The Spy Who Was Left Behind

by Michael Pullara

  The FBI censors had redacted Gogoladze’s statements about how the shooting occurred; however, they left a tantalizing suggestion that the Bureau suspected the chief bodyguard’s account might be false. “The fact of the matter,” said the memo, “is that there is a variance in information reported to the FBI concerning ————.”

  “A variance in information” was a delicate phrase to describe different people telling inconsistent stories. It was an explicit acknowledgment by FBI special agents that there were other witnesses to the murder. Given the limitations imposed on the Americans investigating in Georgia, it seemed probable that the identities of these witnesses had been provided to the agents by Georgian investigators.

  The half-redacted phrase wasn’t exculpatory evidence, but it was proof that exculpatory evidence existed. If I wanted to find those witnesses, I would need to establish a relationship with someone inside the Georgian security services.

  The discussion of the Gogoladze interviews concluded with an examination of his failure to obtain prompt medical care for Woodruff. The first FBI investigation had already raised the issue of his professional incompetence—racing wildly from one closed hospital to another when (as the head of Shevardnadze’s bodyguards) he was expected always to know the nearest available trauma facility. The second investigation hinted at a darker explanation.

  “The first hospital was closed,” said the memo. “The second hospital had no electricity, but a doctor offered medical assistance ————.”

  This was new information to me: A doctor had offered medical assistance to Freddie Woodruff. I focused on the verb. The memo said that the doctor offered the assistance, not that the doctor provided the assistance. This suggested that the offer was not accepted.

  I felt a cold chill. Was it possible that a doctor had offered to ride to Tbilisi with Woodruff and that Gogoladze had refused? If so, what was Gogoladze’s motive? Did he simply want to minimize Woodruff’s chances of survival or was it something more ghoulish? Did he need to be alone with the body in order to fish the bullet out of Woodruff’s skull? If so, did this explain his need to shower and change clothes?

  It was all very confusing. The only thing I knew for sure was that Gogoladze was hiding something.

  The memo focused next on Woodruff’s camera and five canisters of film. These items had been inventoried among the meager possessions returned with his body. I inferred from the discussion that some or all of his five rolls of film had been pulled from their canisters and exposed. It was a fairly simple deduction, really. If the agents had the photos, they’d have been discussing the photos. Instead, they were talking about the camera and the film. And besides, there were no cover memos among the FBI documents requesting that the film be developed or the photos be printed.

  The pictures would have provided a photographic chronology of Woodruff’s last day. However, in the frantic minutes after the shooting, someone destroyed this evidence. Logically this spoliation had to have occurred after Woodruff was shot but before his body was delivered to the Kamo Street Hospital. Before the shooting, Woodruff was alive to protect his film; after the body arrived at the hospital, American security officers, alerted to the murder of a colleague by Georgian authorities, were on hand to protect the integrity of his possessions.

  But why would one of Woodruff’s companions do this? It seemed safe to assume that the spoliator did not want the authorities (Georgian or American) to see the photographs. As far as I could tell, possible motivations for this act fell into one of two broad categories: motives related to the murder and motives unrelated to the murder.

  If the motive for destroying the photographs was unrelated to the murder, then it was probable that the purpose of the quartet’s Sunday outing was something more than mere tourism. For example, Woodruff could have used the trip as a cover to investigate drug trafficking, and Marina Kapanadze (an operative for the mafia group Mkhedrioni) could have taken advantage of Woodruff’s death to destroy the photographic fruits of that investigation. In that case, the destruction of the photographs would not necessarily implicate the spoliator in the killing. However, it seemed unlikely that Woodruff would invite Marina to join him if he intended to spy on her criminal gang without her cooperation.

  But if the motive for destroying the photographs was related to the murder, then the spoliator was almost certainly complicit in a plot to kill Freddie Woodruff. For example, it was possible that Woodruff was taking photographs at or near the time he was shot. If so, it was conceivable that he photographed the shooter. In that event, the spoliator could have protected the shooter’s identity simply by exposing the film in the camera. But the FBI memo seemed to indicate that all five canisters of film had been exposed. This suggested that the spoliator believed there might be relevant damning evidence in photographs taken earlier in the day.

  I could think of only one reason why photographs from earlier in the day might contain evidence relevant to the murder: Woodruff had inadvertently photographed his assassin. It seemed absurd, but the probability of such a close encounter was not as unlikely as I initially thought. My research into the arcane priesthood of the professional assassin revealed that it is standard operating procedure for a shooter to personally observe a victim prior to execution of the contract. This process—called “showcasing”—involves a co-conspirator using a prearranged signal to identify the target while the shooter watches. It is a gambit of betrayal as old as the Judas kiss.

  If the shooter could see Woodruff, then it was possible that Woodruff could see the shooter. And if Woodruff could see the shooter, he could take his picture—or at least the spoliator might fear that he had.

  It was time to take a deep breath. I had started with a hint about exposed film and ended with a conclusion about showcasing for a contract killer. I felt ridiculous. But ridiculous or not, the FBI memo strongly implied that its author had reached exactly the same conclusion.

  The agents were fully attuned to the deficiencies and absurdities of the official version—the Georgian pathologist’s erroneous opinion that Woodruff had been shot just above the right eye; the orchestrated discovery of a bullet casing linked to Sharmaidze’s rifle; the jailer’s fortuitous finding of a smuggled letter sewn into the defendant’s pants; the retracted confession and the probability of torture. However, the matter of greatest concern to the special agents was the fact that “it had never been determined what type of round killed Fred Woodruff.” According to the occupants of the Niva, the vehicle was almost entirely sealed up at the time of the shooting. Nevertheless, no bullet was ever found inside the body or inside the car. And in the absence of both the shooter’s bullet and the victim’s brain, it was impossible for the FBI to link Woodruff’s murder to any particular weapon.

  The special agents hypothesized that Woodruff had been the target of an assassination. The investigators consulted members of the US Army Special Forces and were advised that—at a distance of ten to twenty meters—firing at an individual in a vehicle that has slowed its pace does not present a difficult shot for a trained sniper.

  But Anzor Sharmaidze was no trained sniper—and he had been drinking.

  Citing a potential threat to national security, the FBI refused to disclose the factual and analytical link between the investigators’ hypothesis and their conclusion. However, the censors left just enough of the explanatory detail that I could deduce that conclusion: The special agents believed that Woodruff had been assassinated by a former member of Spetsnaz Group Alpha.

  Group Alpha was the KGB’s elite counterterrorism force—the operational equivalent of the US Delta Force. The FBI memo strongly suggested that the shooter was a former member of Group Alpha and that he had been assisted in the assassination by active-duty members. “Group Alpha is a highly trained group of individuals who form bonds that are deep and long-lasting even after separation from the group,” said the memo. “They have been trained to lean on each other for support and trust each other for discretion. The adage f
ormer Special Forces rather than ex–Special Forces is as applicable to the Russian Special Forces as it is to any Western Special Forces group. It is not unthinkable to rationalize that a former Group Alpha member would have the assistance and support of a current Group Alpha member ————.”

  The censors left an obscure hint regarding something that happened shortly after the killing: “———— was ———— days after the shooting death of Fred Woodruff.” Based on the context, this snippet appeared to relate to the alleged assassin. However, the text was so vague that I could make nothing of it. Little did I know that finding out what happened in the days after the shooting would be the key to unraveling the mystery of the murder.

  It is an axiom among investigators that the person responsible for a crime may be found among those who have something to gain from it. Accordingly, the special agents concluded their letterhead memorandum by analyzing who would benefit from the assassination of Freddie Woodruff. The un-redacted portion of this discussion focused on only one potential beneficiary—Russia. The agents reasoned that the murder was detrimental to Russian reformists and (therefore) beneficial to Russian revanchists. American accusations of Russian complicity would put Yeltsin on the horns of an intolerable dilemma: cooperate in the investigation and risk a coup by the perpetrators or resist the investigation and risk the loss of Western support. “Most, if not all, ———— oppose the breakup of the Soviet Union and see the undermining of Boris Yeltsin as a way to strengthen Russia and begin a return to the old ways,” said the memo.

  But this rationalization seemed superficial to me. The murder itself had no direct effect on Yeltsin. The only way the Russian president would be weakened by the assassination was if the Americans reacted by diminishing their support for reform—and the revanchists could not be certain that killing Woodruff would make that happen. As far as I could tell, destabilization of Yeltsin was not probable enough to justify the risks attendant to killing a CIA branch chief. After all, the US could always find another branch chief.

  The motive seemed more personal than political. Whoever killed Freddie Woodruff did so because of something unique about Freddie Woodruff.

  By April 1995 the special agents believed that they knew the identity of the shooter. “Information received at WMFO has determined that Woodruff may have ————. This individual has been tentatively identified as ————.” Armed with a provisional identification of the assassin, the investigators obtained travel authorization and country clearance for additional interviews in Baku, Vienna, and Tbilisi.

  I could not guess why the special agents chose Baku as their first stop. The capital of Azerbaijan, the city sits 350 miles east of Tbilisi, atop an ocean of oil. By 1995 it was already the crossroads of intense competition between Russia, Iran, and the West. Whatever the special agents did in Azerbaijan was so sensitive that the FBI censors did not disclose a single word about Baku.

  The stated purpose of the Vienna trip was to follow up on leads provided by the FBI legal attaché in that city. The resident legat had identified a man matching the shooter’s description who lived in Austria. “WMFO is aware that Legat Vienna has information concerning an individual whose last name is ————, was allegedly born ————, and was the approximate age of ————.” Upon review of the legat’s file, however, the investigators determined that the local individual was not the suspect.

  Notes of a witness interview conducted in Tbilisi were more ambiguous—and more intriguing. “———— gave an unusually good appearance,” the teletype said. “He was clean and clean shaven.”

  It was an odd observation. “Why would FBI agents comment on a person’s cleanliness?” I wondered.

  The remark suggested that the agents expected the witness to be dirty and were surprised to discover that he was clean. As far as I could tell, an expectation that a person will be unwashed is ordinarily based on preconceptions about his character or his circumstances. Did the investigators expect the witness to be dirty because he was uneducated or did they expect him to be dirty because he was in a place where he would not be able to wash himself?

  “———— was bright and obviously well educated,” the teletype said. In light of this comment, it seemed improbable that the agents expected the witness to be dirty because of poor socialization. But if it wasn’t a matter of socialization, then what were the circumstances of the interview that caused the agents to expect the witness to show up soiled?

  “WMFO opines at this point that the production of ———— for interview by the FBI is ———— intended to mislead the US Government into believing ————.”

  It took me a little while to digest the full implications of this judgment: The FBI believed that the entire interview of an unexpectedly clean witness was a charade staged by a third party to deceive the US government.

  I could think of only one entity in Georgia with both the ability and audacity to perpetrate such a hoax on the FBI: the Georgian government. And I could imagine only one place from which the special agents would expect the Georgian government to produce an unwashed witness—a Georgian prison. For some unknown reason the Georgians wanted the Americans to believe that the witness was being held in prison.

  “Who was this witness?” I wondered. “And why was he worth all this trouble?”

  I briefly considered the possibility that the witness might be the shooter and that the Georgians were pretending to imprison him on other charges. But that would mean that the FBI met face-to-face with Woodruff’s killer and left the encounter with nothing except their impression of him as clean, bright, and well educated.

  “That can’t be right,” I thought. But I was wrong.

  Shortly after their return to the US, the special agents reported the results of their trip to FBI director Louis Freeh. Although this communication was censored, its two principal points remained clear. First, the witness had told the investigators that he knew Woodruff had been shot in the back of the head. This fact had been discovered by the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology using a scanning electron microscope. But most important, it was unknown to anyone except the US government and the shooter.

  Second, after the interview the investigators had traveled to Baku where they obtained a copy of a statement provided to a third party by the witness. In that document the witness claimed to be part of a group that was responsible for Woodruff’s death. He said there were several reasons for the assassination: “One was to send a message to the United States to refrain from actions in countries that border Russia that might be considered threatening to Russians.”

  An embassy-based military attaché had told the first FBI investigators that the assassination was a Russian warning to the Americans. Then two Georgian security service chiefs had publicly declared that Woodruff had been murdered by the Russian SVR. Now a mysterious witness had claimed credit for the killing on behalf of Russia.

  The bread crumbs of evidence had begun to turn toward Moscow.

  So in July 1994, five months after the arrest of Aldrich Ames, the special agents requested travel authorization and country clearance for Russia. The FBI documents did not disclose whether the investigators ever made it to Russia. But one teletype did reveal a curiously timed Bureau personnel decision: The case agent responsible for reexamination of Woodruff’s murder was replaced shortly after he steered the investigation toward Moscow.

  The successor case agent did not share his predecessor’s suspicions about a Russian conspiracy to assassinate Woodruff. Instead, he limited the focus of his investigation to a single issue: whether—when hooked up to a polygraph machine—any of three witnesses presented recordable evidence of deception in response to a predetermined “relevant question” that the case agent intended to ask. The FBI documents were silent as to the topic of this relevant question; however, as far as I could see there wasn’t any single question-and-answer that would resolve all the mysteries that clustered around the Woodruff murder.

  One
of the witnesses refused to be polygraphed. The other two passed the exam without incident. Whatever the agent’s silver-bullet question, the witnesses answered with no physiological indication of deceit. Based on this finding, the successor case agent closed the Bureau’s investigation into the connection between Aldrich Ames and the murder of Freddie Woodruff. His judgment was final and unequivocal: “Exhaustive interviews ———— have left nothing to suggest something other than an accidental shooting. . . . Any further investigation or polygraph examination would be non-productive.”

  This seemed to be an awfully big step to take on the basis of polygraph results alone. After all, the machine only measures physiological manifestations of shame attendant to lying. And I knew from life experience that not all lies cause shame and not all cultures are ashamed of lying.

  But that was it. The FBI investigation of a possible link between the treachery of Aldrich Ames and the murder of Freddie Woodruff was over. And all because of polygraph results recorded in response to a single question.

  All this made me wonder if there was any scientific evidence to support the use of polygraphs on people who weren’t from the West. It would be a few years before I found the answer to this query. In the meantime, I would need to do a little investigating of my own.

  CHAPTER 5

  * * *

  MR. AMERICAN LAWYER

  I was afraid to go to Georgia. After all, someone had already murdered a CIA branch chief, and he was a lot more important than a meddlesome lawyer from Texas. The stakes were high and the players were ruthless—serious people who wielded weapons far more lethal than my subpoenas and legal motions. I comforted myself with the belief that it was pointless to make the journey. The people who had arrested and convicted Anzor Sharmaidze were still in power. They already knew he was innocent and so were unlikely to be moved by my time line and logical inferences.