The Spy Who Was Left Behind

by Michael Pullara

  In order for the FBI to operate officially in a foreign country, it is required to obtain advance approval from the host government. Shevardnadze had granted this approval on behalf of Georgia; however, in 1993 the real power of government lay with another member of the four-person State Council, a mafia warlord named Jaba Ioseliani. It was perhaps for this reason that the scope of the first FBI investigation was limited to providing laboratory support and interviewing embassy staff. Alternatively, the State Department may have requested that the Georgians restrict Bureau activities in order to minimize the possibility that US investigators would discover politically inconvenient evidence. In either event, the special agents were allowed to examine the crime scene and the physical evidence but were not permitted to interrogate Georgian witnesses or perform independent investigation.

  The first piece of physical evidence examined by the forensic team was Gogoladze’s white Niva hatchback—the same vehicle that had been inspected by Special Agent Shukin on the day after the murder. In his report Shukin had said he “saw no indication of glass or other part of the vehicle having been damaged by gunfire.” However, the newly arrived FBI documents stated that the forensic team had identified an obvious bullet hole in the upper right corner of the rear hatch.

  There were only two explanations for the appearance of this previously undiscovered evidence. Either Shukin had missed the bullet hole or it had been placed there after his inspection. But if there was no bullet hole in the Niva at the time of the special agent’s inspection, then the fatal shot either originated inside the car or entered the passenger compartment through an open door or window. I studied the documents carefully to come up with less damning alternatives and in the process noticed that Shukin’s three-page memo had a different file number from the 356 pages I had just received. I called the FBI’s FOIA office to inquire why.

  “You have file number 185A?” asked the information officer.

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s a three-page memo saying that there wasn’t a bullet hole in the car.”

  She laughed nervously. “You weren’t supposed to get that,” she said. Apparently, this was information the FBI had intended to keep from me.

  The FBI forensic team measured the diameter of the hole to determine the caliber of bullet that made it and took scrapings from the lip of the puncture. One agent sat in the dead man’s seat—turning left and right, looking up and down—as his colleagues calculated angles and computed trajectories. They analyzed spatter patterns, sifted through dried pools of blood, and collected minuscule bone fragments. They tested for gunpowder residue and searched for evidence of more exotic accelerants. They checked the car’s operating condition and diagnosed a malfunction in the driver’s window crank. They removed the headliner, the seats, the carpet, and the interior panels. They catalogued and photographed everything.

  At the end of this fourteen-hour examination the special agents drew four conclusions: Freddie Woodruff had been shot while sitting in the back seat of this automobile; the path of the bullet was from the back-right to the front-left of the passenger compartment; there was no gunpowder residue in the vehicle; and the bullet was not in the car. How and when the lead-and-steel bullet core had exited the vehicle remained a mystery.

  The special agents spent the next day with Eldar Gogoladze, the car’s driver and head of Shevardnadze’s personal protection force. He spoke idiomatic English with an American accent. He volunteered to lead the forensic team to the crime scene and the special agents used the opportunity to conduct an informal interrogation.

  The agents’ armored SUV crossed the Mtkvari River and traveled along the right embankment through Tbilisi. Georgian paramilitary and HRT personnel followed closely in chase cars. Just outside the city the highway veered west. The convoy passed through Mtskheta and two miles on the other side turned north onto the Old Military Road. Gogoladze signaled the driver to stop.

  “Here,” he said. “This is where Freddie was shot.”

  It was an unremarkable spot on the road between the turnoff and the village of Natakhtari. The agents had traveled eighteen miles from the Sheraton Metechi Palace. The trip had taken twenty-eight minutes.

  The forensic team did a ground survey and photogrammetric analysis from which they produced a crime scene sketch. They performed a grid search and discovered two brass shell casings. This evidence was marked for purposes of identification and chain of custody; its location was plotted on the sketch; and the casings were transmitted to the FBI lab for analysis.

  As the agents worked, Gogoladze described the shooting: It was dark. There was a cluster of men standing on the side of the road. They were dressed in military uniforms and one of them held an automatic weapon. The man with the gun tried to stop the car and Gogoladze accelerated to evade him. He heard a single shot when the car was fifteen to twenty meters past the men. That shot killed Woodruff.

  “It’s highly unlikely that there could have been a plan to kill me,” he said. “I am, after all, highly trained in countersurveillance and security matters. And I didn’t detect any hostile or suspicious activities directed toward me or Woodruff.”

  However, it was difficult for the special agents to credit this declaration of professional excellence in light of Gogoladze’s actions. First, he did not shoot at or immediately attempt to arrest the would-be assassin. Instead, his first act after delivering Woodruff’s dead body to the Kamo Street Hospital was to go home for fifteen minutes.

  Second, he did not order the police to close the road. If the police had blockaded the road they would have trapped the shooter between the Tbilisi turnoff and the Russian border.

  Third, he did not know which of the area hospitals were currently open and operational. As the head of Shevardnadze’s bodyguards he would be expected always to know the nearest working trauma facility in the event of injury to the chairman. Instead, Gogoladze raced fecklessly from one closed hospital to another while Freddie expired in his back seat.

  And fourth, he did not correctly identify the place where Woodruff had been shot eight days earlier. Gogoladze, a self-proclaimed expert in security matters, had misidentified the location of a crime to which he was allegedly an eyewitness.

  On August 17 the Prosecutor General’s Office organized a reenactment of the shooting, by the confessed killer, Anzor Sharmaidze. The FBI team participated. As the caravan of investigators approached the location previously searched by the FBI forensic team, Gogoladze asked Sharmaidze whether he wanted the cars to stop.

  “No,” said the prisoner. “Further down.”

  According to a special agent riding in the car with them, Gogoladze became visibly angry and might have killed Sharmaidze but for the presence of the American.

  Sharmaidze said that the location of the shooting was a nondescript spot five hundred meters beyond the featureless site identified by Gogoladze. The prisoner showed where he had stood and demonstrated how he had fired his rifle. The special agents searched through the nearby grass and found another spent shell casing. Unlike the brass casings discovered with Gogoladze the day before, this newest evidence was later confirmed by the FBI lab as having been fired from Sharmaidze’s rifle.

  Thus, there was undeniable physical evidence connecting Sharmaidze’s rifle to this location. But the FBI forensic team was not persuaded. They considered it improbable that the casing would have lain in the grass undiscovered for nine days despite multiple searches by the Georgian investigators. It appeared to be a theatrical presentation for the benefit of foreign visitors.

  “Do they think we’re idiots?” asked one of the special agents.

  I was pondering one of the several excuses given by Sharmaidze for firing his weapon—anger that the thoughtless driver had not dimmed his bright headlights—when I came across the murder site coordinates. The FBI had helpfully identified the exact location by plotting its latitude and longitude.

  I wondered how dark it was at the time of the shooting, so I consulted the US Naval Observatory w
ebsite regarding sunset in that location on the day of the murder. On August 8, 1993, the sun set over the village of Natakhtari at 8:29 p.m. and civil twilight ended at 9:02 p.m. News reports and FBI documents stated that the murder occurred at approximately 9 p.m. Thus—at the time Anzor Sharmaidze was allegedly blinded by Eldar Gogoladze’s bright headlights—it was not yet dark.

  The official version of Anzor Sharmaidze’s guilt depended, at least in part, on Gogoladze’s demonstrably false claim that it was dark at the time of the shooting. It was difficult to believe that he could make such a fundamental mistake without malicious intent. Nevertheless, embassy personnel told the special agents that the Georgian’s affection for Woodruff was sincere. They described the two men as “true friends” who met every day for coffee and hunted or fished together during their off-hours. Gogoladze was, they said, “visibly and genuinely upset” over the shooting.

  So how could Gogoladze make such a basic error about the circumstances surrounding the death of his “true friend”? Like the location of the bullet that had crushed Woodruff’s skull then disappeared, that was a mystery.

  At least one US intelligence professional thought that the mystery led back to Russia. An embassy-based military attaché told the FBI investigators that he believed the shooting was a deliberate assassination. The attaché suspected that Woodruff had been killed by the GRU—the Russian military intelligence service—and that the Georgians may have been involved. According to the attaché, the GRU had remained largely unchanged by the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was possessive of the erstwhile Soviet empire and, he believed, had murdered Woodruff to warn Washington not to run intelligence operations in the territories of the former USSR. As for Georgian involvement, the attaché pointed out that its intelligence service was controlled by Jaba Ioseliani. The mafia warlord was known to have GRU affiliations and had been informed that Woodruff was CIA.

  The issue of Georgian treachery came up again when a special agent interviewed a member of the American embassy staff. The staffer had breakfasted with Woodruff on the morning of August 8. Woodruff had needed to borrow the staffer’s camera for a day trip to Kazbegi with Marina Kapanadze, an English-speaking waitress in the hotel’s Piano Bar. “Freddie told me that he thought Marina was an officer in Mkhedrioni,” he said. “They’re a local mafia group controlled by Jaba Ioseliani.” In the evening three days after the murder the staffer was having drinks with colleagues. Marina had returned to her work and served their table. The staffer reported that as he rose to leave Marina approached him. “I’m sorry for Freddie,” she said, “but, you know . . . I am a spy.” The staffer thought she’d stepped closer and said something else, but he couldn’t remember. He’d been dumbstruck by the unexpected admission.

  These interviews appeared to offer potentially fruitful lines of inquiry. However, I could find nothing in the record of the first investigation to indicate that the Bureau had pursued any of them. As I tried to imagine the motivations for such intentional indifference I realized that there was an Agency-sized omission in the FBI investigations at the Tbilisi embassy: There was no indication that the special agents had interviewed any of Woodruff’s CIA colleagues or examined any documents relating to the work he was doing in Georgia.

  The FBI is a law enforcement agency. It is tasked with identifying and arresting criminals. When an American diplomat is murdered, the Bureau will almost always investigate what the dead man was doing that made someone want to kill him.

  The CIA is an intelligence agency. It is tasked with collecting and keeping secrets. When a covert officer is murdered, the Agency will almost never reveal the officer’s clandestine activities.

  Criminal investigator versus intelligence officer: different goals, different rules, different cultures. And in the absence of truly extraordinary circumstances, the need for secrecy will always trump the desire for justice.

  This was my first lesson about the world of Realpolitik inhabited by spies. If avenging Woodruff’s murder in the courts meant that the CIA had to reveal national security secrets, then Woodruff’s murder would not be avenged in the courts. As I later learned, professional intelligence officers understood this as one of the unforgiving rules of an unforgiving game.

  The FBI special agents departed Tbilisi on August 26, 1993. They took with them the rifle, cartridges, and magazine confiscated from Sharmaidze; the shell casings found during both roadside searches; the bullet fragments recovered during the Georgian autopsy; multiple crime scene sketches; dozens of laboratory samples; hundreds of photographs; a videotaped recording of Sharmaidze’s confession; and Woodruff’s clothes including his ball cap. In addition, the agents had a portion of the Georgian investigation file (which was still in the process of being translated). But what the agents did not have were FD 302s regarding Bureau interviews of Georgian citizens. With the exception of limited conversations with Gogoladze and Sharmaidze, the American investigators had not been permitted to interview any of the Georgian eyewitnesses.

  Meanwhile, the Bethesda-based Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP) was completing a second autopsy of Woodruff. The first autopsy had been performed in Tbilisi by Georgian pathologists. American officials had given strict instructions that the Georgians were not to “touch the head” during their procedure. Nevertheless, when the body arrived in the United States the brain was missing and the skull was packed with cotton.

  The body presented with a small circular wound above the right eye and a hand-sized wound above and behind the right ear. Georgian pathologists had concluded that the small wound was the point of entry and the large wound was the point of exit. However, using a scanning electron microscope, the AFIP pathologists reconstructed the bone fragments from around the wounds. Based on the fracture patterns of these fragments the AFIP experts concluded with 100 percent certainty that the bones at the back of the skull had broken inward and the bone above the eye had broken outward. The trajectory of the bullet was from back to front, slightly left to right and downward. There was no gunpowder or gunshot residue on Woodruff’s body or clothes.

  Woodruff had been shot in the back of the head and a bullet fragment had exploded out of his forehead.

  The AFIP pathologists X-rayed the cotton with which Woodruff’s skull had been packed and discovered a few minuscule metal fragments. These fragments, together with the splinters collected during the Georgian autopsy and the shell casing found during the reenactment, were delivered to the Firearms and Toolmarks Unit at the FBI Laboratory. The lab made two conclusions: First, the shell casing was fired from Sharmaidze’s rifle; and second, the bullet fragments taken from Woodruff’s skull were not sufficient to identify the caliber of the bullet or to establish a connection to Sharmaidze’s gun.

  I considered the results of this forensic analysis. Woodruff’s brain and the bullet that scrambled it were missing. It was impossible to prove (or disprove) the caliber of the fatal bullet and it was impossible to prove (or disprove) that the fatal bullet had been fired from Sharmaidze’s weapon. However, it was possible to prove that a shell casing from Sharmaidze’s weapon had been found at the alleged murder site nine days after the murder. Thus, it looked to me like someone was working hard to eliminate any scientific evidence that would exonerate Sharmaidze while manufacturing circumstantial evidence that would convict him.

  The special agents returned the weapon, cartridge, bullets, and shell casing to the Georgians for use by them in the murder trial. In addition, they provided selected photos (conveniently mounted on foam core), diagrams made at the time of the reenactment, and the report from the FBI Firearms and Toolmark Unit linking the shell casing to Sharmaidze’s weapon. But they did not furnish to the Georgians the AFIP autopsy report, the evidence of Gogoladze’s unreliability, or the results of their interviews with US embassy personnel.

  If the government of Georgia was going to judicially murder Anzor Sharmaidze, the FBI wasn’t going to get in the way.

  CHAPTER 3

  * * *

/>   THE TESTIMONY OF TWO SPIES AND A HOUSEWIFE

  The trial of Anzor Sharmaidze began in Tbilisi at noon on December 30, 1993. The timing guaranteed that the press and public would be distracted with celebrations of the New Year and Orthodox Christmas. As a lawyer accustomed to the holiday rhythms of the American courts, I found this scheduling decision odd. The Georgian court clearly intended to do its business with a minimum of public scrutiny.

  Sharmaidze was charged with three crimes: robbery of a house in April 1992; illegal acquisition and possession of a weapon and bullets; and the intentional murder of Freddie Woodruff on August 8, 1993. He pleaded guilty to the first charge and not guilty to the other two. He explained that as a soldier he was allowed to carry the weapon, and that although he had killed Woodruff it had not been deliberate.

  The penalty for intentional murder was imprisonment from eight to fifteen years or death.

  The Georgian court was presided over by a panel of three magistrates: Chief Judge Djemal Leonidze and two junior judges. This panel would decide the law, the facts, and the punishment. As was traditional in Georgia, there would be no impartial jury of Sharmaidze’s peers. The government was represented by an experienced trial attorney from the Prosecutor General’s Office. Sharmaidze was represented by a young lawyer named Tamaz Inashvili.

  Inashvili had been appointed to represent the defendant by Chief Judge Leonidze. It was a strange choice for such an important case. Inashvili suffered from a crippling stutter that made him painful to hear and impossible to understand. And this was his very first case. It appeared to me that the chief judge did not intend to leave anything to chance in his march toward conviction.

  Sharmaidze sat in a metal cage by the wall. He was twenty-two years old and had an eighth-grade education. Like everyone else in the room, he was wearing a heavy winter coat. There was no heat in the courthouse and it was bitterly cold. The room seemed an unlikely setting in which to decide whether a man should live or die.