equivalent of the Western -son (as in Ericson, which originally meant “Eric’s son”).
The suffix -dze is Old Georgian for “son” and the suffix -shvili is Old Georgian for “child.” Whether someone is a -dze or -shvili depends on which side of the country his or her family comes from: the -dze (like Eduard Shevardnadze) are from western Georgia and the -shvili (like Mikheil Saakashvili) are from eastern Georgia.
When a Georgian name is rendered into Latin script, it is written phonetically. You pronounce each letter and place the accent or stress on the suffix. For names ending with -dze, the “e” is stressed (e.g., sheh-vard-nad-ZEH); and for names ending with -shvili, the first “i” is stressed (e.g., sah-kash-VEE-lee).
KEY PLAYERS
THE PEOPLE IN THE NIVA
* * *
Eldar Gogoladze
Elena Darchiashvili
Marina Kapanadze
Freddie Woodruff
THE YOUNG MEN ARRESTED BY GOGOLADZE
* * *
Anzor Sharmaidze
Genadi Berbitchashvili
Gela Bedoidze
THE GEORGIAN GOVERNING COUNCIL
* * *
Jaba Ioseliani
Tengiz Kitovani
Tengiz Sigua
Eduard Shevardnadze
GEORGIAN INVESTIGATORS AND FORENSIC EXPERTS
* * *
Irakli Batiashvili
Shota Kviraya
Avtandil Ioseliani
Otar Djaparidze
Zaza Altunashvili
Levan Chachuria
GEORGIAN POLITICAL FIGURES
* * *
President Zviad Gamsakhurdia
Temur Alasania
President Mikheil Saakashvili
Giga Bokeria
Zurab Zhvania
Daniel Kunin
U.S. POLITICAL AND DIPLOMATIC FIGURES
* * *
President Bill Clinton
President George W. Bush
Ambassador Strobe Talbott
Vice President Dick Cheney
Ambassador Richard Miles
Secretary of State James Baker
Ambassador John Tefft
Vice Consul Lynn Whitlock
Ambassador Kent Brown
FBI SPECIAL AGENTS
* * *
George Shukin
Dell Spry
Robert Hanssen
Dave Beisner
CIA OFFICERS
* * *
Director William Casey
Director James Woolsey
Edward Lee Howard
Aldrich Hazen Ames
Bob Baer
Milt Bearden
Dayna Baer
G. L. Lamborn
THE WOODRUFF FAMILY
* * *
George Woodruff
Dorothy Woodruff
Chery Woodruff
Jill Woodruff-Pully
Georgia Woodruff Alexander
Meredith Woodruff
THE JUDGE AND LAWYERS AT THE TRIAL
* * *
Chief Judge Djemal Leonidze
Prosecutor K. Chanturia
Tamaz Inashvili
Avtandil Sakvarelidze
MEMBERS OF THE PROSECUTOR GENERAL’S OFFICE
* * *
Irakli Okruashvili
Zurab Adeishvili
Zaza Sanshiashvili
SELECTED JOURNALISTS
* * *
Thomas Goltz
Andrew Higgins
Peter Klein
Eliso Chapidze
Jamie Doran
Natasha Gevorkian
Adam Ciralsky
Magda Memanishvili
Sopiko Chkhaidze
Inga Alavidze
WITNESSES ON THE OLD MILITARY ROAD
* * *
Badri Chkutiasvili
Ramin Khubulia
Giorgi Tserekashvili
Tamaz Tserekashvili
Lali Tserekashvili
Eteri Vardiashvili
Merab Gelashvili
Vasiko
RUSSIAN INTELLIGENCE OFFICERS
* * *
Victor Cherkashin
Stanislav Lekarev
Alexander Litvinenko
“Igor”
SELECTED MEMBERS OF GROUP ALPHA
* * *
Igor Giorgadze
Kote Shavishvili
Vladimir Rachman
THE BILLIONAIRES
* * *
George Soros
Bidzina Ivanashvili
HELPERS, GUIDES, AND FRIENDS
* * *
Lali Kereselidze
Maria Semenova
Carolyn Clark Campbell
Lance Fletcher
Nana Alexandria
CHAPTER 1
* * *
DEATH ON A LONELY ROAD
“Mr. President, I am an American lawyer and I represent surviving family members of a US diplomat who was murdered near Tbilisi in 1993.”
It was November 2004 and Mikheil Saakashvili had just finished two hours of remarks in the Tbilisi State University auditorium. Twelve months earlier this thirty-six-year-old former justice minister had scrambled to the front of a popular revolt in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia. In a made-for-TV moment, he handed his predecessor a rose and demanded that the old man quit elected office. Riding a wave of patriotic euphoria, Misha (as he was popularly known) had been elected president of the tiny Eurasian nation and given a mandate to lurch toward the West.
The young chief executive felt comfortable with the invitation-only crowd and agreed to take
a few questions from the audience. I had tagged along with two guests in hopes of having a few minutes with a minor government official. The opportunity to talk to the president himself was too good to pass up.
The murdered diplomat was Freddie Woodruff, a forty-five-year-old former preacher with a gift for languages. I remembered him mostly as the strawberry-blond older brother of one of my junior high classmates. He was a Bible major who played college football and (in my world) that made him a Samson-like hero. But those who knew him better recalled a more complicated character. As one of his friends told me, “Freddie was an extraordinarily outgoing individual—seductive on many different levels. He had an intuitive sense of what people wanted and he used it to manipulate them. But somehow, with Freddie, you just didn’t mind.”
I raised my hand and was chosen to address the president. The question before mine had provoked enthusiastic applause from the fifteen hundred in attendance: What wonders would Saakashvili do in the second year of his administration to match the glories he had accomplished in the first year? The response to me was less congenial. The crowd seemed to hold its collective breath and look to the president for cues on how to react. His displeasure was apparent: He was not happy to receive an unscripted question from a soft-spoken foreigner on live national television.
“We have obtained evidence proving that Anzor Sharmaidze—the young Georgian man who was convicted of killing the American diplomat—is completely innocent,” I said.
An ominous murmur rolled over the crowd of handpicked supporters. I focused my mind on the job at hand: be polite, be respectful, be careful.
“My clients have sent me here to present this evidence and to ask the Georgian government to honor the promises made during the Rose Revolution. They have sent me here to ask you, Mr. President, will you let this innocent man go free?”
The crowd’s murmur became a grumble; the president’s scowl became a glare. One of Saakashvili’s American-trained bodyguards stepped in front of me and put his hand on his gun. I felt the tingle of panic creeping up the back of my neck.
Saakashvili’s answer was a blur of indignation. “Georgia is not some third-rate country that can be talked to in this way,” he said. “We are a small country, but we have our rules and procedures. I’m not some dictator. I don’t tell the courts what to do.”
The president was spitting words at me, but the noise in my head made it hard to hear. His bodyguards had triangulated around me and were poised to spring at the first sign of aggression. I kept my hands in plain sight and tried hard to look benign.
“Imagine if my friend George Bush delivered a speech and some Georgian lawyer asked him to free a person whose case was being reviewed by an American court,” Saakashvili barked. “This American lawyer should respect the Georgian system the same way we Georgians respect America’s system.”
The crowd cheered. The president had defended the honor of the plucky little country and addressed the insult of a stranger’s appeal to fairness. Never mind that a grave injustice had been committed against one of their own citizens. No foreign lawyer could be allowed to point it out.
A terrible fear squeezed my chest. I was seven thousand miles from home and had just offended the most powerful man in the country. I had unintentionally provoked a lethal adversary and quite possibly killed the man I was trying to liberate.
I felt sick with doubt and fixated on a single thought: “How the hell did I get myself into this?” The answer to that question was twelve years earlier and a world away in Houston, Texas.
* * *
Like any respectable adventure, this one had started with a good breakfast and the New York Times. I had turned to page 4 of the paper with no inkling that I was starting a quest. The two-column headline proclaimed “CIA Agent Dies in Georgian Attack.” An inset map identified the Georgia in question as the small Black Sea country wedged between the empires of Russia, Turkey, and Iran. The article made short shrift of the spy’s cover story as a State Department regional affairs officer. A senior administration official identified the dead man as an employee of the Central Intelligence Agency. But it was the spy’s name that caught my attention: Fred Woodruff of Stillwater, Oklahoma.
“Fred Woodruff?” I thought. “Freddie? I didn’t know Freddie was a spy.” When last I’d heard of him, he’d given up on preaching, divorced his first wife, and gone to work for the State Department.
The article said Woodruff had been shot dead on August 8, 1993, while riding in a car driven by one Eldar Gogoladze, the chief bodyguard for Eduard Shevardnadze. Known around the world as “the Silver Fox,” Shevardnadze had been the Soviet foreign minister under Mikhail Gorbachev and, following the December 1991 breakup of the USSR, had become chairman of Georgia’s governing State Council.
According to the Times, Freddie and Eldar were returning from a Sunday sightseeing trip to the mountainous northern border when Woodruff was mortally wounded by a single bullet to the head. The article quoted Gogoladze saying that the shooting occurred at night about twenty miles northwest of Tbilisi in a little village called Natakhtari.
High-ranking Clinton administration officials said Woodruff had been identified to the Georgian government as a CIA officer who was in country to train Shevardnadze’s security force. It was a previously secret mission involving the CIA and US Special Forces, the first such effort inside the former Soviet Union. Woodruff had arrived in Georgia on June 3 and was scheduled to depart on August 20. It was his third visit to the country.
Georgian investigators from the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the national law enforcement agency, said that it was unclear whether the murder was a politically motivated assassination or a carjacking gone horribly wrong. “It may be an ordinary crime or political,” said a ministry spokesman. “Ordinary because this is a dangerous region where car thefts are common; political because the car had Georgian state plates.”
Notwithstanding this uncertainty, Shevardnadze had decried the killing as a crime justifying martial law. “There are mafioso structures and criminal elements which are very active,” he said. “This speaks in favor of the emergency regime that I have mentioned before.”
The US, however, remained officially cautious. “I know the Georgians would like to see this as a horrible accident,” said an embassy spokesman, “but nothing can yet be ruled out. We’re keeping an open mind as to whether it was an incredible accident or otherwise.”
Accident or otherwise, the story of Freddie Woodruff was incredible to me. Someone from a family I knew, a family with whom I’d grown up, had joined the CIA and gotten himself murdered in a faraway and exotic land.
I scoured subsequent news reports for details about the shooting. Two women had accompanied Woodruff and Gogoladze on their sightseeing trip. The quartet made their journey in a Niva 1600, a Russian-made two-door hatchback. Just outside the village of Natakhtari a group of armed men allegedly tried to carjack the Niva and fired a single shot at the automobile as it raced away. Woodruff was sitting in the back seat on the right. The bullet struck him in the forehead and he died at the scene. Three young men—one of them in a military uniform—had been detained for questioning.
A number of newspapers reported that Gogoladze had been suspended as Shevardnadze’s chief bodyguard. An equal number of newspapers denied the suspension and denounced the report. Apparently, Gogoladze’s status was complicated and contentious.
James Woolsey, the hawkish and intellectual director of the CIA, flew to Tbilisi to retrieve Woodruff’s body—a tribute described as both “highly unusual” and a tacit acknowledgment by the CIA that Woodruff was one of its own. The director and Shevardnadze talked for more than an hour on the international side of passport control. Afterward, Woodruff’s flag-draped coffin was loaded onto the director’s Boeing 707 for the long journey home.
Nine days after the murder, the Georgian Ministry of Internal Affairs announced that the crime had been solved. The American secret agent—a veteran of countless encounters with
death—had been killed by a common criminal shooting blindly at a fleeing car. “It was an accidental killing,” the spokesman stated. “Nobody knew who they were shooting at.”
The name of the alleged murderer was one Anzor Sharmaidze, a twenty-one-year-old off-duty soldier. He was one of the three men detained for questioning on the night of the shooting. He had confessed and his two companions had implicated him. According to the government spokesman, all three men had been drunk at the time and Sharmaidze had shot at the car because it had failed to stop for him.
In 1993 Georgia was a lawless republic wracked by separatist rebellions and civil strife. Armed men walked the streets. The police were outmanned and outgunned. Nevertheless, the country’s anemic central government had swiftly investigated Woodruff’s murder and efficiently identified the perpetrator. As luck would have it, the facts of the crime turned out to be exactly what the government needed them to be: The murder of the American diplomat was not intentional, not political, and not their fault.